Good point. It appears that the table is from data almost 20 years old. A more updated table would most certainly show the split as you indicate.
The other thing, though, is any table like this is going to represent some theoretical average, not what you actually see when you pick any two random people from those vast geographic areas. I don’t know where “Chinese” falls in that grouping (it’s not listed), but you can bet your chopsticks that the “Koreans” who are native to the area right at the Chinese border are going to be more closely related to those right across the border than they are to those native to the Southern part of the Korean peninsula.
Charts like these, while interesting in what they tell us about groups, give a misleading impression of the truth value of the chart for any given individual in that group.
Well, Risch makes the point that it is useful from a medical perspective and that *“the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level.”
*
As Cavalli-Sforza says, there are lumpers and splitters. You can divide these groups into much smaller populations down to families. Leroi in his op-ed said *"there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they’re just the easiest way to divide things up…Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences. *
You two seem to think that there’s a very specific and official definition of “race” in biology, and that the term “race” as applied to humans doesn’t meet that definition. If that’s all you want to discuss, then that’s super. You could be right, as far as I know. I don’t have access to the tome of official definitions of all terms used in biology like you apparently do.
However, if one wants to speak about groups of humans who have roughly similar genes, and wants to divide up those humans based on the similarity of their genes, and wants to use the term “race” to refer to different groups of humans who have certain similarities in their genes, then I think that’s a perfectly fine thing to do, your precious official biological definition of race notwithstanding. And different people can come up with different numbers of “races” for different purposes, and that’s fine too (as long as they tell you how they decided who’s in what race and why).
Ok, I’ve addressed the medical utility already. If you don’t know the detailed genetic structure of an individual, they are more likely to share genes with a population of people from a continent in their recent ancestry than not. That again is trivial meaning, or at best a utility. The claim about a ‘greatest genetic structure’ has no biological meaning in itself.
Lumping and splitting are both arbitrary means of classification. The statement about non-precision shorthand precludes meaning, and of course, as a result, does nothing to distinquish genetic from cultural or political differences.
Are you done yet? Can you fill out the form in the OP?
That book is seriously out of date. I glanced through his methods and he analyzed several alleles, chosen only for the fact that there was data available on them. I’m not a geneticist but even I know that we now look at specific regions of the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA to get an accurate picture of how humans evolved. Also, as far as I can tell, he purposed “lumped” people in order to do his analysis (why, I don’t know). It seems as though he could have made the lumps even smaller if he wanted to. Regardless, the author made it clear that his work demonstrates that there is no meaningful biological definition of race.
The other website that you cited also has data from old cites. Nevertheless, that author also came to the same conclusion. In fact, the person said exactly what we were saying; some of the racial distinctions not based on biology are outright wrong. The author went on to say another thing we have been saying all along. Human diversity, in general, is very weak relative to other species including other apes. We had a huge bottleneck very recently and we’re all derived from one stock.
The people arguing for a biological definition of race in this thread are actually supporting race as a social construct. Please remember the title of the thread.
I’m coming in late so shoot me if this has already been stated.
If your claim is that, mathematically, any set of objects, each with N attributes can be arbitrarily classified into X groups, then you are probably correct. But that is a pretty trivial statement.
The only classification that would seem to really matter is a classification that mapped well into our perceived groups based on a small set of physical characteristics. But this has been shown not to work so well.
What does ‘greatest’ mean? It sounds like an opinion. If it refers to the widest scope of genetic commonality, then that would be the entire human species, which contradicts your basic claim.
First of all, I hate you for making me defend Rand Rover, who I almost never agree with, and who I find to be an insufferable prick… but here’s the point I think he’s trying to make, which I think is a valid one.
It may be the case that to a biologist, the word “race” has an extraordinarily precise meaning, one which can be truly objectively defined, one which involves lots of big words and precise applications of genetics. And if that is so, it may well be the case that you can take any grouping of people and say “is this a biological race” or not. And it may well be the case that the commonly understood groupings known colloquially as races provably and objectively do NOT meet the biological definition.
However, if you ask a layman on the street “hey, do you think that races have biological meaning”, they’re not going to interpret that as “there’s some ivory tower super-precise meaning of ‘race’, let’s discuss whether the races we’re familiar with fit that definition, even though we don’t know what it is and probably wouldn’t understand it if we did”. Instead, they’re going to interpret it as something like “we both know what races are, so do you think people in the same race are actually biologically or genetically similar to each other, at least on average, more than they are to people of other races? If so, can we use that to make predictions and so forth? Could the fact that so many NBA players are black be biological as opposed to purely due to social pressures?”, or something along those lines. I think that’s a legitimately interesting discussion, and one which clearly at least a fair number of people in this thread are trying to have.
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not necessarily either ignorant or troll-y for Rand Rover to want to discuss whether they’re races are biologically meaningful without particularly caring about a specific and precise meaning of the word “race” that is used by biologists… similarly, if I ask a computer scientist something about information I don’t necessarily want an answer referencing “information”-the-precise-CS-term, and if I ask a physicist about work, I might not be asking about “work”-the-precise-physics-term.
You are citing opinions based on arbitrary selection processes as having meaning. You could try to justify why the circles your cites draw are more meaningful than other circles. Personally I don’t believe any of the circles are meaningful, they’re just arbitrary circles drawn to find accidental clusters, because no group of humans have never been totally isolated for very long.
Max, there are more precise ways to discuss the non-scientific concepts you are talking about. You won’t find many computer scientists or physicists who don’t point out the terms you are using are not accurate within their field if they are giving you a meaningful answer.
What do you mean by “very long”? That sounds like “an opinion”, as you might say. You could make these complaints about loads of classification or definitional systems.
In any case, Risch has provided evidence of how the major geographical structuring that exists in human populations has lead to meaningful biological or genetic differentiation.
If you ask a physicist how much “work” it takes to do something, he’s going to tell you that it’s the force multiplied by the distance the force is applied. If you say “oh, I meant how many hours it would take someone to do it”, he’d say: “then you’re talking about economics, not physics”. “Work” in physics absolutely does not mean what the layman means when he uses that term. If I start a thread to discuss how physicists define work, and you come in and start talking about man-hours, we’re going to tell you that you’re off topic. We’re discussing physics, not economics.
If you come into a thread about the biological definition of races, and you don’t use the definition that biologists use (genetically isolated populations with distinct morphological features; a subspecies), then you’re off topic.
If you want to discuss the everyday meaning of the term race, knock yourself out in another thread on that topic. This thread isn’t about that.
You could make these complaints about loads of classification or definitional systems.