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Comment by tchaffee | Hacker News Reader

Race however is a social construct and that's where your tidy conclusion falls apart.

Race is a social construct in the context of American racial history and politics, where categories were invented long before the concept of genomic ancestry and "Hispanic" counts as a race. In the rest of the world and within the context of this discussion and other discussions of this sort "race" is a noisy proxy for continental-level ancestry, and it so happens that even American "races" correspond decently well to proportions of ancestry traceable to continental-level populations, with their distinct histories and adaptations. Separating unlabeled genomes into N clusters, we predictably arrive at close matches to traditional racial classifications.

The fact that some small (half a million, a few tens of thousands...) populations constitute distinct clusters that pop out at small Ns is a nice gotcha, but entirely beside the point – which is the a priori plausibility of noteworthy and systemic heritable differences between people of major races, irrespective of their belonging to any social constructs.

Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.

If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.

Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.

I agree that a more fine-grained classification is more useful. However, the fact that all the greatest long-distance endurance runners are of Kalenjin descent (Nilotic race) tells us next to nothing about any other trait. All the best sprinters are also Africans – but predominantly of Bantu ancestry, pretty diverse in this case. As are most NBA stars, and the great proportion of other athletes defined by a rather obvious subset of physical excellences linked to fast-twitch muscle fibers. At the same time, somehow no Bantu group excels in swimming. So using this method of yours, we derive that a great deal of a people belonging to a major race can have a similar ability profile in sports. Not too good for your argument.

If you have to refer to non-central examples, this only shows that your actual case is weak.

It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.

But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.

https://nautil.us/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-abo...

I would not call an obsolete social construct that only racists are still hanging on, "real" :

https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...

Ask the people who are oppressed by it if it's real.

Agreed that we should be dismantling it, but something has to be real to be dismantled right?

Agreed, we just seemed to be using two different meanings of "real".

The lines are a social construct, but there is a real physical spectrum underneath it.

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