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Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you. Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European e

Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you. Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.

alphazard 1y ago
The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.
meindnoch 1y ago
Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
- foldr 1y ago
  There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
  - meindnoch 1y ago
    >there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc. Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
    - foldr 1y ago
      Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans. But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
      - nomel 1y ago
        There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1]. What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/
        foldr 1y ago
        That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate. I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
nomel 1y ago
What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.
- foldr 1y ago
  Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.
  - nomel 1y ago
    Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone outside of academia, today.
rwyinuse 1y ago
Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others. For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial. https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151 https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151 https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medical-history-and-heritage/the-history-of-karolinska-institutet/on-finnish-remains-in-karolinska-institutets-anatomical-collection https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...

alphazard 1y ago

The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.

meindnoch 1y ago

Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?

foldr 1y ago
There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  >there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc. Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
  - foldr 1y ago
    Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans. But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
    - nomel 1y ago
      There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1]. What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/
      - foldr 1y ago
        That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate. I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.

nomel 1y ago

What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.

foldr 1y ago
Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.
- nomel 1y ago
  Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone outside of academia, today.

rwyinuse 1y ago

Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others. For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial. https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151 https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151 https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medical-history-and-heritage/the-history-of-karolinska-institutet/on-finnish-remains-in-karolinska-institutets-anatomical-collection https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...