This is just a preview for my half-hour talk at the CSICon meeting in Las Vegas this October, where Ill talk about some of the distortions of biology created by ideology, distortions summarized in my Skeptical Inquirer paper coauthored with Luana Maroja.

Below is one slide Im using to address the misguided claim (one made by the top editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association), that Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.

Now the definition of race, as we discuss in our paper, is slippery, so we prefer to use ethnicity or geographic populations, but the implication is the same (read the paper before you kvetch): the claim is that there are no meaningful genetic differences between geographically separated populations.

But if that were the case, then you couldnt identify peoples ancestry from their genes. But we can: with good accuracy! If your genetic endowment said nothing about your ancestry, then companies like 23andMe would go out of business. And the fact that this works shows that ethnicity, or ancestry, or geographic population, or race, if you want to use the term, are not simply made-up social constructs, but indeed have important and often near-diagnostic genetic differences.

One example is me. Heres a slide Im going to show at CSICon. Its the 23andMe readout of my ancestry, with 97.2% of my genes coming roughly from the dark green area on the map. Im 100% Jewish, and mostly Ashkenazi.

That matches with what I know of my ancestry, and so my genetic endowment is surely of biological significance. The data from my genome, as analyzed by 23andMe, tells me something about the history of the genes I carry. Apparently, I have not a single nucleotide that isnt Jewish!

At any rate, come to the meeting. It features much bigger fish like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, and for sure it will be a good time, as its going to be similar in spirit and content to James Randis Amazing Meetings, which were great.

The rest is here:

Populations are genetically different, and meaningfully so Why Evolution Is True - Why Evolution Is True