Talk:Race and genetics/Archive 1

message: the user meant mestizo I guess hispanic as anglophoenes can be of any race.
the source says hispanic, does not clarify on race.Muntuwandi 11:48, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: I'VE JUST changed the correct term hispanic it was being used as an ethnic/racial term!!!

message: The intro says it all: 
"Racial distinctions are generally made on the basis of skin color, facial features, inferred ancestry, national origin and self-identification. Ongoing debate exists over the merit of the concept of 'race', especially from the perspective of genetics" Lukas19 17:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, merge in Race and multilocus allele clusters the title is too long anyway-- it can be a section of this article. futurebird 16:56, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge from Race and multilocus allele clusters

message: This article should be called "Race and genetics", the title "Genetic views on race" doesn't make any sense to me. Alun 08:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Race and genetics

message: I already warned about citation of:
""A study called Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure and done by Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv and Hua Tang, two of them from Stanford University:"
No, that study was done by: Noah A. Rosenberg1*, Saurabh Mahajan2, Sohini Ramachandran3, Chengfeng Zhao4, Jonathan K. Pritchard5, Marcus W. Feldman3"
Now, Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease is also attributed to Noah A. Rosenberg1*, Saurabh Mahajan2, Sohini Ramachandran3, Chengfeng Zhao4, Jonathan K. Pritchard5, Marcus W. Feldman  while it was done by: Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv and Hua Tang.
So if you cant manage these simple points dont edit the correct form. Lukas19 01:44, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Dont change citations if you cant do it correctly

message: This user keeps reverting. After being told 4 times, he finally comprehended that sections "Genetic variation at the individual level" and "size of variation" contain same arguments. (And section "size of variation" didnt contain the counter arguments down in section "Genetic variation at the individual level"). Now his edits put the article AGAIN repeating arguments. For ex:
Section: "But is the variation by geographic origin distinct enough to count as race"
"While geographical origin can be inferred from genetics, observed geographically distributed human genetic variation does not amount to the sort of discontinuous distribution that would be expected if the human population were descended from distinct lineages, neither is the variation great enough for human populations to be considered subspecies, the usual biological synonym for race.[7]"
Just down, section "Do biologically distinct races exist?"
Race is generally used as a synonym for subspecies, which traditionally is a geographically circumscribed, genetically differentiated population. Sometimes traits show independent patterns of geographical variation such that some combination will distinguish most populations from all others. To avoid making "race" the equivalent of a local population, minimal thresholds of differentiation are imposed. Human "races" are below the thresholds used in other species, so valid traditional subspecies do not exist in humans. A "subspecies" can also be defined as a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. Genetic surveys and the analyses of DNA haplotype trees show that human "races" are not distinct lineages, and that this is not due to recent admixture; human races are not and never were "pure". Instead, human evolution has been and is characterised by many locally differentiated populations coexisting at any given time, but with sufficient genetic contact to make all humanity a single lineage sharing a common evolutionary fate.Templeton (1998)
Both uses same sources. One summarizes and one full quote. Again Leroi's arguments are repeated. If people will insist on reverting more than 10 times, the least they could do would be not to do such a crappy job...Lukas19 23:23, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Genetic surveys and the analyses of DNA haplotype trees show that human "races" are not distinct lineages, and that this is not due to recent admixture; human races are not and never were "pure". A plain lie - or a nauseating demagogy at best. No wonder that the PC anti-racial propagators never explain this claim in detail and dance around it in foggy verbal circles. Centrum99 02:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Sounds like your argument applies to yourself more than anyone else. So I keep reverting but you don't? Indeed you have reverted massive changes with the most spurious and tenuous excuses. There is nothing wrong with saying the same thing twice in the article if it is relevant to two seperate sections, there is nothing wrong with citing thesame source several times. Take a good look at your really poor editing, just putting long windy quotes into articles, presumably because you do not understand them well enough to explain them properly. Something you don't seem to understand is that biology is not the samer as medicine. When niologists talk of "race" they mean subspecies, medical researchers and doctors don't mean this. When you claim that the term is used heterogeneously in the literature you need to address the fact that biologists are not confused about this term, they understand it and use it consistently. Therefore if you want to talk about "race" as a biological construct you need to understand that to a biologist "race" in the human sense doesn't exist. If you want to talk about medicine and the treatment of disease, and how they categorise/classify people and do genetic analyses, they are not using "race" in a biological context, they are not using "race" as abiological construct, they are using a social construct for medical purposes. This is deliberate, because they want to see if "self identified" descent has any medical validity, if it does then simply asking someone their identity is good enough to determine what treatment to use, but this is 'not a biological construct. Biologists are scientists, they are interested in taxonomy and naturally occuring phenomena, medicine is not a science, it is clinical, they are interested in treatment, not in biological classification. It is therefore incorrect and misleadingto claim that the term "race" is used in various ways in the biological literature, biologists are clear on it's use, medical clinicians are less clear, but they are not biologists, you need to understand the distinction. Alun 07:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Alun, the only thing that allows me to sustain reading such cretinuos defence of a more and more collapsing fallacy is the certainty that genetic research will already soon push you to the corner (at best, if the corner were in some mental hospital), where your screaming and howling about the non-existence of human races will be for laugh to everybody. Centrum99 02:03, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Charming. I note you restrict yourself to insults and refrain from conducting constructive debats. By the way, where did I ever claim that race does not exist? Race is very real and very pernicious. It's effects are felt everywhere a person is murdered because of the colour of their skin. Race is real, as is racism, what it is not is a biologically defined concept. Go and check Homo sapiens sapiens and tell me where it claims that biologists have an accepted consensual categorisation of the human specieson the subspecific level. Furthermore there is no generally accepted definition of subspecies. So essentially your comments have no merit. Claiming that geographically distributed variation is analogous to biological race is simply a point of view, it is not a definition. Alun 10:20, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Please Savignac, pot/kettle? Also, many people complaining about Wobble's reverts are permanately blocked now. Not because he got his way, but because of the tone, soapboxing, constant personal attacks, false reports to AN/I, constant reverts. There was a whole gang of them here. (Lucas19/Hayden5650/KarenAER/MoritzB/Fourdee/Phral) are blocked indef, and one was banned by Jimbo himself. And good riddance to them. This is not a treat, but you seem to be headed in the same direction. ~Jeeny (talk) 09:12, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

