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A new paper in Nature Communications takes a look at racial ancestry DNA of the 297,549 All Of Us volunteers. ...

They find the US population is split up into reasonably distinct racial groups, with, of course, also a lot of people who don’t fit well in just one race. The authors write:

The extent to which human genetic diversity is characterized by clusters of closely related individuals, i.e., population structure, versus clines of continuous genetic variation has long been a subject of interest. The All of Us cohort allows for an assessment of the extent of population structure in the US, given the large size of the cohort, the extensive sampling of participants across the country, and the demographic diversity of the participants. The application of several different cluster analysis methods to participants’ genomic PCA data revealed evidence for substantial population structure in the cohort, with dense clusters of relatively closely related participants interspersed among less dense regions in PC space.

Here are seven racial groups that emerge from the genetic data (not from self-identification), plus a miscellaneous cluster. Can you identify the seven main racial ancestry clusters in the US? (#5 is kind of a stumper; it’s probably something of an artifact of shortcomings in the methodology’s reference works, so don’t worry about it too much.)

Racial diversity in sports performance tends to be less strong than sex diversity, but there are still striking patterns. For example, from 2004 through 2023, 20 years, no non-black cornerbacks started the season as a starting cornerback in the NFL: that's 1280 out of 1280!

Why was this? Most football fans would agree that African Americans tend to have biological advantages at one-on-one pass coverage.