The Race Paradigm

[Delvo]

Look at the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. You can distinguish between high numbers and low numbers.
But that does not mean that there are two mathematical groups of numbers. Wherever you draw the line is an arbitrary choice.

Once you draw the line, you can distinguish mathematically between high and low numbers but they are still arbitrary groups.

With human races it is the same.

Not yet, but we can bring it closer by adding one more aspect to it: different rates of occurrence for different numbers. Suppose there's some set of things, like a pile of pebbles, for which there's some trait that can be represented by a number, like an individual pebble's mass or roundness or blueness or magnesium content or even just a number somebody painted on each one. Then you count up how many pebbles have each number.

Your description of the pebble population would need to depend on how many of each digit were actually there. If it's the same amount of pebbles for every digit, then it's a homogenous population with even distribution. If there's a smooth transition with the fewest pebbles having a 1 or a 9 and the most having a 5, then it's a homogenous population with some kind of centered distribution such as a "normal" or "bell curve" distribution, with something making individual pebbles more likely to be average than much above or below it. If there's a smooth transition with the fewest pebbles having a 9, the most having a 2, and the second-most having a 1 or 3, then it's a homogenous population with a skewed distribution, where something is making individual pebbles more likely to be below average than above it.

So far, we're not dividing anything by drawing any lines. But what if the distribution had two peaks with a dip between them? For example, let's say you counted the pebbles and found that the most common results by far were 3 and 8, the least common were 1 and 9, and the second least common was 6. That population of pebbles is inherently not homogenous but two-grouped, and the "line" between them at 6 is not an arbitrary creation but a part of their reality. It already was this way before you ever saw the pebbles; all you did was find out. It would be nothing but dishonest to refuse to acknowledge this fact (and in real life nobody ever does on subjects that don't have politics or religion involved). Also note that the fact that both groups meet at 6 and an individual pebble whose digit is 6 can't be exclusively placed in one group and not the other changes nothing.

You can distinguish between light and dark colored individuals but wherever you draw the line is an arbitrary choice. Go from north to south and you will find that the local people get gradually darker until you reach the equator.

Not really. The distribution of skin colors as actually measured is more complex than that, not only because of racial separation but also because of migration and the delay before natural selection has had time to adjust things upon arrival in a new land, plus the fact that radiation exposure is not strictly latitude-based either. The result is sometimes relatively abrupt breaks (typically at a boundary between two races' regions) and sometimes smooth gradients (typically within a race's geographic region), often not oriented in simple north-south or east-west lines. For example, black people only fairly recently started expanding away from a little area pretty close to or right on the equator, thus spreading very dark skin out into areas that might have been lighter-skinned otherwise and smashing the "gradient" pretty flat in those areas. (It's never been in the nature of widespread species to maintain smooth gradients for long; what happens instead is that a few bubbles somewhere along the spectrum start becoming especially successful and blow up and crowd out the space between them. It's why, for example, any former intermediates between grizzly bears and polar bears are gone even though reproduction is still possible and their ranges still overlap.)

The general issue with both skin color and your number line analogy, as well as any other trait we could come up with, is that the fact that there's a range of possibilities (such as different skin colors or different pebble digits) that could exist, instead of some kind of simple dichotomy, doesn't mean anything by itself. Gradients instead of strict absolute dichotomies are to be expected in all kinds of traits throughout the animal and plant kingdoms. They're how evolution works. If they meant anything at all about about different groups not really being different from each other, then there would only be one species in the world, no taxonomy at all, because even cases that look like sharp dichotomies are just different positions along gradients where some of the intermediates are missing now. There's nobody anywhere claiming smooth gradients don't exist or making any other case that indirectly depends on such an idea. So when you bring them up, you're not countering any part of anybody else's case. You're just mounting a strawman by acting as if somebody else's case depended on some absurd alternative that nobody believes.

At best, the gradient argument only brings up a question that would need to be answered separately in separate cases: how the real-world population(s) is/are distributed along the given gradient. If it's like the first pile of pebbles I described above with the even counts, then that's what it is. If it has a two-peaked distribution like the last pebble pile I described above, then that's what it is. But you have to actually measure things in order to know which; what you can't honestly do is just say "Well, there's a gradient, so the distribution must be perfectly smooth (like the former, not the latter)". Reality actually yields a variety of answers in different cases. And the answer in human populations has been found, and it isn't what the people who keep dredging up this gradient stuff say it must be.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

So far, we're not dividing anything by drawing any lines. But what if the distribution had two peaks with a dip between them? For example, let's say you counted the pebbles and found that the most common results by far were 3 and 8, the least common were 1 and 9, and the second least common was 6. That population of pebbles is inherently not homogenous but two-grouped, and the "line" between them at 6 is not an arbitrary creation but a part of their reality. It already was this way before you ever saw the pebbles; all you did was find out. It would be nothing but dishonest to refuse to acknowledge this fact (and in real life nobody ever does on subjects that don't have politics or religion involved). Also note that the fact that both groups meet at 6 and an individual pebble whose digit is 6 can't be exclusively placed in one group and not the other changes nothing.

