# Race: Yea or nay? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 14, 2010, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699 "2010-09-14T05:21:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Acid\_Lamp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Acid\_Lamp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acid_Lamp)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/81 "2010-09-15T22:02:39Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@Acid\_Lamp](#): > > > > I’m not sure if you are taking a shot at me or not, so I’m not going to comment on this other than to say that pointing out that some people look like x while others look like y is hardly “racist”. > > Naah, I wasn’t calling you racist. I do think you’re wrong, but merely trying the exercise of classification is, IMO, just misguided and a waste of time, not racist _per se_. _Using_ that classification system to make decisions about people, _that’s_ racist. Ah. Agreed. ---
**Author:** ![Acid\_Lamp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Acid\_Lamp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acid_Lamp)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/82 "2010-09-15T22:07:30Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > > [@Acid\_Lamp](#): > > > > snip. > > > > I’m not sure if you are taking a shot at me or not, so I’m not going to comment on this other than to say that pointing out that some people look like x while others look like y is hardly “racist”. > > If you want to say a person has a particular skin color, go ahead. Two people with the same skin color may have little genetic similarity otherwise. But do you mean that you can seperate people into ‘black’ and ‘white’ races by skin color. Where is that line? And aside from the color of skin, what other purpose is there? As I mentioned above, I think it’s useful to have descriptors for the combination of physical traits that describe a person when they conform strongly to those of others who all share the same combination and live in the same geographical region. other than being a descriptor, it probably has little true meaning biologically or otherwise. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/83 "2010-09-15T23:00:30Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@DSeid](#): > > > > Which actually makes colors a great analogy for race. How we see them, how we classify them, has more to do with what we each perceive has meaning subjectively. Whether color gets called red vs orange (or even persimmon) is not without meaning, but the meaning is very user, culture, and circumstance dependent - not something based on a real physical discontinuity. > > But let’s be clear, since we’re talking about race as biological concept in this thread, that you are using the term race as a social construct in your post. Right? Nope. Not right. The decision to lump as groups biologically here or there is at least as arbitrary and subjective (like where red stops and orange begins or whether to use other color names in between or with different hues) as the sociologic construct. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/84 "2010-09-15T23:08:25Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > But let’s be clear, since we’re talking about race as biological concept in this thread, that you are using the term race as a social construct in your post. Right? > > Nope. Not right. The decision to lump as groups biologically here or there is at least as arbitrary and subjective (like where red stops and orange begins or whether to use other color names in between or with different hues) as the sociologic construct. But “race” does have a biological meaning. It’s just that our species doesn’t meet the criteria. That is my point. Don’t think of “race” as something biologists only use wrt to humans. It can be used interchangeably with subspecies. ---
**Author:** ![Fiveyearlurker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/da6949/32.png) [@Fiveyearlurker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fiveyearlurker)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2010, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/85 "2010-09-15T23:48:29Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > You can’t invoke the continuum fallacy in something which is supposed to be a closed category, as any tight scientific definition should be. “Red” is not a good scientific definition of a colour, for instance. “Light with a wavelength of wavelength range of 630–740 nm” is. I think that there would be a very strong overlap between self reporting of the color “red” with the wavelength of red. I mean, I don’t know the wavelength of the angry smiley face to the right, but I’m guessing it’s zeroing in on the wavelength that we’ve all agreed is “red”. Similarly, the FDA guidelines for collecting data about race, for the purposes of determining biological relevance of that data toward the effects of a drug, are to obtain self reported data on race and ethnicity; the linkages between the genetic factor of CYP2D6 phenotypes to drug metabolisms is based on self reporting, which would be the sociological “race”. Biological factors and sociological race are overlapping. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/86 "2010-09-16T05:45:16Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Nay. > > “Race” is an unscientific idea created by people who had no real clue about human genetics who were mainly just trying to come up with an excuse to conquer and enslave people. It doesn’t reflect real human variation at all well; look how for example “black people” born in Africa and “black people” born in America are both considered black despite the Americans having a highly mixed ancestry. Or look how people are arbitrarily divided into races by skin color and not by, say, eye or hair color; hair and eye color are just as genetic as skin color after all. Race is more than single feature like skin colour though, it is seen in a shared suite of physical traits (eyes, hair, noses, skulls and skeletal features) which reflect a shared evolutionary history. Genetic testing vindicated the findings of physical anthropology. Physical anthropologists have long believed in continental races, although they may have differed as to the number of these races. Whenever individuals from around the world are clustered based on a large number of loci, invariably the major races emerge as clusters of genetic similarity. In regions of the world such as Central Asia, East Africa, or Latin America where anthropology has believed that intermixture of races has created mixed-race populations, genetics has invariably shown the hybridity of these populations. