Race

[Sétanta]

Does humanity have different races? Discuss.









For the highly competent moderators: I don't like the Science forum because race is both a scientific, social and political subject. Don't move the thread.

[Rush Limbaugh]

No. We just have names we call people who differ from us and categories we assign them to.

[Sétanta]

No. We just have names we call people who differ from us and categories we assign them to.

Why do pharmaceutical companies make medicines and have target races in mind (African Americans) while telling other races (Asian Americans) not to consume it as it can have dangerous side affects for one race and not another?

[Rush Limbaugh]

Why do pharmaceutical companies make medicines and have target races in mind (African Americans) while telling other races (Asian Americans) not to consume it as it can have dangerous side affects for one race and not another?

Because their are things particular to certain families. Its all inter breeding. How many races of dog are there? There are lots of breeds however. Now if you want to compare us to dogs be my guest.

[Sétanta]

Because their are things particular to certain families. Its all inter breeding. How many races of dog are there? There are lots of breeds however. Now if you want to compare us to dogs be my guest.

Because certain groups have different genetic charectaristics (although minor) that are passed on from family to family.

[Rush Limbaugh]

Because certain groups have different genetic charectaristics (although minor) that are passed on from family to family.

But they are not exclusive to any one group. Again its simply a way to separate us.

“
There are four facts about human variation upon which there is universal agreement. First, the human species as a whole has immense genetic variation from individual to individual. Any two unrelated human beings differ by about 3 million distinct DNA variants.
”
“
Second, by far the largest amount of that variation, about 85%, is among individuals within local national or linguistic populations, within the French, within the Kikuyu, within the Japanese. There is diversity from population to population in how much genetic variation each contains, depending upon how much immigration into the population has occurred from a variety of other groups and also on the size of the population. The United States, with a very large population whose ancestors came from all over the earth including the original inhabitants of the New World, is genetically very variable whereas small populations of local Amazonian tribes are less genetically variable, although they are by no means genetically uniform. Despite the differences in amount of genetic variation within local populations, the finding that on the average 85% of all human genetic variation is within local populations has been a remarkably consistent result of independent studies carried out over twenty-five years using data from both proteins and DNA.

Of the remaining 15% of human variation, between a quarter and a half is between local populations within classically defined human “races,” between the French and the Ukrainians, between the Kikuyu and the Ewe, between the Japanese and the Koreans. The remaining variation, about 6% to 10% of the total human variation is between the classically defined geographical races that we think of in an everyday sense as identified by skin color, hair form, and nose shape. This imprecision in assigning the proportion of variation assigned to differences among population within ”races” as compared to variation among “races,” arises precisely because there is no objective way to assign the various human populations to clear-cut races. Into which “race” do the Hindi and Urdu speakers of the Indian sub-continent fall? Should they be grouped with Europeans or with Asians or should a separate race be assigned to them? Are the Lapps of Finland and the Hazari of Afghanistan really Europeans or Asians? What about Indonesians and Melanesians? Different biologists have made different assignments and the number of “races” assigned by anthropologists and geneticists has varied from 3 to 30.

Third, a small number of genetic traits, such as skin color, hair form, nose shape (traits for which the genes have not actually been identified) and a relatively few proteins like the Rh blood type, vary together so that many populations with very dark skin color will also have dark tightly curled hair, broad noses and a high frequency of the Rh blood type R0. Those who, like Leroi, argue for the objective reality of racial divisions claim that when such covariation is taken into account, clear-cut racial divisions will appear and that these divisions will correspond largely to the classical division of the world into Whites, Blacks, Yellows, Reds and Browns. It is indeed possible to combine the information from covarying traits into weighted averages that take account of the traits' covariation (technically known as "principal components" of variation). When this has been done, however, the results have not borne out the claims for racial divisions. The geographical maps of principal component values constructed by Cavalli, Menozzi and Piazza in their famous The History and Geography of Human Genes show continuous variation over the whole world with no sharp boundaries and with no greater similarity occurring between Western and Eastern Europeans than between Europeans and Africans! Thus, the classically defined races do not appear from an unprejudiced description of human variation. Only the Australian Aborigines appear as a unique group.

