Greg Laden has an excellent article on the genetics and evolution of race — basically, it’s an irrelevant pairing of concepts.
“Eat your heart out, Philip Rushton,” indeed.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
the subject of race was discussed on the September 5th episode of The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe. I thought Steven Novella had some interesting things to say on the subject.
You can download it here:
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/skepticsguide/podcastinfo.asp?pid=111
I’m still left wondering how the Asian epicanthal eyelid fold does not have a genetic basis.
Basically, that article is a lot of handwaving. Basically, if the theory of evolution is true, humans living in different environments must have evolved differences. Basically, for some people when science conflicts with their ideology, they choose ideology.
Define race, and define exactly how we distinguish between one race and another. What are the dividing lines? And then tell my why the concept is useful.
Given enough time without interbreeding, sure.
How does this conclusion follow from Greg’s post, which only looks at one trait’s association with race?
Bingo.
“Race” is a cultural construct. There’s a difference between “race” and cline. How would the asian eyelid fold mean more than red hair as a marker of “race”? How does skin colour mean anything of that sort when the ancestors of some groups with black skin left Africa before the ancestors of the so-called Caucasians?
“The subject of race was discussed on the September 5th episode of The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe. I thought Steven Novella had some interesting things to say on the subject.”
I actually wanted to post about that. Didn’t he say something about how researchers could tell somebody’s race (i.e. what their ancestral ethnicity is) from their genetic code? I don’t remember it exactly, but he was saying that you can identify race 100% of the time if you have enough “genetic markers” or something like that.
somebody’s race (i.e. what their ancestral ethnicity
Conflating distinct concepts.
That was not an excellent article. It gave grossly insufficient evidence for its conclusion. Were an article of this quality advocating a claim PZ finds politically distasteful, he would be quick to label it “canard.” For shame!
This sure seems like bad science to me, of the type usually attributed to “the other side”. It’s clear that they are looking for a conclusion that satisfies their ideology, even if if means wearing blinders.
We know that race affects outward appearance, whether in terms of skin color or eyelids or hair texture or nose shape. We know it can affect other things, such as alcohol tolerance or tendency toward sickle cell anemia / tolerance toward malaria. Whether these things are “irrelevant” or not is totally subjective, but denying they are determined by genetics, and those genetics come from their ancestry, is just silly.
Still waiting for someone to define “Race.” rob’s attempt to say that race affects skin color etc, is exactly backwards. Those phenomena have been used to define race. Population genetics are not the same thing as race.
What is race?
‘Race’ is an event in which people try to go faster than each-other, typically starting from the same location and endeavoring to reach a finish line.
Also, those who do so are quite selective about the phenomena they use to define “race”, as well. They go on a lot about skin color and hair texture; not so much about other less immediately-obvious traits that vary among populations, such as the ratio of body mass to volume, or relative length of extremities–regularly-varying traits which could also be used to define “races”, but which would break out along different lines than the skin color ones do.
Our being visual primates, it’s not especially surprising that they focus on dramatically visible phenotypic features (skin color and such), and downplay the more subtle population variations. Even so, it’s no less cherry-picking data to reinforce their pre-formed racial conclusions.
Obviously, looking for a strictly biological basis for the notion of race is going to fail, but that shouldn’t lead us to conclude that race doesn’t exist any more than we should reject notions like “hot” or “cold”, or “Christian” or “Buddhist”. Race isn’t something that’s been defined from strictly biological grounds, but rather by taking traits commonly shared by and also largely particular to people within certain a particular geographical region as the defining characteristics. No, those traits aren’t going to be nicely demarcated from the rest of the traits shown by the rest of the people the world over, but that isn’t grounds for rejecting the notion altogether — not any more than I should reject notions like “green” or “blue” because there are hundreds of paint chips between the two, and I can’t pinpoint where they stop being green and start becoming blue. That’s how the human brain works — it is an analog computer that does nothing but develop loose conceptual associations for the purpose of classifying the world around it. And it works. That’s why things like weight and hair color aren’t every bit as good for defining race as facial structure or skin tone, they have to traits which are generally common and particular to a group of people who come from a geographical region which, for whatever reason, we consider to be a region worth applying the label to.
It makes exactly as much sense to dismiss the notion of distinct religions. What makes the difference between a schism and a completely different religion? It isn’t genetics and it isn’t usually any one ideological trait. But we don’t make the argument that any ideological trait could be used as well as any other to demarcate one religion from another. Rather, we simply make a quick mental rundown of percieved similarities and differences and decide, with respect to the system in question, which ones stand out as the best markers for classification.
I think dismissing the notion of race is going to garner knee-jerk reactions from people who think that they have a good idea of what race is (that’s nearly everyone). Everyone, even the ones who pretend not to, makes decisions based on nothing more than fuzzy conceptual associations, so it is better to challenge whether “race” is a classification of value, rather than a classification at all. In any case, there was more than biology that went into the classification, so simply suggesting that biology doesn’t by itself support that classification isn’t going to dispel the notion of “race”.
I didn’t say it’s not “real.” Socially, it’s incredibly real, and the consequences of the concept are there for all to see. It’s a system of inequality.
However, for those folks who want to retain it as a biological definition: What is race?
I should make my stance more explicit — I think (as the post was claiming) that race is an irrelevant classification. I’m taking issue with the “race doesn’t exist” line of attack. It should be a “‘race’ is poorly defined, based on geography and historical tensions, and has no utility” line of attack instead.
Sorry, I misinterpreted your posts.
I’m a sociologist. Race has social origins not biological ones.
I’m a physical chemist. Race has molecular origins. (no citation needed.)
so Christian, what is race biologically?
However, for those folks who want to retain it as a biological definition: What is race?
A partially inbreeding group below the species level that shares some hereditary traits.
Ok, but the point remains that skin color etc are determined by genetics, and that what we label “race” does have roots in genetics. Sure, where the exact lines between one race and another is hard to say and is rather arbitrary. But that is the same with such concepts as “species” and “subspecies” and “order” and “phylum” and whatever. The dividing lines are arbitrary and fuzzy, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t represent genetic differences.
rob: what is race?
I’ve got a sociological definition (basically a system of organization based in phenotypical differences perceived to be significant) but no one has been able to give me a biological definition. How many races are there? What are the lines that separate them? what characteristics define them?
Is there some biological issue involved? sure. But it’s basically a social distinction that uses superficial differences to create different types of people.
True, but that never stopped us classifying all other species into races, varieties, subspecies and whatnot.
Rob and others:
My understanding is that what is being disputed here is the popular idea that “race”, as defined socially by prominent differences in skin texture, facial features, and the like, necessarily implies certain other traits which the popular concept of race associates with a given “race” as defined by those anatomicl features. In other words, I think what’s being contested is the idea that dark skin color, dark curly hair, “black” facial proportions, greater athletic ability, greater dancing ability, disproportionately large penises, etc. constitute a “suitcase” of traits and that possession of the first two or three is a reliable predictor of the others–not the idea that each of these individual traits is hereditary or has a genetic basis.
From a biological perspective, “race” as it’s commonly conceived of belongs in the same category as “kind” the way Creationists use it (the orders Felidae and Canidae are separate “kinds” from a creationist perspective, but the two entire kingdoms of Eubacteria and Archaebacteria–or have those been overturned again–constitute a single “bacteria-kind”). It’s a purely human construction that primarily reflects human perceptual biases and learned prejudices, to the point where it is useless, for the purpose of providing a guide to serious study, as even an approximation of the underlying biological reality.
These all vary independently. For example, sickle-cell anemia* occurs only in a strip of Africa between then Sahara and the rainforest (and obviously in descendants of people from there); people just south of there look identical but lack the allele.
Take hair color and the rhesus factor. Almost all of the variation in these two occurs within people that have are tightly clustered around one extreme each in skin color, eyelids, hair texture, and nose shape.
* You can’t have a “tendency toward” that. Either you have the allele, or you lack it.
And not always in the same way! I keep being amazed at the US definition of “black”, which is “any visible amount of African ancestry”, so that it includes even Colin “Paleface” Powell. Not only is he not considered “white”, he’s not even considered “mixed”! That wouldn’t happen in Brazil, as far as I’ve read.
These all vary independently. For example, sickle-cell anemia* occurs only in a strip of Africa between then Sahara and the rainforest (and obviously in descendants of people from there); people just south of there look identical but lack the allele.
Take hair color and the rhesus factor. Almost all of the variation in these two occurs within people that have are tightly clustered around one extreme each in skin color, eyelids, hair texture, and nose shape.
* You can’t have a “tendency toward” that. Either you have the allele, or you lack it.
And not always in the same way! I keep being amazed at the US definition of “black”, which is “any visible amount of African ancestry”, so that it includes even Colin “Paleface” Powell. Not only is he not considered “white”, he’s not even considered “mixed”! That wouldn’t happen in Brazil, as far as I’ve read.
And how is that different from any other sort of classification, such as species, subspecies, or whatever? I don’t dispute that the lines are arbitrary and fuzzy. I do dispute that they are not indicative of genetic differences. That is as stupid as saying that the difference between a golden retriever and a labrador retriever are not genetic. What are they then? Learned predudice? Give me a break.
David Marjanović,
The Colin Powell/Brazil issue you raise is interesting. I’ve seen estimates of between 49 and 54% of the Brazilian population having African ancestry. In the US, we declare 12% of the population “black” but that depends on factors such as how many of your great-great-great-grandparents had ancestry in Africa. If one of them is “100% black,” you’re black; if that person is “50% black” you’re white (at least in Louisiana where 1/32 “black blood” officially designates one as black–upheld by SCOTUS)
When my students ask me how many races there are, I tell them “However many a society defines there to be.” Yeah, it’s inexact, but we’re dealing with an ephemeral concept conjured into existence.
what is it, then, rob? Define race.
We know it can affect other things, such as alcohol tolerance or tendency toward sickle cell anemia
Oh, lovely. tell me, what “racial” characteristic indicates a higher chance of sickle cell anemia? I’ll tell you which one it isn’t, and that’s skin colour.
When Cavalli-Sforza produced his genetic map, he was asked why he had 256 “races”. His response was that the computers would only let him use 256 colours.
The genetics blend seamlessly, the concept of “race” (as opposed to clines) is a social one, and is not useful in science.
