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Comment by Zetice | Hacker News Reader

Sure; for one thing, there is no biological concept of race. So we should only be talking about ethnicity and cultures, and not about "race" at all, as it isn't a term with meaning.

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That's like claiming color has no physical concept, because wavelengths vary continuously, and our language about color doesn't perfectly match the underlying physical reality.

"What do you mean 'green'? Two sharp peaks at 520 and 540 nm? One 30 nm wide pseudo-Gaussian with mean at 530 nm? Is 564 nm still green, or is that yellow? What about 567 nm? It is a term without meaning."

It is like that, except there's no underlying "wavelength" to support the concept of race. It's just the word "blue" with nothing else.

Of course there is - population-wide genetic variation, as my wikipedia link demonstrates.

Nope, those are not real. There is no "population-wide genetic variation".

You must find it really confusing how smallpox killed off the Indians.

What's confusing about an isolated population that doesn't have variola virus antibodies being more susceptible than a population with antibodies and a much longer generational history of exposure?

I find it really confusing how you think that has to do with genetics...

> That's like claiming color has no physical concept, because wavelengths vary continuously, and our language about color doesn't perfectly match the underlying physical reality.

The problem with the American concept of “race” is the idea of dividing humanity into a small number of categories (five or six), with very arbitrary boundaries - the US government officially considers Afghans to be “White” but Pakistanis to be “Asian” - so two Pashtuns who look rather similar, but whose ancestors come from opposite sides of the border, are different “races”, according to mad Uncle Sam

Now, if you want to defend the idea of humanity as biologically divided into different “descent groups” - I think that may be more defensible, but we will end be up with hundreds of groups not just five or six - groups such as Sicilians, Welsh, Cantonese, Yoruba, Zulu, Ashkenazim, Navajo, Pitjantjatjara, Pashtuns, Malays, Tamils, Punjabis, Bedouins, Berbers, etc - not “White” or “Black” or “Asian”

That's perfectly analogous to color. You can argue all day which shades of teal belong to the broader categories of blue or green, and you could also instead talk solely about narrow shades like mauve, cyan, indigo, etc. That doesn't make the coarse categories of red, green, and blue, meaningless or useless.

What’s your colour analogy for my example of Pashtuns on one side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border being (according to the US government) a different “race” from those on the other, despite being physically indistinguishable? I think that’s a good example of where your analogy fails

Throughout all of biology you find definitions that are often quite arbitrary. Lions and tigers are "obviously" different species even though they share nearly all of the same characteristics and can even successfully interbreed, and produce fertile young. The same is true for all sorts of animals in biology. If you didn't know what a dingo was, and you saw one, you'd just assume it was a mut. And in fact it can also breed with dogs and produce fertile young as well - doggo? But again it's classified as an entirely different species.

Perhaps even a more extreme example is dog and wolf. It's kind of funny to think that this a nothern inuit dog [1] is the same species as a chihuahua [2], while a wolf [3] is a completely different species. Maybe most interesting is that the transition from wolf to dog happened over less than 40,000 years. Somewhere in the doggy afterlife there's one very disappointed great great... grand wolf father looking down at a chihuahua just thinking to himself.. 'Yeah, you had to go to the campfire didn't you. They just wanna give me some free food you said.'

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Inuit_Dog

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuahua_(dog)

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf

> Throughout all of biology you find definitions that are often quite arbitrary

There is a big difference though - there is mostly international agreement on what are the boundaries between species. I’m sure there are some disputes, but also vast areas of agreement

By contrast, “races” and the boundaries between them is a country-specific concept. The US is unusual in having officially defined racial categories. Most other countries don’t do that. And the few other countries that do, have very different categories from the US

I'd argue against most countries not having their own classification system. That has not been my experience, and I don't understand how e.g. a demographic census would even function otherwise. But whether or not this is true, it's inconsequential to the main point. And that's that you're absolutely right the boundaries are often quite arbitrary, but such is the nature of any and all classification systems. You end up with weird edge cases at any sort of binary line you draw.

So I think the issue is not one of arbitrariness, but would it even be useful to have some sort of a global categorization system for humans? And I think probably not. We're a species just a bit too addicted to dystopia, and I'm increasingly averse to pretty much anything that begins with the words global or world.

> I'd argue against most countries not having their own classification system. That has not been my experience, and I don't understand how e.g. a demographic census would even function otherwise.

Many countries collect data on ethnicity-hence, they will have a system for categorising people based on ethnicity, often based on which ethnicities are most common in that country. But the US is unusual in having racial classifications instead of purely ethnic ones.

Differences: race purports to be a biological classification, ethnicity is predominantly a cultural one; racial classifications very often attempt to sort everyone into a small number of categories, while ethnic classifications tend to be much more expansive (with dozens or even hundreds of categories)–e.g. the Australian government's system recognises over 250 distinct "cultural and ethnic groups" [0]

Consider the case of identical twins separated at birth, and raised by families belonging to different ethnic groups-the twins could grow up to have different ethnicities, but few would agree they could have different races. Suppose one twin is adopted by an Italian family and grows up speaking Italian at home, while the other twin is adopted by a Lebanese family and grows up speaking Arabic at home instead

In theory (and occasionally in practice), you can change your ethnicity - sometimes a person joins an ethnic group (often via marriage, religious conversion, and/or immigration), and becomes so thoroughly assimilated to it that everyone accepts them as a full member. A relatively rare scenario-and different ethnic groups differ in their openness to it-but given ethnicity is a cultural category there is nothing in principle wrong with the idea of changing your ethnicity. Whereas, in theory, your race is immutable and cannot be changed (in spite of rare cases when practice has deviated from the theory)

[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/classifications/australian...

Good luck defining race, culture, or ethnicity. They are all referring to tribes of nebulous constantly changing characteristics, that people can not only move between, but exist in multiple simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the racists got there first with their "one drop" policies.

As is usually the case, it's the discriminators that set the stage, and the rest of us who have to act out the play.

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