# 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:** 6
**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, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/101 "2010-09-16T15:54:58Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@DanBlather](#): > > > > 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. Yes you can. Ethnicity is a common, shared cultural heritage. Now you could pervert ethnicity to mean a set of biological characteristics associated with geographical origins, but then it is just a polite term for race. ---
**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, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/102 "2010-09-16T15:55:28Z")
> [@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? Yes, because Tay-Sachs is contracted by eating kosher food or praying primarily on Saturdays. This time of year, the high holy days, are particularly dangerous. Don’t shake the hands of anyone Jewish until at least October. ---
**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, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/103 "2010-09-16T16:00:38Z")
> [@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? As both a doctor and a Jewish man who is the father of a daughter adopted from China, I believe I am in a good position to answer that. Medically I have said it before: we use race and ethnicity because we do not yet have better tools available to us, again, that’s where the light is good. There are already better tools (genetic markers, etc.) to subdivide for risk; they are not however as easy to see as “race” and “ethnicity”. “Race” is a very crude correlate for genetic and/or environmental risks but it is often better than none. My daughter is a Jew religiously and culturally as a large part of her identity. It obviously is highly likely not her genetic heritage, unless you go waaay back. Ethnically (depending on how you define that term) she is of Chinese heritage and to a smaller extent that is also part of her cultural identity. It will be tricky for her. We White parents do try to help our adopted children embrace the heritage of their origins but are very ill-equipped to do so. And of course we want her to completely embrace our family heritage. And the world will see her features before anything else. When a doctor sees her (s)he should think genetic risks associated with Asian and think environmental risk of Middle Class American. I see your point about the squishiness of defining ethnicity and race, but that is sort of the point that many of the rest of us are making. These are squishy terms and as such they are ill-equipped for use in intelligent conversations about potentially loaded subjects. When we discuss subjects of genetic and cultural heritage and effects we need to speak with precise language. Once again, careless use of words like “race” only make discussions go cross purposes because they are so poorly defined. ---
**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, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/104 "2010-09-16T16:52:26Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > > > …Medical professionals however do recognize race, … > > 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. So, is black or African-American describing an ethnicity? Is European-American or white describing an ethnicity ? ---
**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, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/105 "2010-09-16T17:12:32Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > . When we discuss subjects of genetic and cultural heritage and effects we need to speak with precise language. Once again, careless use of words like “race” only make discussions go cross purposes because they are so poorly defined. I basically agree with you. Unfortunately a race discussion springs from percieved differences between blacks and whites and you just can’t discuss the subject unless you acknowlege from the beginning that the simple difference between pure white and all shades of black exists. ---
**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, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/106 "2010-09-16T17:28:46Z")
> [@DanBlather](#): > > > [@MrDibble](#): > > > > :rolleyes: > > > > You can’t be adopted into an ethnicity. > > Yes you can. Ethnicity is a common, shared cultural heritage. No, it’s more than that. Is “Goth” an ethnicity? Or “Amish”? No, these are not ethnicities. _Common ancestry_ is a component of ethnicity just as much as common culture. But you knew that, I’m sure. ---
**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, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/107 "2010-09-16T17:37:12Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > So, is black or African-American describing an ethnicity? Black isn’t, African-American is, or close enough. I’d say there are likely a few different A-A ethnicities, actually. > [@](#): > > Is European-American or white describing an ethnicity ? No, neither of those describes an ethnicity. “Irish-American” or “Italian-American” are more like it. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/108 "2010-09-16T18:35:33Z")
‘Ethnicity’ is no more consistently defined than ‘race’. Obviously people with some apparent physical characteristics are more likely to have similar genetic composition than those who differ in those characteristics. Some cultural classifications may indicate a likelihood of long ancestry of people with similar genetic makeup. Lacking detailed genetic information, guesses can be made on that basis. I doubt any qualified doctor would establish a diagnosis based on any concept of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ alone. ---
