Are you sure that you’re going to find any such correlation? Or is it actually going to be something related to geography? Considering the diversity of the kind of people we consider “Latino,” it’s hard for me to believe that any such situation will actually come up.
And a lot of Latinos will tell you that they’re not a member of any “Latino” race. Several people I know get very angry if anyone calls them anything but “white.”
And then there’s the story from few years ago about the “black” heart medication approved by the F.D.A. It turns out that making assumptions about heart disease based on race is problematic, because black people from Africa don’t have the same problems with heart disease that African-Americans do. And, ultimately, the increased incidence of heart disease among African-American men doesn’t have anything to do with genetics, but is a matter of diet.
So, now we have several people saying “sure you can divide people up into groups according to biological characteristics, but that doesn’t mean you can make any further conclusions about people in those groups.”
However, many of these same people reject any evidence of such further conclusions out of hand without actually considering. So of course you reach that conclusion–it’s what you’ve been aiming for all along. You assume the conclusion then conclude it is correct.
Grrrrr. Doing this with my thumb is slow and confining. I cannot well develop thoughts. Please forgive me.
Max, that isn’t “race”. Pick some other word. Raisin, or rabbit, or whatever and it makes equal sense to a biologist. Better, call it a group or a bunch or some similar term and our disagreement almost disappears. Yes of course you can select a group that has correlations to things beyond the descriptive basis of the group. But that group just isn’t a race of mankind. So the group is a social construct. That isn’t a bad thing.
I’m far from sure. In fact, I said “It may well be that between now and the end of time there is never a situation where something like that actually comes up”, which seems pretty clearly far from sure.
But you seem to be saying that you’re sure such a thing could NEVER happen. That is, I feel someone saying race has absolutely zero zilch nada none biological meaning is the one making the extraordinary claim.
Max, you are talking about the overlap between an arbitrary definition of a race, and specific genes. There are people outside of the group with great genetic similarities to people in the group, including the specific genes you are looking for, and people within the group who are very dissimilar genetically and don’t have the specific genes you are looking for. Now you are defining far more races than there are people on earth because of the limitless number of arbitrary definitions of race you can lay on top of genes.
Try to keep in mind that any scientific definition of race would include a set of criteria that could be applied to any person to determine their race, or even a mix of races to which they belong, where the number of possible races is small compared to the number of people in the world.
Also, I don’t find the possibility of a meaningful biological definition of race to be zero. I do not see any such definition, and I don’t see any rational reason to believe there would be one, and you are just expressing hypothetical situations that even if considered as real don’t produce the definition.
Please show me where in this thread the conclusions you are talking about appear, where such conclusions have been rejected out of hand, and the evidence that they have not been considered, or where a conclusion has been presumed.
The only conclusion I put in the OP is that it would be easy to fill in the blanks if a meaningful biological definition of race existed.
The thing is, we haven’t been that isolated. There are some small populations that have been isolated for extended periods of time, but they are the exception that proves the rule. The rest of us are mutts with successive invasions and conquests that mixed the gene pools quite a bit.
As I see it we’re getting more homogenized, but what we tend to think of as races did not spontaneously develop. When humans moved out of Africa initially and spread to different regions of the world, those branches were obviously isolated enough either by geography or eventually by language and culture to develop into “races.”
Just as dogs, most likely, first branched into a few major “breeds,” say big, furry cold dwelling dogs and small shorter haired tropical dogs, wilder dogs and more domesticated dogs. Then we intervened and created many additional breeds.
Likewise interbreeding of the major human races, created other variations. All humans share a common ancestor and all dogs share a common ancestor, but there are genetic differences today within our homo sapiens species and within their lupus familiaris species.
I don’t understand how human “races” and other animal “breeds” aren’t the same.
Is there such a thing as human race? seems to be in place #3 among Pointless SDMB threads that get resurrected over and over without anyone every changing his or her mind. (#1 and #2 are Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme? and Is rape rape? No! Rape is rape. )
I refer honorable Dopers to the URL I posted some months ago showing a dendrogram based on an ensemble of human genes. If you don’t understand that such dendrograms can be constructed, and that descriptive clusters can be found, then you need to read up on Cluster Analysis. Period.
Now, there are interesting questions, biological, sociological and political, that arise. One key question is how much variation is there between two “races”? For example, in biological classification there are taxonomic ranks lower than species. In one scheme, these are: subspecies, variety, subvariety, form, subform. Now is the difference between Australian aborigine and African pygmy (two “races” most distinct from each other IIRC) large enough to justify referring to these groups as distinct “subforms”? I don’t know. But neither does the Doper who pontifically asserted that it wasn’t in an earlier thread.
