Race is only a useful term if you are willing to exclude literally hundreds of millions of people from whatever categories you choose. Remember, we’re talking globally here, not just what you see in the US (and even in the US you’ll need to exclude millions of people from whatever definition you use). So, how useful is that?
Part of the problem is that the races have been pretty much selected by Europeans, so that group is used as the reference point. We then create, for example, this race we call “Asian” (by which we mean East Asian). But show me any two people where one is from China and one is from the Philippines, and I’ll be able to tell you which is which with at least 90% accuracy. Why is that? It’s only because where I live there are lots of Chinese and lots of Filippinos. Give the same test to someone from Texas and I doubt the person will be able to produce the same results.
As we go around the globe, we find ourselves having to add more and more races where ever we go. The Philippines? Oh, let’s create a new group called “Malay”. Moving on to Tahiti, we create a new group we call “Polynesian”. But when we go to Vanuatu, we have to create yet another group called “Melanesian”. What to do with Fiji, though, where people are of mixed Melanesian and Polynesian ancestry (ignoring all the Indians and Europeans who arrived later). Let’s move on to the Andaman Islands where we’ll find yet another group-- the “Negritoes”. The process never ends for the simple reason that humans vary continuously around the globe and different populations have been interbreed for thousands of years.
So, you have a concept called “race” that doesn’t have any precise definition but that varies depending on the circumstances. How on earth are you going to link that to anything?
At any rate, I defy you to pick any one of those definitions and be able to successfully relate it to genetics without having to exclude large segments of the population not just globally, but even in the US.
No, it has a definition which means “the classification of…” I.e. the subdivision of homo sapiens.
How many life forms are there on the planet? “Life form” is a meaningful concept, but how many different ones there are on the planet depends on at what granularity you feel like subdividing at the time. You could say that there are bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes–so three–or you could say that there are hundreds of thousands of different species.
Yeah, but I can design a genetic test to tell you what species an organism is. Sure, I may run into a few problems with species that hybrid occasionally, but the very definition of species (see my first post in this thread) assures you that those hybrids will be few in number.
Now, let’s look at humans. Show me the race classification scheme that you are going to define and that you can link to genetics that doesn’t require you to exclude large numbers of people. I’d like to know, for instance, how the millions and millions of Mexican mestizos are going to fit into that classification scheme. And how you are going to determine whether someone like Tiger Woods’ daughter wil grow up be seen as Black or White based soley on her DNA. Given that she has at most 25% African heritage, it’s hard to say whether she will look White or Black. Chances are she’ll look one way to some people and another way to others.
The same is true of the many Eurasian people who live in CA alone. For example, my GF is half Japanese and half European. Some people says she looks Asian, some people think she looks European, and some people think she’s Hispanic when they first meet her. Often it depends on who she’s with. She doesn’t really stand out much when she’s with either her Asian relatives or her White relatives.
So, sure, you can define any number of racial categories. But they are social in nature, and can’t be linked to genetics in any reliable way. Not unless you exclude a large number of individuals who aren’t going to fit.
If you want a sociology take on this discussion, see the work of Troy Duster, past president of the American Sociological Association. He does a lot of stuff on the relationship between genes and race. (And he would agree that race is socially constructed.)
From a taxonomic standpoint, race cannot be a meaningful descriptor simply because it is possible to be of “mixed race”, however you choose to define it. “Species” is a sloppy enough term, though certainly more discrete than is “race”. If two presumed species interbreed and produce fertile offspring on a regular basis, most taxonomists would then classify them as a single species. Species are separated out if they do not interbreed, or do not tend to do so when left to themselves (yes, that’s a simplification; I’m using this as an analogy…).
With human races, they all interbreed, no matter how you choose to define “race”. As such, there is no clear distinction between Race A and Race B; there will always be individuals who lie “between” those two groups. As such, “race” cannot be a meaningful taxonomic category. As any taxonomist will tell you, a thing belongs to either one branch of a hierarchy or another; it cannot belong to both. Mixed race individuals, therefore, completely undermine the concept of race as a useful or meaningful taxonomic tool.
Heck, if “mixed” is an allowed answer, then I’ll take up that challenge. It’s easy: I’ll just answer “mixed” for all of them, without even looking at the picture.
Please stop posting this in GQ, because it is factually incorrect. Race cannot be defined in a biological sense wrt the entire human species, and so it can’t have any relation to a biological entity such as genes. It’s like saying ghosts don’t have much relationship to old houses, but they do have some correlation. Since there are no such things as ghosts, they cannot have a relationship to anything.
Not very. I agree that race isn’t useful. It is not a scientifically defined concept. But the OP wasn’t “Is there a biologically valid or useful notion of ‘race’?”. The OP was “Is race (whatever race is, even if it’s just a haphazardly applied system of social labelling) correlated with genes in any way?”. I don’t mean to imply that from someone’s genes you can say “Yup, this guy’s definitely 60% black, 34% white”, whatever. I just mean to say, from a look at certain aspects of his genotype, you can get a decent idea of what kind of labels the guy is likely to have thrust upon him by certain people.
