Race is a human/social construct.

[Skeptic Ginger]

There are good reasons to consider race as a cultural/social construct, and indeed this is how anthropologists generally treat it.

Where people get themselves into trouble confusing it with a biological classification. I can assure you there is no evidence for any biological/genetic cause for the disparity of human well-being in different parts of the world.

Thank you because I'm getting tired of repeating myself.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/haprinderm.pdf

Did you read your citation?

This has a significant advantage over studies employing the cruder and also more controversial category of race (Lewontin, 1972; Woodley, 2010b), as races constitute broad categories, whose constituent populations have significantly disparate origins in both time and space...

...It is debated as to whether coloration has a direct or indirect causal association with cognitive ability and behavioral dispositions, although some researchers assume pleiotropic effects (Ducrest, Keller, & Roulin, 2008; Jensen, 2006). We include it as an indicator of evolutionary history, however this variable like race is broad, encompassing the evolutionary histories of many disparate populations (Beaver & Wright, 2011).

You keep replying that because we have family lineages that means there are racial divisions.

 

[bpesta22]

Did you read your citation? You keep replying that because we have family lineages that means there are racial divisions.

They have data by nations / national origin. At a one-up level in categorization, the haplogroups would be used to define race. Race here is cruder than national origin in the same way that calling something a dog is cruder than calling it a cocker spaniel.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

They have data by nations / national origin. At a one-up level in categorization, the haplogroups would be used to define race. Race here is cruder than national origin in the same way that calling something a dog is cruder than calling it a cocker spaniel.

There's nothing in that link that says haplogroups define race. You are totally misconstruing what you are reading.

How about quoting something specific and describing what you think it means. Maybe we could go from there.

 

[Zelenius]

Here is a challenge for Skepticginger and everyone else saying race does not exist:

I consider myself to be a reasonable person. I am a skeptic and critical thinker. I love learning, and I am open to changing my mind, to correct any false ideas I may have. That said, I find the arguments in favor of "race does not exist" to be rather weak. I've heard them all before, and if they didn't convince me 2 years ago or 5 years ago, they won't convince me now.

As a skeptic, I often question my own beliefs. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the arguments for the non-existence of race are over my head, maybe I am just a fool or lack the education to understand them. Still, to me, the arguments I encounter are usually so poor that they lead me to believe it has everything to do with political correctness and nothing to do with science. The "arguments" lead me to believe the "race-deniers" are dishonest, deluded or a mixture of both.

The challenge is this: It seems this "race does not exist" idea only applies to humans. I've never seen it applied to another species, which makes me suspicious and unconvinced. So I challenge those arguing for it to find another species which once fooled scientists into thinking that it was sub-divided into various races due to discernible morphological differences, but eventually genetic research revealed that these races did not exist.

I am well aware that new genetic evidence(and sometimes from paleontology) has lead to numerous reclassifications of various species of animals, plants, fungi and various micro-organisms. The bonobo for instance was once thought to be a race of chimpanzee; now experts see it as a distinct species separate from chimpanzees. It seems scientists originally erred in favor of bonobos being closer to chimpanzees than is now known, which is the opposite of what I am demanding.

Anyway, so it would be interesting to see the same genetic analysis applied to another species besides humans, to demonstrate that there are no racial divisions, which was previously believed to have different races.

You can take your time or even make it a project if you want. If you find an example, there is no guarantee that I will alter my position in the "race does not exist" debate, but anything that can get me thinking would be appreciated. No more weak arguments, no more sloppiness, let's see you apply the same thinking to another species. I am more than willing to learn new things about biology. I do not believe I am being unreasonable. So give it your best shot.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Your "challenge" makes no sense to me. Of course we don't apply 'race' to other species. Race is a concept that was developed when humans for the most part, couldn't imagine they were part of the animal kingdom. The Tower of Babel story is one example but there could be much older myths that 'explain' the differences people saw in humans. The term, race, has never been applied to other animal species that I am aware of.

Maybe the arguments for the non-existence of race are over my head

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say from the rest of your post that this is very possibly the problem.

 

[Zelenius]

Your "challenge" makes no sense to me. Of course we don't apply 'race' to other species. Race is a concept that was developed when humans for the most part, couldn't imagine they were part of the animal kingdom. The Tower of Babel story is one example but there could be much older myths that 'explain' the differences people saw in humans. The term, race, has never been applied to other animal species that I am aware of.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say from the rest of your post that this is very possibly the problem.

