Initially, it is worth pointing out that what you have said is incorrect. For example, a large percentage, perhaps a majority, of the human population that bears an XX gene is not capable of bearing children by any reasonable definition of the word “capable.”
Now, you’re probably thinking that fatherjohn is nitpicking, and your explanation could be cleared up without too much trouble. Well, don’t be too sure.
If I pushed you to draw a very clear line between the sexes, some parts of that line would be arbitrary.
In any event, I have a bigger problem with your (apparent) requirement that specific genes (chromosomes?) must be pointed to to legitimize biological distinctions.
This point can be illustrated with a couple questions. (And I would appreciate answers.)
Question One
Was there “evidence for sex” before January 1, 1891?
If yes, what was it?
If no, go to question 2.
Question Two
If you had been around in 1885, and somebody did a study claiming to show that men were more likely to be colorblind than women, would you have responded that “there is no such thing as sex”?
**
It is dishonest to judge racial distinctions by different (more difficult) criteria than other distinctions if you don’t disclose that you are doing it because you think racial distinctions are hurtful and/or offensive. Don’t think you’re applying a double-standard? Please answer the next question.
Question Three
Are state lines “imaginary” in the same way that you meant “imaginary” with respect to race? Is state citizenship “real”? If somebody did a scientific study and concluded that residents of Georgia drink significantly more Coca-Cola than residents of North Carolina, would you claim in response that “states don’t exist”?
**
These are good questions, and fatherjohn has good answers. I’ll answer them in a later post – count on it.
In the mean time, why not take a crack at the three little brainteasers in this post . . .
Duh, yeah there was evidence of sex. Man and Woman, Doe and Buck, Cow and Bull, Hen and Rooster, etc, etc, look different. Put the two together and they make a baby. Even if no one explicitly stated: “woman have larger/fewer gametes and men have smaller/more copious gametes”, it was pretty obvious except for maybe a few exceptions - like lesbian lizards and male seahorses that carry eggs around in a pouch - that females are the sex that produce children from their body as the result of something a male does to her. Male-female interaction is recognized in almost every culture as the precursor to pregnancy and/or childbirth. Is having kids biological? Yes. Are there underlying biological differences between dudes and chicks? Yes. Do these differences also sometimes result in behavioral differences? Yes. Is there a genetic difference? Yes. XX versus XY, or maybe ZW versus ZZ(or it it WW?) for birds. Is XX unique to females? Yes. Is XY unique to males? Yes.
Now consider race. Is there a gene or set of genes exclusive to… I dunno, “blacks”? Do all blacks and only black have the alleles QWERTY, that codes for a set of reactions that make them black? No, not really. What is “black” anyway? Is it skin color? It is nose size? Is it height? Is it nappy hair? It is guys with extralong weenies? Not necessarily, for all of the above. I know a brown guy straight from the motherland who doesn’t consider himsef to be black-to him that term is reserved for Americans. Conversely, I know pigment-challenged folks from the Caribbean who most definitely consider themselves black. Oh wait! Those are arbitrary cultural distinctions! What was I thinking!
skip
State lines “imaginary”? Do they exist outside our creation? Do they have a biological reality? No. An angry bear will not stop chasing you because you cross the state line. Maybe the cops will, but not the bear. Mountains will not cease their movement just because some human decided to draw a line in the sand. Just because Kleinfelters’s is prevalent among Jewish people doesn’t mean some llama jockey from Uraguay doesn’t have that nasty genetic abberation sitting in his gonads. Just because sickle-cell trait is prevalent among African-Americans doesn’t mean the wife of a strawberry farmer in Northern Japan won’t have a child with odd-shaped blood cells. If all and only African-Americans had sickle-cell trait, maybe you could say, “Yeah, that’s a separate race”.
If someone did a scietific study concluding any significant difference between the two states, it would have to be because of some environmental difference. There’s a river that flows from Georgia to North Carolina. In North Carolina the river starts out okay, but as it moves on, it picks up a certain chemical that stimulates the “Bad Taste in Colas” (BTiC) hormone and by the time it hits Georgia, all the people have the insane urge to drink Coke (sorry, I’m a Pepsi fan). Or maybe Coke just does more/better marketing in Georgia. Neither condition is a function of “statehood” even if the change in the river chemistry happens to take place at the state line. Remove the state designation, and people who live in that grassy patch drink more Coke than people further down on the grassy patch. Uh, is that what you were looking for?
