Can’t you say this about almost all classification systems? How many languages or cultures are there? You always get boundary issues. Still, you can identify languages by region of origin, and race by lineage or continental ancesty.
Yeah, but when people say this they often think it means there is no underlying biological meaning either. As indicated in that article, people tend to have no problem understanding that something like adolescence is a social construct but also has a biological component.
Affirmative Action and other social programs are not created by the medical community. For all intents and purposes, it relies on self reporting.
The medical and biological community discuss populations which isn’t the same as race. Sometimes in the context of the US or other subsets of humans doctors can talk about races but in reality it is shorthand for populations.
I never said that the medical community created Affirmative Action. You misread what I said. But what you are talking about, i.e. “populations”, is still what I’m talking about, and that is, physical differences in people whose ancestries are from different geographical regions. You can play with word definitions until the end of time, but I’m sorry to say that you’re not going to escape that fact.
All biologists accept this and in fact rely on it.
[QUOTE=GalileoSmith; 13830464]
You can play with word definitions until the end of time, but I’m sorry to say that you’re not going to escape that fact.
[/QUOTE]
But the fact remains that Populations =/= Races no matter how you slice it. They are different things, and it makes no sense to confuse the terms. Race carries centuries of baggage that has no biological meaning and is already being used as a social construct that doesn’t map to any biological underpinnings.
It’s not playing with word definitions - it’s science. And science requires precision.
No, they’d be half great at climbing walls and half terrible, so on the average, ok/good at climbing walls. The average wall-climbing ability of a pea-and-gekko is much higher than that of a banana-and-canary, it just has a very high variation, it’s a bunch of 1’s and a bunch of 0’s averaging out to 0.5.
And, key point, this is undeniably due to genetics/biology as opposed to any societal issue. It’s clearly nature, not nurture.
So in that universe, you can make a statements saying “on average, group X is significantly better at skill Y than other groups, and for reasons of nature, not nurture”. It’s a wildly imprecise statement that is clearly based on a massive misunderstanding, but it’s still TRUE.
I take it you missed my comments above regarding the use of the term population and that things can be socially defined but also have a biological component - such as adolescence? Clearly it does map to biological underpinnings:
I didn’t really think this is a topic worth a GD type of debate at all. I believe there is a factual answer. But a debate broke out in a GQ thread, and I followed the mod’s suggestion to continue the topic here. I thought that was a good idea because the mods are known for flying off the handle and banning people simply for repeated violations of the rules
It’s easy to end up with the race argument descending into a re-definition of race as populations. But the conventional concept of race isn’t based on genetics at all. It’s based on observation of superficial characteristics. And those observations tend to be very poor. Anyone observing the most common factor, skin color, will see a continuum of skin colors across mankind, and great similarities between genetically distinct people. I don’t see any reason to use the term ‘race’, thoroughly disqualified in its conventional form, as a term in biology. It simply confuses things.
There seems to be a never ending effort for people to find a biological definition of race that conforms to the conventional definitions, and they keep failing, or once again resort to redefining race as populations.
Although I find a little bit of meaning in the concept of population, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, they are arbitrary too. Populations are accidents of history. Australian aborigine is a well defined population due to thousands of years of isolation, but I’ve never seen any evidence that a population of these people existed somewhere else once upon a time, and they all got up and left for Australia one day. The idea of a population or genetic cluster being anything but a statistical anomaly in a snapshot of time doesn’t make sense.
I’ll add my thanks for that excellent illustration.
While you are using outlying scientific opinions, at least you have provided cites. I think there is confusion here from the use of ‘race’ being defined as ‘population’, or ‘genetic cluster’, and in some cases disproving mistaken conclusions about genetics that didn’t recognize ‘populations’ or ‘genetic clusters’. As I mentioned to Septimus above, I don’t see any reason to use the term ‘race’ which has different meanings unrelated to biology, to define biological phenomena which already have unambiguous definitions. You could redefine ‘aether’ as ‘vacuum’ and claim that some rejected physical theories are actually true, but it won’t help science much.
The point I was making, and that the Edwards & Cavalli-Sforza example shows, is that population is often simply used as a euphemism for race.
Also, I disagree with Buck Godot’s comment that race is simply a color based division. In fact, the Neil Risch article I linked above addresses that fallacy:
You may also find this NY Time op-ed piece useful.
Le sigh. All septimus is saying is the exact same thing that Maxthevool and I have been saying, yet you seem fine with septimus and are all over my and mtv’s ass.
Basically this thread boils down to you having a hang-up about the word “race.” If we use the words “genetic cluster” then you are fine with everything we say.
You are acting like the word “race” has a singke precise meaning like the words “kilogram” or “electron,” but that’s simply not the case. People can use “race” to refer to different things. One thing they could use it for is to draw circles of various sizes around genetic clusters and call everyone withing that circle a member of a race.
This would be fine, if pointless, if those same people didn’t always “happen” to *only *choose clusters that map to skin colour and call it race (or “geographic origin”, same difference). As opposed to the near-infinite other possible clustering mechanism that don’t map to skin colour. No-one goes on about the O, A and AB races, for example.
Because the word “race” has social meaning that doesn’t correspond to biology. Genetic clusters and populations are more appropriate terms because they are more precise and don’t have the baggage that race does. It’s not a hang-up, it’s about precision. Race is imprecise to the point of being wrong.
Actually, you are simnply repeating what you have done in the past–rely on the ways in which social definitions of “race” are useful in American medicine, where founder effects in immigration have set up clearer lines. Note that the authors do not suggest that we test every patient to discover the “race” to which they belong, instead they note the relative effectiveness of self-identified “race” to indicate the biological population to which an individual in the U.S. is most closely associated. This makes no legitimate argument for claims that “race” has some genuine reality that is useful in world-wide applications.
And its lack of precision and accuracy is exactly why we should be avoiding its use in discussions of biology. Claims that “race X” have certain traits in one context lead to stupid claims that “race X” is defined by some trait in a totally separate context. It is the sort of nonsense that leads to people making the absurd claim that Sickle Cell Anemia is a “black” disease when it affects large numbers of whites and is absent in a large number of black populations. Your need to cling to the misleading word “race” when it actually causes confusion seems like an odd position to hold.
But Halle Berry is also considered african american, and her father also probably has some caucasian blood in him as well. Further The ancestors of Halle and Chelsea for the last several generations come from this mix we call America so from that point of view may have more in common (such as a great deal of englsih and irish blood) than they would be a person from Russia. So this is exactly the point I’m making. We call Halle Berry black, we call Putin and Chelsea white, but ti may well be that Chelsea has more similar genetics to Berry than Putin.
I don’t think the medical community uses race to diagnose disease all that much, but I’m open to being convinced otherwise.
Well, that’s not a bad analogy. There are many “language continuums” around the world where we artificially (ie, socially) impose a boundary that doesn’t exist. One Example would be German-Dutch. It’s convenient to say that people in Germany speak German and people in the Netherlands speak Dutch, but the reality is that the language changes from one to the other in a continuum.
No, you don’t. Not in the animal kingdom when we assign subspecies status to populations that have abrupt morphological and genetic changes that correspond to geographic barriers. Populations that would interbreed easily if those boundaries didn’t exist.
