Is this Anthropology 101? I already took that TYVM!
Mods, please rename the thread ‘Taxonomies Are Abstractions’. Thanks!
More like ALL ontological systems are abstractions.
That’s all good but what about populations even if there are only mostly graduated differences or if they exist in isolation in select groups in a form that easily measurable scientifically?
Most people don’t know enough about the science of this to even comment on it. It isn’t the 1860’s or the 1970’s anymore. Both of those popular viewpoints were wrong and there have been many remarkable developments in this field since people started these types of threads but I don’t think people are keeping up.
If you have Netflix on demand, there is a very good National Geographic documentary available outlining The Genographic Project and most people could learn a lot about this by watching in it’s entirety.
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/National_Geographic_The_Human_Family_Tree/70122464?trkid=2361637
If you don’t have it available, the short version is that recent developments in DNA testing have led to some remarkable understanding in just the past 5 years and it is still ongoing. Humans originated in Africa (I don’t think most people will find that surprising) but there is still more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else in the world many times over.
Some isolated groups are as unrelated to each other as humans can possibly be. Some African groups went through an extreme population bottleneck about 50,000 years ago and a few members of those groups went on to found the populations seen today in most of the world including all of Asia, Australia, North America, South America, and Europe. The lack of genetic diversity as small groups moved out of Africa into other parts of the world led to populations that only have the DNA ancestry from a small group of their founders and that led to some measurable genetic differences as well as phenotypical differences that are obvious to this day.
The Genographic Project maps out how and where the divergences took place based on DNA samples from hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. In a place like the U.S., you will find genetic ancestry from lots of different groups from most people so to say that race is mostly cultural has some basis in fact. Among the San Bushmen in Africa, they find that they diverged from other groups over 50,000 years ago and they are only one of several with a multi-thousand year divergence DNA sequences plus the history and culture to support it so they aren’t completely similar and it is just a gentic and biological fact.
Again, I can’t tell what people are arguing for or against in these types threads.
I can tell you interpretation of it but it isn’t as huggy, feelly as some and I base my view only on the science and not the politics.
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Humans are all one species who share 99.9% of their DNA on average with each other - True but then again, so do dogs and they have a wide range of characteristics just like some human populations do.
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We are all ‘mutts’ so any important racial distinctions have been wiped out through interbreeding - This is mostly true in places like the U.S. but it isn’t true all over the world. There are still some isolated populations with pure lineages that go back tens of thousands of years. It is useful to understand and acknowledge that even if they disappear as distinct populations rapidly.
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Even if there are population differences, individual differences are the only thing that matter and there is great diversity even within a given population - Mostly true for public policy. We shouldn’t just ignore possible scientific reasons for certain tendencies for feel-good or political reasons. Some of them could be rooted in biological and genetic differences and it is always helpful to understand as much about that as possible whether it is for medicine or why certain small populations of Africans seem to be unbeatable in world class marathons no matter how many people compete against them.
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You shouldn’t assume anything about an individual just based on the assumptions about their classical race - I think that is a given for most people this board. We can crank the intelligent conversation up a notch from that.
I’m going to move your two threads to Great Debates, since they fit in there better.
Race is a social construct, by definition. Sure. In the US, we let you define yourself. More specifically, we let you–by law, in the case of medicine, at least–decide how many races you want to be, or none at all. Plus Hispanic tossed in if you want to.
Absolutely, purely, 100% a social construct and absolutely arbitrarily 100% self-associated.
You should be aware, however, that the Self-Identified Race Ethnicity to which you decide to belong has a powerful association with which genes you are likely to have. If you define yourself as Black, you are way more likely to carry a sickle cell gene; if you define yourself as White, and if you are a male, your blood creatine kinase level is likely to be less than the guy who self-identified as Black.
So, in summary: purely a social construct by the modern definition of the term. And an excellent correlation of those socially defined constructs with substantially different gene pools which drive well-described average differences in physiology and phenotypical outcomes.
The “race” we choose for ourselves turns out to be an excellent predictor of which pool of genes we draw from, and we do not all draw from the same library of genes.
No it doesn’t, no matter how many times you say so.
Why yes; yes it does. No matter how many times you insist that race has nothing to do with genes, it turns out it does.
Start with Sickle cell anemia and explain to me, please, how it can be so much more prevalent in American blacks if there is no correlation between SIRE group and gene pools.
Bad luck? Racism?
Look; sickle cell trait occurs in populations that have historically been exposed to malaria. And if the gene pool in the US had no correlation with race, we’d see a random distribution. But as it turns out, blacks brought to this country had a high enough proportion carrying HbS that the distribution of that gene is markedly different between whites and blacks.
Think of gene pools as a bag of marbles. When you are born, momma reaches into that bag and pulls out your genome. The bag of marbles for the black mom in the US has way more marbles containing a HbS than the bag of marbles handed to the white mom.
