The Lewontin Fallacy in Medicine By Brian Simpson
The politically correct woke nonsense to be discussed here, is pre-Covid-19, dating back to 2019, which as we will see is somewhat ironic, given emerging evidence of a racial link to Covid-19 susceptibility. Anyway, a major US medical conference heard biologists and anthropologists proclaim that that race is not a legitimate medical category, since, in short, races do not exist as discrete entities (what does?), and even so must be social constructions because, well, White racism, racial prejudice and all that jazz, as general health warnings, such as to African Americans over heart disease, may fuel racial prejudice, and one thing leads to another in an infinite chain of racist causation, with cops shooting people for trying to murder them with a knife, and members of the tribe burning and looting cities, as seen in Philadelphia late October 2020. It happens because, “orange man bad.”
Others less drunk on social construction bs follow the Lewontin argument, made by Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in 1972, that based upon a study of blood groups of people from seven racial groups, Lewontin allegedly found 85 percent of genetic variation in the difference within groups, and 15 percent between groups. He concluded, totally fallaciously, that there was no “genetic or taxonomic significance” between races. But, for starter, the only inference that could be made on the basis of the data, was in relation to blood groups, not other traits. And even here the argument is circular, since there were seven races initially chosen, and if races do not exist, who is to say what individuals were considered in the study, for in principle they could all be so genetically different as to not fall into a “racial” category. It is paradoxical to presuppose the concept of race, to then show that it does not exist.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/bies.10315
Secondly, even if for many traits there was greater differences between individuals that between racial groups, that would not show that races did not exist. A variation of 15 percent is not insignificant. After all, we are constantly told by the geneticists going to the next level and raving about the unity of life, that chimpanzees and human share 99 percent of their DNA, but the phenotypical and behavioural differences are profound. It is where the differences lie that counts.
Bear in mind that race is not the only biological category to be attacked by the cultural Marxist, only the first. Now we have sex and gender being deconstructed, with some arguing for multiple gender categories, and some going further rejecting the division between men and women because intersex individuals exist. That is like arguing that colours do not exist because they are vague and there are intermediate colours. It is not just racial categories that are vague because almost everything else on the planet is vague as well, including material objects. So material objects don’t exist? Some philosophers, eager for publications argue this, an other bs.
The cultural Marxist view contrasts with a more moderate view that holds that there are average genetic differences between races on certain traits. While environmental factors such as racial stereotyping may hypothetically cause some diseases, we suppose, perhaps influencing hypertension, there are clear examples, such as lactose intolerance in Asians. One would have thought that knowing risk factors or ethno-racial groups, would have been a valuable aid in dealing with disease and ill-health, even if it was only an approximation. However, everything is so woke and race crazy now, that any health defect is seen as “racism.” So be it: let doctors stop the “racist” practice of warning say African Americans to be aware of the risk of hypertension, Asians for cardiovascular disease, and Hispanics for diabetes. Better to get the disease than be “racist.”
“A startling new study casts further light on the race differences in Covid-19 incidence. Discussion of these race differences was repressed by our Race-Denying Ruling Class until it became clear that some minorities were disproportionately impacted, at which point it was proclaimed to be the fault of whites. But it remained possible that these differences were the result of deep-seated cultural practices. Now it increasingly appears they are at least in part genetic. Which means the one-size-fits-all public policy response was wrong.
England has a large “South Asian” population—recent ancestors from India, Pakistan, and Bangladeshi—about 8% of the population on the 2011 census of England and now likely considerably higher. These people are 20% more likely than whites to die of Covid-19 and 12 years younger than whites when admitted to hospital with it [South Asian people in UK 20 per cent more likely to die of coronavirus, study finds, by Sarah Knapton, Telegraph, June 19, 2020].
This disparity is definitely not due to poverty. South Asian doctors and nurses working for Britain’s National Health Service are also far more likely to die of Covid-19 than are white medical workers: they are 21% of NHS workers but 63% of COVID-19 deaths among NHS workers.
Intriguingly, British citizens of Bangladeshi extraction have been particularly hard hit. Age-adjusted, they are 4 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than whites, whereas for Indians the risk is merely 1.6 times more.
Needless to say, the Leftist British newspaper The Guardian claimed that the high Bangladeshi-heritage death-rate was because Corona “is a disease that thrives on pre-existing inequalities within society.”
However, the new study reveals something very different: 63% of Bangladeshis—the highest of any group studied by far—carry a series of genetic variants which lead to serious risk of respiratory failure when infected with Covid-19.
