Chuck has never defined race as subspecies. Chuck argues that that’s a red herring. Chuck defines race as clade. As Blake knows clades are defined by ancestry-descendancy; they are ancestral groups. Given Blake’s stipulations of what race must entail —1) patterns of phenotypic differences and 2) a relation to the ordinary concept (i.e social concept) of race – Chuck points out that the clades that qualify as races roughly overlap with Cavalli-Sforza’s population clusters, which overlap with regionally branches (i.e regional ancestry).
So we have: race = clades with noticeable patterns of phenotypic differences = major population cluster = regional ancestry = ~the ordinary concept of race.
Chuck when you can answer the questions that you promised to answer, it might be amusing to engage you again.
At this stage you have so thoroughly discredited yourself, so thoroughly shown that you are incapable of accurately present references, so thoroughly demonstrated that you do not understand this subject, that there is really little point.
The both have dark skin; that’s enough for a lot of people. And if you were to compare populations in Africa you’d find major differences in appearance as well that tend to get glossed over. The diversity of appearance within Africa is as wide as the difference between Ethiopians and Aborigines.
So you now accept that you were incorrect to say " two random Koreans may be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian"? This is important, because your comment seemed to be an example of the Lewontin fallacy. Something that was pointed out in the same year as the PBS documentary you cited.
I already addressed this issue. As I noted, Cavalli-Sforza et al were discussing sub-species. I am not debating whether races are subspecies.
Cavalli-Sforza (elsewhere) and other do recognize “population clusters” that correspond to “races”:
“By means of painstaking multivariate analysis, we can identify “clusters” of populations and order them in a hierarchy that we believe represents the history of fissions in the expansion to the whole world of anatomically modern humans. At no level can clusters be identified with races, since every level of clustering would determine a different partition and there is no biological reason to prefer a particular one. The successive levels of clustering follow each other in a regular sequence, and there is no discontinuity that might tempt us to consider a certain level as a reasonable, though arbitrary, threshold for race distinction.”
They do not consider these “races” [i.e subspecies], because they argue that there are no major discontinuities – they conclude that there is no non-arbitrary means of deciding which level of population clusters to talk about.
Above, I used Blake’s arbitrary standards (which he imposed on my race qua clade definition) to circumvent this problem. (Personally, I’m fine with an understanding of multiple levels of race).
Depends what you mean by “races” and “exist”. I mean, obviously the “black” race “exists” in the sense that people every day say “hey, that guy is black” and “hey, that guy isn’t black”, and different people will often (although not always) think the same guys are or not black.
The claim I’m making is that in the general act of sorting people into races, which so many people do all the time, and which is:
(a) originally motivated by social/historical as opposed to biological factors
(b) impossible to concretely come up with rules for… it’s a “I know one when I see one”
(c) generally a dangerous thing that we’d be far better off if people did vastly less often
will tend to come up with groupings which are not agnostic to biology. That is, if you examine the groupings that result there will be, on the average, shorter genetic distances between the people grouped into the same race than if you just picked equivalent sized groups out of the world’s population at random. These groupings, however, will be far inferior, less accurate, than similar groupings arranged by actual biology/history/sociology/whatever. I do not endorse using these racial groupings in the actual study of biology. Nor do I claim that races are DEFINED biologically, or that there is ever a single trait that everyone in a race has.
Oh, and one other thing that is “biological” about this is that unlike many other ways one might arrange people into groups – Christian vs non, smoker vs non, marathon runner vs non – these racial groupings will often (usually?) be passed on genetically to one’s children, even if those children are raised by a hypothetical skinnerian box.
(Also note, btw, that in different contexts the word “race” means all sorts of different things… in common US parlance, for instance, it tends to refer to large somewhat-arbitrary groupings of populations, but can also refer to much smaller populations in contexts where that is relevant. Most random Americans, when asked to list races, wouldn’t immediately list “native Hawaiian” as one of them, but someone living on Hawaii, when discussing relations between native Hawaiians and others, might well view that as a racial issue…)
Chen has now said that can races plainly be categorized on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair.
Well, if they plainly can then tell us which sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair allow you to categorise your Pacific Islander and East Asian races.
We have asked you to do this 12 times so far. And you always weasel away form it.
Since you are now explicitly claiming that humans can clearly be categorized on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair, the time has come for you to do so. You have made the explicit claim in GD that you are able to do something. So now lets see you do it.
And everybody remember, Chen’s Pacific Islander race encompasses Polynesians, a population that not infrequently has red hair, along with Mongoloid Indonesians, Singaporeans Australian Aborigines and New Guinean Melanesians.
Chen has now painted himself into a corner. Watching him try to weasel out of this should be good.
And yet again Max has point-blank refused to answer the question.
If the position he and Chen espouse had any validity at all they would not need to adopt these weasel tactics. If race had any objective existence then they would be able to readily list the races and tell us what characteristics separate them.
The fact that they have been repeatedly asked to do so and repeatedly refused really says it all.
These two are not arguing in good faith. They keep saying that race clearly has an objective meaning, and yet they have been unable to name even a single race and the characteristics of that race.
Yeah, the supplement indicates it is disputed which is a truism. But the definition clearly does not relate to a single trait like skin colour. That is a strawman you have created.
Where have we established that? I posted previously with some rather obvious examples that suggest otherwise.
Also, I’d say that you are unaware of recent evidence showing that genetic changes accelerated over the past 10,000 years.
Chen has now said that can races plainly be categorized on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair.
Well, if they plainly can then tell us which sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair allow you to categorise your Pacific Islander and East Asian races.
We have asked you to do this 12 times so far. And you always weasel away form it.
Since you are now explicitly claiming that humans can clearly be categorized on the basis of various sets of heritable characteristics such as color of skin, eyes, and hair, the time has come for you to do so. You have made the explicit claim in GD that you are able to do something. So now lets see you do it.
And everybody remember, Chen’s Pacific Islander race encompasses Polynesians, a population that not infrequently has red hair, along with Mongoloid Indonesians, Singaporeans Australian Aborigines and New Guinean Melanesians.
Chen has now painted himself into a corner. Watching him try to weasel out of this should be good.
Aborigines belong to a specific population. That’s what defines their relation to each other. Their relation is not defined in terms of their traits. Rather, their traits are a mark of their relative difference form other populations (i.e the unique selective pressures acting on this lineage + genetic drift). What unique traits does the Aborigineal population manifest? As opposed to which other populations? Relative to Europeans, Aborigines are darkly pigmented. Relative to darkly pigmented West Africans, they have different cranial structures.
Some look like East Africans, others like Australian Aborigines. It is pretty clear in most of the pics, some of the pics aren’t that good. The first and second pics are good stereotypical examples of each.
You refuse to list the questions. How am I supposed to answer them? I already gave you my definition, cited others who also use it, listed the clades that would qualify as races based on your stipulations, ect. What am I missing?
Which is simply restating your contention that they look different.
But your are clearly incapable of telling us how they look different. You simply keep asserting *that *they look different without being able to demonstrate that they in fact do.
