If evolution is not true why are there different races.

Great Debates
61

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
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.
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Well, in post 13 tomndeb asked what I meant by race and in post 17 I defined it and have stuck with the definition even if I had to change the name for it. If you are categorically telling me that the concept I am talking about is not called “race” then fine, let’s call it something else. “Populations” or “ethnicities” is fine with me. We went through this a while ago and I have avoided the word for the most of my posts.

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]

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.
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Two-part response. First, I understand your point about the analogy not holding for domesticated animals. That is why I asked about any other wild species that shows allopatric divergence (is there any that is not terribly obscure or that we could easily find pics to know what we are talking about) and suggested horses BEFORE being domesticated by men on the WAG that their populations in Middle Asia, Arabia and America would be somewhat different.

Second, I am not sure that at a genetic level, there is any difference between artificial and natural selection. Individuals with certain traits or combinations of traits get to reproduce and those without don’t. I tried to adress this somewhere around the end of page 1 but had to leave and when I came back the discussion was about something else. I would really like to retake that topic if you are interested. (I am really enjoying this discussion and I hope you realize that I am not trying to fight your ignorance but mine)

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]

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.
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Indeed. That is why I tried to define “ethnicities” around a whole series of phenotypic characteristics a while ago. And agreed that, in the end, the classification is subjective even if mostly self-evident (in that groups of non-experts can classify people in these groups and agree on the classification)

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]

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?
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none

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]

…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”.

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Going beyond the super obvious Inuit-Inca-Zulu-Mongol distinctions. Even within a contiguous land mass, take Africa, there are different groups that in pre-modern times had little contact and managed to differentiate enough to see themselves as distinct (kind of a requirement if you want to start a well orchestrated genocidal war on your neighbours). These groups pass the 6-year old test and even if their differences are less than those between them and say the Inuit, they do have certain sets of characteristics that differ consistently from one population to the other.

62

[QUOTE=Sapo]
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.
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You have asserted this several times, but I am pretty sure that it is an incorrect assumption for most of humanity throughout history. One of the reasons that the old chestnut about there being more genetic diversity in a band of lowland gorillas than in the entire human genome (even if the statement is a bit of an exaggeration) is that there really has not been a time when people–aside from a very few limited groups–have wandered off by themselves. The back-and-forth exchange of genetic information among nearly all human groups has been fairly constant throughout the lifetime of humanity.
1,000 years ago? 2,000 years ago, a broad sweep of what we call Europe, extending from France and Spain to what is now Turkey was inhabited by a number of groups of people whom we identify by cultural artifacts as Celts. Between 2,000 years ago and 1,300 years ago, those people were overrun by peoples from Asia and Northern Europe (some of whom actually passed across Spain into Africa with a few making it back to Europe via Italy). 1,400 years ago, groups of people began expanding outward from the Arabian peninsula to expand across all of Asia minor, overrunning Persia and making it to India while others headed West to overrun all of northern Africa, while placing several settlements on Europe. Prior to your 1,000 years ago, China had been overrun by at least three separarte ethnic groups, each being assimilated by Chinese culture, but bringing new “bloodlines” in each case. Want to push it back to 3,000 years ago? Then you had better be prepared to explain how agriculture (using the same crops) and husbandry (using the same animals) expanded across all of central Eurasia between 10,000 and 4,000 years ago while all the people stayed home and failed to interact. I have previously noted that there are massive battles among partisans of one group or another trying to claim Egyptians as “theirs” while all the evidence we keep finding indicates that there has never been a pure Egyptian ethnic group–they were constantly being overrun by different peoples from other places in Africa and Asia.
I suspect that the fact that the sailing ship accelerated the process to move people across oceans may have created a distorted impression of how often people moved and how far they traveled. (And, horny as humans are, any time they met new people they interbred.)
Given what we know (from history and genetics) about the ongoing mixture of humans,I wouldneed to see actual evidence that humans ever sat still and failed to mix. (Given that agriculture only developed 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, it has only been relatively “recently” that human groups had the luxury of sitting in one place instead of migrating around, bumping into each other in their search for food.)

However, if you need a reason why human groupings (of whatever label) do not translate to breeds, note that among breeds there are explicit bloodlines that are required and maintained for generations. If one bred two mutts that resembled a breed and continued to breed for particular characteristics until one got offspring that matched all the required breed characteristics, one would still fail to get those offspring accepted by the breeder association, because one could not establish the lineage. There is no human community for whom we can establish anything resembling breeder lines–even when the members of a community bear great resemblances to each other.