text: Jeeny, please have an above standard sense of understanding both for me, Savignac and these unlucky blocked boys. It is not easy to be non-personal, if you combine reading Alun's contributions with the reading of his anarchist's personal profile. Thank you in advance. Centrum99 82.100.61.114 14:51, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

text: So you actually know Lukas19 et al. then? I have never "let loose" on anyone. I may have been abrasive with you, but considering the offensive personal comments you have made about me I think I have been extremely tolerant. You seem to think that it is OK for you to make very personal comments about other users, but I cannot even point out that you are breaking Wikipedia rules? Take a look at my talk page posts compared to yours. My posts generally deal with discussing the article and using reliable sources to support any given POV. They involve the correct application of Wikipedia policies and guidelines. Looking at your posts they invariably contain ad hominem personal attacks. I have simply and repeatedly told you two important things.
* You cannot remove material cited from reliable sources just because you disagree with the source. You need to provide evidence that the source is unreliable.
* If you can provide reliable sources that contradict the material you disagree with, then you can add this material in addition to the article. This is how we get neutrality, find a different source that contradicts a claim in the article, and add this as well. Giving both points of view leads to neutrality. The problem you have is that you do not have any reliable sources to support the point of view you want to introduce to the article. Alun 09:29, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's pretty obvious that there are quite a few that agree with the edits that wobble makes.  He has the consensus, just not the loudest consensus. Loud, with cherry picked facts and often rude, which is what I have seen here often, gets too trying to deal with after a while, maybe that's why the others are blocked? If you are with the others you should consider that Wobble is not blocked, the fact he happens to be in your path is a good thing for wikipedia. I'm sure you will cry bias but actually its just a case of not giving undue weight to minor or outlying points of view. David D. (Talk) 16:17, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

text: I don't believe anything.  I just read what is available.  Both sides, believe it or not. Why are you so surprised that others find less weight with the racist view.  You think it is based on PC propoganda, but its not, its based on looking at the data. One thing you often miss is that scientists who conclude there are not races do not conclude there are no genetic differences between populations.  So what is it everyone is actually arguing about?  It all comes down to a definition.  The one that racists like to use does not dovetail with the one that academics use. David D. (Talk) 03:36, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

text: I read their data as well as their conclusions. I am free to disagree with the conclusions if they do not fit the data. Am I naive to assume their data is not fraudulant? David D. (Talk) 18:37, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

text: There is no mind game here. And no agenda. David D. (Talk) 04:58, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

