Unless they are black. As mentioned several times, Africa has so much genetic diversity that it’s actually quite likely that the genetic difference between two random black dudes is even greater than the difference between a random black dude and a random white dude. Basically, your chances of making a genetic “hit” between two black dudes is similar to your chances of making a genetic “hit” between any two random not-black dudes…which is to say, not great.
I’m advocating the opposite thing–telling them not to misuse “race” even if they think they’re using it correctly, and switch to “population”.
Using your analogy, my summary of the thread.
Side A: “The earth can be viewed as a flat sphere!” (that is, using a term of art (“sphere”, “race”) to mean something that it doesn’t (“flat”, “population”))
Side B: “Sphere doesn’t mean that, you can’t use it that way.”
(hundreds of “yes it can” “no it can’t” posts)
Me: “Even if you (addressing Side A directly) think ‘sphere’ can technically be used that way, it’s confusing to laymen. Everyone should use ‘flat’ to describe flat things.”
Side B: “But sphere CAN’T be used that way.”
Me: “I agree, but they’re doing it anyway. Can we stop yelling at them long enough to at least ease them onto the correct terminology?”
Side B: “But sphere CAN’T be used that way. Why are you saying it can?”
First, it is intesting that when you ask the question you did not mention “human” race, but race in general. Yet the question is seen as having *human races *as the subject. I guess that goes more to our culture than anything else.
In the animal world there are “races”. It happens when a specie is divided geographically and the two factions evolve different, each to suit its particular environment, each being a specific race. This has happened at the human level too. The results can be seen at a glance. Anthroplogists and various other scientific groups have guidelines as to what constitute a “race”. Most of these organizations believe that “race” does not exist in the human specie because their guidelines are not fully met. On the other hand, many in the medical profession use race for diagnosis or prevention. And of course many millions of ordinary people constantly use race for their personal, sociological reasons.
It should be noted that any competent coroner can test human remains, sometimes just skeletal remains, and put an ethnic group on the deceased person.
As much as I hate having to say it, mind reading the entire rest of the thread where this stuff has been hashed out AT LENGTH?
Side C: This is not happening a vacuum,
There are still people that do want to use the incorrect terminology to claim that they do have support for reprehensible solutions.
Absolutely a valid point. I am of the opinion that (as direct strategies have not worked) that working to at least get those people to use the more correct “population” rather than “race” might start them thinking more in terms of what might actually define a population biologically rather than the mishmash of gross surface morphology and social characteristics that is the lay definition of “race”.
I’ll be honest–I think we’ve won as many converts as we can with “No, race doesn’t work like that”, and I don’t see how it’s more harmful to say “Even if race could be argued to work like that, you should use population instead” with the intended follow-up of “let’s look a little closer at what a ‘population’ is and how that compares to your proposed groupings”.
No, it hasn’t. If you’d have read the thread before posting this tired argument you would know that. The science most emphatically does not support the idea that biological construct known as race exists in humans. End of story.
All of your other points have been refuted, or shown to apply only to a subset of people (such as in the US) and in general don’t work to support the concept of race among humans. It simply doesn’t exist.
Sorry, this is still a ridiculous argument. There are but two possibilities:
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Actual ignorance. If there are indeed people in this thread or in the world at large who fail to understand the facts underpinning the real world around them, it is our obligation to keep trying to explain things in simpler and simpler terms, as we would for the grade school child who “just doesn’t get” long division.
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Willful ignorance. There are apparently posters here, and people in the world at large, who refuse to accept the facts underpinning the real world around them because those facts contradict their cherished assumptions and prejudices.
Neither of these cases will benefit from deliberately distorting the words that actually describe reality.
My point is to not distort the words, but to get them using the correct word so that at least they’re arguing their beliefs with the correct biological terminology.
I don’t know where this idea that I’m advocating distorting any meanings is coming from. I’m expressly saying “Whether or not you agree you’re using ‘race’ wrong, stop using it wrong.”, only appealing to another argument (that is, clarity of communication) rather than the obviously contended definitional one.
Substituting the word population for the word race does not correct the faults of either usage. There is nothing “contended” about the concept of race in the field of biology today. The point is settled; there is but one extant race of mankind, although there may have been more at some previous time. Those who refuse to accept this reality do so, not because they are accidentally using incorrect terminology, but because they want the real world to conform to their prejudices.
Again I vehemently reject the very idea of using semantics to somehow trick them into correctness. The only result will be dilution and misinterpretation of the otherwise already settled point. It would be like saying “Oh, you don’t like the word evolution, so instead of that, let’s call modification through differential survival of the progeny by another name, like, umm, how about Intelligent Design? See how much better that sounds to you! Now everyone will remark on your deep and abiding understanding of evolution!”
It certainly might help end these endless, completely fruitless debates on whether or not “race” is a settled point in biology, since both sides apparently think they have cited appropriate proof that it is settled for their own side. 
Let me summarize a few points and then respond to some specifics.
