Right, I think when you said you were referring to the “latter races”, you meant the “former” in this comment? (sorry to be a pedant, but I think that’s where I might have missed your point).
No. The former “races” were an earlier application of the word that, while societal in nature, were not really part of the current popular discussion of “race.” The latter “races” are the ones in which social constructs get confused for biology and genetics based on visible, but ultimately inadequate and misleading, phenotype markers.
Yo dudes, you want political incorrectness? Those guys are pikers. I think I might have started the most politically incorrect thread anyone has ever done (which, oddly enough, was bumped from ‘The Pit’ to ‘MPSIMS’)…
They give the unwarranted impression that unrelated people are more closely related than they actually are. People infer associations that do not actually exist based on them.
Well, these things are relative. People within a racial group are more closely related to each other than to people from another group. So what?
In terms of associations races aren’t absolute categories. You might be able to see statistical variation (West African sprinters, East African long distance runners), but not imply too much about individuals.
The word “race” as used in current English in regards to claims about the three to six purported “races” is meaningless except as a social construct. It provides no meaningful information regarding genetics or biology. That was the point I made when I entered this coversation and it remains true.
“Racial groups” are nothing more than hazy lumpings of multiple populations based on sloppy groupings of phenotypes and generally include populations that cannot be legitimately included based on genetics. If you admit that races are not absolute categories, then you are better off not employing the word in contexts (such as biology) where categories need to be better defined.
Dancing around the issue by claiming that one might be able to tease some odd meaning out of it by defining it differently is silly, since one could just as easily and more accurately use the word population to identify specific groups while using the word “race” automatically suggests a meaning that is likely irrelevant. (Using population has the added advantage of compelling the speaker to be quite precise in regards to the people being discussed, while the use of the word “race” allows a lot of silly generalizations based on unexamined preconceptions, many of which are wrong. (E.g., “Sickle Cell Anemia is a black disease.”))
I can see why people do this given the history of the term, but I’m not sure that I am defining it differently - it’s simply an “identifiable population sub-group”. These populations intersect with everyday usage of ethnicity & race.
What some people seem to think is that by using a different definition then there are no biologically different groups. They think they’re basically interchangeable. That there will be a pretty much even distribution of traits. But races, or sub groups exist in exists most species of animal.
I don’t think that using a different definition of a word to identify a different phenomenon does anything but avoid confusion. Clearly, there are different biological groups in the world and I have never said otherwise. Attacking some argument that has not been advanced by some person who is not even part of our discussion looks a lot like a straw man to me.
The word “race” when applied to humanity in the overwhelming majority of discussions, today, is applied to three to six enormous populations who cannot be logically included in the same groups for any serious genetic or biological discussion. They are social constructs. Pretending that those groups reflect some sort of biological or genetic reality is just silly.
Exaxctly. It is possible to identify the geographic regions from which groups originate without actually being able to provide a discrete identification of actual biological differences.
If one wants to redifine “race” as geography, one is still left witha lack of actual biological relationships among the various purported “reaces.”
(Remember, the various groups of loci are merely statistical lumpings of junk DNA markers in which people from the same community might not share the same markers, only sharing statistical association from among other markers.)
The biological relationships are in terms of genetic distance & the clustering aren’t they? The groups that Rosenberg identifies are basically what the definition above describes race as:
Of course you can break these down further into sub-populations. For instance, the Oceania sample could then break into Samoan, Tongan, Fijian etc.
They have no distinct characteristics that span all the local populations, nor do they differ from other populations at the greater group level. They have only bits of junk DNA that happens to cluster, statistically, along geographic lines, although the same junk DNA appears, less clustered, in all populations.
Citation? My understanding is that if the clustering were only on a small minority of genes you probably would not get a resolvable separation between groups. Studies like Neil Risch & Hua Tang’s are taking a random sample from the genome at many sites, so it would be very surprising if it wasn’t indicative of what you get from the whole thing.
“Genetic Structure of Human Populations”
Noah A. Rosenberg, Jonathan K. Pritchard, James L. Weber, Howard M. Cann, Kenneth K. Kidd, Lev A. Zhivotovsky, Marcus W. Feldman
SCIENCE VOL 298 20 DECEMBER 2002
pp 2381 ff
I misremembered: only about half appeared in every large group (although 92.6% appeared in more than one group). On the other hand, only 1 in 14 were limited to specific regions and were rare even within those populations.
As to distinct characteristics specific to the multiple-population regions. There simply aren’t any. Skin color, skeletal structure, hair texture and growth patterns, facial features and other characteristics popularly employed by old ethnologists actually differ widely within groups. Beyond that, there are no common, heritable conditions such as susceptibilty to diseases, dietary restrictions, or other phenomena that do not span multi-region groups while being absent from other populations within the groups.
I am not about to spend time demonstrating a negative on this point.
Thanks. Is there variation within groups? Yes. That doesn’t mean these aren’t races. Races or “Lineages" will have clusters of traits that appear together in specific ways. It’s not absolute – the edges are fuzzy and indistinct. But for various reasons, a bunch of traits will start to appear as a group: And we can observe statistical correlations.
Here is a potential list for Inuits. A theoretical example of a “Lineage” or “Race” or “Group” – call it what you want.
Blood type ratio distributions (say, 15% A, 35% B, 30% AB, 20% O)
Hair types; hair distributions around the body
Cranial shapes
Skin/fat morphology, fat distribution
Resistance to certain problems not found among other groups (ie, related to diet: They can eat nearly 100% meat without the ill effects I’d have; they can’t eat what normal Americans do without getting very unhealthy faster than people from other groups).
Inability to metabolize alcohol (or reduced ability)
Superior resource utilization on a cellular level: you get 5% more out of the food you eat
So what? Inuits are pretty clearly a biological population. No one in serious discussions of biology or genetics refers to them as a “race.” There might be cultural references to them using the term “race,” (although I have not encountered one), but with no use by biologists, geneticists, or even anthropologists, it is not really germane to this discussion.
There are, as you have quoted, multiple definitions of the word “race.” As it was used in this thread prior to Damuri Ajashi wondering about the phrase “race is simply a social construct” and as it is used between 95-99% of the time on this message board, it referred to whites, blacks, East Asians, and possibly some other enormous groups of people (e.g., indigenous peoples of the Americas or Oceania), for whom it was previously believed to indicate a genetic relationship nearly on the level of subspecies. Since that distinct relationship has been shown to not exist for those large groups, the word really is “just a social construct” in that context.
It can be used to refer to the Irish, German, French, Japanese, Jewish, or other “races,” but that is pretty much an anachronism in current English.
It could, I suppose, be used to refer to peoples such as the Inuit, but that would be confusing to an audience that was not aware that it was being employed in such a limited fashion–and biologists use the less confusing term “population,” already, which makes more sense by virtue of its better precision.
Trying to find ways to continue to use “race” to talk about the purported three to six larger groups makes no sense, given that there are no legitimate biological reasons to bundle them together, and using the word to talk about smaller populations frequently looks like nothing more than sleight of hand to keep the word in play while practicing a bit of duplicitous equivocation, pretending that there really is some imagined relationship among the smaller populations within the very large groups.
What do you mean there are no legitimate biological reasons? Again here are the biological definitions. The groups identified by Rosenberg are biological races, or you can call them breeding groups, populations. It only makes no sense if you insist on an absolute categories with discrete boundaries, rather than acknowledging they’re fuzzy biological categories.