Race is a human/social construct.

[Wuglife]

Then why did the majority of evolutionary biologists stop using the word in the 1940s? What is Ernst Mayr arguing against in his insistence that there are races? One (credible) scientist arguing against the majority position on an issue is not evidence that wins the agument. It simply shows that, as with most scientific issues, there is debate and minority opinion. Mayr was wrong about the gene not being a significant factor in evolution, so he is not infalible.

Whether the idea is proposed by Mayr or you, I still don't see the point of using "race". What value is it? What do you think we gain by saying that there are races? Especially if you want to ditch the association with skin colour that has been central to all previous race claims.

This, again, becomes a linguistic rather than biological matter. If my new term is preferable, that is alright with me.

There are biologically objective differences between human schmagoogies.

 

[DC]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this.

Two great danes will never give birth to a litter of shar peis.

There are pronounced differences between great danes and shar peis.

my point is that the concept is not defined by any science, but simply by physical appearance. Taxonomy lists them as one subspecies of wolves. and dogs have been subject to decades of selective breeding which made the differences of physical appearances much bigger than the differences between humans are. and yet not enough to split them further into more subspecies.

surely here the concept of races / breed is very useful to know of what kind of dog we are talking about, because the differences are pretty big.

and also for humans, the concept of race tells me roughly how someone looks. when we talk about an African or Asian person, i roughly know some of his physical appearance. but it laks details and accuracy. and the differences are pretty small.
But it doesn't tell me much about genetic make up of a person. someone with only a few ancestors from Africa the rest from Europe can look very African while he actually still is more European than African based on genetics.

 

[lomiller]

I am not trying to create a new meaning of race. I subscribe to the definition of the word as used by the biologist Ernst Mayr and other evolutionary biologists. To associate the use of the word "race" with Nazis or other racist people is merely an example of the guilt by association fallacy. I suppose the Nazis rarely actually used the word "race", in fact, because they spoke German for the most part.

Again, there is no taxonomic ranking called race, nor is there a need for one. What you seem to be doing is trying to map older definitions and classifications onto current understanding but this is silly at best.

The concept exists as a biological reality. Whether you call it "race" or whether you call it "schmagoogie" is immaterial.

Where is your evidence supporting this claim? Certainly there is no support for your position if the formal taxonomic rankings, where race does not exist.

 

[Wuglife]

my point is that the concept is not defined by any science, but simply by physical appearance.

Their differences in physical appearance are caused by objective differences in genetics.

and also for humans, the concept of race tells me roughly how someone looks. when we talk about an African or Asian person, i roughly know some of his physical appearance. but it laks details and accuracy. and the differences are pretty small.
But it doesn't tell me much about genetic make up of a person. someone with only a few ancestors from Africa the rest from Europe can look very African while he actually still is more European than African based on genetics

A tiger that looks like a Bengal tiger could be more than half Siberian tiger, but that doesn't mean there is no objective biological difference between the types of tigers.

 

[Wuglife]

Again, there is no taxonomic ranking called race, nor is there a need for one. What you seem to be doing is trying to map older definitions and classifications onto current understanding but this is silly at best.

I think you should re-read the Mayr link to come to an understanding of what my position is.

Where is your evidence supporting this claim? Certainly there is no support for your position if the formal taxonomic rankings, where race does not exist.

Formal taxonomic rankings are not an objective standard of biological differences.

The crocodile is a closer relative to the eagle than it is to the turtle, yet contemporary Linnaean taxonomic rankings put the crocodile and turtle in the same class and exclude the eagle.

Furthermore, the fact that there are objective biological differences in the human species that are adaptations to varying climates is obvious.

The average Inuit is ~shaped~ differently than the average Kenyan. Two ethnic Kenyan parents will not give birth to an Inuit baby. It has never happened.

Two Australian aborigine parents cannot produce an ethnic Swede for their child. This is a biological reality. I am not attempting to argue a strawman, because I realise no one has directly claimed these instances. I am showing them as an example.

These varying groups of people have until recent times been out of contact, for thousands and thousands of years, and have all adapted different biological phenotypes (caused by different genotypes) to suit their regions. This is objectively true, and I do not see why this is qualitatively different in concept from the differences between a Bengal tiger and a Siberian tiger.

 

[DC]

Their differences in physical appearance are caused by objective differences in genetics.




A tiger that looks like a Bengal tiger could be more than half Siberian tiger, but that doesn't mean there is no objective biological difference between the types of tigers.

there are always genetic differences, but are they enough to put them into groups in a meaningful way? for many animal species it is. because of a very long time of geographical separation. but this is not really the case for humans. we always have traveled a lot and spread our genes all over the globe, we have been mixing too much. Would the tiger have traveled so much and mixed his genes as much as we did, we would not separate them into different subspecies.

 

[DC]

The crocodile is a closer relative to the eagle than it is to the turtle, yet contemporary Linnaean taxonomic rankings put the crocodile and turtle in the same class and exclude the eagle.

really? never heard of that. Got evidence for that claim? sounds interesting.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

http://www.goodrumj.com/Mayr.html
[snip]

Wug, YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO USE THE QUOTE CODE!!! STOP or the Mods will delete much of your posts.

Mayr

AFTER a flurry of publishing in the past few years (MAYR 1997, 2001; MAYR and DIAMOND 2001), Ernst Mayr turned 100 on July 5, 2004. His deep influence in systematics, systematic nomenclature, evolutionary biology, history of biology, and philosophy of biology over the past 7 decades is unmatched by anyone in his generation, or probably after.

Clearly a expert in his day. But you have to recognize how fast the research in genetic science is moving.

