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Comment by drewcon | Hacker News Reader

I defy you to describe race in certain terms.

What you mean by "certain terms"? The OP said plenty of definitions are fuzzy. "Species" doesn't even have a rigourous definition when it comes down to it. Pretty much all taxonomies beyond the Standard Model of particle physics are fictions. In science, the only thing that matters is whether a category is useful for analytical purposes.

“Race” is significantly more fuzzy than “species”.

There are edge cases where people will argue where to draw lines between species. However, it’s profoundly challenging to draw lines between “races” in the first place.

Can you quantify how significant the fuzziness has to be before it should not be subject to analysis? Species is a lot fuzzier than you think.

> Species is a lot fuzzier than you think.

As someone who, as a child, read books on the history of taxonomy and how taxonomy has changed over the centuries, I would love to hear you list what mistaken beliefs about species you claim that I have.

Seriously, though. I am not interested in being the topic of conversation, so please do not make me the subject of your comments.

Just a thought, maybe you could not take informal statements on general knowledge so personally.

Or, you know, you could not use personal language, and instead talk about the subject matter itself.

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

If a thing can't be defined either specifically or usefully, maybe it should stay in the humanities rather than invade science?

If we go with this argument how much of biology becomes humanities?

I think if you actually went over and talked to some biologists, you'd find that they have, in fact, put aside various colloquial terms for scientific use because they're insufficiently rigorous.

No; many things in biology are not easily defined (due to limitations of technology, or our own ability to classify things is faulty) but are solidly in the area of quantitative biology.

Example: in the past, "rho factor" was a magical component in a test tube that had a well-defined activity but nobody knew "what" rho was (hence the term "factor"). Eventually, rho factor was isolated and purified to the point where molecular characterization determined it was a protein with a specific function. but that didn't stop people from studying it as a "thing" that had no real "definition" other than the visible activity of its function.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

try googling "<race> person face" where <race> is "white", "asian" or "black" and you get pretty representative results of what people mean by "race".

(same if you do "dog breed" for example)

That’s not useful in a scientific context. Kind of like trying to come up with a test to see if someone is “crazy”. “Crazy” is not a diagnostic term, you wouldn’t split crazy and non-crazy people in a scientific context. What you would do is, for example, consider a group of people who have experienced psychotic episodes, or people who experience persecutory delusions. Those terms, while not perfectly precise, are at least repeatable and well-understood.

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