Would you be so kind as to offer up your working definitions of “male” and “female”, because the versions I learned make your two sentences contradict.
These are both just classification problems. I don’t really know a whole lot about the specific biologies of race, though I do know that the characteristics differ between various sets of races. For the sake of my point, that’s not really relevant. The thing about classification, though, is that we can easily make a very complicated set of criteria, particularly in a multiclass problem like race, and get just about any set of results we want. That is, if we believe there’s some number of races, we could choose some set of criteria to make that result happen. Even if we do draw a balance between the complexity and the number of classifications, there’s going to be a certain about of leeway in choosing where along the elbow of we choose and there’s probably not a clear ideal set of classifications.
Sex will work very differently though. In the vast majority of cases, there’s two well defined distinct sets with very well known indicators. Yes, there’s going to be some biological ambiguity for unusual genetics, malformed genatalia or whatever. But this is where the kicker comes in, we can vastly simplify the indicators and still get a very high accuracy rate sticking with just two classifications, but to get anything else, not only will it be a very small population, but it would take a signficant amount of complication of the classifiers to even make it work, and it would introduce a lot of additional error as well because of how small those additional classes would be relative to the two main ones. If you look at the elbow of the graph, there would be a very clear and obvious choice at two classes given any reasonable set of indicators.
So yeah, there would be some error with deciding sex, if the genetics and genetalia and all that don’t completely line up with the prediction, but that’s going to be the case with virtually any classifier. That there’s some amount of error doesn’t mean that the classifiers are useless.
Without actually gathering data and running various classification algorithms, I can’t make anywhere near the same sort of statements about race, but the classifications will almost certainly be much fuzzier and with much higher error rates, and the indicators may or may not actualy mean anything. By that, I mean, if we were to classify cars based on performance we may see a correlation between color and speed, say, faster cars tend to be red, but clearly red doesn’t make cars faster; you know, the whole correlation does not equal causation fallacy. So, while there will absolutely be some clusters in race, they may or may not align along what we see as “race”, muchless any specific set of races one would typically define. In fact, if anything, from my rudimentary understanding of how humans dispersed, we’d probably see multiple clusters within what most would see as a single black race and another cluster would probably include more than one of race.
I’ve never said that people “biologically belong to a distinct race.” You are putting words into my mouth.
Let me illustrate how the conversation usually goes:
Me: Hey look, someone did a study, and it shows that people in [racial group x] tend to have more/less [biological characteristic] than people in [racial group y].
Some “race is a myth” person: That study is obviously meaningless since there’s no biological definition of race.
Me: I agree that there’s no objective definition of each race and a person isn’t objective one race or another. But a person doing a study can construct races for purposes of the study (i.e., draw spheres around different attractors in the scatterplot).
Some “race is a myth” person: That study is obviously meaningless since there’s no biological definition of race. Also, you are a racist.
Me: :rolleyes:
The whole point is that there are no objective definitions of those terms. A person with XX chromosomes, testes, and a uterus may be either male or female depending on how someone defines “male” and “female.”
I think we can define male and female sexes based chromosomes. People who do not have XX or XY chromosomes would have a seperate classification, although it may reference male or female classifications. Gender aside from chromosomes is a different construct. It would be best to maintain seperate terms for the concepts of chromosomal and non-chromosomal differences.
I would say that ‘sexism’ is a real ‘ism’ at least in that there are actual identifiable biological differences. That doesn’t mean there is much to qualify in those differences.
Sure, but these anomalies represent a small fraction of the human population, whereas attempting to classify people by race is problematic because virtually everyone is anomalous. In fact, we could say:
Person A has XY chromosomes, a penis and testes (and not XX chromosomes, a uterus and ovaries) and will be our exemplar of “male.”
Person B has XX chromosomes, a uterus and ovaries (and not XY chromosomes, a penis and testes) and will be our exemplar of “female”.
The vast majority of the human population is unambiguously like either A or B, and a small minority is not.
What are your (or anyone’s) exemplar characteristics for race? What keeps the minority population of exceptions from being the actual majority of humanity?
Basically, I don’t get your point in this thread - race is a vaguely defined concept, but sex (despite the existence of anomalies) is not.
In any case, I’m okay with tossing virtually all legal distinctions based on gender, much as legal distinctions based on race have gone by the wayside. As a matter of practicality, I’ll grudgingly accept that for some narrow applications, it is still useful to limit access to one gender, i.e. applications to join military special forces and such. Beyond that, reasons to care are harder to find, i.e. I see no point to opposing same-sex marriage - why should I care about the sexes of the married couple?
“Gender” is the social construct humans create (mainly) concerning observable differences between the human sexes.
“Race” is the social construct humans create (mainly) concering observable differences between human phenotypes.
Obviously, “gender” is easier to track onto “sex” than “race” is onto “variations in human phenotypes”, for the simple reason that there are generally (aside from a tiny minority inbetween) only two “sexes”, while variations in phenotype are legon. Which variations in human phenotypes are significant (such as skin colour) are, of course, a matter of social and not biological significance.
If it were only sex chromosomes that determined your sex, that would be a good argument. But it’s a complex relationship between sex chromosomes, regulator genes and hormones that cause the sexes to differentiate during fetal development.
Not to mention mosaics, where a female and male twin set fuse early in development, so some of the person’s cells are male and some are female.
The point is that some people believe that “there’s no such thing as race” because there’s no objective way to say that a person is one race or another. But it is also true that there is no objective way to say that a person is one gender/sex or another, but you don’t hear people saying “gender/sex is a myth.”