A clustering of populations that does correspond to classical continental "races" can be acheived by using a special class of non-functional DNA, microsatellites. By selecting among microsatellites, it is possible to find a set that will cluster together African populations, European populations, and Asian populations, etc. These selected microsatellite DNA markers are not typical of genes, however, but have been chosen precisely because they are "maximally informative" about group differences. Thus, they tell us what we already knew about the differences between populations of the classical "races" from skin color, face shape, and hair form. They have the added advantage of allowing us to make good estimates of the amount of intermixture that has occurred between populations as a result of migrations and conquests.

The every-day socially defined geographical races do identify groups of populations that are somewhat more closely similar to each other genetically. Most important from the standpoint of the biological meaning of these racial categories, however, most human genetic variation does not show such "race" clustering. For the vast majority of human genetic variations, classical racial categories as defined by a combination of geography, skin color, nose and hair shape, an occasional blood type or selected microsatellites make no useful prediction of genetic differences. This failure of the clustering of local populations into biologically meaningful "races" based on a few clear genetic differences is not confined to the human species. Zoologists long ago gave up the category of "race" for dividing up groups of animal populations within a species, because so many of these races turned out to be based on only one or two genes so that two animals born in the same litter could belong to different "races."

In his article, Leroi is inconsistent and shifting in his notion of race. Sometimes it corresponds to the classical social definitions of major races, but elsewhere he makes “race” coincident with a small local group such as the Negritos or Inuit. In this shifting concept of “race” he goes back to the varying use of the term in the 19th century. Then people spoke of the “Scots race,” “the Irish race” and the “race of Englishmen.” Indeed “race” could stand for a family group defined by male inheritance, as in the description of the last male in a family line as “the last of his race.” This inconsistent usage arises from the fact that there is no clear criterion of how much difference between groups of genetically related individuals should correspond to the category “race.” If it had turned out that groups of related populations were clearly different in the great majority of their genes from other groups, then racial categories would be clear and unambiguous and they would have great predictive power for as yet unstudied characters. But that is not the way it has turned out, at least for the human species.

The fourth and last fact about genetic differences between groups is that these differences are in the process of breaking down because of the very large amount of migration and intergroup mating that was always true episodically in the history of the human species but is now more widespread than ever. The result is that individuals identified by themselves or others as belonging to one “race,” based on the small number of visible characters used in classical race definitions, are likely to have ancestry that is a mixture of these groups, a fact that has considerable significance for the medical uses of race identification.
”
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/

[Earl of Rochester]

Yes. Different groups of people have varying facial structures, skin tones, hair tones, etc. Even different immunities to things.

However this are all highly superficial things and the difference between races end at the superficial level.

[chilon]

Because certain groups have different genetic charectaristics (although minor) that are passed on from family to family.

It has been shown that genetic variation is greater within an alleged "race" than it is between races.

Thus, genetic differences are not correlated to racial differences.

Other differences can arise from the differences in traditional diets between different groups of people.

[MaximiIian]

Because certain groups have different genetic characteristics (although minor) that are passed on from family to family.

That doesn't necessarily mean that there are entire races of humankind.
It simply indicates that we do have genetic connections and variances through ethnic groups (i.e, Greeks, Manchurians, Serbs, etc.) and meta-ethnicities (i.e Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic, etc.).

But "race" goes a bit too far, because the term "race" seems to indicate a separate subspecies or species, which is the scientific use of the term.

Ethnography and taxonomy of the human race is really a matter of scale. Race simply takes to an inaccurately broad scale. The more proper scale would be ethnic groups.

[Armfelt]

Why do pharmaceutical companies make medicines and have target races in mind (African Americans) while telling other races (Asian Americans) not to consume it as it can have dangerous side affects for one race and not another?

Because people from the African genepool have a higher probability of having recistant genes for the side effects of the medicine? We can choose to call people that fit certain criterias for whatever we want but that only means that terms such as race are completely subjective.

[Spurius]

African genepool

You mean Bantu? Xhosa? !Kung? Pigmy? Bushmen? People from Madagascar? Maghribi? Tuaregs?

Oops.

[Armfelt]

You mean Bantu? Xhosa? !Kung? Pigmy? Bushmen? People from Madagascar? Maghribi? Tuaregs?

Oops.

Whatever we want it to be

[Big War Bird]

No. We just have names we call people who differ from us and categories we assign them to.

In other words, race.

[mocker]

Racial differences exist, but in very small scale.

THE END.

[Rush Limbaugh]

In other words, race.