Christian Burbham wrote:
LOL! That was funny. But molecules are made of atoms and subatomic particles. Ha ha! Physicists win (again)!
More seriously, my anthro text (The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology by John H. Relethford, 5th ed.) defines race as “A group of populations sharing certain biological traits that make them distinct from other groups of populations. In practice, the concept of race is very difficult to apply to patterns of human variation.”
However, the text goes on to discuss some of the difficulties with the concept. Relethford wisely points out that “[B]iological variation is real; the order we impose on this variation by using the concept of race is not.”
For example, it is nearly impossible to select a single defining trait or even set of traits that would be useful for categorizing all humans populations (like skin color), and that this is further complicated by the fact that there is often a continuum in the trait, rather than discrete boundaries. Ultimately he discards the concept of race as a dated and largely useless for explaining the complexity of human biological variation.
That seems entirely sensible to me. There is a definition (actually there are probably many, many more), but it isn’t one that’s terribly useful or important from a biological perspective.
Greg Laden’s article is an excellent article on the lack of correlation between skin color and running ability.
Bingo.
On another note, the cats (Felidae) and the dogs + foxes (Canidae) are traditionally considered families (that’s why their names end in -idae) belonging to different suborders (Caniformia, Feliformia; Caniformia also includes the bears, weasels, seals, and so on) of the same order (Carnivora), while Bacteria and Archaea are considered different domains (each containing several kingdoms). But don’t confuse the clades with their ranks: the clades are real, the ranks are 100 % subjective; the clades exist in nature, the ranks are a convention (and a rather unstable one).
Greg Laden’s article is an excellent article on the lack of correlation between skin color and running ability.
Bingo.
On another note, the cats (Felidae) and the dogs + foxes (Canidae) are traditionally considered families (that’s why their names end in -idae) belonging to different suborders (Caniformia, Feliformia; Caniformia also includes the bears, weasels, seals, and so on) of the same order (Carnivora), while Bacteria and Archaea are considered different domains (each containing several kingdoms). But don’t confuse the clades with their ranks: the clades are real, the ranks are 100 % subjective; the clades exist in nature, the ranks are a convention (and a rather unstable one).
I’m ok with “A group of populations sharing certain biological traits that make them distinct from other groups of populations” as someone above quoted. But just like concepts such as species and all the others, they have very fuzzy boundaries.
So you are suggesting that race is all cultural. Why is it, then, that you would be able to identify someone whose ancestors all come from china as “asian” and someone whose ancestors all come from africa as “african”…..even if those people were raised entirely by europeans who had no knowledge of their ancestry?
The only reason is because there are genetic differences which happen to result in differences to their appearance. Are you seriously arguing otherwise? Seriously???
My best friend would be considered “Asian” considering that her mother is from Korea. However, her father’s ancesters come from Norway. What is she?
I’m saying the continent of origin has no inherent meaning or importance, and only takes on such under social conditions. Are you going to dispute that?
And, moving beyond what race is, why is it so important to define people’s race, rob?
let’s take it a step further, rob, what’s Tiger Woods?
Depends on what kind of “running ability” you are talking about.
“The frequency of the 577X null allele differs between human groups: it is approx 10% in Africans but approaches 50% in Eurasian populations. Two independent studies have reported associations between R577X and elite athlete status; the frequency of the 577XX null genotype is lower in sprinting and power athletes and higher in endurance athletes.”
Considering that the “Africans” here are Nigerians (HapMap), the population stereotypically perceived as producing a lot of sprint athletes actually has a higher frequency of the ‘sprint athlete’ genotype!
Of course it would be very bad to draw conclusions about which group “runs best” on the basis of such a small sample, but the sample size didn’t seem to stop people here from drawing the opposite conclusion!
Who said it is?
All I am saying is that race is a word that is identical to words like species, subspecies, and various other taxonomic categories. All of them are by nature fuzzy and hard to define.
Is it clear whether a polar bear and a grizzly bear are the same or different species? Not really, because they can and do interbreed in the wild and produce fertile offspring.
I suppose a case could be made, then, that the word “species” should be tossed out the window, because it is meaningless. Honestly, I don’t have a strong opinion on that one. As with the word “race”. They are just words, and I’m not interested in the words. You keep implying I am, but I’m not.
But if you then try to argue that the only difference between this animal and this animal is “cultural”, I’m gonna call BS.
As with the word “race”. They are just words, and I’m not interested in the words. You keep implying I am, but I’m not.
you’re own posts belie that.
Rob wrote:
People do have genetic differences that make us look different from one another. That isn’t really the issue. The issue is which traits do we select to define race? Skin color turns out to be not terribly useful from a genetic or biological standpoint.
Part of the problem is that race is typically defined by what is most obvious to us, like skin color, but what is most obvious to us may not be the most meaningful biologically trait. More importantly, the differences that are so obvious and easily identifiable to us are dwarfed by the genetic similarities we share.
Your question clarifies one thing for sure, you have misunderstood everything I have said.
I NEVER said that race was a black and white thing (pun acknowledged), or that people couldn’t be mixtures of one and another, in any proportion. Why would I say such a thing? I am not stupid. I have said all along that race is a fuzzy concept. But “fuzzy” is not the same as “meaningless” or “not based on genetics”.
What does that even mean? We share 50% of our genetics with a banana. Does that mean we are “equally similar to a banana as we are different”? Relative to what?
#27: When my students ask me how many races there are, I tell them “However many a society defines there to be.”
Of course you are right. But you can say the same about languages or religions. However, it does not follow that the classifications of those are useless.
There are many other things that indicate a difference … eyelid shape, nose shape, hair texture, etc.
However, all of these things taken together DO give us a fairly good means of estimating what part of the world someone’s ancestry is mostly from. Sometimes the information more reliable than at other times, of course, but with people from european vs asian vs african descent, it is generally pretty reliable. Obviously, the more “pure” their ethnic background, the more reliable it is.
And that comes from the fact that people whose ancestors come from different parts of the world would be expected to have more genetic differences than people with ancestors from similar parts of the world. Some of those would be expected to be superficial appearance differences, some might be other differences like immunities and such.
This doesn’t mean some people are “superior” to others based on their ancestry, or that people fit into neat little categories. If you read what I write and assume I think those things, read it again and again until you are convinced otherwise, please.
you keep saying it’s fuzzy, but you never say what it is.
subcontinental population genetics would seem to be far more important than continent of origin in determining such things as immunity (or susceptibility to sickle cell disease, as noted above)
Race is far too crude to really be meaningful biologically. Its primary importance has been social, and as such it has been, first and foremost, a system of domination–both in the US and globally.
#33: My best friend would be considered “Asian” considering that her mother is from Korea. However, her father’s ancesters come from Norway. What is she?
When populations mix and interbreed, the early-generation individuals of mixed ancestry are likely to be identified by their differences from the majority group. You gave a good example of the strong cultural bias (at least in America) to classify “mixed” individuals as members of minorities. That bias is obviously purely cultural, with zero biological basis.
It follows logically that in a highly “mixed” society, such as present-day North America, any biological significance race might have had when populations were separated, have lost most of their significance.
But this line of argument does not help to answer the question how much significance there was originally.
Well then read them again, because you are wrong. In a post above, I decided to not even use words but used links to pictures to express what I meant.
Here, I’ll do it again, making my point entirely without using the word “race”:
Compare this person and this person.
Which of the two have relatively more more african in their ancestry, and which have more asian? I am only referring to the geographical location of their ancestors.
If you guess that the first has more asian and the second has more african, on what was this based? Because the different genetics of the people pictured resulted in recognizable differences in appearances? Or because of some cultural thing?
That is really my only point. The more two individual’s ancestors are geographically, the more their genetics can be expected to differ, both in outward appearance and in other ways. This is not controversial when it comes to every other species.
As you can see, my point has nothing to do with the word “race”. Hypersensitive political correctness appears to be causing people to read other things into what I say.
Here, rob:
What race is this man
What can you tell me about him from this picture (geographic origin, diseases, anything)
Here’s what you wrote:
So you are asserting that there is an entity, “race”, and your purported entity has a direct causative effect on phenotype.
You call it “hypersensitive political correctness”; we call it asking you to back up your assertion with some evidence.
Since I moved to Europe, I have met quite a few people here who are completely surprised I am an American. “Wow, but you don’t look American!” Evidently, they have some ideas about what Americans looks like, and somehow I do not fit into that. With piqued curiosity, I have asked for an explanation, but I have never managed to get anything coherent out of them. Rob, you sound like these people.
Rob, I am sure you’re a nice person and all, but this kind of talk just doesn’t come across well. Maybe you think it sounds smart, but I would ask you to follow your own advise and re-read your posts… and keep re-reading them until you see why people might not think that you’re coming up with any new insights.
Rob wrote:
It means that the difference in, for example, skin color or eye fold phenotypes are relatively minor considering the vast amount of similarities we share, genetically speaking.
Here is an explanatory snippet from the same text I mentioned in my earlier post:
Emphasis in original. In terms of our genetics, the typical markers that we ascribe to race just aren’t all that important.
Further, it’s harder than it seems (as was already pointed out) to identify a person this way. I mean, you’re just guessing in cases where it isn’t immediately obvious, which means your tool isn’t very good. What is this young woman’s ancenstry?
Yes, populations of people sometimes look very different. But sometimes they don’t. And since there is usually a gradient, demarcating groups of humans this way isn’t exactly the best tool you could use.
They give us a crude and often unreliable method, to be sure. They just don’t tell us very much about our species as a whole. Which is why the concept is more meaningful from a cultural perspective.
In any case, which traits do we pick? You have skin color and nose shape listed, but how to we tell the difference between, for example, people of West African heritage and those with East African just by looking at them? The racial concept is almost worthless in cases where the typical “giveaway” features vary more subtly. It’s not just fuzzy, sometimes it is useless or even worse it’s downright misleading.
You realize evolution can’t work unless there are group evolved differences, right? No, I guess you don’t. I look forward to PeeCee linking to a “refutation” of the existence of dog breeds.
MAJeff said: “Race is far too crude to really be meaningful biologically”
Spoken like a true sociologist.
You people should take it up with real scientists who are doing real race based research. Notice that Laden and PZ don’t – because they can’t.
