Ah. Agreed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Definitions of race - OneLook Dictionary Search
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?
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?
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.
Since you apparently do, can you please name them?
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.
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:
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.
This Cavalli-Sforza:rolleyes::
Okay. I get your point and it is valid. This biology reference definition of race makes it as well.
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.
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.
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.