Certainly. And subdividing life by domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species is arbitrary as well. Those things are still based on the life form’s genes, and perfectly accepted by science.
Would you like to place abet on that? There are some very good websites that demonstrate just how impossible it is to guess someone’s race. The clever peopleon this board can;t even mange to get the same answers the second tiem through with some of them, much less agree amongst themselves.
I’ll post 30 photos on a website in groups of 10 and you can assign them race. If you can’t get them correct better than random chance (based on an agreed statistical test) you pay me. If you can do better than then I pay you. Are you interested?
No, there isn’t. You are suffering from confirmation bias. What race for example would you call Tiger Woods?
You’ve repeated this claim often enough. Now it’s time to prsent your evidence to support it. Not assertions that it’s self evident but actuall evidence that race has a correlation with genetic factors.
Mixed.
FFS we asked you to tell us how many races there are. You said there were four: red, white, yellow an black. THAT WAS YOUR CHOSEN RACIAL CLASSIFICATION. Don’t come this bullshit that it isn’t average. You got to pick whatever racial classification category you like and you picked this one. Now that it has revealed how ridiculous and unsupportable your position is you wnat to try to squirm away from it.
But we’ll give you another chance:
For the seventh time Sage rat: how many races are there and what are they. You’ve claimed that differences exist between races so tell us what these races are that the differences exist between.
:rolleyes: My post is my cite. How quaint.
WTF does this have to do with race?
Look dude stop weaseling and answer the questions:
How many races are there and what are they?
What are the obviously worthwhile genetic differences that you claim exist between any two of these races?
Please, this forum is supposed to be for factual answers, not weasling and made-up bullshit. You’ve made the statements of fact, they have been challenged, now is the time for you to provide your evidence. If you can;t provide evidence then you are quite obviously typing whatever ignorant nonsense springs into you head.
Well, those divisions are to a certain extent just constructs that we apply to nature, not something that is inherent in nature. Individuals from different species interbreed all the time. They don’t know they aren’t supposed to do that.
But if you are going to subdivide the human species by genetics, you need to present a plausible scheme. So far, you have failed to do that. Tell me what the divisions are and where the geographic boundaries are. We all can tell the difference between a native of Beijing and native of Paris, but what about all the people one encounters in between? If you can’t define the dividing lines, then you can’t define subcategories. The human species is characterized by [url=]clinal variations, not distinct boundaries. In that case, any characterization you choose is completely arbitrary, and there can be any number of ways to slice and dice the species.
Absolute nonsense and a brilliant way to disply your ignorance.
Any two organisms within any taxon will be more gentically similar to one another than to any organism outside that taxon. Any two organism within any taxon will posess genes that are not found in any other taxon. Thus taxa are genetically based.
In contrast any two organisms within any race will not be more gentically similar to one another than to any organism outside that race. Any two organisms within any taxon will not posess genes that are not found in any other race. Thus races are not genetically based.
:rolleyes:
We’re gonna run out of rolleyes smileys if you keep posting like this.
You claim that you can get agreement on the race of people at better than random chance, and then you claim that “mixed” is a race.
Please, oh please, take me up on my bet. I want to see you even equal random chance on blind test if “mixed” is one of the allowed responses. Hell I’ll even offer odds. Two to one that you can’t do better than random chance when random chance?
It’s not my position that there is a boundary; it’s not my position that it doesn’t break down. There’s no clear boundary between red and orange either, or at least the guy on the street couldn’t spell one out, but people use the terms and they have meanings nonetheless.
It’s not even my position that it’s a biological concept; just that it’s a fuzzy social construct that has some correlation with certain biological factors.
No. You are misconstruing me as saying something which I am not. I am not saying that it’s possible to tell at a glance of someone whether they are of European or African or Asian or what have you descent. I agree with everyone who notes that there’s no really significant biological concept of race. I am only endorsing the very mild comment that there are some people who get called black and some people who get called white and so on; I am not claiming that this is a well defined mapping, or that it is grounded in anything particularly biologically significant. I am not claiming that such things as this website you point out cannot exist. I think I agree with you far more than we disagree. I am just saying that terms like “black” and “white”, for all their difficulties, are not entirely semantically meaningless, the way a term like “blajorgenden” would be. When I say “meaningful”, I don’t mean “significant”, I just mean “containing semantic content”.
I mean, if nobody could ever bring themselves to agree on these (arbitrary, capricious, sloppy, groundless, but still existent and semantically non-null) racial designators, then why would anyone ever worry about problems of racial discrimination and so forth? If everybody demonstrated the exact same tendency to be called race A, race B, etc., then there would be no ability to engage in racial discrimination from the get-go. But that’s not the world we live in.