I'm not sure that's entirely analogous to this planet, though. There are geographic issues which mean that there are often groups of people, but smooth transitions are also possible. If you start in Western Europe, you have people who are Caucasian-looking. As you head East from country to country you will, at no point, notice a sudden change in people, but their complexions will, on average, become darker. And the people will gradually change and gradually change until suddenly you find yourself in Korea where the people don't look very much like the people of Western Europe at all.

In that example, you do have a continuous distribution of ethnicities, despite the fact that someone from Korea and someone from Norway or Portugal would be considered of different races.

 

[A'isha]

I'm not sure that's entirely analogous to this planet, though. There are geographic issues which mean that there are often groups of people, but smooth transitions are also possible. If you start in Western Europe, you have people who are Caucasian-looking. As you head East from country to country you will, at no point, notice a sudden change in people, but their complexions will, on average, become darker. And the people will gradually change and gradually change until suddenly you find yourself in Korea where the people don't look very much like the people of Western Europe at all.

In that example, you do have a continuous distribution of ethnicities, despite the fact that someone from Korea and someone from Norway or Portugal would be considered of different races.

That's why race is a purely social construct. The circles you draw around those people of various ethnicities to say "these people belong to Race X, while these other people belong to a different race entirely, Race Y" are entirely arbitrary.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

I'd put race closer to the equivalent of breed rather than subspecies, like Holstein cattle vs. Hereford cattle.

As I said, neither race nor breed are taxonomically recognized.

That's true, but one has to be careful using the Sorites paradox as a way to "prove" a classification such as race doesn't exist at all. One can at most prove that race is not rigidly definable, or at least that classification will be arbitrary in many cases.

I don't see the relevance of the paradox.

 

[truethat]

I actually don't think of this as much of a problem to solve. The big problem facing black Americans is a lack of wealth. Education, Crime, etc. are somewhat offshoots of this. But there's a very easy-to-spot group that has been aided massively by government help at federal, state, and local levels - white Americans!

For example, black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be unemployed and looking for work, even adjusting for education, region, and so forth. And when we study employers, we find that yes, they collectively discriminate against black people. Simple solution, hire a bunch of black Americans, train them, and let them work on, say, our infrastructure, the way we did with white people It's one of the simple ways we helped drive down unemployment among white people in the past, it should work again. The college tuition thing is a good one as well, although there's naturally more than that, with the elimination of the "war" on "drugs" being a major component.

And of course this isn't a claim that no white people are poor - just that poverty among white Americans is rare, precisely because of the government assistance they've received. And yes, many white Americans would shriek their heads off at the idea of any sort of benefit for black people - that's an issue regardless.

(ETA: This is a general remark, not a specific reply to what you've said, truethat.)

Poverty among white Americans is NOT rare at all, what in the hell are you talking about???

It's that kind of thinking that pisses white people off in this country. Like I had an easy life? Pahleeze. We had six kids in our family. We had to take cold showers in the morning because we couldn't afford heat and I used to wear socks wrapped around my hands for gloves and eat Mayo Sandwiches for lunch, mostly because it was considered shameful by white Americans to go on welfare. My mother would have rathered us eat nothing than accept food stamps and most white people I know feel the same way. It was considered shameful to accept any form of public assistance. So you ate a lot of soup etc. And this mindset is still ingrained in many parts of the white community which is why they get pissed off when they are in line behind a family in Walmart that is using an EBT card to buy things and then walking out the door in designer sneakers and getting into a new car.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Not yet, but we can bring it closer by adding one more aspect to it: different rates of occurrence for different numbers.

I didn't want to make it needlessly complicated. My analogy should make understandable why the paper presented can't be used as evidence for races. It's a very wide-spread mistake.