I have been scanning the arguments. Time to open my fat trap.
I will try to respond to some of Squink’s comments here. I have a relatively extensive human and molecular genetics background and I see no scientific problem with tomndebb or Collounsbury’s line of reasoning.
First a few nitpicks :
A) Protein coding sequence (open reading frames) will probably be much less interesting than stated in the long run when we are talking about non-disease states. For disease, I agree that coding polymorphisms are the root of most evil. For things like facial features, height, and even skin color, we are probably looking at other things like promoters and enhancers, or splice donor/acceptor sites.
B) The genome data to date represents a very small sample size. Current projects to classify polymorphisms from many population bases are ongoing. Sorting through these will take a long, long time, because for every 1 useful one there are probably 100s if not 1000s of silent ones. We don’t even understand everything that can differentiate the two, and since we don’t do experiments on humans, it is quite difficult to test.
OK. To address the main point.
For fundamental reasons of genetics, “race” in the traditional sense does not exist. No magic black SNP, RFLP, SSTR, or anything else will be found that identifies race (outside of the particular genes linked to an exterior phenotype, for instance skin color).
Squink: Before we can debate a term, we must agree on a definition. Could you scientifically define race for me so I can be sure we are indeed talking about the same thing?
I will refer to race in what IMHO is the traditional sense. By this I mean that “race” refers to a broad group of people from diverse populations who all share a few exterior phenotypes (skin, facial structure, etc.) If we were to try and define this genetically, what we would eventually pick up is the large set of genes responsible for these few phenotypes. We have now a circular definition: A race is defined as having a certain set of alleles. That set of alleles is determined by the phenotypes by which we define race. That being said, I will take our circular definition and show how it has no useful role in biology at all.
I will oversimplify matters a great deal in the following paragraphs to demonstrate a point. Bear with me people.
These set of alleles arose because they impart a selective advantage to those (let’s say from isolated population A) that carry them. An individual carrying the advantageous alleles breeds with another totally different population (population B), which happens to be isolated.
The progeny carrying the advantageous alleles were selected for (lets say that they carried a dark skin gene in a UV-intense area). The progeny go on to live amongst population B and interbreed. After a few generations, what we find is population B with no alleles from individual A except the advantageous alleles.
This is exactly the same technique we use to create a congenic mouse. Let’s say we knock a gene out in an inbred mouse background like BL6. We want to move the mutation into the inbred background C57. We take the BL6 -/- mouse and breed it to C57 mice. We select its progeny with the mutated gene. We mate the progeny to C57 again, and select. In 10 generations or so, the mouse is 98% C57 but carries the mutated gene from BL6.
So what we have (in both examples) is a population carrying a selected allele (or alleles) in two totally heterogenous backgrounds. We have defined race as the carriage of these alleles. The populations are totally distinct, except for the selected alleles. We have defined race as the carriage of those alleles (for instance dark skin). I have just shown you how a little bit of interbreeding can cause two genetically distinct populations to carry exactly those same alleles. The traditional definition of race forces us to group two totally heterogenous populations under one umbrella, and therefore is mostly useless scientifically.
This does not even address the issue of society or politics. This is a whole other issue. If we define people who are 1/8 or 1/16 black as African American, then truly the divisions are hopelessly blurred. Add to this the fact that one could bubble in more than one kind of race on the 2000 Census, which was an option many chose. The concept of race is dead, and society, like usual, just needs to catch up with science.
Absolutely. State lines are artificially constructed by humans who have to go out of their way to define a state, define what a boundary is and implies, establish the rules to create a boundary, then go out with survey equipment to determine where those imaginary lines will lie.
In exactly the same way, humans have picked arbitrary collections of physical features and colors and assigned them to categories they called races. Of course, they have done this with the utmost inconsistency, placing dark-skinned Tamils into the same “race” as pale Scandinavians.