And they’ve inherited these from the Neanderthals.
The study—The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals [September 30, 2020]—has recently been published in the important journal Nature. [PDF] Researched by Hugo Zeberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and fellow-Swede Svante Pääbo (right) of Germany’s Max Planck Institute, the study draws upon earlier findings whereby a cluster of genes on Chromosome-3 have been found, if you have specific forms of these genes, to be a serious risk for respiratory failure if you contract Covid-19. This was proven using a sample of 3,199 hospitalized Covid-19 patients and controls.
The new study builds on this by establishing precisely which segments of this gene cluster confer the risk, where they have come from, and to what extent there are population differences in their prevalence.
The results are yet another nail in the coffin for those who argue that “race” is mainly a “social construct” (except when white people pretend to be non-white, when it mysteriously is wholly biological) and that any biological race differences are trivial. One such race-denier is Britain’s half-South Asian science writer Dr. Adam Rutherford—who himself became seriously ill with COVID-19.
The Swedish researchers found that the relevant genes on Chromosome 3 are all strongly associated with each other, because they all entered human populations via “gene flow”—that is, intermixing—from Neanderthals. Accordingly, they constitute a “haplotype”—a group of genes that come together.
The at-risk genes are strongest in the kind of Neanderthal that lived around Croatia, in Southeast Europe, about 50,000 years ago. This Neanderthal—known as the Vindaja 33.19—carried 11 of the 13 polymorphisms (forms of a gene) that are associated with severe Covid-19 symptoms.
Only three of these polymorphisms were found in the Altai and related Neanderthals, who derive from around Altai mountains in Siberia.
The team then analyzed 5008 haplotypes in the Human Genome Project to see which human groups were most likely to carry the Covid-19-risk haplotype that appears to have been inherited from the Vindaja 33-19 Neanderthal.
No Sub-Saharan Africans carry this haplotype, consistent with evidence that there has been very little gene flow between Sub-Saharan Africans and Neanderthals.
However, this haplotype was found at a rate of 4% among Native Americans, 8% among Europeans—50% among South Asians.
Among Bangladeshis it was particularly high: 63% of Bangladeshis carry the Neanderthal haplotype that is associated with serious complications from Covid-19 and 13% of them are “homozygous” carriers of it.
This means that they have inherited it from both of their parents. A gene is composed of two alleles, with one allele being inherited from each parent. These Bangladeshis have two copies of each of the same risky set of alleles, implying that they will experience particularly pronounced problems with Covid-19.
Part of the reason for this is surely that, in Britain’s Bangladeshi community for example, a remarkable 60% of mothers are married to their first cousins, meaning that the children are much more likely to inherit two copies of any mutant, or otherwise problematic, allele which either parent might carry [The tragic truth about cousin marriages: They can cause a litany of genetic illnesses and they’re a key factor in the deaths of two children a week in Britain, so why is it taboo to talk about them, by Sue Reid, Mail Online, July 7, 2018].
It’s a common belief that Europeans are particularly high in Neanderthal ancestry. So it might seem surprising that Bangladeshis should be so high in this particular form of Neanderthal ancestry.
However, more recent research is revealing that this common belief simply is not accurate. East Asians carry around 30% more Neanderthal DNA than do Europeans [Neanderthal DNA By Race: Asians Have Closer Link From Multiple Breeding Events, Studies Say, by Morgan Windsor, International Business Times, February 19, 2015].
South Asians and Europeans are relatively closely related genetically, as has been set out by Frank Salter in his book On Genetic Interests. So we should not be surprised to find that they also carry Neanderthal DNA. In this case, of course, the key issue is that they carry DNA from a specific Neanderthal type, and that this impacts their ability to fight-off Covid-19.
So, for the Race Deniers and those who insist race differences in Covid-19 fatality are due to “white privilege” or some other unscientific nonsense, here we have a study in a top quality journal which provides very strong proof that the genetics of race very substantially explains the devastating impact of Covid-19 on South Asians in Western countries.
I conclude with the now-traditional mantra I include in all my Covid-19 articles:
If Covid-19 is not an Equal Opportunity disease, that means our race-denying Ruling Class is frightening most people too much—and not warning some people enough. This will not merely cause unnecessary chaos—it will cost lives.
It’s almost as if the lockdown was completely unnecessary for all but elderly and seriously sick white people. It’s almost as if, for the vast majority of Westerners, this has all been, well, pointless.”
Yes, the lockdowns have been as pointless as race denial.
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