Ten reasons why genetics does not explain health disparities between Māori and non-Māori

The aim of this paper is to challenge the hypothesis that genetic differences play a significant role in the disparities in health status between Māori and non-Māori. To do so I considered the patterns of these disparities to see if they are consistent with the manifestations of genetic variation. I compared disparities in health between Māori and non-Māori with patterns of disparity across most social sectors (reason one), patterns of disparity across most health indicators (reasons two, three and four) with international experience (reasons five and six) over time (reason seven) and by spatial or kin based clusters (reason eight) over intermarriage (reason nine) and by considering the consensus of modern population genetics (reason ten) and concluded that there appears to be little evidence to suggest genetics to be a major cause of those disparities.