Race is how one group tends to assert itself and classify outsiders. Remind me how the Anglo-Saxons are racially superior to the Celts, or how the Nordic races are superior to the Alpine races. Oh, sorry, we don’t indulge in that sort of nonsense ay more. How about the relative superiority of the Punjabi warriors, over the plodding Bengali peasants. The British were great at this sort of stuff, classifying everybody ad coming up with reasons why one group would be better at task than another, then moving populations round, as labourers, administrators, etc. Hence we have Tamils in Sri Lanka, their cousins in Fiji, etc.
We differ in too many ways , most of which are hidden from view, but we classify people on their appearance, or at times on their ancestry even when their appearance gives no information. Octoroons could be slaves, because that small amount of blood made them inferior.
Humans have a lot of social malleability, but that often gets confounded with physical markers, so we blame race for what we see of SES. I reviewed a lot of Phil Rushton’s work on IQ and brain size when it came out, and it was and is pernicious nonsense. We might expect group differences if we had different demands between groups, but one of the major roles of intelligence is to allow us to manipulate others and avoid being manipulated ourselves, a demand that occurs in all social situations.
Race’ has a social reality, but correlates poorly with what we actually think of when we mean race.
James T. Smith:
The article you link to argues that there is a good reason “continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity” for epidemiological research. You do realize that socially constructed categories can have real biological consequences don’t you? That the socially constructed category of “African American” can have real biological consequences like increased risk of hypertension, diabetes, etc?
Hence their use of SELF-IDENTIFIED categories of race rather than biological categories? Unless you are arguing that people know their own genetic structure and explain it to their physicians?
You also realize that any groups created by evolution are, by definition, transient and in flux rather than “natural kinds” that are fixed or stable? So pointing to genetic differences that arise out of population genetics isn’t to point to anything other than a temporary condition in the process of evolution rather than anything essentially “real?”
You should take it up with real scientists studying the genetics of race:
http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Luigi_Cavalli-Sforza/
http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/main.html
http://www.smm.org/buzz/museum/ask/graves
Snark aside, that was an interesting article you referred us to. However, I don’t think it definitively refutes MAJeff’s and other’s point in quite the way you seem to think it does.
p. 2:
is a long way away from rob’s assertion that race causes phenotype.
p. 2 again:
That sounds a lot like Leni’s point that
As for that “latent heterogeneity within strata defined by such variables” (p. 3):
In other words, “black Africans” can be more different from each other than they are from Caucasians or Asians or other “races”. That’s a fairly elastic definition of “difference”, when within-group variation can regularly exceed between-group variation.
And it’s reminiscent of Graculus’ point that
Still on p. 3:
So they have to modify the commonly-accepted definition of “race” to make it even crudely useful.
p. 6:
In other words, race works as a classification, except when it doesn’t.
pp. 6-7:
In other words, race works as a classification, except when it doesn’t.
p. 7:
So even differences in outcomes among races can be environmental rather than genetic.
Continuing on p. 7:
Which I believe was Jeff’s point to begin with, and the antithesis of rob’s, about the direction of causality.
Thank you for an interesting article, but I don’t think it provides quite the devastating critique of PZ, Greg, MAJeff, and others that you seem to think it does.
James T Smith wrote:
Circular statement aside, did someone assert that there are no genetic differences between groups of people? I know I didn’t, at least I certainly didn’t mean to.
And the paper you linked to is interesting. Still, I get the feeling Hispanics aren’t going to be a big part of their research.
Re: #55: Said Stewart, “We might expect group differences if we had different demands between groups”
Like maybe vastly different climates? Or are the environments of, say, Norway and Somoa socially constructed, too?
“Race’ has a social reality, but correlates poorly with what we actually think of when we mean race”
That’s completely wrong, read the link provided in comment #54.
Said Leni, “did someone assert that there are no genetic differences between groups of people”
Yes. If you can sort people genetically into related groups then race exists. And of course you can, and these genetic sortings correlate with percieved racial categories.
I’m not going to respond to Thalactros, since he is dilberately misrepresenting the linked article. I urge everyone to read the article for themselves. As it states, “Both for genetic and non-genetic reasons, we believe that racial and ethnic groups should not be assumed to be equivalent, either in terms of disease risk or drug response. A ‘race-neutral’ or ‘color-blind’ approach to biomedical research is neither equitable nor advantageous, and would not lead to a reduction of disparities in disease risk or treatment efficacy between groups. Whether African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders or Asians respond equally to a particular drug is an empirical question that can only be addressed by studying these groups individually. Differences in treatment response or disease prevalence between racial/ethnic groups need to be studied carefully; naive inferences about genetic causation without evidence should be avoided. At the same time, gratuitous dismissal of a genetic interpretation without evidence for doing so is also unjustified.”
thalarctos wrote:
Those were pretty much the same thoughts I had when I read those parts.
I’m not opposed to looking at groups of people based on race or anything, so I let it go. It’s ok if it doesn’t work in every single instance, if they can learn something useful and do it in a way that doesn’t neglect large swathes of people because of the color of their skin, I say go for it.
But it looks like an absolute minefield at first blush, and I can’t help but be suspicious that it’s all going to end up as a marketing ploy for cholesterol medication.
Unless you use other criteria, in which case the differences shake out differently.
Damn me for quoting the authors’ exact words!
If you think I’m misrepresenting the article, show us where the misrepresentation lies.
And just fyi, I’m not a “he”, either.
James T. Smith wrote:
Ok. Except no one said race didn’t exist or that it didn’t have a biological basis. I merely pointed out that the concepts of race that we use in everyday life don’t have nearly as much genetic significance as we seem to give it. MA Jeff points out that it is culturally far more significant, and I don’t think your article refutes that.
One is far more likely to encounter social and cultural issues regarding race (particularly in this country) than they are health ones. I imagine. I admit that is a guess, but it seems like a plausible one to me. Course, that isn’t to say there are no race-related health issues. But calling them race related seems to emphasize their connection to racial traits in a way that is probably misleading.
It’s genetic, and only incidentally racial because those characteristics are also genetic and an easy way to pick out groups of different people. Emphasizing race just seems odd and implies a kind of causality that doesn’t really exist, and it doesn’t address variation within the group. (I don’t think that article was suggesting race causes illness or anything- it just seems overly broad and arbitrary.)
It does, of course, but it’s not really “Asian.” Filipinos and Indonesians often don’t have it; on the other hand, Bushmen and Lapps do have it.
That’s one of the problems with the race concept–the characters used to define it don’t actually line up with one another geographically.
rob,
Sometimes those classifications are inappropriate as well. “Species” doesn’t mean much for a lot of asexual organisms. “Subspecies,” which is pretty close to “race,” doesn’t work well if the characters you’re interested vary clinally rather than discontinuously, and/or have very different patterns of distribution.
It’s not that humans couldn’t in principle have well-defined races or subspecies–but they seem to be among the species which don’t.
Leni claims “no one said race didn’t exist or that it didn’t have a biological basis”, which is odd given that if you folllow the link above you will read Greg Laden saying, “everyone knows that the differences between humans that are often categorized as “racial traits” are either overstated or irrelevant. All humans have essentially the same basic potentials, and the genetic differences that do exist between people are not sorted out by the usual racial categories. Not even the differences that are foundational to those racial categories sort out by racial categories particularly well. By and large, racial categories are cultural fictions vaguely supported by quirky historical circumstances. On close examination they are not real.”
Thalactros, you quoted parts of the article and implied they meant things they don’t in context. Again, everyone should read the whole article.
As for your notion that race doesn’t exist because “you use other criteria, in which case the differences shake out differently,” is a complete non-sequitor. It’s like saying children don’t exist because you can group humans by by hair color or shoe size.
Anton said, “Filipinos and Indonesians often don’t have it; on the other hand, Bushmen and Lapps do have it.
That’s one of the problems with the race concept–the characters used to define it don’t actually line up with one another geographically.”
If you look at single traits. But if you look at the correlation between sets of traits, then you can sort people into racial groups. It’s why despite having eye folds, no one would ever mistake a Bushman for a Lapp. Unsurprisingly, the genetic distance between Bushman and Lapp can also be determined, and percieved genetic backgrounds do line up geographically. Denying the reality of race is putting politics and ideology over science, nothing more.
Rob, James T. Smith, and others:
I don’t suppose you’re going to read and take into consideration my point, rather than arguing against a silly strawman, are you?
Consider the following:
So far as I can tell, the fact that the characters that are alleged to vary between “races” don’t actually line up well with one another either in terms of geographic ancestry or in terms of “race” as a social construction is the entire point. Why do you seem to find this so difficult to grasp that you resort to attacking the idea that genetic variation in humans does not exist, which I’m reasonably certain no one here would claim.
The sociological approach exemplified (from #55 above)
i.e. the claim that ‘whatever you mean by ‘race’, you’re wrong’. Consequently (some claim) there’s no such thing, or it’s purely a social construct that only has to do with power relations, or some such BS.
I agree with those (many above) who associate ‘race’ with the trivial fact that anybody with eyes and a brain can estimate with some accuracy the ancestral geographical origin of another person based on the most superficial features. OK, some people are transethnic, postethnic, products of melting-pots or relatively old dispersal events and there are frequent surprises when you start playing the origin-guessing game. But isn’t it just the same game as trying to place a person’s cultural or geographical origin based on their accent or vocabulary? (e.g. after living for two years in the UK as a child, I can usually place a British person’s accent according to the nearest large city – not quite Prof. Henry Higgins, but not a common ability in a native* Aussie). Just visual instead of verbal; and of course you can do the same thing – using a lot of fancy modern technology to supplement the human senses – with genetic polymorphisms. Origins are not social constructs but historical realities that leave easily observable physical evidence; that’s what I would mean by ‘race’, and it does not entail the existence of naturally separate ‘races’ because so much of the variation is clinal.
* (‘native’ for 6 or 7 generations out of western Europe, except for a female ancestor in Tasmania with no documented parentage or immigration history).
Let me see if I understand this discussion about “race”:
– It is usually socially defined, according to a few traits or by conflating it with ancestral ethnicity.
– Traits usually vary more within ethnicity groups than between.
– Self-identified “race” is largely a worthless concept, but may possibly have some value during triage and medical regimes. (Due to genetic or social influences.)
