I’ve heard it said that that using genetic similarity to define race would yield several dozen black races and one non-black race.
Race can be eliminated, sex can not.
Let us suppose that the prayers of a groaning world are answered, and my plans for absolute world domination come to be realized. So, given absolute power and a longevity equal to Immortality Lite…
I make all the Chinese marry people from non-Asian “races”. (Because there’s so damn many of them, try and keep up, ok?) Each subsequent generation of humans is purposely more mixed than the previous, finally being roughly as mixed as the population of the Earth. Each person is more likely to have more Asian ancestors than any other racial group. Naturally, that segment of the population that might think of itself as “white” will cease to be, merged in an universal light to medium beige. More or less.
And all those other minor characteristics…hair curliness or the lack thereof, eye color, lip size, so on and so forth, will be distributed more or less evenly, and the markers for the social construct of race cease to exist. What, ten generations? Less? More? Dunno, mathtarded.
But my point, and I have one, is that absent some more unnatural intervention than a selective breeding program, that resulting non-racial species would still have precisely the same chromosomal markers for male and female.
So, what we think of as “race” is superficial and changeable, it could even be erased. But gender/sex goes right down to the bone. Race is superficial, gender is fundamental.
And that is the answer in a nutshell.
Race is a purely subjective classification scheme. That is why, when we ask the likes of Chen or Rand Rover to name these races that they claim exist, they are utterly unable to do so in any consistent manner. The efforts of Chen, especially, are hilarious to watch, as he slips from 4 races to thousands of races within just a single post, and claims that “Asian” is a race, and in the very next sentence proclaims that Gandhi, Mao and Jesus Christ belonged to three distinct races.
Race is entirely subjective and arbitrary. Any racial classification scheme tells us nothing whatsoever about the people within that race beyond the very characteristics used to place them in that race. It is perfectly self referential. This is quite easy to see when you examine racial classifications between cultures. If you try to tell a Chinese Tiawanese that they are the same race as a Vietnamese there reaction will vary from amusement to puzzlement to offence. To them, it is quite clear that Vietnamese are distinct race. To Western Europeans OTOH, it is quite clear that they are the same race. Similarly, Western Europeans would never consider themselves the same race as most Sri Lankans, yet to most Chinese, they clearly are the same race.
In short, if aliens came to Earth from another planet tomorrow, the chances of them classifying human populations in any way at all that resembles any existing racial scheme is billions to one against. The boundaries for human “racial” groups are so completely arbitrary that unless someone is told beforehand where those boundaries are, there is no chance they will draw them in the same place.
And that also means that the racial groupings are literally meaningless. If you want to describe someone as “Causcasian”, you need to first define “Caucasian”. But once you have placed someone into the Caucasian group you will find that you won;t know a damn thing about them beyond the very characteristics you used to put them in that group. For example, if you define a Causcasian as someone with skin paler than value X with western European ancestry, you will then find that the people in that group have absolutely nothing in common beyond having pale skin and western European ancestry.
Now contrast that with sex. Sex is neither arbitrary nor subjective.
If aliens came to Earth tomorrow, it is a dead certainty that any reproductive classification scheme they applied to humans would include “Male” and “Female” as the two major groups. They may have other categories for individuals who are intersex or immature and so forth, but the two major reproductive groups are unavoidably the group that gestates and the group that fertilises. Similarly, every human culture in the history of the world has divided humans into two major reproductive classes: male and female. There have been plenty of societies with categories for transvestites or ritual celibates as well, but all societies recognise male and femlae and place the vast majority of people into one of those groups. The same also applies to other species. If I take any person to the zoo and and show them a cage full of animals of a type that they have never seen before, they will still divide them into male and female. It doesn’t matter if the person is an Eskimo who has never seen a snake, if she will, after a short period of casual observation or reproduction, infallibly say that there are female snakes, and male snakes. There is nothing arbitrary about sex. It is based on solid, objective difference between individuals.
And once someone has divided humans into male and female, they then know all sorts of things about that species beyond the characteristics used to make the division in the first place. They may divide humans based upon the presence of a penis, for example, but the member sof the group with a penis will also almost all have testes that produce motile sperm. They will almost all have a Y chromosome. They will almost all have high testosterone levels and so on and so forth. There are vast numbers characteristics shared by members of the same sex, and those characteristics are not shared by the vast majority of members of any other sex.
