there is no evidence for the existence of a race that does not rely on referencing the idea of a race. the idea is self-referential. to understand this, you must understand philosophy.
another way of saying this is that assigning a person to a race doesn't give us any more information than the information we used to classify him in the first place.
> so far the key points made in the book about the genetic existence of race have not even come close to being debunked.
ok, I'll bite: what defines a race? what test do I apply to a specimen in order to sort him/her into a race category?
> there is no evidence for the existence of a race that does not rely on referencing the idea of a race. the idea is self-referential. to understand this, you must understand philosophy.
Huh? Race is defined by a combination of genetics in the form of phenotypes and culture. I don't see the circular paradox here.
> another way of saying this is that assigning a person to a race doesn't give us any more information than the information we used to classify him in the first place.
But we can? We can say that Chinese are more likely to be shorter than africans. That asians are more likely to have black hair than blonde hair or that africans are more likely to have higher testosterone than european whites or indians.
Ask any doctor or pharmacist and they can list you a few ways they are taught about how to treat people of different races differently because of biological differences.
We can even go further and say for instance that ashkenazi jews have a higher average IQ compared to Africans due to a large part their genetic differences and not purely environmental reasons.
The bell curve which was published a few decades ago proves many of these kind of claims so I don't know where you get this idea that we cannot determine anything useful from race.
> ok, I'll bite: what defines a race? what test do I apply to a specimen in order to sort him/her into a race category?
I gave a definition previously which is pretty accepted, for how you test for a race the answer is that's pretty easy, 99% of the time you can just ask someone and they will tell you.
We can prove this through cluster analysis, where you take a sample set of people and first ask them what race they are from a set number of selections. They then can read SNPs from each of the participants and hand that to a computer without the self reported data the people provided.
What you see is that even with 100 random SNP's you have a near perfect correlation between what people say their race is and the computer correctly grouping them into the race they chose.
> We can say that Chinese are more likely to be shorter than africans.
whats a chinese? whats an african? and what is it about those categories that makes it necessary for you to speak in probabilities and not certainties? if those categories accurately described features of reality, and were not mere artifacts that stem from your worldview, you would be able to rigorously tell me a relationship between gene(s) and features.
> Race is defined by a combination of genetics in the form of phenotypes and culture.
> for how you test for a race the answer is that's pretty easy, 99% of the time you can just ask someone and they will tell you.
exactly, its a made up category, i.e. not a real thing.
> We can prove this through cluster analysis, where you take a sample set of people and first ask them what race they are from a set number of selections. They then can read SNPs from each of the participants and hand that to a computer without the self reported data the people provided.
you can do the same thing for things like "hippie", "biker", "nerd" etc. it doesn't make those categories leave the intersubjective realm.
> necessary for you to speak in probabilities and not certainties?
You're replying to a person who is specifically referencing group stats and not in a deterministic way.
Here's one extreme statement:
- There is no such thing as race, in that E(X | race) = E(X) for all X that we care about
Here's another extreme statement:
- Race biologically determines your fate, e.g. E(X | race + C) = E(X | race) for any 'other information' C
Both statements as wrong. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between.
Even if you don't think that 'race' is the most salient metric, it doesn't help that our culture sometimes seems to willfully conflate culture, religion, ethnicity, and race in the most uncharitable possible way.
Eg. if you say something bad about Islam itself as a religion, one often finds themselves accused of implicit racism—and this is accusation is determined by seeing that one group of people of a certain 'race' seems to follow that religion more, so if you criticize a religion, you must be intending to attack that group of people.
> do the same thing for things like "hippie", "biker", "nerd"
while race is not the correct term to use there, breeding two nerds or two biker isn't likely to produce another nerd or biker, while the result of breeding two people of a common ancestry has a likely outcome.
> exactly, its a made up category, i.e. not a real thing.
race is a made up category, but you can't just hand wave all of it:
> what is it about those categories that makes it necessary for you to speak in probabilities [..] you would be able to rigorously tell me a relationship between gene(s) and features.
only because something hasn't been explored in its entirety doesn't make it less convincing of an argument. beside, genetic is rooted in statistics, because of recessive/dominant expressions of traits, so you have to talk in probabilities.
