and what does “biologically meaningful” mean to you? If genes coding for skin color are not meaningful, how about the age of menarche? Or for the length of pregnancy? Or the genetic ability to breathe normally in the Andean highlands? Or the distinctive brain structures that they are gradually finding on fMRI, and will keep on finding, at least over in China where the research will be funded for Chinese supremacism propaganda purposes? Or all these parameters taken together?
RE this entire thread, I think the fundamental problem is lack of decent definitions. I am not a stickler for using “race” as a “first class object” here. Some people say we should use “population”. That’s fine, except the some people never bothered explaining just how do we identify this “population” in real life. If I get a grant to study the temperament differences, can Colibri tell me how I am supposed to identify these “populations” over in NYC so I can do it just the way he wants it done? Or will we keep on talking about this like about the Spherical cow - Wikipedia using words that seem to have no defined meaning?
The same applies to “temperament”. If a newborn cries or does not cry when you make a face at it, is that a measure of “temperament”? Or not? (I may have seen claims that Asians cry less, but no cite). If lots of teenagers behave this way and not that way, is that temperament?
Or are we supposed to approach this whole issue using the Google Scholar test so that the whole issue would hinge on whether any articles with “race” and “temperament” in the title are returned? I hope you do see some of the difficulties involved in hinging your worldview on results of such tests, right?
There are the Aeta in the Philippines who look completely african, with dark dark skin and kinky hair and wide features. I was startled when I saw some Aeta children for the first time simply because I wasn’t expecting black street children in the Philippines the first time I was there.
Studies have shown they’re no more genetically similar to africans than regular filipinos. Race is pretty useless scientifically because the boundaries we as humans have drawn to race are superficial and don’t line up well. We see skin color and differentiate based primarily on that one feature.
There is also that scandanavian group with epithanical folds I cannot remember the name of, they look asian to me but are not. “He’s the black guy” is a roughly useful metric for day to day life, “measuring genetic aggression in blacks” is not useful or even possible.
Those are all attributes that can be ascribed to populations but not what people call races, even in your cite’s cite to justify the concept. If wouldn’t argue that there are predominant genetic traits within populations. And that the conventional definitions of race tend to include similar populations. But it is biological meaning if the something about genetic makeup can be determined by race. Your cite’s cite didn’t demonstrate that. It simply showed that the traditional definitions of race sweep up some genetically similar populations, and then it ignores the exceptions. Then your cite also states that conventional definitions of race are inaccurate (because they are based on superficial characteristics instead of genetics), and relies on self identified race, which apparently includes the race of African Americans. Then it also justifies the use of self identified race based on non-genetic factors, stating that African-Americans are poorer than Caucasions, and susceptible to poverty related disorders.
Nobody argues that dark skinned people are more likely to have some genes that arose in an African population than a light skinned person. But that methodology is dead wrong when the person happens to be Asian.
Nobody is arguing that within populations people can have unique genetic traits either. What people are denying is that definition of race based on superficial characteristics does not determine population.
I have stated, as of others, that there is no meaningful definition of race, so the question can’t be answered based on the idea that there is.
I don’t think that there is a useful definition of temperment either, but I haven’t looked at in depth. I would be dubious, because even if there is such definition, I don’t think the testing for a genetic basis for temperment can sufficiently exclude the non-genetic factors. If you wanted to test for the genetic trait of temperment in Eskimos, you would have to establish Eskimos as a population with high incidence of similar genetics, then demonstrate that Eskimos display the same temperment living in the Arctic as they would living in the tropics and other environments, and that other populations do not show the same temperments living under the same environments, and somehow eliminate every other non-genetic factor as the determiner of termperment. I doubt anything like that has been done. I would expect there have been claims made based on limited samples in limited conditions, and iffy definitions, that are far from conclusive.
I don’t base my worldview on that at all. I knew that the concept of race was invalid science before I ever saw the scientific backing, because it isn’t logical. Simple observation shows that the dividing lines do not exist, and homogenous groups are very small. I don’t know very many details about genetic influence on temperment, but I’ve expressed my view on that as opinion, and haven’t seen credible or conclusive evidence that contradicts those opionions, but logic confirms them. I’ve seen twin studies that deal with temperment, and despite the way they tend to get characterized, they usually show that genetic traits are no more influential than environmental ones, because similarities in twins are not remarkable, while differences are.
There are “negrito” populations all over South Asia, not just the Philippines.
Do you have a cite for that? IIRC, those “negrito” populations are thought to be remnants of the very first migrants out of Africa. In that case, one would expect them to be more genetically distant from Africans.
The Saami (or Lapps). They are thought to be originally from Asia, but after the years are genetically mostly European with only a remnant Asian genetic legacy. Not all of them have epicanthic folds, either.
just because we don’t have a precise definition of what a “lemon car” is and there are all sorts of borderline cases, does this mean that this concept is not a useful one? Does this mean that if you can identify that the car is in fact a lemon with a decent certainty, that this categorization will be useless and meaningless for you?
Note that whereas the “lemon” is a terminological abstraction, there are some [del]biological[/del] mechanical features of it that we could find in many (but not all) cases of car “lemonness”. Just like there are biological features that correlate with “whiteness”, “Chinese-ness” and “blackness”.
ETA: and yes, then there are also the various “populations” or “subtypes” of lemon cars that are even more interesting (cars with burnt engine, cars with water spilled into electronics etc). But recognizing that should not preclude us from seeing the general concept of “lemon” either, if only as a sum of those population parts.
Not the same thing, because the you end up with a whole bunch of people (on the order of billions, btw) who are not in a race (they are not “lemons”).
Better analogy: There are Fords, Toyotas, Saabs, etc. Every car falls into one or the other category. Not so with people. There are no distinct boundaries between human populations as the biological traits are clinal in nature.
Not that telling you this for the nth time is going to make any difference… I’m only posting this for those who are following this thread at home. I have no interest or expectation in convincing you of this as you have made it abundantly clear that you have made your mind up regardless of what the science is telling us.
lemonness and more detailed flaws like “engine no good” are clinal in nature too. If you don’t think so, why don’t you give me a hard-and-fast definition of what a lemon is, so that no two mechanics would disagree and we could always classify cars correctly as “lemon” and “not lemon”.
this analogy is moronic, so I am not surprised you are using it. “Lemon” is as hazy a categorization as “race”; but “Toyota” is indeed a matter of public record because it says right there on the car’s brand and in its documentation.
On one side we assert there is no meaningful biological definition of race. You seem to disagree, so please provide that definition. It would go something like this:
The human races are ____, ____, … , and ____
You can determine the race of somebody by examining _________
From that determination of race you can determine ________
If your contention is true, it can’t be that hard to do.
why do you think that race identification has to be a boolean variable, “is white”? If I provide you with a complex function that rates your whiteness on the 1-100 scale, so that the higher the score, the more “white” you are, does this invalidate the notion that “white race” exists?
And maybe the above function will return different values depending on what we are more interested in right now. Let’s say those passing mixed race Brazilians would end up as “90 white” when we are interested in predicting their crime rates but more like “30 white” when we are interested in the MtDNA or some other such genetic topic where their nonwhite ancestry is a big deal.
The same applies to lemons. If one car rates 95% lemon and another just 23% on some hypothetical evaluation test, we can still talk about “lemon” as a useful category.
This thread has gone beyond the topic in the OP to a discussion of whether or not “race” exists or is a useful concept. The latter is more appropriate for GD. Since we have had many such threads in GD previously, I will invite anyone interested in pursuing this further to start a new thread there rather than moving this one.