If I can observe that the ancestry of two people have a specific shape nose, certain hair colour range, and a typical range of heights different from the members of two other bloodlines, and then make predictions about how would appear the offspring of both, then how is that not scientific?
I am aware that race is a contentious topic for USians, but I don't live in the US, so please assume good intentions and understand that I am asking to understand your viewpoint, not challenge it.
Here's the thing you may be missing: The complete diversity of human phenotypes (including what is socially discussed as 'race') is almost entirely present on the African continent. If you believe in evolution (and I'm assuming pretty much everyone here does), that makes a whole lot of sense – humans migrated out of Africa millenia ago and, as they moved to different environments, preferential selection for certain traits that already existed within the migrating population(s) occurred. There may be some traits that are beneficial and passed on due to spontaneous mutations post-migration, but they are relatively few and typically present in superficial features (e.g. eye color, hair color).
Your argument seems to support the notion of race, not counter it.
Italy builds many classes of cars. We still classify them as luxury vehicles, sports vehicles, economy vehicles, etc. even if some parts are interchangable. The Lamborghini Diablo used passenger bus taillights.
Deciding when features diverge enough to be a difference "race" is entirely arbitrary, and is largely for political reasons not scientific ones. The wikipedia articles on it are actually pretty good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_society
I was watching the Olympics opening ceremony with my young son and he noticed that, at least in some cases, people from particular countries share a skin color. Was I supposed to tell him that he's mistaken and we indeed don't know why that appears to happen?
Yes, races can mix which also mixes their features, making them difficult to singularly classify. But is it necessary to not notice that in some cases larger populations have not mixed for a while and developed a common set of features?
The issue here is slight genetic differences and/or phenotypes are being construed as significant enough to mark people as a different -race- of human, which significantly plays into racism. Whereas my understanding is Africa itself has more genetic diversity than the typical races that been demarcated more for political reasons.
You should explain to him that when people live in certain places for many generations some adaptations to local environment happen in their bodies. Then you could explain how it's a fairly recent thing that skin of some people got white because of living in relatively low light environment for millenia. As people now have have ability to move freely and freely eat food from around the globe this artifact of being stuck in one place will eventually disappear. But for now we can enjoy how differently people can look while being generally the same.
A good explanation of how and why specific combinations of genes get concentrated in relatively isolated populations. What we call “race” historically got based on superficial features, not analysis of similarities in DNA. It turns out that sometimes those correspond, and sometimes they don’t. Indonesians and Brazilians have similar ranges of skin color (melanin) for the same reason — adaptation to sun exposure — but only distant common ancestors and very different histories.
Does anyone consider Indonesians and Brazilians to be a single race? I think that your comment addresses a strawman that nobody stated.
If you are discounting the idea that colour is a singular indicator of race, then yes I agree with you. But that does not mean that race, as a whole, does not exist.
I was pointing out that people can end up with similar superficial features without common heritage. I doubt anyone considers Indonesians and Brazilians the same race, but then again I’m pretty sure a large number of Americans would call both “black.” As evidence I offer the fake “race” Americans call Hispanic or LatinX, a definition that includes people with very different genetic and social heritages, and one mostly rejected by members of the supposed Hispanic race. That’s a political construct and convenience, not a real thing in any sense.
Race exists as a social construct. Collections of genes concentrated in a population describe something, I called it heritage. Sometimes the social construct and the heritage correspond, sometimes not. “African” only describes a race based on superficial features, not genetic variation.
I live in east Asia among people I (white American) always thought of as members of the same race, Asian. But I have learned that the people here have different racial definitions and boundaries, more tuned to their own social constructs and ideas about heritage and history. No doubt people from the African continent have different ideas about race than I got raised with. So in that sense “race” is a social construct, because different societies have different and conflicting definitions. Which do we call correct? My American/western notion of Asian as a race, or the definitions the people of Asia use?
I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
What is the precise unambiguous definition of "race" in any case?
With Brazil you have a country in which a small few were rumoured to be exact clones of Hitler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(novel) ) a greater majority who are descended from European colonizers and former African slaves and a small number who "pure" descendants from the some 2,000 different tribal groups once totalling some 7 million people prior to the 1500 CE European contact.
Indonesia is a similar construct - it's a political boundary about many many distinct ethnologies from some 17,000 islands and over a quarter billion people.
