I’m not Belowjob2.0 but my point is that it is the spin given to those papers that has been refuted. Clearly the users of the old definitions are on retreat, but on some scientific groups they continue to be used a good number of them, but it is really silly to ignore that even there -like the Forensic expert on the NOVA show say- the use of race does not mean what the scientific racists are assuming.
The spin given to those papers? I think you need to be more specific if you’re referring to something on that blog.
I linked to this chart. “European” is listed as an end population. The grouping that I’m referring to is called “Caucasoid” (CS’s term not mine). I have no idea where you came up with European.
&usg=__0caoFm8SwiRS_aB6cZ_tXxYWrtE=&h=413&w=374&sz=40&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=UWUBgR6CHh1ReM:&tbnh=136&tbnw=111&ei=N0ieTaWYEsa9tgeAg6WMAw&prev=/images%3Fq%3DCavalli-Sforza%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D709%26tbm%3Disch&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=1025&vpy=358&dur=739&hovh=236&hovw=214&tx=165&ty=135&oei=_UeeTbmiN8agtgf8z_j7Ag&page=1&ndsp=29&ved=1t:429,r:21,s:0){kind=link}
How does the quote contradict what I said? This is what I said:
Cavalli-Sforza… rejects the idea of human subspecies; he argued that there is no major genetic discontinuity. Yet, he clearly recognizes population clusters that correspond to what others consider to be human subspecies and he clearly thinks there is some genetic discontinuity between the groupings that he, himself, has called races. He, of course, has never stated (in any of the articles that you cite or that I am aware of) what would qualify as a major genetic discontinuity or what criteria we should use to determine if there are human subspecies…
This is what you quoted:
Further support for the conclusions of this study comes from the observation that, almost without exception, gene frequencies form smooth clines over all continents (22). [**Ok, but the the issue is between “racial or continents groups” **]. Zones of discontinuity in human gene frequency distributions are present [See, he agrees that there is discontinuity], but the local gradients are so small that they can be identified only by simultaneously studying many loci using complex statistical techniques (23) [As needs to be done in classifying a number of mammalian populations; note, he agrees that it can be done.]. In addition, such regions of relatively sharp genetic change do not surround large clusters of populations, on a continental or nearly continental scale. On the contrary, they occur irregularly, within continents and even within single countries (24, 25), often overlapping with geographic and linguistic barriers (26–29) [So there are sharp differences within some major clusters and the major clusters are not sharply different. Oh.]… However, this has little to do with the subdivision of the human population into a small number of clearly distinct, racial or continental, groups. The existence of such broad groups is not supported by the present analysis of DNA. [This is an amazing sentence, because it is often misinterpreted. As I was pointing out to Blake and others, C S clearly believes that there are large clusters that can be identified (by cluster analysis). Here he is repeating that these are not “clearly distinct, racial or continental, groups” with “sharp genetic” difference – because there are not clearly distinct with sharp borders.]
I have yet to argued that there are “clearly distinct” “racial or continents groups” with “sharp genetic” boundaries. I was arguing that there are racial groups or clades that can be distinguished. I am now inquiring as to what the criteria for subspecies is, so we can see which of these group qualifies as subspecies. The whole “sharp” genetic" boundaries is another red herring. Let’s first find a source that gives the criteria for subpopultions being subspecies.
Explain why the two issues are logically interdependent.
Yes. “End population” as in people who are living now, as in the people we are talking about in this thread.
From your cite. That’s where. I was the one who first broke down that chart and referred to “European”. You know, the people who are alive today. You wanted to start talking about some proto-population that doesn’t exist today.
I wish I could have just regurgitated that. Unfortunately, the “race realist” community isn’t too strong on the intellectual side (my opinion). I end up having to work through all these arguments myself …
Anyways… Were’re getting off track.
Again, the idea is that races are clades. They are populations defined by their ancestral relations. Follow the branches. Europeans, etc. are the branches of the Caucasian population; Caucasians, etc. are the branches of the Out of African Population. The Out of African population + all the many African branches (many of them very mixed now) are the branches of the human population. By your logic, we can’t say that humans exist because the protohumans that we all branched from don’t exits.
I’m talking about our cladistic (i.e racial = ancestral) relations.
