I honestly don't know what you are getting at here, athon. Are you saying that it not true that humans have developed slightly differently depending on where they were located geographically and their degree of isolation from other humans? Are you saying that these differences are not immediately obvious to any 5 year-old and that they are genetic differences in the sense that, two Aboriginies will generally get an "aboriginie" looking offspring while two Pygmies will get a "pygmie" offspring and so on? Are you saying that a Border Collie pup is not obviously a Border Collie and not a Saint Bernard? Please explain exactly what you are saying.
That there is no categorisation of humans into 'racial' groups if one looks at genetics. I'm not sure if I see that so plainly because I did molecular phylogeny...but it's why your claims of 'because it's obvious' simply aren't valid. It's obvious to me that it's an artificial classification based only on what we find visibly distinct.
Look at it another way (yeah, so I'm stubbornly trying here) - you walk into a paddock and see one hundred sheep. Fifty are black, and fifty are white. You state 'obviously there are two races'. I take blood samples from all of them and send them off to a pathologist, who identifies three HLM antigens on the blood cells. 'Obviously there are three races' he says. He sends the blood samples on to an immunologist who finds there are five types of immune responses to a disease in the sheep. 'Obviously there are five races' he says.
The results are sent back to the farmer, who simply thinks he's got a single race of sheep - the farmer next door has a paddock of sheep with big heads, so his group is a different race (especially as it is geographically isolated in the next paddock).
Blood samples from all sheep are sent to a geneticist, who simply sees a wide variation of genetic combinations. Sure, some combinations seem to correlate with some geographical regions, but that's only obvious when he knows which paddock the given sheep are from, and even then not all the sheep there share that precise combination, so it's too vague to use as a single category.
In other words, the variations of morphologies we describe as race are due to the fact we are biased to weight categorisation heavily on morphology. 'Race' as such is therefore arbitrary.
You yourself in posts later on feel it's important to distinguish 'pygmies' from other African groups. I've not known 'race' to be used in this fashion, to be honest. I do know some Indigenous people who refer to Torres Straight Islanders as being another race. Then again, I'm sure if I showed you pictures of TSIs and Australian Aborigines, you'd be hard pressed to match them in the right groups (I never used to be able to tell, until recent years).
I'm not saying variation doesn't occur. I'm saying that genetically speaking, in isolation of contributing knowledge of geography and culture, there is no category distinct as race.
Ergo, as you said it is useful. So why try to define away a reality?
Now I'm wondering if you're intentionally playing the fool, DD. I thought better of you.
I said 'it is only useful in the
context of geographical populations'. All along I've been arguing that genetically speaking, the term is baseless. If one is clear about precisely what they mean of the term 'race', as in referring to a distinct genetic population, it is only relevant if one knows that the distinction takes into account geographical separation.
You keep stubbornly holding onto the 'it's obvious' stance, even though it fell apart ages ago.
Athon