Hmm. So if you do a PCA analysis of traits you probably don’t see discrete groups but a continuum loosely correlated (due to the large local variation) with ancestral ethnicity or its proxy geographic location? AFAIU it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can discern such things as a “partially inbreeding group below the species level that shares some hereditary traits”, merely that it takes time for alleles to spread.
You see this description quite often, but I can’t say that I like it. A sufficient description is that molecules are made of atoms. Ionic properties are optional. :-)
Ironically, as a close parallel to the problems of defining “race”, if such a beast exists, is the problem of defining atom. It is a bound state of at least quasistatic character, and it has orbitals, but so are also other states such as an atomic nucleus.
The best definition is perhaps top-down: atoms are constituents conserved in chemical reactions. This makes quasistatic “exotic atoms” such as positronium the intended analogs to atoms. (And indeed, I just read a press release of the first observations of di-positronium, a bound state of two positronium atoms.)
Let me see if I understand this discussion about “race”:
– It is usually socially defined, according to a few traits or by conflating it with ancestral ethnicity.
– Traits usually vary more within ethnicity groups than between.
– Self-identified “race” is largely a worthless concept, but may possibly have some value during triage and medical regimes. (Due to genetic or social influences.)
Hmm. So if you do a PCA analysis of traits you probably don’t see discrete groups but a continuum loosely correlated (due to the large local variation) with ancestral ethnicity or its proxy geographic location? AFAIU it doesn’t necessarily mean that we can discern such things as a “partially inbreeding group below the species level that shares some hereditary traits”, merely that it takes time for alleles to spread.
You see this description quite often, but I can’t say that I like it. A sufficient description is that molecules are made of atoms. Ionic properties are optional. :-)
Ironically, as a close parallel to the problems of defining “race”, if such a beast exists, is the problem of defining atom. It is a bound state of at least quasistatic character, and it has orbitals, but so are also other states such as an atomic nucleus.
The best definition is perhaps top-down: atoms are constituents conserved in chemical reactions. This makes quasistatic “exotic atoms” such as positronium the intended analogs to atoms. (And indeed, I just read a press release of the first observations of di-positronium, a bound state of two positronium atoms.)
Sorry, that must become “atoms are bound states conserved in chemical reactions” as I just discounted electrons.
Sorry, that must become “atoms are bound states conserved in chemical reactions” as I just discounted electrons.
Of course; if you take any set of non-uniformly-geographically-distributed traits, they’ll define some group. The question is whether the groups defined by any particular set are worth calling “races,” and using as proxies for other geographically variable traits.
Well, no, no one would mistake one for the other because they look very different. It doesn’t follow that racial categories like, say, “caucasian” and “negroid” capture the main differences that help us distinguish the two.
Only because a reasonably experienced person will estimate their geographic origin based on many more details than are captured by their traditional “race.” (And because both groups are unusually small in number and homogeneous in appearance.)
Per John Scanlon, FCD | September 17, 2007 2:52 AM
Couple of things:
(1) Cool, you are thinking clinally. If I understand correctly, for you the word “race” is merely a loose generalization that summarizes many–but not even necessarily all–facts about the continental origins of a person’s ancestors. It’s a “rule of thumb” kind of term that’s not intended to invoke any sort of material reality that is ontologically separate from–and prior to–those loose patterns of genetic variation. For you, the term just means something like “phenotypic stuff that tends to go together”, and no more, except insofar as it has implications for differential patterns of clinical treatment or whatever.
If so, fair enough so far. The problem lies in the polysemy of the term you’re using as a cover term for what you mean, ’cause many other people mean something rather different about the biology when they invoke the term. For them, the term “race” precisely does index something material that is ontologically separate from, and prior to, the genetic variation you’re loosely categorizing with the very same term. The fact that these people are not very clear about how to think about biology, let alone politics or history, is of course not your fault. However, because the term “race” is so loaded not only with bad politics and history, but also tends to reify a variety of presumptions that don’t work very well to describe physical reality, the term is not a very good choice for your preferred meaning of “stuff that tends to go together”.
It’s much the same way that these days we need to avoid anthropomorphic language like “designed” to describe the products of evolution. We know we’re talking about something different than Happy Happy Jeeeeezus stuff when we use words like “designed” in-house, but we also know that as sure as we do use those words some pinhead will be there to quote-mine them, so we just knock it off. The problem with the term “race” is even more profound, though, because in addition to meaning 1
“phenotypic stuff that tends to go together with clinical implications”
and meaning 2
“quasi-mystical claims about some essential biological differences between groups, always thought of as prior to genetic variation rather than constituted by it if you dig hard enough to ferret this out”
we also have the sociologically oriented meaning 3, which is
“the way that we make social judgments about people based on meaning 2”
…meaning that it’s oh so very easy to talk past each other whenever this term gets dropped into the conversation.
So, for Mr Scanlon and anyone else who thinks using “race” as a cover term for the “rules of thumb” type observations discussed in #69 and elsewhere–observations I have no particular problem with, btw, so long as they never spill into crap like “meaning 2” above–I would suggest some other vocabulary item should be chosen. Generations of misuse have rendered its baggage too heavy. “Phenotypic macroclusters” or some such, perhaps?
(2) The other issue: Social constructs are historical realities. The wording of the original sentence (“[o]rigins are not social constructs but historical realities that leave easily observable physical evidence”) suggests a certain privileging of material reality when it comes to thinking about what’s really worth talking about. However, the social constructs of “meaning 2” above have had some profound implications for history, in much the same way that goofy “social constructs” surrounding religious beliefs have had such profound implications. Just because it isn’t material doesn’t mean it isn’t real, and that’s why some of us are being so scrupulous about trying to keep pernicious social constructs squashed down. These constructs are very much tied up with issues of power, and those are hardly BS when it comes to thinking about their real effects.
We’re happy to talk about “meaning 1” and debate about the details of it in biological terms, but just don’t expect us to ignore the baggage that comes along with poorly constructed ideas associated with that discussion when they arise. And that’s far from being reflexively “politically correct”–it’s just good due diligence needed whenever confusions can arise from insufficiently qualified abstractions.
–pr
You keep on saying that, James, but the problem is, you never actually give any examples of this supposed misrepresentation.
As for your assertion that I’m “deliberately misrepresenting” the article, you’re projecting like a cineplex. The authors simply don’t share your and rob’s essentialist concept of race; if you read the article, it is clear in their exposition that they’re much closer to the statistical view of most of the posters here. Maybe if you weren’t so busy taking catty digs at PZ, Greg, MAJeff, and sociologists in general, and attributing non-existent penises and deliberate bad faith to me, you might take some time to re-read the article and actually provide some examples of this misrepresentation you keep claiming.
As their words indicate, they agree that their carefully-constrained definition of “race” is at best a crude proxy indicator of risk and outcomes; they agree that environment plays a role in even supposed racial treatment and outcome differences, and they themselves point out that the direction of causality is often not from “race” to phenotype, but the other way around. This is consistent with MAJeff’s point that “race” has been used as a basis to justify inequality. The authors would seem to have no problem, as I imagine MAJeff would not, with an epidemiological investigation of how (mostly) white capitalists have shortened the lifespan and increased the infant mortality of poor, non-white populations by locating toxic waste dumps in poor neighborhoods; I suspect, however, that this kind of “race”-correlated epidemiology is not what you’re getting at when *you* mean “race-linked”.
The authors simply argue that self-reported ethnicity can provide a starting point for organizing and collecting information about risk factors, treatments, and outcomes, a viewpoint that is consistent with most of what has been posted here, and which does not require an essentialist take on race with the associated reification fallacy.
I agree, everyone should read the article for themselves. And as I challenged, when you can show any misrepresentation on my part, please do so. It’s “put up or shut up” time.
“non-sequitur” is another word you bandy about without comprehending what it means. Certainly, your example is a non-sequitur, but since your example has nothing whatsoever to do with my argument, you’re erecting a strawman.
My point is this: you’re fixated on visible traits such as skin color and hair texture to define “race”. Everyone agrees that this trait has a correlation with certain populations; the problem is there is so much variation in this trait that it’s very unreliable. And there’s no feedback mechanism to let you know if you’re wrong; if you pass a Persian on the street and wrongly assume she’s Mexican, you’ll never know your mistake.
Using your genetic criteria, if you were willing to let go of your attachment to visible phenomena such as skin color, you could use the thalassemias to define Mediterranean subraces that transcend your essentialist races, or you could define a North European Caucasian subset race around the cystic fibrosis gene. You could use the median and modal proportions of body mass and surface area to define “equatorial” and “arctic” races, with Navajo and Kenyans on the first, and Hopi and Sami in the second. And the thing is, those categories that I defined above, actually have some useful medical predictive value. They correlate consistently with ethnicity (with wide variation, or course), are measurable, and correlate with other physical and biomedical markers. But they aren’t the stereotypical definitions of race that you are advocating, since, for example, it puts two “kinds” of Native Americans into different “races” and Africans and Native Americans in the same “race”.
That’s why your characterization of my argument as a non-sequitur is not only wrong, but also a strawman.
The authors argue that when it’s appropriate, no one should let the history of misuse of racial categories make them shy away from considering self-identified ethnicity as a risk indicator, nor should they overly weight that risk indicator, as it is unreliable in many cases. That is very far from an essentialist position that races are a fixed entity, as you keep claiming they argue, and most consistent with the statistical view held by many posters here.
MAJeff can correct me himself, of course, if I have inadvertently misrepresented his views in any way. My assumption that the authors of the article would have no problem with investigating the hypothesis I described above stems from the following passage from p. 7 in the article.
Still waiting for you to show my “deliberate misrepresentation”, James. You’ve publicly accused me of dishonesty, so put up or shut up *right now*. Else I’m just going to assume that your consternation at publicly being handed your ass on the facts pushed you into an emotional state where slander actually seemed like a good idea at the time.
I just woke up, but it would seem we’re cool.
And James, for the “spoken like a true sociologist” stuff. I’m glad to speak like a sociologist.
And go fuck yourself.
If you can sort people genetically into related groups then race exists.
You can’t sort them like that, there’s too much gradient between groups. A better term is “cline”, as it both describes the genetic reality *and* isn’t carrying enough Samsonite to sink a bulk carrier.