I’m also not sure why we are off on this breed tangent, to begin with.
You originally made a statement that races were real. We have provided a number of citations from a wide array of sources, noting that the original use of the word “race” was flawed because it could not be supported by the data. Somehow, we are now trying to identify why small pockerts of humans (certainly not the great majority of humanity) might be given labels indicating something, although I am not sure what. If (generously) 15% of humans can be grouped accoring to breed or race or clan or whatever and 85% of humanity can not be so grouped, what have we actually established other than that about one in six humans have a (somewhat) longer endogamous history than the other five in six.

It seems like a fair amount of struggling to assert a point that has little relation to the world in which we find ourselves.

63

[QUOTE=Xema]
Dawkins point is that the concept of race correlates with consistent observable differences, upon which a broad range of observers tend to agree.
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But they don’t agree. Not really, not when you compare concepts of “race” over time and from different cultures. That is the thing that opened my own eyes to the falsehood of “race” as a concept.

Oh sure, people can agree in a general, hand-waving way, but the devil is in the details.

For example, Jared Diamond, in his chapter “How Africa Became Black” from Guns, Germs, and Steel (see a version published in Discover here, would separate African groups (he doesn’t use the term “race”) into very dark-skinned Bantu tribes from Western sub-Saharan Afirca, much lighter-skinned, crinkly-faced Khoi-san (think Kofi Annan for an image), and Pygmies. But when they came to 17th-century America, all these peoples were consdered “the black race”. Their wide variations in appearance, height, skin color, language, and behavior were lumped together to satisfy a purely cultural need to define them.

In other times and places, Celtic-derived peoples (Irish, Welsh, Scots, residents of Britanny) were considered a distinct race. Same with Vikings. There was definitely discrimination against them based on assumptions about their inborn behavioral traits. Nowadays in America we’d call them all “the white race” and lump them together.

It’s the fact that these definitions are changeable – and that they often change to serve short-term and selfish ends of the “majority” group doing the defining – that reveals the entire concept to be flawed as well as pernicious.

Sailboat

64

[QUOTE=Sapo]
Second, I am not sure that at a genetic level, there is any difference between artificial and natural selection. Individuals with certain traits or combinations of traits get to reproduce and those without don’t.
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The primary difference between artificial and natural selection is that one is directed, and the other is not. Artificial selection is “intelligent design” in action. We, as an outside source, determine what traits are suitable for passing to the next generation.

In natural selection, such “decisions” are made by the simple virtue of survival coupled with reproduction. Those individuals who, in their particular environment, are better suited to surviving and reproducing than their peers have a better than average chance of passing their genes on to the next generation. Domestic animals which are actively bred don’t get that option; they will either reproduce or they won’t purely at the whim of humans.

65

[QUOTE=Sailboat]
… not when you compare concepts of “race” over time and from different cultures.
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This is certainly valid. But if discussion is to be limited to terms and concepts that stay immutable over time, it will soon be difficult to say much.

In his discussion, Dawkins prominently mentions R.C. Lewontin, whose view of race, Dawkins says, “has become near-universal orthodoxy in scientific circles.” He quotes Lewontin as follows:

Dawkins agrees with the first sentence and strongly disputes the second. The examples he gives (quoted in a previous post) are a counter to the “no genetic or taxonomic significance” argument.

66

[QUOTE=tomndebb]

I’m also not sure why we are off on this breed tangent, to begin with.
You originally made a statement that races were real. We have provided a number of citations from a wide array of sources, noting that the original use of the word “race” was flawed because it could not be supported by the data. Somehow, we are now trying to identify why small pockerts of humans (certainly not the great majority of humanity) might be given labels indicating something, although I am not sure what. If (generously) 15% of humans can be grouped accoring to breed or race or clan or whatever and 85% of humanity can not be so grouped, what have we actually established other than that about one in six humans have a (somewhat) longer endogamous history than the other five in six.

It seems like a fair amount of struggling to assert a point that has little relation to the world in which we find ourselves.
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Even if it had happened just once to a very small group, it would still be a valid subject of scientifical study.

In the absence of definitive examples, cites or numbers on either side of the argument, I will admit that I incorrectly used the word “races”, specially considering the context in which it was intended in the OP.

Still, I leave with the certainty that there is a very self evident fact that, accross the earth and at different times in history, different human populations have shown very distinct sets of characteristics that make them easily identifiable and it has shaped their view of the world and the way they interact with other groups to the point of being the reason for war in several instances. (bring your own punctuation)

That these groupings are in no way related to dog breeds I will just concede since it is a religious matter in which an authority makes the final decisions (and that authority is not me)

Consider this hijack ended AFAIAC (and I will begin a new thread to discuss the issue of natural vs artificial selection which I find interesting and worthy of further discussion)