No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.
There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and india. Our social construct of race varies quite substantially over those places.
[1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the...
Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions.
Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.
Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'.
See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.
Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.
The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.
I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?
The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.
That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).
Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.
Is there any definition of race where, given two people, you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at the definitions of each race and categorize the two people" because that's circular, how were those particular categories chosen? With species, you can determine that a bird and a fish are different species without knowing what birds and fish are.
> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.
This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to any arbitrary social constructs.
Conversely, the definition for “race” is explicitly arbitrary and social:
> A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.
It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1, F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of the same species?
Read up on the species problem for more information (there are now 26, not 24):
That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that a species would include the entire connected graph whose nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability to have fertile offspring.
I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very large graph, but nevertheless, all the examples seem to be within altogether very similar groups.
I think a reasonable definition for casual use doesn’t need to require the graph of a species to be fully connected, only fully reachable.
There are certainly leaks to any abstraction of species, but they are empirical cases of exceptions. They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.
This is another problem with species - where is the transition where one species evolves into another?
That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category.
So to the extent that we find "species" a meaningful category when applied correctly, then we should also find "race" a meaningful category when applied correctly. The key in both scenarios is to apply them correctly, and we should abandon them when we find more precise metrics.
That said, you are correct that there are also numerous cultural and social properties that are sometimes lumped in with race in a manner that we don't see with species, mainly because "species" hasn't been politicized. That doesn't imply that there's nothing "there" once you tune out that baggage.
I think this is the thing people misunderstand about race being a social construct, is that race is a bucket, by nature there need to be correlations between people in that bucket in order to actually place people into that bucket in the first place.
There will likely be other correlations between people in said bucket, who are in this cause usually more closely related and share more recent common ancestors.
The size of that bucket and how we put people in it is arbitrary, but the fact that correlations exist when you put people in buckets isn't.
Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.
I would dispute that claim.
Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable way)
Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives) or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race denominations.
Race as an overloaded term for sociological, antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has smartly stopped using race much, but the others still continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings.
There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.
There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is, serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many (but not all) cases.
Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.
Where's the utility in that?
What's the utility of the concept of race?
But this is true for everything. For example "night and day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue that there are no differences between night and day because of that.
could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses
No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment either.
The point is that just because two categories can mix doesn’t automatically mean that those categories don’t meaningfully exist.