**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, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/109 "2010-09-16T18:47:45Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > ‘Ethnicity’ is no more consistently defined than ‘race’. > > Obviously people with some apparent physical characteristics are more likely to have similar genetic composition than those who differ in those characteristics. Some cultural classifications may indicate a likelihood of long ancestry of people with similar genetic makeup. Lacking detailed genetic information, guesses can be made on that basis. I doubt any qualified doctor would establish a diagnosis based on any concept of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ alone. Right. “Ethnicity” can be sliced and diced in any way that is useful for what you happen to be doing. If biologists use it, they will generally mean people with some sort of shared genetic heritage. But it doesn’t designate an isolated population, as “race” would be when that term is used by biologists. Or, we can use the more neutral term “populations”. We can talk about African and non-African populations. We can talk about East Asian populations or Amazonian populations or Balkan populations or Polynesian populations or… ---
**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, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/110 "2010-09-16T22:14:27Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@TriPolar](#): > > > > ‘Ethnicity’ is no more consistently defined than ‘race’. > > > > Obviously people with some apparent physical characteristics are more likely to have similar genetic composition than those who differ in those characteristics. Some cultural classifications may indicate a likelihood of long ancestry of people with similar genetic makeup. Lacking detailed genetic information, guesses can be made on that basis. I doubt any qualified doctor would establish a diagnosis based on any concept of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ alone. > > Right. “Ethnicity” can be sliced and diced in any way that is useful for what you happen to be doing. **If biologists use it, they will generally mean people with some sort of shared genetic heritage. But it doesn’t designate an isolated population, as “race” would be when that term is used by biologists.** > > Or, we can use the more neutral term “populations”. We can talk about African and non-African populations. We can talk about East Asian populations or Amazonian populations or Balkan populations or Polynesian populations or… There seems to be a fair bit of overlap with what you’re saying and what people are referring to by race. Any population (a group that mates within itself fairly freely and has for quite a while) that is different enough in some interesting observable quality from some other population could be considered a race. Here’s another interesting paper by Rosenberg & co, showing clusters that correspond to geographic distance. > [@](#): > > That is, for the five clusters with K = 5 in Figure 2 of the present study and in Figure 1 of [3]—corresponding to Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas—an intercluster population pair is plotted only if it includes one population from Africa and one from Eurasia, one from Eurasia and one from East Asia, or one from East Asia and one from Oceania or the Americas. > > For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. **For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.** [PLOS Genetics](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070) ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [September 16, 2010, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/111 "2010-09-16T23:09:53Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@DanBlather](#): > > > > Yes you can. Ethnicity is a common, shared cultural heritage. > > No, it’s more than that. Is “Goth” an ethnicity? Or “Amish”? No, these are not ethnicities. _Common ancestry_ is a component of ethnicity just as much as common culture. But you knew that, I’m sure. “Ethnicity” is based on the _concept_ of a shared ancestry, which can be (and very often is) _fictive_, either conciously or unconciously. You can certainly be adopted into an ethnicity, in some cases. An example: Ethiopian Jews are Black Africans and Ashkenazic Jews are White Caucasians. They share an ethnicity, based on common ancestry - both claim descent from the ancient Israelites, and there may be _some_ truth to that, though by the usual markers people associate with biological inherited difference (such as skin colour) they are what people would consider different ‘races’. One can become a Jew by conversion, and be adopted into the tribe; on becomming a Jew, it is considered of the utmost importance that no-one consider you a “second class” Jew because you are a convert - you are considered fully, ethnicly Jewish, and able to pass on “Jewish-ness”, if female, by blood. Another example: the adoption by native Americans of captives in war (if they were lucky). Such captives, when adopted, were considered full members of the tribe and on occasion ended up in positions of high status within it: > **[Captives in American Indian Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captives_in_American_Indian_Wars)** > > Captives in American Indian Wars could expect to be treated differently depending on the identity of their captors and the conflict they were involved in. During the American Indian Wars, indigenous peoples and European colonists alike frequently became captives of hostile parties. Depending on the specific instances in which they were captured, they could either be held as prisoners of war, abducted as a means of hostage diplomacy, used as countervalue targets, enslaved, or apprehended for pur... The point being that various peoples understood “ancestry” to be more of a spiritual bond of affinity (and thus something that could, as it were, be _chosen_ or _adopted_) than a matter of strict biology. Ethnicity is a social construct. ---
**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, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/112 "2010-09-16T23:56:11Z")
> [@bukkake....huh, wha'???](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bukkake-huh-wha/63969/3): > > 1Black isn’t, African-American is, or close enough. I’d say there are likely a few different A-A ethnicities, actually. Well, if “blacks” do no represent an ethnicity, just what do they represent ? ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/113 "2010-09-17T01:08:45Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > > [@John\_Mace](#): > > > > Right. “Ethnicity” can be sliced and diced in any way that is useful for what you happen to be doing. **If biologists use it, they will generally mean people with some sort of shared genetic heritage. But it doesn’t designate an isolated population, as “race” would be when that term is used by biologists.