The AAA declared "race" to have no biological foundation

True to the stereotypes concerning my ethnic background and racial makeup, I am a lazy layabout who cannot be bothered to link to www.instantrimshot.com.

The same thing would have happened to me, but in the time it took for the driver to actually show up I had time to get an advanced degree in Biology and was able to engage him in his arguments.

Everyone knows its Hispanic individuals who prefer knives. Black people have a genetic pre-disposition to use "gats."

[deleted]

When?

You might as well say "death is a social construct, because nature knows no condition named Death."

Wow. Actually, I'm pretty sure ALL things in nature encounter a condition named Death, independent of society arising...

Now, how can we rid your argument of any remaining leg to stand on?

Ah yes, you point to a blog post of summarize opinion as apparent evidence of your claim. (Edit -- it's YOUR OWN BLOG!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA) Stop reading while I create authority-on-all-things.com and set up a quick entry to back this up.

A blog post, furthermore, which argues for the existence of race based on IQ variation. A test which anyone with any familiarity with any anthropological/sociological background will tell you, has inherent cultural bias that cannot be overcome. (Why? Not all ideas translate. Thought patterns are not unilateral.)

What you're really missing, though, is the obvious answer. Characteristics that you are trying to ascribe to a "race" of humans are better attributed to ethnic groups. It is symantics, to be honest, but the distinction is real and clear: Ethnic groups are how we classify perceived biological/physiological/sociocultural differences without personal bias, whereas the very concept of race arose from an idea of a hierarchy of humans (using an arbitrary measure like IQ); it is an antiquated and fallacious term.

9/10 A++++ would rage again

As I said somewhere else in this thread, nobody has found a way to sort humans into a specific number of races genetically. We can only place them on a continuum.

That doesn't mean that anyone's denying that phenotypic differences exist between humans.

No, it's the scientific Anthropological thing to say. I've been studying Anthropology for more than a decade, this is the consensus opinion and has been for decades.

explain

Which is the wannabe rebel, too cool for school and completely ignorant, particularly with respect to genetics, thing to say!

[deleted]

genetically inaccurate

Can you link to some studies that genetically classify humans by race?

It's pretty obvious to me that people are different, genetically different, not just from culture. IQ is correlated to brain size, and the groups with higher IQ have larger brains compared to other groups with lower IQ, in general.

Lets take an example. NE Asians (Japanese, Koreans) have larger brains than SE Asians (Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodians) and also have higher IQ.

Actually to a general point, in skull reconstruction you can predict to a fairly good level what someone is going to look like by their skull, and other bone landmarks.

If you give a skull to a skilled forensic anthropologist who has been trained in facial reconstruction they will to a high degree be able to tell what ones ancestry is to a point.

If someone has very narrow nose hole with a long nasal spine there is a darn good chance this person is of european descent. And that added to other landmarks of the skull is going to tell you they skin is going to be white.

VS. if oyu see the skull has a bregma crest (the top of she skull kinda has a gentle rise on the top, there is a high chance that person is of african descent and that with other notes of the skeleton will tell you with a quite high degree that person has dark skin.

If you have more interest in this subject, there is the /anthropology subreddit which has some super great people in it.

edit: and no a white person growing up in africa would not take on certain bone structures group with someone of black african descent, or lose their genotypical bones structures.

If I understand correctly, which I may not, he means that there is no black-ness gene, or white-ness gene, that changes everything about race in one easy to identify place. Everythings so spread out and muddled that it's hard, just by examining DNA, to tell if someone is "black", "white", "asian" or what-not.

[deleted]

Random genetic mutations also occur in geographically separated groups. That is how entirely different species come about. If two groups are separated and each is separately eating different diets, being introduced to different dangers, and have different genetic mutations occurring within their populations, they will possibly (but not always) change to the point where they can no longer breed.

In terms of something like environment affecting skeletal structure: look at people who live in hot environments vs. cold environments. In Africa, many people are very tall and lanky looking. Tall, skinny people dissipate heat from their bodies much quicker than a short, stout person. Conversely, many people (look at Inuit populations) are extremely short and stocky. It helps hold warmth in the body. These sorts of changes happen over many, many generations and are not rapid by any stretch of the imagination. Diet does have an affect on a person's skeletal structure, but it's only one part of the picture.

Does this clear things up a bit?

I think the idea is that the differences in skin color are only a really, really, really small percentage of our genetic makeup, what makes us human. Heck, I've met siblings with very different skin color and skeletal structure.

Also, I think you're right, diet & living conditions can shape a person's body and brain to a surprising degree, from what the mother eats during her pregnancy throughout a person's life.

