The problem is that your entire argumentation is based on premises that have no basis in facts, but merely technicalities and grammar.
‘c)Genetic variance within an ethnic group is higher than between ethnic groups. As such, looking at the ‘average’ member of an ethnic group is not useful. There is no such thing.’
I would tend to agree, except that it could be that the ethnic group being considered is poorly defined… is it not the case that the Baka people of Cameroon are very distinct genetically from the !Kung of Botswana? And so on for comparisons between several lineages in Africa.
It may well be that the groups have different distributions of some genetic markers, or that individuals exist within those groups which have different markers to other members of the same population… We had better consider these things now, before such apparently distinct lineages disappear.
In fact, ‘alike’ is not at all vague. We’re talking about genetic code here, and how many ‘letters’ two individuals have in common is not only determinable, it is quantifiable.
What does exist are different ethnic groups that have developed (or de-developed) certain physical traits in an attempt to adapt to the environment they live in, both by slow changes within the group and by intermarriage with other ethnic groups in which a given trait might be more prevalent. That doesn’t have anything to do with race.
No. My persistent point (through three years and thousands of posts) has been that the word race does not convey what people believe it conveys. Certainly different scientists could come up with some definition that would cover an objective reality. However, to date, no one has even come up with a consistent definition. Is it morphology (the original source of the classifications)? Then we have “races” that include people that do not look alike and other people who do look alike that are excluded from those races. Is it genetic coherence? Then we are still left with the fact (pointed out in several earlier threads) that there is more genetic diversity among troops of lowland gorillas in a single region of Africa (who are not identified as separate races or subspecies) than among the 6 billion humans scattered across the globe. What meaning is conveyed by the word race when it contains internal contradictions?
Is it possible to frame a definition so that we could have an “objective” description of race? Probably. However, that defintion will not be understood by the vast majority of people who hear it, so what is the point of re-using an old, misleading word, simply to cause confusion? I have never seen a definition of race (until this topic became one of saving the word at all costs) where it did not mean a group in which an individual would have all the appropriate characteristics of that race.
Now we’re changing the definition to mean people among whom their might be a statistical possibility of connection at some point.
IzzyR called attention to an article in Science from December, 2002, in which a group of researchers were able to do statistical analyses of 52 selected populations and group them by geographic origin. No person in the study would necessarily have all the markers for any given region (and, with a couple minor exceptions, every marker was found in every region), but by analyzing anywhere from 150 to 377 markers in combination for prevalence, a computer could figure out where they were most likely to have originated. OK. So now we can (with some assurance) identify a place of origin. Does that make a race? The regions were Africa, Europe, Middle East, Central/South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. While Africa, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas roughly correspond* to the Negroid, Mongoloid, Malay, and American races of Blumenbach, we find the old Caucasian race scattered across three separate groups, intermixed with some Mongols. In each of the groups, we have people with widely different susceptibility to diseases and widely diverging physical appearances. Beyond their “origin” what do they have in common to allow the use of the word “race” that will not confuse any hearer of the word? (There is also a small problem in that the researchers selected people from very specific ethnic groups known to have a certain coherence. We don’t yet know that they could get the same results with randomly selected individuals from across the globe.)
There are, in humanity, clearly populations with a great deal of coherence, but using the word race implies a greater coherence for a larger number of people than we can identify unless we change the definition.
- Even that rough correspondence might need to be tailored based on which groups at the “edge” of the regions were included or excluded.
Not at all vague? Then you’d agree that strawberries and watermelons are ‘alike’ because they’re both fruits, just as cow-milking and roller-blading are ‘alike’ because they’re both activities. What two things, pray tell, aren’t ‘alike’, given your curious assertion?
The one thing we know for certain about human DNA is that we’re still a long way from truly understanding it and exactly how our genetic information is fully coded. Humans are far more complex than flowering plants, but the DNA of some such plant species have more than 15 times as many genes than humans’ mere 30,000! That means that human DNA coding is far more complex then we’d ever imagined and that a mere brute force comparison of alleles may not be sufficiently probative.
Yep, race exists. Please review my earlier posts.
My, you’re full of bald assertions today, aren’t you…
I asserted nothing of the sort you imply. I suggest you read what is being said instead of making things up and putting words in people’s statements that aren’t there.
I’d suggest not trying to lecture a molecular biologist on what he earns his bread with. The molecular clock has been shown time and again to work admirably well. Unfortunately, the point you make have very little to do with the issue you are debating.
Hardly. Just because you happily ignore the supporting arguments doesn’t make something an unfounded assertion.
I certainly agree, but again, you seem to also agree with me that something we can call “race” does exist, even though it is not easily defined and does not denote a fixed, pre-defined, clear-cut set of hard-and-fast distinctions between any two individuals.
My own ‘persistent point’ remains that there’s something that may suitably be referred to as “race” that’s objectively real and is more than merely a social construct, whether the concept is scientifically useful or not. If we were to abolish the word “race”, another word would be immediately needed to take its place to refer to this phenomenon. And it is apparently measurable for at least some races, according to Risch, et. al.
Other than that, we’re mostly in agreement.
You mean you actually offered supporting arguments somewhere? Perhaps you deleted them accidentally…
Just because you happily provide unfounded assertions doesn’t make it an argument.
