And to the extent the existing phylogeny may be useful, which is largely theoretical, it only acquires usefulness with regards to any individual when a genetic analysis is performed. At this point genetic analysis is rare enough that individuals can not be grouped into “races” easily. The thing which would make this easier, the phenotype, is unreliable and should be ignored.
Enjoy,
Steven
The problem with those clades is that they don’t have clear boundaries. If you are going to subdivide below the species level in a scientific manner, you need to establish some sort of clear boundary between the populations. Humans vary in a clinal way, though, and populations which vary in that way are generally not subdivided. There isn’t any objective place to divide them. The fact that you can identify clades isn’t remarkable at all. My family (grandparents, parents and their siblings, my siblings and cousins) is a clade, but it isn’t a very useful one.
Agreed on ignoring the phenotype. And, yes, grouping into “races” may not be easy, but it is possible. I think that answers the question of whether or not humans can be grouped biologically into races. The usefulness of such groupings is best determined by scientists using the groupings. For medical purposes, complete genotyping of each individual is probable the best course. But in lieu of that, determining the clade of an individual (maybe via a cheap test looking at a handful of genetic markers) could be a quick way of estimating other genes.
The phylogenic tree is an objective way to divide populations. And the division is clear, at the level of populations. The objectiveness and clearness of the boundaries is as good as the phylogenic tree is. The fact that a phylogenic tree can be constructed with enough confidence to publish it shows that human populations are not entirely clinal. Although this particular tree may turn out to be wrong, for the time being it is good science. If it’s difficult to place an individual into the phylogeny, that doesn’t necessarily negate the utility of the labeling clades as applied to large populations.
I can, theoretically, publish a phylogenetic tree of my family going back 20 generations. It will be clinal. The fact that such a tree can be published is not an indication that the population is not clinal.
All proper races are clades, but not all clades are races.
Yes; why does it matter? The clades I’ve chosen are certainly large enough to be called races. They roughly correspond to what many people would call races, so I feel justified in calling these clades “races”.
Let me clarify that a bit more. You and I can trace our ancestry back until we find only common ancestors. We can then construct **Mace **and **Pleonast **clades based on generations just below the common ancestors, by splitting off those that don’t lead to me and those that don’t lead to you. In all likelihood, those clades are going to vary clinally, if they vary in any measurable way at all. So, just because you can create all these genetically verifiable clades and construct all kinds of detailed trees does in any way imply that you will find nonclinal variations. I noted above that (at one time anyway) there may have been a few isolated populations like Amerinds and Tasmanians. Those are the rare exceptions, though, as most populations worldwide had constant gene flow.
I strongly suggest you find a copy of Genes, Peoples and Languages by LL Cavalli-Sforza and read pages 25 - 27: What is Race,Then? It demonstrates the futility and arbitrariness of dividing our species into races.
I’ve added the book to my Amazon list, the review sounds interesting. Thanks for the pointer.
While you make a good point about clades constructed from known ancestors, the phylogeny constructed in the SciAm article was constructed from genetic analysis. If the human species was purely clinal, the phylogeny would correspond exactly to geography, where relatedness would be proportional to distance. Instead, they find genetic markers that are not purely distance-based, but instead reflecting past migrations. The markers they used are clearly non-clinal.
That the DNA analysis finds this is the evidence against a purely clinal population. With increased mobility, these markers will certainly be spread thoroughly in the future. The phylogeny would then be impossible to reconstruct with the populations of that time, and we will have an entirely clinal population.
I’m very familiar with that work and that map. It looks pretty darn clinal to me.
I don’t think that is correct. It would only be correct if there were a constant rate of migration outward from a central origin, into a geography that was limitless in all directions. As it is, there was lots of looping, doubling back, and situations where migrations would have stopped for extended periods of time, or people just simply stayed put.
If you look at that map, you see where one population blends into another with simple, single point mutations on the Y-chromosome. Besides, you don’t define races by single, non-coding markers on one chromosome.
I think you’ll enjoy that book. It’s a little dated now, but it stands up remarkably well. You might also want to try Deep Ancestry, by Spencer Wells. He’s the guy who basically drew the map you linked to.