Race is a cultural construct and I have never denied that such constructs have been used. As the parallel discussion shows, however, using those physical features to identify races fails, because race has always meant (sometimes implicitly, more often explicitly) related peoples and we have numerous example of people who share appearances who are not as closely related as other people who do not share those same appearances.
So why do you wish to pretend that race has a scientific reality when it is clearly a cultural creation?
This is just silly.
What is dishonest is to claim that race is being abandoned as a scientific category for political reasons when there are actually ample scientific reasons to abandon the concept of race and there is no evidence that politics has entered into the scientific discussion. In fact, it is demonstrable that the only time that political influence can be shown is when people ignore the science to insist that non-existent races are somehow “real.”
Had you read the citations, you would have discovered that the scientists who have abandoned race have done so based solely on the evidence.
If I showed you photos of Andaman Islanders and inhabitants of the Congo valley, you could not tell me which group came from which location. Since race demands that the members of each group be related and the Andaman Islanders are more closely related to Mao Ze Dong than they are to Mobutu Sese Seko, the use of the term race to link these two groups, based on their appearance, is simply wrong.
And the word race does demand that the members of each race be related. Throughout its attempted use in science, beginning in the late eighteenth century, it has always referred to related peoples. So we start off claiming that we will identify related peoples as a race; we then categorize them by how they look; we then discover that the appearances are deceiving, so that the initial categorization was false. There is no deception in recognizing that appearances fail to demonstrate relationship. (Or to note that we have inconsistently applied even the “appearance” test when we wished to change the racial “boundaries” for political reasons.)
Claims of dishonesty are much more justifiably dropped at the feet of people who claim that races have a reality outside culture.
Note also, and I am sure that this point has been made already, no one claims that there are no biologically identifiable populations. The point is that to identify related populations, one has to continue to pare away at each group, eliminating “foreign” traits/markers/characteristics/whatever until each population is too small to be considered a “race” unless we redefine the word. Since the word race conjures up the image of hundreds of millions of related individuals, carrying some “racial” association, it is not legitimate to use that word, since it will falsely convey an impression of each valid population.
First, Fatherjohn, stop referring to yourself in the third person, it makes it hard not to mock you.
Irrelevant, being sterile does not change gender. (Of course there are some ambigious cases which depend on genetic errors, we can exclude this as a problem as they themselves are clearly definable.).
Given time restrictions, I’ll skip over the not very interesting quesitons.
I am unable to understand where the concept of the distinctions being more difficult or different come from.
Let me clearly frame the observation in the proper terms:
The observation is that the classic races (i.e. White, Black, Yellow, Red or what have you) are unsupported by the evidence to date, which notwithstanding Squink’s objections, have achieved a high degree of confidence among those versed in the art in re adequately describing human variation for the purpose of the conclusion.
How to effectively describe human populations and how they are structured remains unclear, with contradictory evidence available. However, by any genetic standard currently used to define species and populations, the human races fail. No “double standard” or any such nonesense. If you bothered to read the links you would find copious evidence of the same, with citations to the proper literature.
Now, please stop asking irrelevant questions based on poorly concieved analogies. It wastes everyone’s time. Squink at least has interesting objections(*), although I feel they fail.
(*: a note: in re the objection per Squink of selection, we have the logical problem of strong contrary evidence in re selection not operating coherently across our “racial groups” --where we are defining these are the classic big four, five or what not.)
**
These are good questions, and fatherjohn has good answers. I’ll answer them in a later post – count on it.
In the mean time, why not take a crack at the three little brainteasers in this post . . .
Clearly, if this were 1891, you would have to say that “there are no genetically identifiable sexes.” (This is because X and Y chromosomes had not yet been discovered.)
Earlier, you said that “races don’t exist” was “shorthand” for “there are no genetically identifiable races.”
Thus, applying your logic to a person who is around in 1885, and who can only speculate about a genetic basis for sex, you would have to make the absurd statement that “sex doesn’t exist.”
