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Comment by tpm | Hacker News Reader

Race is a social construct. It's used the way you describe in some societies, but not in others, and even if it is, the races have different definitions.

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It’s not entirely a social construct, for example there are very clear genetic factors - you could use a clustering algorithm on genetic data to reveal there are very clear groups, regardless of which social culture is doing this clustering, the clusters would still emerge, because math.

You’re right that the borders are not well defined though - it is a probably distribution - just like the weights in a neural network are also a probability distribution

There are no clear genetic factors at all. They don't exist, because there are no clear biological delineations between 'races'. It's a purely social construct.

You maybe could sort of define a group of people coming from the same locality and having the same history , and they would have maybe some degree of biological similarity as well, but there would be a high number of those groups and even then it would be quite useless and with number of exceptions.

Come on, that’s just today’s Lysenkoism. We can talk like adults here.

Prove me wrong. Give me a way to detect race from DNA sample with 100% accuracy.

Set the bar at impossible so you cant be proved wrong. No system anywhere is 100% accurate, and to demand that as a standard only shows your numerical illiteracy.

Why is it impossible? It's certainly possible to tell apart cat and dog DNA. If the race theory proponents argument hold water, the same must be possible for different races.

> Prove me wrong. Give me a way to detect race from DNA sample with 100% accuracy.

You implied that in order for you to be proved wrong, the test must have 100% accuracy. I was saying that 100% accuracy is an impossible standard.

No tests in the world are 100% accurate, let alone in biology, the fact that you asked for this shows you are numerically illiterate

Here is DNA clustering that shows race: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t9Va5ai9-A4/Xd0cmvRBL4I/AAAAAAAAu...

Here is a link to the Kahn Academy course on statistics: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability If you take this course, you will understand probability better, and then you wont commit the logical fallacy of "false dichotemy" where you try to reduce complexity to binary classes which is a view that is too simplistic to accuratly represent the distributions we are talking about

In that case races do not exist as meaningful biological categories. There is no proof of their existence.

The reason I mentioned cats and dogs is you can tell them apart by their DNA with 100% accuracy.

> Here is DNA clustering that shows race: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-t9Va5ai9-A4/Xd0cmvRBL4I/AAAAAAAAu...

That image does not contain 'race', and it comes from a paper that does not even mention the word 'race'. You have provided no arguments that race exists. The paper writes:

> This observation ... will make it a challenge to trace the ancestry of African Americans to specific ethnic groups in Africa, unless considerably more markers are used.

The more markers you use, the more different groups you get. You can of course choose to 'cluster' them, but then some precision will be lost, and what exactly will be gained?

Ethnicity is not a social construct, and sometimes people use the word race as a synonym for ethnicity. There are clear genetic factors for ethnicity.

So you are saying you are able to clearly detect ethnicity of a DNA sample? Do you have anything to substantiate that?

That's literally what 23&me do, they send you a breakdown of what % of various ethnicities you are based on your DNA. E.g. 95% Northern European, 5% Ashkenazi Jew.

It's what they claim to do. The science is bunk. It's genetic astrology.

Yes and then they change it on each update. Do have a read of what their customers think about it, for example here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0cPeurGB4WX...

By definition, DNA is DNA.

Yes, you can see what someone's DNA is, if you look at their DNA.

But every innate characteristic encoded into our DNA is a social construct, and if you disagree you’re a nazi! Checkmate?

Ah yeah. I forgot that with a good frequency two black people give birth to a white baby or vice versa.

That's skin color, not race.

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