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According to the very sources you cite race is a coherent concept. You cite, for example, Berbajuani et al who claims that there is no major discontinuity between racial subdivisions. For Berbajuani et al’s findings to support your position, you necessarily must grant that race is a coherent concept. Since you think that these findings do provide support for your position, you apparently agree that race can be coherently defined.
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Pointing out that the ordinary (or popular ) concept of race is fuzzy, in no way implies that the concept of race that is used by population geneticists (e.g Berbajuani et al) is fuzzy. Whether or not the ordinary concept of race is related to the concept used by population geneticists is an issue separate from whether or not the concept used ordinarily or in population genetics is coherent. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate that the two concepts are coherent and are related.
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Both the ordinary concept of race and the population genetic concept of race (according to the source you cite) refer to populations defined by regional ancestry (i.e. meta-population lineages/clades)
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Members belonging to “racial subdivisions,” as defined in the source you cite, are necessarily more related to each other than to members of other racial subdivisions. According the source that you cite, the total genetic variance between members of different racial subdivisions is 22%. (To put this in perspective: Assume some phenotypic trait, say IQ, for which there is a within population variance of 225 (i.e. SD = 15). Assuming a 1:1 phenotypic/genotypic correlation for that trait and assume that the genes that code for the trait are randomly dispersed throughout the total genetic variance. A 22% between variance would predict a 1 SD genotypic difference in that trait.)
Specific points:
“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.”
Sure we do. Race means ancestry. Ancestry is necessarily tied to biology. Of course, if you are using the term race to mean something other than what most people use it to mean, say like culture, then there wouldn’t necessarily be a biological connection. As it is, there is a connection.
*“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” *
This patently false. For example, in the US we define African-Americans as people who have substantial African ancestry. We define Asian Americans as people who have substantial Asian Ancestry. And we define “White” Americans as people who have substantial west Eurasian and North Saharan ancestry. Specifically: People who’s ancestors, or the majority of them, lived in those respective regions between 5-30 thousand years ago. Alternatively, we classify “Hispanic” (who are mostly multiracial) as an ethnic group.
“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.”
Groups are lumped by shared ancestry. The question seems to be how do you define the boarders between ancestries. Well, the borders are defined by 1) regional of ancestry and 2) cluster analysis which shows the genetic and therefore regional ancestral relation between populations. For example, Malaysians are not lumped with West Eurasians because the ancestors of Malaysians (between 5-30k years ago) lived in different regions – and this is confirmed by cluster analysis. Cluster analysis shows that West Eurasians are more genetically related to each other than to Malaysians. This is really quite simple.
*“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. 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.”
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Cluster analysis shows that there are <a href=“Population Genetics | Race, genes, and disparity”>regional clusters </a>. These genetic clusters more or less correspond with the classical divisions of regional ancestry. Of course, it depends on which polymorphisms are analyzed. Compare your blurry mess with (1,2,3, 4, 5). Obviously, you could cherry pick a study in which the clusters look more messy. As we know, however, the more polymorphisms, one looks are the more clear the picture gets.
All of this, though is somewhat irrelevant. Race is defined by regional ancestry, which is the same as <a href=“http://occidentalascent.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/treeancrestral.jpg”>regional descendancy </a>. We can lump and slip descendant populations as we like, depending on the level of analysis that we are interested in. Are there 1, 2, 7, 12, 18, etc.? With regards to this discussion, we are interested in discussion race (or regional ancestry/clade/population cluster) on the level of analysis of 15-50k years of separation. this gives us around 18 races (14 African and 4 non-African).
*"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.” *
I haven’t been following this discussion so I don’t understand the distinction between regional ancestry and geography. The boundaries of race are defined by ancestral geography – or at least geographic separation. That said, while this statement was true for the loci understudy –
*“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…” *
– It’s cleary false if applied to total genetic variance. Two individuals from the same genetic population are NECESSARILY more genetically similar than they are to two individuals from different genetic populations. The conclusion that they are not is called Lewontin’s fallacy. See 7.
It is interesting that you quote this statement:
"“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”
This represent’s the second half of Lwontin’s fallacy, which was pointed out by Henry Harpending in 2001. Since we are dimorphics organisms, the total variance within populations includes the variance within individuals. Using Berbajuani data, we then get 10% between “racial subdivisions” versus 45% within “racial subdivisions” between individuals + 45% within “racial subdivisions” within individuals. The later is not relevant so we have: 10/45 = 22% of the total variance is BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS BETWEEN “racial subdivisions”
(It is interesting that you quote Berbajuani to dismiss the concept of racial differences. Clearly, for Berbajuani’s results to be valid, he must have a coherent definition of race, right? You seem to want to have it both ways – race is an incoherent concept AND races, coherently defined, aren’t too different. It’s rather disingenuous of you. Which is it? Are “racial subdivisions” incoherent groupings or is there no major discontinuity between them?
As case in point, without losing breath you say "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 biological religious group?’ How about this, we will define race according to how Berbajuani et al defines it. Since you cite Berbajuani et al as proof of your position, you must agree with their definition.
“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.”