So far, we're not dividing anything by drawing any lines. But what if the distribution had two peaks with a dip between them? For example, let's say you counted the pebbles and found that the most common results by far were 3 and 8, the least common were 1 and 9, and the second least common was 6. That population of pebbles is inherently not homogenous but two-grouped, and the "line" between them at 6 is not an arbitrary creation but a part of their reality. It already was this way before you ever saw the pebbles; all you did was find out. It would be nothing but dishonest to refuse to acknowledge this fact (and in real life nobody ever does on subjects that don't have politics or religion involved). Also note that the fact that both groups meet at 6 and an individual pebble whose digit is 6 can't be exclusively placed in one group and not the other changes nothing.

You need to be a bit careful there.
Land mass is not equally distributed, nor does every region yield an equivalent amount of food.
That means that you can have different numbers of people with certain shades of skin color even if the shade depends only on latitude.
Then also there's polymorphisms.

But basically you are going in the right direction here. But before we go on you should define what you think of as race. Perhaps I will even agree that race in that sense exists. I only say that race as commonly understood (EG as analogous to breeds of cattle, as said by Pup) does not exist.

And the answer in human populations has been found, and it isn't what the people who keep dredging up this gradient stuff say it must be.

What should I take away from the attachment?

 

[Pup]

I don't see the relevance of the paradox.

In reference to this (bold added):

Look at the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. You can distinguish between high numbers and low numbers.
But that does not mean that there are two mathematical groups of numbers. Wherever you draw the line is an arbitrary choice.

An example of Sorites paradox from Wikipedia: "A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? (Or are even no grains at all a heap?) If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?"

The same thing is sometimes stated as evidence that race does not exist, by pointing out people with varying ancestry and showing that there is no sharp demarcation between negroid and caucasian, or whatever labels one wants to use, similar to showing that there is no sharp demarcation between low numbers and high numbers.

Yet the lesson of Sorites paradox is not that one can prove heaps are imaginary. They exist, even though the definition is fuzzy or arbitrary, just as Herefords and Holsteins exist, although their definition may be arbitrary (a herd registry) or fuzzy.

 

[Pup]

My mother would have rathered us eat nothing than accept food stamps and most white people I know feel the same way. It was considered shameful to accept any form of public assistance. So you ate a lot of soup etc. And this mindset is still ingrained in many parts of the white community which is why they get pissed off when they are in line behind a family in Walmart that is using an EBT card to buy things and then walking out the door in designer sneakers and getting into a new car.

Is there evidence that a higher percentage of white people eligible for public assistance refuse to accept it, compared to black people? Anecdotally, I hadn't noticed that, but I'd be curious to see actual statistics.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

The same thing is sometimes stated as evidence that race does not exist, by pointing out people with varying ancestry and showing that there is no sharp demarcation between negroid and caucasian, or whatever labels one wants to use, similar to showing that there is no sharp demarcation between low numbers and high numbers.

Yet the lesson of Sorites paradox is not that one can prove heaps are imaginary. They exist, even though the definition is fuzzy or arbitrary, just as Herefords and Holsteins exist, although their definition may be arbitrary (a herd registry) or fuzzy.

All Herefords are similar to each other. All Holsteins are similar to each other. But Holsteins and Herefords are quite different in some characteristics.

There is no gradual blending from Herefords to Holsteins as you move from one ranch to the next. Therefore Sorites paradox is not relevant.

 

[truethat]

Is there evidence that a higher percentage of white people eligible for public assistance refuse to accept it, compared to black people? Anecdotally, I hadn't noticed that, but I'd be curious to see actual statistics.

try looking up enrollment versus economic status, go back about 15 years as well

 

[blutoski]

In reference to this (bold added):



An example of Sorites paradox from Wikipedia: "A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? (Or are even no grains at all a heap?) If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?"

The same thing is sometimes stated as evidence that race does not exist, by pointing out people with varying ancestry and showing that there is no sharp demarcation between negroid and caucasian, or whatever labels one wants to use, similar to showing that there is no sharp demarcation between low numbers and high numbers.

Yet the lesson of Sorites paradox is not that one can prove heaps are imaginary. They exist, even though the definition is fuzzy or arbitrary, just as Herefords and Holsteins exist, although their definition may be arbitrary (a herd registry) or fuzzy.

In any case, the Sorites paradox is only an 'example' of a fallacy (We're supposed to be doing critical thinking here, right?) called either the [Sorties Fallacy] or [Fallacy of the Continuum]. Other examples aside from piles of sand include: age of consent, safe driving speed, healthy body weight... ethnoclines (on topic), pet breeds, personal space, a living wage, oh! this just in! [High Blood Pressure is an arbitrary social construct, therefore unscientific and we can say it doesn't exist either!]