But consider the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Their genes are very similar to their neighbors, yet they have a distinctive look. Anthropologists hypothesize that the distinctive look arises because when Bushmen take non-Bushman mates, they prefer mates that look like Bushmen. In what sense is this not “breeding”?
Are you saying the Australian aborigine amd African pygmy are races? If so, could you name the others, or the approximate number of them?
Are you calling Bushmen and their neighbors breeds?
Do you think that genetic clusters, breeds, races, or whatever you are referrring to were formed in humans in the same manner as the forced breeding in dogs with comparable results?
Also, this is not a* Is there such a thing as human race? * thread. This is a Can you present a Meaningful Biological Definition of Race? thread.
I woulld not try to define “race” since the term is used in various ways. Charlemagne’s father was called “First King of the Franks of the Second Race” even though his genetic “race” was presumably very similar to that of the “First Race” King he deposed. Similarly, people may speak of the “Irish race” with no intention of claiming their difference from Spaniards is genetic. Indeed, the ambiguity of the term “race” is one reason this topic gets confused. The word “breed” would cause even more consternation. So I’m sure it’s best to refer to genetic clusters as just … “genetic clusters”.
Attempting to list clusters might add to the confusion. Bushmen, Pygmies, Australians, Oceanian Negritos, and a South Indian grouping are five groups much more divergent from each other, IIRC, than, say Caucasian is from Chinese, yet all five groups might be lumped together as “black.” :smack:
Here’s just one example of a clustering but I suspect there is a misleading effect at work in such a diagram. The chart makes it appear that Pacific and S.E. Asian groups diverged relatively recently, but I think the division is more ancient and the groups have instead converged as a result of interbreeding, especially due to the Polynesian expansion.
I really feel like you’re not responding to what I’m saying. I’m not saying “I’m going to come up with a definition of race that’s purely in biological terms”. I’m saying “race is defined in societal/cultural terms, based generally on physical appearance” (or something along those lines). It results in dividing people into groups… different groupings for different sets of “races”.
So we have those groups. They were given to us by a completely non-biological process. They were NOT defined biologically.
The question then becomes… what can we do with those groups? What are they good for? Will they ever allow us to make any predictions about their members, from the bigoted (members of group are dumb and lazy) or the other kind of bigoted (members of group are intelligent and noble) or physiological (members of the group have good heat resistance, or are susceptible to some disease) or trivial (members of the group have curly pubic hair) or athletic (members of the group are fast sprinters) or purely physical (members of the group are taller than average).
Now, your classic old school racist, including the ignorant evil kind and the “scientific” Nazi kind, makes all kinds of such predictions about all sorts of groups and believes them fervently.
I tend not to make such predictions… they’d almost always be wrong, and what would be the point? But what I do not do is say that no such prediction, no matter how vague, no matter how surrounded by disclaimers about how it’s just a slight average propensity and doesn’t prove anything about any given individual, could EVER be made, QED automatically proven beyond doubt period end of paragraph.. and if it could it would CERTAINLY be due purely to cultural or historical factors, never anything biological.
Of course, that puts me on the “same side” as the racists, which makes me grouchy, but I only seem to be on that side because on a scale from 0 to 100 with racists at 100 I’m at 0.2 but not absolute zero.
Ok, I don’t bother to consider the possibility that something like you describe could occur, but I’m not trying to claim it’s impossible either. I am saying there hasn’t been any such thing found. I’m sure you’ve taken flak for the position even though it doesn’t make you a racist, even at my low threshold for qualification as a racist.
I haven’t read your cites yet (unless I saw them in a previous thread). But otherwise you’re presenting the reality of genetics. Our characteristics are inherited, genetic clusters form, one way or another, and the results will be characteristics that are shared by people based on their lineage. I don’t think that really aligns well with any conventional definition of race, and those concepts exist in science with other names and contexts unrelated to conventional definitions of race. Which you seem to be facing as you respond.
I guess you’re saying my points are true but obvious. OK, granted.
But then I’m not sure what the debate is about.
Are the typical American distinctions for “race” unsound? Sure, but we all agree on that already.
(I know someone of pure Portuguese ancestry who gets special treatment, when available, for his “Spanish” surname. :smack: )
Halle Berry has a Caucasian mother and African-American father. You could safely say that Chelsea Clinton would be genetically more similar to the Caucasian. You can say that about any two members of a population or racial group.
but obvious. 
OK, granted.