Recently in a sociology lecture I was told that “race has nothing to do with genes”.
Surely this is false?
(I mean race as in black/white/asian etc, not religious classifications)
In general, decisions as to what race someone belongs to are influenced by factors that are influenced by genetics - primarily looks in the US. But the final determiner of race is social, not genetic. Persons with similar genetic history can belong to different races and people of dissimilar genetic history can belong to the same race.
And just to (hopefully) clarify what Patriot X said, “race has nothing to do with genes” is perfectly correct. However the important point to realise is that this is not the same as “Racial charateristics have nothing to do with genes”, which is cleary incorrect.
Race is a classification method used by humans to divide humans into groups. It has nothing to do with genetics, being entirely a social convention. The primary characteristics used to define what race someone belongs to are trivial physical a features. Those features are certainly the result of genes. Genes dictate appearance, and someone then decided that certain appearances dictate what group people belong to, but the correlation between genes and race is non-existant.
The trap to avoid falling into is ascribing the characteristics of the parts to the whole. Genes control appearance and apperance dictates race, but that does not mean that race is based on genes. To give an analogy, the type of dye used will dictate the colour of a cloth, and the colour of a cloth will determine its “race”. That does not mean that all blue cloth must contain the same dye. We could group thousands of cloths into the “blue” race despite no two containing the same dye. And conversely we could group one cloth as red and one as blue despite them containing almost identical dyes. So as a result the “race” of a cloth has nothing to do with dye type. Race is based exclusively on arbitrary colour choices. While colour itself is determined by dye type we can’t say that all or even most cloths of a racial colour have similar dyes, and we can’t say that all or even most cloths of radicaly different colours don’t contain very similar dyes. As a result “race” is a very poor way to make predictions about dye type, and conversely dye type is a very poor way to make predictions about “race”. Ergo race has nothing to do with dye type.
Now substitute in “gene” for “dye” in that paragraph.
To resummarise what the other two people said: Yes, race is determined but genes, but “race” isn’t a scientific word. If you want to genetically class humans you have to use words like genus, family, and subtype. “Race” might be, for humans, synonymous with one of those classifications but ultimately it isn’t a rigorously defined word and has no guarantee to fall at any meaningful border.
Of course, while race has nothing to do with taxonomy, it quite obviously does have to do with genes. Rigorously defined or not, race does refer to physical characteristics–and those are genetic factors. So you can tell your sociology professor that he’s using the wrong word.
He’s trying to move race from being an unrigorous classification to saying that there’s no worthwhile genetic difference between races. That’s saying two entirely different things. Quite obviously there is worthwhile genetic differences between races or they wouldn’t have evolved that way. I entirely suspect that if you placed me (a white guy) and a black man in Africa with no tools or food that he would have the better odds of surviving (all else equal) as his body is better made for that climate.
El Marco please ingnore everything Sage Rat has posted. It’s nonsense.
No, there are not.
Absolute bollocks.
Which will come first?
Cites or GD?
There have been various definitions of “Race” over the years, and no real elucidation of the phenotypic elaboration of the human genome–it’s just too early in the genome game right now.
Until “Race” is defined by whoever is making the statement, and genetic population pools are more clearly defined by whoever is studying those groups and claiming they are groupable by genes, there is little point in arguing about it at all.
Certainly some populations of humans are characterized by genetic traits more consistent among those populations, and certainly some phenotypic expressions are more consistent among some populations. That’s about it for right now.
I think you need to be more specific about what “nothing to do with” means.
But here’s a simple thought experiment:
Suppose there are a man and a woman who are both of the “white” race as those terms are traditionally defined, and they have a child together. No matter who brings up that child or where, there is an excellent chance that child will grow up to be “white”
It’s the same thing for blacks and Asians.
So it seems pretty likely that “race” has something to do with genes.
I think it would be more accurate to say that race can have something to do with genes and it can have very little if anything to do with genes. But first you have to define “race”. If we use the term as it is defined in the US, and use it in the US then it has very little to do with genes.
Barak Obama gets exactly half of his genes from African* ancestors and exactly have from European ancestors. But he’s Black, just as his father would be if he lived in the US. Tiger woods is Black, but he gets less than 50% of his genes from African ancestors (and it might be as low as 25%).
Usually in the US, you are Black if you look Black or if you self identify as Black. If I have one African grandparent, I’m probably going to be called Black. But if I have one East Asian grandparent (and the rest European) then I’m probably going to be called White. So it’s sort of about genes, but it depends on what genes we’re talking about.
If you tried to apply this concept world-wide, however, you’d run into all kinds of problems because there are many different kinds of people who you wouldn’t normally find in the US. People everywhere blend seamlessly into their neighbors and you can never draw a line somewhere and say people are of race X on one side of the line and race Y on the other side.