Then, for the sake of this challenge, you can also consider sub-species divisions that have been revealed to be non-existent. "Race" and "sub-species" are sometimes used interchangeably anyway. My challenge still stands.

 

[Zelenius]

Your "challenge" makes no sense to me. Of course we don't apply 'race' to other species. Race is a concept that was developed when humans for the most part, couldn't imagine they were part of the animal kingdom. The Tower of Babel story is one example but there could be much older myths that 'explain' the differences people saw in humans. The term, race, has never been applied to other animal species that I am aware of.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say from the rest of your post that this is very possibly the problem.

Oh and by the way, "race" is sometimes used for describing varieties within other species, honeybees for example. There are many different races among Orcas as well. I could list others. Interesting that you either didn't know this or you chose to ignore it.

 

[Kahalachan]

The thing is people class others by race not be detailed examination of genetics, but by cursory examination of things like skin tone.

So you get things like thinking of black or affrican as a race when the continent has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world.

So race as people use it is largely a social construct. Like when the Irish became white.

Is Jewish a race? There certainly are genetic markers that show up in jewish communities. So would the Lemba people be classed as black or jewish?

Or is it that there are too many races for people to keep straight in society?

It's possible to narrow this down to nation. When I lived in Japan I could tell Japanese from Korean or Chinese or other Asians. When populations become somewhat isolated, certain features can become more salient.

With nations, politics and immigration do isolate people to a degree as well.

The question of race is a question of evolution. This population became somewhat isolated and developed certain traits. To what degree has this happened? Is this pronounced enough to warrant some kind of separate classification?

I see no need because humans are highly mobile. An African can immigrate to the UK and interbreed with someone there. Suppose I, as a half white and half Asian, decided to only mix with other half whites and half Asians. And others thought as I did. Would we eventually create a new race? Sub-race? What?

The fact that humans are capable of interbreeding with so many other humans from all over the world today makes classifying humans by various races, that resulted from a time they were less able to travel, nearly pointless aside from the need to trace ancestry.

To put this in perspective, suppose we never bred dogs anymore and just let them all run wild. German Shephard would cease to have any significant value because what the AKC classifies as a German Shephard would be extinct. At best we can only say this dog is 60% German Shephard or something.

At one point in human history, race may have had scientific meaning due to the lack of civilization and mobility, but any race is certainly extinct today.

 

[bpesta22]

There's nothing in that link that says haplogroups define race. You are totally misconstruing what you are reading.

How about quoting something specific and describing what you think it means. Maybe we could go from there.

I concede they're using haplogroups for nations in this paper. You're claiming they are relevant / reliable / accurate for classifying nations (Mackintosh apples) but not races (apples)?

In general, we should clarify different levels of categorization:

Superordinate (animal, fruit)
Intermediate / basic (dog, apple)
Subordinate (cocker; mackintosh)

 

[bpesta22]

It's possible to narrow this down to nation. When I lived in Japan I could tell Japanese from Korean or Chinese or other Asians. When populations become somewhat isolated, certain features can become more salient.

With nations, politics and immigration do isolate people to a degree as well.

The question of race is a question of evolution. This population became somewhat isolated and developed certain traits. To what degree has this happened? Is this pronounced enough to warrant some kind of separate classification?

I see no need because humans are highly mobile. An African can immigrate to the UK and interbreed with someone there. Suppose I, as a half white and half Asian, decided to only mix with other half whites and half Asians. And others thought as I did. Would we eventually create a new race? Sub-race? What?

The fact that humans are capable of interbreeding with so many other humans from all over the world today makes classifying humans by various races, that resulted from a time they were less able to travel, nearly pointless aside from the need to trace ancestry.

To put this in perspective, suppose we never bred dogs anymore and just let them all run wild. German Shephard would cease to have any significant value because what the AKC classifies as a German Shephard would be extinct. At best we can only say this dog is 60% German Shephard or something.

At one point in human history, race may have had scientific meaning due to the lack of civilization and mobility, but any race is certainly extinct today.