** > > > > Or, we can use the more neutral term “populations”. We can talk about African and non-African populations. We can talk about East Asian populations or Amazonian populations or Balkan populations or Polynesian populations or… > > There seems to be a fair bit of overlap with what you’re saying and what people are referring to by race. Any population (a group that mates within itself fairly freely and has for quite a while) that is different enough in some interesting observable quality from some other population could be considered a race. That definition is sufficient to describe any family as a ‘race’. > [@Chen019](#): > > Here’s another interesting paper by Rosenberg & co, showing clusters that correspond to geographic distance. > > > [@](#): > > > > That is, for the five clusters with K = 5 in Figure 2 of the present study and in Figure 1 of [3]—corresponding to Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas—an intercluster population pair is plotted only if it includes one population from Africa and one from Eurasia, one from Eurasia and one from East Asia, or one from East Asia and one from Oceania or the Americas. > > > > For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. **For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions.** > > [PLOS Genetics](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070) Nobody doubts that. Note the word ‘small’ to describe the jumps. There isn’t a smooth continuum. But the distribution is constantly changing, and what is being examined now represents a recent period in history, and will have not be representative sometime in the not distant future. Your second paragraph jumps from an ‘interesting observable quality’ to ‘genetics’. If genetic structure is the ‘interesting observable quality’, you’ve only identified the random clusters that identify populations. If they are some other quality, they’re not based on genetics. Once again, selecting the definition to fit the argument. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/114 "2010-09-17T01:15:23Z")
> [@bukkake....huh, wha'???](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bukkake-huh-wha/63969/3): > > > [@bukkake....huh, wha'???](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bukkake-huh-wha/63969/3): > > > > 1Black isn’t, African-American is, or close enough. I’d say there are likely a few different A-A ethnicities, actually. > > Well, if “blacks” do no represent an ethnicity, just what do they represent ? Cognitive bias. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/115 "2010-09-17T02:27:23Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > > [@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] Yes, Cavalli-Sforza has said a similar thing in a recent interview. But, as Peter Frost points out, Darwin said something quite different. In fact so did Cavalli-Sforza previously, although his statements have changed as the intellectual climate has changed. > [@](#): > > Well, no. Darwin was not “skeptical about the usefulness of the race concept in humans” In the above quote, he was denying that humans had diverged into different species. But he did not deny the reality of human races, as he stated a few pages previously: > \*There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. > > […] If a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian, or Mongolian, were to compare them, he would at once perceive that they differed in a multitude of characters, some of slight and some of considerable importance. On enquiry he would find that they were adapted to live under widely different climates, and that they differed somewhat in bodily constitution and mental disposition. If he were then told that hundreds of similar specimens could be brought from the same countries, he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names.\* > > But why bother quoting Darwin? It’s more fun to quote Cavalli-Sforza! > > _The differences that exist between the major racial groups are such that races could be called subspecies if we adopted for man a criterion suggested by Mayr (1963) for systematic zoology. Mayr’s criterion is that two or more groups become subspecies when 75 percent or more of all the individuals constituting the groups can be unequivocally classified as belonging to a particular group. As a matter of fact, when human races are defined fairly broadly, we could achieve a much lower error of classification than 25 percent, implying, according to Mayr, the existence of human subspecies._ (Cavalli-Sforza & Bodmer, 1977) > > Well, that was Cavalli-Sforza back in 1977. Perhaps he was still unaware of Richard Lewontin’s finding that genes vary much more within human populations than between them. Was not this “a reason to encourage banning the use of the word race in humans”? > > Except that Lewontin had published that reason in 1972. Five years later, Cavalli-Sforza was apparently still unimpressed. And he continued to use the race concept much later, as in this journal article from the late 1980s: > > \*The first split in the phylo-genetic tree separates Africans from non-Africans, and the second separates two major clusters, one corresponding to Caucasoids, East Asians, Arctic populations, and American natives, and the other to Southeast Asians, (mainland and insular), Pacific islanders, and New Guineans and Australians \*(Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1988). > > Cavalli-Sforza did not convert to race denialism until the mid-1990s, with his opus The History and Geography of Human Genes. > > What motivated his conversion? Had Lewontin’s 1972 paper been further bolstered by new data and arguments? Not really. In fact, the 1980s and 1990s saw growing evidence that the same genetic overlap that Lewontin found between human populations also occurs between many species that are nonetheless distinct in anatomy, physiology, and behavior (see previous post). > > As one anthropologist told me: “I don’t think our perception of the general patterns of genetic variation changed much from '76 to '94, but the intellectual climate that geneticists operate in sure did.” [Evo and Proud: A late convert](http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/08/late-convert.html) ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 2:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/116 "2010-09-17T02:56:01Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Yes, Cavalli-Sforza has said a similar thing in a recent interview. But, as Peter Frost points out, Darwin said something quite different. In fact so did Cavalli-Sforza previously, although his statements have changed as the intellectual climate has changed. That is bullshit revisionism. Cavalli-Sforza did not change his statements “as the intellectuial claimate changed.” He actually was one of the leading scientists to change that climate. He set out in his earliest efforts to document the differences among the races. As his genetic knowledge base grew, he came to recognize that his studies were pursuing a chimera and that there were no valid scientific reasons to cling to a notion of “race.” His position for many years has been that populations can be identified and described, but once one begins lumping disparate populations into the vague category of “race,” it becomes clear that the lumping is arbitrary and not supportable by the data. ---
