| sundin13 said: But why? There is no fundamental biological principle which states that is where the lines for these divisions should be drawn. The decision to drawn the line there is based on convenience. That is largely the crux of this discussion: Whether or not the divisions are natural or if the have just been reified through use. |
You could practically use that argument against any biological division among populations ... (biologists aren't going to stop at just "species" either, they are going to make further classifications in the same species group such as "breeds" and to me "human races" are no different than that of animal "breeds")
If we do that for the ENTIRE animal kingdom then human races are not an exception ...
| sundin13 said: And no, skewed allele frequencies are not the key to identifying race. If that were true, we would consider people from East Finland to be a different race than West Finland. As it turns out, through skewed allele frequencies, genetic technology can actually determine ancestry location within a few hundred kilometers. Skewed allele frequencies are simply natural artifacts which present themselves in any large population. |
And it's these skewed allele frequencies which allows us to categorize these large populations ...
Would you categorize the people of East Finland as being more genetically similar to the populations of East Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa compared to the European populations ?
| sundin13 said: I found a few interesting articles on the topic that I wanted to bring up: Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents This article is a direct response to the Rosenburg (2002) article you posted yesterday. Essentially, what it is stating is that the "distinctness" of the populations determined by Rutherford (which already exist on shaky footing as a stand-in for race, for the reasons discussed above) is largely due to the incomplete nature of his population sets. By taking a more even sampling from across the globe, we find that humanity doesn't exist in distinct chunks but instead exist as a gradient, or cline. "Using a homogeneous sampling strategy and a model in which allele frequencies in the different inferred populations are allowed to be independent, we find a stable and reproducible representation of human genetic diversity in which the extent of admixture between individuals in Eurasia and the Americas changes continuously with geographical distance without any major discontinuities" "on a worldwide scale, clines are a better representation of the human diversity than clades, and that continents do not represent more substantial discontinuities in such clines than many other geographical and cultural barriers" |
I don't argue for "race" as a discontinuous distribution of human genetic diversity. In fact I've always acknowledged that race is not a discontinuous classification for human populations much like how we define each "colour" to be distinct only to find out later that they are just a part of the near continuous visible wavelength spectrum of electromagnetic radiation but that doesn't mean that we still can't group based on "range" ...
Not all of us define "race" as genetically "distinct" populations and instead define race as genetically "skewed" populations based off of geographical isolation ... (you call them "clines" but we call it "race")
| sundin13 said: Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4756148/ This article discusses similar ideas, outside of the context of Rosenburg. It shows that the "cluster" effects some studies demonstrate is likely to be an artifact of flawed sampling, it covers the statistical analyses dealing with the division of a species into race and demonstrates that the difference are often not stastically significant and are evolutionarily meaningless, and concludes that the idea of "race" has no basis in biological reality. "Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it demonstrates that the hypothesis that attributes the clustering of human populations to “frictional” effects of landform barriers at continental boundaries is empirically incoherent" "what counts as “biological reality” of human races is elusive, ranging from “trivial” to “obscure,” and often construed in a non-Darwinian biological framework" "In Darwinian classification (but also in phylogenetic systematics), a biological grouping of organisms that does not meet [certain criteria] is referred to as a wastebasket taxon. It is so called because it is evolutionary unordered and functions in science merely as a “warehouse kind” that taxonomically lumped together disparate organisms having no objectively definable evolutionary relationship. Wastebasket taxa lack natural reality and granting them objective biological existence constitutes an erroneous attribution of ontological status called the fallacy of reification" “A classification that takes into account evolutionary relationships and the nested pattern of diversity would require that Sub-Saharan Africans are not a race because the most exclusive group that includes all Sub-Saharan African populations also includes every non-Sub-Saharan African population…” " the cline model maps continuous genetic gradation in a dataset and indicates that there is no natural break in a population's genetic profile " |
@Bold Rosenberg responds otherwise in another paper ... (this pretty much trivializes your entire argument that the genetic differences between races are not statistically significant not true)
And you think race is a wastebasket taxon not based on a natural reality ?! LOL
Ignoring for a second that geneticists showed an insurmountable amount of evidence for the relationship between geographical races/ancestry and the fact that they have yet to be disproved for these studies/research and practices let's also take a look at the biological ramifications that "races" have in the context of the clinical world ...
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1993074,00.html
Mixed race populations are at a MASSIVE disadvantage when finding a compatible bone marrow donors so instead of your body rejecting an organ, your new immune system rejects your body instead so if race is not statistically significant at the genetic level like you keep arguing then what is your hypothesis for the disparity in mixed races having vastly lower chances in finding bone marrow matches ? 
(Can you really tell these patients who have leukemia if you are a surgeon with lifelines at the wire that race doesn't matter ?!)
http://healthland.time.com/2013/11/01/the-hpv-vaccine-and-the-case-for-race-based-medicine/
Even vaccines show different efficacy among human races ...
There's a health organization dedicated to finding bond marrow matches among mixed races ...
