A Guy in the Pew

The New York Times has a very interesting article about how new DNA tools may be reinforcing prejudice--particulalry since many geneology DNA programs seem to reinforce cultural concepts of race into DNA family groups: When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical. But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins. Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans , the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases . At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage o...

I usually save my best stuff for The Lead --I am the Sunday editor. I do so because the readership of that blog (even on Sunday's) is quite large, and the readership here is, well, more modest. Today, I wrote on a matter very important to me as the fatehr of an African American child, and I will rpeat that post here: James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize in medicine for his work in determining the structure of DNA, caused quite a furor when he said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. Watson has since backtracked from these comments, but the furor continues. (And, as the father of an African-American child, this is an issue that I take quite personally). Steven Levitt, one of the authors of F...

We like to assume that a diversity has value, but is there any empirical evidence that a diverse group will make a better decision? The Scientific American blog discusses a jury experiment that offers empirical evidence that diversity does matter: Many liberals share the vague intuition that a racially diverse (or representative) jury is "better" than a racially homogeneous one. The arguments for this view tend to be murky, though. Who benefits, and how, from racial diversity in the jury box? In a recent paper in Psychological Science [pdf download ], Tufts University psychology professor Samuel Sommers argues that this is an empirical question, and he provides a surprisingly powerful answer: when making a complex, ambiguous decision, everyone in a diverse group benefits. . . . In the study, Sommers asked 30 different mock juries, each composed of six adults, to watch a video summary, edited from Court TV coverage, of the trial proceedings of an actual sexual assault case in ...