Radiolab recently had an episode on race where one guy told his story growing up thinking he was African American, and only after participating in the DNA study did he find out that he was European, Native American, and Asian; not African at all.

What happens to any species where groups are separated for long periods of time? Eventually their bodies and bone structures adapt to the environment in which they live. This is the reason for darker skin coloring on the African continent and in the Mid-East, and to flatter, wider noses on many natives of Africa where the climate is hotter and drier. In the European climates, the bone structure modified itself to adapt to the environment.

So genetically speaking, no, a Caucasian raised in Africa won't suddenly have their bone structure mutate. Bone structure (most notably the skull) is part of our DNA make-up.

That being said, however, some non-genetic environmental adaptations can happen within a generation if a family group moves from one environment to another. For example, a group of South American natives from the Andes region decides to migrate into the United States, settling into a non-mountainous region. Now, although parts of the Andes lie close to the equator, the altitude in the region averages about 13,000 feet. Natives of this area are generally short and barrel-chested in order to maximize oxygen intake (their lungs are huge, hence the wide chests).

Studies have shown the children born in the new, lower altitude environment grow taller and slightly thinner than their parents, but their bone structure and facial features remained the same.

In other words, even though they're bigger than their parents, their genetic DNA is still the same, and forensic anthropologists could still probably predict with some accuracy their race by their skull.

[deleted]

If you take a black baby and put it in a white family, the baby will eventually grow a typically white bone structure.

They didn't declare what we can and can't trace in human DNA. What they said was...well, just read the first paragraph again.

Its not just that. There are 'external' variables that can never be measured. Its like the weather, a one degree change in temperature, or one ounce of moisture could be the beginnings of a hurricane. Genetic differentiation is affected by the same type of variables common to all environments like temp, pressure, elevation, gravity, force mass, inertia, etc... There are forces that we can never predicted because they are uniquely interacting in a chaotic system (ala chaos theory). No matter how much more we learn about DNA (transcription, translation,PTM, protein folding) there are forces outside of our control that have made us unique. I would like to think we are better if we never try to control those forces.

We know exactly what DNA does, just like we know exactly what neurons, do. Putting together the big picture is the hard part.

Well, there are no true genetic differences in the sense that there's no 'black' gene. There is no gene that you can pinpoint that signifies the person could be of African origin, as an example. You can however, look at certain patterns of alleles that ONLY exist in certain groups of people. For example, only those of African descent are susceptible to sickle-cell anemia because it was a response to malaria, which originates from Africa. As such, you don't see caucasians with a susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia. There is nothing that is inherently different between a white person and a black person in terms of their genetic makeup, however, there are some things that you can look up (like SCA) that make sense and give you more information when you look at them in context ... Does that make more sense?

Could tell you your ethnic breakdown, but not the distinct, single group that you fall into, which is the point of the article. Everyone shares some genes from this group, from that group. There is no genetic evidence for a specific number of identifiable races. Only a continuum, with clusters of people sharing certain traits along it. There's no way to draw a line between them with genes (or even phenotype: skin type fades from dark to light to yellow to brown, with many shades between the clusters of darker and clusters of lighter).

Say you were going to separate us all into Asian, White or Black. What would you do with all of the people with skin color, hair color, and eye shapes that fell in between? They'd be placed between the 3 clear categories, linking them together into one long continuum. Genetically, it is the same.

All traits are genetically encoded.

Therefore, if there are consistent physical differences, there are genetic differences.

Including, if you listen to Phillipe Rushton and Charles Murray, intellectual ones.

Including, if you listen to Jonathan Haidt, moral ones.

These are not fringe thinkers but thinkers widely respected in their fields.

It's just the people who show up on the internet or vote Democratic that think these scientific facts are untrue.

Genetic drift as well as evolution.

The most substantial "identifiably different inherited traits" between people of different races are socially constructed ones. Differences in hair and skin color are insubstantial in and of themselves; what makes them substantial is the social meaning that's applied to them.

For instance, let's consider a trivial and yet much more substantial inheritable characteristic: hand size. Some people inherit very large hands. Some people inherit very small ones. There's a significant and meaningful functional difference between people with large hands and people with small ones.

But hand size doesn't convey any information about where your ancestors came from.

Which is the whole point here. There are any number of inheritable characteristics that you can use to group people together by. We've settled on set of functionally irrelevant characteristics because we ascribe social meaning to them. We ignore functionally relevant ones because we don't.

Uh-huh... and what exactly is the difference between "certain groups" that mostly screw each other and "races"?

The problem is that you're using a different notion of race than what they are talking about.

Troll?

The point is about the concept of bloodlines. It's a meaningless concept. The question cannot be answered.