Now, there was some talk about penises and vaginas. Can we all agree that in some situations, it is perfectly appropriate to classify people purely on the basis of “phenotype,” even if we can only speculate about underlying genetic bases?
Sex is a clear fixed difference. It is not of the same category as race. Apples and oranges. However, since one would not be making statements about genetic differences before the idea had been developed, your analogy is silly and useless.
I don’t see your point in continuing with bad analogies which fundamentally misunderstand the issue in front of you. Since you have the actual information accessible, you would be well-advised to fit your argument to them.
Collounsbury, I’ve been reading this thread avidly and I’ve noticed that 3 posts ago, you mistakenly attibuted a fatherjohn quote to tomndeb. Maybe you can ask a mod to correct it. It sure confused me to see such a meaningless statement coming from tomndeb
fatherjohn, you have bandied the word “dishonest” around since the very first post. We now have an example of dishonesty to examine:
You did not ask for genetic evidence for sex; you asked for evidence for sex.
The presence or absence of penis and vagina which have clearly differentiated roles in reproduction is, obviously, evidence for sex.
Moving over to the idea of race, however, we cannot extend your analogy. Skin color does not denote race (not even in the old, “classical” sense of race), because we find people with similar skin color in different “racial” groups and people with different skin color in the same “racial” groups. Epicanthic folds above the eyes suffer the same objection, occurring both inside and outside groups who were allegedly categorized by that feature. Hair texture appears as wiry, smooth, kinky, or limp in every group that has been labelled a “race.” The same problem occurs for every physical feature that we would choose to apply to racial categories.
There are no groups of women bearing penises; there are no groups of men bearing vaginas. We do not, therefore, have to fall back on genetics, because the difference is clear. Unlike skin color, hair texture, or the contours of facial skin, which do not occur consistently in “races,” the reproductive organs map very cleanly onto the concept of sex.
Therefore, when we go forth to define race based on scientific evidence, we look for characteristics that are common to all members of a “race.” Since the colors and shapes of body parts fail, we attempt to go to underlying features–genetics. The evidence gathered throughout the 1990s has demonstrated that there are no observable genetic differences, as well.
The point of showing that genetics has failed to define race is that we already know that the colors and shapes of physical features are inadequate to define race.
What are we left with? No shape or color or gene or combination of the above can accurately describe any human as belonging to one race because we can find other humans that we would classify as different races with the same features. Therefore, the scientific category of race fails for lack of evidence.
This, by the way,
is an unsubstantiated assertion. Do you have any evidence that the scientists who have examined “race” and failed to find it are, in fact, motivated by anything other than describing the evidence they have found?
The opposite is clearly true: every “scientist” (most of whom were either not scientists or were working outside their discipline), from Shockley to Herrnstein and Murray clearly had political goals for their assertions.
What we find, therefore, is that the dishonesty appears not in denying race (for which there is no evidence) but in asserting race by twisting and inventing evidence.
Of course I did not ask for genetic “evidence for sex.” I purposefully chose January 1, 1891 because no “genetic evidence for sex” existed before that date.
My point was this:
The lack of a genetic basis, alone, is an insufficient reason to reject a distinction.
Put another way, as I said before, “in some situations, it is perfectly appropriate to classify people purely on the basis of ‘phenotype,’ even if we can only speculate about underlying genetic bases”
Since exeryone seems to have conceded this point, I’ll move on.
To recap, we now agree(?) that the lack of genetic identifiability is an insufficient basis to reject a distinction. Further, the fact that a distinction is somewhat arbitrary is an insufficient reason to reject it.
Next, I’ll put these ideas together. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that I’ve chosen an example from biology.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the “herring gull.” For those readers who are not familiar, I’ll provide a snippet of text written by the great Richard Dawkins about the phenomena of “ring species”
"The best-known case is the herring gull versus lesser black-backed gull. In Britain these are clearly distinct species, quite different in colour. Anybody can tell them apart.But if you follow the population of herring gulls westward round the North Pole to North America, then via Alaska across Siberia and back to Europe again, you will notice a curious fact. The 'herring gulls’gradually become less and less like herring gulls and more and more like lesser black-backed gulls until it turns out that our European lesser black-backed gulls actually are the other end of a ring that started out as herring gulls. At every stage around the ring, the birds are sufficiently similar to their neighbors to interbreed with them. Until, that is, the ends of the continuum are reached, in Europe. At this point the herring gull and the lesser black-backed gull never interbreed, although they are linked by a continuous series of interbreeding colleagues all the way round the world. The only thing that is special about ring species like these gulls is that the intermediates are still alive."
