Sorry for not responding earlier, or at length, but it’s exhausting and unrewarding to be arguing a position of “I totally agree with you 99.9%, but just think that you’re overstating a point in which we’re in fundamental agreement”. But to make one more stab at things, I think “biologically meaningful” is a continuum. On one end you have, say, gender. Gender is totally fundamental to nearly everything in biology, is clearly and rigorously defineable and measurable, etc. On the other end you have, say, last-digit-of-social-security-number… something which is (barring something really freakish, or barring patterns of how they hand out the numbers other than pure nationwide birth order) totally orthogonal to anything relating to biology whatsoever. You’re never going to be able to make meaningful predictions about the 7s vs the 6s vs the 4s, etc. You’re never going to be able to predict the last-digit-of-SSN of a baby by studying the parents. No disease is going to strike 2s harder than 8s, etc. So if we call gender a 1.0 and last-digit-of-ssn a 0.0, the question is, where is race? You seem to be saying it’s a 0.0, and I think that it’s a very very small number, but not quite 0.0. I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to what it is, because what would that gain, and I’m not an expert, and I don’t care; but I think that the general anti-racism argument is weakened by making an unsustainable claim of TOTAL biological meaninglessness rather than ESSENTIAL biological meaninglessness.
I’ll say this one last time - race isn’t just a biological concept, it’s a scheme for classifying the human species into taxonomic subcategories. As such, the only question worth considering is whether that has any taxonomic validity. If the scheme falls down as taxonomy, we’re perfectly justified in saying race is biologically meaningless because all race is is a taxonomic classification. The fact that it’s not valid taxonomy means it doesn’t actually work for science, yes. “Biologically meaningful” is not a continuum in this case - either the classification scheme is valid or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then find one that works better (much smaller population groups, for instance, or blood types, or specific gene carriers, whatever) for the kind of science/medicine you’re doing.
Size has everything to do with whether or not we treat something as fact or perception because there is an amount of gray area in everything, whether it be as subjective as perception or as objective as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Just because there is a minute chance that I’ll plummet straight through Earth due to an unfortunate (non)interaction between my own atoms and the atoms of my environment doesn’t mean that I will live in constant fear of such a thing happening.
Regardless, from what I understand, this gray area can be rather simply categorized with the amendment of a short list of exceptions.
Edit: Seeing as how I felt compelled to answer this question before finishing the thread, I see that we’re on the subject of race. I think before one considers the idea of race, he or she should consider the fact that biology has yet to define species as a whole (by physiology? ancestry? genotype? e.t.c).
MaxTheVool, until you adress my last post, we have notong to dicuss.
You were arguing that the political party that a person votes for is a biologically meaningful categorisation scheme.
At this stage I don’t know whether you are still arguing that, and as such I lack the information with which to address what you have said in your most recent post.
Common courtesy alone should dictate that you spend the 1.5 minutes necessary to address the three questions put to you in hat thread.
No I wasn’t, specifically, but maybe it is, because “biologically meaningful” is such a vague term.
The position I’m taking is a bit of a weird one, because I don’t really care about or want to support any of the examples I came up with in my previous long post, because I don’t really support them, I’m not knowledgeable enough about, or interested enough in, the topic to really want to debate them at length. I’m using them as examples of the types of things which make race different from last-digit-of-SSN when it comes to biology and/or genetics. Are you making the rather extraordinary claim that race is in fact precisely equivalent to last-digit-of-ssn?
Common courtesy also might preclude you from being as snide and condescending as you have been in all your responses to me.
Here is my absolute fundamental key point… respond to it or not as you like:
“So if we call gender a 1.0 and last-digit-of-ssn a 0.0, the question is, where is race? You seem to be saying it’s a 0.0, and I think that it’s a very very small number, but not quite 0.0.”
So you’re a scientist studying epidemiology, and you have huge quantities of survey data about some public health issue, and you can correlate that with another huge survey done by a non-scientist earlier which happened to ask the participants’ race, in the “traditional” American black/white/Asian/Latino sense. Being a scientist, you would vastly prefer to have much more precise and useful taxonomic information, but you don’t have the logistical ability to go out and gather than information at this point. So… do you toss race into the computer and see if any patterns pop out, not because you think the final result of your study will be “blacks suffer X and asians suffer Y and whites suffer Z” but because there’s some chance that patterns might emerge that might lead to further, more precise and valid, learning? Or do you say “well, I’m a scientist, and race has no scientific validity, none at all, so I’m sure as hell not going to use that stinky non-scientific data”?
