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Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?

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I recently read a (non-fiction) book where exactly that kind of clustering was talked about. It's correct that you'll find clusters in each major continent, but with just 6 clusters one of them will be entirely devoted to a small, insular community in the north of Iran. To your eyes and our social consciousness this community would be considered "middle-eastern" when in reality they're about as genetically as different as "Black people" and "Asian people" are.

Since they're a small population, they don't matter for making generalizations about middle-easterners or whatever other larger classification you use.

I didn't make any comments on the utility of racial classification, just that the classification isn't perfect, leaves groups out, and where you decide to draw the lines between them is often arbitrary. Race is an oversimplification of a complex system, but even an oversimplification has value.

Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.

Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on the basis of their race.

> Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits

Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions.

Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.

Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories correlate to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is blindingly obvious – unless there are some people who think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have epithantic folds from their environment?

Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'.

See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.

Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.

Indeed. I heard one of the PIs on the 100,000 genomes project [1] giving a talk in which they flat-out said that anyone whose four grandparents were white and irish is basically a clone compared to anyone whose four grandparents were from sub-saharan africa. The whole point is that there's so much variability within each societal clustering that it tends to make not that much sense to talk about it -- and the degree of homogeneity is different, too, mostly depending on ancient geography (hello Iceland, as an example).

There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and india. Our social construct of race varies quite substantially over those places.

[1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease

So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be in only one cluster.

The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.

> but they can be in only one cluster

I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?

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