Current populations are not clades. One thing that might be confusing you is that C-S isn’t using the term “cluster” the way you are. He just means a bunch of people who live within the same general area (not that they are clades). Hence his emphasis that such gradients that do exist (small as they are) occur within clusters (ie, people living in relatively close proximity) rather than outside of the clusters, as one would expect if such clades existed.
A clade, in this usage, is the set of populations that descend from a common population. “Caucasian” denotes the set we are talking about.
No. It’s one that is descended from a common and unique population. “Caucasian” isn’t a clade.
Chen,
I was thinking about our different models of race. Picture here. It really comes down to a difference in perspective, Caldistics versus Phenetics.
**Cladistics can be defined as the study of the pathways of evolution. In other words, cladists are interested in such questions as: how many branches there are among a group of organisms; which branch connects to which other branch; and what is the branching sequence. A tree-like network that expresses such ancestor-descendant relationships is called a cladogram. Thus, a cladogram refers to the topology of a rooted phylogenetic tree.
Phenetics is the study of relationships among a group of organisms on the basis of the degree of similarity between them, be that similarity molecular, phenotypic, or anatomical. A tree-like network expressing phenetic relationships is called a phenogram.**
They seem to diverge in two key respects: 1) dealing with the diversity in Africa and 2) dealing with hybrids. With regards to hybrids, once my races mix, they mix away; they become historic ancestries and exist like archaic species exist in us (Neanderthals, etc). Your races may mix away, but can then just readily form new races. As for Africa, my model envisions numerous (largely mixed by now) ancestral lines; you model may see 1 or 2 large cluster.
Apart from that, they say the same thing. Different (historic) regional-meta-population lineages. This leaves us with the subspecies question. Do our meta-population lineages qualify as a subspecies.
I found a definition (used by the Fed) for us:
O’Brien and Mayr, 1991.Bureaucratic Mischief: Recognizing Endangered Species and Subspecies
2 and 4 are clear cut in favor of human subspecies. 1 is also when the rule is seen in practice. It basically means a historical geographic range (i.e. NE Asia, Europe, etc.) as opposed to having to be restricted to a location; (animals in the zoo don’t lose subspecies status because they are in the Zoo). [2] seems to be the issue: share a group of phenotypic characteristics which result from the same gene pool (i,e. share a group of heritable phenotypes). (It’s not clear if “share a group of“… means “share a pattern of” or “share a set of“; we’ll have to see how this is put in practice with other subspecies)
…
Why don’t we see if the anti-racers agree with this criteria and go from there.
I don’t know where you’re getting your “unique” from. Clade is a generic term. For example:
*In a previous article (Richards et al. 1998), we proposed a flexible and consistent
nomenclature for mtDNA clades, which is reviewed here. The set of all mtDNAs derived by descent from any maternal ancestor could be distinguished, in principle, by a name. In practice, only clades with, for example, interesting geographical patterning or those derived from major early branchings of the phylogeny need to be named.
*
Clades Q and R share a common phylogenetic node P in the Y-chromosomal tree defined by markers M45 and 92R7 (YCC 2002). The P(xM207) chromosomes are widespread—although found at low frequencies—over central and eastern Asia (Underhill et al. 2000) and were also found only in two Indian samples (fig. 3). In contrast, their sister branch R, defined by M207, accounts for more than one-third of Indian Y chromosomes and is the most common clade throughout northwestern Eurasia.*
In what possible way are different lmitochondrial DNA clades or different haplotpe clades unique in a manner that excludes me from speaking of human clades?
If you have an actual point to make about an argument-- as opposed to a sneer – make it. If you want to make a point, summarize it and cite a source if you can. If you want to know the actually weaknesses in a argument with the intent of discussing them-- I will be happy to let you know them.
Meh, as in academic circles your ideas are not being taught at basic levels anymore, one wonders what is the hurry or the need, the idea of using the old race terms is passing by.
Really? Do you think governments are going to copy France & stop collecting data by race/ethnicity?
Meh, the point deals with the use of the use of the term in biology and how far it has retreated in educational settings, even if there is an assumption that “teaching the controversy” and posting in a message board would change that.
The unfortunate case is that there are groups that do continue to discriminate based on appearance, that is why sociologists and others see race as a social construct and the sad reality is that that racism is still there and it has to be dealt with still.
