This is the crux of the issue (and the point I was originally intending to make). Genetic diverity within the entire range of humanity is quite small, and any characteristic you wish to identify with a specific “race” is likely to have appeared repeatedly and often independently between populations that are geographically seperated. African “blacks” (which have a range of characteristics at least as diverse as Europeans and possibly as much as populations in Asia) and Austrailian Aborigonies are both widely considered “black”, even though they’re no more closely related than a Swede and an Esquimaux.
“Race” is a meaningless term in any technical concept. Speaking of populations or ethnicities is more useful, but can still be quite misleading; in Africa, there are numerous distinct genetic and linguistic groups despite living in common geographical areas. And the native peoples of the Americans would have to be considered one “race” by any rational standard, having diverged from a very small genetic pool at round 10000 BCE; however, rape and intermarriage with European colonists/conquistadors has almost completely obliterated any “pure” genetic groupings.
As has already been noted, comparison to dog breeds is really not appropriate; breeds are not a result of pseudo-random genetic mixing but a deliberate pressure to enhance particular characteristics via artificial selection. Even insofar as this, the genetic divergence of canines is slight; the genomic difference between a Great Dane and a Chihuahua is startlingly slight given the obvious phenotypical distinctions.
Although I hoped I had made this point clear enough, let me ratify it. I am certainly not proposing Black, Caucasian, Asian and Hispanic as races. I am not limiting races to a certain trait just as dog breeds are not “black dogs”, “hairy dogs” or “short dogs”
I am proposing “race” as a combination of characteristics. All the characteristics are also present in other “races” but the particular combination is unique to that “race”.
Just as with dogs, there are several breeds with short hair, several with black hair, several with long snouts, several with long legs. All those together make a Dobberman and no other breed shares all those traits together at the same time.
That the pressures that gave rise to modern dog breeds are different to the pressures that gave rise to ancient human "fill-in-the-blank"s is inconsequential to my question.
The fact remains that if you take three Border Collies of different ages, genders and shades and three German Shepperds also of varied types, most people will be able to separate them by breed over any other trait.
The same happens (or at least used to happen) with humans. If you take a group of Inuits and a group of Massais, even if you have all different sizes, ages, genders and builds, most people will be able to separate them into Inuits and Massais.
My question is, what do we call these groups of humans and how are they similar/different from dog breeds (as identifiable groups, not because of their origins)?
This question has already been answered: groups who share a common heritage are classified as “populations” or “ethnicities”. There is no taxinomical definition of race.
Identifing groups by cladistical means (that is, a set of shared characteristics) can be tricky and misleading. In the animal kingdom, species with common characteristics but highly divergent origins and genomes are common; this is called parallel or convergent evolution (depending on how related the species are prior to the development of said characteristics).
The fact that there are different ethnicities is sufficient to support the fact of evolution on human populations. Bringing in the term “race” is not only superfluous and ill-defined but it also drags a host of political and historical connotations which are neither useful or relavent.
Fair enough with the naming issue. I don’t like the word “race” myself. It not only carries all the negative baggage we all agree must be avoided but the word is also often misused for species.
And understood with it not being taxonomically kosher.
Be patient with me for a little longer and tell me how human populations or ethnicities relate to dog breeds.
They don’t, really. Dog breeds are a result of artificial selection for highly specific traits. The side effect is that most dog breeds would be totally incapable of surviving in the wild, especially in competition with native species. Dogs don’t choose–even unconsciously–to breed with other members of their own “breed”; they’re forced to do so, and this often gives rise to detrimental recessive characteristics that cause them to be less fit in any sense except AKC breed standards.
Ethnic variations in human populations are almost entirely due to allopatric speciation. The venerable Ernst Mayr writes extensively on the topic of allopatric speciation in What Evolution Is, which should be basic reading for anyone interested in evolution. (It’s largely nontechnical, a fundamental understanding of evolution from the organism-centric point of view.) Human populations, when not prevented from contact via geographical seperation will invariably intermingle, even when societal pressures dictacte otherwise. Such intermingling progresses rapidly down the geneline, largely invalidating any attempts to divide populations by strict definitions of race.
I don’t see how this can apply to any known human populations. Differences certainly have evolved when there’s a significant degree of reproductive isolation (those differences being exactly what Richard Dawkins
[quoted above]
among other uses the word ‘race’ for). But surely there are no examples where the differences have been more than a tiny fraction of those necessary to make interbreeding impossible.
In other words, in human history we can find allopatric divergence, but no allopatric speciation. (Or would some argue that neandertals form an example? I don’t know enough about that debate to say.)