Yeah and some have big lips and some have big noses. Your point. Its just a label and in reality its nothing more than bare naked racism at its purist.

[Radulf Heimiric]

I will be using the following definitions of the word "race" in this post:
"an arbitrary classification of modern humans, sometimes, esp. formerly, based on any or a combination of various physical characteristics, as skin color, facial form, or eye shape, and now frequently based on such genetic markers as blood groups."
and
"a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans."
They are both from the dictionary.com dictionary. If anyone is using different definitions then I'm sure they'll reach different conclusions, but these two pretty much cover any definition you'll find in any dictionary.

Yeah and some have big lips and some have big noses. Your point. Its just a label and in reality its nothing more than bare naked racism at its purist.

Saying that some groups of people are, on average, different is not racist. If it is used to discriminate against people then it is racist. If you think differently of someone just because of the race you consider them to be, then that is racist. But there is nothing inherently racist to grouping people in your mind according to superficial characteristics, as long as you consider all the groups to be equal. The American Heritage Dictionary defines racism as

1. The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
2. Discrimination or prejudice based on race.

It is quite clear that grouping people does not, in and of itself, satisfy either these definitions or the ones that you will find in any dictionary.

You remind me of people who insist that I cannot mention someone's skin colour while describing them, yet allow me to say what colour their hair is. There is a difference between saying that there are superficial differences between people (and saying that a person is of a certain race depending upon these characteristics) and being prejudiced as a result of this.

Note: I'll come out and admit it: I'm racist. If I see a black person then I often can't avoid thinking negative things about them. It's a thing I deeply regret and cannot control. This is aided by the categorization of people into racial groups in my mind, but is not a result of this. Because I am aware of my problem I can take it into account; I can stop myself and say "your opinion of [that person] is influenced by how [that person] looks" and, because of this, I can (hopefully) avoid any racist actions or viewpoints. I just mention this to avoid suggestions that I am one of the racist people who doesn't realise that the views they are putting forwards is racist.

It has been shown that genetic variation is greater within an alleged "race" than it is between races.

Thus, genetic differences are not correlated to racial differences.

That line of reasoning makes no sense. Just because the variance in characteristics of each population within a group of populations is greater than the variance of the means of the characteristics of the populations, that does not mean that an individual within a certain population cannot be said to be more likely to exhibit different characteristics as a result of belonging to one population rather than another.

I'll expand upon this. As said in the second link Spurius gives, the majority of variation is individual variation while there is still some variation between populations. As explained in the link, the between population variation is insignificant enough compared to the individual variation for there to be no objective way to categorize races. But this does not mean that the population differences do not exist, as illustrated in the following quote from that article:
'"I'm not saying these results don't recognize genetic differences among human populations," he cautions. "There are differences[...]"'

[Rush Limbaugh]

It is quite clear that grouping people does not, in and of itself, satisfy either these definitions or the ones that you will find in any dictionary.

I said it was racism in its purest form. In other words thats where it all starts. I dont like categorizing people and treating them like statistics. Its been used for at least as much harm as religion.

You remind me of people who insist that I cannot mention someone's skin colour while describing them, yet allow me to say what colour their hair is.

I have no problem with that. Your not calling them any race. I object to something like calling them African Americans which most of them are not. You mistake me for someone else. I cant believe you are infering Im predjudice because I dont want skin color to be an issue as to how one is treated.

Again my point and others is genetically there is only one race just as in reality all dogs are races of wolves. Race is a human construct. We cannot rationally argue that there is no such thing. But we can argue that genetically its just not true.

[Radulf Heimiric]

I said it was racism in its purest form. In other words thats where it all starts. I dont like categorizing people and treating them like statistics.

Sorry. I misinterpreted "purest".

[Richard]

Biologically no, it doesn't exist, just clines. Socially and culturally, yes, certainly. I think Australian Aborigines *might* possibly be an exception as they have been isolated for 60,000 years. But then again they still had one way contact with their neighbours to the north who occasionally visited and traded, so perhaps not.

[chilon]

Biologically no, it doesn't exist, just clines. Socially and culturally, yes, certainly. I think Australian Aborigines *might* possibly be an exception as they have been isolated for 60,000 years. But then again they still had one way contact with their neighbours to the north who occasionally visited and traded, so perhaps not.

I have read that australian aborigines are the most genetically distinct population among homo sapiens.