Is race a social construct? [ANSWERED: YES!]

[John Cuthber]

29 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Listing all of the potential uses of race in humans is irrelevant to the question of whether it's a valid biological concept.

If you could list just one scientifically valid use for "race" then you would show that it was a scientificaly valid concept.

That's pretty relevant.

[Stevie Wonder]

15 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

But race isn't an exception. People have answered this, but perhaps you missed this because you deemed them to be irrelevant to the question.

You link a discussion of the various definitions of species. This is indeed irrelevant. I asked whether species (by any definition) was a biological concept and how one defines a biological concept. This was ignored. So people are ignoring my relevant questions and you are complaining when I ignore irrelevant discussion.

Why is race defined by shared ancestry not biological while other taxa defined by shared ancestry (species being a special case including distinct separation due to infertility or isolation. Darwin of course situated species in a continuum as only being distinct due to non-extant intermediate forms and not fundamentally different to other taxa.) are?

16 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

If you could list just one scientifically valid use for "race" then you would show that it was a scientificaly valid concept.

That's pretty relevant.

Would we agree that predictive validity was the sine qua non of a scientific concept?

Edited April 8, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[John Cuthber]

In order to be useful it would need to make valid predictions.

In order to be scientific it would need to do the same thing.

(There may be odd exceptions but, if so, let's hear about them)

[Stevie Wonder]

5 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

In order to be useful it would need to make valid predictions.

In order to be scientific it would need to do the same thing.

(There may be odd exceptions but, if so, let's hear about them)

So if I tell you somebody is Chinese, you can predict they have black hair. QED.

[Prometheus]

20 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Why is race defined by shared ancestry not biological while other taxa defined by shared ancestry ... are?

You can define race how you like, it is a social construct in that regard. People keep answering your questions, just not in a way you deem satisfactory. If you have a specific answer in mind, one you deem relevant, then tell us. Why this cat and mouse game? Just enlighten us.

Would you like to comment on my cancer example? I think it's a good analogy to what we're discussing, but free from political biases. Once we reach agreement there, it will be easy to agree on race too. For instance i would say the classifications of cancer are social constructs. This is not to say they are not based on biology, only that we have to choose where to draw lines on complex and continuous variable spaces - and that is always a choice based on your outcome of interest. Hence race isn't treated any different to other biological concepts - or indeed scientific concepts in other disciplines. But this is apparently irrelevant, so why don't you demonstrate what you deem relevant?

[John Cuthber]

9 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

So if I tell you somebody is Chinese, you can predict they have black hair. QED.

Never seen a bald Chinese person?

Never seen one with grey hair?

Never seen one who dyed their hair.

And that's before we get to all the Chinese people whose ancestors are not Chinese.

Why bother to say they were Chinese, rather than they were black haired ?

 

On reflection, to a pretty good approximation for humanity as a whole, we all have black hair.

 

Edited April 8, 2018 by John Cuthber

[Stevie Wonder]

8 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

You can define race how you like, it is a social construct in that regard.

So therefore no concepts are biological, if they have different definitions? I think the crux here is that you are arguing all constructs are social, which may be true but is then trivial, and I am claiming race is biological, which you are failing to discuss.

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People keep answering your questions, just not in a way you deem satisfactory. If you have a specific answer in mind, one you deem relevant, then tell us. Why this cat and mouse game? Just enlighten us.

No, they really don't. I've asked how you define a biological concept. I asked why species and subspecies are biological but race isn't. Then you go on an irrelevant waffle about how concepts can have different definitions, which nobody disputes.

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Would you like to comment on my cancer example?

No it's completely irrelevant. Obviously concepts in biology can have different definitions. But they are still biological concepts. I am asking why you are dismissing race as not biological.

3 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

Never seen a bald Chinese person?

Never seen one with grey hair?

Never seen one who dyed their hair.

Why bother to say they were Chinese, rather than they were black haired ?

It seems you fail to understand the meaning of the word predict. Your "exceptions" response was entirely predictable lame sophistry. "Chinese" allows one to make several correlated predictions. Really your responses have been so consistently lame and disingenuous that you aren't worth responding to. I've heard all of the pop fallacies before. 

Edited April 8, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[John Cuthber]

I may have missed it.

Can you tell / remind  me what definition of "race" you are using?

 

[Prometheus]

32 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

So therefore no concepts are biological, if they have different definitions? I think the crux here is that you are arguing all constructs are social, which may be true but is then trivial, and I am claiming race is biological, which you are failing to discuss

Interesting. 'True but trivial'. Is the truth ever trivial? Maybe best to save that for philosophers.

Well i guess then the question is what do we mean by a biological concept as distinct from more general concepts, and then is race a biological concept.

Off the top of my head i would say that a biological concept is one rooted some metric of a living system that is useful to scientists. So then i take two distinct groups. jockeys and basketball players, measure their genes and conclude they are different races because the state space of genes in these groups are quite far apart. We don't treat them as different races though, even though we can predict lifespan to be different in the two groups (at a certain point taller people have an increased risk of death). We seem to need something more than simply some metric in the biological state space to make race a concept. 

I would be interested if you know of any studies that have performed some kind of unsupervised cluster analysis on whole genome sequences of many people of the different races. This would be the most objective way of seeing how groups cluster. If the races did cluster in a way that did not require additional information about the participants, i could accept that as biological. For instance, if we include the jockeys and basketball players in this analysis and they cluster in a more distinct way than some traditional races, then we'd have to accept that jockeys and basketball players are indeed distinct races. 

