Some geneticists have expressed their unease about a figure in a high-profile Nature paper that was published earlier this week1, noting that it could be misinterpreted as reinforcing racist beliefs. The figure has reignited a long-standing debate among geneticists about how best to discuss and depict race, ethnicity and genomic ancestry, given how these terms can be misinterpreted and weaponized by extremists. 'The problem is, a lot of people will see figures like this as supporting a viewpoint' that race and ethnicity are closely aligned with genetics, says Ewan Birney, deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridgeshire, UK. 'And then they build castles in the air from all this.' Alexander Bick, a physician and geneticist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who co-authored the paper in which the figure appears, acknowledged in an e-mail to Nature's news team that 'it's clear that the figure fell short of our intended...
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