> I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
I hope not.
That wasn’t the point I meant to make. The thread I replied in started with trying to explain skin color differences to a child. I had to do that with my own kids, because kids notice that people look different. I stayed away from the concept of “race” and instead tried to explain heritage and adaptation. At first glance a child might very well think Indonesians and Brazilians belong to the same race — it would depend on what features they notice. Sadly too many adults have the same level of discrimination (in both senses).
Sure, I'm further emphasising the point that much of what some regard as "race" is superficial or "familial".
Reading older English books many years past I've seen the claim that Scottish families could be distinguished by features, I'd accept that having recognised people as being from one family or another growing, however I doubt anyone would claim the MacThoseOnes are a different race to the McThemOnes.
I saw in this post some conflation of "Africans" and "(Australian) Aboriginals", both vey large groups with very many sub groups - it's worth a mention that of all the peoples on the planet these two are perhaps the furtherest apart on the family tree as it took a good while to walk (and boat a little) to Australia and arrive here some 70K+ years past - much of Europe is likely more closely related on the great human tree to modern Africans.
I'm from central Europe, so maybe the fine details regarding this topic escape my attention, but I would understand heritage as a much more social concept than race. For example, a kid born to Japanese parents and growing up in Poland may very well feel connection to Polish heritage. This obviously doesn't make them Slavic, but that's not a requirement to be Polish. On the other hand, some people deliberately escape their countries and may find the idea of implicitly connecting them to that heritage offensive.
You're referencing extremes to argue against the concept entirely which is absurd. DNA can identify groups of people with similar clusters of genes that make up a race with high accuracy. It's tracing the lineage of you and your ancestors which isn't arbitrary, and most people are sufficiently more than a drop of a given race making the delineation quite clear.
Deciding that those "clusters of genes" represent an entirely different race is arbitrary, and it's not "clear" at all. Tracing DNA of ancestors has little to do with that. Please read the articles I linked, they're long but address your concerns.
Well, individual variation within what is broadly categorized as "races" exceeds the variation between "races" in aggregate, so the whole idea is nonsense. The vast majority of human genetic diversity is found in people with medium-to-dark skin color.
To take an empirical equivalent, imagine if someone gave you two lists of people, one of whom was "tall", and the other was "short". And you measured the tall and short people, and there were people in the "short" group who were taller than average for the "tall" group, and vice versa. Their height as compared by means and standard deviations didn't vary substantially.
At that point, your assumption should be that the labeling and grouping was wrong. So too for grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings like ethnic groups and national origin.
That being said, there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter - the classic example being broad African-American susceptibility to certain genetic-influenced illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. These are markers that more recent African immigrants don't show, and are likely a result of strong genetic and epigenetic selection for certain kinds of robustness as a result of the historical conditions they were subject to, i.e. slavery, discrimination, and poverty.
During the slave trade, most Africans that were brought to the Americas were from a fairly small area in West Africa. These days, African immigrants come from all over Africa. There is more human genetic variation within Africa than in the rest of the world combined. Parsimoniously it could just be that these West Africans were just more disposed to diabetes and heart disease than Africans as a whole.
Isn't the actual idea that any given individual has more genetic points of difference to any other random individual, even within a racial group, than genetic differences between races. So I don't understand the assertion that the idea that there aren't some foundational genetic correlations tied to race - there are. I'd be intrigued to get a measure of genetic distance between individual chimpanzees vs. humans to see if the standard deviation shows a similar pattern, of sexual selection selecting for diversity between individuals.
In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
>grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings
This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
>there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter
> In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
That's not a race. That's a particular tiny subset of a particular region with unique genetics. It's not even "Sub-Saharan", it's specific regions and tribes in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other rift countries.
> This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
Where they do, great, but often the standard "racial types" share little if anything. Skin color dictates almost nothing about the other traits of a person, so if you're concerned with "how fast do they get a sunburn", by all means group away. If you're concerned with IQ or athletic ability, try again.
>In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
First, you're completely forgetting culture. Second, nobody is claiming that there is no genetic difference between humans, it's just that the races we define don't correlate very well with them. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most human genetic diversity, so why would they be all of the same race?
