4 ms·

On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in t

On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.

energy123 1y ago
> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ... That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
n4r9 1y ago
> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this: > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies. > Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  [flagged]
- mc32 1y ago
  We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts". But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
    - mc32 1y ago
      On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
      - nradov 1y ago
        Who has more athleticism, Aaron Rodgers or Ruth Chepngetich?
        mc32 1y ago
        They’d be the same breed! Or at least American athletic vs Kenyan athletic breed, like we have different terriers or different shepherd dog breeds .
  - n4r9 1y ago
    If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882 > Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 1y ago
> science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-artificial-intelligence-can-determine-race-medical-images https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a... > In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race. AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Ethnicity is what I mean.
    - selimthegrim 1y ago
      I absolutely promise you it would fail massively in my case.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        Why?
        selimthegrim 1y ago
        My self reported ethnicity is based on my mother’s birthplace. Both of my parents have substantial genetic ancestry different from that location.
    - 1y ago
slibhb 1y ago
The idea that "science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences" is a hotly debated subject. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r... One quote from that: > We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real. My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
earnestinger 1y ago
There is no “the science”. There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications) When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
throw310822 1y ago
I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino. The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant. This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.

energy123 1y ago

> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ... That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.

n4r9 1y ago

> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this: > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies. > Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083

DrillShopper 1y ago
[flagged]
mc32 1y ago
We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
- bombcar 1y ago
  We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts". But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
  - mc32 1y ago
    On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
    - nradov 1y ago
      Who has more athleticism, Aaron Rodgers or Ruth Chepngetich?
      - mc32 1y ago
        They’d be the same breed! Or at least American athletic vs Kenyan athletic breed, like we have different terriers or different shepherd dog breeds .
- n4r9 1y ago
  If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882 > Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 1y ago

> science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-artificial-intelligence-can-determine-race-medical-images https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a... > In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.

notepad0x90 1y ago
ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race. AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Ethnicity is what I mean.
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    I absolutely promise you it would fail massively in my case.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      Why?
      - selimthegrim 1y ago
        My self reported ethnicity is based on my mother’s birthplace. Both of my parents have substantial genetic ancestry different from that location.
  - 1y ago

slibhb 1y ago

The idea that "science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences" is a hotly debated subject. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r... One quote from that: > We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real. My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.

earnestinger 1y ago

There is no “the science”. There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications) When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.

throw310822 1y ago

I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino. The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
notepad0x90 1y ago
it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant. This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.