“Male” isn’t a purely self-referential category that only contains individuals that you are pointing at when you say “male”. That is in stark contrast to a racial group such as “Negro”, where, no matter how you define it, the people in the group called Negro only share the very features that you used to define Negro. They have no other genotypic, phenotypic or behavioural commonality.
And that is why sexes objectively exist, and why races objectively do not. In a nutshell, it’s because you can’t divide people into races in a manner that works no matter who is doing the dividing, and that tells you something beyond the character that you used to make the division. In contrast, I can teach anyone how to tell the sex of pups in a matter of minutes, and no matter who I teach it to, they will all agree with >95% accuracy which are dogs and which are bitches. And once the pups are divided into dogs and bitches, I will know that >95% of the bitches will possess ovaries. I will know that they will ovulate, lack a Y chromosome and so forth. By simply dividing based on the external genitalia, I know all sorts of other things about their genotypes and phenotype. You can’t do anything remotely like this with any racial classification, because race is entirely subjective and self referential.
Or, as elucidator said: Race is superficial, gender is fundamental.
So let’s see if you guys can do better than she.
[/grammar pedantic mode]
It’s been pretty solidly covered, I think. But for me I’d hypothesize a test in which people are shown images of or even allowed to physically examine and question individuals from all parts of the world in order to classify them based on gender and based on race (without being given any guidelines on how to do so).
What are the likelihoods of agreement in the two cases? It should be obvious that almost everyone will come up with largely the same gender groups. But the race groupings will be wildly divergent.
You’re assuming that “she” is defined in some scientific way. 
Oh, and btw, “race” certainly does exist as a social construct. We can set some parameters based on ancestry or subjective social norms that put people into any number of racial categories. But there is no objectively scientific way to do it.
With sex, we can define male, female and intersexed with that last category being a hodge podge of people, representing some small fraction of the total, who don’t fit in the first two categories.
If we tried to do that with race, we’d either have thousands of races (which is meaningless) or very large portions of humanity that weren’t in a race. The population of Central and South America, for example, present a particularly difficult problem wrt race, as most people who live there don’t fit into what we traditionally think of as a cohesive racial group.
And although we all think we can tell if someone is a native of Beijing vs a native of Berlin, there is no line between the two where you can say people on one side of the line are clearly different from those on the other side. This is the nature of “clinal” differences in a population that make the use of racial categories of little use.
For a really good answer to your question, watch the BBC documentary Me, my sex and I.
I think the issue is rather more complicated than is represented so far. There is no real proper medical definition of sex. A doctor looks at chromosomes & external characteristics (the docu show this really well), and sometimes it is inconclusive. For example in the well known case of Caster Semenya: she was an athlete accused of being a man. After “testing” (aka ruining her life) the doctors realised they didn’t really know what they were looking for.
It is actually not rare at all that sex is not as simple as we usually think: it occurs as often as red hair. And we hardly pretend red hair “isn’t really a colour”, or that it isn’t significant enough to decide that there is more than just brown, black and blond hair.
I think the world is just obsessed with having 2 sexes that are complete opposites in every way, however unrealistic it is. We try to define “men” and “women” as a huge split, when there is actually very little that supports that simplicity. Read the works of Rebecca Jordan-Young and Cordelia Fine to find out more about that from the psychological perspective. They have extensively researched the data that advocates psychological differences between men and women (where as usual they presented as polar opposites) and found the evidence to be extremely unconvincing at best.
Yes, sometimes someone who we define as male can mate with someone who we call female to produce offspring. That’s about as useful as the definition is. It excludes many people and it has lead to us trying to further categorise and define in an unrealistic way.
I think for a long time to come people will find it useful to approach sex as a binary, but certainly a somewhat broader approach seems to make sense.
Sex doesn’t have to be binary to still be a “thing” as opposed to biological race. We could decide tomorrow that there are, in fact, 12(or whatever) distinct sexes, for each possible chromosome count variation, and it would still be more real than biological race, because sex is not a continuum the way race is.
Gender is as much of a social construct as race. It’s evident in how gender variance is manifest differently in different cultures. Here we have (primarily) transgenderism, while in South Asia they have hijra, also called third gender. In India and Nepal, there is even legal recognition of third gender status to an extent.
Thank you. I agree that this is the main problem in this thread so far–a lack of understanding of gender/sex issues among the responders.
I will respond more later and post some links to attempt to educate some folks.
