
Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say - digital55
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/science/skin-color-race.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
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kemerover
I don't really understand the point of the article.

How does this research “dispels a biological concept of race”?

>“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between
races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a
geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Yep, that's true. Skin color is the most prominent and easily identifiable
feature. But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial
features or voice. Forensic anthropologists can identify a race based on
skull, they can even make a pretty good prediction based solely on a jaw.

The idea that race is just a skin color is not a dated notion of race, it is a
modern interpretation that is pushed by leftists. If racists believed that
race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?

Now, if we could dispel the idea that race is just a skin color and the idea
that some races are inferior, if we could stop treating it as a dichotomy,
that would be good.

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astrodust
Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that
are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there.

> But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian...

It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that
person Japanese or maybe Inuit?

> If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be
> racists?

Yes. If we were all precisely the same skin color they'd find other ways to
put people down. Your "Jewish" nose. Your "nappy" hair. Color's just the tip
of the ice-berg.

Some people are perceived as being inferior because that's what some elements
in society need them to be in order to advance their own social standing.

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kemerover
>Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that
are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877)

>It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that
person Japanese or maybe Inuit?

First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or
"Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept.

Anyway, Japanese and Inuit are easy to distinguish. Middle Eastern and
European are better examples. If you take one European person and one Middle
Eastern person it would be hard to differentiate them, if you take two groups
of one hundred people it would be easy.

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VeejayRampay
Really depends on the European though... Europe is an extremely diverse
continent despite its relatively small size.

~~~
astrodust
It's still pretty big:
[https://twitter.com/mariachong/status/918553777031954432](https://twitter.com/mariachong/status/918553777031954432)

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darawk
This article is somehow trying to say that race doesn't exist because we found
the genes for skin color? What?

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astrodust
They're saying that skin color is what people think is a reliable indicator of
race, but in fact, genetically speaking, it's a total mess and nothing is
clear at all.

~~~
kemerover
But it _is_ a reliable indicator of race.

Article even says it:

>The dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia and New Guinea, for
example, did not independently evolve their color simply because evolution
favored it.

>They inherited the ancestral dark variants Dr. Tishkoff’s team found in
Africans. “They had to be introduced from an African population,” said Dr.
Tishkoff.

~~~
astrodust
There's multiple genetic factors that dictate skin tone, and the overlap
between these is pretty chaotic.

They even admit there's some aspects to skin tone that are still completely a
mystery, there's no genetic marker(s) they can point to as the cause.