I have often insisted in that I would like an explanation that is not linked to how they came to be. I understand that dog breeds we have created for esthetical or practical reasons. I understand that human populations have not been purposefully designed by anyone.
Still, the distinction between natural and artificial selection is, well, artificial. From a genetic standpoint, there is no difference between short legs being selected against by a critical breeder or the ability to chase food.
I would like an explanation based on genetics or taxonomy or what have you that is not a matter of motives.
Ditto for a Zulu family in the North Pole.
It is true that dog breeds are not adapted to any particular natural environment (although I can picture several breeds surviving competently in the wild) but that is only because survivability is not a selective pressure on them.
Utilitarian dog breeds (e.g. shepperds, hunters and retrievers) would have a better chance to make it in the wild than designer breeds (e.g. toy breeds) because the selection that shaped them is closer to natural selection.
I don’t think enlightened humans do either (if we believe in a colourblind society) but we are restricted to what is in front of us (mail-order brides to the contrary) and that sometimes means people from your own “type”. Same thing with dogs, they will hump any quadruped in sight but pedigree dogs only get to see their own breed in their humping moments.
And I could argue againt these dog characteristcs being detrimental if they lead to being purchased by more affluent owners who will get them more quality food and allow them to have more offspring?. They still are adaptions to their new environment.
yeah, speciation is a whole different ball of wax but I get what you are saying. Again, just different pressures that still result in differential selection of traits.
Well, that is what I am saying. Human populations, for a long time in their history, were prevented from contact with each other and as a result evolved different adaptations to their respective environments that resulted in different syndromes (combinations of phenotypical traits) that make them distinguishable from each other.
Nowaday these grouping are disappearing victims to globalization. The fences of our kennels are broken and we are interbreeding like there is no tomorrow. It won’t be long until we are all one mutt species.
But that these syndromes (populations, clustering, models, kits) exist (or at least existed) is, IMO, undeniable and self-evident to the point where ancient religions found it necessary to somehow account or them in their creation myths (specially if they needed to claim superiority over the not-us).
When the OP asks how different religions explain the existence of these without invoking evolution, responding that races don’t exist is a cop out of an answer. Fine, we don’t call them races anymore and we have refined our perception of them beyond skin colour but they are still there and they need to be explained.
I will leave the pulpit now for the supporters (or historians) of different religions to tell us how their different creation myths explain them.
No, sorry, I was unclear there. Clearly, different human populations have not specieated; however, ethnic distinctions are due to allopatric differentiations. Presumably, if seperated for a long enough period–on the order of millions of years–speciation could occur; however, there is no significant (in terms of reproductive capability) genetic or phenotypical distinctions between populations.
Natural selection emphasizes general fitness. While this can occasionally lead to extrema of physical traits (such as the speed of a cheetah or the extended length of the neck of a giraffe), it does not promote the development of traits that are detrimental to physical function and reproductive fitness. Artificial selection, on the other hand, often exaggerates particular physical characteristics to the immediate detriment of overall fitness and health; genetic and congenital defects are common with highly developed breeds. It also exaggerates paedomorphic or neotonic features, retarding development of mature features in the domestic canine subspecies; paedomorphic development is seen only rarely in natural selection, generally either as a precursor to domestication (dogs, sheep) or in response to a relaxation of predation and competition (insular or island dwarfism, where a combination of a lack of competition and reduced resources causes deprecation of unneeded capabilities.)
At any rate, breeds are defined by “breed standards”, regulated (in the United States) by the AKC and UKC, and serve as targets for breeders who select the breeding pair to statistically increase the incidence of those characteristics and culling from the breeding pool offspring that does not meet standard. Clearly (with certain opprobrious exceptions) this does not occur in human populations. Within the population of canines, the vast majority do not meet any breed standard; only those in accordance with breed standard and with a traciable lineage can be considered part of a breed. There is no corresponding characteristic or geneoglocial rigor with regard to human “races”.
But you could create a list of characteristics and enforce it with geneological rigor wrt human “races” if you wanted to. In fact, geneticists doing research on human diverstiy often do the latter when they want to find genetic differences between different ethnic groups. You want to make sure that this fellow from population A didn’t just move here from population area B or had recent ancestors who did.
Now, there would be **lots **of people who don’t fit into one of those defined “races” just as there are lots of dogs who don’t fit into those defined “breeds”. And you have no way of ensuring that those people who do fit would breed in such a way that their children will fit as well-- especially in a country like the US where we have such a diverse population to begin with.