text: It's pedantic to consider all the data? David D. (Talk) 05:09, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Wobble/Alun's Reverts

message: I have removed the following text There are variety of ways in which 'race' is used in biological literature. Pigliucci et al. (2003) because this citation does not occur in the references list, so how can anyone heck it claims this? I have asked Lukas before to learn how to cite sources properly, ther eis still a source cited by a single URL link in the article, this needs to be dealt with by Lukas or I will remove it. Alun 07:21, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Removal of non existent source

message: Regarding this edit. It is factually incorrect to claim that "Not a small proportion according to Edwards. ". Edwards does not dispute the fact that the differences are small. He disputes that this observation automatically leads to the conclusion that "race" is not a biological construct. Edwards argument is not that Lewonin's statistical analysis is wrong, nor that variation is not small, his argument is that what is important is how the small variation is structured when it comes to determining if races are biological or not. These conclusions are based on the old statistical fallacy of analysing data on the assumption that it contains no information beyond that revealed on a locus-by-locus analysis, and then drawing conclusions solely on the results of such an analysis. The ‘taxonomic significance’ of genetic data in fact often arises from correlations amongst the different loci, for it is these that may contain the information which enables a stable classification to be uncovered.....There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification.Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy A.W.F. Edwards Long and Kittles paper Human Genetic Diversity and the Nonexistence of Biological Races is more informative. Here they claim that FST is only relevant when calculated on a population by population basis. They conclude that a great deal of genetic variation within groups is consistent with each of these [race] concepts. However, none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses. They think that none of the current concepts of race are consistent with their observations, because their best fit model for human population structure does not conform to any of the proposed models. They do not claim that this invalidates the concept of biological "race", just that for humans this concept needs to be defined in such a way as to explain the observed diversity and population structure, and no current concepts do this. Their main criticism of Lewonin is that he assumes that all populations are independent, and that all populations are equally distant from each other, whereas in reality many human populations represent sub-sets of other populations, for example all out of Africa populations are sub-sets of the ancient African population. They claim that their observations support this.Alun 08:17, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Edwards does not say it's not small

message: I have had a bit of a reorganisation. I have tried to avoid changing the meanings or emphasis of any section. Please be assured that any section that seems to stress one point of view over another, when it didn't before is purely due to oversight on my part. I did not come intending to make such a large change, but I fond that many sections repeated other sections, and certain sections needed to be merged into other sections, I am assuming this is due to the fact that this article is essentially made up from three previous articles. The main things I have done are to try and rationalise the article, as it makes sense to me. Therefore sections that appeared to be discussing the validity of "race" as a concept I have moved to the section "Do Biologically Distinct Races Exist?", etc. Edward's criticism of Lewontin occured in several places, I have put it in the "Genetic variation and human populations", it is especially relevant to the "Multilocus Allele Clusters" sub-section as this is the crux of his argument. I have also had a go at explaining this argument, Edwards argument is excellent, and exlains why the use of multiple loci is effective very well. Further I have removed two extensive paragraphs, not because there was anything wrong with them per se, but because as I was reading them I got the impression that they were identical to something else I had read just recently. Sure enough they were directly copied from athe paper The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research, by the Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group, National Human Genome Research Institute, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 77:000–000, 2005. This is obviously plagiarism and is not allowed, these sections were unatributed, and even if they had been they represented far too long sections to be compliant with WP:QUOTE. I'm now going to have a go at making a graphic to explain how multi-locus clusters work, I'll base it on Edward's example. Hope I have not troden on anyones toes here, it really was only meant as a bit of reorganisation, if I have inadvertantly removed important info, please understand this was not my intent. Alun 16:21, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Bit of a reorganisation

message: Genetics for the human race lots of papers and reviews. Good resource. There was a symposium at Howard University as well, sponsored I think by Nature. Alun 19:17, 8 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Nature "Race and Genetics" supplement

message: The vast majority of scientists state that : "common racial classifications are insufficient, inaccurate, or biologically meaningless." Thus, writing that "Some scientists argue that common racial classifications are insufficient, inaccurate, or biologically meaningless." is giving undue weight to fringe theories. This is not acceptable, even less on such a sensitive subject where people are looking for what modern science has to say concerning this problem. This article needs expert attention from a mainstream scientist. Tazmaniacs 23:15, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be probably the best solution, although we need to remember WP:UNDUE and not give too much weight (and space) to proponents of scientific racism. Tazmaniacs 21:37, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clean-up: "some says..." 