I think the loop-backs are the essential non-clinal part. They represent edges in the populations’ DNA distributions. After a long time, the loops will be smudged out completely as the markers diffuse. Then we will have a clinal population.
The map is based on genetic markers on the Y chromosome, but the phylogeny is based on the whole genome.
Ok, but to take the discussion away from the technical details, and back to the question in the OP, there can’t be a “race traitor” without a strong concept of “race.” Because the only means most people have to discern a person’s “race” is the phenotype, which varies too widely to accurately categorize people with, the only categorization which, somewhat, withstands scrutiny scientifically is based on the genotype. Most people are ignorant of their genotype. It takes extensive, and expensive, testing and analysis for someone to be aware of their genotype.
Accepting, for the sake of arguement(I don’t accept it overall by the way), the idea that clade=“race”, we still run into problems with fairly calling someone a “race traitor.” Even if someone was aware of which clade they belonged to, they would have no idea who else among the general population was a member of what clade. Thus the only time someone could be a “race” traitor would be if they knew their clade, knew the clades of other individuals(some which matched their own, and some which did not) and made a choice which would be detrimental to their own clade, but not to the others. In the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode The Vengeance Factor something like this happened. A species was subdivided into clans, and there was inter-clan warfare. One clan wiped out all but a couple members of another. The surviving members of the decimated clan developed a biological weapon keyed to a unique genetic factor amongst their persecutors. It would be harmless against anyone but a member of this clan.
To be a “race traitor” someone would have to develop some sort of method for testing for, and harming, those of their own clade, without harming others. This is completely beyond us at this point, so no one can be a “race traitor.” Q.E.D.
Enjoy,
Steven
Can you tell me what you see as non-clinal about that map? Where specifically are you seeing abrupt changes in phenotype or genotype? I’m just not seeing it, other than a few isolated Island populations-- maybe like the Andaman Islanders.
Let’s also keep in mind that race as a social construct really only has meaning within a certain country or geographic area. The races we tend to recognize in the US are not the same ones recognized in Mexico or much of Latin America. Nor would they be the same ones recognized in China, Japan, India or the Middle East.
I agree and would go farther to say that even if one did act against others of the same clade, that it doesn’t rise to the level of treachery, since there should be no presumption of loyalty to one’s “race”.
For example, where the gold M174 path meets the pink M122 path in China. Or, the blue M170 and the cyan M343 in Europe. Those are where distantly related genotypes are geographically close. Unfortunately, the article does not associate the map’s Y marker lineages with the clades in the phylogeny, so we can’t determine how distinct they are, other than when they diverged (50k and 45k years ago for my examples).
Yep. Common usage of “race” is almost completely cultural and culture-specific. Any genetic component is based on appearance only, not on any other underlying genetic similarities.
I don’t think so. Do you really believe you could go into China and find a place where gold and pink are clearly delineated? These pathways are obtained by measuring the relative frequency of markers, which typically increase or decrease directionally so the researchers can infer how the migrations took place in the past. They do not generally represent distinct boundary points visible today, unless there was some very recent migration. You might have been able to see some non-clinal populations in Colonial America, for example, when large number of Europeans displaced the Native Americans in sections of what would become the east coast of the US. But that’s not what you’d see in China or Europe today.
It’s like blond hair in Europe. There is a high frequency of bond hair in Norther Europe, and it becomes less frequent as you head south towards the Mediterranean. But you can’t point to a place where blond hair suddenly disappears.
Besides, there is no reason that variations need to be clinal in all directions in order for there to be no biologically based subspecies/races. Think of ring species, for example-- they may meet at one end and be incompatible, but you often won’t be able to draw a line anywhere else to delineate distinct populations.
Yet despite genetic diffusion, they found enough differences across the entire genome to construct a phylogenic tree. If the population were entirely clinal, then distance in the tree would always correspond to distance in geography. They didn’t publish a geographic map of the clades in the tree, so I can’t give examples of distantly related clades in geographic proximity. But given that they do show Y-chromosome markers that diverged 50k years ago in close proximity, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that other genes follow similar contours.
