
There is no scientific basis for race - jpamata
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/
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toasterlovin
Race is obviously a thing. You can look at somebody and usually have a pretty
good idea of whether their ancestors are from Africa, Europe, the Middle East,
the Americas, Asia, etc. Heck, with some practice, you can often figure out
which part of Europe, Africa, Asia, etc they are from (Koreans look different
than Filipinos, Eastern Europeans look different than Scandinavians, etc). And
such an identification will correspond to measurable genetic differences.

Of course, this is only a coarse grained thing and there are lots of cases
where somebody’s ancestry is difficult to determine based on their outward
appearance, especially in cases where someone has mixed ancestry. But what
most people mean by race—that you can look at most people and make a decent
guess about their ancestry—is a real thing which is born out by genetics.

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zepto
You’re right up to the point where you say that what most people mean by race
is a decent guess about people’s ancestry.

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toasterlovin
What do most people mean by race, then?

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sillywindows
Race is just a very vague method of generalising large groups of humans, once
that is shown to be decreasingly useful as we learn more accurate methods. As
a result even the definition is vague.

These days race has mostly been reduced to vague groups of appearance; for
medical/genetic groups we usually have better indicators. It is still useful
as a vague appearance descriptor. We shouldn't claim that a visual description
is racism, it is just a handy tool.

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growlist
Race is so controversial a topic that I would argue virtually anything that
makes it into print these days is heavily compromised.

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chrisbrandow
I think a better title would have been “there’s no scientific basis for skin-
color-based racial categories”. The article cites all kinds of people grouped
by distinct genetic profiles.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
Agreed, based on this skin color seems to be a red herring in talking about
race in that it takes just one difference and magnifies when it's just one
other difference of which there are many. Interesting to read about the degree
of genetic diversity within Africans and the lack of it (relatively) among non
Africans.

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growlist
Indeed, I'd be interested to know the groups with least diversity also.

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sadris
Police forensics labs beg to disagree: [https://newatlas.com/3d-id-skull-
forensic-software/22137/](https://newatlas.com/3d-id-skull-forensic-
software/22137/)

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jazoom
I don't know if their definition of race is different to most people's
definition, but in medicine we often want to know someone's race since it has
real implications for the types of diseases they're likely to have. Often
culture and country play a big role, but the genetics also do.

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et2o
Agree that there are very important genetic components to disease (it's what I
study), but the article points out that the "races" we use now are pretty
arbitrary and do a bad job categorizing people's generic makeup. For example,
there is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined,
yet we in the United States basically just would think of their race as
"African," and this is not a very helpful description.

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jazoom
Even worse, I've noticed in USA you seem to classify "white" as a race, which
is absurd.

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ponzored
Bone marrow transplants disagree

[https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/matching-
patients-w...](https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/matching-patients-
with-donors/how-does-a-patients-ethnic-background-affect-matching/)

You can't look at the clusters of IQ around the world and ignore a genetic
component to intelligence either:

[https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country](https://iq-
research.info/en/average-iq-by-country)

