# 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:** 4\ **Page:** 27
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2011, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/521 "2011-04-13T19:51:40Z")
There are no human clades. Your major premise is flawed, and so you are not going to produce a valid argument based on it. The idea that I can say I trace my lineage back to Europe and therefore I’m part of some “Europen clade” is nonsense. There is no European clade. The people of Europe blend seamlessly into Asia and the Middle East, not to mention North Africa. It makes no sense to put Bulgarians and Irish in one “clade” and Turks in another. Race as descent is just more nonsense when you have a clinal population like the human species. The decent of all of us blends into one common set of ancestors only 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2011, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/522 "2011-04-13T21:55:16Z")
> [@Chuck11](#): > > If you can’t even agree to these two points, there is no point is continuing discussion with you. You are just being obstinate. Of course, I would say that you are the one being obstinate, since you insist on employing a word that you have to define in special ways to avoid being confusing. 😛 > [@Chuck11](#): > > Now, while I’m at it: > > I am glad that we agree about the existence of biological populations. You clearly have not bothered to read this thread (or any of the hundreds of others on the topic of purported race. I have pointed out the existence of populations, (none of which are large enough to meet the definition of the three to nine races), in every thread in which I have participated, including this one. > [@Chuck11](#): > > The ordinary concept of race (i.e the layman’s concept) is not equivalent to subspecies. There is general agreement about this among biological philosophers. I await your citation for this claim. > [@Chuck11](#): > > As Chen has pointed out, there are multiple biological concepts of race. I will grant that the dominant scientific concept has been subspecies. Actually, Chen keeps pointing out that there are multiple definitions of race three of which are not even concerned with biology, but he has only presented the one biological definition, (now discredited in humans), for race. The other definitions refer to social organizations or ethnic “nations.” And since you grant that the dominant biological definition refers to subspecies, we are back to you having a desire to employ a term that has a widely and readily understood definition, (which happens to be in error), in a way that would require every discussion to start off with a fourteen point warning “WE ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT RACE THE WAY THAT YOU, DEAR READER, UNDERSTAND THE WORD, SO HERE IS OUR NEW, SPECIAL DEFINITION.” I’m afraind that I don’t see any real point to doing something that will simply confuse the issue. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2011, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/523 "2011-04-14T00:00:16Z")
[quote=“John\_Mace, post:521, topic:577007”] There are no human clades. Your major premise is flawed, and so you are not going to produce a valid argument based on it. The idea that I can say I trace my lineage back to Europe and therefore I’m part of some “Europen clade” is nonsense. There is no European clade. The people of Europe blend seamlessly into Asia and the Middle East, not to mention North Africa. It makes no sense to put Bulgarians and Irish in one “clade” and Turks in another. [QUOTE] John, You keep repeating this, but you fail to point to evidence. I, on the other hand, have no problem supporting my claims. > [@](#): > > As shown in Figure 4, TIPS identified 23 population clusters from this dataset. The six main population clusters of the globe were detected by our method and they formed distinct clades in the estimated tree. We also identified many subpopulations within each of the six major population clusters, and they corresponded well to their known origins, such as Yakut and Mongola in East Asia, Kalash in Central South Asia. We observed near perfect separation of populations in Africa, Oceania and America, but only weak separation in Europe and Middle East. In addition, the reconstructed population tree appeared to be roughly consistent with the geographic distributions of the known populations and their migration histories. For example, the African populations formed the outmost clade in the tree in support of the out of Africa model (Stringer and McKie, 1996). Overall, our result was concordant with the previous analysis . Zhang, 2008. Tree-guided Bayesian inference of population structures > [@](#): > > Race as descent is just more nonsense when you have a clinal population like the human species. [ I already explained this. Even if there was a genetic continuum, which there isn’t – hence a between continental population cluster Fst \> 0 – given genetic variability across the globe, it would still matter if you defined race as regional ancestry. For example, If we defined Caucasians as people who’s ancestors hailed form West Eurasia and if you defined Mongoloids as people who’s ancestors hailed from East Asia, you would still have average between race genetic differences. Now, I am not the one who developed the race as descent definition. According to the US government’s definition, race refers, in part, to the regional ancestry of individuals: > [@](#): > > In Directive No. 15, the “White” category includes persons having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. The public comment included suggestions for subcategories and related changes in terminology to collect more detailed information on White ethnic groups according to the geographic region of their ancestors. (Office of Management and Budget. Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity.) ” So race = regional ancestry. > [@](#): > > The decent of all of us blends into one common set of ancestors only 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. You mean 150,000 years (if you want all of us)? I already pointed out [this image](http://abc102.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=307). Can you count? I’m not going to keep repeating myself. If you make a claim back it up either by citing a peer reviewed paper or explaining your reasoning. ---
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007/524 "2011-04-14T00:31:19Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Of course, I would say that you are the one being obstinate, since you insist on employing a word that you have to define in special ways to avoid being confusing. 😛 I don’t know what you are talking about. This is what I said: > [@](#): > > 1. My groups share a unique natural history relative to other groups. They are ancestor-descent groups which split off from other populations. (Take a look at figure 2). This is what the phrase means. > > 2. They also share a “unique geographic range or habitat”; Look how the phrase is used with regards to the American Puma. Figure 1 here. and figure 2 here. Are you honesty arguing that the ancestral popultions that I am talking about did not share a unique geographic range relative to the other populations? Or, is you point that they now don’t. If you mean the later – as I pointed out – the meaning is a unique historic range, where range allow for migration as in the case of the free-ranging Puma. Obviously, if an American SSA. P.c puma migrate north or is sent off to a zoo in China, it doesn’t imply that the puma is no longer a member of its subspecies. > If you can’t even agree to these two points, there is no point is continuing discussion with you. You are just being obstinate. The context: are there human subspecies? Specifically, the context was: do these [biologically](http://occidentalascent.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/ancestral.jpg) [delineated](http://occidentalascent.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/324_1035_f2.jpeg) groupings represent subspecies? I guess we should start with: are there continental level biological groupings which resulted from [ancestral migration](http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~earth/Earth_Part2/African%20Genesis.pdf)? I say yes. John says no. What do you say? If no, then why does both phylogenetic analysis and cladistic analysis point to them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-such-a-biological-thing-as-a-racial-group/577007.md?page=26)