BTW, some of you above are presuming I have views on race that I absolutely do not have. I don’t want to get off on a big discussion about race in this thread, but I do want to state my belief so I’m not misunderstood. I believe that a scientist doing a study could categorize people into any number of races that the scientist wants to, with that number of races being all the way from 1 (all humans are a single race) to the number of humans that have ever existed (all humans are their own race). As long as the scientist says how they decided which race to put a person in, then that’s perfectly OK.
I do not believe that there’s some objective definition of race or that all people can objectively be described as only being a member of one race or whatever.
I think that the current fashion for “there is no such thing as race” comes at the issue from the wrong angle–it essentially plays the game according to the racists’ rules. I think it’s better to say “sure a scientist doing a study could categorize people into races, but that doesn’t mean that any one race is inherently and irredeemably inferior to another, no matter what different characteristics they have.” And I’ve discussed this further in other threads, so if you are interested in my views beyond this statement, you can search those threads–I’m not saying anything further in this thread.
It could be that it actually is a continuum, with two large peaks at either end (one male, one female) and a shallow valley between.
And get your mind out of the gutter! 
Agreed.
Let’s think about a scatter plot, where each individual is represented by a dot, and the placement of the dot on a piece of paper says something about the individual’s biology.
So, flip to the page for gender/sex, and I think we would see (i) two spots that are black as the pits of hell from all of the dots piled exactly on top of each other and (ii) dots in various places along a line between those two piles of dots.
Flip to the page for race, and I think we would see (ii) various groupings of dots around a handful of attraction points and (ii) dots in various places between attraction points. In fact, I think the “page” for race would need to be 3D to capture the relationship between multiple attraction points.
Seems to me that the “there is no such thing as race” people see all the dots in the middle and say “see, there’s no such thing as race.” But they ignore all the dots in the middle on the gender/sex scatterplot.
Just as a reminder of what someone mentioned above, there really is no objective definition of “male” or “female”–a person could be “male” under one definition and “female” under another.
Racial distinction has no scientific merit and we wildly exaggerate its social significance.
Sexual distinction has significant scientific merit… and we still wildly exaggerate its social significance, though not quite as badly.
Except sex chromosomes don’t smear together that way.
No, the scatter plot for sex would indeed be two extremely dark areas containing well over 95% of all dots, and the rest spread extremely thinly between. But the plot for race would be pretty much a grey continuum of dots with a number of random areas with slight concentrations, where probably 95% of the dots can be associated most closely with more than one of those concentrations.
And what people are saying (in the scientific community, and here on the SDMB as well) is not that “there is no such thing as race”. Instead it is that “while there may have been human races at some time in the past, today there are no objective criteria by which to group people into “races” that are anything except arbitrary and completely self referential”. Race can be a useful biological category (taxon) for some species, although it will still be subjective in application, but not for modern humans.
And for sex, you can plot very distinct things - chromosome counts for X vs Y, say. For race, what are you going to plot? Skin colour? Hair?
IQ?
And what I’m saying is who cares whether there is objective criteria. A person doing a study could draw circles (or spheres, if we are still talking 3D) around the different attraction points and say that people within the sphere are one race. There’s nothing wrong with doing that as long as they say how they decided to draw the spheres. In this sense–i.e., that someone could draw these spheres if they want to, there is absolutely “such a thing as race.”
You don’t have a very full understanding of whether a person is “male” or “female.” Chromosomes aren’t even half the story.
No. Either you’re confused about those issues or you’re intentionally blurring the line between social gender issues and sex as a biological distinction in order to avoid the fact that the race conversation is only about biology. Now you’re saying “a person could draw spheres if they wanted to.” That isn’t biology. That’s the racial equivalent of gender as a social construct, which nobody argued against.
The biological distinction between sexes is a recognizable one, and deviations from that distinction are a result of identifiable abnormalities. Those occur on the order of, what, one in a thousands by standard definitions, and one or two in a hundred by certain controversial definitions?
Meanwhile how many people out of a hundred biologically belong to a distinct race, and how many don’t? If sex worked the way race does, every person on earth would meet the strict definition of intersexed. There would be no males or females. That’s the difference, and it’s a real one.
I have a fuller understanding - but chromosomes are a larger part of it (I’d say definitely more than “half the story”) and an easy marker, including not just normal male vs female but the various dysgenic types too. That it doesn’t map onto various other social gender constructs is irrelevant - I specified that I was talking about sex. There’s no easy equivalent for biological race.