Arete

Your first statement is correct, and your second is incorrect. “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” ― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Ignoring the fallacious goalpost shift for a minute - the Framingham heart study demonstrates that natural selection is acting on a human population to, among other things, lower systolic blood pressure and delay the onset of menopuase. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/suppl_1/1787.short

I am a scientist, and I work in experimental evolution. Natural selection is easily observed and quantified. For e.g. Exposing a virus to heat shock leads to a mutation which changes the protein structure of the capsid to improve thermal stability. http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003102 Selection leading to the creation of new species has also been directly observed. E.g. apple maggot flies http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/speciationmodes_05 Disbelief in natural selection is up there with disbelief in a round earth.

Einstein spoke extensively on religion - they are simply a couple of the more illustrative of the hundreds of quotes he made on the subject. Even Creation magazine acknowledges that he wasn't a Christian. Any claim that he was, is either woefully misinformed or deliberately deceitful. Sorry for the hijack everyone.

Sorry, but this is a pet peeve - Einstein was pretty explicit in stating he was NOT a deist: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." (Albert Einstein, 1954, The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press) "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." -- Albert Einstein, following his wife's advice in responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York, who had sent Einstein a cablegram bluntly demanding "Do you believe in God?" Quoted from and citation notes derived from Victor J Stenger, Has Science Found God? (draft: 2001), chapter 3. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. -- Albert Einstein, The World as I See It

There's a lot of needless hostility in this thread, at least I personally would appreciate a more civil tone. I think we need to work through some basic principles: 1) In biology, both race and population have precise meanings which potentially differ from their lay meanings. Race is generally used to describe groups of organisms which share a distinct chromosomal arrangement. Population is generally used to describe a group of interbreeding, genetically related organisms. With humans, we are generally chromosomally monotypic, so in the biological sense, the appropriate word to use when describing genetically distinct groups would be populations, not races. There's no ideological, political or other agenda at work, just standard use of terminology in science. 2) Genetic diversity arises through the incremental accumulation of mutations, over generations, through time. This means that genetic differentiation between organisms, in the broad sense, ranges from genetically identical (e.g. a bacterial colony) through to the diversity we see across the tree of life. As the accumulation of changes is incremental, organisms exist in a multitude of intermediate states between extremes - this renders any classification system, be it be it on the scale of taxonomic, biogeographic, population or landscape partitioning, arbitrary. N.B. This is not to say that they are not useful, or systematically and scientifically defined, but it is important to note that any classification system is a simplification of the biological reality, and inherently imperfect. 3) The arbitrary nature of defining populations means that there is no universally correct way to do this. Determining discrete units will depend on the biology of the organisms in question (e.g. mutation rate, generation time, mode of reproduction, etc), the scale of the study (global, regional, local) and the resolution of the genetic data being used (e.g. microsatellites, SNPs, 12s sequencing). So long at the partitioning scheme is empirically based, justifiable within the given aims of the study and uses an a prioi, unbiased method, it's generally valid. 4) This has been done several times for humans. The generally used method as per Rosenberg et al. Is to run K means clustering using an MCMC algorithm at various values of K, then use some sort of information criterion to determine the most informative value for K. You could also use model based clustering, PCA based clustering, or hierarchical clustering - or preferably a combination. 5) The clusters in Rosenberg et al. are generally speaking, broadly accepted - if these are what you're referring to as "races" then I really think there's little controversy, apart from lack of precision in the term you've chosen to use in the context of biological communication.

The accumulation of genetic variation is an incremental process, rendering genetic diversity between organisms inherently continuous. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that 95% of human genetic variation is between individuals within populations.

Because genetic differentiation is a continuum. Any classification of populations is arbitrary, in a sense. You use a priori delimitation for the same reason you set significance thresholds a priori. What's your proposed alternative, qualitative delimitation? Random selection? Whatever you feel like on a particular day? Yes. An example of such a threshold in practice would be the standard use of 97% similarity at the 16S locus to define a bacterial species. That was the point. What's your cut off of "descent" going to be? Nice strawman.

" Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic)." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707625786 That'd be four, not 18. They simply used the SIRE model to justify setting K=18 in the STRUCTURE analysis.

it has nothing to do with "political" correctness, rather than simple correctness. Population has a specific meaning in the context of biology, and is the scientifically correct term. Redefining terms as you have done above leads to confusion, as seen throughout the thread. The other issue with your "definition" or race, is that its has no a priori quantitative thresholds. You can arm wave and say that you define them by "ancestry" but without some methodology that's somewhat meaningless. Must populations in your model be panmictic? Have an FST > 0.2? an Nm < 25? Without some form of objective criteria for population divisions, the boundaries become subjective, arbitrary, and thus devoid of use in a quantifiable, scientific sense.

First, if you're talking about genetically related groups, then generally the correct terminology would be populations, rather than races. In population genetic context, the term "races" is generally used to describe different karyotypes within a species. Once you've established this, you can then use a qualitative measure of genetic distance to define populations. Rosenberg et al. Already did this. This would then represent a generally widely accepted pattern of human genetic variation, which I doubt many members here would disagree with.

Then you are misinformed. As the previously linked De Quieroz paper documents, there is a substantial body of work since Mayr on species concepts and species delimitation. Mayr was the godfather of the Modern synthesis, however the modern synthesis has changed over time to account for more recently discovered evolutionary processes such as lateral gene transfer, recombination, etc. I would have thought the point was fairly obvious - the original concepts of species/populations as described by Mayr and Darwin have been updated in the light of new evidence. The evolutionary species concept defines a species as a metapopulation of organisms with a shared, discernible evolutionary trajectory - meaning that the methods of delimitation (e.g. reproductive isolation, genetic distance, phenotypic characters) can be varied and simply substantiate the evolutionary distinction of the species. The ecological/evolutionary population paradigm defines populations as groups of individuals that can be shown to be genetically distinct using particular migration parameters and discrete allele frequencies - meaning one can use objective, quantitative measures to define populations.