> breeding two nerds or two biker isn't likely to produce another nerd or biker, while the result of breeding two people of a common ancestry has a likely outcome.
this is preposterous on many levels. 1. the outcome of any breeding project can be described in terms of species, individuals, and traits. race is an unnecessary and poorly defined category. 2. the offspring of nerds and bikers have a non-trivial likelihood of turning out to be nerds and bikers. 3. the person I replied to wants culture to be a component of race.
> you can't just hand wave all of it:
It's well within the bounds of proper discourse for me to be a racial noncognitivist because I believe the concept to be incoherent, and protest its usage by requiring my interlocutor to tell me what exactly they mean by this particular nonsense term.
>beside, genetic is rooted in statistics, because of recessive/dominant expressions of traits, so you have to talk in probabilities.
look, theres a value to studying the interaction of genes and their expression in an organism. there isn't value in delineating a gene pool into "races" because the category is net harmful to understanding.
> whats a chinese? whats an african? and what is it about those categories that makes it necessary for you to speak in probabilities and not certainties?
I already answered that race is generally defined as a combination of genetics and culture. I don't see what your argument is, some kind of no true scotsman where because the definition of race isn't some set in stone definition that you can perfect attain with a genetic test it's completely useless as a grouping mechanic without something else to replace it.
The reason i'm speaking in probabilities is because that is what the facts are, that we have more variance within races than between. Which is to say there is no reason you can't have an african who is the shortest person in the world, or a chinese man could be the tallest just because the mean bears out the opposite.
> if those categories accurately described features of reality, and were not mere artifacts that stem from your worldview, you would be able to rigorously tell me a relationship between gene(s) and features.
You are demanding a standard of evidence that is beyond reason, do you not believe in evolution because there are gaps in the fossil knowledge? There is no reason you require to know every specific gene that influences height to determine that africans are genetically predisposed to be taller.
Not only can we deduce that genes play a predictive role in attributes like height and IQ through twin studies, but we have already begun to find genes that can predict physical attributes like height.
> exactly, its a made up category, i.e. not a real thing.
Category theory is made up, does that make it not real? Something that has no value whatsoever?
I really don't understand the argument, because you seem to believe race is subjective (even though we can prove it isn't based on what i previously said regarding cluster analysis) to the point it has 0 predictive value. Is that your argument?
> you can do the same thing for things like "hippie", "biker", "nerd" etc. it doesn't make those categories leave the intersubjective realm.
And guess what, we can make predictions based on this knowledge. We can say that a self proclaimed hippie is more likely to smoke weed than a self proclaimed Muslim or Christian. Do you believe we cannot do this?
Because if you believe we can do this with subjective social groups, I would say again based on the cluster analysis work i linked to previously, we can say that what people see as race almost perfectly corresponds to what a computer would sort them into based on purely genetics.
Race isn't some wavy concept where you have asians thinking of themselves as africans, or japanese thinking they are chinese. Sure you can point to exceptions but they are just that, not even 1% of the people in these studies when using more than just a dozen SNPs
The average "African" is not "predisposed to be taller" that is just a stereotype. Mainland Chinese people tend to be taller actually than the average West African.
What are you talking about? Why is it then we can see that african americans are taller than asian americans? I would be pretty shocked if it turned out asian americans were more malnutrinted than african americans.
> African Americans on average are taller, but that is probably due to environmental differences and selection bias (slavery etc).
I said African Americans are taller and that might be due to selection pressure (DNA) as well as environment (better diet, etc). My comment was not about Asian Americans at all. I was talking about Mainland Chinese in China, comparing Mainland Chinese to Africans in Africa given height data.
The comment I was responding to was that Africans are predisposed to being tall genetically, and my response to that is we do not have evidence of that given the data we have about these populations.
> The reason i'm speaking in probabilities is because that is what the facts are, that we have more variance within races than between.
thank you, exactly.
> africans are genetically predisposed to be taller.
"african" is not a category that has any meaningful genetic definition.
> genes play a predictive role in attributes like height and IQ through twin studies, but we have already begun to find genes that can predict physical attributes like height.
none of which means that "race" has any meaningful existence.
