The Race Paradigm

[GnaGnaMan]

After you've spent this thread so far trying to come up with theoretical reasons why the facts I've presented should theoretically not be as they are,...

Seems like you're misunderstanding something. I have never said that theoretically there should be no races. I pointed out methodological problems with some of the arguments used for their existence.

The race denial case doesn't need "small". It needs "zero". Otherwise, the case they're defending isn't "no such thing as races", but merely "races do exist (but make relatively little difference)", which I have not argued against.

It would have been good if you had mentioned that earlier, like when I asked you for a definition of race. Or when I first mentioned that there are small dividing lines.
By that definition the population of any city, town or village of any age is its own race. You can use the word in that sense if you like. I just don't think that's how it's commonly understood.
Maybe that's settled then?

I have briefly skimmed over the paper. The two things that stood out to me, when they were talking about the studies showing natural genetic clustering, were the straw men they used: claiming that just a few sample sites from far-flung extreme corners of the world were used, and acting as if anybody had ever said the Mediterranean Sea was supposed to be a genetic dividing line. The underwhelming level of honesty there is not encouraging.

First, you shouldn't suggest that respected scientists lack honesty. It makes you seem kinda crackpot. Then again so does the talk about race deniers.
FWIW: Pääbo is the guy who lead the effort on the Neanderthal genome.
Second, suggesting a lack of honesty when you admit that you haven't properly read it is...

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Not according to my textbooks. (Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, James G Peoples) I have the 2nd edition (I'm old!) and 'ethnocline' is in both the glossary and index.

One example in the text is the geography of India which extends from Caucasoid to Asiatic as we move Eastward and Nortward.


ETA: my wife said i should toss all my old undergrad texts, but this'll show her!

Heh. Looks like that word completely failed to catch on. It seems like a bit of an odd concept. A gradual change of ethnicity? I can't quite see how that would work.
The current edition doesn't have it. If you're curious enough to see what has changed, I'd appreciate a few words on that.

It made me think. A lot of old, out-of-copyright books have been digitized. New books are searchable anyway. But the internet must have a blind spot where books still have copyright but the owner doesn't care.

 

[Vortigern99]

From the OP:

The concept of race depends on a multiplicity of affiliated factors, such as anatomy, culture, ethnicity, genetics, geography, history, language, religion, and social relationships.

This is the mainstream, widely accepted definition of the word.

No. It is not.

Sure it is:

Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or social affiliation. -- Source.​

Race: a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group: we Scots were a bloodthirsty race then -- Source.​

A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race. -- Source.​

"Religious, cultural, social, national, ethnic, linguistic, genetic, geographical and anatomical groups have been and sometimes still are called 'races'". -- Source.​

How many authoritative sources do you need before you're willing to accept that I'm presenting the mainstream, widely accepted definition of the term? Further, and more to the point of my OP, scientific consensus is against you -- a non-expert, non-scientist, unaccredited layperson -- in this:

"Modern human biological variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies ('races'), nor are the taxa of the standard anthropological 'racial' classifications breeding populations. The 'racial taxa' do not meet the phylogenetic criteria. 'Race' denotes socially constructed units as a function of the incorrect usage of the term." -- Source[same as previous].[/INDENT]

Lee, Sandra SJ; Mountain, Joanna; Koenig, Barbara; Altman, Russ (2008). "The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics". Genome Biol. 9 (7): 404. doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-7-404. PMC 2530857. PMID 18638359. Excerpt: "We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

AAA (1998-05-17). "American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"". Aaanet.org. Excerpt: "Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic 'racial' groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within 'racial' groups than between them."

Keita; Kittles, Royal, Bonney, Furbert-Harris, Dunston, Rotimi (2004). Nature 36: S17–S20. doi:10.1038/ng1455. PMID 15507998 http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36...g1455_BX1.html Excerpt: "Modern human biological variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies ('races'), nor are the taxa of the standard anthropological 'racial' classifications breeding populations. The 'racial taxa' do not meet the phylogenetic criteria. 'Race' denotes socially constructed units as a function of the incorrect usage of the term."

Harrison, Guy (2010). Race and Reality. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Excerpt: "Race is a poor empirical description of the patterns of difference that we encounter within our species. The billions of humans alive today simply do not fit into neat and tidy biological boxes called races. Science has proven this conclusively. The concept of race (...) is not scientific and goes against what is known about our ever-changing and complex biological diversity."

Roberts, Dorothy (2011). Fatal Invention. London, New York: The New Press. Excerpt: "The genetic differences that exist among populations are characterized by gradual changes across geographic regions, not sharp, categorical distinctions. Groups of people across the globe have varying frequencies of polymorphic genes, which are genes with any of several differing nucleotide sequences. There is no such thing as a set of genes that belongs exclusively to one group and not to another. The clinal, gradually changing nature of geographic genetic difference is complicated further by the migration and mixing that human groups have engaged in since prehistory. Human beings do not fit the zoological definition of race. A mountain of evidence assembled by historians, anthropologists, and biologists proves that race is not and cannot be a natural division of human beings."

This is easily demonstrated by common cultural references to white people "acting black" or black people "acting white". That does correlate behavior to race, but still treats them separately; it says the people still are what their bodies physically, biologically are, and anything else is just an act.

Here you're foisting yourself by your own petard. You're correlating behavior ("acting black" and "acting white") with that which you elsewhere steadfastly insist is purely physiological, purely genetic. This is my precise point; are you unaware that you're supporting my position in this?

That's how you used the idea yourself in some other cases like this one:

I'm proposing that we (society at large) accept our polymorphisms as part of the human experience -- without ascribing all of the cultural, linguistic, behavioral, intelligence-related, religious, interpersonal and other affiliations that we attach

Anything that's merely ascribed to or affiliated with or attached to something is not a part of its definition. For example, people also, often inaccurately, ascribe or attach stereotypes of behavior/thought/personality to people of different ages, religions, sexes, and occupations. That stereotyping doesn't define what age, religion, sex, or occupation is, and doesn't make age, religion, sex, or occupation not exist.

In order to get us all to quit defining race by affiliated/attached things other than race, you'd first have to get us to start.

I find your line of argumentation unconvincing. "Anything that's merely ascribed to or affiliated with or attached to something is not a part of its definition." This is a nonsensical assertion, insofar as the meaning of a word is defined by its usage, including attributes ascribed to it by speakers.

You're welcome to continue pursuing your illogical and non-evidential stance, but reason and scientific consensus are against you. GnaGnaMan has demonstrated the latter in a series of posts, well-supported by data and by the rational interpretation of that data.

