Now I’ve been right twice. Once when I said race exists and a second time when I predicted someone would try to claim it didn’t by posting some of the rare exceptions (which I’ve already repeatedly stated exist).
I could prove my point by posting four thousand jpgs of Eritrean people that do match what I said but I’d probably exceed this board’s bandwidth before you’ll admit your worldview doesn’t reflect reality.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the position I outlined in my post #73, Little Nemo?
(Also, I’m still somewhat curious why you classify Indians and Egyptians as white. Could you expand on that?)
I don’t think we’re closer to defining “race treason” but this sure looks like “logic treason”.
I’ve been to India (and Bangladesh). The people there didn’t look unambiguously white, or black. Maybe I only ran into rare exceptions for ten months.
Race as a biological reality rather than a societal construct?
Piffle.
How many races are there?
Who is included in each race?
What justifies your attempt to place any population into any race?
Biological construct of race:
People who are genetically similar through heredity and share physical characteristics such as skin, hair, or eye colour or such as epicanthic eye folds. Sometimes, but not always, sharing a close geographic location.
Political / social construct of race:
A myth. Especially when one considers a ‘group think’ social set of mores or beliefs.
Agree?
Define “biological reality”.
INo, it doesn’t mena anything outside of a scientific discussion, but the concept which more or less acccurately describes ancestral dispersion and genetic semi-cohesion of certain population groups over time. The fact that they don’t exist as an identifiable, discrete phenomenon in nature does not mean the concept is wrong.
I didn’t say that people today actually fall definitively within any of those races.
Races existed as population movements, which themselves diverged into ethnicities. The fact that they make no real different in the world does not mean they aren’t critical to our understanding. Today, they talk about abstract population movements more and don’t use the old labels, but it amounts to the same thing.
Yes, but we’re learning that the old notion of waves of Indo-Europeans moving into an area and replacing the autocthonous population just didn’t happen. Language and cultural change doesn’t imply the the old population died and a new one moved in. Look at, say, Ireland. Today the vast majority of people in Ireland speak English, not Irish. And yet, most people living in Ireland aren’t descended from English immigrants, they are descended from native Irish. Feel free to put “native” into scare quotes if you like, since Celtic languages are also Indo-European interlopers. Similarly, the Etruscans weren’t wiped out, they just started speaking Latin instead of Etruscan.
It certainly is true that as you move south from Scandinavia to Zimbabwe you get more and more curly haired people. And skin tones get darker and darker, sickle-cell trait becomes more and more common, noses get broader, hair gets darker, and so on. And as you move from France to Korea, hair gets darker, epicanthic folds get more common, people get less hairy, and hair gets straighter.
But the problem is that all these traits don’t vary together. A person with an epicanthic fold is pretty likely to also have straight black hair and tawny skin tone, but it sure isn’t guaranteed. All that epicanthic fold tells us is that the person has the allele that causes epicanthic fold. Sure, that alelle is very common on one side of Eurasia and very rare on the other side of Eurasia, but so? There are blue-eyed blond-haired white-skinned Slavs with epicanthic folds, what does that prove?
It sure doesn’t prove that at one time there was a group of pure asians (epicanthic fold, straight black hair, button nose, tawny skin) and a group of pure whites (blue eyes, wavy blond hair, straight nose, white skin) and a group of pure blacks (dark eyes, kinky black hair, wide nose, dark skin), and the people with have intermediate facial features are the result of inbreeding between these pure populations.
It means that there are various alleles for various features, and various people in various places have various distributions of these alleles, for complex reasons including the founder effect, genetic drift, and natural selection.
That makes no sense at all, and I have never seen race described that way in the scientific literature – ie, as “population movements”. If the races “diverged into ethnicities”, then we should still be able to group the ethnicities into their ancestral races. And if races once existed, but no longer do, then that means you would find more genetic diversity in the past than in the present, which also makes no sense (unless all but one of these ancestral races died out).
There have been a few known populations that existed in relative isolation for brief periods of our history as a species, but that is not generally true of our species as a whole. American Indians may have existed for 10k years or so with not much gene flow from the rest of the world, and the same was probably true of Tasmanians. For Europe, Asia and Africa, however, constant gene flow between populations was the norm, not the exception.
Can I ask what part of what I’ve said people are disagreeing with? Is it that people have different skin colors? Or is it that skin color is often a hereditary trait?
Is it your contention that race is synonymous with skin color? That would not appear to be the case, judging from your categorizations, but I just want to check.
I know what you mean, and it does somehow viscerally seem more traitorous for a black person to argue for Jim Crow laws than for a white person to do so. It’s certainly more illogical or underhanded, whichever the motivations are.
