4 ms·

There is no biological basis for the word race.

by Phenomenit 8y ago

easshvsh 8y ago
Colour of skin, epicanthic fold, and a thousand more designating traits of race are biologically encoded in DNA.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  They aren’t, however, so uniform that an attack based on presence or absence of a handful of polymorphisms together could form anything like a perfect classifier and therefore target. Race and genetics are related, but not so closely as to facilitate this.
  - k__ 8y ago
    Sure, I can have more DNA in common with people that have a different phenotype than me, but does this mean you can't group the last few genes that make them black, or let them get sicklaemia?
    - runako 8y ago
      > last few genes that make them black, or let them get sicklaemia Popular understanding of race (it's a social construct, so this is the relevant metric) has little or nothing to do with susceptibility to a given disease. Similarly, dark skin != what we commonly think of as "black" (think dark-skinned people from Asia, for example).
      - easshvsh 8y ago
        Dark skinned people from Asia are from a different race than dark skinned people from Africa. For example if you have a dark skinned person with epicanthic fold, chances are that's a person from Indonesia or its whereabouts. Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA.
        runako 8y ago
        > dark skinned person with epicanthic fold, chances are that's a person from Indonesia or its whereabouts. Or South Africa, or east Africa, etc. Or since we're talking about people and not geographic features, we could be talking about a person in the e.g. Americas who is the product of many "origin" regions of the world. > Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA. The problem is the "set of traits" is squishy and often defined in the moment. This, plus the importance we assign to race in all affairs, has led many societies to try to codify what is meant by race. Racial distinctions are different in the context of different communities (e.g. in the US it's very important to know who is "black" vs who is not). For example, in the US we long practiced the One-drop rule [1], which lead to absurd racial classifications [2] that required you to know a person's entire ancestry back 3 or 4 generations in order to identify her race (obviously, this is recursive). The trouble is we start from a position of knowing how we want to classify a person, by seeing them or knowing where they come from ("I know she's black, so my classification scheme needs to ensure she's black."). We then need to apply tools (one-drop rule, etc.) to make sure that person fits the classification. Gene clusters are a clumsy way to accomplish the same thing using modern tools. Obviously some populations share some traits. But saying "race" is something that can be objectively identified for every given individual is naive. Back to your original point -- there's no such thing as the "last few genes" that make a person black. That's approximately like saying the last few quanta of pigment in a person's skin change their race. Or that a person's race can be determined by calipers [3]. It's ridiculous. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
- taneq 8y ago
  Ssh you're not allowed to say that!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- runako 8y ago
  Millions of people from many different origins have any given set of those traits (e.g. [epicanthic fold, pale skin] or [epicanthic fold, dark skin]. The phenotypes presented are divided into any number of social "races". QED there's no biological basis for race.
atq2119 8y ago
I find this meme annoying because it so often misses the point (as I'd argue it does in this particular discussion). Yes, races are largely a social concept. However, once society has defined races based on whatever phenotypes that are in fashion at the time, it turns out that yes, there is a biological and genetic basis for those phenotypes. It's conceivable that this biological basis could be targeted by some gene-based technology. Probably not very accurately, but based on past observations I'd say that racist mass murderers are not particularly likely to care about such subtleties. And that's what matters for the GP's point.
- Phenomenit 8y ago
  I understand what you are saying and there is definitely a difference in phenotype but from what I've read the it's not possible to make a distinction because the interrace variance is smaller than the intrarace variance. It might be hard targeting a specific race with biological tools when it's hard to specify race biologically. But yeah there is difference in people appearance depending on location of origin.
- mercer 8y ago
  Not disagreeing per se, but I think we often underestimate how much of our definition of 'race' is based on context, separate from our genes, such as: - where we see a person - who this person is with - what clothes the person wears - what a person smells like - body language - spoken language - the manner in which they speak (loud, soft, etc.) - the way they walk - all sorts of other cultural markers (like stance, eye contact, etc.) I suspect that all these contextual, largely non-biological factors play a huge role in how we decide a person's race. Possibly so much so that the biological markers we do have available are mostly useless. Please correct me if I'm wrong though; I am far from an expert in this area!