The US federal government does – surely that counts for something. And that “Asian” race corresponds with the popultion split 30 years ago – as illustrated in “Campbell and Tishkoff, 2009. The Evolution of Human Genetic Review and Phenotypic Variation in Africa”
“Asian. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. It includes ‘Asian Indian,’ ‘Chinese’, ‘Filipino’, ‘Korean’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Vietnamese’, and ‘Other Asian’]”
(1) In Bastos-Rodriguez, Pinmenta, Penal, 2006. The Genetic Structure of Human Populations Studied Through Short Insertion-Deletion Polymorphisms."
(2) Heath, 2008. Investigation of the fine structure of European populations with applications to disease association studies.
(3) Tishkoff, et. al., 2009. The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans.
(4) Lopez, et al., 2009. Genetic variation and recent positive selection in worldwide human populations: evidence from nearly 1 million SNPs.
(5) Jinchuan Xing et al. 2010. Toward a more uniform sampling of human genetic diversity: A survey of worldwide populations by high-density genotyping.
(6) Edwards, 2001. Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy
If the point is settled about race, why do people (here) keep citing population geneticists (e.g Berbajuani et al) who conclude that racial populations really aren’t that different? Were there no racial populations, they couldn’t be different at all. So the question is: how different?
There are quote and link tags at the top of your text box; you should make good use of them as it will make your posts much easier to read. I don’t have much else to say, but I’d like to complement you on your nice blog.
It would be extraordinarily helpful if Max the Vool and others who agree with his general points could clarify the debate. List the races you believe exist and explain why you believe they are biologically meaningful ways to classify people.
This is a very slippery subject to discuss without specifics. Surely, after all this back and forth, you could take a stab at demonstrating to everyone what you mean by race and why you think it makes sense.
I argue that there are 1-18 races, where I define race as a metapopulation lineage (or clade or ancestral population clusters) – and where I mean that 18 is just as valid as 1 when it comes to the number of races. This concept of race is not much different from the core concept of species. (There are at least 24 separate taxonomic definitions of species so, as I see it, it should not be unexpected that there are many separate taxonomic definitions of race. The specific number depends on the level of analysis and time frame that you are adopting.
Ancestral population clusters are biologically meaningful because ancestry is biologically meaningful. Is this seriously disputed? Different ancestral population clusters have different population structures. It seems to me that the question is: Why is it socially meaningful to classify people by ancestral population cluster? Or: To what extent do social racial classifications, in X country, correspond to ancestral population clusters.
Well, I’m not about to rerad the entire thread. I did read some of it. I have gone into this before with other people, and at other forums. It creates curious arguments. One of the sticking points is simply the definition of the word “race”. It seems to me this is generally used to kind of throw a wrench in the entire discussion.
Here is basically were I stand… There are people in different locations of the world who due to different environmental conditions, evolved differently. Call it “race” if you want. Call it “Chevrolet” if you want. Whatever name you put on it, the phenomenon exists in humans. This is why a person who has had his *primary ancestral period of evolutionary change *in Africa looks different from the person whose distant forefathers evolved in Asia. It is why a person who has had several thousand years of ancesters living in Asia can be discerned almost every time when compared to the person who has thousands of years of ancestral evolution in sub-Sahara Africa.
There are many problems when using race in humans. Who exactly is “white”, or “Black”, for example, what is the criteria? There has been significant interbreeding, and there has been much human travel over the last 1000 years. And the basic differences in “races” is genetically tiny. All that is true. And people can argue (as others in this thread have) about “where is Asia?”, or Africa, or wherever. Others will declare that race does not meet the criteria of the American Anthropological Society, and therefore it does not exist. I won’t entertain a point that is intended only to sidetrack. Those things do not alter the basic premise that the phenomenon of race (or whatever name you want to put on it) took place to some degree in humans, has worked to change our physical appearance, and that it is still very much evident today.
I think some of the posters are going at this wrong. There are clear visible differences between those populations that had a period of ancestral evolution in sub-Sahara Africa regions when compared to those whose ancestral evolution took place in Europe or Asian regions. Same is true when comparing Asian populations and European populations. The differences might be genetically tiny, and they may not adhere to specific man-made borders, but they are visible. So, what caused these differences, what phenomenon? I’ll call it, and those visible results, anything you want.
Tiny? 15% of the human genetic variance is between continental races (10%) + populations (5%). This is equivalent – after factoring out intraindividual variance – to 35% of the total human genetic variance between individuals. How is that tiny? What would be substantial?
Except that those “clusters” are not reproductively isolated, and there are too many people in the “intermediate” zones. From the source of your first link (not the link itself, but the paper it references):
Emphasis added. The graphic in your link is misleading, because it makes it look like those ancestral population clusters are isolated (like “races” would be), when in fact they are highly mixed (like “races” wouldn’t be).
There is only one generally accepted species definition for vertebrates and that’s the Biological Species Concept. And scientists no longer have to rely on morphology for defining species, but can use the much more accurate method of analyzing DNA. Often, that results in more species being found because sometimes reproductively isolated populations do not have obvious morphological differences (at least to the human eye).