So a survey that asked about a completely non-scientific, self-assigned social category? Sure I’d use it, but I wouldn’t pretend it was anything like the same thing as the “race” the race realists in this thread are talking about. So a data set, but not a biologically meaningful one, no. I certainly wouldn’t draw any hard conclusions from it, given the proven murky nature of American race groupings.
So if you saw a correlation between self-identified race and some piece of medical data or whatever, you would not instantly say “well, race is purely biological, and I see a correlation, so this is clearly hereditary and genetic and race X is more susceptible to condition Y”. But, there would also be at least a vague vague possibility in the back of your mind that, since there are SOME correlations between race and genetic origin, there might in fact be a genetic correlation at work here, but you would first examine a bunch of other hypotheses, gather more data, examine environmental conditions, try to get more-precise-than-race taxonomic information, and so forth? That’s the position that seems reasonable to me…
Precisely. Always at the back of my mind will be the awareness that race groupings are so imprecise that relying on them would possibly lead to errors that more precise, scientifically-derived groupings would avoid. Take sickle-cell, for instance, a genetic disease that plots to precise geographic origin but cuts sharply across any notion of races. No opponent to race classification in this thread has said you can’t draw correlation between some single genetic value and geographic population groups.
It’s easy to fall into the trap (as the race realists have) of seeing some utility value in the correlation for a highly-filtered subset of humanity, and accepting that as genetic gospel for the whole human race.
Sorry, I’ve been ill of late and haven’t had a chance to follow up here.
To retread old ground. Academic discussions of the “biological meaningfulness” of race do not merely revolve around race’s taxonomic validity. I’ve already cited examples. Let’s take Armand Marie Leroi’s “A Family Tree in Every Gene.” Leroi argues that race is real because genetic differences correlate. He goes onto argue that even Basques constitute a race:
Clearly, Basques do not constitute a zoological subspecies. So is this prominent geneticist off his handle in making this argument?
Let’s look at some ant-racist arguments:
“[T]here is only one race— the human race” …“there are no alleles that define the black people of North America as a unique population." (Schwartz, 2001).
“The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise. . . . All populations or population clusters overlap when single genes are considered, and in almost all populations, all alleles are present but in different frequencies. No single gene is therefore sufficient for classifying human populations into systematic categories.” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, 1994.)
Clearly a single gene is not required for zoological subspecific classification. Are all these proponents misinformed about the debate? Obviously not. The reason is simple: there are multiple debates going on. Multiple concepts of “biologically real,” “race,” and “biologically meaningful” are being discussed. As such, it is necessary to clarify which meanings we mean in discussing this topic.
While the taxonomic validity by international zoological standards might be the only issue of worth for you, it obviously isn’t for others.
I appreciate, though, that you are moving the debate in a constructive direction. Focusing on specific definitions and concepts represents two large steps forward. (Reducing the issue to one specific concept or definition, represents a small step backwards.) Compare the current debate with this previous one in which Blake was arguing about unicorns and logical coherence.
Contrary to what some might think, I’m not a human subspecies fundamentalist. I do think, however, that the idea of human subspecies is unduly dismissed in the Anglosphere. (It’s not, however, in other regions.) Elsewhere, I’ve discussed many of the problems of applying the subspecies concept to humans. For example, with regards to the geographic race concept, I’ve noted on Nick Matzke blog (3/10/2012):
As for the geographic issue, I’ve noted, on Richard Dawkins’ site (2/11/2012):
I think the best critique of contemporaneous human geographic subspecies is contemporaneous human migration. But at best this only regresses the issue to “Where there recently human geographic races?” If so, “human races” can be “meaningfully biologically defined” as “the aggregate descendants of historic geographic races.” Precedent for maintaining this classification schema despite recent migration can be found in zoology as noted elsewhere. And if this doesn’t hold up, not much is lost in the transition from “members of taxonomically valid subspecies” to “members of once taxonomically valid subspecies.” (It could be argued, of course, that no human populations ever recently qualified as subspecies by the geographic concept, but I find this untenable. Blake seems to make much of the criteria that “members of a subspecies share a unique geographical range or habitat,” but I’m sure that I can show, given how the criteria is used, that some major populations recently fit this criteria (i.e., if not my 5 races then at least the big 2, e.g., sub-Saharan Africans and non-sub-Saharian Africans.)
I open to discussing this, though – at least if we can be sensible (and avoid getting bogged down with issues such as whether or not the concept “unicorn” is coherent or whether or not human’s can have natural histories.)