I would suggest reading a thread before posting in it. And I’d also suggest reading a post before replying to it.
Ambushed: I guess a semantic issue will continue to exist, because for me a phenotypically similar group of people that shows only a loose genetic coherence = social construct ;).
Why? Because that loose genetic coherence is so loose as a universal ( again, if we’re talking large classical groupings like black or asian ) as to be virtually meaningless IMHO. Which is why it is of not much scientific use as you acknowledge. Black on the scale of the U.S. has some medical utility for allocation of resources for things like outreach, as much for cultural reasons as genetic ( for example higher rates of hypertension and diabetes in American black populations quite probably correlate, partially or wholely, to diet ). Black on a global scale seems to lack such utility. The Andaman Islander conundrum again.
The real center of that definition is phenotypically similar. Intuitive differences by phenotype are identified and reenforced by social interaction. Hence race, on that broad intuitive level we seem to be discussing, is essentially a social construct.
Now, as has been argued before many times, if you start narrowing your focus to smaller and smaller populations, that genetic coherence in some cases will tighten and become meaningful. But at that point those broad intuitive phenotypes no longer refer to a single race. Which is why population would be the preferred term.
Technicalities and semantics? Perhaps. But sometimes technicalities matter :).
- Tamerlane
I’m not sure from that answer whether you agree or disagree with the statement. Let me reword:
Do you agree or disagree with the statement ‘black recipients have a better chance of finding a match among black donors than they do among white donors’.
You already asked this question and I already answered it. Now how about answering the questions I asked you?
I’d like to see ambushed take a crack at them too.
IMO that social construct is indeed objectively real. It also doesn’t rule out some degree of genetic inter-relatedness. It just means that what defines the group as a whole is not necessarily genetic inter-relatedness, but rather a perception of inter-relatedness based on shared appearances.
Closer?
- Tamerlane
[peering through the haze of smoke generated by all the brushfires]
**Aw, honey, so Collounsbury barked at you, so what? He barks at everybody. 
Illegitimi nil carborundum and all that, eh? 
You posted a perfectly straightforward and sensible GD topic, it’s not your fault that C-bury has issues and jumped all over you.
So don’t go hide out on us in GQ. You’re one of the few non-raving-loonies here.
[enjoying the spectacle of Lucwarm accusing Tom~ of “intellectual dishonesty”]
I wasn’t sure by your answer if you agreed or disagreed with the statement. By ‘not so much’ did you mean you did not so much disagree or not so much agree?
In answer to your question, the groupings are being classified as Caucasian, African, Asian, and Native American. I’m assuming the criteria used to separate races is self identification. They are not using biological identifiers to mark people as a member of a race, but using race (by their definition) as a marker of likely marrow compatibility.
From this Scientific American article:
Yep. Scientiss keep arguing the subject, just as we do.
Ineresting article. Including:
Scientists are looking very deeply into gene diversity and genetic distance. What they are finding (and keep finding) is that human populations do not break down into the broad catagories of race that many of you keep arguing for.
Here is a site that explains some of the ways genetic distance is calculated.
And here are a few reports on research in genetic distance.
http://www.css.orst.edu/CLASSES/css620/2002literature/Genetic_Sampling_Error_of_Genetic_Distance.pdf
http://www.bio.psu.edu/People/Faculty/Nei/Lab/1993-nei-roychoudhury.pdf
http://courses.washington.edu/phg513/boehnke00.pdf
They are all pdf except for the first. Geneticist are studing human variations. They are studying them quite intensely. The fact that what they are finding out does not match popular belief seems a bit hard for many to understand.
Since this is Great Debates and not General Questions, allow me to add my personal opinion on the subject without any references to supporting documentation whatsoever…
Yes, there really is such a thing as “race” and no, it’s not “just” a social construct. But it is, in a very literal sense, just “skin-deep” and really not worth making a fuss about.
Most Asian people, to take an example, have certain physical characteristics that distinguish them from, say, most Caucasian people. And those physical characteristics are passed from one generation to the next, indicating that there must be some genetic component involved.
These differences, however, are not particularly significant, and have their origin in the fact that for many thousands of years people tended to live in large groups essentially isolated from other groups of people, and also tended to intermarry within those groups.
Yes, there are “black” people (meaning people with dark skin, curly black hair, flattened noses, etc.). And there are “Asian” people (meaning people with epithelial folds, yellowish skin tones, etc.) But that fact is no more significant than the fact that there are people with blue eyes, or red hair.
What makes race a “social construct” in my opinion is that some people ascribe a significance to these outward physical differences that doesn’t belong. I have brown hair and brown eyes, and it would be generally considered ridiculous to claim that I was a different “race” from somebody with blond hair and green eyes. It’s just that, since there are large populations of people living in or from well-defined (more or less) areas that share a group of similar physical traits, it is easy to claim that there must be “other” traits that they also have in common (different levels of intelligence, for example).
To sum up, it is disingenous to say that there are no differences between the various “races” of people, or that the differences have no basis in genetics. It’s just that those diffrences are not significant, and the color of one’s skin says as much about who a person is as the color of one’s eyes.
Regards,
Barry
That fact that what they are finding out does not match popular belief does not negate points such as differences between races were greater than differences within races and the most likely match is an African American donor and genetics cannot prove that race doesn’t exist. That seems a bit hard for you to understand.