Today the Telegraph reported on an academic paper commending a new lexicography of race and ethnicity in order to combat very, very naughty racist thoughts by white men:

Dr Ewan Birney, deputy director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridgeshire, is also a co-author of the article.

He explains that beyond dropping Caucasian, other terms should also be avoided, including ethnicity labels - such as “Native American”, “Hispanic” and “White Irish” - and cultural terms such as “European”.

Dr Birney and his colleagues advocate for scientists to replace these commonly used words and phrases with more complex language, based around a two-step genetic analysis.

As a result, he says this more technical language would see the label of “European” replaced with “The European-associated PCA cluster, which aims to minimise variation in non-genetic factors and genetic factors”.

Dr Birney is actually Prof Birney, and as well as holding other positions in the gene biz he is a co-director of the European Bioinfomatics Institute, the “home for big data in biology”.  Oddly, this rather large and, no doubt, exceedingly well-funded organisation does know what race is when it needs to:

As Europe’s premier centre for bioinformatics, our commitment to diversity and inclusion is critical to our success in delivering excellence in science. As a global organisation with employees from 80+ nationalities we encourage and empower our employees to be their authentic selves at work, embracing the unique combination of culture, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, physical or mental ability and work-life situations.

Along with himself, Prof Birney credits five colleagues with the writing of the paper, which is titled “The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research”.  They set out their case thus:

In the case of human genetics (by which we mean the genetic study of human biology and disease) this often involves terminology inherited from anthropology and population genetics, both of which have evolved significantly in recent years. Both fields now firmly reject longstanding ideas of race as a meaningful biological category and labels which were founded in racist perspectives of the 20th and preceding centuries. For example, it is now clear that while humans vary genetically, there is no natural or inherent categorization of human genetic diversity at any global scale. The genetic structures we find are tangled and complex, reflecting our history of worldwide migration, population divergence and admixture, both ancient and recent. While not without consequence for human traits, genetic ancestry and diversity are poorly reflected in the range of anatomical features used in older studies that sought to categorize individuals and groups, features such as pigmentation and cranial or post-cranial morphology. Hence, the racial and ethnographic labels used in such historical studies, and more fundamentally their categorizing approach, have little relevance for understanding human population genetics. Furthermore, the consequences of misunderstanding and misusing these categories, and the terms associated with them, are far from neutral: science, society and politics have always been inherently connected.

As geneticists, we believe that there is an increasing need to address one of the more uncomfortable aspects of this connection, where in the words of American Society of Human Genetics “the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist” [1]. As the source of evidence which some ideologues misrepresent to fit their views of biology and society, the human genetics community has an obligation to revisit and, where possible, change its language to be both more accurate and less confusing or harmful in the public arena. In science, we always aim for precision in our language, but it is not feasible to completely eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding, wilful or otherwise.

Prof Birney also has a blog, which he has not used much, it must be said.  But his last but one post back in 2019 was titled “Race, genetics, and pseudo-science: an explainer”, and it explains that:

Racial categories, as most people understand them today, have some of their roots in the development of scientific thinking during only the last few centuries. As Europeans explored and colonised the world, thinkers, philosophers and scientists from those countries attempted to apply taxonomic structures to the people that they encountered, and though these attempts were many and varied, they typically reflected sharp geographic boundaries, and obvious physical characteristics, such as pigmentation and basic morphology – that is to say, what people look like. Research in the 20th century found that the crude categorisations used colloquially (black, white, East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation, meaning that differences and similarities in DNA between people did not perfectly match the traditional racial terms. The conclusion drawn from this observation is that race is therefore a socially constructed system, where we effectively agree on these terms, rather than their existing as essential or objective biological categories.

Some people claim that the exquisitely detailed picture of human variation that we can now obtain by sequencing whole genomes contradicts this. Recent studies, they argue, actually show that the old notions of races as biological categories were basically correct in the first place. As evidence for this they often point to the images produced by analyses in studies that seem to show natural clustering of humans into broadly continental groups based on their DNA. But these claims misinterpret and misrepresent the methods and results of this type of research. Populations do show both genetic and physical differences, but the analyses that are cited as evidence for the concept of race as a biological category actually undermine it.

