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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true

Examples, please, of books that investigate socioeconomic status & race that have not been called racist? Because I can't think of any. By the way, I'm not talking about literary explorations of race like "Huckleberry Finn". Although that was called racist too.

There are orders of magnitude more genetic [...] diversity among each race than there are between the races.

Hold it right there, buddy. License, registration, and sources please. Mostly sources.

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Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man.

Or you could read The Bell Curve. It is positing a small difference between "races", a difference so small that it is very minor compared to the expected range of deviation for a populace.

The idea that there is a scientifically definable thing called "race" lacks data. That is your row to hoe if you believe other. Skeptics are not required to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, Nessie, or "race".

I wonder then, what about the Melanesians that have 6% of DNA of a unique population?

Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk.

Or that some diseases only affect blacks, or whites, or whatever?

This is not data? People use freely the same techniques to categorize humans, to categorize other animals with significant variations in their species, why only humans you must not use the word "race" and use other words to describe the same thing?

> Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk.

Asians and whites don't have wildly different reactions to milk. Adult mammals are generally lactose intolerant. There is a mutation that, in humans, is found far more often in people with ancestry in Northern Europe (which isn't coextensive with "whites") than any other origin, but which is neither universally absent in all other people or universally present in people of that origin that results in lactose tolerance.

Most supposed "racial" differences (EDIT: that is, most that refer to anything that is actually a measurable difference between real human populations at all) are of this type -- things that are statistically more or less common in a population of a particular origin that is not coextensive with any of the usual "race" categories with which the supposed hard-and-fast difference is popularly associated.

You've learned anything about the history of race relations and think "race" is a better word to describe that phenomenon than "lactose intolerant"? I'll be right back, going to inform my friends that because they aren't Chinese we can go get ice cream.

Doesn't genetic testing allow you to determine where your ancestors came from to an astonishing degree? I'm pretty sure there are lots of valid ways to define a race. The question is how useful it is. Also in the past a lot of people have been lumped together inappropriately, for example apparently the genetic diversity in Africa is the biggest of all continents, yet all people from there were lumped together as "blacks".

The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents,. (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005) (Editied my previous post to reflect a single order of magnitude between 8% and 85%).

Thanks Wikipedia. Regarding being labelled racist, fine, everything gets labelled that. Even this post. I took your statement for something bit more meaningful than the cynic's "woe is the opinion of The Populous".

"The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003)."

This is completely f'n stupid...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/to-classify-h...

[edit]

BTW, I find it funny that you're wiki-scholaring using old sources that date back to before we learned all non-african humans have some neanderthal dna in them.

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