 

[Vortigern99]

You never responded to an earlier request for clarification of your own viewpoint. Do you think you can do so now?

I had to look back again to see the original question & context...

Can you divide humanity in to well-defined groups based on physical characteristic?

Do those divisions match the traditionally used ones?

Yes.

Am I one of these "deniers" because I'm attempting to show that race is an artificial invention with an untenable biological foundation? And if so, to which specific "piles of lies" are you referring?

Things like this looked just like threads I've seen before where people claim there are no biological/physical differences between the human races.

I'm not claiming that; you've been ascribing to me the words and viewpoints of others. A few years ago I began my investigation into this topic with the opinion that race is demonstrable and evidential, just as you opine, but I've had to readjust that position based on the data. The physiological differences between or among populations -- "geographic polymorphisms" is a good term -- do not suffice to support the term race as it is used by English-speakers, in the media and in private conversation, which includes the cultural traits I've discussed elsewhere in this thread.

You also said you don't deny that, but it's right here in the same thread where you said stuff like this here, and the self-contradiction on this subject is also very familiar.

You misunderstand me. The "untenable biological foundation" to which I refer is precisely the cultural (religious, linguistic, behavioral, intellectual) baggage attached to the word race, which makes it untenable.

Usually, though, the way a thread develops after a start like that is that they cling to the original absurd claim much longer and more desperately, lobbing every silly trick they can come up with to try to save it, and don't retreat to saying they never said what they said until pages later. So when this thread went differently, leaning away from the biophysical reality of races toward sociological issues about them, and it appeared that that was the original intent anyway, I dropped the argument as off-topic. I guess I have less interest in sociological opinions than in setting the facts straight when scientific reality is denied, or in letting threads stay on track. (I just came back because the subject I was dropping came up a few more times anyway.)

Okay, thank you for the clarification.

You never responded to an earlier request for clarification of your own viewpoint. Do you think you can do so now?

My viewpoint: "Working on how society handles issues about human races does not require, and is even harmed by, absurdly pretending races don't exist."

We appear to be proceeding from different starting points. You use race exclusively physiologically, which I think is an error owing to the way the word is used in the media, in scientific literature (see my previous post quoting from several papers) and in private conversation, all of which usages include cultural and behavioral traits. The word is loaded and, insofar as distinct clusters of geographic polymorphisms can be identified among some 42 different human populations, I propose a new word be used to convey that idea, since the word race is already used to mean, include or contain cultural and other behavioral traits.

 

[Vortigern99]

I'm upping this to give Delvo a chance to rebut what GnaGnaMan and I have recently posted. Previously Delvo has accused "race deniers" of fleeing threads when counter-arguments began to weigh against them. So before I proceed, I'm here offering Delvo an opportunity to avoid the irony of his fleeing this thread.

 

[Delvo]

The post I intend to write will take time (which I haven't had much of lately but think I probably will this evening) because there are a handful of sentences scattered in various recent posts (and the linked article) that I need to find and quote. But here's one little thing that sums up the big picture in a relatively compact form and might save me a lot of words & quoting later. (Which is why I took the time to create the image with only the cumbersome image editors I can get for free!)

X: Deniers' straw man of non-deniers' case; the only model their arguments counter even though there's nobody claiming it

Y: The picture deniers paint while arguing against X

Z: What the data, including deniers' own references/studies, actually indicates; also the only case the non-deniers ever claimed.

 

[Brainiac2]

.
Skin color will always be a separator. It's such an easy mark, takes little intellect to use it as a separator, which is why it's so popular!
It's what inside our bags of skin that matter, not the shade of the bag.

Some folks use hair texture and facial features as racial-classification criteria and consider skin color of lesser importance.

 

[blutoski]

Heh. Looks like that word completely failed to catch on. It seems like a bit of an odd concept. A gradual change of ethnicity? I can't quite see how that would work.
The current edition doesn't have it. If you're curious enough to see what has changed, I'd appreciate a few words on that.

I am curious, so I scanned the digitized version of the current edition for comparison. The chapter on race and ethnicity has been chopped down quite a bit. I expect there has been a trend to head off complaints by removing controversial content from introductory courses, and the authors responded. Anthropology always walks a political tightrope.

And ethnocline was problematic due to what you indicate above: are we talking about ethnicity or biological racial features? Perhaps the term was too vague to be useful, but yes, it described a gradual change of ethnicity (cultural and physiological) across a geography. As opposed to abrupt changes, such as geographic/geologic borders or unoccupied regions like a desert, mountain range, or ocean.

It made me think. A lot of old, out-of-copyright books have been digitized. New books are searchable anyway. But the internet must have a blind spot where books still have copyright but the owner doesn't care.

Yes, there's many a gap in The Long Tail. And textbooks are especially vulnerable to being obsolete and completely useless after a new edition comes out, by design, so probably very little interest in digital archives.

 

[blutoski]

The post I intend to write will take time (which I haven't had much of lately but think I probably will this evening) because there are a handful of sentences scattered in various recent posts (and the linked article) that I need to find and quote. But here's one little thing that sums up the big picture in a relatively compact form and might save me a lot of words & quoting later. (Which is why I took the time to create the image with only the cumbersome image editors I can get for free!)

X: Deniers' straw man of non-deniers' case; the only model their arguments counter even though there's nobody claiming it

Y: The picture deniers paint while arguing against X

Z: What the data, including deniers' own references/studies, actually indicates; also the only case the non-deniers ever claimed.

A good analogy. A related example I have is from growing up with first nations is that they disagree that there are seven colours in a rainbow. ROYGBIV is a Western Concept. A social construct, if you will. First Nations depict rainbows with five colours. RYGBV.

Now: we all see exactly the same gradual transition from red to violet, but categorize them differently. Indigo is a type of blue. This discordance about the social construct of Indigo does not mean Indigo is a useless idea that should be jettisoned to history's footnotes and that all those people buying indigo paint at the hobby shop are buying into a myth.

 

[Delvo]

As far as similarity goes... As you mentioned, the book creates 9 clusters. You also quoted two anthropologists who had 5 and 8 "races". That really shouldn't happen if there is an underlying, detectable biological reality to the term.