You could try to this, but I think the degree of commonality in groupings is going to be nothing like that of canine breeds. It’s a common meme that members of another “race” (East Asians, Africans, et cetera) all “look alike”, but that’s an artifact of identifying people by characteristics that are most common to you rather than exhibiting a narrow range of differentiation. As previously noted, “blacks” comprise a large host of distinct ethnic and linguistic subgroupings, which can often further be reduced to familial or tribal distinctions from a restricted gene pool. (Not to single out Africa; the same can be said of many general ethnic groups like the Gaels, the Nordic peoples, et cetera. It’s just that people of African descent seem to be particularly selected as being of a common group, when in fact they are considerably more diverse.)
And lacking the impetus for inbreeding, no “breed standard” for human racial groups would hold up to phenotypical or taxanomical rigor for long. We could call all people with dark skin and broad noses “Negros”, but this would be unsuitably and unusably vague, except for the purposes of artificially dividing populations by an imposed diachotomy.
One can make an analogy between human ethnic groups and canine breeds, but the analogy (like most) breaks down pretty rapidly with any realistic application.
Stranger, throughout the entire thread it has been made fairly clear that we are not referring to “blacks” or “east asians”. Just in Africa we have referred to Zulus and Massais as separate populations and leaving most of the map still to fill up with several other populations (I don’t know, tutsis?) and good areas of mixed populations. In fact, I have been questioned about choosing groups that are too small!.
Well, there are hundreds of dog “breeds”, so if we use hundreds of “races” it wouldn’t be that hard, theoretically, to so something similar. It would be a lot of work, but it was a lot of work setting up the dog breeds, too. All members of a given dog breed are not identical looking, and neither would members of the humdreds of human “races” have to be. Sure, you’d have to allow for more variability in the human “races”, but so what? You’d still never mistake an Eskimo for an Australian Aborinal. And with hundreds of human “races”, you’d have some “races” that were quite similar to each other, just as some dog breeds are quite similar.
It breaks down if you insist on maintainging it over time. But if you had lots of resources, and wanted to classify people very quickly, you could do it. It’s not too different from what The Genogrpahic Project is doing right now. They are desparately taking DNA samples from all sorts of ethnic groups to try and map, in detail, the history of human migrations. To do that, they have to get samples from as many “pure” ethnicities as possible.
BTW, I encourage everyone to participate in that project. I mailed in my sample just today!
I’m using the example of races in the larger and more common context (blacks, Caucasians, Asian, et cetera) because it’s easier to illustrate dramatic differences within that group. Even if we use much more refined definitions, though, the concept of race is not terribly useful. Race is used in the social context to categorized populations of people. However, the vast majority of people, including people who are obviously “black”, “white”, “Oriental”[sic], are by any more refined definition, of mixed ethnicity. Canine breeds are, by definition, highly exclusionary, deliberately intended to remove from the category any member that doesn’t fit the specific breed standard. Unless you live in an insular tribe in a remote region of Africa or South America, you are most likely not to fit into any exclusionary definition of “race”, making such a definition useless for any valid purpose.
In short, classifying “race” in a way that is highly specific and exclusionary (analogous to canine breeds) leaves a substantial portion of human populations outside of definition (or at least in an anomolous grey zone). If we make the definition of race losey-goosey enough that most people (aside from obvious mulattos) falls strictly into one category or another, we lose specificty for any technical purpose. This may be useful in a general sociological context, provided that generalizations are not used to support very specific conclusions (i.e. Negros are less innately less intelligent, or “Aryans” are inherently superior) but when extended too far or without qualification, can resulting in claims of sociobiological distinctions between groups that are erroneous and even counterfactural.
Speaking of the features characteristic of an ethnic population is specific, explicit, and useful. Speaking in terms of “races”–again, not a taxonomically-defined or accepted term, is not particularly valuable, and brings with it a busload of unnecessary and detrimental context.
This is a trick question, since evolution is fact. Asking why fiction doesn’t take fact into account is a losing proposition. The factualists will say it’s obvious and the tale tellers will weave a tale.
A strawman then. I have repeatedly specified that we are talking about something else. I don’t look for my lost penny in the brightest lit room of the house, I look for it in the place where I dropped it.
As useful as the rest of taxonomy. Science doesn’t need to be useful
Again, not that we are talking about. We are talking Zulu, Inuit, Massai and the hundred more there might be.
