I’ve put forwards arguments on here before about ‘race’ and skin colour. Skin colour is a very superficial trait, there are evolutionary reasons for it that are largely irrelavent these days.
Take the case of athletics;
It wouldn’t be unusual to see an Olympic 100m final with all eight contestants being of West African origin.
And it wouldn’t be unusual to see, say, six out of the top ten finishers of the 10,000m being of East/Horn of African origin.
Ever seen a Kenyan win the 100m final?
Ever seen a Jamaican win the 10,000m final?
They are, obstensibly, the same colour, but evolved in very different environments, which plays a far more important role than their skin colour.
And I’m not expecting there to be much rigor in what you’re seeing, i.e. no real scientific merit. If you want to sort people by color like they’re M&Ms, be my guest. Where would you put this guy and this guy? Same category? Is it significant if they’re closely related or not? Got any idea how many (if any) genetic markers you plan to reference in your sorting scheme?
What I don’t understand is why we’re okay with domestic cats having “breeds”, and not people. There’s far less variation between a Siamese cat and a Maine Coon than between many _____s of people. We’re perfectly able to understand that a cat is a cat, whether it has long fur or short fur or black fur or white fur. Cats can all interbreed and you get recognizably mixed breed cats, like a Maine Coon with Siamese points. And when they interbreed enough, there’s no breed label that really applies anymore, and they’re just “domestic longhairs” or “domestic shorthairs”. But they’re all cats, no question. Yet we still see the utility in talking about the lanky grace of the Siamese and the aggressive affection and size of the Maine Coon, even if you have a fat clumsy Siamese or a reclusive tiny Maine Coon.
Would people who deny that humans have “races” be okay if we called them “breeds” instead?
But breeds were intentionally created through forced breeding. If you take any species and subject it to enough artificial selection, it won’t take very long for you to create groups that are so different, they might as well be different species
I’m not sure why intent matters. But if you want intent, there’s been a lot of time, energy, religion, and money historically put into controlling who your daughter marries so she breeds true to your race. Breed. Whatever.
Do you have a cite for this, other than someone else asserting the same thing?
Any number of studies using self-identified groups (including those for the US categories of “race” ) show quantified differences between, for example, self-identified asians and blacks on, for example, standardized IQ tests and standardized school exams such as the SAT or ACT.
For physical characteristics, a number of standardized measurements also show quantifiable, repeatable differences.
It’s true that enough variation exists to make an argument that the total variation overlap renders a conclusion for any two individuals imprecise, but the populations in aggregate would have disparate distributions for any number of phenotypic expressions that would be reproducible and quite distinct between groups.
Self-identification, and the fact that a race is not biologically definable does not mean that there are not biologically-driven different average outcomes for self-identified groups (including self-identified races) when the whole self-identified group is aggregated. How much of a difference and how much intra-group variation would of course depend on how one is defining a population being compared.
The migration patterns and evolutionary changes over the course of anatomically modern humans have not created a world in which any two populations have equal chances of drawing the same gene variants from the same total pool. A typical self-identified population draws from an aggregated pool that is distinct enough from the aggregated pool of a different self-identified population such that an individual’s genetically driven phenotype reflects the odds within that pool of genes much more than the odds of a different population’s gene pool. You wouldn’t expect nearly the concentration of Neandertal genes in a west africa population–even today–as you would in a eurasian population. You wouldn’t have nearly the chances of having MCPH1 Haplogroup D in a subsaharan aggregate as a european aggregate–and that’s an example where self-identified race grouping would drive that aggregate average difference, even if neither group is biologically define. It’s just a quirk of human migration…
At issue is how much of the difference is biological and how much might be nurture, but I would be curious what makes you think the random variation among an intragroup population somehow renders the between-group aggregate average less signficant…
Without getting into that whole argument again, the East Asians including Han Chinese, Koreans and Japanese are not reliably distinguishable from each other. If you go to a control set such as Chinese-, Korean- and Japanese Americans, people can’t them apart. Likewise, most of what people claim are distinct differences are confirmation bias.
I think your point is that we can tell groups apart, but as you say, the problem is that the groups are difficult to define. Sure, it’s easy to tell East Asians from Caucasians but it’s not in clear blocks.
One of our friends is a Uyghur Chinese who is quite fair with darker, much brothers who look more classic Middle East. She is constantly mistaken for American or European.
Your classifications would place them in difference races would make the concept meaningless.