Multiracial. Cablinasian. Of course, I happen to know things about him that aren’t immediately apparent from his appearance. It’s not my claim that people like Tiger Woods don’t exist, or to endorse the idea “Every human has a particular well-defined race, which is a significant and useful biological concept”, or even "There is a scientifically significant concept of being ‘multiracial’ as opposed to being ‘uniracial’ ". I reject those ideas as much as anyone else does. But you ask somebody “Is Michael Jordan black? Is Al Gore white? Have we ever had a black president?” and you will get an unequivocal “Yes, yes, and no, respectively”, because for all the uselessness of the term, everybody can agree on certain things. You ask some further questions like “Are Hispanics Caucasian?”, and you’ll get sputtering and pointless debate, because this is an area where the concept of race reveals itself to be deeply groundless. But groundless doesn’t mean utterly devoid of any semantic content.
The property of going through life with a tendency to be called white/black/Asian/whatever runs in families. Because I am not claiming that there is anything more to race than being called a particular thing, because I am agreeing with everyone that this is a misguided but existent social construct, this is all I need in order to claim that race has some correlation with genetic factors.
:dubious:
No, it was the one that you chose out of two possibilities I gave. Neither I nor the US government uses that classification and nor did I indicate any sort of stamp of approval for it. If I was personally asked to define race, I would say that it’s a synonym of haplogroup.
There are anywhere from no races to 80,000 depending on how finely you want to cut it. Race is dependent on waves of population migration and how long the people spent in a certain area before moving on to another place. You could say that there are “Native Americans” or that there are the Northern Native Americans, Southern, and the Inuit peoples–it just depends on how finely you feel like subdividing it dependent on the conversation at hand.
No, because there is no such thing as a cite for logic and math. 2 + 2 = 4 because that’s the result of the mathematical equation, not because I have a cite from MIT saying that 2 + 2 = 4.
Genetic differences between races most often are differences in bone structure, height, pigmentation, certain glands (for instance, Japanese people don’t have as many of the kind of sweat gland that makes stinky sweat), blood type, and other things. Why certain traits came to fore in different areas is of course debatable, but the assumption that it was for greater survivability in that region is a good bet.
I agree with all of this. Does this clear up my position any?
When I say race is a “meaningful” term, I don’t mean that it is biologically grounded in any significant way, I just mean that it carries semantic content, which should be obvious. Someone’s race is, in my eyes, nothing more than what race people call them part of. But that process of calling them things, while in a sense misguided and not tracking genetics in any significant way, while missing out on large genetic variations and blowing up small ones, while conflating superficially identical but underlyingly quite different traits, does, all the same, do something, something which correlates with certain factors which are genetically based (skin color, etc.). This is a very weak assertion, and this is the only assertion I’ve been making.
So then if I take the child of two Ethiopians, and the child of two Norwegians, the children will not be more genetically similar to, respectively, other Ethiopians and Norwegians than to each other?
I claim that if you show me a half great dane, half chihuahua dog and ask me what breed it is, while requiring me to answer either “great dane” or “chihuahua” then I can’t answer. If I am allowed to answer whatever I want I’ll say mixed great dane and chihuahua.
It might also do some good to point out that I am not Sage Rat. I do not think the social construct of races is a particularly good indicator of one’s genetic history, because I agree with everyone that two individuals identified as black may be wildly genetically divergent while someone called black and someone called white may be much more genetically similar. I do not think the social construct of race tracks worthwhile differences, I do not think race is a worthwhile or significant biological concept. I just think it’s a semantically non-null concept that happens to correlate with some superficially apparent biological factors (e.g., people with higher melanin levels are much more likely to be called “black” or “Indian” or some such thing than to be called “white”, even though this has little in the way of significant biological grounding, and even though this might group genetically quite disparate people as identically “black” and genetically quite similar people as separately “black” vs. “white”).
Perhaps the whole problem was the term “meaningful”, which could ambiguously refer to either “semantically non-null” or “significant/worthwhile/informative”.
Indistinguishable I have no idea what point you are trying to make. The thread is about whether race has any basis in genetics or science. John Mace pointed out that from a scientific perspective “race” is as meaningless as “thlurble”. You then stated that race has a very clear menaing. This is not the case.
If your sole point was that race has some sort of legal or social or artistic meaning then youcleralymissed several other posters such saying excatly that. IOW you have managed to confuse the issue and add absolutelynothing new as far as I can tell.
