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Comment by apk-d | Hacker News Reader

There is no race, it's all just brains doing overactive classification. I wish that we got over this as a species already.

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I'm afraid this view is completely incompatible with the findings in population genetics. Two papers to get you started:

* Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

* Genetic Structure of Human Populations https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf

Glancing at your first citation, nothing in the summary seems to challenge the idea that people of all races see much bigger differences among races (for example, when someone like James Damore start dogwhistling IQ tests in their footnotes) than actually exist genetically.

Sure, there are genetic distinctions among groups of people. But as soon as someone mentions black or white people, the discussion isn't about these kind of fine genetic distinctions. They're about stereotypes that are much more social than they are genetic.

Now in the political realm, the significance of these terms and the groups is completely different because of the way groups have been treated historically on the basis not of these fine genetic distinctions but rather these crude social racial/ethnic identifications.

I'd prefer we avoided using footnotes pointing to scientific publications to oversimplify more complex political discussions or to justify the economic and social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups based on purposeful misreading.

>justify the economic and social marginalization of historical disadvantaged groups based on purposeful misreading.

This wouldn't be a problem if we weren't measuring economic and social marginalization by outcome, particularly when it comes to systemic bias. If we can't have a sober look at the inputs, I'm afraid we can't say anything meaningful about the outputs.

I agree with you, but I would also note that the original person being replied to seems to be committing a common colloquial misunderstanding in regards to social constructions; just because something is socially constructed does not mean it's not real. Race is absolutely real, regardless of the degree to which genetics does or doesn't correlate with it, because we make it real in our day to day interactions.

But your point is succinct: just because you can group people using genetic markers into clusters that align well with our society's typical social categorization of race does by no means validate a genetic basis for all the other sociocultural baggage that we associate with those categories. The most it seems to do particularly in regards to the social category of race is show that genetic markers useful for identifying kinship (I'd file that under "duh"). It's interesting to note, for me, that the analysis of the first paper works just fine for 2 clusters as well (basically East Asian and everyone else), but those super-racial groupings don't exist in the US to my knowledge.

Right, but this opens the door to there existing, in theory, racial genetic differences causing variation at the human scale; whether or not these map to racist stereotypes, it becomes harder to argue against them because people can no longer discard them by just denying the concept of racial variation altogether. So they actually have to put the work in to demonstrate that they're untrue, invalid or inapplicable.

Anything that makes it harder for people to attack the enemy is interpreted as aiding the enemy.

The Rosenberg et al paper just says that at a particular K partition (5 in this case) you get genetic structures that closely map onto what Americans view as race. It also says that at K=1 there are only Africans,and at k=3 there are only Africans, Europeans and Asians. If you’re gonna say these are races, why stop at k=5? Why not look at what STRUCTURE pops out for k= 25?

It's absolutely true that there are genetic clusters on multiple levels, and the choice of K is to a certain extent arbitrary. But the fact that there are multiple ways of slicing things up does not affect the reality of the underlying structure. The use of "race" to denote 25 different groups would probably be a bit confusing though, unfortunately we don't have any better terms ("genetic cluster" is a bit awkward?)

Here's a really cool chart from an ancient DNA paper with stacked charts from K=2 to K=20: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...

(The paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2013/12/23/001552)

Zoom in far enough and the clusters basically replicate national borders: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/09/01/european... so you might use the term "ethnicity" for them.

My Masters thesis covered a lot of what is in these papers. Here are a few possibly surprising things people who think genetic clusters point to races may not realize: 1) People from Papua New Guinea and Chinese people would be considered the same race according to genetic clusters at K=4. 2) At k=2 there are only Africans and Asian races. 3) And Europeans and dravidians are part of the same race, at k=5.

If we were not analyzing ourself the different races would be called different species, never mind races.

Butterflies are called different species based on much smaller differences. Or for example the two moths in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution

Calling different races different species obviously would upset people, so we don't. But let's not pretend the differences don't exist.

While we can't even define what a species is[0], this is quite an overstatement. I think you'd be on stronger, albeit equally politically charged, ground if you used "breed" or "variety".

[0] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/defining-species-fuzzy-a...

“These forms are often accidentally elevated to subspecies status when they appear in literature. Not adding the ‘f.’ (form) or morpha implies that the taxon is a subspecies instead of a form, as in Biston betularia carbonaria instead of Biston betularia f. carbonaria. Rarely forms have been elevated to species status as in Biston carbonaria. Either of these two circumstances might lead to the erroneous belief that speciation was involved in the observed evolution of the peppered moth. This is not the case; individuals of each morph interbreed and produce fertile offspring with individuals of all other morphs; hence there is only one peppered moth species.” - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth

> individuals of each morph interbreed and produce fertile offspring with individuals of all other morphs; hence there is only one peppered moth species

If this criterion were universally applied, there would be very few plant species, and zero microbial species.

Precisely how to classify “species” seems to be a major debate. Regardless, it does not appear that these two kinds of moths are actually considered to be different species.

Indeed; however, a convenient line of differentiation presents itself: animals, let alone humans, are not plants.

The fact that there are observable aggregate genetic differences between groups of humans does not endanger the proposition that all human groups have equal moral worth. But denying that race is a real thing sure does give a lot of oxygen to people with bad ideas.

The issue is semantic, the word "race" when applied to the human species doesn't have the same meaning when applied to other species.

moral worth and capacities

Do all races have equal capacity to play professional basketball?

If not, what rational basis could one have in claiming all races must have equal capacity in other areas?

Fundamentally, creating policy based on racial capacity cannot end in a moral place. Every single time governments/societies start down that path, it ends poorly.

Frankly, who gives a shit. It seems better to me to live in a world that's .000005% less efficiently allocated than it is to live in the caste system that always emerges from that path.

Yeah but you've broken a sanctity to take that 0.00005% away. You've opened the door to instrumentalizing science, formerly the pursuit of truth, for political gain. And I know everybody's doing that already, but there's a difference between everybody doing it and everybody being okay with it. One of those is salvageable, the other isn't.

Nobody advocates creating policy based on racial capacity, though.

There absolutely are people advocating creating policy to the specific benefit of some race(s) over others based on the underlying premise that racism/oppression must be the only significant cause of inequal statistical outcomes. This inherently rejects the possibility of different (generalized) capacities between races, among other potential contributors (culture, individuals' decisions).

Do you feel like that, too, cannot end in a moral place?

> Nobody advocates creating policy based on racial capacity, though.

To be fair, I think a more precise statement would be that nobody within the mainstream advocates for this at this point in time. But they have in the past and people outside of the mainstream advocate for this even now. And it's conceivable that this could enter mainstream discourse again, even if we are pretty far from that point now.

I think the person you were responding to was pointing out that it is almost certainly not the case that the various traits which we would describe as capacities are distributed evenly across races. As far as I can tell, they were not advocating for racially based policy.

Everything is relative and nothing is unique at a large enough spectrum

Arguments made by people claiming that there's no such thing as race, such as this one, seem to have this underlying premise that while certain thing are relative, other things are objective. Yet they have no possible way of backing this up because their own experience of the world is relative. Ironically, ideas are as close as we can get to real objectivism. When it comes to the mechanics of the universe, everything is fundamentally relative. So claiming that humans making consistent classifications of each other isn't legitimate doesn't make sense.

from the article:

> It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.

> But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage

> The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.

> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Prove your statement, please.

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