Okay, I’ve seen it stated several times (various places) that race is not a real distinction. I’m confused by this. Are there not physical traits that are distinct, inheritable, and indentifying of specific populations? So how is this not race? How else would you qualify these distinctions?
Well obviously not all humans are the same, people from different parts of the world are whiter, darker, shorter, taller, have bigger noses, smaller feet, etc etc…
I assume you’re talking about color, and obviously not every human is te same color; there are many shades ranging from pinkish white and dark brown. However I don’t know if you could call each or some group a race.
And even if it would be correct; as I recall from a politics book, the term became pejorative and it is more politicly correct to call it “ethnies”.
Here’s a definition I found on an online dictionary
http://www.yourdictionary.com/cgi-bin/mw.cgi
I hope this helps…
Anthropologists say that their investigations show them that there are no physical trails that are exclusive to a particular group. Physical characteristics, whether overt or hidden, such as blood type variations, are not useful for separating humans into categories.
Make that “physical traits.” And I previewed too. Go figure.
Further to what’s been said, racial differences appear to be large when you are comparing certain populations, but there is no absolute way given an individual to distinguish which race they belong to. If you consider the difference of appearances between caucasians, from Scandinavia to the Middle East you will see as many differences as similarities, and nothing that clearly divides them from other conventional racial groups.
In particular when it comes to genetics, there is no gene that determines race (such that having it gives you e.g. dark skin, curly black hair, a broad nose and a lack of swimming ability). Any division of race based on genetics would have to be arbitrary at the boundaries. And scientists have found that genetic differences among populations are far greater than those between populations of what conventional wisdom would consider different racial groups.
The problem isn’t so much that there aren’t human populations that share traits, it is that they do not have the kind of genetic exclusiveness that constitutes a race. Take skin color, for example. Although (east) Indians can have skin as dark as any black African (not that there aren’t plenty of Africans whose skin is not dark), it is clear that they are more closely related to so-called whites than to any Africans. There are many Europeans with tightly curled hair, with broad noses, thick lips, and many black Africans that lack some or all of those features. There are no known genetic markers that distinguish Africans from others. At best, there are statistical differences in distribution of certain traits and this is just not enough to constitute a race (or subspecies) in the biological sense. Contrast different breeds of dogs, where the differences are clear and easy to define. Those are true races, but this applies only to purebreeds, which, BTW, are generally the least healthy, although is apparently the result of breeding for shape only and ignoring other things, while protecting them from selective pressures.
More politically-correct nonsense. Tell us then, why do black couples predictably have babies with dark skin, kinky hair, black eyes and broad noses, while chidren of white couples have pale skin, straight hair, narrow noses and light-colored eyes?
Proponents of this new tend in denying the existence of race never have a logical answer for the following question: If there is no such thing a
A better statement is that race is not a biological term; it is a social term.
It is silly to say there is no such thing as “race” – clearly, as a society we perceive that these distinctions exist. However, the distinctions we place on people are cultural disinctions, not a scientific description. As in the example above, if a darker skinned person and a lighter skinned person have children, the children are usually a mix, or “cafe au lait” complexion. Further mixing of skin colors yeilds further variations, because “race” is not a dominant/recessive trait. You probably can’t define in any way that makes sense from a biological basis (for an interesting treatise on those who have tried, read “The Mismeasure of Man” by Stephen Jay Gould.) It is simply a cluster of attributes we, as a culture, find important.
I think I might be rambling so I’ll get back to my main point:
Race: cultural concept: yes
Race: biological concept: no
I do believe refusal meant there is no ONE gene that gives you ALL of those traits at once. There’s the hair color gene, the eye color gene, the nose shape gene, etc. African American people posess those genes already and pass them on to their children.
By the way, my brother, a child of “white” parents, has dark skin, a broad nose and dark eyes. And while I have pale skin and light-colored eyes, i have curly hair. The notion of the Aryan went out of style about 60 years ago…
One way to approach it is to try and describe what would be the definitive characteristics assigning an individual to a particular racial group. The concept of “race” breaks down very quickly when you try this.
Some previous links and discussions:
I’m not sure what the specifics of this question were going to be,
but I can assure you that the scientists who have demonstrated that there are no biological races have already answered it. (In fact, the odds are overwhelming in favor of the probability that we have already answered it on the SDMB a dozen or so times.)
How do groups tend to look alike? Easy, they share enough common genetics to reinforce similar appearances. No one denies that genetics play a part in appearances.
The problem, as noted above, is that there is no way to identify anyone’s purported “race” that can be objectively tested.
If one put a collection of people from the Congo Basin, the Andoman Islands, and several Pacific Islands (notably Fiji) together in the same place, it is very likely that one could not distinguish among them. Certainly, no list of physical characteristics could be used to identify which person came from which group. Therefore, physical appearance is a bad predictor of “race.”
(It should be noted, as well, that there are groups in Africa with dark skin and wiry hair who have narrower noses and thinner lips. Are they a separate race? Or do we make exceptions so that we can call them Negroid since they live in Africa? Again: appearance is a good cultural identifier of groups in local contexts, but a bad predicter of biological race.)
