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Race as biological concept exists but there are no human races in the biological sense. Humans are able to interbreed and were not selected by their environment

Race as biological concept exists but there are no human races in the biological sense. Humans are able to interbreed and were not selected by their environments for long enough to develop significantly different cognitive abilities. If we use the word race for human being it can only mean cultural or other such societal concepts meaning it is a social construction. I hope that helped.

leephillips 5y ago
It didn’t really help. Why do you mention interbreeding? Are you confusing race with species?
- freemint 5y ago
  Because partial but not complete genetic isolation is a criteria in the IMHO applicable (or rather not applicable) definition of race here. I am not confusing race and species.
- burnished 5y ago
  No, there is just history to the word you might not know, some extra meaning. Race fundamentally refers to the idea that there are different kinds of people. Which is why 'interbreeding' comes up, because some people used to believe that a black person and a white person having a child was more like crossing a horse and a donkey than say a person with light hair and a person with dark hair. There is some real ugly history here.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    No kidding?
    - burnished 5y ago
      Dead serious.
  - lliamander 5y ago
    That's not really a good argument for the thesis that "there are no human races in the biological sense". Even if there were misconceptions embedded into the definition of the word "race", that doesn't mean there's no underlying biological reality to the differences between human populations that are identified by categories of race.
    - burnished 5y ago
      Nobody has lost sight of genetic differences across populations. I don't know why you are bringing that up. But, there are no human 'races' in the biological sense. At best it makes you sound like you're discussing the politics in your Tolkien fanfiction. It is purely a social construct.
      - lliamander 5y ago
        > Nobody has lost sight of genetic differences across populations. I don't know why you are bringing that up. Listen, I'm not saying self-identified race and genetic or ancestral population are the same thing, but there are strong correlations. Perhaps you can clarify how the claim "there is no biological basis for race" makes sense in light of this fact? > It is purely a social construct. Something being a "social construct" does not mean it is purely arbitrary.
lliamander 5y ago
Even if there wasn't enough time for selection to act on cognitive abilities (citation needed), the fact of the matter is that patterns of population genetics do correlate highly with self-identified race.
- VLM 5y ago
  > patterns of population genetics Which then result in patterns of race related medical diseases and similar topics. Sickle cell anemia, etc.
rendang 5y ago
Seems like a weird false dichotomy - even in the olden days of pseudoscience on race, obviously people didn't believe that races couldn't interbreed, as they observed such themselves. The fact remains that if you run PCA and clustering on genetic data as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering#/media/File:Rosenberg_1048people_993markers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering#/medi... you will get groups that generally correspond with Caucasian/SS African/East Asian/Amerindian. You can call those "races" or something else, but they are not just artifacts of society/culture.
- rovolo 5y ago
  > even in the olden days of pseudoscience on race, obviously people didn't believe that races couldn't interbreed, as they observed such themselves. They did however believe that there were "purebreeds" of races; that you could objectively categorize people into various races. Mixing races wouldn't create new races, it would only create a mixture of races. As an analogy, you can create metallic alloys from different metallic elements. That won't create new metallic elements though, it will just create new mixtures of the pure elements. The strongest example of this view is Polygenism. Before Darwin, people were arguing about whether there was a single origin for people or multiple origins corresponding to the assumed races. This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenism#Scientific_polygenism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenism#Scientific_polygeni... The person you're responding to is trying to say that humans are a single species, and thus we can't be different races (species). But that is obvious in the modern context and isn't really what people are saying when they talk about race. Today, the argument is over: what are racial categories if they aren't species, and given a definition of race what does it actually tell us? > If we use the word race for human being it can only mean cultural or other such societal concepts meaning it is a social construction. > The fact remains that if you run PCA and clustering on genetic data ... you will get groups that generally correspond with Caucasian/SS African/East Asian/Amerindian The person you're responding to is being very imprecise. There is no one definition of race. It a squishy class of "categorizations I can define which separate europeans, amerindians, africans, and asians". When we create a racial categorization, we are flattening these various categorizations into a single categorization. It is a social construction to choose the most important categories as "europeans, amerindians, africans, and asians" regardless of the categorization you're using. As an example of the limitations of defining race from genetic clusters, Think of Obama in the U.S. He has a White mother and a Black father, but can you honestly say he is treated as equally White and Black in the U.S.? No, he is treated as predominately Black, even though the genetic view disagrees. You could say that the social definition is wrong and the genetic definition is correct, but you could equally say that your genetic definition fails to describe the social racial categorization.
twofornone 5y ago
>and were not selected by their environments for long enough to develop significantly different cognitive abilities This is patently false. There are hundreds of known genes which are strongly correlated/anticorrelated with above average and exceptional intelligence and are absent or underrepresented among various ethnic groups. Humans left africa some 200k years ago and even if you think thousands of generations of adaptation to drastically different environments before agriculture wouldn't have been enough time for populations to evolve cognitive adaptations, the fact that geographically isolated interbreeding with other homonids occured further suggests a genetic basis for differences in cognition. The modern scientific establishment's denial of race based differences in cognition (not just intelligence, see e.g. warrior gene) is nothing but politically motivated science denialism, and does immense harm to the institution's credibility.
- staticman2 5y ago
  Or maybe you aren't as rational as you think you are and have a credulous attitude towards pseudo "scientific" reasoning than confirms your personal biases about race? Who can say?
  - hn_sucks 5y ago
    Anyone with sufficient understanding of the issues can say. Unfortunately it's an open secret in the field, everyone knows it, noone can talk about it. How about learning some actual material about genetics and psychometrics instead of making yourself look like a fool?

