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> For example, populations with a high degree of Irish descendants have a higher then average set of a few noticeable traits like red hair, pale skin, the O+ bl

> For example, populations with a high degree of Irish descendants have a higher then average set of a few noticeable traits like red hair, pale skin, the O+ blood type, etc. These traits also exist in other populations and someone that has 100% Irish ancestry for the last few dozens of generations is not guaranteed to have all of them. Genuinely curious: isn't this an example of cherry-picking outliers in an attempt to refute the overarching rule? So what if it's technically possible to find a minority of non-Irish who exhibit some traits that are much more common among Irish people, and it's possible to find Irish people who are phenotypic outliers? In general, the fact that clusters in a dataset are fuzzy and imperfect doesn't imply that the clusters are meaningless.

runarberg 7y ago
> Isn't this an example of cherry-picking outliers in an attempt to refute the overarching rule? I don’t believe that is the case. I think all we need to do is show that a race categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to demonstrate the uselessness aspect of it. And we do that by showing that there exists a non-irish person that has enough traits generally regarded as belonging to the Irish race (not necessary), and that there exist a person of Irish heritage that doesn’t nearly all of these traits (not sufficient). But regardless of it being guilty of cherry-picking. As long as the dataset is fuzzy, I think the opposite opinion will necessarily have to be arbitrary to define which traits, how many, and how consistently they inherit in order to be defined as a race. I know the technical definition is also arbitrary (when are two populations distinct species?) but at least the arbitrariness is consistent with how we view the rest of the natural world. That is we don’t consider gray wolfs with darker coats to be a separate race from gray wolfs with lighter coats. We correctly differentiate them as belonging to separate populations. Applying this only to humans is arbitrary.

runarberg 7y ago

> Isn't this an example of cherry-picking outliers in an attempt to refute the overarching rule? I don’t believe that is the case. I think all we need to do is show that a race categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to demonstrate the uselessness aspect of it. And we do that by showing that there exists a non-irish person that has enough traits generally regarded as belonging to the Irish race (not necessary), and that there exist a person of Irish heritage that doesn’t nearly all of these traits (not sufficient). But regardless of it being guilty of cherry-picking. As long as the dataset is fuzzy, I think the opposite opinion will necessarily have to be arbitrary to define which traits, how many, and how consistently they inherit in order to be defined as a race. I know the technical definition is also arbitrary (when are two populations distinct species?) but at least the arbitrariness is consistent with how we view the rest of the natural world. That is we don’t consider gray wolfs with darker coats to be a separate race from gray wolfs with lighter coats. We correctly differentiate them as belonging to separate populations. Applying this only to humans is arbitrary.