Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!agate!root
From: mkkuhner@codon1.berkeley.edu (Mary K. Kuhner;335 Mulford)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Hybrid vigor
Message-ID: <1989Aug11.175450.29567@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 11 Aug 89 17:54:50 GMT
References: <1989Aug10.003610.14496@agate.berkeley.edu> <9129@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Reply-To: mkkuhner@codon1.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Mary K. Kuhner)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 39

In article <9129@thorin.cs.unc.edu> barkley@unc.cs.unc.edu (Matthew Barkley) writes:

>"Race" may be a handy label, even in population genetics, but it really
>has no scientific validity, IMHO.  How does one tell the "proportion of
>Caucasian admixture"?  Remember that Asian Indians are considered Cau-
>casian; is that part of the admixture, too?  What objective criteria do
>you have for classification?

Simply dividing people into Caucasian, Negro, Oriental is certainly
not perfect, though it's a step in the right direction.  Good
objective criteria to use are the frequencies of single-gene
traits--blood types, enzyme polymorphisms, immune types.  You
collect data from a number of unrelated genes and look for
patterns of distribution.  The process is reasonably objective--
math can be used to define the groups and tell whether a population
(not an individual) belongs to one racial group or another.

For the diabetes study, proportion of Caucasian admixture was
estimated from genealogical records.  There is certainly error
involved in this, but when one studies a large number of
diabetics the error doesn't prevent the general pattern from
being visible.  I would suspect, though I don't know, that
people with demonstrable Oriental background were not considered
in this study.

>To put the whole thing into sharp focus:  The singer Don Ho is said to
>be of Portugese, Chinese, and Hawaiian ancestry;  what "race" is he?

Mixed, clearly.  The existance of unclassifiable people doesn't
make the classifications useless, however.  

If you don't like the term "race" you can use "population".

>Matt Barkley                                           barkley@cs.unc.edu
>Any opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by anyone else, and may 
>not even be my own. How an organization can have an opinion is beyond me.

Mary Kuhner
mkkuhner@enzyme.berkeley.edu