1. Race as a social construct. It does exist in that capacity - as an extreme example Irish were not considered "white" in America (google for some "hilarious" images from "back in the day").
2. Race as a biological reality. This is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't mean that well documented taxonomic differences between human races are "fake". They do exist and are more than "skin deep" - things like bone density, cranial capacity, maturation etc etc. Ask your dentist if he can tell by looking at someone's jaw x-ray whether it belongs to an east asian or sub-saharan african.
Race is not just a word for different breeding populations of humans. The dilution of its meaning into something so innocuous is ahistorical, in fact it contradicts what was claimed to be the reality of race just decades ago. It's a political concept first and foremost.
No biological theory predicts races. Races are categories rooted in historical economic exploitation and domination that are a posteriori fitted with whatever truthy pseudoscientific justification is catchy at the time. Any categories of humans that biological measurements would come up with would hardly match racial categories. Perhaps the most racialized group that has distinct biological markers are Ashkenazi jews. However, the relation between Ashkenazi jews, Sephardic jews, and ethnic Arabs is very strong.
P.S. A review of the legal history of race in colonial America: https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whitene...
Actually, there very much are.
I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.
Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
to quote my own post - well documented taxonomic differences between human races.
Or are you talking about biological differences as they correlate with geographic locality?
"Heaps don't exist because you can't prove an ironclad boundary between heaps and non-heaps."
"Tallness isn't a thing because you don't have a firm, binary definition of when someone is tall."
I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.
But even so the human genome is not continuously distributed, even if the difference is linear with distance, simply due to the fact that humans are not continuously distributed geographically. You can't handwave oceans and mountains away.
The main criticism of clustering is that the hierarchy of clusters that you obtain depend on the distribution of your samples, and that we currently do not have a good uniform sampling of human DNA. In short clustering can tell you reliably if someone is Irish or Italian, but may falsely identify the french as italian if there are not enough samples for french people.
“These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,” said Noah Zaitlen, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor of medicine and co-senior author on the new study. “In a medical context both elements may provide valuable information.”
Setting aside the fact that this is such a touchy issue that the authors are carefully couching their language, it looks like there may be ways in which this new information can help people by tailoring medical treatments. I'd love a ELI5 explanation of this if I'm somehow misunderstanding, but the conclusion I formed seems to be supported by the article to my reading of it.
Note, I'm not taking a hardline stance. That's why I said "race is not just a social construct" in my conclusion.
The classic example discussed is a study of children born during a famine. Children born during famine are going to be smaller than normal, but it was found that their children and grandchildren would be born smaller than normal, even though the famine has long since passed. This change has been attributed to a particular methylation pattern that was passed down.
It's known that things like exposure to famine and abuse can change methylation patterns, but this study suggests that non-traumatic things like your cultural upbringing can affect methylation.
It seems like the debate we're having is a rehash of nature vs nurture, where it seems like the new research indicates nurture can affect nature for future generations through gene expression.
I don't think there's more genetic diversity among Bantus than the rest of the world combined.
Not population geneticists. Africa in those cases == sub-Saharan African people, not just Bantu.
I am a layman who knows next to nothing about genetics, but a bit about Africa, and I would not consider the two peoples to be in the same race. They look completely different - which is what most laymen use to determine race, isn't it?
That's not how I read it. My takeaway was that "race" is a social construct that can leave epigenetic markers. In other words, culture can affect physiology.
In other words harder sciences are proving that social sciences obsession with identity politics has hindered medical advancements once again.
I would agree that many in the social sciences create epistemological problems for ideological reasons.
The Atlantic had an article about exactly the kind of thing you're taking about, and how this kind of pseudoscience is being pushed by neo-nazis and the alt-right: http://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/510962/
Nothing in the article is racist, nor is anything in my statements. Please take your ad hominem elsewhere.
At the time of this article only two of the many subthreads related to this article had descended into politics and name-calling. One was initiated by your very own unsubstantiated attack on "identity politics". The other (considerably less favourably-received) post was claimed the notion of a social element to race that was the work of "lunatics and agitators seeking to attack and disrupt western society" and argued the researchers were doing themselves and society a disservice by engaging with it. Remind me who it was that's putting a negative slant on useful medical research again.
As a side note, when I started my thread there were more than 60 upvotes on the article and no comments. At least there's a discussion.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
It says nothing about identity politics.
Constructively, try not to see news as a chance to reinforce your existing views. Try and do the opposite. try to expand your world view.