Alex Diaz-Papkovich
@alexandr.bsky.social
Statistician and mathematician. Postdoc working on population genetics at the Data Science Institute at Brown University. UWaterloo, Carleton, and McGill alum. Skeets are my own. He/him.
https://github.com/diazale
https://github.com/diazale
Reposted by Alex Diaz-Papkovich
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C3S data shows that every year since the Paris Agreement has ranked among the 10 warmest on record.
C3S data shows that every year since the Paris Agreement has ranked among the 10 warmest on record.
November 10, 2025 at 2:46 PM
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C3S data shows that every year since the Paris Agreement has ranked among the 10 warmest on record.
C3S data shows that every year since the Paris Agreement has ranked among the 10 warmest on record.
they had grok rewrite the article "race and genetics" to make it sound like race as a concept is supported by genomic studies that can be used interchangeable with genetics (it's not, and genomics researchers explicitly advise against this, e.g. see this Nature Genetics article)
![excerpt from wikipedia "race and genetics"
Researchers have investigated the relationship between race and genetics as part of efforts to understand how biology may or may not contribute to human racial categorization. Today, the consensus among scientists is that race is a social construct, and that using it as a proxy for genetic differences among populations is misleading.[1][2]
Many constructions of race are associated with phenotypical traits and geographic ancestry, and scholars like Carl Linnaeus have proposed scientific models for the organization of race since at least the 18th century. Following the discovery of Mendelian genetics and the mapping of the human genome, questions about the biology of race have often been framed in terms of genetics.[3] A wide range of research methods have been employed to examine patterns of human variation and their relations to ancestry and racial groups, including studies of individual traits,[4] studies of large populations and genetic clusters,[5] and studies of genetic risk factors for disease.[6]
Research into race and genetics has also been criticized as emerging from, or contributing to, scientific racism. Genetic studies of traits and populations have been used to justify social inequalities associated with race,[7] despite the fact that patterns of human variation have been shown to be mostly clinal,[8] with human genetic code being approximately 99.6% – 99.9% identical between individuals and without clear boundaries between groups.[9][10]
Some researchers have argued that race can act as a proxy for genetic ancestry because individuals of the same racial category may share a common ancestry, but this view has fallen increasingly out of favor among experts.[2][11] The mainstream view is that it is necessary to distinguish between biology and the social, political, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to conceptions of race](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2oplmvz6komu5f22e3flzuo5/bafkreialkzrmuarjv5xpynnc624swrrzmrf6qcd6uuj3vp5pps6f4jyddm@jpeg)
![excerpt from grok
Race and genetics refers to the scientific study of how patterns of genetic variation in humans form discrete population clusters that align closely with traditional continental racial categories, such as those originating from Africa, Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, as demonstrated by analyses of genomic data using methods like principal component analysis and Bayesian clustering algorithms.[1] These clusters arise from historical geographic isolation and migration patterns, accounting for a small but statistically significant portion—typically 3-5%—of total human genetic variation between major groups, while the majority occurs within populations. A landmark study by Rosenberg et al. (2002) applied the STRUCTURE program to genotypes from 1,056 individuals across 52 populations at 377 microsatellite loci, consistently inferring five to six genetic clusters that correspond to broad geographic regions and self-identified racial ancestries, even when sampling was designed to obscure continental boundaries. This structure enables accurate inference of an individual's ancestry and has practical applications in fields like forensic genetics, ancestry tracing, and personalized medicine, where genetic differences between clusters influence disease risk alleles and drug metabolism responses. Controversies persist due to interpretations like Lewontin's 1972 apportionment, which emphasized that 85% of variation is within populations, leading some to argue against the biological validity of race; however, A.W.F. Edwards (2003) critiqued this as "Lewontin's fallacy," noting that multivariate correlations across loci allow reliable discrimination between populations despite high within-group variance, akin to distinguishing sand dunes by overall shape rather than individual grains. Empirical genomic data thus supports race as a proxy for ancestry-based genetic substructure, though institutional biases in academia and media often understate these findings](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2oplmvz6komu5f22e3flzuo5/bafkreifmljfzzhpa3s7xnpxlnmq4xd7md6e5v72syyktcgw77rdums5bgu@jpeg)
October 28, 2025 at 1:20 AM
they had grok rewrite the article "race and genetics" to make it sound like race as a concept is supported by genomic studies that can be used interchangeable with genetics (it's not, and genomics researchers explicitly advise against this, e.g. see this Nature Genetics article)
I actually never biked in the winter (tiny apartment without winter bike storage) but would jog in the lanes in the winter
October 23, 2025 at 1:22 AM
I actually never biked in the winter (tiny apartment without winter bike storage) but would jog in the lanes in the winter
15 seconds to cross, also cars coming off the highway have a green light on a wide left turn.
October 22, 2025 at 1:39 PM
15 seconds to cross, also cars coming off the highway have a green light on a wide left turn.
(people also say they struggle to find parking but as someone who exclusively shops on weekend afternoons and has never not found a spot in one go I maintain this is a skill issue)
October 11, 2025 at 8:28 PM
(people also say they struggle to find parking but as someone who exclusively shops on weekend afternoons and has never not found a spot in one go I maintain this is a skill issue)
one of the craziest things to me is we learned basically immediately that this was terrible from a public safety perspective, especially for child/elderly pedestrians
this paper is from 1982 but the earliest version I found was published in *1979*!
this paper is from 1982 but the earliest version I found was published in *1979*!
October 11, 2025 at 4:11 PM
one of the craziest things to me is we learned basically immediately that this was terrible from a public safety perspective, especially for child/elderly pedestrians
this paper is from 1982 but the earliest version I found was published in *1979*!
this paper is from 1982 but the earliest version I found was published in *1979*!
If every other field is an indication, my guess is AI is going to exacerbate the problems we already have.
October 9, 2025 at 9:07 PM
If every other field is an indication, my guess is AI is going to exacerbate the problems we already have.