Ok. Suppose I were to divide the birds referred to in the above passage into two categories - A and B. Category “A” includes all herring gulls, going westward. Category “B” includes all lesser black-backed gulls going eastward. The dividing line is an arbitrary meridian drawn through Alaska.
Now please note the following:
(1) The distinction between “A” Gulls and “B” Gulls is totally arbitrary. It is literally an arbitrary line;
(2) It is highly unlikely that there is any clear genetic distinction between “A” Gulls and “B” gulls, since the line between them was chosen arbitrarily; and
(3) It seems very likely that in many cases, an “A” Gull and a “B” Gull will be genetically closer than two “A” Gulls. (Think about it - if an “A” and a “B” live close to the dividing line, there is a good chance that they are very close genetically. By contrast, there exist pairs of “A” Gulls that live far apart.)
Now, suppose somebody claimed to have done a study showing that “B” Gulls can fly faster than “A” Gulls.
Would anyone seriously reject this study for the simple reason that “Gull categories don’t exist”?
P.S. One poster questioned how fatherjohn could know that certain people reject racial clasifications because they are hurtful/offensive. Admittedly, it is difficult to “get inside people’s heads,” but based upon comments made by many of those same people, I think it’s pretty clear.
For example, one poster in this debate has stated the following:
True. But since there are no other distinctions of morphology that can be used to delimit a race–since most morphologies appear in all races and no “race” has any exclusive morphology, (as has been pointed out in multiple threads, including this one)–then the only area left to examine when seeking races is in the context of genetics, where we find that such distinctions fail, as well.
Sex does have a clearly defined morphology. fatherjohn has still produced no evidence that any “race” has such characteristics.
fatherjohn has, not surprisingly, confused cause/effect with correlation. I have never argued that we reject race because it is hurtful. I have noted that we have no valid definition of race and further (but separately) noted that those who choose to define races have done so in a way that is hurtful. If there was any evidence for a physical/biological race, I would accept it. I accepted the notion of race for well over thirty years until I discovered that biologists had been forced to reject the idea for lack of evidence. My positions on human relations and (cultural) racism have not changed in forty years, but my awareness that those cultural distinctions have no physical reality has only occurred in the last four years or so–with my acquaintance with actual evidence. (Got any?)
fatherjohn has repeatedly avoided responding to any question seeking to discover whether he can, himself, identify any “races” that have biological coherence and has steadfastly shrunk from addressing the distinction between using cultural perceptions to label some groups as races and having actual scientific evidence that such “races” physically or biologically exist.
The gull story is interesting on many levels, but I note that the point of the distinction in Europe is their complete lack of interbreeding. There are no groups of humans who will not interbreed. (And no groups of humans can be identified as distinctly as the two problematic “species” of gulls.)
Ah, ring species. The local paper’s science section just had an article on this very topic, using as example a type of finch from Siberia and Central Asia, and my favorite example ( cited in two other threads, and now a third ), the salamander Ensatina eschscholtzii. It’s a fascinating phenomena. The problem is - human’s aren’t a ring species .
Oh I realize you didn’t make that claim - Your inference instead seems to be that all genetic divisions within a given species are arbitrary and therefore can’t be used to rebut the claim that there are multiple races. Well, yes and no. Yes subspecies ( and it’s virtual synonym - “race” ) are often delineated in a fairly arbitrary manner, usually based on morphology. It’s a convenience term used as a mental placemark to help keep straight different variable morphs of a given species. It has some ( limited ) utility for studying gene-flow and the process of speciation in organisms that exhibit “ring patterns” and the like. Some modern systematic biologists however are loath to use it because it generally doesn’t convey useful historical information in of itself ( something a species designation does, by definition - At least some definitions - See the thread in GQ about Human and Chimp mating ).