Using your hypothetical: After 1000+ years of restricted breeding, dogs are now mating randomly across breeds. How many generations of random breeding would it take before dogs just looked like prototypical dogs (versus poodles or shepherds?). I imagine this would take a long time; perhaps longer than even the conversion into breeds.

Suppose though that having poodle ancestors correlated strongly (now) with all sorts of negative social outcomes, and that the dog kingdom invested lots of money on improving environments for dogs with poodle ancestors, yet they still fared far worse relative to other dogs.

Could it be ancestry's legacy, despite the now unrestricted gene pool, that's holding current dogs with poodle ancestors back? Why does this seem so implausible? Why does lactose intolerance exist today since the sub-population that it evolved in is now inter-breeding?

Worse, scientists in the dog kingdom now have ways to identify the genetics of dog breeds and could use these markers in experiments to perhaps understand and fix the poodle-ancestry problem (by testing whether various traits seem linked to dog ancestry in general).

 

[bpesta22]

Despite inter-mixing today, take pictures of 1000 randomly selected individuals and ask me to guess their race. Use the DNA stuff to trace back their ancestry.

I'd bet impressive but non-perfect accuracy on my part.

How can this be if race is purely social?

 

[DC]

I concede they're using haplogroups for nations in this paper. You're claiming they are relevant / reliable / accurate for classifying nations (Mackintosh apples) but not races (apples)?

In general, we should clarify different levels of categorization:

Superordinate (animal, fruit)
Intermediate / basic (dog, apple)
Subordinate (cocker; mackintosh)

no they don't. They rather use them for regions. which is normal for haplogroups. haplogroups are a scientific construct.

 

[Pacal]

Be kind if someone else has already mentioned it.

It is my understanding that "race" scientifically speaking when applied to animals is used for different subspecies of a single species. The criteria is that there is greater genetic variability between the subspecies than within each subspecies.

It is my understanding that however you classify human "races" there is always greater genatic variability, (average difference) with the "racial" group than between racial groups. What this means is not only are humans one species we are one subspecies also.

There is literally just one human "race".

It is also my understanding that from a genetic perspective humans are remarkably homogenous. I remember reading someway that a Chimpanzee troop of c. 50 individuals was found to have twice the genetic variability of all c. 7 billion humans!

 

[Delvo]

I do see endless use of strawmen, and continuum fallacy...

The continuum fallacy is an especially bad one because it's really two different ones combined: a biological one and a geographic one. The biological continuum fallacy is the pretense that there's a vast number of people in expansive populations over broad areas of the globe possessing various mixtures between the identified groups of traits in all possible ratios, even though what's actually been mapped out is clear distinct clustering of consistent traits within broad regions with only narrow border zones of any mixing at all (and even there, the mixing ratio usually stays pretty lopsided toward one group or the other).

But there's also a geographic continuum fallacy, the pretense that human populations have never been isolated from each other, as if there were simply no such thing as an ocean or a desert hundreds of miles wide, or as if people routinely cross those as casually as a stroll through the woods or prairie. And the strangest thing about that is the fact that human genetic distinctiveness or the lack thereof between two locations tells you pretty well how isolated they were or weren't. In what was once Gaul, for example, there's no way to identify genetic groups descending from the Vandals, Ostragoths, Aedui, or Helvetii, or even to separate Celts from Germanics, and we still can't tell which of those two groups, if either, the original Belgae might have been a part of. In the Middle East, the descendants of the people of Ur and Akkad and Lachish are completely melted into the general Middle Eastern pot. THAT is what happens when there really is no isolation and no genetic grouping but a smooth continuum of mixing. And that's how they're claiming to think the whole world works. They're not just race deniers; they're also geography deniers, their assertions depending entirely on there simply being no such thing as geography.

You keep replying that because we have family lineages that means there are racial divisions.

You keep acting as if those are two separate things instead of the very same phenomenon at different scales. What are you claiming races are, other than rather large families? (Another odd thing about the denialist case: perpetually insisting on using their own private little made-up ad-hoc redefinition of the word "race" that nobody else uses and no dictionary contains, which must call for some additional requirement above and beyond any of the real ones, but never even getting around to specifying exactly what it is, nevermind actually giving any support for it as the definition.)