 

[Wuglife]

really? never heard of that. Got evidence for that claim? sounds interesting.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14772010903537732#tabModule

The archosaurs (“ruling reptiles”, Cope 1869) are a speciose and diverse group that includes birds, dinosaurs, and crocodylomorphs, as well as a range of extinct taxa restricted to the Mesozoic (Fig. 1). The clade Archosauria represents one of the fundamental divisions of vertebrate phylogeny, and has been a successful and at times dominant group ever since its origination in the Late Permian or Early Triassic. Palaeontologists have long recognized numerous archosaur subgroups, including the flying pterosaurs, the long-snouted phytosaurs, and the armoured aetosaurs, as well as the extant crocodilians and birds (and their dinosaur precursors).

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

...

The crocodile is a closer relative to the eagle than it is to the turtle, yet contemporary Linnaean taxonomic rankings put the crocodile and turtle in the same class and exclude the eagle....

For the record, the current classification puts Crocs in the Romeriida branch of Amniota and turtles in the Anapsida. That is where turtles and crocs, both branches of Reptilia, diverge. Accordingly birds didn't diverge from crocs until Archosauromorpha group further down the tree. Think dinosaur ancestors of birds.

Tree of Life Web Project - Amniota

Tree of Life Web Project - Archosauria

You can click back and forth through the tree. It's a tad easier than Wug's link.


But I'm wondering here, if something is closer up the tree and another thing further away genetically down the tree, I'm not sure "closer relative" automatically favors down the tree. The problem is compounded by the time various species remain on the planet before going extinct. Sharks and crocs are two species that have existed an exceptionally long time relative to many other species.

Eagles are 9 rungs down the tree from crocs:

Tree of Life Web Project - Accipitridae

Turtles are 5 rungs down from the Reptilia common ancestor of crocs but if you go up and back down to get to crocs I think I counted 11 rungs. Perhaps the tree branch divisions is not as efficient as looking at percentage of DNA overlap.

The genomes of some individuals in all three species have been determined. Reassessment of genome size in turtle and crocodile based on chromosome measurement by flow karyotyping: close similarity to chicken

American Bald Eagle Sequenced

Croc Genome Sequenced.

That's as far as I got.

 

[Wuglife]

Wug, YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO USE THE QUOTE CODE!!! STOP or the Mods will delete much of your posts.

I used quotation marks. Next time, I will use the quote tags. I think you are overreacting a bit--if my posts get deleted, I will deal with it and repost with quote tags.

Clearly a expert in his day. But you have to recognize how fast the research in genetic science is moving.

Mayr wrote that paper in 2002 and was an active scientist until his death.

 

[Wuglife]

For the record, the current classification puts Crocs in the Romeriida branch of Amniota and turtles in the Anapsida but both those branches are Reptilia. Eagles are not in the Reptilia branch.

Tree of Life Web Project

And that does a great job of showing my point.

Eagles and crocodiles are both archosaurs, and are descended from a more recent common ancestor than the crocodile and turtle. Eagles and crocodiles are part of a clade that excludes the turtle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archosaur

 

[lomiller]

There are biologically objective differences between human schmagoogies.

You keep saying that but have not shown any evidence for it. To start why don’t you tell us what meaningful biological differences you think exist between “races”?

 

[Wuglife]

we always have traveled a lot and spread our genes all over the globe, we have been mixing too much. Would the tiger have traveled so much and mixed his genes as much as we did, we would not separate them into different subspecies.

Australian aborigines were isolated from all other human populations for thousands and thousands of years. This is only one example.

Most people never travelled great distances until recently. There was no permanent European settlement in the Americas until a few centuries ago.

 

[Wuglife]

You keep saying that but have not shown any evidence for it. To start why don’t you tell us what meaningful biological differences you think exist between “races”?

First, let me ask you something here so I understand where you're coming from.

Do you accept that there are meaningful biological differences between the Siberian tiger and the Bengal tiger?

 

[lomiller]

First, let me ask you something here so I understand where you're coming from.

Do you accept that there are meaningful biological differences between the Siberian tiger and the Bengal tiger?

Irrelevant. These are different sub-species, something that doesn’t exist in humans.

Again you seem to biasing your arguments on the notion that all the geneticists and biologists have it wrong and there really are different sub-species of humans but we need a lot more than your say so to accept something like this.

 

[Wuglife]

Irrelevant. These are different sub-species, something that doesn’t exist in humans.

It is not irrelevant.

"Sub-species" is a label given to organisms by humans, just like "species" and "genus". It is humans who decided to consider the Bengal tiger and Siberian tiger different subspecies, because they have differences--they do not have differences BECAUSE THEY ARE CONSIDERED SUBSPECIES. You are reversing the cause and effect.

If humans had not given them their labels, the tigers, with their differences, would still exist in objective reality.

I ask again. Do you agree that there are meaningful biological differences between the Siberian tiger and the Bengal tiger? The fact that they are considered separate sub-species is an example of the human species's attempt at classification, but whether they are or are not considered separate sub-species does not affect the morphological differences.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Sorry guys, I didn't realize posts were flying as I edited. I tend to edit that a lot when I first post. I'm done with post #330 now.

Wug, I'm not overreacting, I'm trying to tell you about the forum rules before you get one of those ugly new oversized font mod boxes replacing your posts.

 

[Wuglife]

Sorry guys, I didn't realize posts were flying as I edited. I tend to edit that a lot when I first post. I'm done with post #330 now.

Wug, I'm not overreacting, I'm trying to tell you about the forum rules before you get one of those ugly new oversized font mod boxes replacing your posts.

I appreciate it, and will use the quote tags now.

 

[DC]

Australian aborigines were isolated from all other human populations for thousands and thousands of years. This is only one example.

Most people never travelled great distances until recently. There was no permanent European settlement in the Americas until a few centuries ago.

while it is true that Australian Aborigines have had longtime isolation, there still was gene flow.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8726.full.pdf+html