I've never met an actual scientist who cared about IQ scores. I don't actually know my IQ and don't really have any desire to. IQ measures a small subset of analytical intelligence that has been demonstrated to be culturally biased. So, determining if it's useful depends on the use it's being put to. As a measure of general intellect, I'd say its utility is limited. Also, another issue is that it's simply a test score. One may do an IQ test when feeling unwell and score low, then repeat the test on a better day and score high. I'm not sure why people describe themselves as "having" an IQ of XXX like it's a fixed score you have for the rest of your life. Furthermore, most people bragging about their IQ on the internet seem to demonstrate that they lack a basic understanding of normalized scores in general. IQ is normalized, or as my undergrads might say, "graded on a curve". The mean of the distribution is fixed at 100, and the standard deviation is fixed at 10. This has two major implications: 1) Any IQ score is relative to the group the score is normalized to. A high IQ among a sample of dunces might not be worth much, and an average IQ at among an elite group of intellectuals might be quite impressive. 2) We can quickly and easily determine the probability of observing a given IQ score, which, for the more outlandish claims, gives a pretty good indication if someone is telling porkies. For example, the probability of observing a score of 140 is approximately 3 x 10-5, so about 1 in every 30,000 people will have an IQ of 140 or higher. For an IQ of 160, the probability is less than 1 x 10-10, so considerably less than one in a million. For what it's worth, a lot of the crackpots that show up here claim a high IQ, so it certainly doesn't prevent you saying or believing stupid things, or make you a strong critical thinker.

Absolutely, I agree. I was simply proposing that we don't throw the baby out with the racist water. Human genetic clustering can be useful to determine predisposition to certain genetically underlain diseases and predispositions. Thus acknowledging that humans fall into distinct genetic clusters can be useful. However these clusters are inherently blurry and useless to determine someone's likely IQ, propensity to violence or crime, or any other distortion of the factual information to fit a particular agenda. Then you're only around 80 years out of date. For more modern interpretations I would look into the evolutionary species concept http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/content/56/6/879.full and evolutionary/ecological population paradigms. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2006.02890.x/full

There are some ethnically associated genetic disorders (e.g. sickle cell anemia, Tay Sachs disease, etc.) and some ethnically specific drug metabolic responses that can be quite dramatic, even fatal. So there is a case for determining a patient's genetic population history in a medical context.

As with most broad scientific questions, the answer is yes, and no. 1) Yes, distinct human populations exist, and in some cases are useful e.g. Scandinavian populations are ~90% lactose tolerant, East Asian populations ~10% 2) However differences in human populations are generally clinal, and gradients of genetic diversity exist between each genetic cluster of human populations, making the separation into discrete "races" problematic in many instances. 3) Significant, long term gene flow between populations is evident in genome comparisons of human populations. There is no such thing as "racial purity" in a genetic sense. 4) Genetic clusters of humans do not correspond well to ethnically defined "races". E.g. Most human genetic diversity is within African populations ethnically defined as "black", Mediterranean Arabic communities are genetically closer to Europeans than Middle Eastern Arabic populations, etc.

I'm a biologist, so my offerings on specific journals will be limited. It might help the mathematicians if you posted up a title of your paper. It shouldn't give anything away and assist in determining appropriate publication venues... although in writing a paper, and doing the relevant research, one generally forms an idea of the journals likely to be appropriate for submission. Here is a ranked list of journals in applied mathematics to get you started: http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2604

I have successfully crowdfunded a few small projects. Generally have big, easily tangible aims (e.g. solve antibiotic resistance) a small budget (e.g $5,000) and a lot of community interaction (e.g.organize a regular sci-beer event at your local ale house, teach a middle school "virus hunters" course). Basically, you need a lot of people to sling a few bucks your way. It's a lot of work, for a relatively small return (compared to NSF/NIH grants) but it looks pretty awesome on your tenure packet/broader impacts statement.

As a long term sufferer of generalized anxiety and associated imposter syndrome, I appreciate that some rationalization can help you with your stress disorder. There's no shame in getting help. Good luck.

Viruses are not used to synthesize peptides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide_synthesis There are no viruses in an HIV test. Even if they were, they would only survive, at best, a few hours in solution. Even if they didn't disintegrate in a few hours, without an open wound in your mouth, the infection risk would be negligible. Even if you did have an open wound in your mouth, and the swab had active HIV viruses on it, the risk of infection would be less than 1 in 500. The risk of contracting HIV from an HIV test conducted via a cheek swab is so imperceptibly small being struck by lighting on a cloudless sunny day is probably several orders of magnitude more likely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide Proteins that detect and bind to HIV antibodies. There is no HIV virus in an HIV test, nor any substantive risk of contracting HIV from having a test administered.

That's incorrect. Viability of the virus is dependent on a number of variables, but usually for HIV, hours is a good measure. Virtually all modern medical implements are either disposable or autoclavable. If you're going to a licensed clinician who is practicing in a legal fashion, in a developed nation, you're very safe from HIV infection. No. If you had no open wound in your mouth at the time, there is no risk of transmission.

HIV is a relatively fragile virus, but is viable for short periods (usually measured in hours) outside the body. Other bloodborne pathogens (e.g. Hepatitis) are much more resilient and thus more of an indirect transmission concern. Yes, HIV could be conceivably transmitted by improperly sterilized medical and dental equipment. Proper autoclaving and aseptic technique reduces the risk to a negligible level.

The key word is "antibodies". The positive control contains antibodies to hiv. Not the virus itself. It is therefore non infectious.