There is no biological basis for the word race.

easshvsh 8y ago

Colour of skin, epicanthic fold, and a thousand more designating traits of race are biologically encoded in DNA.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
They aren’t, however, so uniform that an attack based on presence or absence of a handful of polymorphisms together could form anything like a perfect classifier and therefore target. Race and genetics are related, but not so closely as to facilitate this.
- k__ 8y ago
  Sure, I can have more DNA in common with people that have a different phenotype than me, but does this mean you can't group the last few genes that make them black, or let them get sicklaemia?
  - runako 8y ago
    > last few genes that make them black, or let them get sicklaemia Popular understanding of race (it's a social construct, so this is the relevant metric) has little or nothing to do with susceptibility to a given disease. Similarly, dark skin != what we commonly think of as "black" (think dark-skinned people from Asia, for example).
    - easshvsh 8y ago
      Dark skinned people from Asia are from a different race than dark skinned people from Africa. For example if you have a dark skinned person with epicanthic fold, chances are that's a person from Indonesia or its whereabouts. Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA.
      - runako 8y ago
        > dark skinned person with epicanthic fold, chances are that's a person from Indonesia or its whereabouts. Or South Africa, or east Africa, etc. Or since we're talking about people and not geographic features, we could be talking about a person in the e.g. Americas who is the product of many "origin" regions of the world. > Race is not ONE trait, it's a set of traits, and all of them are encoded in DNA. The problem is the "set of traits" is squishy and often defined in the moment. This, plus the importance we assign to race in all affairs, has led many societies to try to codify what is meant by race. Racial distinctions are different in the context of different communities (e.g. in the US it's very important to know who is "black" vs who is not). For example, in the US we long practiced the One-drop rule [1], which lead to absurd racial classifications [2] that required you to know a person's entire ancestry back 3 or 4 generations in order to identify her race (obviously, this is recursive). The trouble is we start from a position of knowing how we want to classify a person, by seeing them or knowing where they come from ("I know she's black, so my classification scheme needs to ensure she's black."). We then need to apply tools (one-drop rule, etc.) to make sure that person fits the classification. Gene clusters are a clumsy way to accomplish the same thing using modern tools. Obviously some populations share some traits. But saying "race" is something that can be objectively identified for every given individual is naive. Back to your original point -- there's no such thing as the "last few genes" that make a person black. That's approximately like saying the last few quanta of pigment in a person's skin change their race. Or that a person's race can be determined by calipers [3]. It's ridiculous. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
taneq 8y ago
Ssh you're not allowed to say that!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
runako 8y ago
Millions of people from many different origins have any given set of those traits (e.g. [epicanthic fold, pale skin] or [epicanthic fold, dark skin]. The phenotypes presented are divided into any number of social "races". QED there's no biological basis for race.

atq2119 8y ago

I find this meme annoying because it so often misses the point (as I'd argue it does in this particular discussion). Yes, races are largely a social concept. However, once society has defined races based on whatever phenotypes that are in fashion at the time, it turns out that yes, there is a biological and genetic basis for those phenotypes. It's conceivable that this biological basis could be targeted by some gene-based technology. Probably not very accurately, but based on past observations I'd say that racist mass murderers are not particularly likely to care about such subtleties. And that's what matters for the GP's point.

Phenomenit 8y ago
I understand what you are saying and there is definitely a difference in phenotype but from what I've read the it's not possible to make a distinction because the interrace variance is smaller than the intrarace variance. It might be hard targeting a specific race with biological tools when it's hard to specify race biologically. But yeah there is difference in people appearance depending on location of origin.
mercer 8y ago
Not disagreeing per se, but I think we often underestimate how much of our definition of 'race' is based on context, separate from our genes, such as: - where we see a person - who this person is with - what clothes the person wears - what a person smells like - body language - spoken language - the manner in which they speak (loud, soft, etc.) - the way they walk - all sorts of other cultural markers (like stance, eye contact, etc.) I suspect that all these contextual, largely non-biological factors play a huge role in how we decide a person's race. Possibly so much so that the biological markers we do have available are mostly useless. Please correct me if I'm wrong though; I am far from an expert in this area!