One of the reasons I have less and less interest in skeptical community discussions practically every day is that skeptics cherry-pick when they want to do critical thinking. Race is one of a few topics where so many skeptics throw critical thinking under the bus if it doesn't give the result they want.

 

[Pup]

All Herefords are similar to each other. All Holsteins are similar to each other. But Holsteins and Herefords are quite different in some characteristics.

There is no gradual blending from Herefords to Holsteins as you move from one ranch to the next. Therefore Sorites paradox is not relevant.

Not familiar with cattle breeding, I see.

http://www.backyardherds.com/threads/hereford-holstein-x.21288/

One can run across the same lack of blending by going to a remote village in Siberia and a remote village in central Africa. It would be easy to categorize an unknown villager with his correct village.

But other places, the population is full of the equivalent of "Hereford-Holstein crosses," which either need to be given one or more new names or to be classified inaccurately by one of their ancestral names. And yet, they're not evidence that Herefords and Holsteins are nonexistent categories.

 

[blutoski]

Not familiar with cattle breeding, I see.

http://www.backyardherds.com/threads/hereford-holstein-x.21288/

One can run across the same lack of blending by going to a remote village in Siberia and a remote village in central Africa. It would be easy to categorize an unknown villager with his correct village.

But other places, the population is full of the equivalent of "Hereford-Holstein crosses," which either need to be given one or more new names or to be classified inaccurately by one of their ancestral names.

Yep. The word is 'ethnocline'.

And yet, they're not evidence that Herefords and Holsteins are nonexistent categories.

At least no more than 'middle age' proves there are no children or seniors.
The argument has been recognized as a fallacy for at least 2600 years. That has never stopped a skeptic from using it.

 

[Delvo]

The study found that self-identified race contains information about ancestry. However, that does not mean that the division between races falls out of biology.
You could also predict someone's religion, language or nationality with the same method. That does not mean that those are biological categories.

They are, however, real things that actually exist, and which people identify themselves as because it's what those people really are. So the equivalent here to a biological category such as race would be if there were someone claiming that religions, languages, and nationalities aren't real... and/or responding to the fact that some independent method of verifying what religion/language/nationality somebody really is matches up with what religion, language, or nationality they claim, without actually coming from people's real religions/languages/nationalities.

Yes, nationality and religion are real social constructs, just like race. I am not sure if language falls into that category but doesn't matter.
Since you apparently know what a social construct is, I do not know what you are up to here.

People say they have a particular religion because that's the one they really have, which requires that religions are real.

People say they speak a particular language because that's the one they really speak, which requires that languages are real.

People say they have a particular nationality because that's the one they really have, which requires that nationalities are real.

People identify themselves as descendants of a particular ancestral population because that's the one they're actually descended from, which requires that biological descent from identifiable ancestral populations is real.

Even the existence of a genetic test to identify them and compare with people's answers requires that the thing the tests test is real.

What is your evidence for "groups of biological traits"?

The fact that the races are distinct from each other in more than one biological trait: not just skin color but that and hair texture and cranial structure and facial bone structure and facial soft tissue structure and hormone levels and a few immune factors and some digestive enzymes and timing of the growth & maturation process... even without touching genetics, the total of observed phenotypic differences is a few dozen, including some that are more obscure and less famous & obvious but still measurable. (I've never seen the complete list myself, but Stephen Jay Gould used navel height as an example.) If it were just any single trait, it would be no different from any other single trait that isn't necessarily associated with race, like type B blood antigens. But the fact that these hang together in certain combinations is called "correlation", and it indicates relatedness, as in "family resemblance".

Including genetics gives us similar clustering of observed correlated traits in just a few large clusters worldwide (each one found in a certain region of the world), just multiple times as many traits .

But basically you are going in the right direction here. But before we go on you should define what you think of as race. Perhaps I will even agree that race in that sense exists. I only say that race as commonly understood (EG as analogous to breeds of cattle, as said by Pup) does not exist.

Breed, subspecies, variety, strain, megafamily/superfamily... whatever... they're all the same basic idea: biologically distinct, separate populations or types within the same species, another level of division below species level. Why act as if this were at all mysterious?

What should I take away from the attachment?

The actual distribution of the few basic allele clusters in worldwide human populations, including sites where the local gene pool is an x% match for one and a y% match for another... in other words, the actual extent to which reality matches the "all just gradual gradients, no identifiable boundaries between uniform regions" claim... which, of course, is practically not at all.