**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 17, 2010, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/117 "2010-09-17T02:59:17Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > There seems to be a fair bit of overlap with what you’re saying and what people are referring to by race. Any population (a group that mates within itself fairly freely and has for quite a while) that is different enough in some interesting observable quality from some other population could be considered a race. No. Race is a subspecies, that is morphologically distinguishable from other populations and that rarely interbreeds with those other populations. For the 1000th time, humans do not fit that definition. Human populations do not fit the biological definition of race, which is what this thread is addressing. There are no genetically isolated, morphologically distinct human populations. Period. None. Nada, Zilch. Nein. They do not exist. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/118 "2010-09-17T03:59:46Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > > [@Chen019](#): > > > > There seems to be a fair bit of overlap with what you’re saying and what people are referring to by race. Any population (a group that mates within itself fairly freely and has for quite a while) that is different enough in some interesting observable quality from some other population could be considered a race. > > No. Race is a subspecies, that is morphologically distinguishable from other populations and that rarely interbreeds with those other populations. For the 1000th time, humans do not fit that definition. Human populations do not fit the biological definition of race, which is what this thread is addressing. > > There are no genetically isolated, morphologically distinct human populations. Period. None. Nada, Zilch. Nein. They do not exist. Yes there are, look at the races I listed above for starters. > [@](#): > > **tomndebb** wrote: > > His position for many years has been that populations can be identified and described, but once one begins lumping disparate populations into the vague category of “race,” it becomes clear that the lumping is arbitrary and not supportable by the data. Then why did Rosenberg el al get such robust clustering results? Again, the number of clusters or races is not arbitrary, but some numbers of K fit the data better than others: > [@](#): > > When the number of loci, sample size, and correlation model were held constant, K = 2 (that is, two clusters) generally produced smaller clusteredness than did the larger values of K (Figures 3 and 4; Table 1). For the correlated allele frequencies model, K = 5 and K = 6 tended to have higher clusteredness than did K = 3 and K = 4, whereas the reverse was true for the uncorrelated model (Figure 4). … > > Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions. [PLOS Genetics](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070) ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/119 "2010-09-17T04:05:16Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > > [@Blake](#): > > > > Since you apparently do, can you please name them? > > Here are some examples from Cavalli Sforza’s tree diagram of genetic frequencies; African…caucasion So, you chose African and Caucasian as examples of races, of gentically and phenotypically distinct groups. So according to you Muammar Ghaddafi, Anwar Saddat and Nelson Mandela are all the same race; African. Whereas Saddat and Ghaddafi, being African, are not the same race as Yassir Arafat or Ariel Sharon, both Asian Caucasians, and Saddat and Sharon are the same race as both Mahatma Ghandi and Boris Yeltsin, who are also Caucasian. I’ve been waiting for a race proponent to answer this question for years. Normally they dodge and weave and avoid answering. Thank you for being honest Now we can finally play ball. Can you please tell us what phenotypic characters are shared by Mandela, Ghaddafi and Saddat that enabled you to place them in the same race? And when you have done that, can you tell use what the genotypic basis of the cluster is? You also claimed that races must genetically isolated. Can you please tell use how Egypt has managed to remain genetically isolated fom Israel/Palestine, and how Libya has remained isolated from Spain, and present us with your evidence that this is the case? Because your entire position hinges on your claims that races are genotpyically distinct, phenotypically distinct and genetically isolated. Now that you have named two races for us I look forward to seeing your evidence that theyare indeed genotpyically distinct, phenotypically distinct and genetically isolated. Then we can start working oin the much more difficult case: the fact that Ghandi, Yeltsin and Arafat are apparently more gentically and phenotypically similar to each other than Arafat is to Sadat. That’s gonna take some doing I can tell you. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 17, 2010, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699/120 "2010-09-17T04:28:23Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Then why did Rosenberg el al get such robust clustering results? Again, the number of clusters or races is not arbitrary, but some numbers of K fit the data better than others: > > > [@](#): > > > > When the number of loci, sample size, and correlation model were held constant, K = 2 (that is, two clusters) generally produced smaller clusteredness than did the larger values of K (Figures 3 and 4; Table 1). For the correlated allele frequencies model, K = 5 and K = 6 tended to have higher clusteredness than did K = 3 and K = 4, whereas the reverse was true for the uncorrelated model (Figure 4). … > > > > Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara—that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions. > > [PLOS Genetics](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070) Rosenberg got clustering on various populations. The various populations were still clinal in nature. If you want to use the word “race” to identify a population and list several hundreds of races in the world, that would match the data, but it would not match the meaning of the word “race” as it is used either popularly or, previously, among scientists. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/race-yea-or-nay/553699.md?page=7)