That would only be the case if there were only supposed to have been 1 separating event in human history, upon which we were immediately split directly into some number of smaller units which could not themselves have split later. It would not be the case if humans were supposed to work just the same as every other animal, in which case one split could be followed by other splits within any of the smaller units created by the earlier one. Sequential divergences yield nested hierarchies, and nested hierarchies show different numbers of members just depending on the level/resolution at which you look at them. For example, the "gray wolf" splits first into northern and southern (2 groups), then the northern splits into Eurasian and North American (at least 3 groups total), then the North American splits into arctic and subarctic (more than 4 total), and even among the subarctic North American, there are eastern and western groups which still include more smaller units within themselves. It's not a matter of any particular number being the final absolute answer and other numbers being wrong; it's just a matter of scale. (This is part of the problem with the idea of "subspecies"; it's only one word, so it would seem like it should apply to only one level, but sometimes there's more than one level below species.)

By that definition the population of any city, town or village of any age is its own race. You can use the word in that sense if you like. I just don't think that's how it's commonly understood.

Same basic idea, different scales. "Tribe" and "clan" are also comparable. So what? We have different words for the same general phenomenon at different scales... and this is somehow a problem... for one out of several such words but not the others... because...?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "computer", "tablet", "cellphone", "smartphone", or "supercomputer"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "tree" or "shrub"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "twig" or "branch"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "nation", "state", "confederation", "union", "county", or even "city" or "municipality"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "shoe" or "boot"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "sword" or "knife"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "horse" or "pony"?

Which word is invalid, or indicates something that doesn't exist, or whatever: "lightning" or "spark"?

There is no clinal variation between dog races.

I've known some mutts who would disagree with you. And even without that, if breeders had always managed to make sure there was absolutely no introgression and there were no such things as "village dogs" (dogs in areas where breeding didn't take off like it did in Europe, representing a more general, un-tinkered-with state of dog), what difference would it make? Even thoroughly isolated, discontinuous groups in a species would still just be points along a greadient where the segment between them was missing for one reason or another. If you started with a fully expressed gradient from end to end and drove a middle section extinct, that wouldn't change the fundamental relationship between the remainders.

The race denial case doesn't need "small". It needs "zero". Otherwise, the case they're defending isn't "no such thing as races", but merely "races do exist (but make relatively little difference)", which I have not argued against.

It would have been good if you had mentioned that earlier

I don't believe it was necessary to notify you that the evidence for your own claim that something doesn't exist would need to indicate that it... doesn't exist.

I find your line of argumentation unconvincing. "Anything that's merely ascribed to or affiliated with or attached to something is not a part of its definition." This is a nonsensical assertion, insofar as the meaning of a word is defined by its usage, including attributes ascribed to it by speakers.

Define "truck". Now describe a particular truck. Now notice that none of what you said to describe any particular truck is part of the definition of "truck". (In fact, they're all things that don't apply to all trucks, which a definition would need to! That's how completely separate definition and description are.)

People routinely give all kinds of descriptions of other groups of people, places, objects, and so on, which don't define those things. To just stick with people: people say children are loud, men are arrogant, old people are forgetful, women are cooperative, rich people are lazy, poor people are lazy... we all know that the definitions of "child", "man", "old person", "woman", "rich person", and "poor person" don't include loudness, arrogance, forgetfulness, cooperativity, or laziness. These groups are defined by age, sex, and wealth, nothing else. Those other traits just get ascribed to them.

Here you're foisting yourself by your own petard. You're correlating behavior ("acting black" and "acting white") with that which you elsewhere steadfastly insist is purely physiological, purely genetic. This is my precise point; are you unaware that you're supporting my position in this?

Anything that's an "act" isn't who/what you really are. It's just an act.

Lee, Sandra SJ; Mountain, Joanna; Koenig, Barbara; Altman, Russ (2008). "The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics". Genome Biol. 9 (7): 404. doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-7-404. PMC 2530857. PMID 18638359. Excerpt: "We caution against making the naive leap to a genetic explanation for group differences in complex traits, especially for human behavioral traits such as IQ scores"

Not even on the subject of races' existence

AAA (1998-05-17). "American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"". Aaanet.org. Excerpt: "Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic 'racial' groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within 'racial' groups than between them."

Making my case for me: they differ, which is the opposite of not differing

Harrison, Guy (2010). Race and Reality. Amherst: Prometheus Books. Excerpt: "Race is a poor empirical description of the patterns of difference that we encounter within our species. The billions of humans alive today simply do not fit into neat and tidy biological boxes..."

"Neat tidy little boxes" = the straw man I illustrated as model X in the image I uploaded recently. Burning that poor guy has no effect on the actual claims made by actual people, such as model Z.

Roberts, Dorothy (2011). Fatal Invention. London, New York: The New Press. Excerpt: "The genetic differences that exist among populations are characterized by gradual changes across geographic regions, not sharp, categorical distinctions... There is no such thing as a set of genes that belongs exclusively to one group and not to another..."

"Sharpness" and "exclusivity" = the straw man I illustrated as model X in the image I uploaded recently. Burning that poor guy has no effect on the actual claims made by actual people, such as model Z.

"Modern human biological variation is not structured into phylogenetic subspecies ('races'), nor are the taxa of the standard anthropological 'racial' classifications breeding populations. The 'racial taxa' do not meet the phylogenetic criteria. 'Race' denotes socially constructed units as a function of the incorrect usage of the term." -- Source

What they're calling "incorrect" usage of the word is exactly what you have insisted it means! (bringing in arbitrary cultural stuff instead of just biology)

Other interesting quotes from that page get wacky about how they handle word definitions. For example, it addresses the issue of inconsistent definitions of "race" but then makes delcarations like the one you quoted without first picking a definition. Without picking one, such a declaration can only make sense as a blanket over all of them: "whatever it is, it has to be something that's not real, and anything that's real can't be it". That makes such declarations both false, for definitions that race non-deniers use which do fit reality (according to data they refer to in the very same page themselves), and straw men, for definitions which non-deniers don't use. Either way, it's also starting at the desired end point.

They suggest what they find to be a good definition of "subspecies", which isn't the same word, but I'll copy what they did to it here just because because it's demonstrative and beause they brought it up suggesting that it's at least roughly equivalent:

Avise and Ball suggest a definition of 'subspecies' that is consistent with the goals of evolutionary taxonomy: "Subspecies are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding populations phylogenetically distinguishable from, but reproductively compatible with, other such groups. Importantly the evidence for phylogenetic distinction must normally come from the concordant distributions of multiple, independent, genetically based traits."

