The other thing to keep in mind is that as long as there is no radical disruption to civilization (eg, armageddon), then the races will blurr even more over time. Genetic distinctions require isolation in order to survive. The trend is very much in the opposite direction.
Most people are not aware of how recently we all had a common great-…-grandparent. While “genetic Eve” of 150k yrs ago has been reported widely in the press, “genetic Adam” has gotten much less press. Significanlty, he lived about 60k years ago. And that date corresponds very well with the time that geneticists think humans went thru an evolutionary bottleneck-- ie, populations plummitted to maybe 10,000 people total. That means that the most likely scenario is that racial characteristics all emerged within the last 60k years.
As for the dog analogy, it’s not a very good one. The different breeds of dogs were deliberately bred to have certain physical and behavioral characteristics. It would a huge stretch to assume that physical differences in humans imply behavioral differences as well.
I’m no biologist, but on a purely observational level it is easy to see why the term “race” is more of a social construct than a biological one.
No-one denies that certain differences exist, based on genetic heritage - skin colour for example, or the shape of noses. The problem arises when one is forced to determine the significance of these differences.
For example, what makes a person “Black” seems to depend to a large extent on culture. Is having slightly dark skin enough to make one “Black”, or must one meet a certain standard of “Blackness” of skin? That seems to depend on where one grows up. In America, where the local black population has interbred with the white population over centuries, many are considered “Black” even though they clearly have as many “white” ancestors as “black”. In a social sense, if not in a genetic sense, “blackness” of skin is a dominant characteristic.
Indeed, it is very difficult to seperate out matters of ethnicity, genetic traits, religion and nationality (and even such personal traits as occupation, gender and sexual orientation) in order to determine the all-important question – is this other person “like me” or not? Some of these characteristics may be confirmatory, others contradictory. It all depends on which traits one considers, personally, to be important.
Did we just do this? Usually a week or two passes before we get this all over again, but the linked thread dropped off the first page a few hours ago.
Well, go at it again my more patient Dopers (and Collounsbury).
Here’s a quote from me in that last thread in response to The Human Genome Diversity Project’s claim that the data they hope to gather will help end racism:
Of course the HGD’s claim that their research will help end racism just feeds all those who absolutely insist that there is some great biological divide between people with different skin color and anyone who says different is on some PC head trip. HGD should just let the data speak for itself. It is also possible that they will find some cluster of DNA that really is distinct to a very large group of humans-- or even many distinct markers for many distinct populations. But that hasn’t happened yet and, frankly, doesn’t look like it is going to happen.
I asked this in the other thread, but did not get any answer: How do you (those of you who instinctively “know” that there are different biological races) define in scientific terms what constitutes a race of people? And please, no “I know it when I see it” type answers-- I want a proper biological definition to what you are so vigorously defending.
If I get a chance this weekend, I’ll go ahead and update my website regarding the various race threads of the SDMB board. It’s been awhile, I know (over two years). Hopefully, it should make it easier for people to find in those threads the relevant citiations that Collounsbury and others have provided in the past.
For those interested, you can check out what I currently have at www.eneubauer.com.
eponymous,
Thanks for the link.
Tiger Woods:
1/4 American Indian
1/4 Black
1/2 White
1/4 Oriental
An interesting “race,” eh?
I don’t really have an interest in this topic. I just thought you people would like to hear from a non-white on the topic.
I consider myself a “mixed race” (an oxymoron, no?). I also consider myself a man. That makes me part of the largest “race” of people - the “human race.”
Discuss, debate, and diatribe. I think this is one of those circular issues that will be booted around forever.
i had forgotten about that thread (probably because it was in GQ and i rarely go there). The thread does show Rushton is some sort of WN, and some of his data is manipulated. There is disagreement on how much manipulation is going on. I will disagree with you in that thread that ignoring culutral aspects is within the realm of normal scientific give and take, since Rushton is painting with a broad brush, and shouldn’t have exceptions popping up like dandilions in the field. I’d do some googleing and reading looking for more info, but the odds of hitting a WN site is too great to risk at work, and with class tonight and tomorrow night, i don’t know when i can get back. I also plan to abandon this thread to the winds if lucwarm shows up with “genetic” evidence that consists entirely of no one having non-genetic evidence he agrees with.
