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Comment by factsaresacred | Hacker News Reader

The idea that race is a social construct is simply dumb.

Race: Genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin, and that differ from humans from other geographic origins, sometimes distinguishable by appearance.

If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans by what we call 'races'. But it would require science to clarify what distinguishes a race at the genetic level (physical differences being a decent proxy but often wrong and clearly primitive) and to map the distinct differences between each race.

Why is this controversial?

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> The idea that race is a social construct is simply dumb

The idea that it is not a social construct is both dumb and ahistorical. (OTOH, readily apparent phenotype obviously has some correlation to genotype, so there is going to be a degree of correlation between he social construct and genetics, especially when the social construct includes socially-enforced rules discouraging reproduction outside of the socially-ascribed category.)

> If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans by what we call 'races'.

We'd probably adopt a somewhat similar concept with different dividing lines based on loose association of readily apparent phenotypic traits with the social affinities, power dynamics, and other conflicts and commonalities that formed after the mass forgetting event. This is easily predictable because studies of concepts of race across time and space in history without such mass forgetting events show differences driven by such affinities, shifting (mostly slowly) as those affinities change over time.

> Why is this controversial?

Because it aligns with what some people want very much to believe (hence support for it) but is inconsistent with historical evidence (hence, opposition to it), producing controversy.

> concepts of race

How is 'genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin' a concept? Did you read the article?

> Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology...enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Allow me to emphasise: "differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real".

Wow, what a coincidence given the fact that "differences in genetic ancestry" is exactly what race is.

Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct but "differences in genetic ancestry" is what most people mean when they say 'race'.

> How is 'genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin' a concept

It is a concept (pretty much anything that you can refer to in language is a concept), but more to the point it's not the basis of actual racial categories in the real world.

> Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct

Yes, the categories socially ascribed (including legally assigned) and self-identified (which are usually similar, but not always aligned), largely based on trivially observable lphenotype, into which people are sorted as “races”. Which, demonstrably, have a drifting relationship over time and space, driven by social factors, to any genetic-based assignment system you might care to establish, though they obviously have a correlation to genetics (both because geneticd play a role in determining phenotype and because those social categories are often socially enforced, or at least incentivized, boundaries on acceptable mate selection, making them semi-isolated breeding pools.)

> The idea that race is a social construct is simply dumb.

All of the interaction surface with 'race' in our society is absolutely a social construct which varies dramatically over time and from location to location. Moreover, even if the genetic variations by population do lead to statistically significant differences, that doesn't matter one iota: the qualities of the individual matter far more than whatever statistical distribution they may be drawn from, and to give those poor proxies any kind of social significance is morally wrong and extremely dangerous, as centuries of bloody history have demonstrated.

> the qualities of the individual matter far more than whatever statistical distribution...

I'm making zero judgement on any individuals. Can we separate the science from the possible implications, please? Otherwise it's hard to have reasoned debate.

> All of the interaction surface with 'race' in our society is absolutely a social construct

That may well be, but it doesn't lessen the fact that 'race' - i.e "differences in genetic ancestry" - is real.

Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races but have merged into the "white" race. Have the genetics of Ireland changed drastically in the past 100 years? Or was it the social construct of "race" that changed? Why do some countries consider certain groups a different race and other countries view them as a socioeconomic class e.g. gypsies? Humans migrate and interbreed with different genetic groups and have been doing so for a long, long time. We are really a spectrum of genetic differences and not really a bunch of grouped individuals.

https://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white13.htm

This is one of the weak points of the author's presentation. He's meaning "race" as ancestral origins grouped at the level at which there was relatively little external gene flow during premodern times, e.g groups separated by large geographic barriers like the Sahara or Pacific. Apparently, and this was the point of the article, there are significant AVERAGE genetic differences based on these groupings.

> Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races

To whom? Outside of America this is ridiculous. Maybe that's it - The US has so many hangups about race they changed the definition.

Race: "differences in genetic ancestry based on different geographic origin". Just because people exploited the term and used it incorrectly does not mean it does not have an exact definition.

In the middle ages people who carried out trepanning claimed to know about medicine. People who called the Irish non-caucasian claimed to know about race. They didn't (or in the latter case, they did but were prejudice).

Neither medicine nor race need be discredited by past ignorance.

If you travel south from Scandinavia to sub-saharan Africa, you will encounter every shade of skin colour from really really white to extremely dark brown. It's a continuous spectrum, and drawing some arbitrary lines delineating different "races" makes about as much sense as all the other borders the colonial powers loved to think up.

But the real problem is obviously how rather useless it is to sort humans into some set of boxes. Any individual should be treated as such, and judged by their behaviour. Differences in behaviour between "races" are either non-existent or so small it takes extremely high-powered empirical studies to find extremely small effects.

To use an example: say some statistics showed that race A is 2% more intelligent than race B, on average. Using such a data point for decision-making is statistical malpractice. Because the variability of intelligence within each group will mean that any single individual from A only has an advantage of maybe 0.5 percentage points of being smarter than an individual from B.

Now that's not strictly a problem with the science, and more about its misuse. But there really aren't any compelling uses for such research. And even if your work is done with the best intentions, you can't just ignore its possible misuse.

With the world's history of racial animus, the least one should do is not to use the term. The science will actually be better for it, because for any genetic phenomenon you might want to study, the likelihood of it neatly following the "race" borders of the 19th century is no different than random chance–unless you're studying skin colour.

Look at the distribution of the "sickle-cell trait", a mutation that protects against malaria at the cost of increased risk of sickle-cell anaemia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#/media/Fil...

You'll find that its prevalence neatly corresponds to historical regions with malaria. It does not, however, follow any racial borders. I assure it's the same for anything but skin colour, which follows an almost exact gradient of solar intensity.

But it is also a problem with the science right now, because it is not at all clear that correlations that have been observed have a causal relationship with intelligence. If you take two populations and any behavioral trait, you are likely to find genetic markers correlated with that trait.

Indeed! I was trying to make an even-if argument.

your second assumption is false because the idea of race is a relatively recent phenomenon.

If you read any of the old Roman texts, you would not find reference to race rather you would find references to a person's ethnicity. Ethnicity is tied to culture and language.

It is only controversial when you have what is the far right using Mott and Bailey arguments to justify racism.

Wrong. Both In Greece and Rome black people were referred to as “Aethiopian,” regardless of their actual ancestry in Africa.

Black people were not excluded from any profession, and there was no stigma or bias against mixed race relationships in Antiquity.

Why is Obama considered black? The very fact that some races bind harder than others should indicate that our racial labels are not tied strongly to genetics.

> Why is Obama considered black?

It's obvious that's he's black and Caucasian. Why he's called black in America while in other places he'd be mixed-race is a product of American culture and his own preference I imagine (many mixed-race people decide to 'identify as black', meaning culturally).

But the label he's given does not change his underlying race.

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