This definition is different from the previous one in that it emphasizes phylogenetics. It is, in theory, more objective and consistent with neodarwinian evolutionary theory and can be used as the basis for determining whether or not modern Homo sapiens can be structured into populations divergent enough to be called 'races'. We know that there is human geographical variation, but does this infraspecific diversity reach a threshold that merits the designation 'subspecies'​

OK, now, aside from the fact that the evidence they called for at the end of the first paragraph there is exactly what I've already given here and they report themselves later, take a look at the bait-&-switch in the paragraph right after it: they almost immediately started talking about a "threshold" and "divergent enough"! The definition they were just advocating right before that did not include any such magic line in the sand. Adding one on their own, in a question that treats the addition as if it had been there all along, is begging the question: trying to get us to accept the addition of an arbitrary, biologically meaningless "threshold" to count as "enough", just by acting as if we already had.

Also, while there are declarations like the one you quoted peppered throughout the page, there's a clear pattern about them: they're never associated with, or even located near, any specific data to point to as the source of such conclusions. And whever they do report actual genetic data, not only is it not associated with equivalent conclusions about what it means, but the actual data also always fails to support those declarations and perfectly agrees with what I've been saying all along:

Anonymous human DNA samples will structure into groups that correspond to the divisions of the sampled populations or regions when large numbers of genetic markers are used. This has been demonstrated with autosomal microsatellites, which are the most rapidly evolving genetic variants. The DNA of an unknown individual from one of the sampled populations would probably be correctly linked to a population.​

Notice the use of "structure" as a verb where the subject is "DNA samples"; it's something they do themselves, part of the reality of their distriubtion in the human population, not a fiction superimposed on them by people. Right after this quote, they did go back to the "level of differentiation" mantra, but they still never established any such level or a need for one or even that anybody anywhere had ever claimed one, nevermind any reason to think one could possibly be at all relevant when the issue is existence or non-existence.

Another example:

The within- to between-group variation is very high for genetic polymorphisms (85%). This means that individuals from one 'race' may be overall more similar to individuals in one of the other 'races' than to other individuals in the same 'race'. This observation is perhaps insufficient...​

...of course, because there's no reason why it would/could be sufficient, which is why classification/grouping/whatever has never required otherwise in any other case...

...although it still is convincing because it illustrates the lack of a boundary. Coalescence times calculated from various genes suggest that the differentiation of modern humans began in Africa in populations whose morphological traits are unknown; it cannot be assumed from an evolutionary perspective that the traits used to define 'races' emerged simultaneously with this divergence.​

"Boundaries" again... and then the thing about human populations not having developed all of their present traits immediately when they first started diverging from each other in Africa. Well of course when they first diverged they hadn't yet developed all of the separate traits that they would end up with dozens of millennia later! Who in the world are they pretending to counter with such an absurd straw man? But that's not even the worst part of this little tidbit. They also just admitted that human populations which came to populate different regions of the world did in fact diverge from each other... right in the same paper where they declared on several other occations that they didn't.

scientific consensus is against you

Not at all. What actually keeps happening with scientists or scientific papers brought up in situations like this is any one or more of a few options:

1. The surce is being misrepresented and did not say what they say (s)he/it/they said
2. The source did say it but not in any kind of research study or analysis or such, but just speaking personally outside of professional scolarly context
3. The source has actual research, but it actually supports my case and negates that of the person who showed it to me (even if the way it's written looks like the behavior of authors who really didn't want it to)

* * *

There's more I wanted to add, but it will just need to wait...

 

[Delvo]

we all see exactly the same gradual transition from red to violet, but categorize them differently. Indigo is a type of blue. This discordance about the social construct of Indigo does not mean Indigo is a useless idea that should be jettisoned to history's footnotes and that all those people buying indigo paint at the hobby shop are buying into a myth.

I actually have to disagree with where you took this, at least in context of my own point with the image. Color names & categorization are a cultural thing, but I was using the spectrum to illustrate options for how something can actually be in the real world, not cultural concepts. Model X: completely separate, disjunct things with crisp absolute boundaries and no intermediate states (more like the classic definition of species than races within a species); model Y: an even, smooth distribution across a range, with no inherent bumps, dips, or disturbances; and model Z: a range with clumpy distribution, where most of the population is in a few major groups with sort of fuzzy transitions where the intermediate states are present but not so well represented. In any species fitting any one of those descriptions, the point would be that it's just the way they are, and all we can do is observe it.

 

[Jono]

Z: What the data, including deniers' own references/studies, actually indicates; also the only case the non-deniers ever claimed.

Saved me from making a longer reply. That's basically the case in point, as shown by Sforzas groups of human populations. That he said the division was made with concern of the history of movement/migration of people, as opposed to a rigid "classification scheme" is basically potatoe potato wordplay, as these groups were observed phylogenetically and show the very pattern of the Z-strain spectrum.

The problem, as you noted, is that people here like GnaGnaMan really think Y applies as the "smooth continuum" I keep hearing about (yet which doesn't exist).

As Entine put it when answering a few points concerning race:

1. Humans are 99.9 percent the same. Therefore, race is "biologically meaningless."
...
A large-scale study of the variability in the human genome by Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Connecticut, has convincingly shown the fallaciousness of arguments tied to the 99.9 percent figure. The research shows that while humans have only 32,000 genes, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 gene versions. More specifically, they found that different versions of a gene are more common in a group of people from one geographical region, compared with people from another.

The implications are far reaching. By grouping individuals by the presence and variety of gene types, physicians may someday be able to offer treatments based on race or ethnic groups that will have been predetermined to work on a genetic level. Kenneth Kidd, a population geneticist at Yale University who is not connected to the study, said it confirmed the conclusions of those who have maintained that there is in fact considerable variability in the human population. He also chided the government and some genetic researchers for having stripped ethnic identities from the panel of people whose genomes have been searched for gene sequences. The study prompted Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, to backtrack from earlier assertions that the small percentage of gross gene differences was meaningful or shed light on the debate over "racial" differences. "We have been talking a lot about how similar all our genomes are, that we’re 99.9 percent the same," he said. "That might tend to create an impression that it’s a very static situation. But that 0.1 percent is still an awful lot of nucleotides."

In other words, local populations are genetically far more different than the factoid that humans are 99.9 percent the same implies. The critical factor is not which genes are passed along but how they are patterned and what traits they influence.
...
4. "There are many different, equally valid procedures for defining races, and those different procedures yield very different classifications."
...
The problem with this argument, however, and the clumsy way it was presented, revolves around the words "equally valid." Diamond appeared to embrace the post-modernist creed that all categories are "socially constructed" and therefore are "equally valid," no matter how trivial. To make his point, he served up a bouillabaisse of alternate theoretical categories that cuts across traditional racial lines, including a playful suggestion of a racial taxonomy based on fingerprint patterns. A "Loops" race would group together most Europeans, black Africans and East Asians. Among the "Whorls," we would find Mongolians and Australian aborigines. Finally, the "Arches" race would be made up of Khoisans and some central Europeans. "Depending on whether we classified ourselves by anti-malarial genes, lactase, fingerprints, or skin color," he concluded, "we could place Swedes in the same race as (respectively) either Xhosas, Fulani, the Ainu of Japan, or Italians."

