I definitely agree with that. What I’m objecting to with this thread is going too far into the other direction and stating not just things like “races are impossible to rigidly define” or “discussing races is rarely useful” but “race is a completely meaningless concept, biologically”.
Here’s another way to look at it: let’s say aliens show up, abduct a bunch of humans, and analyze human biology and physiology, while paying absolutely no attention to culture. Presumably they’ll very quickly figure out how to differentiate between, say, male humans and female humans; or young and old humans. At some point they’ll probably also notice variations and categories of external appearance that we call “race”, and they’ll (if they have enough human subjects) compare that to DNA. Will they come to any conclusions? Do pureblooded Native Americans, for instance, have both distinct enough DNA and physical appearances that aliens would eventually pick up on it? And if so, how are they not a race?
What I’d like to think would surprise aliens is how damn important it all is to us, but that’s a separate issue.
GIGOBuster quoted this conclusion:
I agree with all of that, but to me that’s not saying that biological races don’t exist at all, just that they’re rarely if ever useful in biological contexts for various reasons.
But some people from the tall race are nonathletic and have poor eye-hand coordination and move around like their spinal cord is a rigid iron bar. Thankfully they’re white as a warning so GMs know to stay away. The short race has this warning too.
Maybe it’s unscientific or based on culture, but the stereotype will change as soon as non-black counterparts to LeBron or Jordan or Dr. J or many other super athletic black swing men start showing up. And since this hasn’t happened in 70 years it’s looking a bit grim. It’s not like the offerings from India, the Middle East, or China look decent either.
You are anthropomorphizing here, assuming that the way an alien life form would interact with it’s environment would be similar to ours. Who’s to say that if an alien life form even had what we call intelligence, and that it then conceived of the world in the same object oriented manner in which we do, that it would not put humans in 6 billion and some different categories along a male-female continuum?
Yes, but remember the OP, IMHO if you do want to press the issue, just drop the use of the “biological” part in a different thread.
The aliens would be much more objective and would realize that “pureblooded” Native Americans in Alaska are genetically distinct from “pureblooded” Native Americans in Patagonia or Brazil.
They’d also realize that many populations with superficial similarities are quite distinct, genetically.
They’d conclude that there is considerable variation between different populations of humans, but that it’s clinal in nature, and it’s impossible to draw objective boundaries between them.
Why don’t they ALL reject the notion of biological races? I mean all scientists reject the notion of the earth being flat.
There is a potential risk of Lieberman being biased in his “conclusion”, fearing a new holocaust if white students were told something politically incorrect.
Meh, as noticed you are basing that on a survey from some time prior to March 1992, as I have seen, the current situation is that more scientists accept the facts.
And reaching for conspiracy theories does not fly much over here.
Because that would be rejecting reality. Here is a genetic map of Europe showing how easy it is to separate even a fairly homogenous population by ancestry groups. Genetic differences between populations are real, significant, and quantifiable - this is not in dispute in the scientific literature.
Anthropologists don’t usually use traditional “European/Asian/African” groupings not because those groups aren’t distinct populations, but because they’re often the wrong level of analysis for their academic work, which usually involves finer gradations and detailed study of subpopulations - like say comparing two Polynesian tribes. Much in the same way that an engineer wouldn’t use quantum dynamics to model an airplane wing, or a biologist wouldn’t use the animal vs. plant dichotomy to classify species of bacteria. Doesn’t mean those concepts do not describe reality, or even that they’re useless in scientific research.
I got your basketball player right here
The same reason that ALL scientists don’t reject the notion that dinosaurs and birds have distinct lineages.
But more to the point, I think we’d need to explore what these anthropologists mean by “race”. Like I said, it’s very common for them to talk about “populations”, but those populations will vary depending on context. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that some of these are thinking of the ability to group humans into populations for some purposes, even if they realize that different grouping might be used for different purposes.
Of course, if you want to make your case for the existence of biological races, go ahead. How many are there and where do you draw the lines? And why are those lines better than another set of lines that divide humans even further?
The idea is that if you are constructing a basketball team, telling your assistant “bring me a bunch of black guys” probably is not going to get you as good of a team as “get me a bunch of tall dudes.” A set of good basketball players may be likely to be mostly black, but a set of random black people is not likely to be mostly good basketball players.
What we term “black” encompasses a pretty mind-boggling chunk of human diversity. Africa is the center of human diversity and the genetic diversity found outside of Africa is just a tiny offshoot of the diversity found within. So one “black” guy is likely as different than another “black guy” as a “white” guy is to an “asian” guy.
How will it vary in the context of race-based medicine? This has the potential of saving millions of lives in the third world.
Science involving probabilities and predictions depends on aggregating measurements of real things. If “race” was a real biological characteristic, there would have to be some way to measure it definitively in an individual specimen. How would you propose to do that?
You’re looking for “absolutes” – “Blackness”, “Whiteness”, etc. It’s essentialism. Biology is all fuzzy borders. We’re not talking about absolute qualities. We’re talking about different statistical distributions of traits you can’t think in categories. It’s not neat and clean. You need to think in fuzzy groups of statistical samples. Every single species of life has the potential to fracture into different statistically separate groups of in-group breeding units.
I don’t really see how you can deny the existence of races, unless you think humans are magically distinct from other mammals. Humans are easily dividable into semi-distinct subgroups that have coherent sets of traits – in different distributions -than others. Call this “race” if you want.
Geography started this all. Proximity of breeding mates in a world without airplanes or animal husbandry or boats. Then introduce different selective factors.
Here is the biological definition.
You get robust clustering results which correspond to the continental populations of traditional anthropology. The reason? Because you had breeding groups separated by geography:
There really isn’t much, if any, “race-based medicine”. The holy grail for medicine would be a treatment based on each person’s individual genetic make-up. So if you’re doing “race-based medicine”, the more finely you can divide up the human population, the better.
What the heck are you talking about? The “third world” is not suffering from any particular glut of genetic disease. I imagine some malaria drugs and improved sanitation infrastructure would go a long ways, however.
That definition is (I actually should say “those definitions are”) useless. Race, according to that cite, can mean almost anything.
No one disputes that you can’t divide humans into certain groups based on physical or genetic traits. It’s just that there isn’t any one objective way to do it, and any system that divides people up more finely is going to be more precise than one that doesn’t.
Well, yeah. That’s what we call “populations”, and there are any number of such “barriers” that can be used to divide people up into any number of different groups.
And here is what you missed quoting: