As some of "mixed race" these conversations always get weird. Defining a person's race seems mostly exclusionary in my experience. By that I mean, when I'm around a group of people who identify as one of my races, they think I look like a member of the other group (noticing the differences more prominently than the similarities) so either way I'm defined as an other. My family is pretty heterogenous and in a few generations I see it being hard to peg specific individuals as a particular race.
As far as I can tell, race has no taxonomic significance when applied to modern humans, because all modern humans are the same species. The system for grouping people together by facial features seems to be a social construct most of the time. I can think of a partial exception to this rule: facial features which can be linked to diseases and injuries (for example, the tell-tale evidence of stroke make it possible to know stroke-victimness by face). I call that a partial exception, because there are groups of face-affecting conditions which look similar.
What do we mean when we talk about human races anyway? I've been thinking about this for a few minutes now and I am stumped.
Ethnicity is defined primary through shared history and social grouping. Race is defined through genetics. They share some of the same, but are not the same.
> Ethnicity is defined primary through shared history and social grouping.
Agreed. But I feel ethnicity is "used" in a way like "race".
> Race is defined through genetics.
Sure? I thought genetically race had a very weak basis, and that it was basically some aspects of bodily looks and location of genetical/blood origination? The main reason we needed ethnicity as a term, because race was "simply not there in the genes" and thus "mostly about looks" which gave it very little use in proper science.
I don't think I agree with second. Germans have clearly different culture, language, habits, preferences, values and humor then Czechs. Wo ha different all above from French.
A lot of it remains when group emirates but keeps being close knit.
All dog breeds are part of the same species, and dog breeds are fundamentally a social construct. Does this mean that we need to stop categorizing dogs into breeds?
I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.
> But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".
> The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.
> They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".
>Ancestry’s DNA expert Mike Mulligan (93% Irish – everyone’s email at Ancestry gives their ethnicity breakdown) admits that the ethnicity percentage is a “top line” estimate derived from just a very small part of our DNA, a couple of letters long in the 3bn letters that make up our DNA, and that there are a lot of “inferences” made from the data. Precision is still a problem for DNA kits. Mulligan says that the Irish, Scots and Welsh are “almost indistinguishable from a DNA point of view”. Meanwhile, when it comes to western Europe “it is the most traipsed-about part of the planet The amount of DNA that has been blurred together is incredible”. Remarkably, DNA testers can’t really tell the difference between German and French DNA.
> I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.
"Race" is just how you look to other people and how that ties to your status. Its categorization is very much country dependent - Hispanic people are often not considered white in America, while no one would be making that distinction in Europe. On the contrary, Europeans often don't consider Arabs white, even though they often look white. The US and Europe have things like 'white', 'black', 'asian' but Latin Americans are much more nuanced. There are people that would be considered 'white' in Brazil and 'black' in the US. There are also things like passing [1] and so forth.
All I'm saying is, this has nothing to do with the results of a 23andme sequencing run, which would provide details about your ancestry. Race (in the US sense) correlates pretty weakly with ancestry, e.g. all the early humans for most of human history were black.
If you keep doing flamewars on HN, including race war, we're going to have to ban you. If that's what you want to do on the internet please find somewhere else to do it.
I agree in the real world, I can send a swab of spit to 23andme and get a guess as to where my ancestors were. I could also send a swab of spit to ancestry.com and get a completely different guess. These services are not precise, and even if they were, race and ancestry are not tightly coupled. Race is phenotypes, color of skin, shape of nose. Gene expression is a crapshoot, with the number of genotypes often dwarfing the number of phenotypes, racial features can skip generations or disappear entirely. My grandfather had white skin, a sharp nose, yet none of these features were passed on to me. Ancestry (genetics) and race (gene expression) are not tightly coupled.
I do think that ancestry can provide valuable insights into one's self, however I'm still not sold on the necessity or reality of race. Ancestry is not written on a person's face.
Skin color, facial structure and other commonly held visual traits of "race" don't map strongly to genetic identifiers that could form some scientifically valid definition of "race." Two black people living in the same area, sharing the same cultural and ethnic identity, can differ more genetically than either with a white immigrant.
In other words, that "black" is a race, and "white" is a race, etc, is entirely a social construct, which should be non-controversial given that these categories were created and solidified, culturally and politically, long before genetic science was even a thing.
> Two black people living in the same area, sharing the same cultural and ethnic identity, can differ more genetically than either with a white immigrant.
I'm pretty sure that's false. What is true is that africans exhibit a great amount of genetic diversity, i.e. two africans will typically be more genetically different than two europeans. But the genetic distance between either of those two africans and either of those two europeans will still be even greater.
> In other words, that "black" is a race, and "white" is a race, etc, is entirely a social construct, which should be non-controversial given that these categories were created and solidified, culturally and politically, long before genetic science was even a thing.
It's a social construct to the same extent as colors are a social construct, which were formulated long before the theories of electromagnetism was even a thing.
A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality. That applies to any category invented by mankind. For instance, considering plants and animals, or even living beings and inanimate objects, as belonging to different categories is also a social construct. Because, after all, they're all just an association of atoms.
>I'm pretty sure that's false. What is true is that africans exhibit a great amount of genetic diversity, i.e. two africans will typically be more genetically different than two europeans. But the genetic distance between either of those two africans and either of those two europeans will still be even greater.
I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people.
A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
>A thing being a social construct doesn't mean it doesn't describe an underlying reality
It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
> I didn't say Africans and Europeans, I said black people and white people.
Same thing
> A black person from Africa and a black person from elsewhere are considered the same race because of their visual similarities, regardless of their background. That's the social construct.
And also perhaps because they actually are from the same race? Do you consider all the current inhabitants of the USA to be native americans?
> It can be inaccurate enough that it isn't useful, though.
That's true, but racial categories are really accurate, especially in this age of cheap DNA testing. As for usefulness, I'd say it's pretty useful in the medical field, for instance certain drugs work in some races but not in others due to racial differences in body chemistry.
All Africans are black and all Europeans are white? That's a new one.
As for medicine, while the efficacy of drugs can be ethnicity dependent, race is such a weak proxy for it that it often leads to mistakes when doctors operate by habit. Nothing trumps actual genetic screening (as opposed to "which Anglo-centric category do you fit best based on how you look").