I think it's an Americanism to think humans in Africa are a monolith. At least here in the UK the idea of having the most genetic diversity goes hand in hand with correlating with lots of races within.
Notice how they all come from specific population that is a small subset of black race. Probably more black people run slower then them than there is white people in total.
If you noticed that 99 of 100 finalists of some jumping discipline were Ashkenazi Jews or western Slovenians you wouldn't claim that white race is awesome at jumping.
That's why concept of race is useless. It focuses on superficial differences and similarities ignoring the real significant ones.
> Well, individual variation within what is broadly categorized as "races" exceeds the variation between "races" in aggregate, so the whole idea is nonsense.
The same is true for men and women for a wide range of characteristics yet we sometimes find useful to differentiate one from the other in some contexts.
The variance for most traits is higher within races than it is between them. I assume OPs point is the division into categories "black, white, asian, latino" is arbitrary, and you could easily reduce or add more groups as you see fit.
Theres nowhere in science you can look that will tell you how many groups there are and where to draw the lines between them - i.e a construct.
I agree that the pseudo races that you mentioned are quite arbitrary, but I suppose they could be useful terms in a population as the diverse the US. In less mixed contexts such as Ethiopia nobody is "Black" rather they would be called one of the 300 some odd races they have there. Likewise in China - nobody's "Asian" in China, rather they are Han or something.
There's probably a whole Venn diagram or tree to describe different races, how far up the tree we go to describe someone pretty much depends on how far away we are from them on that tree. And then there are people of mixed race - we are all human after all.
Genetic inheritance is different to the social construct of race ("black","white" etc). Bloodline is best avoided as a concept where humans are concerned, because the human gene pool was and is highly mobile. "Racial purity" is an idiot concept, and to the extent it has been attempted in humans, as with dogs it mostly leads to deformities and genetic diseases.
(That Proclaimers song - "... and I would walk 500 miles" - turns out to be an order-of-magnitude underestimate of how far the 99th percentile will walk to get laid - and on a timescale of centuries/millennia, it's the 99th percentile that matters).
And remember that in the US (and, for example, South Africa), that social construct extended to become a _legal_ construct used to discriminate against those designated as black. Most of Europe doesn't share that unhappy recent history (although we have our own, of course), it's hard to appreciate just how much more contentious it is in the US than Europe.
We can draw conceptual borders between any two things, that doesn't automatically make those categories "scientific". Something being "scientific" has the implication that is has explanatory usefulness or predictive validity beyond the tautological ability to predict the definitions used to construct the categories. A taxonomy of humans based on statistical clusters of genotypes might be a scientific way to approach race/ethnicity, but subjectively chosen phenotypes is not it.
One thing you should consider is that genetic diversity is highest between people in Africa. So two Africans who look the same to you might be more genetically different than European from Asian. In this sense race is not really scientific. Because it doesn't reflect general genetic similarity or diversity but rather a very small subset that's intersection of adaptions to local environment and things that are easily visible just by looking at someone.
Ask a random passerby if they ever heard about Haduo or Tigre races. Then ask them again if they heard about Black or White race. You can't make general claims based on how you understand the words.
I mean the categories that have been selected, are absolutely ridiculous. There isn't just one "black", as much as there is one "white". Imagine the differences in two white races at their most extremes: iranians and finns. Or slavs. Or irish. And blacks - are Khoisan black? If they are, they are extremely different from Nigerians, which again is an extremely ethnically diverse country. This is why I seriously dislike the categories selected by politicians and administrators.
> I mean the categories that have been selected, are absolutely ridiculous. There isn't just one "black", as much as there is one "white".
Alright, so American popular conception of race is incorrect, not the concept of race as a whole. In my country we do not refer to black and white, we use the names that each racial group calls themselves (Beduin, Arab, Ethiopian, Moroccan, etc).
I think OP's point is that it's arbitrary and context dependent where the line between races is drawn. It also includes non-genetic cultural traits, as in your example.
Should a different eye color detemine a race demarcation? Is e.g. religion a factor in detemining a race?
The examples you listed are probably better described as ethnic groups, which are not genetically detemined, not necessarily mutually exclusive and quite vaguely defined.
I am aware that race is a contentious topic for USians, but I don't live in the US, so please assume good intentions and understand that I am asking to understand your viewpoint, not challenge it.