The thing is, though, is that humans are unlike other animals ( a point I just made in that other thread ). Their adaptiveness, global distribution, high vagility, and tendency to mate with anything that moves has led to a tremendous jumble of genotypic vs. phenotypic expression. Most other animals don’t exhibit this. If you look at your Herring and Black-billed Gulls I’d bet dollars to dimes that their geotypic differences maps out pretty closely to their phenotypic expression. So the exact halfway intermediate morph-wise is probably about halfway between the two genetically as well. Their definition as separate species ( as with all ring species phenomena ) is problematic, depending on what definition of species you want to use ( and that is an argument that’s far from settled ).
But humans phenotypes don’t map out linearly with genotype - Instead they’re all over the map, a relic of our tremndous adaptive expansion. Hencetomndeb’s example of Andaman Islanders vs. the inhabitants of the Congo Basin. Similar phenotype, unrelated genotype ( relatively speaking, of course ). So I’ll ask this question - What useful biological information is conveyed by placing them both in the same category ( race )?
I can only think of only one thing - You can safely assume that they were subjected to roughly similar environmental pressures. That’s it. Is that a sufficient reason to place them in the same very large, very broad category? Not IMNHO. Because that categorization obscures more information than it provides. The categorization of humans into a handful of large guilds based on morphology just isn’t very explanatory ( we’ll ignore the cultural/social aspects for a minute - No one is arguing those at the moment ).
You CAN ( and this has been pointed out time and time again ) place people into populations and study them as such. Andaman Islanders vs. Trobriand Islanders for example. That’s a much narrower categorization and one from which you can ( conceivably ) extract useful information. Literally hundreds or thousands of populations of vrying size and type can be teased out and studied in isolate this way. But large-scale race categories? No - They just aren’t utilitarian.
Tamerlane
p.s. - Information that could conceivably be derived from studies of the “classical” races - One could attempt to discover whether adaptation to a tropical climate vs. a nordic one has any broad spectra impact on physical or mental performance in a modern setting. This has been repeatedly attempted - All results have been negative or inconclusive. At this point I considered that a settled issue. There is literally nothing further from a biological standpoint to consider within these parameters.
Of course you are absolutely right - I have not yet made the “positive” case. i.e. I have not yet said what I think are the proper criteria for assessing a classification. And I have made no attempt yet to defend racial classifications.
Trust me, we are wonderfully close to that point.
So far, this debate has progressed as follows:
fatherjohn infers (guesses?) the criteria for why his opponents reject racial distinctions;
fatherjohn cooks up an example for a distinction that satisfies the criteria and yet would be a reasonable classification to use in science;
fatherjohn’s opponents distinguish the example, adding yet another criteria for evaluation distinctions and rejecting racial classifications.
So now, the criteria for rejecting a distinction, according to my opponents, seems to be the following:
if (1) the categories are not genetically identifiable; and (2) the categories are (somewhat?) arbitrary; and (3) there are pairs of individuals within groups that are “further apart” than individuals between groups; and (4) all groups within the classification can interbreed, then
we reject it.
Now, before fatherjohn comes up with an example that satisfies (1), (2), (3), and (4), I would like to ask the following question (and I really would appreciate an answer):
Are there any other criteria you would like to add to the above? In short, please tell me exactly why you reject racial distinctions.
Asked and answered, the categories are not useful in re biology. Feel free for any other uses. Added observation: The OP’s bizzare habit of refering to himself in the third person is becoming truly irritating, as is his habit of coming up with poorly concieved analogies.
a very large group of persons who can be identified by physical characteristics
who are more closely related than other groups.
You do not need any other criteria. (Interbreeding is not an added restriction, and to suggest so is to interject more disingenuous red herrings. The issue of the gulls is that they make up a ring species that is already problematic for biologists, but at the closure of the ring, they are totally distinct and do not interbreed. There is no large group of humans about which either of these statements can be made, so the comparison or analogy fails.)