message: I think this section should be delected. It is mostly a collection of various quotes. Most of the arguments have already been presented in earlier section, so it adds nothing new but takes up unnecessary space.Muntuwandi 17:51, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, or at least the quotes could be replaced with a brief section discussing the various POVs. On the whole though the existence or non existence of biological races is not a subject for this article. Whether biological races exist or not is totally dependent upon the definition of "race" used, and given that there is no universally accepted definition of "race", or even subspecies in the biological sciences it seems like a pointless excercise to try to "answer" the question. Certainly if this question needs to be addressed at all it is not in this article because this article is not about biological race, it is about "Race and genetics", the question of the existence or non existence of "biological races" cannot be answered by the discipline of genetics, it can only be answered by a universally accepted definition of "race". Therefore this question belongs in the "race" artice and in the subspecies article. Alun 12:54, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Do Biologically Distinct Races Exist?

message: The articles are discussing the same issues thus they should be merged. The title of Human genetic variation sounds less controversial.Muntuwandi 16:34, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge with [[Human genetic variation]]

message: Let me get this straight, you are trying to say that information un Muntuwandi's source shoulkd not be included because your source says it is unreliable?  Is that the basic jist of this argument? -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 14:38, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: To clarify further that the content here XGustaX's sources means that content here 
Not exactly. XGustaX 16:55, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: New Section break

message: I have reviewed the sources.  Here is what I think.
*User:XGustaX 's source from XGustaX's sources - states, "This is a briefing paper published by the Indigenous People’ Council on Biocolonialism, P.O. Box 818, Wadsworth, Nevada 89424. Ph: (775)".  I am leery about this source, it does not appear to be peer reveiwed or even very academic.  Plus it appears the group performing the study may have a conflict of interest.  I cannot see why this source would overrule anything in a more appropriate source.
* User:Muntuwandi's source -  appears to be the most reliable source and should trump the above source in my opinion.  This appears to be a scholarly peer reveiwed soruce that I would use if I were writing a paper for college credit.
* User:Muntuwandi's other source - another source added by Muntuwandi - comes from an repository of sholarly sources, I would take this 2nd above the one listed above.  Based on this, I see no reason information from either of Muntuwandi's sources should not be included based on the information in XGustaX's source.  I hope this can go to help acheive a consensus on the appropriate version of the article. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 14:21, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  My point of view 

message: TELL ME IF YOU NEED SOURCES,
Where do you take something like 45% of the Mtda AMERINDIAN chromosome!!!! IN ARGENTINIANS??? Thisis the most important genetic test in that country and shows that it's 80% European, and this is including immigrants and the entire population regerding their ethnic orgin. 
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114025749/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
:"Notably, when individual admixture was examined, the Amerindian and European admixture showed a very large variance and individual Amerindian contribution ranged from 1.5 to 84.5% in the 94 individual Argentine subjects." Muntuwandi 13:38, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: why not just include the information from this new article into this article aswell instead of removing the table. I have no problem with including autosamal admixture, infact I would welcome it. Muntuwandi 00:32, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There seems to already be a consensus on this talk page. That is why. I think most 3rd parties have spoken. Including myself. YuZuu 00:37, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  fellow wikipedians. there is no need to worry about admixture, the whiteness of Argentinians has never been in doubt, they are white.  but admixture is present and scientists have found it using both autosomal, mtDNA and y-chromosomal dna. why trying to sweep this admixture under the carpet. Are you ashamed that some argentines have native american admixture. Its just the truth. Both history and science attest to this.Muntuwandi 00:51, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No one seems to be worried about this on the talk page. I think what most people are trying to tell you is that they know quiet clearly we are all mixed. I believe no one here is ashamed of Argentines. I suggest you settle down because now your edits are becoming to look like Wikipedia:Disruptive editing Rejects community input. You need to learn you can not always be right. Happy Wiking. YuZuu 01:29, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes I cannot always be right but I need a solid reason why you dispute this scientific information. Not simply because a gang of editors disagree with me.Muntuwandi 01:34, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  They have tried to tell you why, but it seems that you do not bother to listen. In order to be a good editor here you need to take criticism and be willing to accept others view points not just throw sources at them and say they are wrong. You need to learn how to work well with others and not just edit with you. You are assuming  Bad faith when you say we are ganging up on you we are not. We are trying to give our view points to an issue that has gone on long enough. This needs to end. I suggest you leave here with all this in mind. YuZuu 01:47, 25 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: i REMOVE THE TABLE IS WRONG

message: "Some estimate that as much as 40% of the genome may contribute to intelligence[37]." 
It is contradictory since 97% of the genome is junk DNA, therefore, it must be less than 3%. 
I suggest removing that statement.
71.175.32.77 14:39, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contradictory statement 

message: I wrote this a while ago on the messy Race in the United States page (help requested if any of you are interested) but now am taking it out.  I think it fits better here.  Incorporate some/all if you wish: Calliopejen1 09:09, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  text being removed from [[Race in the United States]] page taht you might want here?  