So “race” in the US often has something to do with your genetic background, but the rules are always changing, and not only to different rules apply to different “races”, but some people will apply them differently than others. Applied to the whole of the human species, it’s a meaningless concept.
*African = Sub-Sahara African for the purpose of this discussion.
Please define, in your own words, what the “white” and the “black” races are.
Asian of course is not a race by any definition at all.
I’m getting a sense of deja vu… 
For purposes of this discussion, why is this necessary? Do you disagree that my thought experiment would turn out as I predicted?
I would rather not get sidetracked by debating a definition.
Let’s do it this way:
Do you agree that Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt are “white” as most people understand the term?
Do you agree that if Brad & Jen had a natural baby, that baby would almost certainly grow up to be “white” as most people understand the term? Even if that baby were raised by somebody else?
No, it’s called evolution. Species become variegated so as to adapt to their surroundings. (Though of course there’s some amount of societal sexual attraction thrown in that has little to nothing to do with the surroundings.)
Do you believe that there is a reason why people whose ancestors primarily lived in hotter climates are of darker skin and those in colder of lighter skin? If not then, sure, take what I said as bollocks, but Darwin and I will have to disagree with you.
Suppose there are a man who is of the “white” race as traditional defined and a women who is of the “black” race as traditionally defined, and they have a child together.
What race is that child?
Suppose there are a man who is of the “asian” race as traditional defined and a women who is of the “indian” race as traditionally defined, and they have a child together.
What race is that child?
Suppose those two children have a child. What race is that child?
Now multiply that by thousands of generations of humans.
There are some simplistic correlations of skin color within certain ethnic groups. However, there are skin color variations within each “race” that are as wide or wider than those between races. Italians, Spaniards, Arabs, Asian Indians, and Mexicans are all traditionally put inside the “white” race, although they can have brown or darker skin. Conversely, Hispanics range from the blackest Caribbeans to the whitest Chileans.
No trait of skin color, or even of other “racist” telltales, such as wide noses, epicanthic folds, or kinky hair, is particular to any one “race” or omnipresent within it.
Skin color is determined genetically. Race is determined culturally. They often broadly overlap but there is no sound scientific method for delimiting race, any more than there always is a cultural method for accurately identifying race. Race is a term that has no boundaries and no accurate definition. It cannot be a scientific term.
Suppose you answer my questions first?
Do you agree that the term “family” is non-scientific by the same criteria?
So, if a native of Papua New Guinea were to move to the US, what race would he be?
Most Americans would say he was Black-- ie, the same race as Barry Bonds or Bill Cosby. But he’s as close, genetically, to an African as any European is. It’s not about the genes, but about how you look. Now, there aren’t many Papua New Guineans in the US, so this isn’t much of problem here. But world-wide there are all sorts of groups like that-- in fact every group is like that since there is no reference group like there is in the US.
To restate what I said in another way:
The style of a house–Victorian, Modern, Art Deco, etc.–is entirely arbitrary. They can be mixed, substantially different from the way houses of that style used to look, overlap, or entirely fail to look like the style they were meant to be. Never-the-less it’s stupid to say that “a house’s style has nothing to do with its construction.” How else would it have come to look that way?
Yes, “house style” is a rather amoprhous thing, and it may be useless as a classification for houses in the end–but whether it’s a useful classification system is unimportant to the question at hand. Is it related to the construction? Yes.
This is an excellent example for the purposes of this thread, because it is the very opposite of science.
In fact, cherrypicking one particular favorable example to “prove” a point is the hallmark of pseudoscience, crackpottery, and bias, as well as plain vanilla ignorance of the scientific method.
Science never proceeds by looking at one particular example. True science can only be done by going through the entire universe of examples and trying to determine what common underlying principles they have, rejecting false conglomerations if nothing can be found that properly unites them.
That’s exactly why race is rejected by science. When scientists look at everyone labeled collectively as comprising a particular race, they find that nothing is common to all of them and that nothing of theirs cannot be found in others who are not given that label.
Remember the “black swan” theory? That says that you can disprove the statement that all swans are white simply by finding a single black swan. However, you manifestly cannot say anything about the theory at all, at least rationally, factually, or scientifically, by looking at nothing but the two whitest swans.
That’s the antithesis of science, and why making that mistake is so valuable as a teaching tool.
Because you have demonstrated previously you have no real idea of what “race” means.
You haven’t actually described an experiment.
Of course you wouldn’t. You never sidetrack discussions yourself.
How do “most people” understand the term “white,” exactly? Please be precise.
How about you answer my questions before you ask any more of your own?