As I’ve stated on other threads, forensic anthropologists are in the business of determining race, among other things, from skeletal (mostly cranial) measurements. I’m not a biologist, so I’m not going to venture my own “scientific” definition of race, but I trust this field to be based on scientific principles, in the same way I turst chemists to be able to determine a given chemical formula even though I might not be able to do so myself. Now, it’s always going to be a statistical business, but like most technologies, the predictive ability should improve over time. Here are a few links if you’d like to do some reading:
“Logistic regression analysis revealed C3 and C4 to be the most useful levels for identifying race. Based on these levels, 76.05% of the sample was correctly classified by race (80.25% for whites, 72.09% for blacks).”
And, of course, it’s always going to be impossible to determine the race of someone with (recent) race mixing in his/her background. Yes, that’s going to rule out a LOT of people, but I;d doubt if it ruled out the majority of people.
Well, Tiger is 3 for 5 this season. And judging by how much higher he ends up on the money list each year than anyone else, I think it might be more than just an extra 25%.
I did check out the most recent race-related topic, which biggirl pointed out to me in her own subtle way in another thread; in fact this most recent thread did give me a much better understanding of my main misunderstanding (the definition of ‘race’), especially the posts by Kimstu.
Regarding the dog analogy: my point there was that dogs share a common ancestor, and breeds came about through selection and now there are some distinct breeds and there are also ‘mutts’ which are harder or impossible to define as particular breeds…correct? My thought was that humans also share a common ancestor, that distinct characteristics had been selected and have come to be associated with peoples from similar genetic and geographical backgrounds, and today we have some groups that are generally associated with a particular genetic and geographical heritage, and we have an increasing pool of ‘mutts’. It’s not my attempt to make other people understand race, of course, since obviously my definition of ‘race’ was (and probably still is) wrong, it was an attempt by myself to find out if my understanding of the subject was getting closer or farther from the truth. As I mentioned briefly earlier, I do not have any substantial formal training in the sciences and I’m a late starter in that regard. I tend to gravitate toward comparison and analogy, perhaps too much.
For example; I was also thinking of race in terms of color (as in colors on a color wheel). As an artist, I know that there are potentially innumerable steps of variation between red and yellow, and I cannot say with any certainty when yellow becomes orange and orange becomes red at any one step along the way; but if I see yellow next to red, I can easily differentiate them. Similarly, it is possible to mix violet and purple colors that are very close visually; seeing two separate swatches of that color that are that close in hue and color might fool most people into thinking that they are the same color, unless the two swatches are juxtaposed, at which point the colors are easier to tell apart. I felt that this analogy was worse than the dog analogy, though, which is why I went to the dogs, so to speak.
Now the off-topic stuff:
I want to apologize to those who I have offended here; it certainly wasn’t my intention to cause ill will here, and I will readily admit that I am at fault for overlooking a very recent thread that probably would have been sufficient to answer my question. I quite honestly don’t know if I’ve ever felt as unwelcome at a message board as I do right now; I think I’ll go back into perpetual lurker mode outside of the GQ forum.
Well we came up with a definition that at least fits the purpose of the National Marrow Donor Program: “grouping based on visible characteristics or reported lineage that increases the chance of common ancestral origin”. About as scientific as the standing drunk test, but it’ll do in a pinch to narrow down the genetic field for medical purposes, or so the NMDP seems to believe.
So using that definition in the case of Tiger, based on his reported lineage he belongs to several different races.
