Except that I’m not arguing that any particular set of races is correct and scientifically superior and defineable. I’m arguing that the idea of grouping people together based on “race” is not a biologically meaningless one.
Similarly, a scientist might not be able to prove that “red” exists, but might say “I’ve demonstrated that this species of bat can not see red”. That’s a potentially 100% objective scientific useful statement that a full-on science-y peer reviewed study might study, which would use the word “red”. Presumably somewhere inside the study it would more explicitly describe exactly what wavelengths were involved, but the scientist would still use the word “red”.
But that analogy fails if taken TOO far, as do most, even useful ones, so there’s no point in pursuing it to the bitter end.
Again, my point is not “scientists all know that humans can be divided into precisely these 3 races: whites, blacks, and asians… and if they’re denying it it’s only because of political correctness”. I’m merely objecting to the completely and absolute denial of any biological underpinnings to the concept of race, which I think takes a valid point too far.
I would say that that is what experts are doing, so excuse if I agree more with them.
Of course, but then that is why there is also the option of then being a follower of crackpot ideas. It would be as in Astronomy a renegade group insisted to call Pluto a planet, but instead of making the case in the astronomical circles they made their case to the public. It may convince many among the public, but the scientists would already be farther along. The Pluto fans would be stuck forever in 2005
Science does plenty of organization of things into groups in a way that is not purely objective. For instance, if our hypothetical ETs set out to taxonomize all living beings, they might well not end up with a grouping that precisely matched subphylum vertebratae, including precisely 7 subgroups, precisely matching the following classes:
Class Agnatha (jawless fish)
Class Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes)
Class Osteichthyes (bony fishes)
Class Amphibia (amphibians)
Class Reptilia (reptiles)
Class Aves (birds)
Class Mammalia (mammals)
They might put the dividing lines somewhat higher or lower, maybe diving those 7 classes into 2 or 3 groupings. Or maybe they would have the division between placental mammals, marsupials and monotremes up at that same level. Or whatever. Those divisions are a human-made description of the complexity of life. They are in a sense arbitrary. That does not make them unscientific.
I can’t tell you exactly what all the cultures are, or exactly what all the languages are, or exactly what all the sports are, or exactly what all the arts are. Yet people devote their lives to categorizing and studying and grouping all those things.
You’ll find that biologists make those distinctions not on randomly chosen physical morphology (like colour, hair form, etc) -which is called folk taxonomy, but on something called common descent. The latter has been done ever since Darwin which replaced the former published by Carl Linnaeus.
Not exactly. I think any astronomer would admit that they are sort of stuck with this term “planet” as a hold-over from pre-scientific times, and what they really do is study “objects that orbit the sun”, whatever they are called. But the analogy would only hold if we had one definition for “planet” in our solar system, but used a different definition for other solar systems.
We have a definition of race (or subspecies) that we use for animals. Humans simply fail the test. It’s not scientific to use one set of criteria for deciding how many chimp subspecies there are and a different set for determining how many subspecies of humans there are.
They study “objects that orbit the sun”, and we call a bunch of them planets because some ancient Babylonians (or equivalent) thought they had magical properties to predict the future.
It seems to me that you are missing an important point. Those divisions are made in such a way that there is agreement among scientists and experts on the field, otherwise science would had a hard time going forward.
The problem was the old race definitions, the arbitrary divisions in the case of homo sapiens that were imposed in the past hit a wall specially when DNA entered the picture, it has made more sense then nowadays for the researchers to agree that first they have to assume that there are no races. Once that was established the differences that **are **being researched depend less on the artificial (or mistaken) division that was imposed in the past.
IIUC then any attempts to force the scientists to comply with popular views on this is a no go. Scientists just do not bend easy to the attacks on science coming from creationists, climate change deniers, anti-vaxers and other crackpots out there, so it is with the race issue.
NO ONE IS DISAGREEING THAT GENETICS DON"T CORRESPOND ROUGHLY TO GEOGRAPHIC ORIGIN. NO ONE.
But that genetic “clustering” isn’t anything special. We can “cluster” people at any number of levels. We can “cluster” Africans and non-Africans. We can “cluster” Europeans and Asians. We can “cluster” northern Europeans and southern Europeans. We can “cluster” Sicilians and mainland Italians.
Popularly speaking, I see no problem with it, the problem is by assuming that academic and scientific circles should take heed, and there is also a problem when politicians tell the scientists what to do.
Of course, there is no honest reason to do so, since using that word conjures up false images in the minds of most people of fixed groups with fixed traits that do not actually existy outside statistical analysis.
That has no bearing on whether there is a biological thing as a racial group. People should emphasise treating people as individuals and suggest equal treatment/human rights rather than deny that racial groups exist.
Take it up with Rand Rover. His position is that there is nothing wrong with applying the word “race” to any of several different ways to categorize, lump, or split humanity. In the real world, the use of the word “race” conjures up the specific notions of “Caucasian,” “Negro,” and “Mongoloid” or “white” and “all those others.” If there is supposed to be some reality to “race” in regards to humanity, then throwing the word around to identify different groups at different levels of division is not accurate and if there is no such legitimate category in biology, then claiming that we can use the word to mean different things to different people when the reality is that it will invoke a specific (erroneous) meaning is dishonest.
Those are the options. I did not make the argument, Rand Rover did, so you need to be addressing him.