Race is a human/social construct.

[Jono]

amazing its 2012 and some people are still trying to make the Social construct of race into a scientific concept. decades of fail in that regard should have been a clear indication that it has nothing to do with science.

Holy moly, who ordered the Lewontin special? Hold the garlic.

 

[DC]

Holy moly, who ordered the Lewontin special? Hold the garlic.

Human races are an irrational construct of society and have nothing to do with science. Racists would like it to be scientific construct but fail to realize that it isn't.

 

[ponderingturtle]

There's certainly something to be said about the colloqual usage and broadness of its historical application within different domains, as well as our own free-willed or pressured aquiring of identity. In a sense I suppose a 'hadron' can be argued being a social construct too.

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?

 

[ponderingturtle]

amazing its 2012 and some people are still trying to make the Social construct of race into a scientific concept. decades of fail in that regard should have been a clear indication that it has nothing to do with science.

Not exactly. People are trying to fit new evidence of how people are related into existing terms.

 

[DC]

Not exactly. People are trying to fit new evidence of how people are related into existing terms.

no, when debating this, you come across alot of people that claim it to be a scientific construct.

 

[ponderingturtle]

no, when debating this, you come across alot of people that claim it to be a scientific construct.

And it depends on who you are talking too and what they are saying. You can't stereotype all people making this kind of argument just because some racists make similar arguments.

 

[DC]

And it depends on who you are talking too and what they are saying. You can't stereotype all people making this kind of argument just because some racists make similar arguments.

sure there are also people that are mislead into believing that human races has anything to do with science, but are not racist or would not discriminate against others based on that race construct.

 

[Jono]

Human races are an irrational construct of society and have nothing to do with science. Racists would like it to be scientific construct but fail to realize that it isn't.

It's not irrational, at least I can't see that it would be. Neither can I agree that it has nothing to do with science, which for me is akin to claim that 'heredity' has nothing to do with science either. One might wish for anything thereof to be the figment of a racist imagination, but that would be a bit beyond reason.

 

[DC]

It's not irrational, at least I can't see that it would be. Neither can I agree that it has nothing to do with science, which for me is akin to claim that 'heredity' has nothing to do with science either. One might wish for anything thereof to be the figment of a racist imagination, but that would be a bit beyond reason.

i see nothing rational in it. When you look how other species are grouped into subspecies / races, you can see that this not apply to humans, especially not since we have global travel.

 

[Jono]

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?

The fact that we can trace with pretty darn accurate certainty, in very notable agreement with past morphological, lineages and where the genome comes out in more or less the same groupings as the older anthropologists did, is more telling for me to the validity of the biological weight of race than its social one. But as you said, "race" as people use it is often in a colloqual way, but that doesn't make the biological reality of the observed differences and groups go away. So, ultimately, like I've said repeatedly; it tends to boil down to a philosophical argument about 'what' to call it (i.e a semantical argument).

I do not agree that "jewish" is a race. I believe, while other usages exist, ashkenazi jewish chiefly and predominately denotes a specific genetic cluster of a people still very much identifiable as such through dna markers, where they have less distance inbetween each other than with other non-ashkenazi europeans/western people, in particular this is evident via their y-chromosome lineage. With regards to the Lemba people in Africa, it's because of our understanding of racial differences (or whatever term you wish to use in its stead) that we could verify some of the historical claims they themselves make about their jewish heritage. If none of the above groups had been definable, at all, by their genetic breed-group heritage (see, didn't use "race"), then it would've been impossible to verify by means of tracing markers since these would mean absolutely zilch as "jewish", according to some, has nothing to do with genetic groupings. But, as it is, they are at least to a notable degree definable as such, in a biological reality (by whatever term you fancy). Interestingly it seems it would've been mostly jewish males interbreeding with african population there, as opposed to the women, and this would explain the high frequency of the paternal CMH found while a lack of a maternal equivalent.

 

[Jono]

i see nothing rational in it. When you look how other species are grouped into subspecies / races, you can see that this not apply to humans, especially not since we have global travel.

Nothing rational in it? And then you add that bit of chestnut? Global travel? There are plenty of mammalian subspecies/races who are not as genetically diverse as humans, this goes for protein diversity as well (see Sarich's formentioned book on Race... or is he and Miele too racist for you?).

 

[bpesta22]

Yeah, a person can develop 6 toes or 6 fingers. An albino can evolve. None of that changes the fact there are not distinct human sub-species.

Answer my question. Why skin color, why not blood type?