Regarding scientific determinations of race in forensic anthropology: yes, forensic anthropologists are able to determine what someone would likely self-identify as their race from skeletal structures. All that really tells us with certainty, though, is that those we group together under the rubric of race are similar not only in skin coloration and soft tissue structure, they also share certain similarities in skeletal structure. All that’s really saying is that, within what we group as a race, there exist not only similarities readily observable to the naked eye, like melanin content of the skin, but also similarities that aren’t, like the curvature of the femur.
To put it more conversationally, a quote from a forensic anthropologist I once read ran something along the lines of: “If a ctive comes to me and says, ‘what was this guy’s race?’, I can tell him with a degree of accuracy what it said on the guy’s driver’s license. Now, if he comes to me and asks, ‘what is race?’, well, that’s a little murkier discussion we’re going to have to have over a few beers.”
John Mace’s cite had an interesting section about determining race (African or European) by spinous process bifidity. Anyone know what that is?
“Significant differences between race/sex subgroups were found at C3_C6. At each of these levels, whites showed a higher frequency of bifidity than blacks and males a higher frequency of bifidity than females. Differences between races were greater than differences within races.”
Race here is defined simply as ‘ancestry’, so presumably the more ‘racial mixing’ one has in his background, the more difficult such identification would be. The section doesn’t go into differences between ancestry other than African and European.
I think it’s referring to the cleft shape of four of the cervical vertabrae. Some folks, maybe up to 40% of the American population, have an incomplete closure of one or more vertabrae in the the spinal collumn called spina bifida occulta, but because there’s no damage to the spinal cord, they have no symptoms and never even know it (unlike some other more severe forms of spina bifida). I’m guessing that’s what the article is referring to, and that a certain bifida is more common among in these vertabrae whites than blacks, and males than females.
Pravink: You are correct. I thought it was interesting that the error rate at identifying blacks was larger than that for whites. Since the subjects were all Americans, one would expect a larger amount or racial mixing in blacks, and hence a larger error.
I know that forensic anthropoligists use cranial measurements to determine the race or geographic origin of fossil remains. For instance, that was one way that the debate was solved about Esater Island natives: were they Polynesians or Amerindians? Genetic tests pretty much closed the door on the fact that they were Polynesian, but skull measurements were pretty convicing, too.
Spencer Wells, in his new book The Journey of Man, has shown how genetic markers on the Y chromosme can predict with a fairly high degree of confidence the geographic origin of a person’s ancestors (men, in this case). It’s a pretty fascinating read as he has put together a very credible scenario of how humans dispersed once they left Africa some 50-60k yrs ago. He also gives one case study where a “black” person in England was classified as European by this method for the obvious reason that he had “white” ancestors in the not too distant past.
Which is a point that has been raised in previous discussions. Nearly all the forensic information that has been presented on the SDMB (and all the forensic information that had actual data cited) has been limited to efforts to identify persons of known heritage who were already living in the U.S. We already know from the historic record that the black population in the U.S. is primarily from a specific region in Africa. (And in the reference now cited twice, they could only attain a 76% rate of accuracy even on those terms.) Setting up distinctions between one localized group and another does not quite establish a reality of world-wide racial entities.
I would be interested in seeing a world-wide index of bones where they can actually demonstrate that there are clear and convincing “racial” characteristics in the bone structure that map onto genetic families. For example, where do people on the Indian subcontinent fall on those maps? How about Persians, Siberians, Fijians, Patagonians? Do Patagonians clearly show a closer relationship to Ojibway than to Mongolians (or even Laplanders)?
The first forensic scientist brought in to look at the Kennewick discovery found “Caucasian” attributes–a finding to which he continues to adhere, yet when the government was sued over the disposition of the remains, the forensics experts identified them as most similar to Polynesian or Southeast Asian remains (with several features that failed to match that interpretation, as well).
If race is a distinct or discrete classification representing some underlying genetic distinction, I have still seen no evidence of it.
As I’ve pointed out in other threads, the trouble with the “race is a social construct” position is that it is somewhat ambiguous. Further, I’ve noticed that its proponents seem unwilling to be pinned down as to what exactly their position is.