We are, however, dealing with an extreme case: it’s all fuzz and no boundaries. The traits all vary independently. The conventional races have very broad transition zones, e.g. in and around Ethiopia and between the Caspian Sea and western China. Once you look into genetics, you find traits that vary along entirely different geographical clines. For example, 25 % of the Basques are rhesus-negative, and the farther you go away from the Basque country, the lower the percentage becomes — so gradually that it still doesn’t reach 0 in South America.
You imply that human races are as distinct as dog breeds. (And indeed, German doesn’t have a separate word for “breed” and uses “race”.)
They aren’t.
Dog variation is discrete. Human variation is continuous.
Dog breeds are (kept) reproductively isolated (most of the time). No human population has ever been reproductively isolated for longer than 400 years — and those 400 years are the single case of Easter Island, where no distinctive phenotype has emerged in that genetically short period of isolation.
When you look closer, you will notice a lack of correlation, and most people will end up having to be classified “transitional”.
Yes, but each gene lines up in a different direction, and, again, just about the entire range of variation occurs within subsaharan Africa, whereas the variation outside Africa is a small part of the African one.
The fun is that more or less all people are postethnic and have been so for millennia, if not forever. The most famous European examples:
– To this day, the Greeks like to call themselves “Romans” because their ancestors were free Roman citizens and mighty proud of it.
– What does “I am a Hun” mean other than “Attila wants to go plundering, and so do I”?
– The name “Hungarian” comes from a Turkic-speaking tribe (ongur or the like, with the h being added because people thought the Huns had come back) that came plundering with the Hungarians, not from the Hungarians themselves (magyar).
Now, we have no evidence on that part, but can we be sure that “I am a Celt” meant something else in 300 BC than “Brennus wants to go plunder Rome — me too”?
We are, however, dealing with an extreme case: it’s all fuzz and no boundaries. The traits all vary independently. The conventional races have very broad transition zones, e.g. in and around Ethiopia and between the Caspian Sea and western China. Once you look into genetics, you find traits that vary along entirely different geographical clines. For example, 25 % of the Basques are rhesus-negative, and the farther you go away from the Basque country, the lower the percentage becomes — so gradually that it still doesn’t reach 0 in South America.
You imply that human races are as distinct as dog breeds. (And indeed, German doesn’t have a separate word for “breed” and uses “race”.)
They aren’t.
Dog variation is discrete. Human variation is continuous.
Dog breeds are (kept) reproductively isolated (most of the time). No human population has ever been reproductively isolated for longer than 400 years — and those 400 years are the single case of Easter Island, where no distinctive phenotype has emerged in that genetically short period of isolation.
When you look closer, you will notice a lack of correlation, and most people will end up having to be classified “transitional”.
Yes, but each gene lines up in a different direction, and, again, just about the entire range of variation occurs within subsaharan Africa, whereas the variation outside Africa is a small part of the African one.
The fun is that more or less all people are postethnic and have been so for millennia, if not forever. The most famous European examples:
– To this day, the Greeks like to call themselves “Romans” because their ancestors were free Roman citizens and mighty proud of it.
– What does “I am a Hun” mean other than “Attila wants to go plundering, and so do I”?
– The name “Hungarian” comes from a Turkic-speaking tribe (ongur or the like, with the h being added because people thought the Huns had come back) that came plundering with the Hungarians, not from the Hungarians themselves (magyar).
Now, we have no evidence on that part, but can we be sure that “I am a Celt” meant something else in 300 BC than “Brennus wants to go plunder Rome — me too”?
j.t.delaney: Since I moved to Europe, I have met quite a few people here who are completely surprised I am an American. “Wow, but you don’t look American!” Evidently, they have some ideas about what Americans looks like, and somehow I do not fit into that.
Europe has much more coherent “subraces” in place, due to generations of political isolation. The native populations of various countries and regions really have developed characteristic “looks”, so that Europeans are used to being able to identify a Frenchman from a German from a Netherlander by eye. The naive will thus assume that whatever batch of folks they first saw identified as “Americans” are in fact typical. They learn quickly, though. ;-)
The classic example here is to look at the Olympics, with their various teams — the French look French, the Germans look like Germans, the British look like Brits — but the Americans look like everybody, because we’re a nation of immigrants. I expect that over the next few decades, the European area will see a lot more inter-regional mixing, and the variations will decay to a historical curiosity like the “Black Irish”, or Moorish blood in Spain.
thalarctos: …you’re projecting like a cineplex.
I am so stealing that! (But I’ve already killfiled James T., so I won’t bother analyzing him.)
As far as “easy identification or origins”… one of my uncles is from what was then India (his family was on the wrong side of the Pakistan line). That is, he’s a dark-skinned Caucasian type. Whoops, make that “he was dark skinned” — he got vitiligo a few decades ago. Good luck guessing his origins now! Last time he visited India, even the locals treated him like any other American.
It would seem that arguments about the term “Race” among the well-educated is little different than arguments on the same subject between the rest of us. A lot of political correctness thrown around by one side in an effort to squirm out of the “Race” concept as if it were some kind of poison and arguments from the “other” side suggesting that they were right all along.
One thing I think we could all agree on: without the help of a Swede, and maybe ever WITH the help of a Swede, it is extremely unlikely that an African pygmy woman will give birth to a white-skinned, blonde that grows into a 6 foot super model. And, without the help of an African pygmy of some kind, it is extremely unlikely that a Swedish woman will give birth to an African pygmy child.
Whether that kind of biological behavior can be described as “racial” or “varietal” or “claudal(??)” or not it is certainly different from the view that there are NO races or NO differences between the peoples of the earth.
Furthermore, the denial of deep genetic and biological difference between people also denies the possibility that different drugs may work differently on average in different “races” whatever races are.
From a sociological and anthropological view, the denial of “race” may lead to the inability to design laws to protect primitive populations from the predation of European and Arabian “princes”, for instance, since it can be claimed that such differences cannot be described between peoples therefore there is nothing to protect.
Ethnic differences are not genetic differences. However, differences in ethnic backgroud may mean long term isolated breeding practices. When a “race” is ethnically described, it may also have genetic meaning. When I was in Special Forces training in the early 60’s I was told that no matter how good a shape I was in physically, a Montagnard of the Central Highlands with a full load could outwalk me easily. Was that because he walked all his life? Or because he had a slightly more efficient arrangement of bones and muscles in his legs?
There is a south east asian tribe that lives almost entirely on the water and survived the recent tsunami with no problems because they knew it was coming (somehow) and moved out to sea where they rode it out. Their children can, on average, hold their breaths much longer than you and I. Are they a different race? Should that difference be ignored because it is politically incorrect? or should it be studied because it is interesting? and maybe useful?
The fact that Obama is identified by most Americans as a “black” American (a view which he himself seems to support btw) is the sort of racial assignment you want to stay away from. Obama is also a “white” American, something he often forgets at his peril when in front of a African-American crowd.
Tiger is the ultimate human. lol. And very lucky to have had both the genetics and the upbringing he had. But, if he is smart, he will be aware that his African genes, whatever they are, may make him more susceptible to high blood pressure and heart attacks later in life.
Hi, Oldfart–
(Just some background for people not familiar with Southeast Asian cultural anthropology: “Montagnard” is a term of deprecation by the colonial French for the indigenous people of the mountains of Vietnam.)
I have a couple of questions that should be extremely easy for you to answer: Are all of the indigenous peoples of Vietnam the same race as each other? Are they the same race as the Vietnamese?
Why or why not?
Thanks!
Per Oldfart | September 17, 2007 11:17 AM:
OK, here it is again, the Confusion That Refuses To Go Away: “races” are NOT the same thing as “differences between the peoples of the earth”. What we’ve been saying is that those are two different concepts. The latter one reflects the facts of biology. The former one is all tangled up in a bunch of outmoded thinking about biology. Come back when you’ve (a) figured that out and (b) can tell us what the hell “claudal” means.
–pr
Thalactros said, “I’m just going to assume that your consternation at publicly being handed your ass on the facts pushed you into an emotional state where slander actually seemed like a good idea at the time.”
There’s nothing emotional or slanderous about encouraging people to read the quotes you misreprented in context. Your most recent one you present that as if it undermined the concept of using race, when what was being argued was more precisely identifiying race, and that self individuals self-identified race was more precise than lumping people into broader, “racially neutral” genetic cluster categories. I apologize for suggesting you were dishonest, but you’ve obviously not read the entire article. Here is some of the context you omitted:.A major discussion has arisen recently regarding optimal strategies for categorizing humans, especially in the United States, for the purpose of biomedical research, both etiologic and pharmaceutical. Clearly it is important to know whether particular individuals within the population are more susceptible to particular diseases or most likely to benefit from certain therapeutic interventions. The focus of the dialogue has been the relative merit of the concept of ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’, especially from the genetic perspective. For example, a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [1] claimed that “race is biologically meaningless” and warned that “instruction in medical genetics should emphasize the fallacy of race as a scientific concept and the dangers inherent in practicing race-based medicine.” In support of this perspective, a recent article in Nature Genetics [2] purported to find that “commonly used ethnic labels are both insufficient and inaccurate representations of inferred genetic clusters.” Furthermore, a supporting editorial in the same issue [3] concluded that “population clusters identified by genotype analysis seem to be more informative than those identified by skin color or self-declaration of ‘race’.” These conclusions seem consistent with the claim that “there is no biological basis for ‘race'” [3] and that “the myth of major genetic differences across ‘races’ is nonetheless worth dismissing with genetic evidence” [4]. Of course, the use of the term “major” leaves the door open for possible differences but a priori limits any potential significance of such differences.
In our view, much of this discussion does not derive from an objective scientific perspective.Another part many here seemed to have missed:.
Many here continue to insist, like Graculus, that “You can’t sort them like that [into races], there’s too much gradient between groups,” but it seems no one has told the scientists who do this all the time.
David Marjanvic claims, “No human population has ever been reproductively isolated for longer than 400 years” Isolated, no, but human populations have been distanced from disimilar ones for thousands of years.
It’s sad David Harmon’s uncle has vitiglio, but his anecdote does not change the scientific fact that indviduals can be grouped into different races.
Um, Dr. Meyers? It’s “Philippe“.