Throughout the piece (and indeed throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel), Diamond appeared to want it both ways: asserting that all population categories, even trivial ones as he puts it, are equally meaningful, yet suggesting that some are more meaningful than others. In discussing basketball, for instance, he writes that the disproportionate representation of African Americans is not because of a lack of socio-economic opportunities, but with "the prevalent body shapes of some black African groups." In other words, racial categories based on body shape may be an inexact indicator of human population differences–as are all categories of human biodiversity–but they are demonstrably more predictive than fingerprint whorls or tongue-rolling abilities.

It’s one thing to say that race is in part a folk concept. After all, at the genetic level, genes sometimes tell a different story than does skin color. However, it’s far more problematic to make the claim that local populations have not clustered around some genetically based phenotypes. However uncomfortable it may be to Diamond, some "socially constructed" categories are more valid than others...

And... with some relevance, as this article relates:

Frudakis’ test is called DNAWitness. It examines DNA from 176 locations along the genome. Particular sequences at these points are found primarily in people of African heritage, others mainly in people of Indo-European, Native American, or South Asian descent. No one sequence can perfectly identify a person’s origin. But by looking at scores of markers, Frudakis says he can predict ancestry with a tiny margin of error.
...
But the real DNAWitness touches on race and racial profiling — a subject with such a tortured history that people can’t countenance the existence of the technology, even if they don’t understand how it works.

“Once we start talking about predicting racial background from genetics, it’s not much of a leap to talking about how people perform based on their DNA — why they committed that rape or stole that car or scored higher on that IQ test,” says Troy Duster, former president of the American Sociological Association.

I don't see how one would be able to use the population-genome in order to identify, for any general use within crime-investigation, the actual group of a person's social construct place of a smooth continuum. That would be really wacky. Now, if it wasn't a social construct to begin with...

Let's hear George W. Bill give his two cents worth:

Slightly over half of all biological/physical anthropologists today believe in the traditional view that human races are biologically valid and real. Furthermore, they tend to see nothing wrong in defining and naming the different populations of Homo sapiens. The other half of the biological anthropology community believes either that the traditional racial categories for humankind are arbitrary and meaningless, or that at a minimum there are better ways to look at human variation than through the "racial lens."

Pro and con

Are there differences in the research concentrations of these two groups of experts? Yes, most decidedly there are. As pointed out in a recent 2000 edition of a popular physical anthropology textbook, forensic anthropologists (those who do skeletal identification for law-enforcement agencies) are overwhelmingly in support of the idea of the basic biological reality of human races, and yet those who work with blood-group data, for instance, tend to reject the biological reality of racial categories.
...

Bones don't lie

First, I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities (white, black, American Indian, etc.) by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. Many well-conducted studies were reported in the late 1980s and 1990s that test methods objectively for percentage of correct placement. Numerous individual methods involving midfacial measurements, femur traits, and so on are over 80 percent accurate alone, and in combination produce very high levels of accuracy. No forensic anthropologist would make a racial assessment based upon just one of these methods, but in combination they can make very reliable assessments, just as in determining sex or age. In other words, multiple criteria are the key to success in all of these determinations. I have a respected colleague, the skeletal biologist C. Loring Brace, who is as skilled as any of the leading forensic anthropologists at assessing ancestry from bones, yet he does not subscribe to the concept of race. Neither does Norman Sauer, a board-certified forensic anthropologist. My students ask, "How can this be? They can identify skeletons as to racial origins but do not believe in race!" My answer is that we can often function within systems that we do not believe in.
...
Where I stand today in the "great race debate" after a decade and a half of pertinent skeletal research is clearly more on the side of the reality of race than on the "race denial" side. Yet I do see why many other physical anthropologists are able to ignore or deny the race concept. Blood-factor analysis, for instance, shows many traits that cut across racial boundaries in a purely clinal fashion with very few if any "breaks" along racial boundaries. (A cline is a gradient of change, such as from people with a high frequency of blue eyes, as in Scandinavia, to people with a high frequency of brown eyes, as in Africa.) Morphological characteristics, however, like skin color, hair form, bone traits, eyes, and lips tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc.
...
Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the "race denial" faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.

 

[Delvo]

Serre and Pääbo...

All remaining quotes in this post will be from that link; I just can't make the little link icons in the quote boxes here link to an outside page like they do to posts within this site.

Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for “races.” A recent study in which >350 microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity...
...there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or “races.”

Right from the start, they're establishing that what they are arguing against is "discrete" (completely separate, no intermediate states) races whose genomes are "discontinuous" (not overlapping or even adjacent along a continuum). In other words, the whole paper is going to be one big example of argument against model X from my image above. This is not only a claim I have never made, but also one I've never seen anybody else make, and most importantly, one that isn't made by the specific study that they spend most of this paper reanalyzing; in fact that paper explicitly showed the extent to which their results did not fit such a description.

One could argue that maybe that word choice is just a dramatization for the introduction, not really what the whole paper and its research & analysis are about, but no, versions of those words (same two roots, different suffixes for different grammatical contexts) appear two dozen times throughout the page, always as an opposing position they are arguing against. One could argue that maybe they meant something less severe & absolute by those words than the way I'm interpreting them, but no, they made this quite clear here:

To understand if worldwide genetic diversity is best described as discrete units (an “island model”; Wright 1969) or by continuous variation in allele frequencies (“isolation by distance”; Wright 1969)...

"Islands" do not touch, blend in to each other, have some other kind of land formation connecting them, or anything like that. "Islands" are isolated things with nothing islandy between them. That's the model for the opposing position that S&P are setting up to knock down. But I won't quote the rest of the places where they say so, because there are too many to bother with and there's more interesting stuff to get to.

The analyses performed by Rosenberg et al. (2002) use a model in which the allele frequencies in the inferred populations at each locus are correlated with each other... We tested if it is possible to find a stable assignment of the individuals to inferred populations using a model in which allele frequencies in the inferred populations are allowed to be independent of each other.