 

[Mumbles]

Poverty among white Americans is NOT rare at all, what in the hell are you talking about???

It's that kind of thinking that pisses white people off in this country. Like I had an easy life? Pahleeze. We had six kids in our family. We had to take cold showers in the morning because we couldn't afford heat and I used to wear socks wrapped around my hands for gloves and eat Mayo Sandwiches for lunch, mostly because it was considered shameful by white Americans to go on welfare. My mother would have rathered us eat nothing than accept food stamps and most white people I know feel the same way. It was considered shameful to accept any form of public assistance. So you ate a lot of soup etc. And this mindset is still ingrained in many parts of the white community which is why they get pissed off when they are in line behind a family in Walmart that is using an EBT card to buy things and then walking out the door in designer sneakers and getting into a new car.

Now, imagine an entire neighborhood in a city where everyone has that same problem...and which is surrounded by wealth, but where your skin color means you can beaten up on the spot by the police if you walk into those wealthy areas.

Again, I specifically stated that none of that was aimed at you, and yes, I've met truly poor white people before. That's upsetting, but not really my point. The average (they never say mean or median, which does irritate me) household wealth for white families, last I saw, was over $100,000 in the US, while the average black household wealth is around $5-6,000. That's not a matter of how you personally grew up, but how America's wealth is distributed as of today. And that means that when black people go to college, they take on crushing debt. If they try to open a business, it's move likely to be off the books, because they can't afford tax consultants or taxes. If someone loses a job, it's an immediate emergency, which is why older black people begin screaming "get a job!"

Again, I won't say that no white person has been in true poverty. But I will say that it's far more common in " the black community".

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Not familiar with cattle breeding, I see.

http://www.backyardherds.com/threads/hereford-holstein-x.21288/

One can run across the same lack of blending by going to a remote village in Siberia and a remote village in central Africa. It would be easy to categorize an unknown villager with his correct village.

But other places, the population is full of the equivalent of "Hereford-Holstein crosses," which either need to be given one or more new names or to be classified inaccurately by one of their ancestral names. And yet, they're not evidence that Herefords and Holsteins are nonexistent categories.

No, I'm not familiar with cattle breeding. What exactly are you trying to say here?

I'll take a cue from Delvo here and explain it like he did but with a real world example.
Look at height. You can't draw a line between small men and tall men. You can set an artificial line for some purposes, like a theme park ride. But that won't be a biological category.
If you say that race is arbitrary just like that, then I have no problem. I just don't think that's how people understand it.

But now look at the height difference between men and women. There is a lot of overlap. If you were to chart the heights of a single sex on a histogram, then you would find that both follow a bell curve distribution. But you would find that each sex has its own distribution with peaks at separate locations.
IOW, you find a clear discontinuity. That is why the fallacy of the continuum is not relevant with regards to the height difference between sexes: It's not a continuum.

Delvo understands race as being likewise. And I think that's how it's generally understood.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Yep. The word is 'ethnocline'.

Have you ever tried googling that word?

 

[GnaGnaMan]

People say they have a particular religion because that's the one they really have, which requires that religions are real.

People say they speak a particular language because that's the one they really speak, which requires that languages are real.

People say they have a particular nationality because that's the one they really have, which requires that nationalities are real.

Yes, of course. They are all real social constructs. I don't know how much more violently I can agree.

People identify themselves as descendants of a particular ancestral population because that's the one they're actually descended from, which requires that biological descent from identifiable ancestral populations is real.

Even the existence of a genetic test to identify them and compare with people's answers requires that the thing the tests test is real.

Absolutely. Yes. Ancestry is real.

Breed, subspecies, variety, strain, megafamily/superfamily... whatever... they're all the same basic idea: biologically distinct, separate populations or types within the same species, another level of division below species level. Why act as if this were at all mysterious?

I'm just trying to make sure that I understand you correctly. BTW Superfamily is an actual taxonomic rank way above species.

In modern taxonomy, you want your groups to be monophyletic. That is you want a group to have the same common ancestor population. In order for a population to qualify as a species it must be reproductively isolated. There should not be gene flow between the populations.
I'm actually mixing separate species definitions there but I think the concepts are close enough. If there is gene flow, you'll have a hard time getting a monophyletic group.

(Order of quotes changed from Delvo's post)

Including genetics gives us similar clustering of observed correlated traits in just a few large clusters worldwide (each one found in a certain region of the world), just multiple times as many traits .