Not that the extra “pe” at the end should keep him from eating his heart out.
thalarctos:
Ask the Vietnamese who also have pejorative terms for the mountain tribes. Go to Vietnam, get yourself a Vietnamese guide and sit by the road side for a few months. He/she (pick a she, more fun) will tell you the race of each person is as they pass. Eventually you will learn.
prismatic:
I meant to look that up before posting. Whatever the adjectival form of clades is. Give me credit for imagination anyway. lol. I do not understand clades. Cladal????
As for figuring that out, I have already done so, for myself. Biological and genetic differences between humans exist. Both between individuals and between groups of individuals that most of us refer to as different races. Some of us can divest the ourselves of the connotations of the term, some cannot. That doesn’t change the reality and the necessity of recognizing these differences.
You’re the one asserting the concept, so I’m asking you to explain it clearly, precisely, and rationally.
James, in your analysis you don’t cite the authors’ description of the way race classification flattens the differential rates of the hemochromatosis gene. The authors are saying don’t let the baggage of the term goad you into making a Type II error; that certainly doesn’t mean they’re advocating full speed ahead on Type I errors.
The people who take issue with the word race have a philosophical problem. Science is running smack into their ideology. Genes are either meaningless or they really do matter. If we are constantly evolving, doesn’t it make sense that some people are more evolved than others? How’s that for a loaded statement? What evils can be concocted from that?
But the response is no different than the irratinal ranting of creationists faced with natural selection. Like them, you have a philosophical problem, so make a philosophical argument. Many answer with God made evolution. It’s stupid, but it allows them to accept the facts without losing their religion. Christians have no problem with “race”, since they will say that all men have souls created by God. They try to stop Downs Syndrome and other gentically defective babies from getting aborted. I think the issue for others is that their philosophy, or ideology, has no answer. They cannot accept innate human difference without either the worldview or their moral code being completely shattered.
Oldfart:
Annoying_Atheist:
Please show us where anyone in this thread has asserted that biological differences don’t exist. Exact citation, please.
If your construct had any independent merit at all, you wouldn’t have to resort to mischaracterizing your opponents’ position so blatantly.
thalarctos:
I don’t have any opponents here. I read thru the discussion and was amused by the appearance that you big brain boys aren’t having any more luck with this discussion than the great unwashed masses. Why are you wasting your undoubtedly more valuable time on me? I don’t even understand what you are talking about most of the time…….
Which is why, if you all ever come to a conclusion, you won’t be able to communicate it to anyone but yourselves. So, it won’t really matter anyway.
Also, try to develop a sense of humor.
BTW, what the hell is a “racialist“?
Well, since you don’t understand anything we nasty nasty intellectuals say, look it up. You do know how to use a dictionary, don’t you?
Right-wing trope #1: when the facts are lined up against you, dodge the subject by accusing your opponent of “political correctness” (extra points if you work in “run amok”).
Right-wing trope #2: when #1 fails, accuse your opponent of humorlessness.
What’s this right wing crap? To use your own techniques against you, you pompous asshole, do you have any facts to support your constuct? No? Then STFU. I don’t know WHAT your problem is thalarctos but you are wasting a great deal of time on the little guy. What EVER gave you the idea that I was right wing anything?
As for you, MAJeff, to use thalarctos techniques, point to where ever I said “nasty nasty intellectuals”? Be careful how you educate me. I learn very very fast. And, unlike you, I am able to admit that I am a normal human being instead of some superior insufferable twat…..
lol
racialist = racist.
I see.
Placing the ‘ali’ in there makes it a “very serious” word.
Just like:
shootist = shooter…..
lol
Boy, did you ever show me–I stand in awe of your superior knowledge, logic, and rationality.
I don’t particularly give a rat’s ass what you are or are not; I was just pointing out the typical tropes you were deploying, in lieu of actual facts, reason, or argumentation. If you don’t like being called on it, then drop the insults and rhetorical devices, and mount a real argument.
Let’s see. I believe YOU started with the ad hominem attacks. I did not represent my view as a valid scientific thesis of any kind. I did express my OPINION. I attacked no one here. I thought it amusing that this disagreement about the nature of race had many of the same aspects as disagreements among people who had less scientific backgrounds. You have said nothing to dissuade me. In fact, your adolescent reaction to my opinion surprised me since I did not mention you at all until you attacked me. If you are so concerned about deriving a technical definition of “race” based on biology and genetics, why the hell are you arguing with me? I don’t have what you need. Am I an easy target or something? lol. Well, why don’t you just declare victory as the ID/Creationists do and carry on. It really sounds more and more like you are compensating for a severe inferiority complex.
the British look like Brits —
I’m British. I look like a Native American (to the point where Native Americans – First nations up here – think I am, not just the white folks.)
The traceable genetics on the side that I *don’t* look like is Scots and Norse. On the side that gave me my phenotype it’s Saxon and Scandinavian. “Race” my arse.
Furthermore, the denial of deep genetic and biological difference between people also denies the possibility that different drugs may work differently on average in different “races” whatever races are.
No one if fucking denying that there are genetic differences between groups of people. We are pointing out that “race” is a completely useless descriptor for those differences, because 1) the clines don’t divide neatly, and 2) phenotype is deceiving.
By asking you to explain your construct more thoroughly? That’s not what an ad hominem is. Your deployment of “arrogant” and such terms, on the other hand, actually is–even if I were arrogant, it would have no effect on the evidence.
Please show me where I have been anything other than 100% civil. Exact citation, please.
First James accuses me of deliberately misrepresenting the article, and now this. Despite the sample size being too small for any statistical significance, and the bias introduced by your self-selecting to post here, there still does seem to be an extremely strong correlation between believing the construct “race” is useful and projecting all kinds of perceived failings on those who point out that the evidence does not support it.
At least James did have the decency to apologize for his smear, though–I’ll give him that.
Per Oldfart | September 18, 2007 7:16 PM
Um, wouldn’t that have to be shootalier or shootalist?
Anyway, no, it’s not necessarily the same. For folks who use the term racialist to signify something other than racist, the former refers to the idea that racial categories have some sort of prior or ultimate reality, but not necessarily that these have implications for any sort of moral or political hierarchy. The latter term refers to judgments about members of “races” in ways that postulate or reinforce such hierarchies, based on racialist concepts.
Where to begin, where to begin?
How about this first:
If you don’t understand a given concept and couldn’t be bothered to look up something that would make us think you understood it, this makes me wonder what in the world you’re trying to express. Many of us have been talking about clines, which are frequently used to describe patterns of genetically based variation from population to population. I’m wondering whether this is the concept you meant to invoke, because if you are trying to relate “races” to clades that has some big implications I don’t even want to unpack until necessary.
Ah, I see. This was an independent endeavor? No reading, bouncing off concepts from others (that “standing on the shoulders of giants” thing), none of that? just observing and thinking it through?
I think we’d all like to know more about how that process played out–or, if I’ve misunderstood the thrust of your statement as signifying more independence than I originally surmised, we’d all like to know what kinds of sources, conversations, and reading shaped your thoughts in this matter.
Do tell. I had no idea.
You know, the most annoying thing about this conversation is that too many of you keep putting words in our mouths. We are not asserting that biological differences between humans (and between groups of humans) don’t exist. We are trying to get across something else entirely: namely, that descriptions of ways that biological differences cluster are not the same thing as descriptions that claim there are “races”, even where these descriptions are jazzed up with quasi-scientific framing.
Descriptions of clusters are formed from the bottom up–to the extent it’s useful to do so, you lump together genetically similar folks along clines. But concepts of race have an inherent tendency to be defined from the top down, as if the broad groupings are natural kinds, and the actual differences between them are then treated as somehow derivative from those natural kinds. This is what the sociologists (oooo, sociological thinking!) call the reification fallacy (quoting here from wikipedia): it’s “when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it represented a concrete, real event or physical entity… [it] often takes place when natural or social processes are misunderstood and/or simplified; for example when human creations are described as ‘facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will’. It’s dastardly easy to fall into this, as we saw with rob’s post in #11:
Not quite. All those variations certainly exist, and they certainly display particular clusterings that covary, in large measure, with various “racial” categories embedded in our cultural knowledge (more on this in a moment). But there is not some metaphysical quality that is your “race” that influences, or has causative effect, on all of those phenotypic attributes. (The fact that we sometimes speak in a sloppy way about causality that suggests otherwise only indexes our sloppy communication, not anything else–cf. my comparison with use of the “design”, in my post in #73.) At best, a biological definition of “race” would be driven from the bottom up, would clearly be emergent from the properties it’s lumping together, and would be restricted only to something like: an abstraction that groups together people who share a high amount of clustered genetic variation. To speak otherwise invites ontological error–and a whole host of sociopolitical difficulties that have in the past, and still in the present, feed off that kind of ontological error.
Now, it’s undoubtedly certain that many clusterings of biological difference will covary with traditional conceptions of racial origin based on primary continent of ancestral origin, as in the article first referenced in #54. To the extent this is true, self-reported information from patients about how they describe their origins may index these differences rather well. Many other clusters will not divide up in this fashion–and as thalarctos discussed in #57, even the authors of that paper are very careful to try not to claim more for their concepts than is appropriate. It’s worth noting (again) that in that paper, much of the argument for making use of self-reported racial affiliation is because it indexes patterning in social environments, incorporating race as a social marker:
Apologies for the long quote. While it’s true that the authors of this paper are indeed enamored of the view that descriptions of clustered genetic differences essentially map onto traditional racial categories, and thus provide a kind of contemporary redefinition of what the word “race” should mean along the lines I suggested as the “best” case for the term “race” above, some of us have gone on to argue that this is probably a bad move because the term just has too much baggage–it just brings too much crap with it, and even in a sophisticated forum like this one we’ve already seen signs of sloppy causality associated with deployment of the term (as in my #11 example cited above).
Just as with my “design” example in #73, most of us cannot perform this divestiture regarding a word in common parlance with a well-coalesced nimbus of associations. That’s why there has to be a better way to thread the needle than insisting on being able to keep using a loaded term, just because there is some way to kinda sorta maybe redefine it that kinda sorta works even though few people have the knowledge needed to sort that out. Why not just talk about clustered genetic variation when that’s what we need to talk about, forcing people toward a more sophisticated concept, to begin with, and talk about social categories of “race” when that’s what we’re talking about?
