Estimating Genetic Ancestry Proportions from Faces

Ethnicity can be a means by which people identify themselves and others. This type of identification mediates many kinds of social interactions and may reflect adaptations to a long history of group living in humans. Recent admixture in the US between groups from different continents, and the historically strong emphasis on phenotypic differences between members of these groups, presents an opportunity to examine the degree of concordance between estimates of group membership based on genetic markers and on visually-based estimates of facial features. We first measured the degree of Native American, European, African and East Asian genetic admixture in a sample of 14 self-identified Hispanic individuals, chosen to cover a broad range of Native American and European genetic admixture proportions. We showed frontal and side-view photographs of the 14 individuals to 241 subjects living in New Mexico, and asked them to estimate the degree of NA admixture for each individual. We assess the overall concordance for each observer based on an aggregated measure of the difference between the observer and the genetic estimates. We find that observers reach a significantly higher degree of concordance than expected by chance, and that the degree of concordance as well as the direction of the discrepancy in estimates differs based on the ethnicity of the observer, but not on the observers' age or sex. This study highlights the potentially high degree of discordance between physical appearance and genetic measures of ethnicity, as well as how perceptions of ethnic affiliation are context-specific. We compare our findings to those of previous studies and discuss their implications.

[1]  L. Parr,et al.  Visual kin recognition in chimpanzees , 1999, Nature.

[2]  Rita Astuti.  Comment on F. J. Gil-White's article 'Are ethnic groups biological "species" to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories' , 2001 .

[3]  R. Kittles,et al.  Implications of correlations between skin color and genetic ancestry for biomedical research , 2004, Nature Genetics.

[4]  U. Boehmer,et al.  Self-reported vs administrative race/ethnicity data and study results. , 2002, American journal of public health.

[5]  R. Kittles,et al.  Ancestral proportions and admixture dynamics in geographically defined African Americans living in South Carolina. , 2001, American journal of physical anthropology.

[6]  L Cosmides,et al.  Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization , 2001, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  S. D. Pena,et al.  Self-reported skin color, genomic ancestry and the distribution of GST polymorphisms , 2007, Pharmacogenetics and genomics.

[8]  D. Jones,et al.  Group Nepotism and Human Kinship1 , 2000, Current Anthropology.

[9]  R. Malpass,et al.  Recognition for faces of own and other race. , 1969, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[10]  S. Bowles.  Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism , 2006, Science.

[11]  D. Perrett,et al.  Social Perception of Facial Resemblance in Humans , 2008, Archives of sexual behavior.

[12]  S M Teutsch,et al.  Inconsistencies in coding of race and ethnicity between birth and death in US infants. A new look at infant mortality, 1983 through 1985. , 1992, JAMA.

[13]  J. Weinstein,et al.  Ethnic Identifiability: An Experimental Approach* , 2004 .

[14]  Racial Classification of Racially Ambiguous Faces , 2000 .

[15]  D. Allison,et al.  Estimating African American admixture proportions by use of population-specific alleles. , 1998, American journal of human genetics.

[16]  G. E. Codina,et al.  Skin Color and Latinos in the United States , 2001 .

[17]  Randolph M. Nesse,et al.  Sex differences in ability to recognize family resemblance , 1990 .

[18]  P. Sherman,et al.  Self-referent phenotype matching: theoretical considerations and empirical evidence , 2001, Trends in Neurosciences.

[19]  J. Brigham,et al.  The Role of Experience and Contact in the Recognition of Faces Of Own‐ and Other‐Race Persons , 1985 .

[20]  A. G. Goldstein.  Race-related variation of facial features: Anthropometric data I , 1979 .

[21]  Macartan Humphreys,et al.  Why Does Ethnic Diversity Undermine Public Goods Provision? , 2007, American Political Science Review.

[22]  C. Antunes,et al.  Color and genomic ancestry in Brazilians , 2002, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[23]  Kim Hill,et al.  A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity , 2000 .

[24]  Conditioned Fear of a Face: A Prelude to Ethnic Enmity? , 2005, Science.

[25]  Andreas Olsson,et al.  The Role of Social Groups in the Persistence of Learned Fear , 2005, Science.

[26]  R. Cooper,et al.  Race and genomics. , 2003, The New England journal of medicine.

[27]  Sarah M. Greene,et al.  Race and ethnicity: comparing medical records to self-reports. , 2005, Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Monographs.

[28]  G. Miller,et al.  Genetic admixture, self-reported ethnicity, self-estimated admixture, and skin pigmentation among Hispanics and Native Americans. , 2009, American journal of physical anthropology.

[29]  M. Shriver,et al.  Admixture in the Hispanics of the San Luis Valley, Colorado, and its implications for complex trait gene mapping , 2004, Annals of human genetics.

[30]  L. DeBruine.  Facial resemblance enhances trust , 2002, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[31]  John A. Lynch,et al.  The Role of “Genetics” in Popular Understandings of Race in the United States , 2004, Public understanding of science.

[32]  L. Cosmides,et al.  Perceptions of race , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[33]  Gerd Gigerenzer,et al.  Models of ecological rationality: the recognition heuristic. , 2002, Psychological review.

[34]  A. G. Goldstein.  Facial feature variation: Anthropometric data II , 1979 .

[35]  M. Nowak,et al.  Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection. , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[36]  Psychology. Conditioned fear of a face: a prelude to ethnic enmity? , 2005, Science.

[37]  L. DeBruine,et al.  Trustworthy but not lust-worthy: context-specific effects of facial resemblance , 2005, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[38]  C. Mendes-Junior,et al.  Ancestry informative markers in Amerindians from Brazilian Amazon , 2008, American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council.

[39]  N. Risch,et al.  Population stratification confounds genetic association studies among Latinos , 2005, Human Genetics.

[40]  N. Kressin,et al.  Agreement between administrative data and patients' self-reports of race/ethnicity. , 2003, American journal of public health.

[41]  Joan Y. Chiao,et al.  Differential responses in the fusiform region to same-race and other-race faces , 2001, Nature Neuroscience.

[42]  J. Brigham,et al.  Thirty years of investigating the own-race bias in memory for faces: A meta-analytic review , 2001 .

[43]  S. Redline,et al.  Self-reported race and genetic admixture. , 2006, The New England journal of medicine.

[44]  Mark Shriver,et al.  A panel of ancestry informative markers for estimating individual biogeographical ancestry and admixture from four continents: utility and applications , 2008, Human mutation.

[45]  J. Kelsey,et al.  Inconsistencies between self-reported ethnicity and ethnicity recorded in a health maintenance organization. , 2005, Annals of epidemiology.

[46]  E. Wilson,et al.  Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology , 2007, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[47]  P. Sherman,et al.  Kin recognition. , 1995, Scientific American.

[48]  F. Gil-White,et al.  The Cognition of Ethnicity: Native Category Systems under the Field Experimental Microscope , 2002 .

[49]  Lyle B. Steadman,et al.  Human kinship as a descendant-leaving strategy: A solution to an evolutionary puzzle , 1997 .

[50]  N. Risch,et al.  The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice. , 2003, The New England journal of medicine.

[51]  Li Jin,et al.  Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping , 2003, Human Genetics.

[52]  F. Gil-White,et al.  Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain? , 2001, Current Anthropology.