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.
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.
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.
So, is black or African-American describing an ethnicity?
Is European-American or white describing an ethnicity ?
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.
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.
Black isn’t, African-American is, or close enough. I’d say there are likely a few different A-A ethnicities, actually.
No, neither of those describes an ethnicity. “Irish-American” or “Italian-American” are more like it.
‘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.
Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure
“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:
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.
Well, if “blacks” do no represent an ethnicity, just what do they represent ?
That definition is sufficient to describe any family as a ‘race’.
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.
Cognitive bias.
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.
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.
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:
Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure
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.
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.