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What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? Interpopulation diversity of both phenotype and genotype isn't remarkably different from intrapopulat

What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? Interpopulation diversity of both phenotype and genotype isn't remarkably different from intrapopulation diversity. There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". The concept of race was never grounded in real science and its proponents constantly change their justifications after the fact. At one point the "biological reality" of race was said to be rooted in phrenology. Race is not just a word for different breeding populations of humans. The dilution of its meaning into something so innocuous is ahistorical, in fact it contradicts what was claimed to be the reality of race just decades ago. It's a political concept first and foremost. No biological theory predicts races. Races are categories rooted in historical economic exploitation and domination that are a posteriori fitted with whatever truthy pseudoscientific justification is catchy at the time. Any categories of humans that biological measurements would come up with would hardly match racial categories. Perhaps the most racialized group that has distinct biological markers are Ashkenazi jews. However, the relation between Ashkenazi jews, Sephardic jews, and ethnic Arabs is very strong. P.S. A review of the legal history of race in colonial America: https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whiteness%20as%20Property_106HarvLRev-1.pdf https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whitene...

qntty 10y ago
This is really insightful. Can you recommend any books to introduce thinking critically about race?
- danharaj 10y ago
  There's many different angles to approach the topic from. I added a link to my post providing a legal point of view. Law is an excellent historical record in many ways and it provides a window into what the ruling class thought of race. Here's a book with a much wider scope that requires a little ambition to read: https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.
ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
>>>What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? to quote my own post - well documented taxonomic differences between human races.
- r00fus 10y ago
  At what point does someone become "black" or "asian"? Or are you talking about biological differences as they correlate with geographic locality?
  - SilasX 10y ago
    You can play Sorites Paradox[1] with anything; doesn't mean the categories don't exist, or that they don't carve reality at important joints. "Heaps don't exist because you can't prove an ironclad boundary between heaps and non-heaps." "Tallness isn't a thing because you don't have a firm, binary definition of when someone is tall." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
cb18 10y ago
There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". Actually, there very much are. I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups. Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
marchenko 10y ago
"Race" is more of a sociopolitical idea with a particularly noxious history, but human groups with differentiable shared recent ancestry - while fuzzy - do exist. Because "race" can be described as a continuous distribution, it helps to think about it probabilistically: there are no "definitely Caucasian" SNPs, but we do have suites of what we call Ancestry-Informative Markers that can be use to infer the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular ancestry group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the polymorphisms associated with pigmentation are informative in this regard. The fuzziness of the continuum means that it is quite possible to define an arbitrary number of "races", depending on your chosen criteria. And admixture at multiple points in history further complicates the picture. But it is possible to discern biogeographical mappings within a generous error margin. As the parent poster points out, these mappings sometimes conflict with the those that we've constructed out of ideological convenience.

qntty 10y ago

This is really insightful. Can you recommend any books to introduce thinking critically about race?

danharaj 10y ago
There's many different angles to approach the topic from. I added a link to my post providing a legal point of view. Law is an excellent historical record in many ways and it provides a window into what the ruling class thought of race. Here's a book with a much wider scope that requires a little ambition to read: https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago

>>>What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? to quote my own post - well documented taxonomic differences between human races.

r00fus 10y ago
At what point does someone become "black" or "asian"? Or are you talking about biological differences as they correlate with geographic locality?
- SilasX 10y ago
  You can play Sorites Paradox[1] with anything; doesn't mean the categories don't exist, or that they don't carve reality at important joints. "Heaps don't exist because you can't prove an ironclad boundary between heaps and non-heaps." "Tallness isn't a thing because you don't have a firm, binary definition of when someone is tall." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

cb18 10y ago

There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". Actually, there very much are. I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups. Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

marchenko 10y ago

"Race" is more of a sociopolitical idea with a particularly noxious history, but human groups with differentiable shared recent ancestry - while fuzzy - do exist. Because "race" can be described as a continuous distribution, it helps to think about it probabilistically: there are no "definitely Caucasian" SNPs, but we do have suites of what we call Ancestry-Informative Markers that can be use to infer the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular ancestry group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the polymorphisms associated with pigmentation are informative in this regard. The fuzziness of the continuum means that it is quite possible to define an arbitrary number of "races", depending on your chosen criteria. And admixture at multiple points in history further complicates the picture. But it is possible to discern biogeographical mappings within a generous error margin. As the parent poster points out, these mappings sometimes conflict with the those that we've constructed out of ideological convenience.