–pr
From thalarctos:
In the first case, thalarctos, you chose to challenge, for some unknown reason, anecdotal evidence I presented from person experience by demanding that I submit to you evidence on the nature of indigenous races of mountain tribes in Vietnam and compare them with the Vietnamese themselves. As if my little story somehow threatened you or your position. In fact my little story ended with a question, not a statement of position. I will restate the question and let you go on screaming. If in fact the mountain tribesmen of Vietnam can, fully loaded, out walk any young American soldier in good shape over mountainous terrain, is it because he walks more efficiently? or just because he has walked all his life while the American has not? Is this an invalid question? I think not.
In the second case you seem to think that my statement of my opinion somehow is a statement about your opinion. When did everything become about you? How did my statement of my opinion become a blatant mischaracterization of whatever your position(which I assume is the same as mine) is?
Now that is how this whole thing started and it went downhill from there. Please understand this. You hit me, I hit back. That’s the way it is. If you don’t like it, don’t hit me in the first place. I didn’t hit you first.
Prismatic:
Thank you for the very informative post. And I mean that honestly.
Only two comments:
(1) I do not live alone – my wife occasionally demands that I drop what I’m doing and pay attention to her. My dog and my grandchild (whom I occasionally babysit) do the same thing. Life is messy. Consequently I cannot always “look” something up before I post. That has happened before and it will happen again. I try to apologize when I do not have the time to look things up.
(2) I am 66 years old. I lived thru the riots of the 50’s, 60’s and so on. I’ve been hearing about race all my life. Not just race but sexism. For a long time it was politically incorrect to even hint that women were somehow different from men. It is NOT surprising that I would have put considerable thought into the matter. I did not claim my thought was particularly scientific. Just that it was mine. I will agree that my statement certainly sounded pompous….lol
I’m still trying to figure out how asking you to clarify your concepts is “hitting”, Oldfart. Can you please show me an exact citation for where I did anything else but inject facts into the discussion, or where I was less than perfectly civil to you?
Per Oldfart | September 19, 2007 11:46 AM:
Thanks.
Some responses to your recent comments:
Per Oldfart | September 19, 2007 11:30 AM:
I’m not sure that I saw any “screaming” there, but as thalarctos seems to be away for now, I’ll address this myself: I don’t think the question that you’ve asked in the quote above, as it’s phrased here, is invalid. I think finding an answer to it is not likely to be exceedingly easy, as there are likely to be a number of confounding factors–but perhaps we could study some of the Southeast Asian mountain folk (Jarai, Rhade/Ede, whomever) who were resettled here after the war, and/or their descendants, and see if there are genetic differences that would lead in some clear way to the phenomenon you described.
Personally, I tend to doubt it, as we know that there are many lifecourse-developmental concomitants of both mountain living and constant exercise that don’t have a straight-line relationship with genetic variation, so I would expect that (say) Jarai folks living here now enjoy no special physical advantages over Americans with similar lifestyles–but, hey, maybe.
As to the “screaming” bit. I don’t speak for thalarctos, but I suspect what got the ball rolling there is the fact that–in addition to the fact that you didn’t evince an understanding of the critique of the “race” concept that’s been floating around in this thread since the beginning–the ethnic diversity and history of the people who live in the mountains of mainland Southeast Asia is very complex, and your use of the word “Montagnard” glosses over those distinctions somewhat. (It’s also a deeply offensive word to many, given its colonial associations, and its current use is very much entangled with the [local and emigre] politics of religious repression [mostly fundamentalist Christianity] in the SRV–these are hornet’s nests I’ll just gesture at and move on.) When you make statements like
this accepts the idea that ever more granular ethnic groupings could correspond to discrete biological “races”, which doesn’t even rise to the level of sophistication displayed by the large-scale, continental-origins-identification style approach to “race” suggested by some of the folks we’ve been debating with above. That’s a problem, and the problem is compounded when you say things like
I can tell you from living in Vietnam myself (not as long as you were there, I assume, and certainly not under similar circumstances) that the Vietnamese have all kinds of pejorative, racial, and pejorative racial terms for everybody, once you get a few beers in ’em–just like everybody else does. This data does not necessarily tell you anything about biology, just some things about how people draw lines between themselves and others in order to be clear about their own identity. There was a time, earlier in this nation’s history, when there was disparaging talk of “the Irish race”. Who’s going to argue today that there was a true racial difference between the Irish and WASPs of those days? Sure, there could have been some sort of patterned genetic variation with some particular implications for phenotype, on some large, easily visible scale… but does that rise to the level of “race”, which is a term that–without extremely careful finessing–tends to foster the assumption of metaphysical entities in advance of, not following upon, the actual material facts they purport to explain? I think not.
Beyond that, I’ll leave this issue to you and thalarctos to work out.
One more theme from your conversation with her deserves commentary, however:
My answer to that would be: because the definition of race you were promulgating does not square with what we know about biology and genetics. And this is (repeating it one more time for anyone who hasn’t gotten it yet) not the same as denying there is no biological variation. Obviously there is biological variation; what there is not is “race” as some ontologically independent category. (This is what people mean when they say “race doesn’t exist”. They are not denying biological difference.)
I’m sure you have thought about these matters quite a bit, but the very fact that you don’t claim any scientific sophistication for your thoughts means that need to become aware of something: when you enter a forum populated largely by those possessed of a great deal of scientific sophistication, you might kind of run into a buzz saw when you discuss concepts that depart in a significant way from received wisdom, particularly when it concerns a concept with a big emotional charge on it. That’s not to say you should never express anything outside the received wisdom, but just that you should be prepared to be challenged when you do. Some people here are more bridge-building, others would challenge you if you said the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow morning because, gee, astronomical data tell us the sun isn’t really “rising”. Pedantry? Sure, sometimes, but it’s dirty work that someone has to do, first because being punctilious about the details is something scientists need to practice to keep themselves sharp, to progress, and to detect knowledge breaks that require resolution–and second because there are tons of people who are ready to pounce on everything we say and do looking for something they can use for their own ends, meaning we have to be as precise as possible in order to head this off.
I don’t speak for this group, because I’m an infrequent poster at best, and an outlier within the group in many ways. I’m just trying to give a word to the wise. This is a complicated, subtle topic, and questions like yours about the mountain people are not in themselves “bad”–it’s just that conceptual adjustments are needed in order to make that question as sensible as it can possibly be.
–pr
Prismatic: Once again you have made a very useful and informative post and I thank you for spending that much time on me. I did not realize that thalarctos was female not that that makes any difference.
—UNSCIENTIFIC OPINION OF A LAY PERSON COMING UP—
The matter of “race” is going to come up in lay discourse more and more in the future for a variety of reasons. Some of these include protection of so-called “wild” tribes and some of these include differences in medical treatments. But these also will include attempts to narrow down suspect searches based on DNA identification of race and sex. So it is sorta important not to ignore “race”. It is also important to communicate to lay people how biological/genetic divisions of the human race might work. Why? Because it is the lay people who make the laws and regulations that govern our behavior with respect to “race”. And it doesn’t take too many misinterpretations of scientific research to give energy to the racist KKK’s of the world.
—UNSCIENTIFIC OPINION OF A LAY PERSON ENDED—
There – that should be clear enough.
re: Comment 102:”when you enter a forum populated largely by those possessed of a great deal of scientific sophistication”
There’s been no “scientific sophistication” demonstrated in this thread, see Jeff the sociologist’s comments for example, and Laden’s “refutation” which P.C. admires so much isn’t scientific at all, it’s rhetorical spin.
I did link to one article summarizing actual scientific research above, research which, if Myers and Laden are correct, is wrongheaded, racist junk science. For some reason Myers and Laden won’t attack this research, or this researcher, directly.
“Type I error, full speed ahead!”
Nothing to attack–the article doesn’t say what you think it says. You clearly do not understand the implications of what they say about differential expression rates of a particular hemochromatosis gene among Norwegians, Armenians, and Ashkenazi Jews, for example. And I’ll bet my left testicular homologue that you don’t know the difference between Type I and Type II errors without looking it up, because you keep stepping in it so publicly.
And there’s the precedent of when someone does take the time and patience to analyze what the article says, you smear them as “deliberately misrepresenting” it. While I did accept your apology, I can also certainly see why lots of others who could respond perfectly well may have just killfiled you by now.
Re; Thalactros:
Just “kilified”? That’s some of that “scientific sophistication you all posesses, I take it.
You’ve repeatedly made the bizarre claime I’ve “misrepresented” Risch’s position, as if Risch somehow was in agreement with all of you that race does not exist and does not matter. Quoting Risch:
Greg Laden’s position, which Myers lauds, is that:
Per Oldfart | September 19, 2007 2:39 PM:
Not so much, actually, because I can’t tell whether you got what I was talking about, or not. If your point is that lay discourse about the “race” concept needs to be infused with the kind of debate we’ve been having here, well, fine–I agree. (And I’ve already agreed about issues like medical treatments.) However, if you’re just reiterating the same uncritical acceptance of the ontologically prior race concept that I (and others) have been criticizing, I can’t get on board with that. Your words don’t clarify what your current position is, so it’s for me to react now one way or the other.
–pr
Per James T. Smith | September 19, 2007 4:58 PM:
I speak for neither Myers, Laden (is he even posting here? how is he supposed to respond to this thread?), nor Risch–only myself. But I think your characterizations quoted above are overly binary. Clearly Laden and Risch are at different poles of an ongoing debate–much like the one we’re having here–that essentially turns on whether the concept of “race” has some utility, provided it receives a great deal of recontextualization (Risch), or whether it doesn’t (Laden). (Go wiki Risch for links to more about the debate.) Despite their disagreements, I see no absolutely necessary reason why Laden would be forced to claim that Risch’s work was merely junk science or racist (though I expect he would quibble about many details of its framing), or why Risch would be forced to dismiss completely Laden’s perspective about the unsubtle notions deconstructed in his article (though I expect Risch wouldn’t want to go as far as Laden does in doing so).
It’s called nuance. It’s a key feature of academic debate.