If someone posts a study saying that men or women have more or less of a particular biological characteristic, no one shouts them down or calls them a sexist on the grounds that “there’s no such thing as gender/sex.” But that’s exactly what they do for race even though, biologically speaking, race and gender/sex are equivalent in this regard (in that there’s no objective biological definition of either).
Yes, you do (or, that it’s a social construct, like race). It’s just not a consensus view. Yet.
There is an objective way to say that a person is male, female, or a set of others based on chromosome configuration. I’m not saying there is great significance to those differences. But they are directly linked to actual biological differences.
Agreed, but again, chromosome configuration isn’t necessarily the whole story. A person can have a penis, testes, no mammary glands or gynocomastia (sp?), no uterus or ovaries or vagina etc., and otherwise just in general look like a dude, and have XX chromosomes.
Sure, a person can define races for the purposes of a given study, but as far as I know, usually, they don’t. In my experience, researchers don’t typically categorize people by genotype or even phenotype. Instead, they rely on self-reporting. At the beginning of the study, participants fill out a form, and check the box that they feel best applies to them. Then, that information gets plugged into a database along with their results, and dictates how the numbers get crunched.
So if you see a study that “shows” that people in [racial group x] tend to have more/less [biological characteristic] than people in [racial group y], what it often shows is actually that people who consider themselves to be in [racial group x] tend to have more/less [biological characteristic] than people who consider themselves to be in [racial group y]. That’s a very different statement.
And even if the researcher is the one categorizing the subjects, and they’re doing so using phenotype or even genotype, the issue is that they’re then rather arbitrarily calling one group “black”, one group “white”, and so on. There will be no physical or genetic characteristics that are not held by some of the members of every “race”, even if the majority of the people who hold those characteristics are in one particular “race”, or the majority of the people who are in a particular “race” hold those characteristics. Or as Bryan Ekers put it, we can define an “exemplar” female who has no male characteristics, and vice versa. But there’s no characteristic, whether genetic or phenotypic, that belongs to (or is entirely absent from) any particular “race”.
Self-reporting is just one way of drawing the sphere–it doesn’t mean that the study is entirely useless.
Sex is a very poor analogy for race.
I’m pretty confident that it’s been pointed out several times that your second claim is not correct (or at the very least, you’re implying the existence of anomalies invalidates all efforts at classification), so until that gets addressed, I’m not sure how to argue any conclusions you’ve drawn.
We hoo-mahns like to categorize things. It’s part of what we do. We create models that work well enough until the prevailing wisdom tells us we need a better model. And a lot of times, that’s because Mother Nature creates continuums, not discrete groups. What we call a “planet” is something useful until it’s not. We put wolves and coyotes in different species, but that doesn’t stop them from mating with each other.
We have a definition of what it takes to be a subspecies, and humans don’t cut it. So far, we haven’t run into much problem using the dichotomous model of sex, but maybe someday we will. For some people (scientists) that someday is already here. For most, it is not.
Start at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and walk north all the way to Sweden. Absent man made divisions (artificial, by definition), you won’t find a sharp dividing line between one “race” and another.
Now, head for the Americas. Visit Brazil and Puerto Rico, two countries whose populations are the product of extensive mixing between formerly separate populations.
Analyze the population of each country in two separate ways: by DNA, and by phenotype (skin color, facial features, hair, etc.). What you’ll find is that continental ancestry as determined by DNA has decoupled from phenotype. That is to say, many people who look “black” by physical appearance will actually have majority European DNA markers. And many people who look “white” will have majority African DNA markers.
So what “race” are the people who look “black” but who have a majority of their ancestry coming from Europe? “Race” has traditionally been determined by phenotype, but the genes which govern phenotype are a tiny fraction of the genome.
You would like me to prove a negative (i.e., that there is no objective definition of “male” or “female”)?
I’m not. It was a rhetorical question. I assume that you know the answer is none. And if you know the answer is none, that’s all it takes to show why the question you asked when you started this thread doesn’t make sense to the people you’re trying to confront with it. It’s the solution to your dilemma: biological sex exists in a way that biological race does not, whereas socially-defined gender “does not exist” in exactly the same way that race does not. I really think you just aren’t taking the time to try to consider the objection here. You obviously understand what it is, but you extrapolate it into such wild stuff that it’s hard to believe you’ve ever taken it seriously.
Right, and that statement is the issue. If “race” isn’t a biological distinction in itself, we’re all in pieces here. It’s incoherent to base assumptions about biological characteristics on subjective classifications that haven’t been connected to biology. It’s like somebody saying that “country girls” are better-looking than “city girls.” It’s not that the statement is literally devoid of content, or that it isn’t possible to measure some kind of biological attractiveness-analog; it’s what the fuck is a country girl, and how is that science? I generally get what that person is going for, but I can’t take that conclusion and reliably apply it to a set of 10 people selected randomly. It’s a distinction that doesn’t objectively exist.
Likewise, when a person can just decide for himself who belongs to which racial group, which you agree is what has to happen for the distinction to appear, then that person’s conclusions about biological racial characteristics are useless to everyone else. We can’t apply them to anything. The distinctions that person drew, when I’m sitting in a room with a different population of people, don’t exist. You can’t tell me white people have a certain characteristic based on your sample of people in Chicago and then send me to Sao Paolo and expect me to derive any use from what you’ve told me. Suddenly I’m out there and I don’t know what the fuck a white person is.
Meanwhile - and at some point people will have said this to you enough, and then what do you want everyone to tell you? - if I do a study and say that I tested biological males and biological females, that is a distinction that objectively means something to you. When you are confronted with a population of people and try to apply that knowledge, you will be able to do so in a way that maps like 99% to the way I would apply it, as opposed to the god knows what percentage we’d match on with race. Do you agree with that?