I don’t deny that some genes are clinal. I’m simply pointing out that some genes are not.
And ring species are an excellent example. A ring species is often divided into subspecies (which is what I’m trying to do with H. sapiens), subject to the usual splitter/lumper debate. That seems to be the essence of our discussion.
You are making the question to be more difficult than what it is. Treachery is purely a social construct, so it makes no sense to bring biology into this. If a society groups people by race and a person within a socially defined racial group knowingly acts in a way that is perceived to go against the interest of their own racial group, then there is nothing semantically incorrect with calling them a “race traitor”.
It would be no different if we were talking about countries. The boundary lines which delinate nations are pretty much arbitrarily set and can be considered social constructs in a similar way that races are. Does that mean it’s wrong to call John Walker Lindh an American traitor?
Just because race doesn’t have a strong biological basis doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as race as a social way of classifying people. I wish we could make this a sticky or something, because failure to understand this is starting to look like a persistent hangnail on this board.
I don’t deny that “race” exists as a social construct. There were arguments being put forth for a biological, scientific, basis for “race” and I was speaking against those being able to support an accusation of a “race traitor.”
The sociological usage of “race” is too muddled a subject for me to take much interest in. It quacks like a dog, walks like a bird, and looks like an amoeba. I prefer to stick to matters with reasonably objective answers. Essentially my argument is there is no such thing as a biological “race” that a person could identify with, and easily identify others as not part of, and to which they owe a duty of fealty. Ergo, no such thing as a “race traitor” in any objective sense.
I could make the same argument with regards to sociological “races” because being a “race traitor” requires some duty of fealty towards one’s “race” and I’ve never seen evidence of such a duty. Biologically I take issue with the “race” part of a “race traitor” accusation. Sociologically I would take exception to the “traitor” part of a “race traitor” accusation.
Enjoy,
Steven
But what I think you’re missing is that they do so by taking large samples and measuring the frequency of occurrence of these genetic markers. They are not finding step functions, but rather they are finding changes in the frequency of genes spread out over geographies. The fact that Y-chromosome markers of different lineages are found side by side just means that the population split off at some point and then came back together, then they mixed together again. You might very well find cousins in the same village with different Y-chromosome markers. Just look at the timescale on the graph of your map-- we’re talking about migrations that happened 10s of thousands of years ago. To put it bluntly, there’s been a lot of fucking going on since then!
How many non-clinal genes does one need to find to create a race?
They will only be subdivided thusly if they meet the criteria for subspecies. Humans do not. You need to find some population that can be clearly distinguished from other populations of the same species and that rarely interbreeds with with those other populations due to some natural barrier preventing that interbreeding from taking place.
If an alien scientist arrived on Earth 1,000 years ago armed with our current BSC definition of species and subspecies, he might decide that there were a few subspecies of humans: The Afro/Euro/Asiatic/Pacific subspecies, the Americas subspecies and the Austro/Papua subspecies. If two such scientists arrived, they’d probably disagree about that last one, wanting to lump it into the first due to the fact that it is fairly clinal in nature. They might recognize a number of very small island populations that could be put into subspecies, but they might not bother because the populations are so small.
Still, the alien scientists would clearly recognize that the mobility of humans would lead to the inevitable collapse of such a classification scheme.
So do you think John Walker Lindh is an American traitor? There’s no such thing as a biological “nationality”, you can’t tell just by looking at him what nationality he is, and it’s debateable whether he owes anything except taxes to the US.
If your answer allows him to be an “American traitor” because you can look at his records and identify his nationality from a review of his birth certificate and other “objective” documents, remember that race shows up on birth certificates too. It’s on mine.
Yes, but the mixture is not complete. There are still statistically significant differences between the different clades. That’s how they generated the phylogeny and the marker map.
That’s precisely the lumper/splitter debate. Biologists disagree on it; other reasonable people can disagree. The fact that their are still genetic differences shows that something was slowing gene flow. One can choose clades within our species that are genetically distinguishable from other clades. Whether or not you want to label some of those clades “subspecies” is a subjective decision.
I believe we’ve reached the end point of this line of discussion. I think we can both agree that
Yes?