This is often true, the key word being “reliably.” The wife is Thai but ethnically Chinese. She has been mistaken by her fellow Thais as Japanese and even Filipina.
You can only make intellectual distinctions based upon “race” using college entrance exam scores (or, indeed, any other standardized testing) under the assumption that the self-identification of groups is an accurate representation of the whole and that genetic factors are the predominate influence upon test results over all other factors. Neither of these is true, as can be demonstrated by looking at the distribution of scores in comparison to other factors such as cultural background, socioeconomic status, quality of available education, et cetera. In fact, SAT and ACT scores aren’t even a particularly good metric of the single parameter they’re designed to measure, i.e. a predictor of academic success in higher education, so trying to use these to prove the ancillary point that there are intellectual differences between ‘races’ is sort of like arguing that all cars painted red are faster than all cars painted black.
There are certainly morphological differences between individual populations that result in functional physiological differences, e.g. why the Kalenjin dominate in competitive long distance running, or why we will never see a star Bambuti NBA player, nor will an Amerindian demonstrate the characteristic hooked ‘Greek’ nose of the Medicis. The problem is that to make these kinds of observations you have to confine the range of genealogical variation to a very small group. The broad scope of identified “races”, e.g. Black, Asian, White/Caucasian, et cetera are so generalized that the identifiable functional characteristics of any small group within are completely lost. If you wanted to define races as specific to each of these populations, you’d have thousands of different races and yet, the majority of the world population–and especially the developed, industrial world–would not fall neatly into any one of these groupings.
In fact, the modern identification of ‘races’ even on purely superficial morphology is wholly arbitrary; Africans and persons of African descent can actually broken into three major phenotypical groups (along with other smaller ones) that are every bit as distinct in appearance from each other as so-called Caucasian Europeans are from East (“Oriental”) Asians. The entire modern concept of race was developed and exists strictly to give a sense of moral certitude to the colonial nations of Europe in their forced subjugation of the natives of Africa, Asia, Melanesia, and the Americas, and was previously applied to groups that are now considered part of the homogenous Caucasoid race, e.g. Irish, Sicilians, Iberians, et cetera, (and despite the fact that the people who actually inhabit the Caucasus geological region and/or speak in traditional Caucasian languages are a jumble of Arabs, Persians, Armenians, Turks, Huns, Magyars, et cetera).
Race is an outdated, prejudicial, functionally insubstantial, and ultimately useless concept for any practical purpose other than as a shorthand for socioethnic groupings (and even in this venue it is more used to stereotype than legitimately categorize). If you want to talk about morphological or phenotypical differences it would be more useful to talk in terms of haplotypical groups, or rather, combinations of haplotypes. Unfortunately for those wishing to maintain the traditional nomenclature, these track very poorly with ‘race’.
You shouldn’t. You should drop out because you are wrong. Many regional populations/nationalities/etnicities have “a look” based on a number of features that are particularly common in that population, but none of those features will be ubiqitous, unless also shared with other groups (except possibly for extremely genetically isolated groups).
If you have trait A, B and C occuring 80% of the time in group 1, the human tendency to find patterns will dub the combination of A,B, B,C, A,C or A,B,C group 1s look and 90% of group 1 will have those characteristics, but 10% will have just one or none, despite obviously being part of the group.
And even though that combination will be based on the features that differ the most from neighbouring groups, if those traits occur 30% of the time in one such group, then 20% of that population will have the “group 1” look, despite (and this is the important part) not being more closely related to group 1 than their relatives and neighbours.
That’s not to say that you can’t have similarities that really correlate to relatedness, but there’s a good chance those will be coincidental, and they will be swamped by the simple result of genetic diversity.
“Japanese look like Japanese” only if you exclude all those Japanese that don’t look Japanese and all the individuals of neighbouring ethinicities who happen to that the Japanese look. It has no useful meaning other than increasing your chances of guessing someone’s heritage correctly.
There’ve been some reported in news articles, mostly individual ancestry not group studies, but it’s generally acknowledged that Afrikaners have a Khoisan/Cape Coloured input, this has been known since the 80s and backed byhistoric records of intermarriage.
Counterpoint. Proves that Khoisan were not reproductively isolated. Two distinct pulses of outside inputs are evident, much more recently than 150 000 years ago. Plus there’s the migration of distinctly Khoisan genes outwards into the Nguni, like I already cited.
Well, there’s the standard core-rules human, and then there’s azurins, karsites, illumians, neanderthals, possibly half-elves and half-orcs with an optional rule, and a few others from Races of Destiny.
