Monthly Archives: March 2022

Alexandra G. EllerCara C. HeuserSalt Lake City

To the Editor:

I want to thank you for publishing this article. As a parent of a 15-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, I couldnt agree more with Amy Julia Beckers view on prenatal testing. I had an amniocentesis test to confirm the diagnosis at 20 weeks and was very scared. I was determined to carry out the pregnancy despite my doctors options being heavily weighed toward termination, and I couldnt be more thankful for that choice!

The more we can educate parents on all the positive experiences that come from having a child with a disability, the better off our world will be.

Gretchen WhiteBuffalo

To the Editor:

Its not the prenatal testing system that is broken, but our culture and society. As the mother of a child with multiple disabilities, Down syndrome being one of them, I can attest to my sons good character and loving nature. My family is one of the lucky ones, yet other families fracture under the added challenges of a child with a complicated diagnosis.

At my sons school, special education teachers are not paid the same as their general education counterparts, and there are many open paraprofessional positions, because of low pay and no benefits. In addition, not every family has extended family members nearby who are willing and able to pitch in.

When families can better afford to care for children with disabilities and have enough support, and teachers and caregivers are paid well, then it will be easier for me to tell a family facing a prenatal anomaly, Youve got this.

Leslie NussValparaiso, Ind.

To the Editor:

Amy Julia Becker has raised a very important point. In selecting to abort abnormal fetuses (which in some cases are wrongly identified, which parents find out after their perfectly healthy child is born), we are creating a platform for eugenics. Most people would recoil at such a thought, but that is exactly what is going on here.

If the abnormalities would cause suffering for the newborn baby with no chance for survival or would endanger the life of the mother, then yes, sadly, the pregnancy should be terminated.

More:

Opinion | Prenatal Tests, Disabilities and the Decision Whether to Abort - The New York Times

The disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine that is being broadcast by Putin to his people is frightening, to say the least, for the message Putin is spewing forth is that his is not an invasion, but simply a special military operation in an effort by Russia to de-Nazify the Ukrainians. Putins message is all a lie, but many Russians are buying into it.

The U.S. has also been invaded for years by political lies and untruths, many of our own making pushed primarily by political special interest groups. And, like many Russians, we dont realize we are forming our views based on fake facts

Four days after Russia began dropping artillery shells on Kyiv, a scared Ukrainian restaurateur, Misha Katsiurin, who was racing to evacuate his wife and children from Ukraine, wondered why his father living in a small Russian city had not called him. Didnt his father care about him, the son wondered? So he called his father.

Arent you worried about this war, Misha asked him? What war? was his reply. His father did not believe there was a war, nor did he think the Russian soldiers could bomb innocent people. He started to yell at his son for being wrong and said the Nazis are doing all this!

Many Ukrainians are experiencing the same disbelief from their Russian relatives. Why? Because that is the Nazi-caused-this message that Putin has been deliberately promoting over the air waves and social media, insisting there was no invasion by his troops.

Many Russians have accepted Putins version of what is happening, perhaps because they are used to believing their leader, or perhaps because they fear disapproval if they challenge that message, or maybe they know no other truth.

I feel sorry for these blindsided Russians. If people dont -- or cant --find out the facts, then they are living in a world of false beliefs, and, unfortunately, may not even realize it.

Some of us in the U.S. are also living in a world of delusions. The reasons are many total trust in a leader, reluctance to hear the other side, unwillingness to analyze, or even think about an issue, or simply saying, I know what I believe, dont bother me with the facts.

Several examples:

The antivaxxers, who read the erroneous social media messages about COVID-19 and were easily convinced that these vaccines will harm or eventually kill them, or say they are a government plot. Vaccine mandates are a threat too, they say because they damage a persons freedom. The same freedom issues do not seem to be a concern to them when studies show the country may be losing democracy, a precious component of democracy.

The Trump supporters who declared the 2020 election was stolen from their leader 53 percent of Republicans, according to polls, declare that Trump, not Biden, is the rightful leader, and only 19 percent of the GOPers say Biden definitely won, according to a December Newsweek poll. The 2020 vote returns show Biden was the clear winner.

The anti abortionists, who, in their eagerness to condemn all abortions, dismiss facts as to when a fetus becomes viable and if expanding anti-abortion laws violate a womans right to decide about her own body. The anti-abortion bills before state legislatures are wildly increasing. Approximately 531 abortion restrictions have been introduced in state legislatures THIS YEAR alone.

The eugenicists movement, which has now thankfully disappeared, did govern intellectual views in the 1930s. Eugenics is the study of how to improve the human race. It was increasingly discredited as unscientific and racially biased during the 20th century, especially after the adoption of its doctrines by the Nazis in order to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups.

The cry from many that global warming in simply a hoax and does not need our attention is disturbing. They either say climate change is not happening, and/or it is, but humans have nothing to do with it. According to a NASA February 2022 report, Earths surface continues to significantly warm, with recent global temperatures being the hottest in the past 2,000-plus years.

