Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic.
Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.
Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.
Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.
Just off the top of my head, there are over 93000 references in PubMed to "ancestry." They vary whether they call it "race" or "ethnicity" or "region of ancestral origin" but plenty of adults are quite happy talking about it.
Now who is strawmanning? (BTW, there is no blood test for autism, yet scientists are pretty darn sure it's mostly genetic.)
I'm sure you can come up with a definition of "Polynesian" such that genetic tests would be useless. That more shows that people can some up with useless definitions. However, someone else can could up with a definition of "Polynesian" that is useful: people whose ancestors inhabited Polynesia (say) 1000 years ago. And genetic tests for any individual in isolation would be very very very highly correlated with the actual answer of their ancestors coming from Polynesia. (There are, of course, people of mixed ancestry, but this doesn't mean that ancestral measures don't exist no more than hermaphrodites mean sex doesn't exist.) "Black" would need serious subdivision, but nothing that makes a person on the street drop their jaw and say "I never thought of 'Black' that way."
I suspect this is as far as constructive discussion has gone, so I'm going to stop here if that's okay.
The same is true of "polynesian" -- sure, they might have been isolated at one point but by now almost every "polynesian" you meet in Hawaii has a ton of white and japanese ancestry too (substitute appropriate mixing for Maori or Samoan and Fijian, etc...), so what use is it to talk about the potential IQ effects his great-great-grandparents might have had?
Yet the argument at hand (that, as far as I can tell, you are in support of) is that somehow the "race" of real people can, because it is "genetically determined", be correlated with something like IQ, which it just can't. It's far too polluted a data set.
That typical (now there's an overgeneral term!) black woman will have a darker skin color than a typical white woman. She will be less susceptible to sunburn. She is more likely to suffer from certain genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia.
Now, none of these are absolute statements. They are all probabilities. That does not make them useless. If someone comes into the ER with severe pain in their extremities, it is very useful to know that they're black. They may or may not have sickle cell anemia - that can be determined conclusively through a blood test and thorough medical examination. But knowing whether they're likely to is very useful information, because it lets you determine whether it's worth putting in the extra effort to diagnose it conclusively. (Similarly, even if they carry the genetic marker, they might not be having a sickle-cell crisis, and it could be a blood clot or some other medical condition. But it's pretty damn likely.)
It's a fallacy to believe that just because the data you're working with can't tell you everything, it tells you nothing. Rather, you should recognize the limitations of what you know, and use them to determine what else you need to know. Race tells you something. It doesn't tell you a whole lot, because there's a lot of individual variation within a race. But that doesn't mean it tells you nothing, either.
It doesn't even pass the smell test. Seriously: would Obama (who's turning into quite the counterexample here) show up "black" or "white" on that test? If the answer isn't "both" (it has to be, as he's almost literally 50/50) then the test can't work. If it is "both", then what meaning did "black" have again as a genetic grouping?
People insist on misinterpreting me here. I'm not saying that it's impossible to tell if someone has ancestry from africa or east asia or wherever. I'm saying that blocking real people (i.e. not members of an isolated subgroup with pure ancestry) up into a "race" like "asian" or (especially) "black", doing studies on them (like an IQ test) and arguing that this is "valid" because those groups are "genetically defined" is wrong. It's bad science. Please stop.
I tried to qualify my statements here very carefully. I'm not claiming a strict genetic definition of race. I'm also not defending this specific blood test, I only know about it from that Wired article. But the theoretical possibility of what I have mentioned seems to exist, if that test or one like it actually works. Or am I mistaken?
Out of curiosity, when you say "people have been interbreeding like rabbits", does that mean that you believe that rabbit "breeds" are also a cultural distinction?
So please, don't say things like "race is genetically determined". You're right that a "genetic cluster" or "ancestral group" is better defined. But those IQ results weren't corrected for that, so again: non-science.
No, it's not, and classifying people "like that" makes sense.
> In one of the most extensive of these studies to date, considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas
http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
These guys http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/815.long even have a picture http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/815/F2.large.jpg
Please find me the "races" on that chart. I don't see any. This is a chart of "genetic clusters". Which one does, say, Barack Obama (most famous mestizo I could think of, but frankly you could put almost all of the non-white population of the US into similar buckets) belong to? He doesn't fit. Most people don't fit. (Editted to point out: it's specifically a study of a small number of individuals of "pure" background.) Yet, and this is important, he does have a "race". Everyone, including himself, agrees that he's "black".
So where does "black" go on that chart? It doesn't. So "race" is non-scientific.
In the cluster on the left.
This is specifically a chart of individuals with "pure" ancestry. People with mixed ancestry (i.e. almost all of us) have no spot on it. It doesn't tell us anything about our "race".
To get back to the example. If "blacks" belong on the bottom left than Obama (with his northern european mother) isn't black. So either he has a "race" or he doesn't. Which is it?
Stop thinking about "race" as a measurable thing, it isn't.
The fact that some people, mostly from the former European colonies, won't perfectly fit doesn't change that. The fact that this distinction is blurred, emphasized, or altered for political reasons doesn't change that. The fact that outward features, which are often used as proxy for the underlying genetics, can sometimes be misleading doesn't change that.
Also, I don't think "almost all of us" or even most of us wouldn't fit into those clusters. Do you have a source?
I understand that Obama is not exactly technically black; that legal, political or self-identified race may not align with those clusters or even known ancestry but it doesn't invalidate the concept. Just like there are people who are legally blind, and a subgroup who really can't see anything.