I was unsure just what part Brazil84 played in all this, or what his position was.
OTOHColibri has in my experience been an honest debater and a good scientist. If he says that Brazil is a liar, frankly I believe him.
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What term would you prefer for African Blacks? Negroids? Africanus? Use whatever you’d like. Same for Asians/Orientals…any term you’d like. Caucasians/Whites, whatever you’d like.
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Speaking for myself I don’t really care what term you use, so long as you can prove it refers to a scientifically valid group.
All you need to know about brazil you can learn from my discussion with him about anti-Asian discrimination. Incredibly dishonest, dickfingered assbag.
What I would like—in fact, what I would require in order to consider racial categories to be a scientifically valid classification system—is a term that represents a well-defined set of genetic populations that are demonstrably more closely related to each other than they are to genetic populations outside that set.
I’m not asking you what we ought to call that set, I’m asking you to define scientifically what constitutes the criteria for belonging to that set.
Again, it’s not a matter of choosing the term (although admittedly it’s less confusing to have terms that don’t easily conflate with skin color if you don’t want the categories to be defined by skin color). It’s a matter of explaining what the term refers to.
What actual genetic populations fall into the categories that you call “Asians/Orientals” (or some equivalent term) and “Caucasians/Whites” (or some equivalent term)?
Dude, this isn’t a “game”, this is the whole crucial point of the discussion. If you don’t even know genetically what you mean by calling people “black” versus “white” or “Asian” or whatever racial category name you want to use, then how can you claim to be drawing any valid conclusions about people’s genetic backgrounds from their racial category?
Heck, of course you will! You’re postulating a racial classification system based largely on what people look like, and claiming that you’ll be able to correctly classify pictures of random people according to that system—i.e., based on what they look like. I sure can’t argue with that!
That’s like saying that given a random selection of color pictures of butterflies, you’ll be able to pick out which are the blue ones, which are the yellow ones, and which are the orange ones, with a high degree of accuracy. Well, duh—I wouldn’t have expected otherwise.
But what we’re arguing about here is not whether you can tell somebody’s race (i.e., appearance-based category) based on what they look like, but rather whether you can reliably infer anything about the genetic kinships of those random people based on what they look like.
If “race” is to be a scientifically useful concept in human genetics, then it has to tell us something verifiably correct about genetic relationships between humans. Your proposed test wouldn’t tell us jack-point-shit about how the random people in your pictures were actually related to one another.
I repeat: if a racial classification system doesn’t provide reliable information about the actual genetic relationships of members of those races, then what the hell is the point of it?
Kimstu, let’s try this as a starting point. You seem to agree that neither you nor I would have any trouble identifying people in our little wager. That we’d be able to identify—with a very high degree of certainty—Asians as Asians, Caucasians as Caucasians, and African Blacks as African Blacks. (Let’s leave aside the side issue of Aboriginals for now, though I’m fairly certain I could identify them, too.)
So, these characteristics that allow us to correctly identify people in our wager, would you say that they are genetically based? That those characteristics are very likely to be passed on generationally?
Well true, in natural sciences you invariably have continuous underlying variation but people have no difficulty describing categories that roughly map that variation. This happens all the time (hills vs mountains for example), or a more mundane example, when is a bald person bald?
This is also why I’ve asked some people on this thread whether they simply disagree with the whole subspecies/race approach across the board. For every species, or just in relation to humans.
Passed on generationally between individuals, sure. Individuals tend to look more like their parents than like unrelated individuals, although there are certainly many exceptions.
But not necessarily genetically based with respect to populations. That is, when it comes to genetic populations, the extent to which they look alike is not a reliable indicator of how closely related they are. This is partly due to “convergent adaptation”, as Belowjob2.0 noted, which over time leads populations in similar environments to evolve similar traits irrespective of how closely related they are genetically.
For example, if we identified among our pictures one member of the “Caucasian race”, one member of the “Asian race”, and two members of the “African Black race”, then your hypothesis about racial categories, as I understand it, would suggest that the two African Blacks would be more closely related than the Caucasian and the Asian.
But that could very well be entirely wrong. Many African populations, such as the !Kung and the Tswana, are farther apart genetically than, say, Japanese and French populations. Counterintuitive, but true.
Even though you and I might think, on the basis of the racial classification scheme, that the two Africans “look more alike” than the Asian and Caucasian do, they could very well be less closely related than the Asian and Caucasian are.
This is the big hitch in attempting to interpret current racial classifications as proxies for actual genetic population divisions. They just fail to take into account the effects of things like convergent adaptation. Consequently, they can’t reliably tell the difference between “groups that look alike because they’re closely related” and “groups that look alike even though they’re not closely related”.
That’s incorrect. Just because cohesive populations might (and do) exist, does not mean that all people are easily identified. Certainly not by the naked eye.
Let’s say that we have three different peoples living on three isolated planets. And they are factually quite different. Group A is quite tall—all over 7 feet—with blue hair. Group B is quite short—all under 4 feet—with red hair. And Group C is Medium height—all between 5 and 6 feet—with yellow hair. All groups have there eyes. They all have a common ancestor.
If we went and brought these people to earth, would you say that they’d constitute three groups that we could talk about as being three races? I’d say that would make sense. Now if these people are all sent to a huge, previously uninhabited pleat and over the millennia, interbred, might you expect there to be some people that you’d have a hard time determining which DNA was most strongly represented in their bodies? Of course the answer is yes. And they are your Italians, Turks, Lebanese, etc. And they’re existence does not negate nor disprove the existence of the three races.
Oh, I see what you’re saying now. That’s helpful. I completely get that the two Black Africans may not be was closely related genetically as two individuals who appear to not share overt characteristics. I wasn’t concentrating on that, but I agree with the logic behind it. But that doesn’t negate my point, which is only that two African Blacks, or two Asians, or two Caucasians DO share genes that make them similar. They needn’t be more similar than disparate individuals. That’s got nothing to do with my position. The fact remains, that there may be (are) certain identifiers that are very reliable for classification. For instance, dark skin, or kinky hair, or dark skin and kinky hair.
Turkey has an interesting history and there is a recent paper on the ancestral background of that population. Unfortunately, I can’t open the full paper but here is part of the abstract:
This is the case with other species too, you have intergradation and mixed populations. Here’s a beetle example:
Do these standards apply to all categories which are used in science? Or just to human races?
For example, if I divide the human population into “non-smokers,” “light smokers,” and “heavy smokers,” does this grouping have scientific validity? Why or why not?
Also, what are the consequences is a grouping lacks scientific validity? Does it mean that any scientific study which attempts to generalize about such groups is somehow per se invalid? Or does it mean something else?
And this whole post (and many of your other posts in this thread) are also based on misunderstanding. You seem to think that I believe that any person with black skin can be lumped into a racial group called “blacks” or something. I’ve never said that. all I’ve said is that I think it’s legitimate for scientists to come up with racial groups for purposes of doing studies as long as they explain how they did so.
More basically, the issue you seem to be most up in arms about is how actual genetic populations do not track perfectly with the social/cultural groups that make up traditional concepts of race. I agree with that and have no beef with it. So you can save your sermons and address my actual points if you are able to.