Yes, I agree that one’s perceptions of racial categories depend on what one has become conditioned to notice or not.
I agree with this as well.
Lots of people do cause a “Hm, what is he? I can’t really tell” reaction when it comes to questions about race. Race is not at all a precise concept; it exists in people’s minds more than in any physically significant way. All the same, to the extent that it does exist in people’s minds, the way people toss out racial labels does have correlation with some (superficial, arbitrary, otherwise unimportant) genetic factors, such as skin color and the like. Person A’s chances of getting the reaction “I think he’s black/white/Asian” has high statistical correlation with Person A’s kid’s chances of getting the same reaction. The one doesn’t guarantee the other, these labels are ultimately not terribly useful for all the reasons you point out, but there is this correlation in the labelling which goes on nonetheless.
Certainly that’s true, though it is most likely true of nearly all animal species as well. If I have Mountain Warbles on the West coast, Plains Warbles in the middle, and Forest Warbles on the East, most likely those birds are interbreeding at the edges of their areas, and so a Mountain Warble might be the great great grandson of a Forest Warble that lived 3,000 miles away. That doesn’t stop zoologists from announcing new species regularly and feeling that this is taxonomically sound.
But most of the world is not like the USA. Certainly everyone on the planet is a mutt, to be certain, but historically, usually your foreign genes came from short distances away, and those from just slightly farther, and then just slightly farther. Usually, you didn’t get people transported halfway across the planet to copulate. And even in modern day this has been largely true everywhere except for the USA.
If I go to China and look at a person’s ancestry, I might find that 10 generations back, there’s a Mongolian, 20 back a Russian, 30 a Pole, and 40 a Fin. It will slowly circle out further the deeper I go into his family tree. While as if I, an American, get looked at, in just a few generations you’ll be able to jump from Ireland, to Germany, to the Americas, and back to Wales. So myself and most Americans, indeed, are worth calling mutts, but most of the rest of the world you’re pretty darn fine to split them up into different races.
Well, for one thing, just because people think you are in race X doesn’t mean that you actually are in race X. For another thing, phenotype doesn’t determine what race you are in. It’s a marker for race, but not a determinant.
Take the Papau New Guinean example. Such a person may be pegged as black by folks who only have phenotypic cues to go by. But in the US at least, blacks = people of sub-saharan African descent. Papau New Guineans, dark-skinned SE Asians, and fro-wearing Australian Aboriginees are not generally considered Negroes.
Race seems to have more to do with geographical ancestry than it does appearance, in the US. If we were in Brazil, where multiple races can be present in one family based on how dark a person’s skin is, then we could say racial classification is phenotype-determined.
Well, if enough people with access to whatever they would consider to be the relevant information agree that you’re in race X, then you are in race X, since race is a social construct. Though, yes, it will be the case that often people might label you in some racial way based on your looks, but then revise that and say “Oops, I was mistaken. You’re actually …” if given further information about your ancestry.
Right, and this applies to all things labeled by people. Cats, bananas, and bacteria, included. That doesn’t mean that the labels we use aren’t based on some kind of consistent rule, though. The rules are socially contrived, but so are most labeling conventions.
I’m not saying that " ‘race’ is a biological concept, and it has correlation to genes." I’m saying that “The intuitive way the word ‘race’ is understood when you use it in everyday speech has some degree of meaning, and the distinctions you make when you use it has some correlation to genetics.”
Dude, there is nothing you can tell me about Haplogroups that I don’t already know. If you read that article, you’ll find that they support the idea that race is meaningless. Haplogroups ≠ Race, since they don’t necessarily correspond to what we think of as racial phenotypes, but they are only present in populations at certain statistical levels. Besides, the best understood Haplogroups are Y-Chromosome or mtDNA Happlogroups. Since they are transmitted only through the male and female lines, respectively, you can end up classifying cousins in different Y-Chromosome/mtDNA Haplogroups. That would lead you to putting cousins in different races. Of the 3 basal Y-Chromosome Haplogroups, only one is found* outside Africa, but all three are found in Africa. That means all non-Africans are descended from some small subset of the original African population (some of whom stayed in Africa).
If you aren’t going to read what I say in my posts then please don’t debate saying that I’m lying or have no idea what I’m talking about. If you look at a census form, when they ask for your race/ethnicity, they don’t ask for white/black/yellow/red, they ask for something like caucasian/african/oceanic/middle eastern/native american/asian/etc. In modern day, race is meant to refer to a haplogroup-like grouping. Maybe you’re older then me, or maybe where I grew up (California) has a less ambiguous meaning to the word race, but I would say that that’s the way the word is going. And so that’s the way I mean the word and would generally read someone to mean the word unless they specifically said otherwise.
For any other, more ambiguous definitions of race, I agree with and have said nothing other than what everyone else has said, namely that it’s based on your physical appearance and your physical appearance is based on your genes–ergo there is a relationship, however tenuous.