It means whatever the speaker wants it to mean; it is simply the term used to distinguish groups apart. To an American, it generally means “black, white, Asian or Hispanic.” (Hispanic, of course, being more ethnicity than anything else, which calls into question your claim that race is not ethnicity.) To a Japanese, as pointed out, it means a very different thing entirely; they do not generally consider themselves the same race as the Koreans. To a Hutu, a Tutsi is a difference race and who cares about the Japanese.
The link does not link to the original paper, but I’m calling BS on a so-called scientist who thinks he can extrapolate a human custom back 150K years. As for the genetic data, without seeing the actual paper, I will still call BS on the idea that a group of humans could exist in Africa for 150K years without interbreeding with other groups of humans. I would also doubt our ability to measure that level of detail, at the genetic level and on those timescales.
You are looking at aggregation and race backwards, I think. It’s not that “race” is a biologically definable group. It’s that if folks self-identify by (standard) races, there are biological differences in genes for the aggregate which is produced by the self-identification.
Let’s agree “race” is fairly useless. I think we can agree that there is no useful biological definition of it.
However, from that does not proceed a conclusion that self-identified “race” groups do not have biologically-driven average differences for the aggregated group. Nor does morphologic appearance serve as a particularly good marker for what makes the underlying gene pools different.
Let’s use “black” and “white” as examples.
Whether they are “races” is a question of definition, so we can simply allow self-identification to create the two groups. Now we look at average differences in gene pools for the aggregate. Lo and behold, those differences are marked, quantifiable and consistent.
Why?
Well, as you know, the main historical migration of humans out of africa into the Levant occurred about 40-70 kya, following which the geographic gate is presumed to have closed, minimizing the backflow of migration (with some exceptions in the horn of africa and across the Sahara; not enough to change the aggregate average).
OK; using mtDNA haplogroup tracers for shorthand, sub-saharan africa is mostly L1-L3, with the exceptions noted above, and eurasian populations are mostly the rest of the mtDNA alphabet. As a consequence, gene variants which arose or were introgressed within sub-saharan africa did not flow out to eurasian populations, and gene variants which arose or were introgressed in post africa populations did not flow back to the majority of sub-saharan populations.
Among the most interesting example of such gene introgression is the Neandertal lineage, which was introgressed into an early out of africa population. Thus, descendants of those ancestors have a surprising amount of Neandertal genes, which are quite rare for most of sub-saharan (non-horn) africa, except where remnants have been carried in. The aggregate average difference is quite marked, with 1-4% not being an unusual amount of Neandertal gene content in eurasians.
There are many other examples of how self-identification drives an aggregated difference for gene variant prevalence. MCPH1 haplogroup D is an (infamous) example, but if you look at well-studied genes such as those for disease, you will nearly always see prevalence differences if self-identified race groups are aggregated.
Do those differences make a difference? Let’s not go there.
What is scientifically correct is that if self-identify as white or black, I place myself into an aggregated group with a different average prevalence for pretty much all the gene variants (and archaic line introgressed genes) which have come about in the last 70,000 years. Thanks to evolution and those archaic lines, that’s a lot of gene variants. Those gene variants accrue only to descendant populations, so to the extent the out of africa divide correlates with “I am black”/“I am white,” that self-identification will create an aggregate average difference even where the difference for any two individuals may by trivial.
Aside from differences in the prevalence for the gene variants themselves, differences also exist for those two aggregate populations in the prevalence frequency for the same gene variants. Homozygosity for R577X alleles (ACTN3 X/X) would be an example of that kind of prevalence frequency difference.
But you can look up almost any gene variant study that uses self-identified blacks and whites, and it’s kind of unusual NOT to see a difference in either prevalence frequency or gene variant.
Even if “race” is not definable biologically, and identification is an arbitrary personal choice, for any of the major typical race groups, there are aggregate average differences for gene variant prevalences. It may be a stupid way to group people, but having done it, it does create biologically different aggregates.
It has nothing to do with evolution. East African cultures value marathons and West African cultures value sprinting. Just like Japan and the US value baseball while the UK and India value cricket. Are you going to say there’s a racial or evolutionary factor behind which countries enjoy cricket versus baseball?
Your example also illustrates why race is culturally based. In the US, black people have a distinct and recognizable culture, patterns of speech, history of discrimination, etc. Worldwide, however, there’s little you can say about black people as a whole except that they’re more likely to come from poor countries. Do you really think people from Nigeria and people from Kenya have evolved significant physiological differences?
