What evidence would falsify this claim?
Evidence that humans meet the criteria generally used by biologists to denote a “subspecies” (race = subspecies). As it is, we don’t.
brazil84: I think it would be helpful if you read the wikipedia article on subspecies. It should be quite clear that our species can’t be logically divided into distinct groups with clear boundaries.
And what are the criteria for denoting a “subspecies?”
I beat you to it. 
See post #63.
Well, just to back up brazil84 (he doesnt seem to be getting much), and since y’all seem to be righting off his linked article:
From the American Journal of Human Genetics:
The article also states that America is a specially tough place to run this type of research, what with the “melting pot” and all. Anyone care to point out that article’s flaws?
John Mace, I think you are moving the goal posts by saying race=subspecies. Racist and Enlightened alike believe that the races are the same species - well a modern racist anyway. It would be better to say race=breed (as in dog).
I don’t see where in the article you are referring to. Could you quote it for me?
And that article was written about the US (and Taiwan), which lacks significant numbers of individuals from many of the world’s ethnic groups. If you tried to apply that study to a country like India or Afghanistan or even Russia, I doubt it would work. It would be incorrect to conclude that you can impose a world-wide racial categorization on the human species based on that study. Again, please look at the wikipedia article on subspecies.
No. Race, as it is generally applied to humans is a social construct. If you want to make it a scientific construct, then you’re stuck with race = subspecies. If you want to say that “race” is somehow even lower than “subspecies”, then you have to establish that there are subspecies to begin with.
The traditional racial groups seen in humans are not at all like breeds of dogs, which are artificially designed to produce certain traits and which are then artificially kept separate from other dog populations to maintain those traits.
There are several parts, but here is a good one:
We are characterized by bullet #3.
If you want to look strictly at genetic variation (and forget for the moment about phenotype), look how humans compare to our close relative, the chimpanzee (see figure 3), which generally has 4 recognized subspecies (races). We’re not even close.
You’re not even trying to understand. Thanks for the exchange!
I think that’s grasping at straws, don’t you? I mean the United States has plenty of different “ethnic groups”. The abstract says “Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic)”, and the genetics backed them up. Do you have a similar study from Afghanistan or Russia that shows contrary evidence? I would think those countries would be different for sure being so close to or straddling continental borders, but I don’t think you can wave it away with a “I doubt it would work”.
This criteria for a subspecies from your wikipedia article re-enforces to me that you should not be conflating race and subspecies:
I doubt even the most ardent racist would think that. We’ve all seen Mulatto babies.
You are not doing anything other than sighing at his “ignorance” and re-stating your one line point. Not much of an “exchange”
If you can show me where I have sighed at his ignorance, please do. Otherwise, please check your facts first.
Any more requests?
Actually, I am trying to understand. Part of the reason why I asked what evidence would falsify your claim was to force you to make it clear exactly what your claim meant.
So again, my question: What evidence would falsify the claim that there are no races among humans?
I would also disagree with this point. I would say the racial divide in humans is extremely similar to the breed divide in domestic dogs. The main difference only being that dogs were “artificially kept separate” and humans were, I suppose, “naturally kept separate”. This produces more distinct and wider variation in dogs but I don’t think it means they are essentially different.
eta: And you accept the existence of distinct breeds but don’t suppose that these breeds are actual subspecies do you?
Of course I can. If you’re making an assertion that you think this method would work in continental border areas, then you need to produce the data to show that it does. You simply cannot generalize from US data, which represents a diverse, but still small sample of the ethnic groups in the entire world. For instance, note that this study really didn’t tell us much about “Hispanics” at all, per the authors:
Emphasis added. Reading on further, we find that “East Asian” is only an arbitrary group as well:
So is there one “East Asian” race or two (or more)?
The point is that you are predetermining what the groupings are and then fitting the data to it. Nothing wrong with that, per se, except that the predetermined groups are arbitrary, and they are selected from groups that are native to areas quite distant from each other (East Asia vs Western Europe vs Western Africa). They looked for “Asian” and found clusters that could determine “Asian” as opposed to European or African, but if they looked for “Chinese” and “Japanese” they would have found clusters to support that division, too. You could do the same thing in Europe, finding clusters that could separate, say, native Irish and Greeks, but are those meaningful distinctions?
Another example would be Native Americans and Eskimos. Are they the same race or are they separate? You can find genetic difference between them if you look for that, but you could put them in the same group, too, if you were simply contrasting them from other groups. You could set up any number of divisions based on genetic data, and there just isn’t any good reason to select one over another. Everywhere you look you are going to find border areas where lots of people aren’t going to fit into whatever categories you choose.
Firstly, the term “subspecies” cannot properly be applied to domesticated animals. Breeds of dogs are kept separate from the general dog population, but the general dog population is constantly reabsorbing genes back from those breeds, too.
And humans have not been naturally kept separate. If you look at central and South America, for example, we have more than an entire continent where a large percentage of the people are of mixed heritage (“mixed” meaning that they can trace their recent ancestry back to at least 2 different continents). Europe itself has always been a melting pot, with gene flow from the Mideast, Central Asia, and North Africa happening as far back as history can record.
Right, the less than total separation amongst humans means we have less diversity than dogs. It’s undeniable that during the development of “races” (i.e. long before European settlement in South America) travel between continents was difficult or at least very time consuming. That made for a weaker, but distinct, “breeding effect”. At least ISTM.
It also seems to me that the existence of Aboriginal-European mixed race people in Central America is no more a denial of the concept of “race” than the Cockapoo is a denial of the concept of “breed”.