leephillips 5y ago

It didn’t really help. Why do you mention interbreeding? Are you confusing race with species?

freemint 5y ago
Because partial but not complete genetic isolation is a criteria in the IMHO applicable (or rather not applicable) definition of race here. I am not confusing race and species.
burnished 5y ago
No, there is just history to the word you might not know, some extra meaning. Race fundamentally refers to the idea that there are different kinds of people. Which is why 'interbreeding' comes up, because some people used to believe that a black person and a white person having a child was more like crossing a horse and a donkey than say a person with light hair and a person with dark hair. There is some real ugly history here.
- leephillips 5y ago
  No kidding?
  - burnished 5y ago
    Dead serious.
- lliamander 5y ago
  That's not really a good argument for the thesis that "there are no human races in the biological sense". Even if there were misconceptions embedded into the definition of the word "race", that doesn't mean there's no underlying biological reality to the differences between human populations that are identified by categories of race.
  - burnished 5y ago
    Nobody has lost sight of genetic differences across populations. I don't know why you are bringing that up. But, there are no human 'races' in the biological sense. At best it makes you sound like you're discussing the politics in your Tolkien fanfiction. It is purely a social construct.
    - lliamander 5y ago
      > Nobody has lost sight of genetic differences across populations. I don't know why you are bringing that up. Listen, I'm not saying self-identified race and genetic or ancestral population are the same thing, but there are strong correlations. Perhaps you can clarify how the claim "there is no biological basis for race" makes sense in light of this fact? > It is purely a social construct. Something being a "social construct" does not mean it is purely arbitrary.

lliamander 5y ago

Even if there wasn't enough time for selection to act on cognitive abilities (citation needed), the fact of the matter is that patterns of population genetics do correlate highly with self-identified race.

VLM 5y ago
> patterns of population genetics Which then result in patterns of race related medical diseases and similar topics. Sickle cell anemia, etc.

rendang 5y ago

Seems like a weird false dichotomy - even in the olden days of pseudoscience on race, obviously people didn't believe that races couldn't interbreed, as they observed such themselves. The fact remains that if you run PCA and clustering on genetic data as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering#/media/File:Rosenberg_1048people_993markers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering#/medi... you will get groups that generally correspond with Caucasian/SS African/East Asian/Amerindian. You can call those "races" or something else, but they are not just artifacts of society/culture.

rovolo 5y ago
> even in the olden days of pseudoscience on race, obviously people didn't believe that races couldn't interbreed, as they observed such themselves. They did however believe that there were "purebreeds" of races; that you could objectively categorize people into various races. Mixing races wouldn't create new races, it would only create a mixture of races. As an analogy, you can create metallic alloys from different metallic elements. That won't create new metallic elements though, it will just create new mixtures of the pure elements. The strongest example of this view is Polygenism. Before Darwin, people were arguing about whether there was a single origin for people or multiple origins corresponding to the assumed races. This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenism#Scientific_polygenism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygenism#Scientific_polygeni... The person you're responding to is trying to say that humans are a single species, and thus we can't be different races (species). But that is obvious in the modern context and isn't really what people are saying when they talk about race. Today, the argument is over: what are racial categories if they aren't species, and given a definition of race what does it actually tell us? > If we use the word race for human being it can only mean cultural or other such societal concepts meaning it is a social construction. > The fact remains that if you run PCA and clustering on genetic data ... you will get groups that generally correspond with Caucasian/SS African/East Asian/Amerindian The person you're responding to is being very imprecise. There is no one definition of race. It a squishy class of "categorizations I can define which separate europeans, amerindians, africans, and asians". When we create a racial categorization, we are flattening these various categorizations into a single categorization. It is a social construction to choose the most important categories as "europeans, amerindians, africans, and asians" regardless of the categorization you're using. As an example of the limitations of defining race from genetic clusters, Think of Obama in the U.S. He has a White mother and a Black father, but can you honestly say he is treated as equally White and Black in the U.S.? No, he is treated as predominately Black, even though the genetic view disagrees. You could say that the social definition is wrong and the genetic definition is correct, but you could equally say that your genetic definition fails to describe the social racial categorization.

twofornone 5y ago

>and were not selected by their environments for long enough to develop significantly different cognitive abilities This is patently false. There are hundreds of known genes which are strongly correlated/anticorrelated with above average and exceptional intelligence and are absent or underrepresented among various ethnic groups. Humans left africa some 200k years ago and even if you think thousands of generations of adaptation to drastically different environments before agriculture wouldn't have been enough time for populations to evolve cognitive adaptations, the fact that geographically isolated interbreeding with other homonids occured further suggests a genetic basis for differences in cognition. The modern scientific establishment's denial of race based differences in cognition (not just intelligence, see e.g. warrior gene) is nothing but politically motivated science denialism, and does immense harm to the institution's credibility.

staticman2 5y ago
Or maybe you aren't as rational as you think you are and have a credulous attitude towards pseudo "scientific" reasoning than confirms your personal biases about race? Who can say?
- hn_sucks 5y ago
  Anyone with sufficient understanding of the issues can say. Unfortunately it's an open secret in the field, everyone knows it, noone can talk about it. How about learning some actual material about genetics and psychometrics instead of making yourself look like a fool?