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non_radical_centrist  8mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   2897 thread views

How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?

astralcodexten.com

I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.

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I have not performed this exercise, but my understanding is that the first two PCs you'd use as the axes of this plot will usually explain a negligible percentage of the total variance in a genomic dataset.

that is, assuming 1 gene corresponds to 1 trait and all traits are equally important. But suppose some trait (say, amount of melanin in skin) is determined by 10 genes and one population has 35% frequency of dark allele and other population has 65% frequency of dark allele. Most genetic variation is within populations but looking at their resulting color, they are visibly distinct. Height or intelligence are much more polygenic.

There are lots of genes related to immune system in which variants are no worse or no better, they just make it harder for germs to jump from one individual to another, and selection will favor diversity in this gene. Other genes would be selected in one direction and can reach fixation. Pick traits you are interested about, and then estimate how much PCs explain it.

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