Roboramma said:
[The reason I used that language "nearly all", "almost any" was because there will be some members of any race who will not share every characteristic of that group. Not many. I was thinking of albinoes, for instance.
Do you really think that nearly all of the members of a group are going to share every characteristic of that group? That is only vaguely plausible if you pick an extremely limited number of characteristics and define them in an extremely elastic way. Look at the risible attempts which have been made to find measurable characteristics of a Jewish race, for an example.
The same is true of the human species as well. If you define the difference between humans and chimpanzees as that we have a complex language, you will come across people who can't speak at all
Which is precisely why I would not pick such an arbitrary and clearly non-definitive characteristic to identify a group.
Or mentally challenged people who's langauge is not complex. But they're still human. Why? Because they share so many other features that are also defined as human.
Then picking a feature which is neither necessary nor sufficient and which is not even a feature of every member of the group you wish to identify seems rather pointless in the first place. It is not the case that you picked a definitive feature of humans that some humans do not possess it is the case that you picked a feature that was not definitive.
The same can apply to race. If you see an albino Indian, there are other features than skin colour that will point to his ancestry.
Not necessarily so. You have perhaps heard of Grey Owl, the Englishman who earlier this century posed as a Native American very publically, even touring America and England as a Native American spokesperson for environmental issues. He was accepted as a Native American for man years both by Native Americans and the public at large. Why? Because he had the superficial features which were commonly held to be features of some Native American race. You assume a large number of differentiating features and a sharp dividing line for which there is no evidence. Even insofar as there are features which reliably point to ancestry, this does not validate the concept of race. You and I have features that point to our ancestors being shrew-like mammals but we are not shrews.
I am a member of a race whose members can have blue-eyes, brown-eyes, green-eyes, etc. Who are "white skinned" though there is some difference in skin tone ranging from very pale to relatively tan, none will be "black
A perfect example of how arbitrary and fuzzy your selection of characteristics has to be in order to assign you to a race. You say none will be "black" but that is only true in virtue of the fact that you arbitrarily define the range of skin tones identified as "black" in such a way that you can make the claim and you implicityly acknowledge that the term is elastic. Given that characteristics skip generations it would be entirely possible for you to have a child with skin colour in the range you arbitrarily call "black" (note that you even have to put quotes around your characteristics to produce a set you can use to separate your races). In fact, we don't even have to posit a dark-skinned ancestor for this (though there is no reason to suppose you don't have one), our good friend genetic mutation would allow you to have a son who produced enough melanin to have skin in your "black" range. Would it change your son's race, yours or your ancestors or would you adjust the range of skin tones you refer to as black? How many arbitrary characteristics do we have to change before your son's race is changed if you want to base it on such characteristics?
There is a tendancy to straight hair, though some have curly hair
This is even worse than compex language as a defining feature.
Maybe there are other features
And maybe they are all as arbitrary, fuzzy and open to interpretation as the features you have already listed.
I would guess that geneticists would be even more accurate at discovering someone's race than those of us who can only look at surface features
Then you would guess wrong. Geneticists can say some interesting things about ancestry (far more than can be said from surface features, certainly) but the overwhelmingly greater variation betwen individuals vs between population groups has made "race" a useless term in genetics.
show me one person of predominantly african ancestry with "white skin", "blue eyes" and straight hair
To state the obvious, go far enough back in our ancestry and we are all of predominantly african ancestry. Now I don't know enough people of
predominantly African ancestry (and note how fuzzy and elastic that term is) to even begin to know whether your implicit assumption that there are no such people is correct or incorrect. I have known a dark-skinned African with blue eyes and straight-ish hair (straight hair is an abraction representing an undefined range of conformations of hair found in many diverse populations). Did she belong to your African Race purely in virtue of her dark skin? Can I put you with the Vikings in virtue of your blue eyes and white skin?
Or better, show me one person of predominantly asian ancestry who would be concisered african by most people who have had contact with both asians and africans in their lives
Why is the onus on me to provide a counter-example to your global theory that shared superficial characteristics between people imply membership of a group in any meaningful way other than that they have been selected by you, or by social convention as members of that group? Is that how we do science now? Surely the onus is on you, if it is your theory that race is real rather than a social/psychological construct, to show that "race" has predictive power beyond merely the ability of a person to conform to convention. Even if we assume that you are correct in that I will be unable to find an Asian (and Asian encompasses a huge range of variability in those superficial physical characteristics you deem to be objectively useful) it would not that the social conventions followed by your abiters of race had any objective basis.
I'm not trying to suggest that there are any meaningful differences between races
Let us ignore meaning for further discussion and stick to definitive, well defined and objective. I can't see that we should have any interest in non-definitive, ill-defined or subjective differences unless we wishe to explore the phenomena of socially constructed categories.
But isn't this a scientific question?
It should be.
Your wording here seems to suggest that anyone who did "make such an arbitrary distinction" would be evil, or malicious, rather than simply wrong.
That is not my implication. I use prejudice purely in the sense of arriving at a conclusion be prior to ascertaining evidence. That the word often has connotations of evil, rather mere wrongness, is because prejudice and evil have a relationship. It is much easier to treat people badly on the basis of prejudice than it is to do so on the basis of careful, rational consideration. That is too say the most harmful beliefs held about people tend to have no rational basis and therefore are by default examples of prejudice. There are also many, more or less harmless and morally neutral prejudices: there is no clear evil in believing that fairies live at the botom of the garden, for instance. I don't even think that all racists are evil and malicious, though it is easy to see how evil actions can arise from their beliefs. I certainly don't mean to imply that you are evil and malicious - I think it is fairly obvious that you are not - but I do think that you have started with the assumption that race exists rather than trying to determine from first principles whether it does. I disagree with you and have not, so far found your arguments compelling, though they have been worthwhile arguments. I thank you for participating in this discussion with me.