message: i replaced the 2-20% figure, which came from the backintyme website.  On that site, the author is not a geneticist but he cites the Shriver paper for the statement.  I went back to the original shriver paper and what i added (0.7%, s.e.=0.9%) were the actual findings.  The 1/3 have 2-20% statement is silly, because you could say 1/3 of Americans make between $60,000 and $1,000,000,000 per year, if you want to include Bill Gates in the mix.  The current number is more informative.  
I also deleted a bunch of unreferenced stuff that looked implausible.  If anyone wants to find citations and readd it, have at it! Calliopejen1 10:40, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  admixture 

message: I have made some changes regarding this content for the simple reason that any reading of the NY Times article in question does not support the claims made by this article. My biggest concern is the breach of Wikipedia guidelines regarding science and the popular press, we should avoid citing the popular press when we make scientific claims, but there were serious distortions even using the Times article as a source.
*"However, some scholars disagree with this philosophy."
:I don't see any mention in the Times article of the researchers making any comment regarding Jared Diamond's book.
*"Recently scientists identified two genes, microcephalin and ASPM that were thought to be associated with brain size."
:We are citing the NY Times so we state this clearly, this appears to imply that the scientific papers themselves are the source for this edit, they are not, it is a newspaper article written by a non expert. The genes identified are not "thought to be" anything, they are known to be associated with brain size, people lacking functional copies are microcephalic.
*"These genes are found at high frequencies in the Eurasian populations...but they are not found amongst the sub-Saharan African populations."
:Not what the Times article says. It says that a specific type of the microcephalin gene is found at a 70% frequency in Europe and Asia (meaning that 3 in 10 of Europeans and Asians lack this allele) and that a specific type of the ASPM gene is found at about a 50% frequency in the Middle East and Europe (meaning that 5 in 10 Europeans and a great majority of East Asians lack this allele), they are not both found at high frequencies in Eurasian populations. The article nowhere states that these alleles are absent from sub-Saharan Africa: They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. About 70 percent of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, but it is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.....With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged 14,100 to 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a midway date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and is found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
*"They thus believe these two genes conferred some cognitive abilities upon the Eurasian populations."
:This claim is not made in the article, the article states: "They note that the ASPM allele emerged about the same time as the spread of agriculture in the Middle East 10,000 years ago and the emergence of the civilizations of the Middle East some 5,000 years ago, but say that any connection is not yet clear."
The article not only misreported the NY Times, it also selectively omitted certain statements such as this: "Even if the new alleles should be shown to improve brain function, that would not necessarily mean that the populations where they are common have any brain-related advantage over those where they are rare."
I have endevoured to correct this biased interpretation of a journalistic source. It appears that the data in question are not really relevant to this section of the article. I would suggest that these data do not belong in this article, they have little or no relevance to any concept of "race". In which "racial" scheme are "Eurasians" considered a "race"? If Eurasians have never been considered a "race", then how can the fact that they share a specific allele in common be relevant to any concept of "race"? Indeed how can any single genetic marker ever be considered a marker for "race"? These genes show the same pattern of distribution as many other genes, they appear to be distributed clinally, am I to infer that African people who happen to have the relevant copy of these genes are considered to be part of an "Eurasian race"? Obviously these genes are not "racial" genetic markers, for no such thing exists, in which case what is the point of mentioning them? Indeed, I don't understand what a section entitled "Modern civilisation and genetics" has to do with an article about "Race and genetics". The concept of "Modern civilisation and genetics" seems best debated with regard to the way genetics was misused by "modern civilisation" in the first half of the twentieth century in order to promote eugenic and racist policies in places like the USA and Germany. Jonathan Marks discusses this in detail in his book "What it means to be 98% chimpanzee", a discussion of genetics with regard to eugenics and racism would be much more apt in this section IMHO. Alun 16:13, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: NY Times article about "brain" genes