The reproductive isolation gets us to the clustering.

Individuals that are geographically distant are also less closely related. You have to go back further in time to get to the last common ancestor. But if that were all one could not distinguish races. I think we're agreed on that.
What we want is a dividing line. Such a dividing line can only come about when there is some barrier to gene flow.

I do agree that we find such lines among human populations. For example Ireland is surrounded by water. At least in pre-modern times this will have inhibited gene flow to an extent. That means that the genetic distance across the irish sea to britain should be expected to be greater than the physical distance.

I'm sure that many people would argue that the difference the irish and the british is so small as to not warrant separate designations. Indeed, I can't imagine anyone would argue for different subspecies based on such a minuscule difference. However, there is no agreed upon minimum difference for race. If you want the irish to be their own race then you can just assert that the difference is big enough.

You can make the same argument for most groups which you want to be a separate race. You want jews to be a separate race. No problem, traditionally religion separated them from christian europeans, inhibiting gene flow. We wouldn't regard the difference as noteworthy in animals but that needn't stop us.

The best case for a separate race is australian natives. Apparently there was very little gene flow between australia and asia for a very long period. Still, by all outer appearances they aren't that different either.
Of course we can do it by looking at a large number of subtle clues. But in no animal species we would bother to make a distinction based on such details.

Neanderthals, now. They were different: Stronger bones, stronger muscles, bigger brains. That's something that makes for a subspecies.

The actual distribution of the few basic allele clusters in worldwide human populations, including sites where the local gene pool is an x% match for one and a y% match for another...

That's a necessary consequence of the sampling and the statistical methods used. It doesn't mean that there were separated ancestral populations which hybridized.

 

[Jono]

Individuals that are geographically distant are also less closely related. You have to go back further in time to get to the last common ancestor. But if that were all one could not distinguish races. I think we're agreed on that.
What we want is a dividing line. Such a dividing line can only come about when there is some barrier to gene flow.
...
We wouldn't regard the difference as noteworthy in animals but that needn't stop us.

Well, this makes me query. Colours, there are definable focus-cluster points for them, as we can determine the gradient of pixels of said colour in each mix, even if visibly we can't (the same with biological ancestral-groups/ecotypes/races... semantics). Ethniticity can be used to denote both cultural and genetic groupings, as it is it's a lot less specific than "race", or more encompassive and adaptable to any colloquial usage that might be begged of the writer. Personally I have little issue with it, but to say that race is a meaningless term as per taxonomical contexts can only be a made against the choice of word, not for the consistently observed groupings which come across fairly evidently in most related fields... regardless of what word is the flavour or stigma of the month. The fact that we can approximate many levels and extents of ancestral admixture is not a blurring of the concept of any taxonomy applied to humans. If it was, it would have to be so for animals in general. On the other hand, many absolutes and ideas revolving around race depend on race or racial-related classifications to be not only simple, but inherently one-dimensional and often deterministic (which is of course false). And it's been argued, for example, biological categories can't readily be based initially on one or two initially notable differences in physiology. Of course, this is little else than nonsense (also human groups differ on a lot more points than so). The actuality of this is that not only is it not nonsense, it's common practise.

Furthermore, one of the points often raised in these discussions is that human beings are supposedly more genetically diverse than dogs are, if looking at heterozygosity (humans 0.776, dogs 0.401). Also, differences between two seperate species of gorillas (G. berengi and G. Gorilla) are on the order of six times less than between african Bantu people and anglo-saxon british (drafted from here and here). For other creatures (ie non-human) we classify via the international codes or the phylogenic codes, and related scientists do not always agree... yet I've never heard one to claim one or the other of being a social construct, let alone the concepts thereof in applying to be that. But of course... humans aren't all that mammalian are we? We're social constructs, or all definable as an homogenous blob, or only differentiable on an individual basis... not!

The problem about "race" is observed to be an issue of semantics, and beyond race we have a problem with species as well... aptly called the 'species problem'. These pesky "social constructs" have a nasty habit of being biologically/genetically predictable and approximatable with an almost perfect certainty. And they aren't put into brackets with a neatly dividence between two evenly laden piles of rocks... or numbers.

 

[Jono]

Breed, subspecies, variety, strain, megafamily/superfamily... whatever... they're all the same basic idea: biologically distinct, separate populations or types within the same species, another level of division below species level. Why act as if this were at all mysterious?

As it usually boils down to... semantics.