# Is there such a biological thing as a racial group? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 3, 2011, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007 "2011-04-03T03:39:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/221 "2011-04-05T11:42:48Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Did you read the 2005 paper? The genetic clusters correspond almost perfectly with peoples own self identified race/ethnicity. Yes, hispanics included. Of course, that paper, (like most of the stuff you cite), is limited to U.S. populations, where specific filters on immigration have limited the subjects studied to a rather restricted population from each of the regions outside North America. By limiting the subject group to specific locales, the broad spectrum and clinal nature of humanity is masked by the higher percentages of specific populations. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/222 "2011-04-05T11:46:35Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > Obviously there’s a ton of gaps there because I’m not claiming I can prove anything. I’m simply claiming that “there are biological reasons why so many top sprinters are black” can not instantly be laughed out of court and dismissed as false due to the fact that it contains both the word “biological” and the word “race”. Even given your backtracking on what you claim this thread was supposed to be about, this claim supports your opponents, not you. “Fast sprinters” come from the populations of West Africa and fail to come from East or Southern Africa. They are not indicative of the sprinting speed of some imagined “African” or “black” race, but only of the smaller populations of the West that are not identified by “race.” ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/223 "2011-04-05T12:01:31Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > First of all, please dial down the condescension and hostility. Then please respond honestly and fairly. It is annoying in the extreme when I respond at length to your queries, and you ignore what I have said and repeat the same claim about some ill-defined"Asian Race" in your next post, so I have to address it all over again. If you are polite and honest then so will I be. > [@](#): > > I absolutely admit that I can’t tell you a single certain biological or genetic trait that links all people considered “Asian”. I’m not sure if anyone can. I have never claimed that such a thing exists. If there is no biological commonality to “Asian” then by definition it does not exist biologically. So that answers your question in the OP. There is, by your own admission, no biological Asian race. > [@](#): > > (1) We all agree (I think) that there are many populations of humanity (FAR more than there are generally thought of being ‘races’). They tend to share a common geographical origin, and they members of these groups share both genetic and morphological (assuming that word means what I think it means) traits. There is no way to precisely count or enumerate them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Yes, we call such groups “families” or “communities” I assume that you want to contend that such groups are “races”, but what you have posted applies better to families and villages than it does to anything resembling a race. > [@](#): > > (2) That said, plenty of people fall into gray areas between these groups due to interbreeding. Other people are members of these groups by descent but just don’t look much like their parents and relatives. Once again, more true of families and villages than of races > [@](#): > > (3) “Races” are groups of these populations, and groups of individuals, all lumped together, usually due to vaguely arbitrary physical traits, most commonly (historically) skin color Wrong. As already noted, people with nearly identical physical traits are commonly placed into separate races, while people with dissimilar traits are commonly linked together. This is why Indians and Timorese are not considered Negroid, despite having far more Negroid traits than Ethiopians, who have been considered Negroid for millennia. > [@](#): > > (4) Members of the same population will USUALLY, although not ALWAYS, end up in the same perceived “race”. (And this is probably way more true for some populations than others… I’m sure there are populations 99% of whose members would be classified as “white” and others whose members vary far more greatly.) No, I disagree entirely. put the terms [Indian man](http://www.google.com/images?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&hl=en&q=Indian+man&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=551) and "“[ethiopian man](http://www.google.com.au/images?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=N11&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&q=%22ethiopian%20man%22&noj=1&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=551)” into Google. Now look at the first 20 results of each. Now tell me what perceived race all those men belong to, and why you placed them all in that race. Because I do not buy for a second that people of those populations usually end up in the same race. And once again, these are not being selected for being atypical. We could do the same test using Philipinos or Libyans or literally dozens of other nations. So no, I do not accept that members of the same population will usually fall into the same race. that is only true for very tiny populations or populations at the extreme ends of any racial spectrum. The vast majority of the world’s populations are comprised of people who will be fall into at least two different races. > [@](#): > > If you pick someone at random from a randomly chosen population anywhere in the world, and pick another random person from that population, then have random Americans give their best guess as to their race, there will be a correlation far greater than chance between the answers you get.) Are you willing to test this? First you define your races. Then I will select, say, 10 nations. Then you can select a random number which will be a photograph number on Google image search using “nationese man”. I will then select the first photograph at or after that number that is free of other clues to race (signwriting in the background, clothing etc) or will modify the photo to remove same. This way we will all be able to see that I am selecting random people from those populations The we will post the photos in IMO and use the first 10 respondents answers to gauge success rates of the typical American. This will be an overestimate because Dopers are of above average intelligence. but it should be an interesting test. Because I do not believe that most people can pick races at better than chance probability. > [@](#): > > (A) If one agrees with me up until now.. I don’t entirely agree with anything you have said, and some of it I dispute wholeheartedly. > [@](#): > > … then races are made up at least partly of groups of people from the same population. Yes, because it is a circular argument based on your definition of race as a population that “tends to share a common geographical origin” IOW you are arguing that races are populations of people from the same geographic area, then concluding that the people in races come from the same geographic populations. Perfectly circular and hence totally enlightening and unscientific. > [@](#): > > And the populations themselves have a biological meaning. So does this all by itself is arguably enough to give the race biological meaning. No, that is what they call a fallacy of composition. You can not attribute the properties of the components to the entity as a whole. Bricks way about 2kg, bricks are red, that house is made of bricks. Therefore that house weighs about 2kg and is red. Hydrogen is a gas at STP, oxygen is a gas at STP, water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen, therefore water is a gas at STP. The population that comprises a race have biological coherence, the populations that comprise a race share physical characteristics, therefore the race has biological coherence and shares physical characteristics. Nope. While all the people in a Tamil Village in Kerala share physical and genetic commonality, and all the people in a Parsis village in Maharashtra share physical and genetic commonality, that does not allow you to conclude that all the people in an Indian or Caucasian race share physical and genetic commonality. That is a classic fallacy of composition. > [@](#): > > It certainly means the race isn’t purely orthogonal to biology the way SSNs are. How did you come to that conclusion Since we still have no evidence what these supposed races are, or even that they exist in any objective fashion, it’s kind of hard to argue that this is true. You are basically arguing that invading Venusians are all biologically interrelated, and we are all asking "What Venusians? What do you mean by “Venusians”. This is simply begging the question. You are trying to construct an argument based on the interrelationship between race and biology, but you have been unable to tell us what even on of these race sis or how it can be defined. Since you can not name a race and can not define a race, how were you able to ascertain that it isn’t purely orthogonal to biology? Don’t you kinda need to define what you are talking about before you can assign properties to it in any meaningful way? > [@](#): > > If in fact a single population shares some fairly unique biological trait, and that population is part of a single race, then there is a biological correlation between that race and that trait… even though it’s only because of a definable subset of that race. Once again, this is blatantly begging the question. Do you agree with the following statement: If in fact a single population shares some fairly unique biological trait, and that population is part of the Venusian Invasion Force, then there is a biological correlation between the Venusian Invasion Force and that trait… even though it’s only because of a definable subset of the Venusian Invasion Force. This is therefore evidence for the biological existence of invading Venusians. Would you agree with that? Or do you think that it is logically invalid that I used hypothetical traits of the very phenomenon I am trying to prove exists as evidence \*that \*the phenomenon exists? ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/224 "2011-04-05T12:05:12Z")
> [@](#): > > If I’m given a list of 1000 words, then group them into 26 groups based on their starting letter, then randomly lump those 26 groups into 6 groups with no rhyme or reason, I have not alphabetized the words. But neither are my groupings totally unrelated to the alphabet. This is a really good analogy, but not for the reasons you think. This works for words because you knew \*a priori \*that the alphabet existed and then you used that as the basis of your initial classification. In contrast we have no _a priori_ reason to assume that races correspond to any biologcial factors. So you can’t claim that your initial groupings correspond to anything at all. What you have done is randomly assigned words to 26 groups/races. Then you separated them into subgroups based upon the \*second \*letter of each word. And now you are trying to convince everyone that all the words in each group start with the same letter because you can show correlation between _subgroups_. Any racial classification used by anybody in the world was essentially a random grouping based on a mish-mash superficial physical appearance, geography, politics, culture and linguistics. The fact that you can now find coherent sub-groups \*within \*those randomly assigned racial groups is not evidence that the initial sorting has any coherence. Any more than finding common second letters in your 26 random word groups is indicative that the original sorting was any better than random. > [@](#): > > … if we pick some definition of the traditional “classical” races, 7 or 8 of them or whatever, and assign as many of the world populations as we can to those 7 or 8 races, and then use genetic analysis to see how closely related the populations we’ve assigned to the same race are, will the results be statistically better than chance? The first problem is that you have not told us how we are to go about assigning people to these races? Are you just going to assign all Indians as being Caucasian? Or are you going to say that 30% of them are Australian Aborigines (whom they resemble physically) and another 30% are “mixed race”? If you do that then you have no hope at all of getting accurate results. As has already been pointed out, genetic patterns vary along geographic lines, and if you lump 1/3 of all Indians in with Australians then your results will immediately fail, even without the worries about Malays, Libyans and so forth. The second problem is that you are being vague as to what you mean by “use genetic analysis to see how closely related the populations we’ve assigned to the same race are”. You might mean that you intend to collect a whole lot of genetic data, use that to perform a cluster analysis that produces 7 or 8 clusters, and then see how well those clusters correlate to the classical 7 or 8 races. Well, [that’s been done](http://mathildasanthropologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/race-twig.gif). It doesn’t correlate at all well, to the extent that both the San and Ethiopoians are more closely aligned to Caucasians than to Negroids, Turks are grouped with Central Asians and American Indians rather than with Caucasians, some Chinese are grouped with South East Asians, some with the Japanese and some with the Mongols while the Australoid Khmer and Dravidians are grouped with Thais and Indians respectively rather than with Aborigines. You can get a similar finding from Bastos-Rodrigues et al 2006 “The Genetic Structure of Human Populations Studied Through Short Insertion-Deletion Polymorphisms” Annals of Human Genetics (2006). In their cluster analysis American and Oceania populations form distinct clusters, as do some, though not all, sub-Saharan populations. The rest of the world is just one big blurry mass. In both these examples the genetic distance correlates fairly closely to geographic distance, as expected, but is only vicariously correlated with the classical races due to both being somewhat correlated with geography. Alternatively you might mean that you want to collect your genetic data, and then overlay that genetic data with your racial data to see if there is a correlation. Again, you can see this done in Bastos-Rodrigues et al. and in Wilson et al 2001 “Population genetic structure of variable drug response” Nature Genetics. In both cases of course there is reasonable overlap because genetic distance varies with geographic distance, as do racial differences. However as Wilson et al conclude that “Although there is some DME allele frequency differentiation between ethnically labeled groups, in most cases it is less than that seen for the genetic clusters.” IOW applying ethnic labels produces population groupings that are _less_ reliable than the underlying genetic groupings, not more so. Having said all that, of course the result will be better than chance. If we did similar tests based on the brand of cigarette smoked or the type of music listened to we would also do much better than chance. We will do better than chance simply because genetics, cigarette brand and “race” all correlate to some extent with genetic distance. It has been known for almost 100 years that genetic distance correlates very, very tightly with geographic distance. As such any proxy that also correlates to geographic distance will also correlate with genetic distance. This is not evidence that race or music preference have any underlying biological cause. It is entirely attributable to what is known as a vicarious correlation. You can not validly use known vicarious correlations as evidence of actual correlation. So the question is not “does race correlate with genetics better than chance”. That can not be the question since we know that vicarious correlation exists. The question is “does race correlate with genetics to a degree that is higher than expected through geographic distance.” Well we know that geographic correlation exceeds 90%. So what about racial correlation? According to Bamshad et al 2004 “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Gentics and Race” “Regardless of the racial group to which an individual belonged, two people from different racial groups were more different than two individuals from the same racial group approximately twothirds of the time…Only approximately one-third of the time were two people from the same racial group more different that two individuals from different racial groups.” Or to put another way, while we can attribute 90% of the correlation between race and genetics to geographic distance, we can only attribute 66% of it to race as an independent factor. IOW the answer to your question is “No, the results are not better than what we would expect from chance and vicarious correlation” To add further to your information pool: “results suggest that, at random biallelic loci, there is little evidence, if any, of a clear subdivision of humans into biologically defined groups.” Romualdi et al 2002 Patterns of Human Diversity, within and among Continents, Inferred from Biallelic DNA Polymorphisms. Genome Research 12 “Differences among continents represent roughly 1/10 of human molecular diversity, which does not suggest that the racial subdivision of our species reflects any major discontinuity in our genome.” Berbajuani et al "An apportionment of human DNA diversity"Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94 > [@](#): > > But will it do a better job than just eeny meeny miney moeing them? Yes, but so will grouping them according to brand of cigarette or favourite pop star. Grouping them