If we went out and identified all the people who were lactose intolerant, we would find groups of people living in every continent. If we track people by a susceptibility to Sickle-Cell Anemia, we would find a very large number of people in Africa in regions where malaria is endemic. We would also find large sections of relatively malaria-free Africa where there were no people who carried the Sickle-Cell trait, while we would find quite a few people with the very same Sickle-Cell trait living in Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. (There is a different anti-malarial genetic trait that appears in Iraq and extends East all the way into India.)
So, we have (at minumum) two separate genetic markers that cannot be used to identify “race.”
People who come from specific regions tend to have similar appearances and this is the basis for the cultural identification of race. There are, however, no coherent biological markers that we can use to identify people from any culturally-determined “race.”
There are certainly populations of people who are more closely identified, genetically, than other people. However, the word biologists use is population because none of these groups is large enough to justify the misleading term “race.” Whether one identifies the Three Great Races, the Five Great Races, or the 60 Great Races, no biological population is congruent with any of them.
To a certain extent, this can be considered semantics. It would be possible to use the word “race” instead of the word “population.” However, there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of populations, depending on what criteria are used. (And there are millions of people whose ancestry is sufficiently diverse that they could not be placed in any of those populations.)
To use the word “race” for any of those relatively small populations would create misunderstanding among the people who heard the word “race” without realizing how small the population actually was. Since language should be used to promote understanding, not confuse it, there is no purpose to be served by using the term.
BTW, I always find this reaction amusing:
The geneticist who has done the most work to destroy the biological concept of race has had further funding denied him because the PC crowd was afraid that he would be too thorough in breaking down the self-identified “racial” identities.
So a politically incorrect biologist reports that race is an invalid concept and the immediate charge made is that he is being too PC.
Whatever.
well put, again, tomndebb
Threads about race almost always turn into debates, as this one has. I’ll move this over to GD.
Take a biology class, son! There is no one gene, do you think scientists are so dumb they’d miss something so freaking huge and important? There are traits that are more common in populations, usually for certain reasons (darker skin=less cancer, lighter skin=better vitamin E absorbtion from sun, just for aa few examples), but no clear cut definitions.
i can’t anwer a question that makes no sense. If i were to walk down the street and ask the policeman “If there is no such thing a” he’d throw me in the paddywagon! BTW, i’m no hippie, despite living in SF and some socialist tendancies. I AM a geneticist, and can assure you race is an outdated term. Population is preferred, humans have this tendancy to screw the living crap out of each other, with makes isolated populations hard to find and blurs race distinctions down to almost nothing. This was debated a few weeks ago, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=123505&highlight=race You are gonna make blood shoot out of Collounsbury’s nose when he reads your post, though.
I’ve seen a million of these “race” debates on this board. There’s always a bit of a bait and switch going on.
The people who claim that “race doesn’t exist” seem to dance around when you try to pin them down on what they actually mean. It turns out that “race doesn’t exist” means, to them, something much weaker than it seems to.
lucwarm, could you explain that better? what i am saying is “race” is an outdated term, as we have mixed enough that there is no “pure” race, so using race as a separation is antiquated. I am not sure what you mean, unless you think i believe that people from africa and people from asian are indisguinshable, which is not what i am saying at all.
And, of course, there is always this question. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that “race” is well defined and you can sort people into “races.” What are you going to do with that information? What purpose is served by that sorting?
Does this statement say anything?
OK, so I decide I’m “black.” I don’t know what the definition of that might be. I could also easily be “Afro-American.” What are the criteria to decide if I’m right or wrong?
I do own a drum kit (or two).
Sigh, lucwarm. Neither tomndebb, Collounsbury, or I, to the best of my knowledge, have ever claimed that race doesn’t exist. We have said it once, we have said it a bunch of times: race is not a biologically or scientifically definable concept. It has a shifting sociologic meaning on which we scientists make no judgement. Scientifically, it has no meaning, and so race, as a scientific concept, does not exist. It doesn’t bother sociologicists that they can’t draw a hard and fast line around a group which they consider a “race”. For scientists, it totally obliterates the idea of race.
My hypothesis is that mutations that we commonly identify with race (hair, skin, facial structure, preponderance of certain diseases) were evolutionarily selected for – loss of skin pigment as neutral mutations in white populations, broader nose in black populations for better heat radiation, sickle cell trait for malaria resistance. Such evolutionary selection with population interbreeding ensures that no common genetic background except for the traits we identify with race. Markers of race therefore are exactly opposite what we would want to use as population markers (we usually use neutral polymorphisms as markers of populations).
Not to give a genetics lecture, but I saw Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project) talk this weekend. He gave a great talk about taking apart multifactorial disease. Tars may be interested because it was all about polymorphisms and haplotype analyses. Basically, they are going around cataloguing all the polymorphisms and fitting them into haplotypes. Of course they are not using race, although different groups from different parts of the planet are being sampled. There is a broad gradient of differences across humanity, with the steepest being within Africa. It turns out that within certain groups in Africa, there is 10% more genetic variance than between any other two populations. It is a pretty interesting way to think about the migrations and selections on humanity in our short history.