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/87 "2010-09-16T06:01:40Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > > Nay. > > > > “Race” is an unscientific idea created by people who had no real clue about human genetics who were mainly just trying to come up with an excuse to conquer and enslave people. It doesn’t reflect real human variation at all well; look how for example “black people” born in Africa and “black people” born in America are both considered black despite the Americans having a highly mixed ancestry. Or look how people are arbitrarily divided into races by skin color and not by, say, eye or hair color; hair and eye color are just as genetic as skin color after all. > > Race is more than single feature like skin colour though, it is seen in a shared suite of physical traits (eyes, hair, noses, skulls and skeletal features) which reflect a shared evolutionary history. Not true at all. People get lumped into belonging to this race or that race without having such shared characteristics. Nor is there any reason to think that there’s any reason to consider those particular characteristics important other than a racial system created by ignorant slave traders trying to justify their behavior via bigotry. It’s notable how attempts to “scientifically verify” the notion of race always _just happens_ to support the prevalent prejudices. Unlike real science, there’s never any surprises. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 7:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/88 "2010-09-16T07:23:27Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > > [@Chen019](#): > > > > Race is more than single feature like skin colour though, it is seen in a shared suite of physical traits (eyes, hair, noses, skulls and skeletal features) which reflect a shared evolutionary history. > > Not true at all. People get lumped into belonging to this race or that race without having such shared characteristics. Nor is there any reason to think that there’s any reason to consider those particular characteristics important other than a racial system created by ignorant slave traders trying to justify their behavior via bigotry. It’s notable how attempts to “scientifically verify” the notion of race always _just happens_ to support the prevalent prejudices. Unlike real science, there’s never any surprises. So if something is misused it doesn’t exist? It’s basically a shorthand for ancestry and people like Neil Risch have written extensively about the medical usefulness of the concept. Using the American Heritage Science dictionary: RACE 5. Biology a) An interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms differing from other populations of the same species in the frequency of hereditary traits. A race that has been given formal taxonomic recognition is known as a subspecies. [http://www.onelook.com/?loc=lemma&w=race](http://www.onelook.com/?loc=lemma&w=race) Do you think there are no geographically isolated human populations that differ in the frequency of hereditary traits? Or that there aren’t different allele frequencies between such populations? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 7:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/89 "2010-09-16T07:28:56Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > So if something is misused it doesn’t exist? Race wasn’t “misused”, it was made up by people with ill intentions who had no idea what they were talking about. Do you buy into the effectiveness of alchemy too? > [@Chen019](#): > > Do you think there are no geographically isolated human populations that differ in the frequency of hereditary traits? Or that there aren’t different allele frequencies between such populations? I think that those things have no particular connection with “race”. Race is a socially created label that has little to do with any particular combination of genes or your ancestry. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/90 "2010-09-16T08:09:32Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Do you think there are no geographically isolated human populations that differ in the frequency of hereditary traits? Or that there aren’t different allele frequencies between such populations? Since you apparently do, can you please name them? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 9:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/91 "2010-09-16T09:15:00Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Do you think there are no geographically isolated human populations that differ in the frequency of hereditary traits? Yes. **There are no geographically isolated human populations** , full stop. Or, not large enough or isolated enough to matter, and certainly not any that line up with any proposed notions of “race”. Unless your set of races is (“Australian aborigines”;“Everyone else”), this wasn’t even the case 500 years ago. Even the classic binary “Out Of Africa”/“Stayed in Africa” split is so much bunk when you look at it at any fine level, what with the Sahara Pump essentially making the human family tree a bunyan, not a pollard. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 11:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/92 "2010-09-16T11:02:01Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > > [@Chen019](#): > > > > Do you think there are no geographically isolated human populations that differ in the frequency of hereditary traits? Or that there aren’t different allele frequencies between such populations? > > Since you apparently do, can you please name them? Asking how many exactly is like asking how many cultures or colours are there. They aren’t fixed categories. Here are some examples from Cavalli Sforza’s tree diagram of genetic frequencies; African, native australian & New Guinean, South East Asian, Northeast Asian, caucasion, Native american, arctic asian/inuit. Or more recently discussed in a paper by Risch et al: > [@](#): > > From an evolutionary point of view, population stratification (genetically distinct subgrouping) and admixture (intermating between genetically distinct groups) are created by human mating patterns. Geographical, social, and cultural barriers have given rise to reproductively isolated human populations, within which random drift has produced genetic differentiation. Numerous recent studies using a variety of genetic markers have shown that, for example, individuals sampled worldwide fall into clusters that roughly correspond to continental lines, as well as to the commonly used self-identifying racial groups: Africans, European/West Asians, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans (Bowcock et al. 1994; Calafell et al. 1998; Rosenberg et al. 2002). > **[Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in...](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1196372/)** > > We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects ... ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 11:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/93 "2010-09-16T11:10:06Z")
People keep bring up genetics and genetic markers, but this is not evidence of biological races. Yes, you can, with some certain degree of confidence, predict whether a person has recent African ancestry based on the presence and number of certain markers. However, you can do the very same thing to predict whether someone is, say, from Guam or has Basque heritage or is an Ashekanazi Jew. Mating is NOT random; geography places a huge role on who gets what markers and who doesn’t. So do cultural “rules.” I’m sure if Rwandans let the whole “Hutu/Tutsi” dichotomy continue for several more generations, we’ll be able to predict someone’s “Hutu-ness” based on DNA. Does that mean that Hutus and Tutsis are different races? I don’t think so, but a typical Tutsi probably disagrees. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/94 "2010-09-16T11:39:39Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Here are some examples from Cavalli Sforza’s tree diagram of genetic frequencies; This Cavalli-Sforza:rolleyes:: [QUOTE=From The History and Geography of Human Genes] The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clear to Darwin [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 12:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/95 "2010-09-16T12:38:05Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@DSeid](#): > > > > Nope. Not right. The decision to lump as groups biologically here or there is at least as arbitrary and subjective (like where red stops and orange begins or whether to use other color names in between or with different hues) as the sociologic construct. > > But “race” does have a biological meaning. It’s just that our species doesn’t meet the criteria. That is my point. Don’t think of “race” as something biologists only use wrt to humans. It can be used interchangeably with subspecies. Okay. I get your point and it is valid. [This](http://www.biologyreference.com/Ar-Bi/Biology-of-Race.html) biology reference definition of race makes it as well. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/96 "2010-09-16T13:44:21Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > > [@Blake](#): > > > > Since you apparently do, can you please name them? > > Asking how many exactly is like asking how many cultures or colours are there. They aren’t fixed categories. Exactly. Which is why biologists reject the idea that human races exist, and that it is nothing more than a social construct. If there were races (subspecies), we would be able to enumerate them objectively, and they would be fixed categories. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/97 "2010-09-16T14:21:34Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@Chen019](#): > > > > Asking how many exactly is like asking how many cultures or colours are there. They aren’t fixed categories. > > Exactly. Which is why biologists reject the idea that human races exist, and that it is nothing more than a social construct. If there were races (subspecies), we would be able to enumerate them objectively, and they would be fixed categories. Whatever biologists decide, races or no races, there are no consequences for deciding one way or the other. There’s is merely an academic exercise. They have set the bar to define “race” and that is the end of it. Medical professionals however do recognize race, because there are consequences by ignoring it. They do not burden themselves with all kinds of criteria that would supposedly nullify their position. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/98 "2010-09-16T14:28:58Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > Whatever biologists decide, races or no races, there are no consequences for deciding one way or the other. There’s is merely an academic exercise. They have set the bar to define “race” and that is the end of it. > > Medical professionals however do recognize race, because there are consequences by ignoring it. They do not burden themselves with all kinds of criteria that would supposedly nullify their position. No. Medical professionals consider a person’s ethnic background as one factor in determining the likelihood of certain risk factors or the effectiveness of certain drugs. They do the same thing for gender. Although it may never be practical, the ideal situation would be to consider the person’s entire genome. Now, you can poo-hoo that as mere semantics, but it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about-- you can divide and subdivide human groups ad infinitum, and there is useful information you can get from that, but it doesn’t mean we have reproductively isolated populations. ---
**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/99 "2010-09-16T15:04:21Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > No. Medical professionals consider a person’s ethnic background as one factor in determining the likelihood of certain risk factors or the effectiveness of certain drugs. REeally? So the girl adopted from China and raised by a Jewish family as a Jew might be more susceptible to Tay-Sachs? How does that work? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/100 "2010-09-16T15:49:19Z")
> [@DanBlather](#): > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > No. Medical professionals consider a person’s ethnic background as one factor in determining the likelihood of certain risk factors or the effectiveness of certain drugs. > > REeally? So the girl adopted from China and raised by a Jewish family as a Jew might be more susceptible to Tay-Sachs? How does that work? :rolleyes: You can’t be adopted into an ethnicity. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699.md?page=6)