Denying race is a form of professional lying, which is invariably undertaken by otherwise educated people “because racism”.  Prof Birney could as easily prove the taxonomic validity of race as disprove it - a fact my good friend John Standing thought he might demonstrate to the anti-racist Prof by way of some emailed questions, as follows:

Dear Professor Birney,

You will no doubt be aware that a paper titled “The language of race, ethnicity, and ancestry in human genetic research”, published by you and your colleagues at arxiv.org, was cited this morning by the Telegraph Online. As my interest was piqued I downloaded the paper and then had a look at your somewhat neglected blog just to assess the quality of your thinking.

It is evident that you have taken an interest in the white nationalist scene in the US, and you appear to be advancing what I would regard as a standard “in-group” academic establishment-style rebuttal of its common sense claims on race and racial difference, ie, a rebuttal constructed with the usual unwittingly Marxistic interpretations and selective conclusions, and very much relying on the usual semiotics of academic authority.

Well, I wonder if we can open up your mental processes a bit. I am not an American or a WN, but I do consider myself a nationalist, and like all nationalists I have an interest in the state of the liberal mind. Can yours “stand up” its own underlying universalist assumptions? To find out I am asking you in this email three questions on the facticity of population genetics and six on the ethics of ethnic survival and continuity. Obviously, they are not difficult to answer, but the answers are difficult for that rarity, the liberal conscience. Here they are:

1. Is a typical member of a given landed ethny or descent group related to his or her co-ethnics more closely than to the typical members of another such group?

2. Is a typical landed descent group related more closely to its neighbouring landed groups than it is to a random group elsewhere in the world?

3. Is there any fundamental reason why a cluster of such inter-related groups cannot be described as a racial or, indeed, sub-racial entity, where that cluster broadly accords with physically-bounded geographic regions, and where its most physically distant groups are more related genetically to their immediate neighbours within the group than to any neighbour without the group?

4. Given that the descent group is the repository of unique or distinctive traits for fitness selected and transmitted on the land, is it evolutionarily adaptive for group members to exercise a preference for their own group-members, however instinctively and by whatever means, over members of an out-group in whom those traits are absent?

5. Is it (a) evolutionarily adaptive, (b) necessary for survival and continuity, and/or (c) moral for a descent group to reject its colonisation and replacement by an ingressing group?

6. Given that the colonisers are the aggressor, and given that the costs of defeat for the respective parties are asymmetric (ie, if the colonisation succeeds the cost to the defenders is existential while if it fails the cost to the aggressors is leaving the land) which side should an objective, fair-minded and neutral observer wish to see prevail?

7. Given the aeons of selection on the land required for the sublime patchwork of human group variation to obtain, and given that the simple fact of that patchwork demonstrates that human history is not at all a process of constant genetic churning by migration, indeed migration is not privileged over ethnicisation, should you not respect the life and uniqueness of ALL groups and be committed to their preservation rather than their undoing?

8. Given that in all the living spaces of European-descended peoples the political class and the corporate and other interests that class serves have, over the last several decades, engineered a vast and on-going colonisation by foreign peoples of all kinds, and have done so without any visible sign of respect for these Europeans’ future existence, will, and interests, and with extreme prejudice against their defence of life and land, does the narrative of the defenders’ racism rest on anything more than a learned (ie, socially-constructed) and dehumanising othering, sans any natural or moral foundation and thus any philosophically respectable argument?

9. Do you understand that the politically generated and entirely coercive migrations of our time into the living spaces of Europeans and only Europeans are not at all justified by the great human migrations of millenia past or, indeed, by any event from history, and that by conflating these you could allow yourself and your work to become weaponised by those forces acting against the life and freedom of your own people?

That will do for now. You are most welcome, Professor Birney, to offer replies to each of these questions. Obviously I would ask you to do so without falling back on the racism smear, which is boorish and tiresome and, anyway, can never apply to any people, or any part thereof, acting in such a cause as ours today. Likewise, I would earnestly request that you do not attempt a rebuttal of the demographic impact upon our people of the endless foreignisation of our land, which is another craven stratagem one encounters from those who suppose themselves to be courageously removing the splinter of racism from the European eye while ignoring the moat in their own.

Yours sincerely,

John Standing

One never expects a reply from these exalted beings.  But if one arrives it will be posted on the thread.