There we agree. Ditto for the groups I am asking about. Whatever we call them, we are talking about little drawers where we put stuff to sort them
If the dog analogy bothers you so much, I am sure we can find some example of an species which is widely distributed and shows allopatric differentiation. I am thinking horses could be right. I feel confident that the horses of the Mongols were very different from the horses of the Native Americans or the Arabs long before they started to breed them.
True that there are not many groups that manage to remain isolated in our present time. But go back to a very recent past (say 1000 years) and a good percentage of humanity lived under such conditions. It might not make qualify for the daily news but it makes good history and good anthropology.
There is nothing wrong with a large percentage of the population not falling into one of the categories (and how large that percentage is would be very much arguable and dependent on the time of the sampling). That grey zone would not be anomalous. It is normal.
That the system could be abused by someone with an agenda does not make it any less valid. Nobody is accusing Einstein of bad science just because some people used his work to make atom bombs.
The features are specific, explicit and useful (for something) for sure. So is speaking of the populations. Let’s drop the word “races” and focus on the concept more than on the historical connotations of one of the possible words to name them.
You are getting too hung up on a specific and avoiding the issue at hand.
Humans, just like many other species with wide ranging habitats, at some point of their history, diverged into distinct groups with their own particular morphology. The classification and study of those groups and their history makes for good and valid science just as any other natural process.
Different cultures have noticed this phenomenom and tried to explain it in a way that fits their cultural/religious beliefs. Those explanations are also interesting in themselves and as part of the cultural development of those cultures. This was the point of the OP.
That some groups have used these explanations and beliefs to justify injustice against different groups, unfortunate as it is, is also a valid subject of study.
The injustice of an idea doesn’t make it taboo for study. Quite the contrary, it is their study who can lead us away from its error and see them for what they are.
And you’re trying to redefine the term race to mean what you want it to mean, rather than the context in which it is commonly used. In any case, I will again state that there is not taxonomic validity to the term “race”; it doesn’t have an explicit, or even widely accepted, definition, and brings with it decidedly unscientific connotations. The identification of “races” per the most common interpretation is not a strawman (or at least, not any more so than the restrictive definition to which you intend to put it, which the prose following the quote you cited makes clear), and the definition is vague enough that it hardly bears use as a scientific classification (hence, why the technical literature talks “populations” or “ethnic groupings” but not “race”.)
Any analogy to domestic animals, be it dogs, horses, or whathaveyou, is still still a falicious comparison. Domestic animals have been specifically and consciously bred for certain traits (docileness, obedience, appearance, milk-bearing capability, et cetera) often to the detriment of their survival in any nondomestic environment. This is a result of artificial selection. The high degree of differentiation in domesticated species has an entirely different mechanism from that which creates obvious differences in the appearance of H. sapiens. The analogy breaks down at this level.
You can redefine “race” to include as broad or narrow a group as you like–we can speak of a “race” of left-handed people–but that doesn’t make it scientific or useful. I have a friend who is have Filipino and half Japanese (by ethnic background); when she goes to Mexico, people talk Spanish to her. When she goes to Vancover, people curse at her for being Vietnamese or Thai. When she went to China, the locals assumed she was a native. (She doesn’t really look any ethnicity of Chinese to me, but I’m a blue-eyed Irish/German/Eastern European, so what do I know?) What “race” should she be? Even trying to use the ethnic background is a cheat; while the Japanese have, via strong societal pressure, managed to maintain a pretty insular genetic pool (with an unadmitted bounty of Korean and ethnic Han blood), the same can’t be said for Filipinos, any random member of which almost certainly have a variety of Asian (from China to Malaysia), Pacific Islander (including both the aborigonal “negritos” and the sweepback Austronesian people who ended up populating the South East Asian Archipelago), and quite likely European background in the family tree. By and large, with a few very remote exceptions, human populations are neither as distinct or isolated as you believe them to be, demonstrating more of a blended spectrum across major land masses than discrete groupings useful for identification as a unique “race”.
Vancouver has a lot of immigrant populations, and seems to have been one of the most popular cities in Canada for immigrants from Asia; Vietnamese, Thai, and Laosian in the Seventies, Hong Kong and in the Eighties and early Nineties. The Wikipedia article says that “while not completely free of racial tension, Vancouver has relatively harmonious race relations.” I don’t doubt that there is less racial tension than in, say, Atlanta, but from what I’ve heard (and I’ve only visited twice, so my personal observations don’t hold much merit) there is a degree of resentment against immigrants, and a significant amount of cultural protectionism among populations which discourages integration. Perhaps a Vancouver Doper can show up and tell me that I’m all wet on this (and I’d be happy to concede) but I’ve heard a couple of unsavory first-hand stories.