However, you have jumped from ancestors-from-malarial-areas to “race” with no reason to do so. Millions of people wo would be lumped in to the “black” race by any standard, (such as the “five groups” to which eralier posts in this thread alluded), will never display any sickle cell traits since they come from regions in South Africa where malaria is not endemic while millions of people who are coonsidered “white” do suffer sickle cell because the regions of Europe and Asia Minor from which their ancestors came are heavily malarial. The association of “black” and “sickle cell” in the U.S. is a function of the specific region in Africa where malaria is endemic being the source of the vast majority of slaves while people of Sicilian, Maltese, Greek, Turk, and Lebanese ancestry are overshadowed by the Irish, British, Poles, Italians, Germans, and other “white” immigrants to the U.S.
Of all the appeals to race that one might offer, sickle cell is the least persuasive because it clearly crosses supposed “racial” boundaries.
I reckon this is one of those topics where the SDMB just doesn’t communicate properly - people see ‘race doesn’t exist’ as meaning “everyone is the same as one another, the world over” - which patently isn’t true.
Race - as a concept, can exist. It’s quite possible, even common, for distinct populations to share a prevalence of some genetic and morphological/phenotypic traits - this is quite an important factor in evolution.
I think (someone correct me if I’d wrong) that what people actually mean when they say ‘race doesn’t exist’ is that the classical or popular definitions of human races aren’t very useful or consistent - and that those which do have an element of truth, are tautological (i.e. white people are white; probably a bad example) - they don’t tell us anything more than we already knew when we did the work of whittling down the group selection.
Yes. As is often pointed out when this comes up, what is and isn’t a “race” changes over time and from place to place. Nor do concepts of “race” match actual genetic groupings.
I believe, if you read carefully what Chief Pedant has asserted, that his discussion is limited to people in the United States. So at least in that regard, your discussion is not a correct counter to his assertions.
However, in this day and age, if being of the “race” of “blacks” means people whose ethnic heritage extends back to Sub-Saharan African ancestors with markedly dark brown skin color, even that is likely to be less and less correlated with genetic issues prevalent among descendants of American slaves. This is because we are experiencing increasing immigration from all sorts of geographic locations in Africa. Which is why I find labeling someone who just immigrated from, say, Kenya “black”, a term which in this country has been applied mainly to our ex-slaves, is a bit silly. It’s like calling a tangerine an orange, simply because they look somewhat the same.
And, of course, as it continues, it most likely will have a diminishing effect upon the statistical correlation pointed out by Chief Pedant.
Agreed. Witness the slow migration of “Hispanic” from a description of area of origin to something almost “race”-like.
And, of course, despite the fact that it might be nice to live in a “color-blind” world (meaning we treat everyone without pre-conceived notions of how they will behave or think based upon their outward characteristics), a fair amount of difficulty in doing this comes from the fact that humans seem to enjoy self-identifying on the basis of some of these characteristics.
If we are limiting the discussion to the U.S., however, then we are simply talking about a social construct, not a biologicial reality. We are also claiming that a number of Greek, Maltese, Turk, and Lebanese Americans who share no DNA with black Americans are “actually” black. That would tend to push the discussion well into the realm dominated by Humpty Dumpty.
Cleanup! Cleanup in Aisle 5!!! 
There’s glory for you.
In the US, the SIRE group of “black” has gene pools that have marked average differences from the SIRE group of “white.”
What constitutes a biologic “race” is not typically worth arguing about, but I bet we can agree on this, tnd:
Sub saharan populations with a mitochondrial eve around 150-200K years ago split off somewhere around 75K years ago from a group that left Africa and populated the rest of this world; some of these may have mated with Denisovians. That out of Africa group had another group split off that ended up populating most of the groups now typically referred to as Asians and Europeans. That Eurasion group had a mitochondrial eve somewhere around 35-75K years ago, may have mated with Neanderthals, and acquired a set of genes (including, for example, broad penetrance of the haplotype D version of MCPH1) which are not present in the Africa group. The groups remaining in Africa have a number of distinct mitochondrial lines. In fact, there may be more genetic variation among these African groups than there is between African groups and Eurasian groups.
At controversy is whether or not the out of Africa group gained any genesets along the way which contribute to a greater average intelligence. If they did, then in this key area there is a significant division between the Eurasian group and the sub-saharan group. Whether you call any give group a “race” is kind of irrelevant. As a matter of fact, in today’s world one approach to getting rid of the idea that one race outperforms another is to decide there is no such thing as “race.” Fine, but this does not mean there is no such thing as biologically-driven differences between two given groups.
What is not controversial is that there is a clear historic demarkation between the out of Africa Eurasion group, and the left-in-Africa group.
I refer you to the charts in Oppenheimer’s Out of Eden to look through some of these mitochondrial lineages.
So when I note that looking at Sickle Cell is a poor way to categorize race–and make no further comment on the matter–your response is to point to the separation between African and not-African groups, (who both share the Sickle Cell trait).
Odd.
This is a fact I’ve noted many times. And considering that there are African populations that are farther apart from each other than Europeans are from Asians, genetically speaking, it becomes laughable to consider Africans (or sub-Saharans, or black Africans) a race. And by mitochondrial lines, there are many African populations that have a more recent common ancestor with non-Africans (Europeans and Asians) then with other far-flung African populations. Most of human genetic diversity is in Africa.