Reconsidering Race in the Genetic Era

So, how should we think about race? Perhaps we should move from the level of categorizing based on skin color to thinking about family trees. Everyone is descended from a particular line of ancestors. Those lines have intersected with many other family lines over the millennia and ultimately those lines all originate from the same family of the first modern humans in African between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago (Behar, Villems, Soodyall, Blue-Smith, Pereira, et al., 2008Caporael, 2004Relethford, 2008). Take any two humans at random and their genomes will be 99.9% genetically similar to each other (Collins, Green, Guttmacher, & Guyer, 2003Foster & Sharp, 2002). Of the 0.1% differences, only a small fraction of those are associated with racial or ethnic variation. While genetic research may find links between disease and genetic ancestry, we must keep in mind that no one is purely of any one racial group or ancestry. There is a rich diversity in how the human genome is expressed; yet, in the end, we are much more similar than different. We all descend from the same family, the human family. In light of the increasing amount of genetic research and its potential negative influence on racism, it is important that we conduct research that examines how folk notions of race are formed and how we can better help the public understand the relationship between genetics and race.

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