Personally, I think both articles have good points to make, as I’ve tried to indicate above. The basic thrust of Risch’s article makes sense to me, for the reasons he cites, except that I don’t go so far as to claim we really need to re-ground concepts of race under a snazzy new bottom-up, value-neutral definition–it’s just too hard to get around the baggage associated with “race”, so let’s call that otherwise useful redefinition by some other term instead. I think Risch errs a little too far in this direction, though I certainly agree that taking into account patients’ own concepts of what race they are is useful, again for the reasons cited. Laden’s article focuses much more on lay conceptions of “racial” differences, and exposes yet another example of a common problem with these–although I think his rhetoric is a little too overheated and black-and-white, if you will. He might need to be willing to look more closely at the subtleties in arguments like those of Risch, in order to be maximally effective in conveying his own perspectives–but I’m not sure about this, and I’d have to read him more to be able to be sure.
I suspect most of the people here whom you perceive as having been arguing with you take a similar position, though the details will of course vary. One thing remains clear, though–none of us are denying biological variation exists, and those of us who are still reading this thread (which is undoubtedly a rapidly dwindling number at this point–hell, I’m getting tired of it myself) are annoyed with being told that this is so.
Per James T. Smith | September 19, 2007 4:58 PM:
One last time:
*** biological variation exists as a material phenomenon
*** biological variation matters for many reasons
(probably more, imnsho, than Laden would initially allow)
*** “race” is not the same thing as clusters of biological variation
(even Risch himself is not fully consistent on disagreeing with this position)
*** “race” as an ontologically prior material category does not exist
*** insofar as this is the definition, “race” is not important
*** as a social category–related to various aspects of biological variation, but not reducible to them–“race” continues to be important, for various reasons (such as many of those described by Risch, as well as more purely sociological ones)
Like I said–it’s called nuance.
–pr
Prismatic:
I liked your list at the end of your last post.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Unfortunately, I didn’t say it any better myself.
Doesn’t solve any problems at the lay end but it is clear.
Pick any term other than “race”. Define it in a such a way that each of you can agree adequately describes the meaningful differences between groups of human beings. Publicize your new term to the public along with the definition.
Hope that they (we, the unwashed masses) will use it to perform good deeds instead of evil.
One thing that confuses me.
How does the term nuance fit in the with the demand for evidence?
How does reality leave any room for nuance?
Is there a theory of nuance?
Hmmmmmm.
Oldfart, I’ll take a stab at your questions. I’m changing their order slightly, in order to lay a foundation and build on it.
lol. very good one.
If you modify your question from “of nuance” to “of biology”, you’ve hit upon one of the great eternal questions. And it’s one of the real controversies in biologies, as opposed to the pseudo-controversies the creationists are trying to push. There are some scientists who assert it cannot and will never have a grand overarching theory; others who maintain that it not only can, but eventually will. The jury’s still out on that issue, so you’re asking a question that can’t yet be answered.
And I think the change is fair, because biology is full of nuance, everywhere you look.
However, we can make a small start at answering the question–while there is no theory yet either of “nuance” or of “biology”, one way we can begin to approach nuanced biological questions is through the method of statistics.
I’m trying to sum up a whole discipline here in one sentence, so this is destined to be totally inadequate, but very briefly, *descriptive* statistics is a technique for describing the range of patterns and variation that we see in the natural world, while *inferential* statistics is an attempt to make predictions, based on what we know about that range of patterns and variations.
This is where James keeps making the same mistake over and over again, and I doubt he even realizes it–he thinks in a binary way: “race” as an explanation is either perfectly complete or “wrongheaded, racist junk science”. Because he only sees things through that binary filter, he fails to comprehend the example of the hemochromatosis gene in the very article it provides, and how it undermines his argument.
In other words, he is bringing a preconceived set of categories to the argument, and insisting on fitting the evidence into those categories, no matter what contortions he has to put them through to make them fit. And he is so attached to those categories that anyone who doesn’t share them must be “deliberately misrepresenting” the evidence, because he cannot conceive that there might be any other explanation for the evidence not fitting his categories. (To be totally fair, he did retract the smear later, and I didn’t even have to eat his soul to get that retraction, like my hero ERV had to do to Sal Cordova.)
Sometimes we call those fixed and inappropriate categories a “Procrustean bed”, a reference to a Greek myth about Procrustes, who had a one-size-fits-none bed for any visitors. Rather than adjusting the bed to fit the visitor, Procrustes would fit the visitor to the bed–stretching short people on the rack, cutting off the feet of taller people. So “Procrustean bed” has come into the language as an analogy for forcing something into an inappropriate and unfitting “box” of some type, like the binary categories above.
Anyway, back to statistics. Rather than the Procrustean bed of preconceived categories, statistics tries to describe as accurately as possible the patterns that actually *are*.
Explanations have to fit the reality, and not the other way around; science is no place for Procrustean beds. And rather than asking how reality has any room for nuance, I’d argue the other way around–reality already possesses nuance out the yin-yang. Life does not begin “at” one point; there is no bright and shining line where one species ends and a totally different one begins; and so forth.
It’s also one of the great challenges in developing computer models of biological phenomena–trying to fit continuous data into computers that, by definition, are built on discrete mathematical principles, presents issues that can bite unwary modelers in the ass.
When we use statistics and other methods to try to describe as accurately as possible what nuance actually exists, we’ve provided something that is potentially useful in describing or predicting something in the world.
When we get too attached to our pre-conceived categories, on the other hand, like the binary “either-or” about race, above, then not only does our explanation *not* provide useful predictions because it does not match the reality, there’s a good chance that when confronted with the dissonance with the evidence, we’ll behave badly to someone who challenges the preconceptions we’re attached to–a position that’s neither scientific nor useful.
I wrote a response to Oldfart, but apparently, linking to ERV’s blog AND Wikipedia is enough to get you thrown into moderation limbo around here.
I considered writing a paranoid screed about being censored directly to PZ’s email–but really, what artist could follow Neal, after all?
I was about to throw in, when thalarctos’ comment was released from moderation. I can’t say it any better than that.
–pr
I understood all of that. I think.
You are saying that Biology is essentially descriptive, at least at this point in time. That there is no Theory of Biology. Compared to, say, Physics which has a variety of theories whose predictions can be tested (and some whose can’t). And, of course, a little club of physicists who try to combine all the theories in to one big Theory of Everything. (What ever would they do for a living if they succeeded?)
I think before Einstein there were a group of spectroscopists who came up with a formula that described the lines in the spectrum of sunlight very very well. But even though the formula could be used to make predictions about spectra, it did not explain the cause of the lines. I believe Einstein did that. Though the spectroscopists were doing science, it was a different kind of science from that which Einstein was doing.
Thank you for the very interesting post.
Yes, I would agree that parts of it currently are essentially descriptive. There are other parts where we can make very good predictions about what will happen, and we don’t yet understand very well what the relationships among these different parts.
It’s like if you had two patients, one with prostate cancer and one with rabies. If you leave them both untreated, it’s very easy to predict exactly what will happen to the patient with rabies, and about how long it will take, almost to the exact day. The prostate cancer patient, on the other hand, may live a long and happy, almost symptom-free, life without treatment, or may die horribly from aggressive spread of the tumors, or may have a fate somewhere in between those two extremes.
Yet both prostate cancer and rabies are “diseases”, but within the concept of disease, there is a great deal of variation in the effects, and in the reliability of the predictions (vs. just descriptions) we can make about them. So I would partially agree that there are areas in biology which are now mostly or all descriptive, but there are other areas where we can make very good and reliable predictions (and understand the mechanisms behind them), and we are making progress in expanding those areas where we can predict reliably.
Not one that is universally recognized. Of course, my anatomy professor says that anatomy is the underpinning of all biology, so there are individual opinions, of course :).
That sounds like a reasonable comparison to me, though there are people here who know a lot more than I do about physics, and may or may not think the analogy works.
My pleasure. And I learned something from your spectroscopy example, too.
“This is where James keeps making the same mistake over and over again, and I doubt he even realizes it–he thinks in a binary way: “race” as an explanation is either perfectly complete or “wrongheaded, racist junk science”. Because he only sees things through that binary filter”
You only see what you want, and are unable to read and understand plain language. There is a dichotomy between Risch’s position and Laden’s.
Meyers entirely endorses Laden’s position, so the same is true of Myers and Risch.
Risch’s position is, notably, supported by science, and Laden’s and Myers isn’t, but even if that weren’t the case it doesn’t change the fact that the two positions can not both be true. Laden and Myers belive that “the differences between humans that are often categorized as “racial traits” are either overstated or irrelevant.” Risch not only states he thinks these traits are relevant, he wouldn’t be doing the research he is doing if they thought them irrelevant. If you want to complain about lack of nuance, direct it at Myers and Laden for their gross oversimplifications in the name of ideology.
Similarly, Laden and Myers consider everyone who disagrees with their view that race is a “cultural fiction” to be a racist. By their own standards then Risch is a racist.
Per James T. Smith | September 21, 2007 12:23 AM:
This has been acknowledged (re-read #102)…
…and that ain’t the dichotomy. They’ve both got reasons for what they think, and those reasons aren’t just pulled out of nowhere as if we were dealing with creationist dingbats. Certainly we can debate which position is more correct, whose evidence and arguments are better, and so forth–that’s a valuable activity and we should do it, but scientific progress does not always rely on the notion of some either/or dynamic with one “side” completely right and one completely “wrong”. I tried to point toward a middle course in #102, and I assume this is also part of what thalarctos was trying to do in #110 (even though I get the sense she’s probably a bit closer to what you might call the “Myers-Laden position” than I am). Irrespective of that, I completely agree with her statement that
OK, if one of them says “race” is a useful way to characterize biological differences and the other one says nuh-uh, girlfriend, no it ain’t, then, yeah, it’s hard to hold both of those positions in the same box. But so what? That’s not even close to being the most interesting part of the debate. The cool parts are where we all duke it out with evidence and arguments and elevate the level of the debate. After some amount of time, maybe we’ll all even come to some broader consensus about what terms are the best to use and which qualifications are necessary (and which aren’t) and all that sort of thing.
Key point: If you don’t think PZ and Laden are holding up their end of the debate, super–find a way to prod them to do better–but I don’t see how the hardening of battle lines into some Manichaean drama, as you’ve been insisting on here, is going to help with that.
–pr