This distinction between correlated and uncorrelated alleles is crucial. The argument for genetic clusters was about correlations between alleles all along, for a reason. Correlation between alleles is what indicates relatedness; a bunch of people sharing the same cluster of alleles does so because they inherited the whole cluster from their common ancestors. If different sets of people weren't descended from different sets of ancestors, their alleles wouldn't be in clusters. Of course, even among people who do share clusters of alleles like that, there are other alleles that won't be correlated with each other, but those don't indicate how related or unrelated they are to each other like correlated ones do. Alleles in arbitrary sets of people who aren't particularly related to each other would have no correlations, so the presence of many alleles that aren't correlated is what would be expected whether people are related or not.

A couple of examples are the genes for type A and type B blood antibodies. All human populations have people with one or the other (blood types A & B), or both (type AB), or neither (type O). They're each more common in some places than in others, but where each one is common has no relationship with where the other one is; in some places one is particularly common and the other isn't, in others they're both common, and in others neither is. Maps showing each one's frequency around the world would look different from each other. If they were correlated positively, then most people would have both or neither (blood type AB or O) and few would have just one (type A or B); if they were negatively correlated, then most people would have one and not the other (type A or B) and few would have both or neither (type AB or O). In either case, it would give us reason to think that we descend from two different populations with two different frequencies of these alleles. But they're not correlated at all, in either direction, so they don't tell us anything about ancestral grouping; for all that the A & B genes tell us alone, we could all descend from a single population that had all four possibilities, or from any greater number of separate ones, as long as those also generally had all four possibilities. Uncorrelated alleles just can't be expected to distinguish between those situations.

The study by Rosenberg et alia that Serre & Pääbo are reacting to here checked for correlations and found them. S&P didn't negate this. They chose to go for uncorrelated ones instead. Because the two approaches are looking for completely different kinds of information, neither of them could possibly counter the other; they're on different subjects. So whatever was found in one type of analysis still stands after the other one is added.

What's amazing is that even the uncorrelated allele distribution still only weakened the observed regional grouping effect instead of being completely blind to it as might be expected, which, if anything, could only strengthen the case for it:

When the 1066 individuals of the CEPH diversity panel are analyzed using a model of uncorrelated allele frequencies, the results are similar to those found by Rosenberg et al. (2002), with slightly lower coefficients of ancestry.

So the effect is still seen even in the kind of study that you would do if you were trying to avoid seeing it. While this is quite interesting and causes me to ponder how it's possible, I won't go into this any farther for now, because what it certainly doesn't do is counter a different kind of study by the Rosenberg team, which is the actual subject here.

The next thing they did was cut out subsamples of the original sample. I'm not going to get on their case for reducing the sample size to about a fourth of what it was, because that actually is what you need to do if your argument is going to be that the original sample had too many of certain things in it. In this instance, what they're saying was the problem is that the original sample, although it was taken from many scattered locations worldwide (which thus makes their whole earlier spiel about isolated samples irrelevant), had too many individuals from some places and needed to be smoothed out:

We therefore analyzed subsamples of the individuals of the CEPH diversity panel that equalized the number of individuals per population

This brings to mind a possible objection about sample size and population size, but the paper isn't entirely clear about exactly how this was done, so I'll skip it as possibly inapplicable.

Anyway, since they're responding to the Rosenberg team's study, it would only be fair to run these subsamples through the same kind of analysis as they did. And they did so, and found that the subsampling method, which they expected to be an improvement over the original, still didn't get significantly different results:

When the first subsample {the only one they reported on, possibly the only one they did this with} is analyzed using a model of correlated allele frequencies (i.e., the model used in Rosenberg et al. 2002), the results are very similar to those found by Rosenberg et al. (2002), despite the reduced number of individuals... individuals tend to cluster according to continents.

They didn't get really different results until they applied both the subsampling and the different analytical method (the one that's irrelevant because it can't agree or disagree with the correlation study they're reacting to):

The high degree of clustering of genetic diversity according to populations described by Rosenberg et al. (2002) for the CEPH diversity panel is in disagreement with our results obtained by analyzing subsamples of the CEPH diversity panel that equalize population sizes, and a model of uncorrelated allele frequencies.

In the concluding section:

what Rosenberg et al. (2002) have shown is that given enough markers and the extraordinary power of Structure {the software everybody here used to do the math}, the tiny amounts of genetic differences that exist between continents can also be discerned.

So, while they did uncover some other interesting new facts to add to our knowledge here on a somewhat different subject from the one the Rosenberg team was studying, they did not conclude that the Rosenberg team got it wrong.

(The "tiny" part in that quote is an example of what I have recently taken to calling "pseudoquantities", words that sound like they imply some kind of quantity or a presumed reaction to one, but don't specify it, so all they do is tell us how to feel about it. I have little interest in debating whether a given pseudoquantity accurately describes any particular actual quantity, since nobody can get anywhere in trying to quantify the unquantifiable or treat it as quantified. But I do note that they serve a rhetorical purpose, rather than an informative one, and could be eliminated without any loss of information or factuality from the statements they're used to try to color, so putting them in scientific papers is generally just bad form.)

Also, although it's really not exactly on the subject of the existence of human races because Lewontin's Fallacy is already debunked elsewhere and the number I'm going to point out only needs to be above zero, not necessarily very "high"...

87.6% percent of the total diversity is found among individuals and only 9.2% among continents

When I see people quoting numbers like this, I realize that their point (as shown by the pseudoquantifying use of "only") is "wow look how small that number is", but to me, it looks really large, compared to what I might have expected if I hadn't been told the real number. It's the same when people say we "only" have a 2% difference or a 0.6% difference from chimpanzees; the impression it makes on me is how large the difference is. Before hearing such numbers for the chimpanzees, I never would have guessed anything over 0.1%. This kind of discrepancy in the impressions the same numbers can make on different people is the kind of trouble that pseudoquantities get us into.

 

[Delvo]

race: a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group: we Scots were a bloodthirsty race then – Source.

Not an accurate quote; "race:" does not appear before the bit you cut out, and putting it there yourself implies that the source considers that to be the definition, while eliminating the rest of what the source says creates the illusion that it says nothing else about it, neither of which is true. In reality, here's what your own source actually says, starting from the top this time:

noun
each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics...

That is the basic definition, the starting point from which everything else follows, according to your own source. The bit you cut out and separated from the rest only appears as the second item in a bullet list of spinoffs from that, in which the first one just shifts the grammatical reference point, the third is clearly metaphorical, and the fourth, fifth, and sixth all are clear that they, like the primary definition used as the starting point, are entirely biological.

A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race. -- Source.