I am sorry to have done that. My point is that “race” is not quite as meaningless as “thlurble”, because the word “thlurble” doesn’t mean anything to anyone. That’s all my point was, it’s obvious, I shouldn’t have bothered making it. Somehow, hearing things like that set me off purposelessly. It seemed like people were going a bit too far in denying that race has any meaning. Looking back, it might be right to say that I agreed with much of your post #3, except the interpretation that “race has nothing to do with with genes”. Race has something to do with genes, just not in any useful way, but rather in precisely the way you spelt out in that post. It seems to me this is what was gnawing at the OP as well, in the overstatement he heard. We can all agree that race is not a scientifically useful concept, that it exists only as an arbitrary and capricious social artifact, that it doesn’t significantly track genetic similarity, but to say it has 0 to do with genes is to go a bit too far.
That’s right! You were asked to tell us how many races there were. You gave us a choice, one of which said that there were four. I selected that choice as an example.
You now want to weasle away from that position becaus eit highlights how ignorant and stupid your claims are.
And you have been. At least nine times. By at least three different posters. :rolleyes:
And yet again you have weasled away from answering the actual quetsion.
You said there were obvious and significant diffrences between races.
Define a race as a haplogroup if you wish, but answer the freakin’ question:
How many racial haplogroups are there and what are they?
Do you really think it has escaped anyone’s notice how much weaseling you have done to avoid answering this simple quetsion?
The question is not how finely I want to cut it. The question is how many racial You claim there and what are they?
:rolleyes:
Seriously!
:rolleyes:
Do you realise how this appears to the readers of this thread?
But if you want to play this game and bury yourself deeper, fine: show us the mathematical equation that there are obvious genetic differences between races.
Please provide a refernce for these claims.
Do you even realise that "Japanese’ isn’t a race by anyone’s* defintion? Event he Japanese don’t consider japanese to be a race.?
Well let’s start with your evidence that these differences even exist, shall we? After you’ve provided that evidence then we can worry about why they exist.
Oh, that;s right you can’t provide that evidence because it’s “self evident”, right?
:rolleyes:
A question for the peanut gallery: is there even any point in John Mace and myself attempting to debate someone who admits that he can’t provide evidence for his extraordinary claims because it is just “based on logic” and “self evident”?
Should we just note that the factual question has been answered and accept that ignorance is going to keep fighting back on this one?
Sage Rat are you going to start answering the questions put to you, or do you just intend to keep weseling away from them ?
Can you understand that “Norwegian” and"Ethiopian" are not races by any standard? So far in this thread you have tried to confound “continental origin” (Asian), Nationality (Norwegian) and “Race”.
Once again, a stellar way to demonstrate your complete ignorance of the topic.
WTF? No really, WTF? I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. But let’s not go there. How about you restrict yourself for now to answering the questions put to you.
Isn’t that reasonable?
I’m not weaseling out of answering the question. I have very accurately answered it.
Race = The classification of people based on the migration of various populations. How tightly someone–including myself–subdivides those classifications depends on how finely it needs to be subdivided dependent on the conversation at hand. There is no magical number that works for all situations. If there was, I would give it, but there isn’t and so I’m not. It’s an impossible question to answer.
Bolding added.
The logic was that as people migrated, their bodies adapted to their surroundings. These adaptations are most probably beneficial to survival in those regions, and survivability is a worthwhile thing.
That’s nonsense. See below.
Why? If somebody claims that all swans are black, you need only to point out 1 white swan, and the claim is falsified.
In this case, the claim being discussed is that “race has nothing to do with genes”
Clearly race has something to do with genes. What exactly the relationship is open to debate. But there is clearly a relationship.
That’s not true, but anyway, it’s irrelevant to this thread. The question that prompted this thread is whether “race has nothing to do with genes”
Please take your personal attacks elsewhere. Thank you.
It is not necessary to define “white” precisely in order to answer the question posed. If you will not even concede for purposes of this discussion that Brad Pitt is “white” as that term is commonly understood, then it’s a waste of time to discuss things any further.
Feel free to open a thread asking people to define race precisely, however.
Ok Guys, thanks for all the responses…
It seems that a lot of us have different ideas of what ‘race’ means:
From wikipedia (yes, I know its not a great source, but this seems a reasonable definition):
The term race refers to the concept of dividing people into populations or groups on the basis of various sets of characteristics and beliefs about common ancestry. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color, facial features and hair texture), and self-identification.
I don’t really think one could argue that skin colour, facial features and hair texture are not affected by genes. I must confess that I know very little about DNA/Genes, but it seems obvious to me that they affect the physical characteristics of a human being, including those aforementioned.
Getting back to my original post, I feel I should have elaborated on my query:
I don’t understand why my lecturer would (indirectly) quote a natural scientist (some form of biologist if I recall correctly) if she was defining race in terms of cultural and religious attributes - things that have no real relationship with natural sciences.
All I wanted was for someone to confirm that those people who possess the physical characterisitcs of a particular race invariably inherited them throught their genes. It seems most of us agree on that much…
Thanks again all! 