Race matters - but not for the reasons you think it does Dale Amon has a thoughtful post up at Libertarian Samizdata on race, but he inadvertently falls into a Tranzi trap. The Tranzis' influence means that any contemporary discussion of race must include a discussion and condemnation of racism, Nazism, and the like and (possibly) a prequel of a utopian future empty of racism. As Razib has discussed recently, discussions of race need not necessarily lead to racism any more than discussions of egalitarianism invariably lead to Communism:

Nazi, the word carries such opprobrium. It even sounds a bit disreputable rolling off the tongue, the disconcerting mix of German abruptness and sibilance. It has been observed that to be a former Nazi is a far graver crime than being a former Marxist-Leninist. That is a different topic, but let us say that both the Left and the Right have blood on their hands. Humanity is an imperfect species by any measure. But since my evolutionary conservative perspective might have some points of intersection with National Socialist ideals-I am tainted no? And yet somehow, Leftists are never tainted by the fact that Marxist-Leninists killed in the name of egalitarianism....

In other words, it's no more reasonable to bring up Hitler's crimes in a routine discussion of race than it is to bring up Stalin's crimes in a routine discussion of class. I encourage you to read the whole post for an elaboration on this theme. As I've said before, the reality of genetic differences is the root of our quarrel with the Tranzis. In this battle of ideas, establishing the biological reality of race is the first and last step in the refutation of the Tranzis' fundamental belief in what I call the axiom of equality: "Genetic differences between humans are of no importance and have no influence on behavior." But today I want to take a different tack. Forget about the political implications of race for a second, and let's focus on science - particularly biological science. As some farsighted commentators have observed, we are on the verge of genetically reengineering humanity. [1] A key and underappreciated step in this process will be a large-scale survey of human allelic diversity . This project (which I've commented on before) is called the haplotype map. As I said before:

In other words, if you think of the human genome project as a massive effort to provide a "first order" approximation to human sequence space, the HapMap will be a massive effort to provide a "second order" approximation to human sequence space. How is this useful? Suppose we want to describe the sequence of a randomly selected Joe. If you're limited to describing Joe's sequence with a single string, you'd give the consensus human genome sequence. If you can afford to be more accurate than that, you'll start figuring out which haplotypes are most common in Joe's population group, and give the haplotype distribution instead. A higher degree of accuracy would of course be to sequence Joe's genome de novo , but that's not yet cost effective.

In other words, we are moving towards a future in which one's biological origins become ever more important in one's life. We are moving towards a future in which genetics matter profoundly. The fact is that humans are not laboratory animals in the Western world.[2] Because of this, most of the standard tricks in a geneticist's arsenal - gene knockouts, mutagenesis, etc. - are simply unavailable when studying humans. Many clever methods have been developed to route around this problem, but the data thus obtained is far inferior (from a biologist's point of view) to the information that could be gained through the methods of standard genetics. It is for this reason that a survey of existing human biodiversity is crucially important . The determination of a human gene's function involves many steps (e.g. studies in animal models, bioinformatics, expression data, etc.) but the most important data of all comes from a survey of the phenotypes associated with the natural human variation in that gene. Despite the efforts of many obfuscators, the fact is that after describing you as human, the second most important fact from a geneticist's viewpoint is your race. [4] What do I mean by race? Steve Sailer has an excellent layman's description here, but from the genomicist's viewpoint a race is a cluster in genome space. (You may want to read these references before continuing.) Forget about the squid ink you've heard about the "biological irrelevance" of race. There is a huge amount of genetic variation that's more than skin deep that covaries with race. Examples include (but are not limited to): drug response, preponderance of genetic diseases, organ transplant acceptance,stem cell suitability, and most importantly haplotype distribution . Here's a quote from the genomicists building the hapmap:

The first will be to create haplotype maps of the genomes of three populations: those of northern and western European ancestry, Japanese and Chinese, and Yorubans.[From Africa.] In the second stage, scientists will test whether the haplotypes they find in those very large populations also appear in about 10 others.

These genomicists understand what the Tranzis do not, even if they have to speak in code to get their meaning across. The importance of race will only increase in the years to come. [3] [1] A crucial question among futurists is whether our destiny will be dominated by genetic engineering or cybernetics. There was a fascinating debate on this some time ago. In my opinion, these futures are not mutually exclusive. [2] China is a different story altogether. [3] Many believe that the inevitable problems that will accompany a revelation of the biological differences between races will be best solved by a program of large scale interracial marriage. It is doubtful that such a campaign will solve anything. For one thing, such campaigns don't remove racism - witness Brazil or Mexico. For another thing, genetic engineering will be far more effective in blurring racial boundaries - at the cost of introducing generational conflict, as new models with vastly higher intelligence supplant the old... [4] And sex, of course. Thanks to Smith for noting this. Note: usually we don't explicitly mention sex because we consider the case for genetically important sex differences to be overwhelming, but in this case it should have been included.