From that page:

1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics.
3. A genealogical line; a lineage.
5. Biology

a. An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits. A race that has been given formal taxonomic recognition is known as a subspecies.
b. A breed or strain, as of domestic animals.​

1. (Anthropology & Ethnology) a group of people of common ancestry, distinguished from others by physical characteristics, such as hair type, colour of eyes and skin, stature, etc. Principal races are Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid
3. (Biology) a group of animals or plants having common characteristics that distinguish them from other members of the same species, usually forming a geographically isolated group; subspecies

1. a group of persons related by common descent or heredity.
2. Anthropol.

a. a classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on an arbitrary selection of physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups.
b. a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans.​

5. Zool. a variety; subspecies.

1.

a. An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits. A race that has been given formal taxonomic recognition is known as a subspecies.
b. A breed or strain, as of domestic animals.​

2. Any of several extensive human populations associated with broadly defined regions of the world and distinguished from one another on the basis of inheritable physical characteristics, traditionally conceived as including such traits as pigmentation, hair texture, and facial features

3. race - people who are believed to belong to the same genetic stock
4. race - (biology) a taxonomic group that is a division of a species

noun people... blood, house, family, line, issue, stock... seed (chiefly biblical), breed, folk, tribe, offspring, clan, kin, lineage, progeny, kindred

1. any one section of mankind, having a particular set of characteristics which make it different from other sections. the Negro race; the white races; (also adjective) race relations.
2. the fact of belonging to any of these various sections. the problem of race.
...of mixed race
having ancestors (especially parents) from two or more different human races.

* * *

Biological definitions there outnumber others multiples-to-one, and those others are split between cultural stuff like the ones you pick out and other obvious metaphors grouping people or things by just about any trait, like in the phrase "the race of authors". Here's the equivalent page from another site that collects its definitions from multiple separate official dictionaries like that one; it's the same story there.

The other two sources you linked to here aren't even dictionaries at all. One, although hosted by a science magazine (which wouldn't be much of an authority on definitions of words of common English anyway), is what they call a "perspective" essay right at the top, with a title that just says "Conceptualization of...". It's written by an individual who is framing things his/her way to set up an essay advocating his/her perspective or desires. The other is Wikipedia, which not only is open to exactly that kind of author itself (and sometimes even seems to particularly attract and motivate them), but also, even in the hands of authors who take it as a serious responsibility, is meant as an encyclopedia rather than a dictionary. That difference gives them reason to discuss archaic, misguided, debated, and other generally non-standard ideas about an article's subject, not just stick to giving accurate basic definitions.

How many authoritative sources do you need before you're willing to accept that I'm presenting the mainstream, widely accepted definition of the term?

One would be a good start. (But even then, any dictionary would have to be secondary to real-world use.) And even then, to prove a claim that "races don't exist" would require proving that it's non-existent by every definition, not just some of them, even the most mainstream and/or widely used.

You're talking about group selection but it is highly dubious if such a thing exists at all.

I think you mistraslated group selection. FWIW, it's almost universally rejected.

You think that group selection happens, right? I would like to know how you think that can be.

I know of two ways to interpret that phrase, both of which seem to be sidetracks.

One (which is the one that comes up on Wikipedia) is a suggestion for how altruistic traits can evolve, as opposed to other suggestions like kin selection. It's not universally accepted, but it's also irrelevant here because the subject isn't how altruism evolves.

The other is simply a scale at which to look at units of evolution. For example, an individual organism would be one kind of unit of evolution, acting to preserve and replicate itself; a gene would be another, acting to preserve and replicate itself; a family could be another, acting to preserve and replicate itself. There can be legitimate debate about what's the best unit to use when looking at any given case; for example, does it make more sense to consider a whole hive/colony to be the evolutionary unit for bees or ants, acting to preserve the hive/colony and create more hives/colonies, or to consider the queen the basic unit and the rest merely parts of how she acts to preserve and replicate herself? I can see how you would think of that subject because I was talking about one human subpopulation expanding and taking over others' territory, but the fact that that does repeatedly happen is beyond doubt regardless of whether we describe it in terms of individuals or groups of them, so I'm not getting the point of bringing it up.

Maybe you meant some third option by that phrase, but I don't know what it would be.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

A good analogy. A related example I have is from growing up with first nations is that they disagree that there are seven colours in a rainbow. ROYGBIV is a Western Concept. A social construct, if you will. First Nations depict rainbows with five colours. RYGBV.

Now: we all see exactly the same gradual transition from red to violet, but categorize them differently. Indigo is a type of blue. This discordance about the social construct of Indigo does not mean Indigo is a useless idea that should be jettisoned to history's footnotes and that all those people buying indigo paint at the hobby shop are buying into a myth.

First of all, as I pointed out, there are objectively 3 primary colors. This is because the color sensing cells in the human eye come, roughly speaking, in 3 different types.
Roughly speaking means that this is not true for all humans. We do not all see exactly the same gradual transition from red to violet.
The color sensitive cells (or rather light sensitive proteins in those cells) come in many different variants. Some of these variants give rise to the different types of color blindness.

Second: A social construction and a myth are very different things. Money is certainly no myth, though there is no physical basis for value. OTOH many myths may safely be considered objectively untrue.


Finally let's get to the meat of analogy:
How many people see race that way? I know there are a few but is that really the mainstream?

Delvo, whom you are replying to, made it clear that you are misunderstanding him. He doesn't understand race to mean what you think it means.
Indeed, I have never heard of physicists arguing about how many colors there are or how many bands in the spectrum. If race is commonly understood to be an arbitrary classification along the lines of color, then why isn't it treated as being as important as the color of money? That is, socially important but not objectively.


Previously, I compared the word 'race' to the word 'psychic'. I could say that it is a fact that everyone has psychic abilities. Indeed, are we not all able to, eg, recognize patterns? Such abilities are studied by psychology, the science of the psyche, so surely, they are psychic abilities.
Or, perhaps, I should rather say that those are mental abilities?

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Saved me from making a longer reply. That's basically the case in point, as shown by Sforzas groups of human populations. That he said the division was made with concern of the history of movement/migration of people, as opposed to a rigid "classification scheme" is basically potatoe potato wordplay, as these groups were observed phylogenetically and show the very pattern of the Z-strain spectrum.

You continue to misrepresent Cavalli-Sforza. Have you tried reading the chapter?

If the answer is yes, then it may be that you fail at the language barrier. Then you should find a translation and/or refrain from participating in english language discussions.
If the answer is no... well...

