Well, no. Any characteristic that is inherited is genetic. Racial characteristics are genetic.
I agree. I’m not saying it’s genetically significant, just genetic.
We agree.
But those racial characteristics that form “race” are grouped. Which is why they form race.
You’re right, they aren’t genetically important, just genetic.
I think you’re going by the “letter of the law” of the OP while ignoring the spirit. Tigers and lizards are both quadrupeds, but I don’t think “quadrupeds” can be considered a genetic classification in any useful sense.
The characteristics themselves may be genetic among sub-populations, but not when you broadly group them.
It’s maybe a more subtle distinction than you expected, but it exists.
For one example, in the racial classifications that NDD uses, sub-Saharan Africans are all “black”.
The problem is that while darker skin is itself a genetic characteristic, it’s not a single genetic characteristic.
For example, the San (while “black” to Americans) are actually much lighter skinned than the Bantu. This is due to the fact that the genetic expression of the San’s skin color is different from the Bantu’s.
So, we have two groups of people who are both “black” by common notions of race, whose not-actually-the-same skin color express differently genetically.
That’s what I mean. The San and Bantu apparently have the same skin colors in the sociological-race sense, which express differently genetically.
So, yeah, technically, their racial characteristics are genetic. But they’re also different from each other, yet we are to accept that they can be grouped together genetically based on that? That doesn’t stand to reason.
I can’t make heads nor tails of what you are trying to say here. Especially in that last paragraph, you seem to be contradicting yourself. But I can see you’re new here, and probably not familiar with the level of debate expected in this forum. If you’ve got an opinion, that’s fine, but this is a scientific discussion and needs to be at that level.
Rather condescending, old boy.
I think a more precise way of phrasing what the subject/original post is saying is:
Race may be a deeply meaningful cultural/social concept structure, but it is only a trivially meaningful biological/genetic concept structure.
Analogically, the quadruped example is a good fit. Quadruped or biped is determined genetically, but does not imply a great deal of connectedness over the entire set. Humans, birds, and kangaroos are among the biped species. Bipedness is inherited in these categories of organisms genetically. But humans, kangaroos, and sparrows are not particularly closely related to one another.
My husband has tightly curled/kinked reddish-brown hair that went white in his early 20s, visible epicanthic folds on his hazel eyes, pale skin that burns easily. All his ancestry is in one category as far as the typical USA resident would categorize race, but his features not so much.
OK. You tell me what this means:
We get that. But the OP’s example is not a good proof of his thesis.
Yes.
This is getting too deep.
Why not? It defines a certain clade. A ver large clade, but I don’t see why it’s any more useless than, say, vertebrates-- an even larger clade.
I’ll take that.
In the analogy I’m using, “quadrupeds” only includes animals that walk on four legs. Snakes are in a different category, so are birds, whales, and humans, etc.
I think John was thinking of the term “tetrapods” which means all land vertebrates. “Quadrupeds”, if that means “all creatures with four legs” isn’t a good clade, because any clade that includes both lizards and tigers is also going to have to include kangaroos, pigeons, humans, and snakes. If that’s OK with you, then you can use the term, as long as you realize that there will be lots of quadrupeds that don’t have four legs.
You’re right. Thanks. I saw “quadruped”, but my mind went to “tetrapod”.
But if we’re just using the actual physical characteristics, then yes it’s not a good clade.
Perhaps a better analogy to the black skin/white skin issue is “swims in the ocean/lives on land”. The first one puts cetaceans and fish in the same category and humans and spiders in the same category.
There are people all over the world with skin as dark as people who live in Africa. Saying there is a “black skin race” is nonsense.
Err, we are all of the species homo sapiens. Race is a concept in biology. Are there human races? Yes. This comment nicely sums up the reason for all the obfuscation on this:
Also, I would recommend the long debate on this subject a year ago.
Chen- how do you respond to the fact that there are many sub-Saharan African populations that are closer, genetically, to European and Asian populations than to other sub-Saharan African populations?
For example, the Bamileke have a more recent common ancestor with Europeans and Asians then with Kikuyu; as do the Mandenka compared to the Hausa. And there are lots more examples.
I haven’t looked in detail at those examples, but that is not inconsistent with the existence of biological races in the human species (see Coyne’s comment above concerning the existence of numerous races depending on how exact a definition or fine grained analysis you want). Note Razib Khan’s comments when this debate arose earlier in the year concerning sub-saharan africa:
So you’d agree that it’s absurd to consider population A and B both part of the “black” race when population A is closer, genetically, to “white” and “Asian” populations than to population B?
Absolute bullshit. Most “population geneticists” disagree with the good doctor, who does not, as he claims, speak for that profession.