All humans have shared characteristics due to evolution. The people that are right handed can point to evolution as a factor in their shared characteristics. It’s also much easier and objective to measure which people are right handed, and which are left handed. If you are only interested in dividing up humans into categories that seems like a much better one. Neither it nor skin color is a good indicator of geographical origin so it should work just as well for your purposes, right?
I admit that I’ve mostly checked out of this thread due to sheer exhaustion, but I more or less agree with this statement as long as the qualifier “significant” is in there. All that I object to is the claim that race has absolutely ZERO connection to underlying biology, which I believe to be an overstatement, and this thread has not changed my mind on that point.
And if you didn’t know who Chris Rock was, how would you know if his recent ancestors were from Senegal, Paupa New Guinea, Egypt, or the Australian Outback? Those groups aren’t particularly biologically similar. So his physical appearance doesn’t really give you much information, does it? If it weren’t for the context of a popular entertainer in the US the concept of race wouldn’t work. It’s almost as if the concept of race is a social construct, with little underlying basis in biology.
As I just mentioned above, if you concede that black skin might just as well mean someone from Senegal or Paupa New Guinea, populations that are not biologically close, I agree. In the context of the US, due to the founder effect mentioned by Tom earlier, it gives you some information. But the term race can’t be applied to all humans since superficial characteristics don’t map to populations in a meaningful way.
You’d end up saying that someone of the black race could be from any one of a dozen fairly well defined but unrelated populations, or possibly just someone with a skin coloration gene from one or more ancestors, or someone with a random mutation. In what context is that useful?
So, what made Chris Rock dark and Paris Hilton light? What factors went into that? If you answer “no factors” you win, provided that there are, in fact, no factors. See, your argument is based on the notion that scientists cannot adequate define race, therefore “race” does not exist. I argue that whatever term you want to put on “race”, environmental factors in our ancestors have produced visible, and some not-so-visible differences in humankind globally. Whether there are dark people in Senegal and the Australian Outback is irrelevant. Evolution has simply made them similarly darker while making those with Finnish ancestry lighter.
And what about the continuum of people who live between Finland and Senegal? Can you tell me where you draw the boundary between white people and black people? And to keep things simple, let’s just focus on the area that we call Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Yes, very much out there, but not really a planet.
Actually there was, Slavery was not related to skin color until modern times when the peculiar institution made it a short hand for what a slave (and according to the defenders of that institution in America, the inferior people) was supposed to be. Slavs (where the word slave comes from as many Slavs in ancient times were sold to) were almost for sure not dark skinned.
Not to mention that many slaves in the US, like Sally Hemmings, were more white than black (she had 3 white grandparents, and one black grandparent). Even today, someone like Tiger Woods is considered black, when he’s more Asian (Thai) than anything else. His father was maybe 50% black, but also part white and part Native American.
Part of the problem we Europeans have in dealing with race is the “they all look alike” syndrome that permeates a European view of the world. Spend any time in Africa, and it’s obvious there are many different ethnic groups that, while they might all have dark skin, don’t really look much like each other at all.
Then what is the point of grouping them together? I think this is the crux of the discussion. If the only thing that connects these two groups is that they didn’t move away from sunny places (light skin is the mutation, not dark skin) then what is the point in calling them a “race”? It’s certainly not evolutionary heritage since they don’t share that except in an extremely basic way. The person from Senegal may be closer biologically to someone from Greece, but they would never be grouped as such under any racial scheme based on superficial characteristics like skin tone.
Height is even easier to determine superficially than skin tone and definitely has environmental factors. Why not base your racial characterizations on that?
Very very few, if any.
I provided you with some reasons here here and here
Also, you seem to think you’re just looking at skin colour. There is a reasonable explanation here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/14leroi.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2
Height? With that logic, why not classify animals by the number of legs? See, there are going to be far more similarities than differences, but it’s the differences that, well, make the difference. But getting back to height, height could in fact be part of it. If Asians are in fact smaller on average than those people of European descent, then height is possibly a byproduct of evolution. So no, it isn’t just about skin color. Simply, it’s about differences in people due to enviromental differences that evolved over many tens thousands of years. I’ll go back to my original point, and that is there are two different discussions that are being intertwined and confused with each other. One is that the term “race” cannot be applied to humans because of the many complications of classification. And I agree with that, the human specie has become too complicated an animal to classify by races. “Race” has become a layman’s term, at best.