And yet making that distinction doesn't suggest making a judgement about one group or another, just that those groups exist
It doesn't entail a moral judgement but it does entail a judgement. Imagine that you had never come across the concept of race. Where would you start in your categorisation of people into groups and would you end up with the same groups you have now? Judgements will have to be made (including, possibly the judgement that there is no real advantage in constructing such groups) but what are you going to use as the basis of that judgement? I would be intrigued to hear your answers, which I am sure will be different to mine.
I don't think its a matter of morality, it's a matter of what the data says
But does the data say anything concrete? Imagine if an explanation of homeopathy, say, came back with "well it sort of works like this, I can't give you any precise data because it just doesn't work like that. Oh, and sometime it doesn't work like that but, generally it does". Do we have anything better than that for race?
What is so very very bad about my judgement that someone with dark skin of a certain hue, dark curly hair, and maybe some other features, is of predominantly african ancestry?
All of the terms to define the data from which you derive your conclusion are ill-defined (dark-skin of a certain hue, dark curly hair and maybe some other features) as is your conclusion (predominantly african ancestry - define predominant and how far back that african ancestry has to begin and end). Beyond that, you are going to be wrong some of the time because the history of our ancestors' geographical locations only points to the genetic characteristics we are most likely to have not the ones we will have.
Or would anyone? Some of us might make one or two mistakes in a large sample. But we would also tend to correlate very well with each other, and with a high degree of accuracy.
That our opinions correlate with each other very well is not particularly surprising. Socialisation ensures that our opinions correlate very well with each other on a great many things, regardless of whether are opinions are right and wrong. Lets say that you are right about the degree of accuracy with which you assess the predominant ancestry (once you have defined that term in a useful way) of your subjects , that would at most, show that there is a difference in the frequency with which certain characteristics occur in the descendants of populations of a particular region during a particular period in history (that is going to have to form at least part of your definition of predominant ancestry for the term to be meaningful). But you would still have identified no more than a trend and a social construct useful in predicting trends but which may have been misidentified as a means for producing definitive categories of people with significant differences.
Well, for one thing the closer the characteristics of two races are, the harder it will be for people to distinguish between their members, until you come to two groups that cannot be called different races at all
I respect the fact that you choose to provide a counter-example to your own argument. If I think of one to my own argument, I will do the same. Note that you used the phrase "called different races" rather than "are not different races". Does that point to an implicit acknowledgment that race is an abstract construct, or is it merely an accident of words?
But can you say that a geneticist with enough knowledge of the different gene frequencies would not be able to, with no more information than her genetic code, determine her ancestry?
I can definitely say that a geneticist cannot, with certainty, determine her ancestry. What can be provided by genetics is a good idea of her
likely geographical ancestry, given sufficient information about gene frequencies by geography. They are remember, frequencies, measures of probability not of certainty. I am aware of large-scale studies in Europe with some interesting results as to the Viking ancestry of modern populations. It is I suppose pertinent to point out that despite the fact that it is possible to identify a person as being likely to have Viking ancestry, noone has seriously suggested that there was a Viking Race.
And if you told them that no, actually she's european, they wouldn't beleive you
Though, in fact, you would find many people of European, particularly eastern European descent who have Asian characteristics. Not particularly surprising considering Asia and Europe are connected and populations moved back and forth for thousands of years. What people believe is quite distinct from what is true.
I know that the differences between races are very small and pretty meaningless. But I don't see that it does any good to decide that therefore races don't exist at all
I'm still not convinced that they exist at all in any real sense. If you want redefine the term so that the sentence "my girlfriend is of an Asian race" is equivalent to "a cluster of superficial characteristics of my girlfriend are such that it is statistically likely that she had a line of ancestors originating in Asia" then we have no dispute. I'm not quite sure where that gets us though.
But that's not how it works. Race is determined not by one single "character" but by a number of them that all coorelate rather well, and happen to fall into regional lines
I'm still not convinced race is determined at all and the sort of superficial characteristics you have used - quite in line with the traditional concept of race - are so poorly defined that the determination of their presence or absence is necessarily arbitrary. If we turn to genetics, we get population genetics which gives us statistical likelihoods of particular sequences of genes in a given population rather than providing discrete characteristics that might be used in discriminating (no moral commentary intended) races.
Those geographic lines are blurred, because there has been interbreeding across them, but when you take two people whose ancestry was far enough apart geographically - like a norweigan and an austrailian aboriginee, that criticism no longer applies
There is truth in that but please recognise that Australian and Norwegian are terms of nationality rather than race and that implies a whole other are of arbitrary delineation. We could discuss caucassoid vs aborignee but these are socially defined terms - defined long before DNA was even thought of, as were all the racial categories once used in science.
To categorise somebody according to the fact that most of their ancestors lived and interbred in a certain geographical region over a certain period of time is arbitrary categorisation and furthermore represents a category which is not synonymous with race, unless we redefine the term to make it so.
To categorise them according to superficial characteristics is problematic because the types of characteristics used are necessarily fuzzy, arbitrarily selected and non-definitive. They say more about the person applying the category than the person categorised (no implied criticism, most of us are social beings as well as individuals).
To categorise them according to the fact that they have particular sequences of genes that are most likely to reflect that they had ancestors that lived and interbred in a certain geographical region over a certain period of time, represents arbitrary categorisation without even the certainty that one has picked the arbitrary category one intended to pick.
namely where his ancestors lived.
That's all it tells you. But that doesn't mean it doesn't tell you anything
If we can change that to where some of his ancestors most likely lived then we are in agreement on both counts but that doesn't make race any more real.
)