But we’re talking science here, and there is not scientific definition of the color red that isn’t arbitrarily drawn. Color is a social construct, and it’s useful in that sense. Race is the same. It works as a social construct, but not so much as a scientific one.
I looked at the people citing the paper, Google Scholar just reports 2 citations, I would have to say that it was discouraging to see a neo nazi site recommending that article among the first links in the regular Google.
But later on 2003 Scientific American came with the Race issue and the overall conclusion from the experts was:
Which is entirely consistent with what I’ve said above. These are biological categories, they’re not fixed, discrete categories like makes of car. Go back and look at the biological definition above. Also, I’d recommend Sesardic’s paper (in my post above) which addresses these strawmen arguments.
You seem confused about what “science” means. It’s really just a process–i.e., the scientific method. You can use the scientific method to discover things based on subjective categories that you assign things to. There’s nothing that’s “not science” about that.
Science is not subjective. We don’t say: It’s OK if different chemists use different elements to describe the world. Science uses facts to test hypothesis. If you want to state the hypothesis that races exist, you have to test that against the facts. And the facts can’t be subjective, otherwise we have no way of arriving at the correct conclusion.
Now, we might use science to test our own propensity to divide people into races, but that’s not the same thing as scientifically dividing people into races.
A person can create subjective categories and assign people to those categories based on objective factors, and can then perform research (using the scientific method) on people in each category and see if they have other similarities or differences. There’s nothing about that that is “not science” or “unscientific.” Other people can review the work and say “the categories you created were stupid” or “you should have assigned people to your categories differently” or whatever, and that’s fine too.
So only things like physics and maths are scientific? What about science that deals with the natural world. Natural science involves subjective ideas & criteria as I mentioned above.
btw. I posted a couple of responses to your comment about morphology above.
And when no one can agree on what those categories are, then we rightly conclude that the categories themselves are meaningless.
It’s not for lack of trying that we conclude that biological races don’t exist. It’s precisely the act of trying, and never succeeding, that forces us to conclude that they don’t.
It’s funny, though, that all the people in this thread who claim that races exist can never tell us what the races are. Can you?
I think that is fine too, what I have found is that the discussion is still ongoing, but the current consensus is that biologically speaking there are no races.
I can only conclude at this point that you are willfully missing the point. The idea of a “race” is subjective, and that’s OK, it doesn’t mean the idea is “not science” or “only a social construct and not biological.” One can create as many races as they want to. Other people can then ask why not one less or one more.
How many cultures are there? Does culture not exist? When does someone become bald? Is it meaningless to refer to bald people? When is someone healthy? The fact that continuous variables doesn’t mean there are no useful or meaningful categories.
Population geneticists identify clusters that correspond to these non-existent races.