QAnon It is a loosely-organized anonymous group who believe some in the government are part of a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children who operate a global child sex trafficking ring QAnon claims it conspired against former U.S. President Donald Trump during his term in office It also says the Democratic Party has sinister intentions.

While propaganda, fake news and more recently, alternative facts have been with us for years, the messages seem to be increasing here and abroad.

And why is that bad? I believe people deserve the truth you and I are smart enough to make up our own minds, as long as we have the real facts in front of us. If we spout out fake news, we lose our credibility,.

Fake news can hurt other people, especially those easily latch on to false facts without thinking, and those who swallow false information about medical issues.And once they accept false information, it makes it harder for them to accept true information. And that's frightening.

Think of the Russian father who could not believe his son was in danger in Ukraine.

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Propaganda, disinformation invade our lives -- here, and in Ukraine - Palo Alto Online

Why do some people equate the phrase human biodiversity with racism? And what does it really mean?

HBD, as its often referred to, is the pseudoscience of the alt-right, opines Vox. Some progressive academics say its a clarion phrase for white supremacists, a code phrase cnnjuring up a pre-genetic era when so-called races were hierarchically ranked by skin color, with Caucasians (white Europeans) at the top followed by Mongoloids (Asians) and Negroids (black Africans). Those who use the HBD term, or dont aggressively reject it, are often labeled as closet racists.

This is part one of a four part series on thecontroversy over human biodiversity. Read part two on Tuesday, March 15.

Writing in 2016, as the far right coalesced in support of Donald Trumps candidacy in the United States, Ari Feldman wrote in Forward a scathing analysis on the ideology he believed undergirded the alt-right movement.

An ideological successor to eugenics, human biodiversity (HBD) is, like eugenics (from the Greek words for good and breeding) primarily a euphemism. Ostensibly, HBD refers to the scientifically proven (and therefore apolitical) genetic differences between groups of humans.

But it is just pseudoscientific racism, updated for the Internet age.

Human biodiversity appropriates scientific authority by posing as an empirical, rational discourse on the genetically proven physical and mental variation between humans.

The refrain of HBD bloggers and forum commenters is that the (gene-driven, according to them) dissimilarities they outline are non-negligible or non-trivial and have, accordingly, social policy implications. Though it has a rational, policy-wonk zing to it, thats just Internet forum-ese for youre genetically distinct from us and should be treated differently.

The Forward piece became a template for many journalists and some academics who saw a reactionary movement embedded in the HBD term. Of course, any phrase can take on connotations beyond what those who use it mean. You dont have to be a scientist or a racist to acknowledge that some human differences pattern by populations.

We are not talking about cultural diversitywere encouraged to celebrate thatbut evolved patterns of genetic or biological diversity linked to ancestry and geography, from body type (small Inuits; tall Danes) to disease proclivity (diseases among the Basques or Costa Ricans or so-called Jewish disorders, all the result of centuries of intermarriage within cultural or geographically circumscribed populations).

Is it racist to research or write about similarities and differences rooted in our ancestry across a range of characteristics? The larger question is whether in this polarized world, its even possible to have a good faith, science-grounded discussion on the genetics of human group differences. Were going to try.

If you review Google Trends, the term human biodiversity sprang into use as the human genome map began unfolding more than two decades ago. The phrase and its HBD abbreviation trace to Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, who authored the 1995 book Human Biodiversity: Race, Genes and History. Marks primary thesis: humans are defined more by their similarities than group differences shaped by geographical isolation. Thats hardly controversial on its face, but at the time it needed to be said, and loudly. After all, for centuries, humans had been ranked by a racist hierarchy with European-descended whites at the pinnacle.

At its best, Human Biodiversity served as an enlightened attack on simplistic notions that races are rankable based on often superficial characteristics like skin color, which racists correlated with highly complex characteristics like intelligence.

But Marks wrote a polemic not a science book. HBD (as the book came to be known) created its own monster. Marks claimed there were no meaningful group differences. All significant population-based characteristics were the result of culture and environment, a resurrection of John Lockes tabula rasa/blank slate theory of human nature. The book was a hit among post-modern social scientists and in the media eager to replace equality with equity; not so much among scientists. Marks feckless views have been scathingly dismantled over the years for their exaggerative simplism and their ideological rejection of any meaningful, population-based differences.

No reasonable person disputes there are geographically rooted differences in physiology and physique that impact athletic performance, though Marks has argued that. These are not racial differences as that highly-charged ideological term has come to be used. Rather, they are differences rooted in ancestrypopulations circumscribed by geography, like Icelanders, or scattered geographically but historically evolving as a group because of adherence to religious and cultural principles groups like the Amish or gypsies.

Inuits, sometimes known as Eskimos, are an indigenous group originally of Siberian Asian descent who inhabited, and adapted to, the North American Arctic and sub-Arctic. They have been a relatively coherent population group tracing back 4,000 years. Evolving in the frigid far north has shaped the Inuit body type heavily built with a high natural amount of body fat. And they are short relative to other human populations, with the men averaging 54 (the average Canadian male, by contrast, is 510).

Why? Because evolving shorter, stouter bodies with extra layers of fat helped to preserve body heat, an essential evolutionary adaptation to survive in the coldest habituated region on Earth.

We know in reconstructing history that pockets of humans evolved in far different and often geographically isolated regions for tens of thousands of years. Thats shaped different body types: longer arms and legs relative to the torso, for instance, is found in some African peoples as an evolutionary adaptation to dissipate body heat in equatorial climes, while shorter and stouter endomorphic bodies are a distinct feature of many human groups in Euro-Asia, again as an adaptation to climatic conditions.

Geography has long shaped body patterns. Sports, running in particular, provides an unusually informative template to understand patterned human differences. As Jon Entine documented in Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why Were Afraid to Talk About It, coincidence and culture cannot explain why every world record in running, from the 100-meters to the marathon, is held by a person of African ancestry.

Unlike Inuits, equatorial Africans have longer limbs relative to their torsos, which helps in dissipating heat. Thats also a key advantage in running. But Africa is a large continent with many geographical differences. It is made up of multiple sub-populations, some of which have very distinctive physical characteristics that scientists believe give them advantage over other population groups when it comes to running.

East Africans, such as Kenyans who totally dominate distance running, evolved in the mountains of the Nandi region as ectomorphs, with slender limbs, large lungs and a preponderance of slow twitch muscles suited for endurance races.

As a generalization, Africans who trace their origins to the coastal west central flatlandsthe heart of the slave trade to the Americasare more mesomorphic, athletic and strong with more compact lungs and a preponderance of fast twitch muscle fibers better suited for sprints races.

No surprise that the top 300 100-meter times are held by runners of West African ancestry. There are no West African long distance runners of note. East Africans, who are absent in shorter races, dominate distance running.

Although humans have fooled around and moved around for many centuries, Eurasians as a generalization are more likely to have endomorphic body types, with more muscle and body fat. Based on patterned body type differences, its hardly a surprise that Eurasian totally dominate strength events, from the shot putt to the hammer throw to weight-lifting. They are the prototypical beefy football lineman. Opportunity and environmental factors play a role on the margins, but at the elite level of sports where access is wide open (such as running and field events), the genetic cream rises to the top.

Over the past twenty years, the controversy over whether ancestral body types produce elite runners has disappeared. No one believes that a white from the Europe or the Americas can regularly compete at the elite level in races from 10 thousand meters to the marathon with Kenyans. Thats an acknowledgment of human biodiversity. But beyond the indisputable, when discussing other aspects of human differences, just expressing an interest in the subject is often treated with deep suspicion or challenged with vitriol by many otherwise open-minded people, or worse: one is accused of being a scientific racist.As some liberal commentators have put it, the study of HBD (human biodiversity) is a form of hierarchical thinking, blatant eugenicist pseudoscience, popular among white nationalists and Neo-Nazis, the pseudoscientific racism of the alt-right that provides scientific-sounding cover for [racists] odious ideas.

Given such vituperation, it is hardly surprising that prominent anti-racists react so strongly at the very mention of human differencesexpressing concern, for instance, about Stormfront White supremacists having a good time discussing HLA [human leukocyte antigens] diversity among different races; or fretting over American neo-Nazis gulping down cows milk with their shirts off to demonstrate Europeans genetically encoded capacity to process lactose, a sugar in milk that cannot be digested by the majority of humans after weaning.

And yes, there are white racists who use the fact of human differences to make sweeping judgements on character and capacity, with Blacks and Jews ranked as inferior races. Such racists twist the fact of human group differences to suit their equally twisted beliefs. As a result, discussing any and all evidence of human genetic diversity is viewed with suspicioneven when those findings are important to understanding history or unlocking medical mysteries. But as we will address going forward, in Part II and beyond, as the field of medicine has shifted towards trying to understand the patterned genetic basis of disease, its become increasingly clear that proclivities and behavior are shaped in part by geographic and ancestral group differences. Scientists know this, and its become the central focus of much of the research into biomedicine. But it considering the racist past of US history, it is a direction that touches social and political nerves, and therefore remains an often unspoken taboo.

Jon Entineis the foundingexecutivedirectorof theGenetic Literacy Project, and winner of 19 major journalism awards. He has written extensively in the popular and academic press on agricultural and population genetics. You can follow him on Twitter@JonEntine

Patrick Whittle has a PhD in philosophy and is a freelance writer with a particular interest in the social and political implications of modern biological science. Follow him on his websitepatrickmichaelwhittle.comor on Twitter@WhittlePM

Read more here:

Part I: ViewpointMany people believe 'human biodiversity' is alt-right code for embracing racism. Here's why they are dangerously wrong - Genetic...