according to any variable that correlates in any way at all to genetic distance will produce much better than random results. It is a known vicarious correlation and once it is known to exist there is no valid way to use such correlations as evidence. > [@](#): > > So I’m trying to come up with ways of looking at things where there is a connection between race and biology, as I was doing above. No once disputes that there is a link between race and biology, just as there is a link between religion and biology. That is very, very different form a claim that race has any biological meaning. Or do you also claim that there is such a thing as a biolgical religious group? > [@](#): > > I’m not sure what you mean by “reputable source” here, since you could easily argue that no reputable source recognizes the concept of race at all No, that is not true. All sorts of reputable sources recognize the concept of race. Choose your favourite one. Any of the Anthropology or Sociology journals would be good. > [@](#): > > But are you seriously claiming that in traditional American/Western categorizations, “Asian” is in fact NOT (in some contexts) a word used to describe a race? (Ie, not meaning “someone who lives in or comes from Asia”, but meaning “the more polite version of Oriental”)? Honestly, that seems like such an outlandishly bizarre claim that I want to be 100% sure I know exactly what you mean before I respond to it. You can respond by simply providing a reference to anybody who has ever said that “Asian” is a race. I have asked you to do this 4 times now. The fact that you are unable to do so and instead bluster about how it is “outlandish” speaks volumes. If it is so “outlandish” that Asian is not a race, then it should be simplicity itself to find a single person who is not a complete crackpot who believes that “Asian” is a race. Just one single person who believes that Jesus Christ, Mohandas Ghandi, Bruce Lee and Kemal Attatrurk all belonged to the same race. Just one. Do _you_ even believe that Jesus Christ, Mohandas Ghandi, Bruce Lee and Kemal Attatrurk all belonged to the same race. To me that is an outlandish belief. But hey, if that is what you mean by Asian race then that’s great, we can take the discussion from there. The biggest problem is that you have made numerous and constant references to this “Asian” race, and have not been able to give the vaguest clue as to what you mean by it, nor have you been able to link to the works of other show share a belief n this race so I can evaluate what it means. IOW the term “Asian race” is meaningless in the fullest sense of the word. You do not know what it means, I do not know what it means and nobody else in the world knows what it means. Well I’m sorry but that makes any further discussion of the topic impossible. Until you can define the term or link to someone else who can, then there is imply no point engaging with you in nay post where you use such a term. > [@](#): > > If a particular island’s are a reasonably-genetically-distinct population, that population (which may or may not be one that would be viewed as being part of a particular race) is the population from that island. If that island then is colonized, then that population is the population from that island, who are subjects of some empire. If that island then wins independence, then the inhabitants of that island are still members of the same population they always have been (well, modulo interbreeding with the colonizers) and are also now the national population of a nation state. So in the last case, for that particular population and nationality, there’s a very strong correlation between a genetic/biological population and a nationality. Which doesn’t mean there always is. OK, so if nationality correlates with your genetic methodology, how can the exact same methodological results be used to support the contention that race is not subjective, cultural, plastic and non-biological? That was the question asked, and you have totally failed to address it, although you used a lot of words in doing so. :D. If you agree with me on this point as you claim then you are agreeing that your proposed methodology is useless as a method of determining whether race has any biological existence. Is that what you are agreeing to? Or do you still think that your methodology has some sort of validity? ---
**Author:** ![Isamu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/7c8e57/32.png) [@Isamu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isamu)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/225 "2011-04-05T12:05:50Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > You could also play a game where you walk down the street and notice people of with substantially east asian, european or african racial ancestry. I bet you’ll do just fine. I agree with this to a certain extent. I don’t think you could pick out the ‘race’ of everyone you passed, but if you restrict yourself to only those people who you feel comfortable with making a guess, and you defined what you meant by ‘race’, and your system of racial groups first, then the average person would do OK. That’s fine, but its not a biological classification, and its not science - it’s a heavily socialised and somewhat idiosyncratic discrimination. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/226 "2011-04-05T12:14:26Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Heh, except that the definition of “uniqueness” or purity is a complete strawman (as discussed previously). Go back and read the biology online definition above and you’ll see Ousley & Konigsberg’s findings in fact support the existence of biological races/populations. > > **Ousley finds shows there is a success rate of 80% in distinguishing between American Whites and Blacks, using just two variables. With seven variables, however, it reached the reliability of 95%, and with 19 variables the probability of correct classification rose to 97%**. Also, you didn’t mention this: > > Konigsberg et al noted that it is sufficient to use as few as 13 characteristics to have the posterior probability of the correct classification attain the value of 99%. > > see p156 Biol Philos (2010) 25:143–162 > [http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf](http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Race.pdf) As I proved in [this post](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13652341&postcount=224) Chen consistently, repeatedly misrepresents the cirations that he presents on this topic. The references that he refers to here do not say what he claims that they say, they in fact totally refute his position. Those references state clearly and plainly that **skeletal evidence contradicts the biological race concept** and that skeletal evidence can only lead to a racial classification is census data allows the **rejection of the most likely racial groupings based upon the physical evidence.** Be warned, Chen is being dishonest in the extreme in the way the he misrepresents these references. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/227 "2011-04-05T13:43:04Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Since the whole point of this thread has been to explore whether or not “there is such a thing,” the fact that you admit that you have not been talking about that indicates to me that you are either posting without any effort to understand the thread or you are trolling. > > Either way, you need to stop this “talking at cross purposes” in which you have been engaged. > > [/Moderating] :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/228 "2011-04-05T13:46:02Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Then you should have asked for the title to have been changed a long time ago. If the OP is not even going to say what you mean, it is going to go nowhere and cause a lot of confusion and anger. > > You let it sit this long, if you want thqt different discussion, open a different thread. > > [/Modding] And now I hope you see what I was getting at in my post that you “moderated” and why I was not intentionally trolling. I took the thread to be about “race” as a biological concept v. a “social construct.” I didn’t think it was about the narrower topic of some specific “biological definition of race.” Once I realized that some people seem to think there is such a narrow definition and that’s what they were talking about, I clarified what I had been saying. ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/229 "2011-04-05T13:48:16Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Even given your backtracking on what you claim this thread was supposed to be about, this claim supports your opponents, not you. “Fast sprinters” come from the populations of West Africa and fail to come from East or Southern Africa. They are not indicative of the sprinting speed of some imagined “African” or “black” race, but only of the smaller populations of the West that are not identified by “race.” Maxthevool addressed this exact objection earlier in this thread. Perhaps if you can’t read the whole thread, you shouldn’t participate at all. [/HelpfulTipFromFellowPoster] ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/230 "2011-04-05T15:58:45Z")
We’ve learned a lot about the geographic origins of particular genes. It stands to reason that people who live near each other, or whose ancestors did, would tend to share many of the same genes; people mostly have sex with people that live nearby. We have, historically, applied ethno-cultural labels to certain more-or-less recognizable phenotypic groupings of _some_ of those genes. Looking at people (or making macroscopic measurements) is vastly less accurate in fixing their genetic ancestry than sequencing their genomes, but it’s not content-free. This does not amount to distinct genetic races. Yes, you can often make reasonable guesses as to whether someone’s ancestry is primarily from this or that area. If you’re good at this game, your guesses will roughly correlate with _certain_ patterns of genetic clusters, provided that the “right” genes have been chosen to derive the clusters. The visible markers that comprise the traditional signposts for “race” are but a small, fluid subset of the spectrum of human genetic variation. Sharing a distinctive gene with another person, or a recognizable haplotype of related alleles, _does_ mean a common ancestry. Henry Louis Gates and I both have the Uí Néill haplotype–that much of our shared ancestry is a demonstrable fact–but nobody who believes in traditional races would ever label us as members of the same one. Each of us would be grouped instead with others who _don’t_ have the Uí Néill haplotype. The concept of race thus relies on assigning categoric importance only to _certain_ genetic characteristics. Why _those_ characteristics? Well, at this point it’s because they are the ones that support the enduring attachment to the concept of race. Before we figured out how to look directly at the genome, it was easy to look at visible characteristics and see them as primary statements of _what a person was_. But we know better now. It’s not that the visible variations between people have _no_ significance, it’s that they have no more significance than the larger set of invisible variations. Sometimes less. If I’m ever in desperate need of a transfusion, I damn sure want them to get a compatible blood type in me, but I don’t care what color the donor’s skin was. Modern racialists whose _ **goal** _ is to separate humanity into biological races–the _particular_ races they already have in mind, natch–can carefully select combinations of genetic markers which will seem to _almost_ achieve it. They wave away the remaining fraction by claiming that they never meant to say that “the races” were _absolutely_ distinct; that’s your strawman! One must wonder _why_ these people are so dedicated to their sifted, not-quite-conclusive results. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/231 "2011-04-05T17:25:41Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Even given your backtracking on what you claim this thread was supposed to be about, this claim supports your opponents, not you. “Fast sprinters” come from the populations of West Africa and fail to come from East or Southern Africa. They are not indicative of the sprinting speed of some imagined “African” or “black” race, but only of the smaller populations of the West that are not identified by “race.” But that’s exactly the point I’m addressing. Let’s assume for a moment that you’re 100% correct in everything you’re saying. We know there are plenty of people who would group west, east, and southern Africans into a group and label that group “black”. Such a racialist will look at the sprinting finals in one olympics and say “wow, those blacks are good at sprinting… I bet the sprinting finals next olympics will be dominated by black people”. And likely, he’ll be right. So he’s making a prediction based on perceived race, and his prediction is correct. And it’s NOT because of cultural factors where black kids are encouraged to go into sprinting due to the culture they grow up in, or anything like that. It’s due to biology. Now, his prediction is far less precise than it could be, because he’s talking about the arbitrary and ill-defined group “black” rather than the more precise group “certain populations of West Africa”. But that doesn’t make his prediction _incorrect_. Once again, the point I’m trying to make (and given that my OP began by questioning the absoluteness of an absolute statement, I don’t think I’m backtracking here) is that if someone points out that so many top sprinters are black and says “hey, I wonder if it has something to do with biology” the best possible answer might be something like “well, ‘black’ is a very imprecise term, we’d be better off discussing things in terms of various genetically similar populations, as follows…” but that doesn’t mean that a response of “well, black is a biologically meaningless term so your observation is meaningless and it certainly has nothing to do with biology” is entirely correct either. ---
**Author:** ![LonesomePolecat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a88e57/32.png) [@LonesomePolecat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonesomePolecat)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/232 "2011-04-05T18:16:16Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Yeah we know, conspiracy theories are also your forte. 🙂 It is not a conspiracy theory to point out that scientists are no less subject to political pressure than the rest of us. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/233 "2011-04-05T18:19:21Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > And now I hope you see what I was getting at in my post that you “moderated” and why I was not intentionally trolling. I took the thread to be about “race” as a biological concept v. a “social construct.” I didn’t think it was about the narrower topic of some specific “biological definition of race.” Once I realized that some people seem to think there is such a narrow definition and that’s what they were talking about, I clarified what I had been saying. It’s like we’re all talking past each other here, and frankly you’re making more sense than most (if occasionally also more provocative). It seems pretty clear that the primary objections to the term “race” are twofold: 1. There’s a biological definition of the term “race” that may or may not map directly onto the common lay definition of “race”. 2. There are useful things to be gleaned from dividing humanity into multiple populations, but the divisions implied by the common lay definition of “race” are not particularly useful for that. It equally seems to me that biologists don’t use “race” primarily because “race” carries implications to the general public that are not true/applicable, even if there are definitions under which “population” and “race” are indistinguishable. Fair statement? ---
**Author:** ![Rand\_Rover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/db5fbb/32.png) [@Rand\_Rover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rand_Rover)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/234 "2011-04-05T19:06:10Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > It’s like we’re all talking past each other here, and frankly you’re making more sense than most (if occasionally also more provocative). > > It seems pretty clear that the primary objections to the term “race” are twofold: > > 1. There’s a biological definition of the term “race” that may or may not map directly onto the common lay definition of “race”. > 2. There are useful things to be gleaned from dividing humanity into multiple populations, but the divisions implied by the common lay definition of “race” are not particularly useful for that. > > It equally seems to me that biologists don’t use “race” primarily because “race” carries implications to the general public that are not true/applicable, even if there are definitions under which “population” and “race” are indistinguishable. > > Fair statement? Yep, that all sounds good to me (especially the first sentence 🙂 ). ---
**Author:** ![Hank\_Beecher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hank_beecher/32/7275_2.png) [@Hank\_Beecher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hank_Beecher)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/235 "2011-04-05T19:13:01Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > No once disputes that there is a link between race and biology, just as there is a link between religion and biology. That is very, very different form a claim that race has any biological meaning. This discussion has grown to an absurd level of semantic nitpicking. The thing about the SDMB is that here there are actually _some_ people here who seem to be arguing the semantic minutiae for it’s own sake, instead of every last person’s motivations being dominated by their strong racial-political stands. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/236 "2011-04-05T19:22:49Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > Yep, that all sounds good to me (especially the first sentence 🙂 ). So to follow it up: 1. “race” as commonly used by laypeople (“blacks, whites, hispanics, and asians (oh my!)”) has limited biological usefulness, in part because all three of those groups comprise numerous genetically distinct subpopulations divisible in any number of ways. 1a) Some people in modern US society are ALWAYS going to interpret “race” as “blacks, whites, hispanics, and asians” no matter how you present it. 1a.1) …which makes it particularly useless, since “hispanic” is a subset of “white” in terms of typical descriptions of genetic diversity among continental-scale populations. 2. “Population” has the twin advantages of requiring a definition in situ (having no pre-defined expectations) and not carrying any connotations to the lay public about the fuzziness or expected divisions in said populations. So we can probably conclude that “Race is not a biological concept” would be better phrased as “The term ‘race’ has sociological baggage that render it less useful a term (for the purposes of lay understanding) than the term ‘population’.” Thus, I don’t think “political correctness” has anything to do with it unless “wanting to be understood for what I’m saying rather than what you read into it” is a subset of PC. ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/237 "2011-04-05T19:35:27Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > So we can probably conclude that “Race is not a biological concept” would be better phrased as “The term ‘race’ has sociological baggage that render it less useful a term (for the purposes of lay understanding) than the term ‘population’.” > > Thus, I don’t think “political correctness” has anything to do with it unless “wanting to be understood for what I’m saying rather than what you read into it” is a subset of PC. It should also be stated that “racial groups” are simply inaccurate ways of depicting human genetic variation. Also the reason that Race is not a biological concept, is because it is defined by randomly chosen morphology (skin colour, hair type, eye shape) and social factors (language, culture, geography, social status). 1. It’s inaccurate at descriping human genetics. 2. It’s formed using randomly chosen morphological and social factors. 3. It’s simply outdated. Race serves only to mislead and pervert reality. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/238 "2011-04-05T19:47:10Z")
> [@orcenio](#): > > It should also be stated that “racial groups” are simply inaccurate ways of depicting human genetic variation. Also the reason that Race is not a biological concept, is because it is defined by randomly chosen morphology (skin colour, hair type, eye shape) and social factors (language, culture, geography, social status). > > 1. It’s inaccurate at descriping human genetics. > 2. It’s formed using randomly chosen morphological and social factors. > 3. It’s simply outdated. > > Race serves only to mislead and pervert reality. Well, to head off the (apparently, based on upthread) inevitable Rand comment, the common lay definition of race has certain amounts of biologically applicability with regard to, say, groupings of skin pigmentation production, or prevalents of epicanthic folds. In other words, “if you sort population groups by morphology, they’re valid groups for examining morphology. This maps approximately onto common lay definitions of ‘race’.”. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/239 "2011-04-05T19:55:18Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > It seems pretty clear that the primary objections to the term “race” are twofold: > > 1. There’s a biological definition of the term “race” that may or may not map directly onto the common lay definition of “race”. > 2. There are useful things to be gleaned from dividing humanity into multiple populations, but the divisions implied by the common lay definition of “race” are not particularly useful for that. I’m not sure I’m parsing the first statement as you intend it. It’s certainly incorrect to say that there is “a” (one) biological definition of race generally accepted in science. It’s certainly correct to say that there are _various_ attempts at biological definitions, none of which maps directly to common cultural understandings (which are also variable). I agree with the second statement, with the note that different divisions are applicable to different purposes, and no one divisional basis has any inherent biological primacy. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2011, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/240 "2011-04-05T20:02:59Z")
> [@spark240](#): > > I’m not sure I’m parsing the first statement as you intend it. It’s certainly incorrect to say that there is “a” (one) biological definition of race generally accepted in science. It’s certainly correct to say that there are _various_ attempts at biological definitions, none of which maps directly to common cultural understandings (which are also variable). > > I agree with the second statement, with the note that different divisions are applicable to different purposes, and no one divisional basis has any inherent biological primacy. Roughly what I’m trying to do in the first statement is make it clear that there is a legitimate basis both for conflating the terms ‘race’ and ‘population’, and a legitimate basis other than ‘political correctness’ for not wanting to do that. And it seems like it’d be patently obvious that population divisions are arbitrary (in terms of “one division style is not superior than the other”)and generally fuzzy–heck that seems to be the only thing consistently agreed upon in this thread. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007.md?page=11) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007.md?page=13)