11 ms·

I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap,

I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    Indeed. I heard one of the PIs on the 100,000 genomes project [1] giving a talk in which they flat-out said that anyone whose four grandparents were white and irish is basically a clone compared to anyone whose four grandparents were from sub-saharan africa. The whole point is that there's so much variability within each societal clustering that it tends to make not that much sense to talk about it -- and the degree of homogeneity is different, too, mostly depending on ancient geography (hello Iceland, as an example). There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and india. Our social construct of race varies quite substantially over those places. [1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the-100000-genomes-project/ https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
- foldr 5y ago
  Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on the basis of their race.
  - caeril 5y ago
    > Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions. Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.
    - foldr 5y ago
      Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories correlate to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is blindingly obvious – unless there are some people who think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have epithantic folds from their environment? Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'. See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalemeth-,39%20minutes%20ago,-%7C%20unvote%20%5B%E2%80%93%5D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.
- packetlost 5y ago
  I didn't make any comments on the utility of racial classification, just that the classification isn't perfect, leaves groups out, and where you decide to draw the lines between them is often arbitrary. Race is an oversimplification of a complex system, but even an oversimplification has value. Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.
- herbstein 5y ago
  I recently read a (non-fiction) book where exactly that kind of clustering was talked about. It's correct that you'll find clusters in each major continent, but with just 6 clusters one of them will be entirely devoted to a small, insular community in the north of Iran. To your eyes and our social consciousness this community would be considered "middle-eastern" when in reality they're about as genetically as different as "Black people" and "Asian people" are.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Since they're a small population, they don't matter for making generalizations about middle-easterners or whatever other larger classification you use.
- mcguire 5y ago
  So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be in only one cluster. The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.
  - nomel 5y ago
    > but they can be in only one cluster I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
naasking 5y ago
> "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days. That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).
- fao_ 5y ago
  You're so, so close to getting it. And then you decide to just hop over the point :(
  - naasking 5y ago
    See my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329
- pessimizer 5y ago
  I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a social construct at all.
  - naasking 5y ago
    I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social construct" that would have to exclude species as a meaningful category. Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.
- 5y ago
esyir 5y ago
I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.
- screye 5y ago
  > The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. I would dispute that claim. Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable way) Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives) or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race denominations. Race as an overloaded term for sociological, antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has smartly stopped using race much, but the others still continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings. There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.
  - esyir 5y ago
    >There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies. There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is, serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many (but not all) cases. Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.
padastra 5y ago
Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green exists doesn’t mean those colors aren't real.
- mcguire 5y ago
  The differences between blue, yellow, and green are pretty minor compared to radio or gamma radiation. No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment either.
- vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  Is magenta a color? A real one? We perceive it as such, but there is no place on the electromagnetic spectrum corresponding to magenta. If you went hunting for magenta photons, you'd be hunting for quite a long while. What that says to me is that our intuitive mental construct of color isn't very reliable, even though it feels so real. Likewise, maybe we should be less trusting of our intuitive labels for other phenomena.
  - padastra 5y ago
    Tigers are real. Lions are real. The fact that Ligers exist doesn’t mean they’re not two different populations. The point is that just because two categories can mix doesn’t automatically mean that those categories don’t meaningfully exist.
jcun4128 5y ago
random side note: glasses for example, bought RayBans my nose bridge isn't the right shape for it sucks could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses
kkoncevicius 5y ago
> is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation But this is true for everything. For example "night and day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue that there are no differences between night and day because of that.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?

sillyquiet 5y ago
Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Indeed. I heard one of the PIs on the 100,000 genomes project [1] giving a talk in which they flat-out said that anyone whose four grandparents were white and irish is basically a clone compared to anyone whose four grandparents were from sub-saharan africa. The whole point is that there's so much variability within each societal clustering that it tends to make not that much sense to talk about it -- and the degree of homogeneity is different, too, mostly depending on ancient geography (hello Iceland, as an example). There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and india. Our social construct of race varies quite substantially over those places. [1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the-100000-genomes-project/ https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
foldr 5y ago
Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on the basis of their race.
- caeril 5y ago
  > Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions. Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.
  - foldr 5y ago
    Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories correlate to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is blindingly obvious – unless there are some people who think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have epithantic folds from their environment? Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'. See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalemeth-,39%20minutes%20ago,-%7C%20unvote%20%5B%E2%80%93%5D https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.
packetlost 5y ago
I didn't make any comments on the utility of racial classification, just that the classification isn't perfect, leaves groups out, and where you decide to draw the lines between them is often arbitrary. Race is an oversimplification of a complex system, but even an oversimplification has value. Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.
herbstein 5y ago
I recently read a (non-fiction) book where exactly that kind of clustering was talked about. It's correct that you'll find clusters in each major continent, but with just 6 clusters one of them will be entirely devoted to a small, insular community in the north of Iran. To your eyes and our social consciousness this community would be considered "middle-eastern" when in reality they're about as genetically as different as "Black people" and "Asian people" are.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Since they're a small population, they don't matter for making generalizations about middle-easterners or whatever other larger classification you use.
mcguire 5y ago
So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be in only one cluster. The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.
- nomel 5y ago
  > but they can be in only one cluster I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

naasking 5y ago

> "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best. The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days. That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).

fao_ 5y ago
You're so, so close to getting it. And then you decide to just hop over the point :(
- naasking 5y ago
  See my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329
pessimizer 5y ago
I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a social construct at all.
- naasking 5y ago
  I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social construct" that would have to exclude species as a meaningful category. Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.
5y ago

esyir 5y ago

I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.

screye 5y ago
> The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry. I would dispute that claim. Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable way) Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives) or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race denominations. Race as an overloaded term for sociological, antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has smartly stopped using race much, but the others still continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings. There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.
- esyir 5y ago
  >There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies. There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is, serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many (but not all) cases. Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.

padastra 5y ago

Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green exists doesn’t mean those colors aren't real.

mcguire 5y ago
The differences between blue, yellow, and green are pretty minor compared to radio or gamma radiation. No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment either.
vladTheInhaler 5y ago
Is magenta a color? A real one? We perceive it as such, but there is no place on the electromagnetic spectrum corresponding to magenta. If you went hunting for magenta photons, you'd be hunting for quite a long while. What that says to me is that our intuitive mental construct of color isn't very reliable, even though it feels so real. Likewise, maybe we should be less trusting of our intuitive labels for other phenomena.
- padastra 5y ago
  Tigers are real. Lions are real. The fact that Ligers exist doesn’t mean they’re not two different populations. The point is that just because two categories can mix doesn’t automatically mean that those categories don’t meaningfully exist.

jcun4128 5y ago

random side note: glasses for example, bought RayBans my nose bridge isn't the right shape for it sucks could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses

kkoncevicius 5y ago

> is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation But this is true for everything. For example "night and day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue that there are no differences between night and day because of that.