The other discussion has to do with the process that made those people who have a long ancestrial line in Japan (for example) different from those who have a long ancestrial line in Ethiopia (for example). The argument I’m getting seems to be that there are no differences whatsoever. None. Obviously that isn’t true. The other argument I’m getting is that there are “dark” and “Asian” people who have evolved in other regions besides Japan and Ethiopia. I agree. So what? It’s still evolution at work. But getting back to the Japanese and the Ethiopians, if their physical differences does not constitute “race”, then what do you want to call it?
While I’ve got my fingers limber, I’ll continue… I’ve heard that “race” is a social construct. Yes, so is Homo sapien sapien. So is the state of Kansas. “Social construct”… that sounds good but it doesn’t really mean anything.
I’ve heard that “there are more differences within a race than between two races”. Okay, for the sake of discussion we’ll cheat and say that races in humans do exist. There are brilliant, strong, healthy people who are deemed “white”. There are also severely deformed, chronically ill “white” people. The genetic differences between the two could be relatively large. In fact, the differences could easily be greater than the average differences between two “races”. So the original statement is true. But again, we’re talking about regional similarities through evolution. So obviously the statement is really pointless.
I’ll finish by saying that I’m an ardent opponent to any form of racism. But I don’t think it does our (U.S.) culture any good to simply say “race doesn’t exist” and then do a semantics tapdance to try to make it fly. It’s kind of a fun debate, but in the end it’s mostly a time wasting effort (assuming the idea is to battle racism) that could be better spent attacking the problem head-on. Race has too fierce a devil to fall for wordplay.
Nope, not reasonable.
The thing is, most of the biologists and anthropologists and sociologists accept that, while it is ok to dumb down concepts for regular folks to gain understanding, the reality is that in the end lines like the one here are an attempt to justify ignorance.
I wish that was the case, what I have seen on several threads already is that indeed wordplay is the tool that many racists and followers of crackpot ideas are using nowadays.
No one is saying race doesn’t exist. It exists, as a social construct. That doesn’t make it any less real, it just makes it not scientific. We made it up because we like to categorize things, but when we try to pin it down in a biological manner, it proves itself illusive. You can try to chop up a continuum, but you shouldn’t pretend that your chopped-up segments have any special significance.
Find someone who has claimed that in this thread. Everyone agrees that thre are differences in populations that have been geographically isolated to some degree. This is a strawman.
And so what? The same can be said about all human traits. The fact that there are populations that are taller than average all around the globe doesn’t make height a characteristic of any particular “race.” What’s the point of grouping Australian Aborigines and Ethiopians together simply because of skin color when they are not especially closely related? Isn’t that the whole point of the term?
Populations. That’s the term biologists use. If you want to claim that populations is just another word for race then fine, but that’s not how people use race. If you wanted to go with that definition for race there would be dozens if not 100’s of races, and you might find the divisions are much more complex and varied then you imagine. And it doesn’t match the way biologists use the term race so there’s really no point in making that switch.
I can show you biological definition of human based on DNA. I can show you the physical boundaries of the state of Kansas. Show me the boundaries of any race definition and we’ll talk. No one has ever come up with a definition that has withstood even the most cursory critical examination. That is why race is a social construct.
Strawman. No one says race doesn’t exist. What people are saying in this thread is that race, as a biological system for classifying humans, doesn’t exist.
On Preview - John Mace and GIGObuster beat me to all the good points.
I read the NY Times piece and though it’s mostly matter-of-fact in its approach, I do get a chuckle out of the idea that a European-American (for example) who has been in the U.S. for two hundred years could theoretically use DNA to locate some single European origin of his forefathers. The humor has to do with all the various European immigration into the U.S. and all the many generations of ancestors over a two hundred year period. The number of “grandparents” grow exponentially with each previous generation. One European location can be picked out (sort of) but there are literally hundreds more. I think if you go back eight generations you’ll have over 500 great (x8) grandparents.
Except that aborigines and ethiopians are not grouped together. Go back and read my responses above. You still seem to think that you’re just looking at skin colour. Look at the NY Times editorial I linked above. Maybe even read a paper which discusses group categorization in biomedical research.
Right, but as the biological definition indicates - there are heritable sets of features and traits. These allow forensic anthropologists to identify race from a set of skeletal features. This is why when you look at over 1000 loci people fall into identifiable clusters.
Race differences reflect ancestral differences so there are different correlations of genes - not just a single gene.
Not true. Two random Koreans would never be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.
Genetics, Vol. 176, 351-359, May 2007,
I did forget to link to the reply to that NY times editorial.
Suffice to say, the writer of that editorial said that “The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years. But now, perhaps, that is about to change”, Not much, sorry.