message: *It is a statistical program that works by placing individuals into a number of predefined clusters based on their overall genetic similarity. These predefined clusters are based on genetic markers whose frequencies are already known to vary significantly amongst the races.
:I'm not sure what is meant by "predefined clusters", predefining them would be an a priori classification, something the papers claim they don't do. I have reintroduced my infobox, I think it explains how the methodology of clustering works quite well. The claim that these alleles are known to vary significantly across races is surely wrong, it would invalidate the research if it were true, as their sample genes would be biased and therefore the results would be predetermined. It also pre-supposes that "races" are know biological constructs, another thing that would invalidate the research. Indeed it is a fundamental point of these analyses that it is the geographical spread of multiple allelic frequencies distributed clinally over geographic distance that is determining the clustering, and not a pre-known property of the genes.
*The notion of a genetic cluster is that people within the cluster are significantly more related to each other than to those in other clusters.
:According to Edwards it is the fact that populations that are geographically close tend to share alleles at the same frequencies that causes the clustering, so I have said this. It may amount to the same thing as being closely related, but I have more closely worded it to what Edwards says.
*I have included a small section on factors that affect clustering analyses. Specifically that clustering is relative, samples are compared to samples in the same study, the clusters are not absolute entities; sampling methods are important because geographically distant "populations" will give more discrete clustering patterns that geographically close "populations". The number of alleles available for study is also a factor, more alleles produce better resolution and consequently a greater number of clusters, this is related to the concept of relativity mentioned above, these clusters are not absolute entities. "Populations" are another problem, is an "ethnic group" really a [Panmixia|panmitic] population? If it is not can we claim that these "populations" conform to an accurate definition of "population" for such studies? There is a nice paper about identifying populations called "What is a population? An empirical evaluation of some genetic methods for identifying the number of gene pools and their degree of connectivity" by Robin Waples and Oscar Gaggiotti that tests several concepts of "population", they show that the computer programme STRUCTURE gives very mixed results when it identifies "populations", especially when mutation rates are low and there is a large degree of migration between sub-populations. So we should also include these criticisms of STRUCTURE. Besides this paper also clains that 
When it is not possible to partition individuals into a priori samples (or when the basis for doing so is of uncertain validity), it is necessary to use an approach that clusters individuals without reference to sample information. We chose the most widely used clustering program (STRUCTURE) to represent this class of analyses. The authors (Pritchard et al. 2000; Falush et al. 2003) admit that the procedure to estimate the number of populations is ad hoc and recommend that it be used only as a guide, but these caveats are often ignored. Previous assessments of the performance of structure (Evanno et al. 2005) have focused on situations involving strong differentiation. In agreement with those results, we found that structure accurately identified the number of populations when Nm was 5 or lower, mutation was High, and full samples of loci and individuals were used, but performance deteriorated sharply under less ideal conditions (Fig. 7). The complete inability of structure to correctly estimate the true number of populations using Low mutation markers is somewhat surprising but in agreement with previous observation regarding the factors primarily responsible for statistical power to detect population differentiation.
*Another study by Risch of 3,899 SNPs in 313 genes based on US populations (Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics) once again showed distinct and non-overlapping clustering of the Caucasian, African-American and Asian samples.
:This claim seems to be confusing three different publications. Tang et al. from Risch's lab produced a paper in 2005 (Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies) that used 326 microsatelites, it also used the SIREs (Self Identified Race/Ethnic group) white (not Caucasian), African American, East Asian, and Hispanic as "populations", but individuals did not actually self-identify, they were compelled to choose from one of these defined groups. A comment paper (not a research paper) by Neil Risch in 2002 called Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease cited some work published by a different research group that did indeed use "3899 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were present within 313 genes" (the paper is called Haplotype Variation and Linkage Disequilibrium in 313 Human Genes by Stephens et al. and was published in 2001), but this paper does not do any clustering analyses, it discusses linkage disequilibrium. I have corrected this and have included a quotation from the Tang paper.
*I have included mention of two papers that identify clustering in European "populations". These papers define "populations" differently from each other, and use different numbers of alleles, unsurprisingly they produce different results. I included these papers to show that clusters occur within continental regions and not just between so called "races".
*I included a map of Europe where I have displayed the regions that the clusters are found, the map also shows that the clusters overlap significantly, which one would expect from geographically proximate "population" sampling. Alun 15:40, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Clustering analyses