 

[GnaGnaMan]

That would only be the case if there were only supposed to have been 1 separating event in human history, upon which we were immediately split directly into some number of smaller units which could not themselves have split later. It would not be the case if humans were supposed to work just the same as every other animal, in which case one split could be followed by other splits within any of the smaller units created by the earlier one. Sequential divergences yield nested hierarchies, and nested hierarchies show different numbers of members just depending on the level/resolution at which you look at them. For example, the "gray wolf" splits first into northern and southern (2 groups), then the northern splits into Eurasian and North American (at least 3 groups total), then the North American splits into arctic and subarctic (more than 4 total), and even among the subarctic North American, there are eastern and western groups which still include more smaller units within themselves. It's not a matter of any particular number being the final absolute answer and other numbers being wrong; it's just a matter of scale. (This is part of the problem with the idea of "subspecies"; it's only one word, so it would seem like it should apply to only one level, but sometimes there's more than one level below species.

If something objectively exists then different observers should come to the same conclusion about it.
You can't theorize your way out of the facts.

Same basic idea, different scales. "Tribe" and "clan" are also comparable. So what? We have different words for the same general phenomenon at different scales... and this is somehow a problem... for one out of several such words but not the others... because...?

Are you saying the city relates to race like spark relates to lightning? I guess you do... Well, that settles the disagreement.

I've known some mutts who would disagree with you. And even without that, if breeders had always managed to make sure there was absolutely no introgression and there were no such things as "village dogs" (dogs in areas where breeding didn't take off like it did in Europe, representing a more general, un-tinkered-with state of dog), what difference would it make? Even thoroughly isolated, discontinuous groups in a species would still just be points along a greadient where the segment between them was missing for one reason or another. If you started with a fully expressed gradient from end to end and drove a middle section extinct, that wouldn't change the fundamental relationship between the remainders.

It seems you do not understand what 'cline' means. Look it up.

I don't believe it was necessary to notify you that the evidence for your own claim that something doesn't exist would need to indicate that it... doesn't exist.

Please don't misrepresent me and please don't quote me out of context.
Full context, for the record:

The race denial case doesn't need "small". It needs "zero". Otherwise, the case they're defending isn't "no such thing as races", but merely "races do exist (but make relatively little difference)", which I have not argued against.

It would have been good if you had mentioned that earlier, like when I asked you for a definition of race. Or when I first mentioned that there are small dividing lines.
By that definition the population of any city, town or village of any age is its own race. You can use the word in that sense if you like. I just don't think that's how it's commonly understood.
Maybe that's settled then?

I guess that settled then, indeed. Races, as you understand the term exist. You did not say if you think that this is how the term is commonly understood so I don't know if we disagree on this.
I assume that we agree on race making little difference. As you point out, you did not argue against it and I have a hard time imagining someone making that argument from a genetic stand-point (now sports, OTOH...).

BTW: note that you are misrepresenting the Nature paper that Vorti linked. If this is inadvertent, then you should re-read it.

 

[Vortigern99]

Sufficient links and quotes have been supplied in this thread so that anyone interested in the topic can educate him/herself on the evidence for and against the valid classification of humans into discrete-yet-overlapping units called races; whether it's useful and practical to do so; and whether that classification system includes cultural and behavioral traits.

As with any controversial topic, even among the most informed experts, there is on-going controversy and contention. In such a scenario, pointing emphatically to this or that study, chart, table, graph or data set is no certain indicator that one's own interpretation will be shared by one's interlocutors.

I for one have reviewed the data, and I remain on the side of those who argue against the validity of race as described above. Part of this conclusion is, for me, semantic: the word race, as it's used in the media, in much scientific parlance and in everyday speech, includes behavioral and cultural traits which do not derive from any discrete geographic polymorphisms.

If race proponents want their position (EG concerning 42 more-or-less distinct human genetic categories) to be globally accepted, I suggest coining a new term, because the word race is already loaded with connotations, has since its inception included behaviors, and has historically been used to support ideologies of supremacism and non-equal treatment.

Moving forward, I consider the debate a sidebar to my purpose in creating this thread. There have been and remain other threads for the in-depth discussion on the legitimacy of race in this forum; links to these have been provided upthread. That said, the argument does have a place here, and for what it's worth Delvo et al. are welcome to continue arguing their position that race is a valid and evidential system of human classification.

Regardless of the opinions of my oponents, however, I remain firm in my intentions to disintegrate the idea of race. I want to tear it down in order to make a better, more inclusive, less restrictive society. Call it lofty or elitist or liberal or unrealistic; it remains my purpose here, as I hope to show in forthcoming posts.

 

[Vortigern99]

Racism

Whether one interprets the data as supporting race or falsifying it, one conclusion that invites little argument is that racism -- non-equal treatment of individuals based on perceived differences among populations -- is detrimental to society.

Elements which define racism include supremacism (belief in a given race's right to rule) and an attendant climate of group privilege; harmful intent against members of the perceived inferior race; exclusion, restriction and suppression of innate rights and freedoms; and a climate of preference which nullifies or impairs the recognition or exercise of lawful rights and liberties.

Throughout the 20th century and especially beginning with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, racism as defined above has been mainly associated with the majority group, namely the race called "white", "Caucasian" or "of European descent", many of whose members and institutions defended their advantages through subordination of minority groups. Today in the US, at some 72% percent of the total population, persons of European descent are still in the majority, with those of African descent at less than 13% of the total population, those of Asian descent at less than 5%, and Native Americans at less than 1%. (Hispanics or Latinos are at 16% total, but of that 16%, almost 9% consider themselves "white", while 6% are of "some other race".) -- Source.

It has been argued that racism by definition must include a condition of power attainable only by the majority, and that therefore only the majority, namely so-called whites, are capable of racism. The latter opinion has given rise to such terms as "reverse racism" and "reverse discrimination", in order to describe instances of racial injustice committed against the majority. I for one disagree with this opinion. I oppose race-based supremacism, group privilege, harmful intent, and exclusion, restriction and suppression of rights and freedoms whenever and wherever it's committed.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Throughout the 20th century and especially beginning with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, racism as defined above has been mainly associated with the majority group, namely the race called "white", "Caucasian" or "of European descent", many of whose members and institutions defended their advantages through subordination of minority groups. Today in the US, at some 72% percent of the total population, persons of European descent are still in the majority, with those of African descent at less than 13% of the total population, those of Asian descent at less than 5%, and Native Americans at less than 1%. (Hispanics or Latinos are at 16% total, but of that 16%, almost 9% consider themselves "white", while 6% are of "some other race".) -- Source.

Note that all Hispanics and Latinos are of european descent regardless of their self-described color.
Also most (if not all) of those of "african descent" as well.
I doubt you will find many US americans who are not of european descent.