With all due respect, that’s a lot of hand waving. You assume you are going to be able to draw boundaries based on your ability to perceive differences. And you are ignoring the many physiological traits (like blood type) that are not visible. It’s not for lack of trying that biologists have given up the idea of race. There are just too many variables and it’s just too subjective to pick which of those variables you use to group people together.
The fact is, those physical features you think you can distinguish blend into each other. You may be able to tell the difference between someone from Seoul and someone from Beijing, but facial features don’t make a quantum jump when you cross the border from China to Korea.
We can, in fact, assign different wavelengths to specific (increasingly more narrow) ranges of “color.” We can even arbitrarily assign the broad range of wavelengths to red or blue and include the variations of pink and scarlet or turquoise or cobalt. However, when we make those arbitrary assignemnts, we are working with a single variable, the wave length of light, and we are always open to challenge from someone who wishes to separate the light reds from the dark reds.
When we try to identify “race” we are talking about a whole host of variables, (about many of which we cannot even get a lot of people to agree), and we still wind up with arbitrary assignments that simply provoke discussion while doing nothing to provide information about the individuals grouped by those arbtrary classifications.
When biologists discuss populations, they are describing people with some limited common ancestry that can be used to inform the discussion. No claimed “race” has a sufficiently clear pedigree to permit such grouping or sufficient common features as that their identification as a group provides information.
I’m with **John Mace **on the “it’s a cline not a clad”, but I was also thinking about morphs. I know morphs are on the same population and that one can make the case that humans are more than one population.
Only by the broadest nitpicky definition of “race”. But not the way it is commonly used, and not the sense in which we are saying it does not exist. If you want to postulate, say, a Meru “race” that’s separate from the Zulu “race” based on differences in SCT, freak freely, but you’ll be using the word in a way nobody else does.
Han speak Hanyu languages and Mongols spoke Mongolic ones originally, is the main difference, but there are lifestyle and other cultural markers. But generally, I don’t go around “describing differences” between arbitrary groups of people. It’s not often a useful endeavour.
I get what you are saying, but it doesn’t wash against the reality of the human physical spectrum. You lack for a proper definition, not evidence of difference. That is why I mentioned I dislike the idea of race and prefer the more loose term “breed” or “type”. Just like all dogs are Canis Familiarus, all humans are the same species. We don’t argue about whether or not a bloodhound and a shi-tzu are the same species. We know they are. They are different breeds. I don’t see why there is any difference when discussing the physical differences between a bushman and an Inuit. I get that history, cultural lines, and political borders can make for a mess, but it is not impossible to sort out if someone wanted to try. The problem is emotional and cultural, not physical. The failing of taxonomists to agree on a term or what defines it does not alter reality.
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.
No-one’s disputing this “I know it when I see it” pseudo-definition of race exists. We’re saying it is neither scientific nor useful, and does magnitudes more harm just by existing, than any nebulous, rarely articulated good it could do.
Because no-one goes around calling those separate, complete races.
That’s exactly the problem - they have been trying, and the harder you look at it, the more it falls apart. I mean, like I pointed out in that other thread, what “race” would you assign the Lemba to?
The failure of racists to line up with reality is the problem, not the inverse.
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”.
We could do the same with humans. East of the Urals and you’re of the Asian race; West of the Urals and you’re of the Caucasian race. But it’s arbitrary and meaningless. We could just as easily draw the line somewhere else.
Do you agree that we could divide humans into tall and short people? We could have a tall race and a short race, with the cut off at 5’ 9" for men and 5’ 4" for women. But that wouldn’t be useful in any scientific way.
No, we don’t. We’ve gone back and forth between species and subspecies as the data we had became more complete over time.
It’s also much more complicated with extinct populations from the distant past. Neanderthals lived in isolation from Sapiens for at least 200k years, not counting the time pre-Neanderthal and pre-Sapiens populations were isolated from each other. When they came together, we really don’t know how much interbreeding there was, but the overlap was at most 10k years. Which is more important-- the 190k years or the 10k years?
The term you are looking for is “ethnic group”, or just “population”.
But a dog breed is something very different. There is no analog in human populations to that.
And dogs are Canis lupus [familiaris], the same species as the wolf. The trinomial designation is not something scientists agree on, as domesticated animals pose some problems with the BSC convention, which requires animals to be “in the wild”.
There is all sorts of speculation about Neandertals, with the consensus appearing to change back and forth every few years as new evidence is provided. If they are a separate species, then “race” hardly applies. If they were, indeed, a subspecies, they were clearly more distinctly different than any of the proposed “races,” today, might be.
Colors are subjective, an artifact of the way most people’s eyes are set up. Someone who is color blind will see different colors than I do, or none. Some animal or alien with a greater variety of color receptors will see colors where I see nothing; someone with synesthesia may see colors where there isn’t even any light. So no, I don’t “believe in colors”, not as something objective.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Han speak Hanyu languages and Mongols spoke Mongolic ones originally, is the main difference, but there are lifestyle and other cultural markers. But generally, I don’t go around “describing differences” between arbitrary groups of people. It’s not often a useful endeavour.