I don't know enough about blood types to answer. I imagine some type of factor or cluster analysis on traits and genetic markers could offer evidence for or including it as a defining characteristic.

We can identify both fuzzy and distinct characteristics of cocker spaniels that makes the label, cocker spaniel, useful. We can do the same for Shih Tzus.

Is your argument: If these dogs bred, we wouldn't be able to label the pups as cockers or as shih's. Therefore cockers and shihs can't exist?

 

[DC]

Nothing rational in it? And then you add that bit of chestnut? Global travel? There are plenty of mammalian subspecies/races who are not as genetically diverse as humans, this goes for protein diversity as well (see Sarich's formentioned book on Race... or is he and Miele too racist for you?).

geographical separation would be one of the requirements for a human race.
in taxonomy, i have never seen humans being split up into races. we, homo sapiens sapiens, are a subspecies of the species Homo sapiens, the only alive known subspecies of that species.

are black poodles also a different race from white poodles? or brwon poodles?

 

[bpesta22]

The thing is race is a social construct, there was a report on the genetic underpinnings of race where the authors mother was surprised to learn that genetically she was not black, despite growing up thinking she was and everyone around her thinking she was.

So by social race she was black but not genetically.

See, identifying people like her would offer a litmus test, experimentally. Find people who are socially black (white) but genetically white (black). Test them on any variables that currently co-vary with race. Seems almost like the identical twins raised apart studies in terms of potential to inform.

 

[bpesta22]

Human races are an irrational construct of society and have nothing to do with science.

Agreed, except for the scientists publishing peer-reviewed articles on the topic by following the rules of the scientific method (independent of whether that method eventually shows they are wrong).

What makes something a scientific topic in your world view?

 

[DC]

Agreed, except for the scientists publishing peer-reviewed articles on the topic by following the rules of the scientific method (independent of whether that method eventually shows they are wrong).

What makes something a scientific topic in your world view?

ihave no problem when science is dealing with the topic, but that does not make the construct a scientific one.

 

[lomiller]

When you have children from very divergent family lineages the odds of a match go down. Races (social construct) can result in family lineages remaining far apart genetically. Then when that family lineages are mixed there will be rarer combinations in the offspring. But that doesn't go to supporting race or sub-species genetically unless the isolation of the two groups goes on for hundreds of thousands of years, not tens of thousands when the population is a large as the human population is.

I completely agree with the point you are making but I think it’s worth pointing out that there is one and only one sub-species of human. Every person alive in the world today is a member of the homo sapiens sapiens sub-species.

Were race to exist and a meaningful biological categorization would need fall below sub-species. There are, however, no formalized categories below sub-species. There can be ad-hoc groups defined below this level, but these are generally used for a specific purpose or specific research and are not generalized.

 

[Pup]

People aren't isolated. They have not been isolated long enough to divide into subspecies.

Note that I specifically omitted subspecies from my definition. I'm defining race as the same as breed or variety in animals or plants. I don't believe that Angus cattle and Jersey cattle are considered subspecies either. However, I do think that human populations have been isolated at various times, long enough to produce distinct homogenous populations, similar to the difference between Angus and Jersey cattle, thoroughbreds and quarter horses, etc.

What else can account for the visible differences between American Indians and Europeans when the latter first arrived in the Americas, for example?

The fact that the two groups were originally not separate, and are no longer separated, doesn't change the fact that they were for a while, and therefore developed characteristics identifiable to the two populations.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

You say that like there are clear non subjective definitions of species and subspecies.

There are, with some gray area divisions in some species where there is more continuum and less sharp divide. That doesn't mean there isn't some degree of scientific controversy. However, just like in the future no one is going to doubt that Pluto is a Kuiper Belt Object and not a planet, during the scientific paradigm shift you still find a lot of scientists arguing over the change.

Again, the problem is people can't let go of old beliefs in light of new evidence.

link

Dog breeds are classified as in the same subspecies. Domestic dogs are sort of like humans in a sense. Like humans, dogs can have very different appearances however also like humans each different breed (also called race) has no genetic difference, meaning each breed of dog or race or human are not subspecies as many thought before.

It all comes down to genetics when it comes to species and subspecies. "Race" or "Breed" are more or less term used further on classification beyond subpecies, but usally these are based only on superficial classification.

So I guess I was wrong about the dog subspecies. I stand corrected.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I have encountered you before, but for reasons I'll leave unsaid, you don't count.

Good, then I don't have to read your tl,dr posts.