Do you perhaps believe that people can somehow be taught not to see obvious physical and cultural differences among themselves? That we can somehow suppress instincts like tribalism and ethnocentrism with a program of propaganda and education, and we can somehow do this on a global basis? Or perhaps you believe that humans are devoid of all instincts except sex, and the brain of every newborn baby is a blank slate upon which you can write anything you wish? I am immensely skeptical of all this.
I would be skeptical of any claims that we can eradicate xenophobia and clannishness through simple efforts of education, as well. Since no one has made any claim to do that, that point does not appear to be relevant to this thread.
What is more relevant to this thread is the effort to stop pretending that science, particularly the biological sciences, provide some sort of factual support for the discrimination that does occur, particularly when the “facts” are imaginary artifacts from previous and discredited theories.
People will tend to organize themselves in ways that allows them to establish in-groups and out-groups. Among religion, class, wealth, local ethnicity, food preferences, and sports, we have a plenitude of criteria over which we can include or exclude other humans from “our” group. Pretending that science actually identifies people whom we should include or exclude based on some “factual” scale of qualities that do not really exist is silly.
The above is a good point. Yet, I think the mistake is to see something special about taxonomic race categories. These categories were used in the Angloshpere (US, Canada, South African), no doubt, but beyond that they were not the basis for defining in and out groups. Across continental Europe during the 1800s and early 1900’s, for example, nation (or ethnicity) was.
Whether you like it or not, there is a biological reality, and therefore scientific reality, to race (in the inclusive sense of “ancestry”). The issue then – for someone who wants to use this concept to define identity or other who want to dismiss the concept – are the boundaries. As such, much of the debate about the “reality of race” revolves around the ability to distinguish this race form that. But this is an artificial debate. One can define the boundaries in terms of non-biological terms (e.g religion, culture, geography), giving the concepts of relgiorace, ethnorace, and geographic race. Ethnorace is more or less “nationalism” in the traditional sense; religioracial identification is something like what Jews and others practice – some kind of religious identity tied to ancestral myths of peoplehood or maybe actual genealogies; geographic race is what “white nationalists” use to define themselves, most not identifying with non-European Caucasians.
This is why many antiracers are not satisfied with arguing that subspecies don’t exist; rather, they argue:
[1] Races are not subspecies, since there are no sharp distinctions. [2[ Races have no “biological reality”; in this case (as opposed to the case of culture and religion), things without “biological reality” are not real, [3] so races are illusions and “social constructs” [4] and so there can be no heritable differences between racial groupings.
The above, of course, makes no sense. Race can have “biological reality” without representing subspecies. There can be distinctions without them being sharp. There can be coherent racial concepts in absence of biologically defined boundaries. And the idea of heritable difference is completely separate from the existence of subspecies-- obviously, if we have a social category called race that classifies people on the basis of regional ancestry, and those people differ in heritable traits (skin color, behavioral tendencies, etc) due to ancestry, there will be heritable differences independent of whether the global genetic diversity is continous or not.
From the anti-race perspective, the point, of course, is not to make sense – but to a) convince people that racial identification is not important and that b) none of the social differences between racial groups in society are due to genetics.
Why? With regards to social identifications, to the extent racial identification was problematic, as you note, religious, ethnic, cultural, national, class, political, etc can be and historically have been more problematic. So the issue is tribalism. As I see it, tribalism is not the problems but rather the externalities of tribalism (conflict, inhumane exclusion, etc) are. Tribalism is a way of relating to others that gives many people meaning; if that’s not your way, don’t be a hater because others find that that works for them.
Why? With regards to heritable differences, to the extent that differences between socially delineated “racial” populations are heritble, differences can’t be blamed on institutional racism and arguments for legal “racial” preferences (i.e. quotas) need to be revised. As I see it, anti-hereditarians do not have the moral right (of way), since they are making the case for legally mandated racial discrimination; as such, they need to prove that the cause of differences is something that warrants compensatory discrimination. Or make their case on the basis of the merits of ethnic/racial diversity.
In general, in my view, we should keep the discussion of the biological status of race separate from that of the implications of various statuses. You don’t see to want to do this. Given that, maybe you could elaborate on why the taxonomic race concept [subspecies] is especially dangerous.