 

[DC]

Despite inter-mixing today, take pictures of 1000 randomly selected individuals and ask me to guess their race. Use the DNA stuff to trace back their ancestry.

I'd bet impressive but non-perfect accuracy on my part.

How can this be if race is purely social?

what race would Tiger Woods be?

 

[DC]

The continuum fallacy is an especially bad one because it's really two different ones combined: a biological one and a geographic one. The biological continuum fallacy is the pretense that there's a vast number of people in expansive populations over broad areas of the globe possessing various mixtures between the identified groups of traits in all possible ratios, even though what's actually been mapped out is clear distinct clustering of consistent traits within broad regions with only narrow border zones of any mixing at all (and even there, the mixing ratio usually stays pretty lopsided toward one group or the other).

But there's also a geographic continuum fallacy, the pretense that human populations have never been isolated from each other, as if there were simply no such thing as an ocean or a desert hundreds of miles wide, or as if people routinely cross those as casually as a stroll through the woods or prairie. And the strangest thing about that is the fact that human genetic distinctiveness or the lack thereof between two locations tells you pretty well how isolated they were or weren't. In what was once Gaul, for example, there's no way to identify genetic groups descending from the Vandals, Ostragoths, Aedui, or Helvetii, or even to separate Celts from Germanics, and we still can't tell which of those two groups, if either, the original Belgae might have been a part of. In the Middle East, the descendants of the people of Ur and Akkad and Lachish are completely melted into the general Middle Eastern pot. THAT is what happens when there really is no isolation and no genetic grouping but a smooth continuum of mixing. And that's how they're claiming to think the whole world works. They're not just race deniers; they're also geography deniers, their assertions depending entirely on there simply being no such thing as geography.

You keep acting as if those are two separate things instead of the very same phenomenon at different scales. What are you claiming races are, other than rather large families? (Another odd thing about the denialist case: perpetually insisting on using their own private little made-up ad-hoc redefinition of the word "race" that nobody else uses and no dictionary contains, which must call for some additional requirement above and beyond any of the real ones, but never even getting around to specifying exactly what it is, nevermind actually giving any support for it as the definition.)

what is your definition of race?
how is it exactly defined?

 

[bpesta22]

what race would Tiger Woods be?

My cocker spaniel and shih had puppies! What breed were the puppies? Whatever the answer, does their birth mean that neither cockers nor shih's exist?

 

[Delvo]

It is my understanding that however you classify human "races" there is always greater genatic variability, (average difference) with the "racial" group than between racial groups.

OK so far, but then where do you go with that? It's true of a lot of ways that groups of things can be divided into smaller groups. There are more ways to distinguish one car from another car, or one truck from another truck, than to distinguish between cars and trucks. There are more ways to distinguish among canines and among felines than between canines and felines. There's more variation among soft maples and among hard maples than there is between hard and soft maples. There are more traits distinguishing one couch from another or distinguishing one chair from another than there are differences between a couch and a chair.

Now, picture yourself trying to convince someone that there are no such things as cars or trucks because of some long list you made of differences between some trucks and other trucks. Why in the world should they listen to that? Clearly, we all know that the amount of variation within a group has nothing to do with its distinctiveness from some other group. There's no magical threshold amount of between-group difference below which it somehow equals zero even though it's still greater than zero. The idea just doesn't make sense, and nobody really believes such a rule themselves, including those who assert it anyway for humans and conspicuously only humans. They couldn't possibly buy it. It's just too absurd and has not one single other attempted application anywhere else. (And that's why its inventor, Lewontin, is the only person I know of who has his own formal logical fallacy named after him.)

 

[DC]

My cocker spaniel and shih had puppies! What breed were the puppies? Whatever the answer, does their birth mean that neither cockers nor shih's exist?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_breed

Dog breeds are not scientifically defined biological classifications, but rather are groupings defined by clubs of hobbyists called breed clubs.

Colloquial use of the term dog breed, however, does not conform to scientific standards of taxonomic classification. Breeds do not meet the criteria for subspecies since they are all considered a subspecies of the gray wolf; an interbreeding group of individuals who pass on characteristic traits and would likely merge back into a single homogenous group if external barriers were removed. The recognition of distinct dog breeds is not maintained by a scientific organization; they are maintained by a number of independent kennel clubs that need not apply to scientific standards and are often inconsistent.