Seems like a contradiction to me. If we are saying the majority of humans are incredibly genetically similar except for some genes that code for pigmentation but also there are reduced clinical efficacy for drugs based on certain races. I can understand outliers like sickle cell anemia but this diversity of sampling is required for every drug.
When they do clinical testing, pharma companies try to pull from different racial groups to ensure their drug works across demographics. If we were that genetically similar then wouldn’t pulling from one group primarily do the job?
Please don’t make this a white supermacist thing. I don’t believe in that stuff. Legitimately just curious.
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Pulling from different racial groups is a convenient/easy proxy for “pull from a wide variety of genetic backgrounds so you don’t miss something.”
There’s nothing magic about the skin pigmentation genes, there’s no causation, but there *is* correlation between different genetic backgrounds. For example, you’re much more likely to be lactose intolerant (which might be relevant to some medicine formulations) if your genetic heritage is rooted in Asia. This does *not* mean that lactose intolerance is carried on the same genes as epicanthic folds (“Asian eyes”) or that particular skin pigmentation, it’s not, but saying “make sure you’ve got a representative sample of Asians in your test sample” makes it way more likely you’ll pick up lactose intolerance and is far simpler to actually do than “test everyone in your sample through ancestry.com to make sure you’ve got a representative genetic spread”. Similar logic applies to a ton of genetic pre-dispositions.
It’s not just race…you want to make sure you’ve got a wide spread of sexes for the same reason. Men & women are only different by a single chromosome but that has *huge* biological implications.
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