What do people mean exactly when they say that race is a social construct?

[Sammy Boy]

Just now, dimreepr said:

Yep, accurate...

No it's strawman. I don't think cheerleading your forum buddies and name calling the people they disagree with is the kind of quality suitable to a science board. Please contribute substantive arguments or desist from posting.

[dimreepr]

2 minutes ago, Sammy Boy said:

 Please contribute substantive arguments or desist from posting.

 

You first...

3 minutes ago, Sammy Boy said:

 I don't think cheerleading your forum buddies and name calling the people they disagree with 

 

I think I've argued with every senior member on this forum. 

[ConvolutedSolutions]

This question can only be answered with two levels. In one sense, yes, what you write is true: different environments and different histories necessarily construct different organisms with different gene sequences that pertain to those different conditions which have determined their systems particular uniqueness. 

In a certain sense, the whole issue has been improperly framed i.e. it has spawned from an intellectually glib postmodern culture which simply doesn't think in reasonable/coherent ways. 

At a strictly biological level, there are differences that mostly arise from heat and light differences; so, African's have longer legs because animals at the equator need to dissipate heat, which is more effectively done when the core of the body is smaller, and the limbs longer. The reverse of this makeup can be found in Neanderthals and their barrelled chests, as well as Eskimo peoples who have evolved in the North. And light, or UV rays, determine the degree of melanin in the skin; melanin is a protein with the unique property of being able to breakdown uV rays, and hence, is again just a structurally evolved difference - but simply surface level. 

At the neurological level, human brain-minds are enormously plastic, and so, constantly undergoing differentiation in terms of cultural elements and developmental history (i.e. critical periods which reify certain homeostatic patterns); and so, indeed, there is a quasi-behavioral difference between human ethnic groups, but at the same time, look at how malleable we are! Papua New Guinea aborigines can pick up and assimilate without problem any element of modern culture so long as they learn these skills early on. This strongly supports the image of a dynamically plastic process which responds more or less to the same relational meanings i.e. from the bottom-up, which is why its not a problem for aborigines to jump-forward thousands of years of civilization i.e. they already have the neurodynamical prerequisites to assimilate complex abstract knowledges about reality i.e. sciences, philosophy, etc

All in all, racism, or caring too much about race, reflects a small-mindedness that spends way too much energy focusing on minor and paltry differences, at the expense of very large and very general dynamics (i.e. recognition of needs) which more or less determine how well a society functions and how highly a person is able to regulate their emotions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Sammy Boy]

2 hours ago, ConvolutedSolutions said:

All in all, racism, or caring too much about race, reflects a small-mindedness that spends way too much energy focusing on minor and paltry differences, at the expense of very large and very general dynamics (i.e. recognition of needs) which more or less determine how well a society functions and how highly a person is able to regulate their emotions.

Racism seems to mean caring at all about race. For example I am a "racist" because I do not want the European people to be replaced with non-European people. Is that caring "too much"? It's subjective.

The natural meaning of "ist" words is extremely wide and includes any connection the noun used to construct it. A "knifeist" could be somebody who supports the concept of knives, such as a housewife. These words are stupid and vague and only used to stifle thought for political reasons rather than elucidate.

Edited September 19, 2017 by Sammy Boy

[Ten oz]

"It has long been appreciated that differences between human populations account for only a small fraction of the total variance in allele frequencies (typically presented as FST values of 10–15%; Lewontin 1972; Nei and Roychoudhury 1972; Latter 1980; Barbujani et al. 1997; Jorde et al. 2000; Watkins et al. 2003; International HapMap Consortium 2005; Rosenberg et al. 2005). Such observations triggered controversy from the outset. Some geneticists concluded the differences were negligible (Lewontin 1972); others disagreed (Mitton 1978). Despite the limited data, it soon became apparent that even a modest number of loci should allow accurate assignment of individuals to populations (Mitton 1978; Smouse et al. 1982).

More recently, the Human Genome Project (2001) (HGP) highlighted the basic genetic similarity of all humans, yet subsequent analyses demonstrated that genetic data can be used to accurately classify humans into populations (Rosenberg et al. 2002, 2005; Bamshad et al. 2003; Turakulov and Easteal 2003; Tang et al. 2005; Lao et al. 2006). Risch et al. (2002) and Edwards (2003) used theoretical illustrations to show why accurate classification is possible despite the slight differences in allele frequencies between populations. These illustrations suggest that, if enough loci are considered, two individuals from the same population may be genetically more similar (i.e., more closely related) to each other than to any individual from another population (as foreshadowed by Powell and Taylor 1978). Accordingly, Risch et al. (2002, p. 2007.5) state that “two Caucasians are more similar to each other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian.” However, in a reanalysis of data from 377 microsatellite loci typed in 1056 individuals, Europeans proved to be more similar to Asians than to other Europeans 38% of the time (Bamshad et al. 2004; population definitions and data from Rosenberg et al. 2002)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1893020/