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Comment by ChemicalWarfare | Hacker News Reader

"Race" has 2 meanings.

1. Race as a social construct. It does exist in that capacity - as an extreme example Irish were not considered "white" in America (google for some "hilarious" images from "back in the day").

2. Race as a biological reality. This is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't mean that well documented taxonomic differences between human races are "fake". They do exist and are more than "skin deep" - things like bone density, cranial capacity, maturation etc etc. Ask your dentist if he can tell by looking at someone's jaw x-ray whether it belongs to an east asian or sub-saharan african.

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What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? Interpopulation diversity of both phenotype and genotype isn't remarkably different from intrapopulation diversity. There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". The concept of race was never grounded in real science and its proponents constantly change their justifications after the fact. At one point the "biological reality" of race was said to be rooted in phrenology.

Race is not just a word for different breeding populations of humans. The dilution of its meaning into something so innocuous is ahistorical, in fact it contradicts what was claimed to be the reality of race just decades ago. It's a political concept first and foremost.

No biological theory predicts races. Races are categories rooted in historical economic exploitation and domination that are a posteriori fitted with whatever truthy pseudoscientific justification is catchy at the time. Any categories of humans that biological measurements would come up with would hardly match racial categories. Perhaps the most racialized group that has distinct biological markers are Ashkenazi jews. However, the relation between Ashkenazi jews, Sephardic jews, and ethnic Arabs is very strong.

P.S. A review of the legal history of race in colonial America: https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whitene...

This is really insightful. Can you recommend any books to introduce thinking critically about race?

There's many different angles to approach the topic from. I added a link to my post providing a legal point of view. Law is an excellent historical record in many ways and it provides a window into what the ruling class thought of race. Here's a book with a much wider scope that requires a little ambition to read: https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html

I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.

>>>What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"?

to quote my own post - well documented taxonomic differences between human races.

At what point does someone become "black" or "asian"?

Or are you talking about biological differences as they correlate with geographic locality?

You can play Sorites Paradox[1] with anything; doesn't mean the categories don't exist, or that they don't carve reality at important joints.

"Heaps don't exist because you can't prove an ironclad boundary between heaps and non-heaps."

"Tallness isn't a thing because you don't have a firm, binary definition of when someone is tall."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white".

Actually, there very much are.

I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.

Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein

It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance

"Race" is more of a sociopolitical idea with a particularly noxious history, but human groups with differentiable shared recent ancestry - while fuzzy - do exist. Because "race" can be described as a continuous distribution, it helps to think about it probabilistically: there are no "definitely Caucasian" SNPs, but we do have suites of what we call Ancestry-Informative Markers that can be use to infer the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular ancestry group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the polymorphisms associated with pigmentation are informative in this regard. The fuzziness of the continuum means that it is quite possible to define an arbitrary number of "races", depending on your chosen criteria. And admixture at multiple points in history further complicates the picture. But it is possible to discern biogeographical mappings within a generous error margin. As the parent poster points out, these mappings sometimes conflict with the those that we've constructed out of ideological convenience.

What I understand of the issue is that genetic differences between populations are real, but they form a continuum whose boundaries are extremely blurry if visible at all from a genetic level. Thus the drawing of boundary lines and the assignment of individuals into those handful of categories is something subject to change from culture to culture. In other words, genetic differences do not make race a "biological reality".

They're not visible at the level of looking at one SNP at a time. If you look at a whole lot of genes, you can get a very good idea of race.

If you do a clustering analysis on a large sample of DNA data you will get different clusters corresponding to the usual definitions of races or ethnicities, depending on the number of clusters you choose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering

That wiki page has a pretty substantial "Criticism" section. The Rosenberg et. al. paper even says their paper "should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of biological race." Their study shows that genetic distance is roughly linear with physical distance, barring obstacles like mountains and oceans. The consensus in the field, based on citations on that wiki page, seems to be that human diversity is a continuum, so any dividing lines you try to make to partition it will be largely arbitrary. It's like looking at a rainbow at trying to divide up the yellow from the orange from the red and so on: you can do that, but your color categories don't completely capture the spectrum visible.

You can make meaningful and consistent groupings in a continuum . For example you can make a distinction between poor and rich citizens, even tough the income distribution is a continuum. Same goes for the rainbow, the fact that it is continuous doesn't prevent people from being able to differentiate yellow and blue.

But even so the human genome is not continuously distributed, even if the difference is linear with distance, simply due to the fact that humans are not continuously distributed geographically. You can't handwave oceans and mountains away.

The main criticism of clustering is that the hierarchy of clusters that you obtain depend on the distribution of your samples, and that we currently do not have a good uniform sampling of human DNA. In short clustering can tell you reliably if someone is Irish or Italian, but may falsely identify the french as italian if there are not enough samples for french people.

Just because there's "color brown" doesn't mean there's no "red" or "green" used to produce it even if (hypothetically) in someone's culture "brown" is considered to be "red-ish" :)

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