>Category theory is made up, does that make it not real? Something that has no value whatsoever?
it has value in organizing information. another system of organizing information might be harmful. suppose you had a system of organizing information that weighted irrelevant data and disregarded relevant data. would it have positive value or negative value?
> you seem to believe race is subjective
race is intersubjective, as is language and culture.
> to the point it has 0 predictive value
what are you trying to predict? either the trait that you select for when you delineate a sub-population is connected to the variable you predict, in that case you define the category by the specific trait, not some giant bag the size of a continent; or the trait you select for when you delineate the sub-population IS NOT connected to the variable you predict, so you're spouting nonsense. there is no third option.
> we can say that what people see as race almost perfectly corresponds to what a computer would sort them into based on purely genetics.
the computer is just doing what the programmer told it to do based on a bunch of genetic categories that are artificially constructed. you get a guy's genes. what makes you say that guy is asian? oh thats right, a hand wavy mix of phenotypes and culture. thats entirely objective, dont know what I was thinking.
> We can say that a self proclaimed hippie is more likely to smoke weed than a self proclaimed Muslim or Christian. Do you believe we cannot do this?
you're going to classify him as a hippie because he smokes weed and predict that he smokes weed based on the fact that he is a hippie. and you dont see the circularity?
> Race isn't some wavy concept where you have asians thinking of themselves as africans
actually it is much more fluid than you seem to think. parts of africa and asia are geographically close, and have mingled for millennia.
> Sure you can point to exceptions but they are just that, not even 1% of the people in these studies when using more than just a dozen SNPs
thats more an artifact of the limitations of your studies, if you know anything at all about this subject you should know just how genetically diverse the human species is.
> "african" is not a category that has any meaningful genetic definition.
If you want me to be specific, the negroid, is that specific enough for you? I assume not.
> it has value in organizing information. another system of organizing information might be harmful. suppose you had a system of organizing information that weighted irrelevant data and disregarded relevant data. would it have positive value or negative value?
Again, you haven't proved that race can't predict. You haven't even tried to disprove what im saying, you just keep banging on about this stupid aragument that "well what is the color orange? Is it red or is it yellow? or gold even?".
Should we throw away colors because someone might see a yellow and another sees gold? Are colors useless now?
> the computer is just doing what the programmer told it to do based on a bunch of genetic categories that are artificially constructed. you get a guy's genes. what makes you say that guy is asian? oh thats right, a hand wavy mix of phenotypes and culture. thats entirely objective, dont know what I was thinking.
So you agree that cluster analysis proves race can be objectively measured? Thanks.
> you're going to classify him as a hippie because he smokes weed and predict that he smokes weed based on the fact that he is a hippie. and you dont see the circularity?
No see you are just strawmanning, you know damn well I said self reported hippie and i was making a point about self reporting vs actions.
> actually it is much more fluid than you seem to think. parts of africa and asia are geographically close, and have mingled for millennia.
Ok but you agreed with the cluster analysis work i linked to that shows we can still put them into nice little groups with around 99% correctness so I don't see what legs you have left to stand on here.
> thats more an artifact of the limitations of your studies, if you know anything at all about this subject you should know just how genetically diverse the human species is.
The more SNP's the studies add the more clear the race picture is, how on earth could you get the opposite picture from the studies?
Are you even reading the studies or do you just assume they say what you believe? Because at this point your just strawmanning over and over and it's just not a productive conversation.
> Again, you haven't proved that race can't predict.
actually I demonstrated that you are either using the trait you select for to predict itself (circular) or you use a trait to predict something its not related to (nonsense). there is no third option.
> So you agree that cluster analysis proves race can be objectively measured? Thanks.
you don't understand how that is impossible?
> self reported hippie
exactly, not a feature of objective reality.
> The more SNP's the studies add the more clear the race picture is, how on earth could you get the opposite picture from the studies?
because I understand the a priori nature of the modeling process.
there is no evidence for the existence of a race that does not rely on referencing the idea of a race. the idea is self-referential. to understand this, you must understand philosophy.
another way of saying this is that assigning a person to a race doesn't give us any more information than the information we used to classify him in the first place.
> so far the key points made in the book about the genetic existence of race have not even come close to being debunked.
ok, I'll bite: what defines a race? what test do I apply to a specimen in order to sort him/her into a race category?