• PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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    11 months ago

    I generally don’t think genetic research of ethnicity is very useful, it smells of calipers for mile and entire history already showed us it’s basically completely irrelevant. Culture and language research is much more useful.

    • urshanabi [he/they]@lemmygrad.ml
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, I would not like the precedent it would set.

      The claim for this paper is that it is a necessary consequence of determining the medical nature of a condition which Ashkenazi Jewish people are at risk for. I read about the increased risk before, the author also lays it out well. In class we learned it was called a ‘founder effect’, when a population has it’s size greatly reduced and then there is less variation present.

      The issue is any existing conditions, say an increased risk for a disease, propagate as the population grows and can become ‘fixed’. It isn’t as much of an issue for a large population, since if like, 10 out of 10 000 000 have the increased risk then it’s not too bad. If it’s 1 out of 10 000, that is troubling. When that population grows more and more people will continue to have the condition :(

      Jewish people are discriminated against, that is rather obvious, finding out using diagnostic tools is helpful to anyone who might have an adverse condition and not know about it. Uh, unfortunately, medicine/research sucks and is chalkful of stuff like Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment, whenever ethnicity or specifically people from a given geographic region are focused on…

      Ashkenazi are a population which are studies a lot (there are a ton of population genetics papers, those are the ones I am familiar) because there is an established history and it is fairly accurate.

      Hope this stuff isn’t used by anti-semites (obv it will, I’m hoping the harm is kept at a minimum…)