The arguments against race are as simple as the definition:
we can identify smaller groups of peoples (labeled populations) by physical characteristics, but no population is large enough to meet the classical definition of “race”
several populations of people, if matched by physical characteristics, turn out to be less closely related than other groups of people who have dissimilar characteristics.
To expand on those themes:
A word exists in the English language that has specific meanings. The word was initially used to indicate a clan or gens or patrilinear (or, more rarely, matrilinear) descent from a particular person.
When European scientists initially began observing the world and its people, late in the eighteenth century, they grabbed that existing word to classify very large groups of people, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had arbitrarily divided the world into three great “races.” An unintended consequence of this, proceeding from the human proclivity to assign hierarchies or rankings to categories, was the tendency to make claims that each race was “higher” or “lower” or more or less “developed” than other races. This use of the word was accepted for political reasons by non-scientists to make laws or re-inforce attitudes, politically.
As scientists gathered more information about the humans scattered around the world, they discovered that their three great categories were inadequate to accurately label the people they examined. Different scientists then began parsing out the “big three” into smaller components, ranging from five to 200, with the most popular numbers being 5 and 60. Now, if they cannot come closer in agreement than that, we are obviously looking at categories that have been assigned with a certain arbitrary selection.
From the perspective of culture, different arguments can be put forward for each of the classifications. Culturally one might say that there are, indeed, “races” depending on what you did with the information.
We have already seen (at least, those of us who choose to look at the real information), that no set of characteristics of appearance can be mapped onto any large population. We have unrelated populations who are physically indistinguishable from each other and related populations that are radically dissimilar in appearance.
Beginning in the 1980s (some in the 1970s), with most of their work published throughout the 1990s, a number of researchers have examined the genetic structure of people and discovered that there are also no sets of characteristics that can be mapped onto any large (remember the definition of race?) populations.
Biologically, the racial classifications are useless and not supported. There is no use to which these classifications can be put. (Disease by race? It doesn’t happen.)
(We could, in theory, apply the word “race” to those smaller populations that we can identify, genetically. However, there is a significant problem with doing this. The word race has established itself in the language as meaning large populations. The overwhelming number of English speakers use the word to identify either the original “big three” or the later “five” races. To use the word race in the context of any smaller populations would require wrenching the word out of its meaning, simply to be able to continue to use the word–and for what purpose? It is more informative to get people to recognize that the concepts behind the “three” or the “five” races are in error than it is to go around trying to explain that we want to assign a new meaning to the word.)
An additional (not causative) argument against the use of the word race is that it has been used improperly by Shockley, Jenson, Herrnstein, and Murray and others. Claiming an unsupportable coherence for the concept of race, these people have drawn and published conclusions for the purposes of effecting political change. Since their conclusions began with a false premise, it would be helpful in avoiding these sorts of political games by recognizing that the word as they used it has no meaning. And since the way that they used it conforms to the basic (and invalid) concept of the “five races,” it is perfectly legitimate to note that the “races” they claim to have examined do not exist. fatherjohn channels Phaedrus:
and
fatherjohn has done no such thing. If your ring species citation had any bearing on the discussion of human races, you did not provide any logical connection.
Umm, I was referring to criteria for assessing distinctions, not criteria for assessing group membership.
And yes, I agree that “interbreeding” is a red herring. I note that tomndebb not fatherjohn raised that issue. By listing interbreeding as a criterion, fatherjohn was merely attempting to summarize tomndebb’s position.
In any event, I think the time has finally come to reveal what fatherjohn believes to be the only reasonable criterion for assessing a distinction. That criterion has been mentioned several times now, and it appears that the first person to mention it is growing impatient.
And that criterion is of course “usefulness.”
Note that this applies to any distinction, be it scientific, philisophical, cultural, or what have you.
(And fatherjohn will attempt to define “usefulness” in the context of science shortly.)
But first, can we all agree that even if racial distinctions are arbitrary, even if races are not genetically identifiable, and even if there exist members of one race that are more different than a pair of individuals from different races:
**If racial distinctions are nonetheless “useful” for science, we keep them, otherwise we chuck 'em. **
- See the thread in GQ about Human and Chimp mating ).