No, they don’t.
Could you elaborate on this? According to O’Brien and Mayr’s (1991) criteria for human races to be subspecies, the members:
1] share a unique geographical range or habitat
2] share a group of phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters
3] share a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species.
2 is ambiguous, but individuals can be correctly assigned to racial groups with a high degree of accuracy, it’s evident that members of races do share common distinguishable phenotypic patterns in the sense of frequency. Some of these traits are more or less uniquely characteristic (EDAR codes for thick hair in most East Asians ; SLC24A5 codes for skin color in most Caucasians.
:rolleyes:
So, tell us what the races are, where are the boundaries, and who is in and who is out. Show me that people close to, but on opposite sides of your borders are more distantly related to each other than they are to people at the other end of theor borders.
Well, first of all it’s not really my analogy… but I think that at least a reasonable way to view it is that most inhabitants of that universe are only vaguely aware, if at all, that peas-and-gekkos are composed of two distinct groups, and that many peas-and-gekkos themselves are unaware of which they are. Compare that to different populations that make up “black” in the real world. I think most educated people know that “black” isn’t just one monolithic genetic group, but don’t know enough to accurately start assigning individual black people to subgroups… and many black people themselves probably couldn’t begin to tell you their own genetic makeup.
But really we’re straining the limits of the hypothetical here…
It depends if you’re a “lumper” or a “splitter”. From the article above you could use the major clades Nei & Roychoudhury (1993) identified sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Greater Asians, Australopapuans and Amerindians. Or from the Risch article, Native Americans, Caucasions, Pacific Islanders, East Asians and Africans. Those are the major geographic or continental populations. Using Cavalli-Sforza’s analysis you could further deliniate Arctic Peoples (inuit) & South East Asians.
Ok, do you have any biological populations to list?
Those are biological populations.
A “race” is simply a circle around a genetic cluster. One can draw that circle as big or as small as they want to. And they can make it have rough edges (i.e., so the circle juts out to include some people and pops back in to exclude some people). Put those two concepts together and you can basically choose how you want to define “race.”
There’s nothing wrong with doing the above as long as you explain what you’re doing and why you did it.
Now, while we’re critiquing each other’s use of language, your use of the term “scientific” is odd (and, as it turns out, also comes up in threads about race, usually as “there’s no scientific definition of race”). Science is simply a process of making guesses, testing the guesses in a repeatable and rigorous manner, and rejecting guesses that prove not to fit the facts.
So, I could construct a “race” by drawing a circle of some size with certain deviations around as many genetic clusters as I liked. And I could make guesses about the biological aspects of people within a cluster and how they compare to that same biological aspect of people outside a cluster. And all of that could be done in a perfectly “scientific” manner.
I’m feeling charitable so I’ll ignore the rest of your post.
Which is precisely why “black” isn’t a race. The only reason it makes sense is because someone doesn’t know the biology. Once you take a look at the genetics the idea of a “black” race falls apart. That is precisely why race is a social construct, not a biological one.
Two people who self-identify as African-American may not be very closely related - and thus the idea of race doesn’t make sense. It only makes sense if you either don’t know or ignore the science. We’re better than that.
Except that clearly “black” is a race, in common parlance. People who hate black people are “racists”. If “black” isn’t a “race” then the word has no meaning at all.
That’s really somewhat orthogonal to what I’m saying. You’re saying (I believe) “the social constructs of race lump groups together in a way that has no biological justification”. I’m saying “take the social constructs of race as a given, and discuss whether they have any possibility scientific meaning/validity/utility”, to which I say “certainly not very much, but it would be an overreach to say that the amount is zero”. I see no reason why both those positions can’t be true (although I would qualify your statement by saying that the lump groups together in a way which SOMETIMES/OFTEN has no biological justification).
Well, those social constructs or self identified labels do tend to correspond to genetic clusters.
So, you are putting together people in Africa who are more distantly related than Europeans and Asians are. That makes sense. And you’re putting together Hawai’ians and Australians. That makes a lot of sense, too.
But just out of curiosity, where is the dividing line between Caucasians and Asians? What’s the border? I want to see that people near the border on either side are really more distantly related to each other then the guy on the “Caucasian” side is to someone in Ireland.
We are talking about the real world, here, not hypothetical college discussion groups. When someone uses “race” to identify a socially defined group in a medical context, there is an absolute certainty that someone else will come along and decide that there is some biological “truth” being claimed that is not supported by the science. Eliminating the word that is always confusing, always needs separate clarification, and is always ultimately misleading makes more sense than trying to put 300 word footnotes at the end of every newpaper and magazine article and scientific paper identifying the specific odd meaning that one is trying to impose on the word in that particular article.
Yet, you have danced around the fact that the word is misleading in every discussion and now you are making ludicrous claims that anyone using the word is being identified as an “evil evil person.” Seems pretty much like clinging to me.
People with black skin all share at least the gene(s) controlling skin color, right?
There are more up to date graphs & data than this, but this figure from Cavalli-Sforza gives a rough idea of genetic distance across various groups.
Not necessarily the same set of genes. For example, in the Tays-Sachs example the mutation has come around at least 3 different times in three different populations.
And light skin is the mutation, not dark skin. All populations trace their skin coloration back to dark skin.
And you’ve just made my case for me. These are all social constructs, not biological. And that’s why biologists don’t use the terms. We use lots of terms in common parlance that are not scientific.
Excellent, then we’re finally in agreement. 
And your posts in these types of threads seems to me like equal parts “oooh, I learned me some Science! and I wanna tell everybody!” and “I’ve got so many hang-ups about race that I’m going to deny that there’s any way to put humans into different groups on a biological basis for any purpose whatsoever.”
Exactly.
If the word “race” has no meaning without a “black race,” then, yes, from a biological point of view, you’ve hit the mark, the word “race” has no meaning.
There is no scientific/biological/genetic basis on which to define the black race in any way that allows for the delineation of non-black races in any rational manner. The “black race” as commonly understood encompasses a huge amount of the genetic variation that exists in humans overall. If “black” is a biological race, then it’s pretty much the only race, because all the non-black races are more closely genetically related to some segment of the black race than segments of the black race are to each other.
That’s why the concept of a “black race” is entirely social and why the concept of “race” is entirely social, not biological.
Whatever your views might be–aside from clearly wrong–you are now mischaracterizing what I have said. That would indicate that you are here simply to yank chains and not to participate in the discussion.