I don't consider that evil. It's just rationalization. Europeans rationalized the different social strata in world society by asserting that Europeans were just made of better stuff. It was a convenient psychological sop that has not foundation in actual biology or geneology.

Rationalization can lead to evil (slavery, genocide, etc.), but it is not evil in and of itself. We all do it.

The term "race" was used in Asian and the Middle East as well, conflatable with "nation" or distinct ethnicity; science supports the idea of there being four basic racial groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians and Australids.

Politics is not susceptible to reason, and science focuses on details, so is too easily abused.

I wonder what the great philosophers said on this topic.

Two reasons:

1. The color analogy doesn't work because there is a single attribute that determines color. No such single attribute determines race.

2. Race exists as a social construct and not as a biological one, because the races have been defined by a subset of traits whose groupings have been determined sociologically.

For example, most people could list the identifying characteristics that make up the classic races (caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid), but there are also sets of traits that identify individuals as Polynesian, Melanesian, native American, Asian subcontinental, aboriginal and Inuit, to name a few.

Why are these subgroups not considered race? Because they did not fit cleanly into the larger social context when the idea of race was created. And it doesn't stop there; even if you restrict yourself to the white race, there are clear physical traits that are shared by Scandinavians that make them discernable from Turks, or French or Russians. Spend enough time looking at large groups of Europeans and you get to be pretty good at spotting their ancestry; not perfectly, but well above chance. These groups are also separated by geography, and exhibit genetic differences due to restricted breeding, but we don't call them races, although you don't have to go too far back in history to hear groups like the Irish referred to as if they were a separate race.

Race ultimately represents a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal based on a collection of traits that have been chosen somewhat arbitrarily by the path of history. There is no correlation to the traits that identify one's race other than the fact that we've picked that subset ourselves. That's what makes it a social construct.

Imagine, for a moment, a room full of objects. Power tools, furniture, canned food, video game cartridges, etc.

Are some of those objects blue and some red? Sure. Is it meaningful to talk about a given object's "blueness" or "redness"? Without question. Nobody would deny the existence of blueness or redness. You might have difficulty deciding that a can of pineapple that has a blue label with red lettering is blue or red. You would have to invent a rule for making determinations like that, if you needed to divide the objects up by their blueness or redness.

And yet, for any functional purpose, a blue circular saw is more like a drill press that has a red button than it is like a can of pineapple that has a mostly-blue label.

It's arrant nonsense to say that the AAA claims that race doesn't exist, or isn't real. They're anthropologists, for Christ's sake. Nothing is more real to an anthropologist than a social category. Their point is that using a genetically and functionally insignificant set of physical characteristics to group human beings by is something that serves (and emanates from) social purposes. That "race" is a social construction.

They're not saying that people don't have black skin, or white skin. They're saying that the importance we ascribe to that is a function of culture.

That something self-evident should be controversial is an indication of how deeply rooted the cultural function of race is.

Here, let me help you with that. By "real" you mean "irrelevant," and by "mainstream media sources and peer-evaluated publications" you mean "blogs."

Pedantry, teaching, whatever.

Biologically, "race" doesn't exist. Inheritable morphological characteristics, sure. But the fact that we group a bunch of these characteristics together and stick the label "race" on them doesn't have a thing to do with biology.

You wrote:

Popular racial distinctions fail to completely capture this variation

But the major divisions in this and other studies correspond very well on the whole to popular perceptions of racial groupings.

Phenotype can be connected to genotype. We can all agree that skin color has a genetic basis. Obviously that's why a darker skinned person has darker skinned children. That doesn't mean that anyone's found a way to genetically sort each person into one of a specific number of categories of race, which is the point of the original idea.

That's a list of blog posts that link to Salon, WSJ, and NYT articles. Good job. You're a troll.

So you actually meant "i have met some indians and they had black hair and brown eyes", I will not argue against that. What you need to show to prove your point is that you have never seen a guy without black hair and brown eyes that also, with or without your knowledge, was an indian.

ps. I'm not arguing the fact that most indians have black hair and brown eyes, just that both your premise and conclusion was illogical.

"All Indians walk in single file. At least, the one I saw did."

[deleted]

And you are probably jealous.

[deleted]

I'm not sure why you're chasing the "PC" crowd, if anyone is likely to abuse the soundbite "race has no biological foundation" I'd imagine it would be dyed in the wool racists.

I prefer to use the term "ethnicity" unless talking about the four root races, so you and I agree.

However, that's not how the scientists cited felt, apparently.

I imagine "breeds" -- because we use it for domesticated animals -- is even more offensive.