2024-03-08 17:15:41
People who accept genetic essentialism believe, among other ideas, that most racial differences are determined by genes. Essentialist beliefs constitute a biological error.
Around the world, students receive a basic genetics education that focuses on the inheritance of a single gene. Students learn Mendel’s laws of inheritance and how different versions of a gene (i.e., alleles) are inherited across generations through probabilistic mechanisms that can be easily modeled with a Punnett square.
This is a risk factor for the development of genetic essentialism during adolescence, say Brian Donovan of the non-profit organization BSCS Science Learning in Colorado Springs, United States, and his colleagues in their study titled “Human genomics education can reduce racism”, published in the academic journal Science.
The study’s authors advocate teaching genomic concepts in a way that refutes genetic essentialism in a framework they call “humanitarian genomics education.”
Donovan and colleagues point to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in the United States that already show that teaching eighth through twelfth grade students about key related concepts can lead to a reduction in students’ essentialist geneticist beliefs about race. .
One of these concepts is that most genetic variation occurs within geographic populations, rather than between them.
Results from related studies show that students trained in these concepts are more likely to disbelieve genetic essentialism because they are more likely to develop the perception that races are not all that genetically different.
Artistic recreation of DNA and the concept of racism. (Illustration: Amazings/NCYT)
However, the study authors say these past randomized controlled trials have key limitations. To overcome these limitations, they designed new cluster-randomized crossover trials, in which all participating clusters consecutively receive both intervention treatments (human genomics education) and control treatments (basic genetics education) at separate time periods. His essays were the first to explore how these two instructional styles affect racial conceptualization.
Between December 2019 and May 2022, the authors recruited 15 biology teachers and 1,063 biology students from six US states (Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts). Participating teachers received 40 hours of professional development to learn how to implement the humanitarian genomic intervention.
Judging from the results, students who participated in the humanitarian genomics classroom setting showed greater knowledge of genomics and less belief in genetic essentialism.
Importantly, as students begin to disbelieve genetic essentialism, they also seem to lean toward believing that race is a social concept and that racial disparities are caused by prejudice.
In contrast, basic genetics instruction produced none of these benefits for students.
To quell potential criticism about the scalability of their approach, the researchers described the results of an additional preregistered, randomized human trial they conducted with approximately 1,000 college students in the University of California system. The results suggest that humanitarian genomics instruction can be scaled in a relatively cost-effective and time-efficient manner through an online platform, the study authors say. (Source: AAAS)
#Racism #genetics #education