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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best.

The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.

That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).

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The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for “species” reads:

> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.

This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to any arbitrary social constructs.

Conversely, the definition for “race” is explicitly arbitrary and social:

> A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.

> This is the definition I’ve always heard

It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1, F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of the same species?

Read up on the species problem for more information (there are now 26, not 24):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

IIRC, there are two species of birds, A and B, in the North Atlantic that cannot interbreed. But A can breed with C which has a range to the east, and C can breed with D again further east. And so on, around the arctic circle, until you get to Q which can breed with B.

I can’t admit I have any qualifications to speak about biology, and I know HN is known for proposing reductive “solutions” based on oversimplified models of reality.

That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that a species would include the entire connected graph whose nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability to have fertile offspring.

I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very large graph, but nevertheless, all the examples seem to be within altogether very similar groups.

I think a reasonable definition for casual use doesn’t need to require the graph of a species to be fully connected, only fully reachable.

There are certainly leaks to any abstraction of species, but they are empirical cases of exceptions. They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

That doesn't work because the graph for humans would go all the way back to those ancient apes by many connected edges and back down to modern apes, making us all the same species.

This is another problem with species - where is the transition where one species evolves into another?

> They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.

That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category.

So to the extent that we find "species" a meaningful category when applied correctly, then we should also find "race" a meaningful category when applied correctly. The key in both scenarios is to apply them correctly, and we should abandon them when we find more precise metrics.

That said, you are correct that there are also numerous cultural and social properties that are sometimes lumped in with race in a manner that we don't see with species, mainly because "species" hasn't been politicized. That doesn't imply that there's nothing "there" once you tune out that baggage.

> That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category

I think this is the thing people misunderstand about race being a social construct, is that race is a bucket, by nature there need to be correlations between people in that bucket in order to actually place people into that bucket in the first place.

There will likely be other correlations between people in said bucket, who are in this cause usually more closely related and share more recent common ancestors.

The size of that bucket and how we put people in it is arbitrary, but the fact that correlations exist when you put people in buckets isn't.

A modern definition of "species" generally gives a set of objective criteria that you can use to determine if two organisms are the same species (such as "can they produce fertile offspring"). Is there any definition of race like this? Genuine question, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of race more specific than "a collection of people with similar physical characteristics" or something like that, and I can't find one now. There's lots of definitions of what all the different races are, but none of what a "race" actually is.

Is there any definition of race where, given two people, you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at the definitions of each race and categorize the two people" because that's circular, how were those particular categories chosen? With species, you can determine that a bird and a fish are different species without knowing what birds and fish are.

The imprecise definition of "species" is exactly what I was describing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

I agree we don't have a perfect definition of species, but I'm wondering if we have literally any definition of race. Has anybody even tried? Is there any criteria more specific than "if two people look very different then they are different races"?

Can't say to be honest, I don't have that much interest in the topic of race beyond its informal use to define cohorts in studies. More than likely someone could start from ethnicity and expand it from there, but the whole endeavour is likely doomed from the start given the sensitivity of the subject.

You're so, so close to getting it. And then you decide to just hop over the point :(

See my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329

I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a social construct at all.

I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social construct" that would have to exclude species as a meaningful category.

Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.

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