In the final analysis though, I pretty much want to call the whites traitors too: traitors to all logic and compassion to other humans. The point being that I won’t let them say, “but those aren’t my people!” Yes they are, especially if you really read that Bible you’re thumping while you argue for enforced segregation.
So I can be a “Strawberry Blonde” supremecist? I think I could get behind that. All you “dirty blondes”, get down on your knees!
Enjoy,
Steven
Especially since it’s also a Khoi-San trait - pepercorn hair, yellow-brown skin and all.
For me, it’s that skin colour alone is any criterion to base a conception of race off of, given its high variability.
I guess no one else reads SciAm, since the phylogeny published there shows us exactly how to subcategorize the human species in a scientific way. Simply pick the clades you feel are most useful* and call them “races”. Yes, we can disagree about which clades are most useful, but those are exactly the arguments biologists have about many species. Since we are one species and thus the clades can outbreed, some individuals will not fit cleanly in a single clade. But that doesn’t remove the usefulness of the phylogeny or categories sized between species and individual.
*I use “useful” to mean for some scientific discipline, for example anthropology, linguistics, medicine, etc.
Agreed!
So “muscular blondes” is a race, then? No? How about “Dark-skinned twinks”? No? “Redheads”? Am I getting closer? How about “athletes”? What the hell, man? I thought you said this was easy!
I can’t imagine why linguistics would particularly care to group people into clades qua clades; surely they’d prefer to group people by language, and not be terribly concerned with the small correlations between this and biological descent.
Also, I wouldn’t have thought modern humanity separated in a significant, clean, useful way into distinct clades, particularly given the common estimate that the most recent common ancestor of living humans lived within historical times.
I read the article several weeks ago, and I didn’t see where it said races exist. Can you quote the section? The entire article is on-line now.
It doesn’t talk about races (and I haven’t said it does). It does have a phylgenic tree of human populations, which would the starting point of scientifically dividing humans into races. I couldn’t find the figures before, but you’re right, it’s online now: Whole Genome Results.
Linguists may be interested because the phylogeny is associated with geographical migrations.
The authors of this article have found evidence for clades. I find that fascinating, myself. Whether or not this holds up in the long run is another question, but that’s how science progresses. For now, it’s scientifically reasonable to divide the human species into clades.
I think the problem is the Scientific American(I subscribe, but I didn’t read that particular article) article is talking genotypes and most people, when they use the term “race”, are using it to discuss phenotypes. Genotypes can be grouped, loosely with a significant number of exceptions, assuming we have access to genetic information about an individual. These categories can be useful when tracking disease resistance/susceptibility(sickle-cell anemia for instance) and for analyzing likely outcomes of offspring(what are the odds this child would have an inheritable heart defect). There are genetic markers, in the genotype, which can be traced regionally and the presence of such a marker could be used to change the order in which a medical professional runs a series of tests based on the relative frequency of a certain disorder within a group of individuals with the same marker. Ok, so at a genome level, there may be some possibility of a loose grouping which has value, although this is being bred out of the genome with increasing globalization and population shifts.
The problem is when you take that same concept(loosely grouping large numbers of individuals) based on a phenotype. Genetic makers are either present or absent. They function as “bright lines” as much as anything can in biology. Phenotypes show a spectrum of variation and are not useful for classifying an individual into “races” because the variation within a race would be greater than the variation between races. This renders the whole concept of dividing into “races” based on phenotypes useless for any practical purpose.
Enjoy,
Steven
Just to show it can be done, here’s a cladistic division of the Homo sapiens:[ul]
[li] African: descendants of the common ancestor of Papuan and San. Equivalent to Homo sapiens. [] Non-african: descendants of the common ancestor of Papuan and Mozambite. Sub-clade of African. [] Eurasian: descendants of the common ancestor of Papuan and Tuscan. Sub-clade of Non-african. [] European: descendants of the common ancestor of Russian and Tuscan. Sub-clade of Eurasian. [] Asian: descendants of the common ancestor of Papuan and Adygei. Sub-clade of Eurasian, sister clade of European. [] Pacific: descendants of the common ancestor of Papuan and Cambodian. Sub-clade of Asian. [] American: descendants of the common ancestor of Pima and Columbian. Sub-clade of Pacific. [/ul] I don’t know how useful this division is any particular purpose, but it’s easy enough to adjust.[/li]
On preview: I think you’re right, Mtgman. Going forward, the out-crossing between clades is going to (sooner or later) totally swamp the existing phylogeny.