Over in Gd there is yet another thread going on about the biological validity of the term “race” as it applies to humans. However, here I’d like to conduct an experiment. For the purposes of this thread you need to consider yourself constrained as follows.
You are an alien being who collects Sentient lifeforms. Your current assignment is to collect representative humans from the planet earth. For those who care, all specimens are collected voluntarily and are treated to membership in the galactic federation of sentient beings. Your superiours have provided you with a human information sheet to help you along. It reads:
H-Sapiens (Humans) A bipedal, mostly hairless primate and the only highly sentient form of life on the planet known to our scouts. H sapiens occurs naturally on all continents except the southern arctic zone. While H Sapiens divides itself into groups based upon many criteria, your task shall concern itself with the natural physical appearance of a specimen. Please ignore all references a specimen may make to ethnic, national, or language groups as these are irrelevant. Please ignore references to religions, modes of dress, or other non physical attributes. Males may exhibit facial hair in all populations though it is more prevalent in certain clines and should not be considered in your sorting. Please collect as many specimens as you deem fit to provide us with the full physical representation of this species.
We have defined certain zones to assist you in your assignations. Please assign them in the following manner. H.Sapiens, (zone, population)
Equatorial: A population of physical homogenization that occurs in tropical zones and ma not extend farther than halfway between the equator and the center of the temperate zone.
Arctic: Referring to a population of physical homogenization that occurs near the northern arctic zone
Temperate : A population whose center is roughly between that of the arctic zone and that of the equatorial zone.
Most H. Sapiens are intergrade types, and for those populations you may designate them H. Sapiens, (zone, Population 1 X Population 2) Please note that such specimens are of less concern to us unless they represent a *distinct *physical typology different from either primary population.
The Pioneer plaque, which we have sent out to space to inform alien civilizations of the essentials of the human race and life on Earth, required depiction of only two specimens: one male and one female.
We already know that humans are biologically a single species. You have been asked to collect a physical representation of all the human physical variations to avoid embarassing problems with their Ferderation IDs. Many other Federation members are unable to tell humans apart at all and will need to refer to additional information. DNA chips are simply too expensive, and can be faked too easily.
If you don’t want to play then just say so. In addition you could make a good argument that the plaque is racist and incorrect as it shows a caucasian male, and female. The male clean shaven.
If the Federation species are having trouble IDing individual humans, I don’t know that even pulling “representative physical variations” is really going to help them a whole lot.
If you’re at a level where you’re not even sure what ***eyes ***are, looking at two sets of people who have slightly different colors or shapes of eyes isn’t really going to be that useful.
The real question is how much humans look like the other FS (Federation Species) and whether or not any of the physical variants look enough LESS like them to be worth the bother of notating.
That said, obvious variants as to hair and skin color are usually generally picked. I think it would also be interesting if the FS selector picked based on something we as humans can’t even readily tell like our scent, pheremones, radioactivity… or something easily changed, like our clothing (really, how would an FS tell that a bodysuit or a leotard *isn’t *part of our skin?) or hair length.
Good points. You as a selector may use whatever criteria you choose providing it is based only upon natural physical characteristics. You have been issued equipment to assist you in separating out the human volunteers from non natural items of dress and affectation.
sheesh, they’ll be collecting either short, pot-bellied balding men past 40 or skinny horse-faced women past 50. anyone smart enough to build a spaceship must know that a basic population segmentation is age (and also gender.)
It’s never any fun when our, ahem, “thought experiments” fail to come out the way we want them to, is it?
Let me ask you, are you still keeping up the appearance that this little kabuki theater of a “thought experiment,” with its multiple mandatory assumptions and peremptory dismissal of inconvenient responses, is going to prove anything other than “What Acid Lamp thinks about the validity of racial classifications”?
To help you understand how your GF ID might work let us consider a human traveler to another world. The being assisting you in passing interplanetary immigration will follow the following steps.
(Takes your card, and passes it to the AI which will help it process you. )
A.I < This card belongs to Acid Lamp, A Human, planet of Origin Earth, A Male. The Polite term of address is “Sir”. Is this a Male human?>
Agrees that I am indeed a male human.
< This specific human is listed as a temperate european intergrade type, does he meet the assigned criteria for such an assignation? (goes on to list some general physical attributes) >
Agrees that I do meet those criteria, but there is a problem with the color temperature of my hair.
<This is a cultural affectation, Humans do not naturally occur hair in blue, politely inquire as to the human’s natural hair color and ensure a match to the listed information.>
Asks and answers correctly.
<This human is not listed as a security threat, or criminal within the federation or on his planet or origin, please check the image against the human and indicate if it grossly differs in any other manner, if not, please warmly welcome The human in the following manner: Welcome to Beeblebrox mister Lamp, please enjoy your time on our world.>
Not at all, I’m interested in how the various dopers would break up human populations. your answer was: “I Don’t.” So either you think there is no difference between humans of any physical sort worth mentioning,:dubious::rolleyes: or your threadshitting. Either way you aren’t contributing. Lasciel jokingly mentioned gingers, but it’s true that for a given set of physical traits, you could indeed separate red haired people into a separate group if you were inclined to do so.
I don’t have any of the hang-ups about race that many of our other esteemed Dopers seem to. So I’d grab:
A white person (from the US or Europe or Australia)
A black person (from Africa)
A hispanic person (from South/Central America)
An arabic person (from the Middle East)
An Asian person (from Asia, duh)
The Pioneer couple are not Caucasian, but were designed to be racially ambiguous. (This is based on a lecture by Carl Sagan that I attended at Cornell University in 1972, when I was an undergraduate there and Sagan was on the faculty.) They have wavy hair, very broad noses, and at least the woman seems to have epicanthic folds. They more resemble Polynesians than Caucasians.