There are many such divisions rooted in biology we could make, but we do not. But some people want to for race. Why should race be an exception? If it were useful i could see a case for it - in medicine it is used as a proxy marker for disease risk - as has already, but apparently irrelevantly, been discussed. But that demarcation becomes irrelevant when we have direct measures of the genes responsible, and also mitigates the cross-correlations you get with cultural issues in populations such as diet. 

Edited April 8, 2018 by Prometheus

[Stevie Wonder]

14 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

Off the top of my head i would say that a biological concept is one rooted some metric of a living system that is useful to scientists.

Yes, I would agree.

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So then i take two distinct groups. jockeys and basketball players, measure their genes

Fine. That's a biological construct.

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and conclude they are different races because the state space of genes in these groups are quite far apart. We don't treat them as different races though

No, because race is a different biological construct defined by shared ancestry, not sports habit. It's a different construct which allows different predictions.

Edited April 8, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[Prometheus]

Just now, Stevie Wonder said:

No, because race is a different biological construct defined by shared ancestry.

I.e the genetic state space is not sufficient to distinguish racial clusters and additional information based on history is needed. History then, not genetics or biology, determines race. I think we have reached agreement.

[Stevie Wonder]

1 minute ago, Prometheus said:

I.e the genetic state space is not sufficient to distinguish racial clusters and additional information based on history is needed. History then, not genetics or biology, determines race. I think we have reached agreement.

But you defined a biological concept as 

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Off the top of my head i would say that a biological concept is one rooted some metric of a living system that is useful to scientists.

So the history of living things is a metric of them and thus a biological construct. And that history is inferred from either morphology or genetics. You realise your same sophistry could be used to deny that genus was a biological concept? Do you?

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Well based on that African Americans may not be a group. If some African Americans share ancestry with East Africans vis a vis other African Americans then they're not a group by that definition.

You are getting to the issue with ancestry here. Effectively using that as a racial system basically means that people are going to be grouped according to geography. The reason I mentioned these groups are that they have higher proportions of children with European groups, for example. So yes, using pinpoint genetics we can define groups and they will mostly follow geographic distributions. Using specific sets of markers one can, up to a certain point, trace ancestry of certain familial lineages.That is neither surprising, nor new. However, it is only useful in certain contexts (say, tracing population movements over long periods). Also, this usage is very different to what folks understand when they refer to "race" in common parlance. 

The same is the usage in non-human systems. Generally one only uses subgroups in order to study certain aspects. E.g. tracing populations that live in different locations. However, the amount of genetic flow determines how useful the boundaries that one can draw are. There are certain guidelines, but there are no strict scientific rules and according to most, if not all measures, the divergence in human population is one the lower end of the scale (i.e. we have high gene flux and/or have not been separated for long enough). This is consistent with the known fact that human populations have a wide range of habitat and mobility. Chimpanzees, for example appear to be more territorial, however, some of the observed differences in chimpanzee populations (which are larger than in humans) could be the resulted of human fractionation of their habitat, which essentially increase inbreeding.

Again, the classifications are made for convenience and to facilitate certain analyses, not out of biological necessity. Or to put it succinct, it is a term of scientific utility, not biological reality.

To some degree  this is also true for the term "species", which has a far higher separation than sub-species. That, unfortunately, is in stark contrast to what most folks seems to think when the topic of race comes up. 

Now the grouping used in common usage (e.g. black, white, Hispanic, Asian or similar) these are indeed social constructs as they were derived and modified in a specific historic context and not based on biological data or research. It is a brain child of the age of enlightenment when systematics in science just started to gain traction and when these categories were produced based on the persisting world view. And this is not to say that they are entirely useless, as they e.g. allow a relatively quick assignment of visual features of individuals. Yet, they are also burdened with a ton of historic detritus that have been extremely difficult to shake off. As such I would always take care to clearly separate these elements. 

13 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

So the history of living things is a metric of them and thus a biological construct. And that history is inferred from either morphology or genetics. You realise your same sophistry could be used to deny that genus was a biological concept? Do you?

Yup. It is surprisingly difficult to use a definition that satisfy all known organisms. Especially when going down to unicellular or asexual organisms we cannot use the concept of interbreeding becomes meaningless, of course. Add horizontal gene transfer and the headache just gets worse.

It is generally accepted that we use a system (or more precisely, different systems) that are just good enough. And even then there are a lot of inconsistencies that we just live with (e.g. even among bacteria the distance for certain genera as established vary markedly). There have been various pushes to replace the concept for e.g. bacteria completely. But obviously there is so much historic use that it would result in quite a lot of practical problems.  

[Stevie Wonder]

34 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Now the grouping used in common usage (e.g. black, white, Hispanic, Asian or similar) these are indeed social constructs as they were derived and modified in a specific historic context and not based on biological data or research. It is a brain child of the age of enlightenment when systematics in science just started to gain traction and when these categories were produced based on the persisting world view. And this is not to say that they are entirely useless, as they e.g. allow a relatively quick assignment of visual features of individuals. Yet, they are also burdened with a ton of historic detritus that have been extremely difficult to shake off. As such I would always take care to clearly separate these elements. 

You're confusing common and political definitions of race with scientific ones. This is akin to disputing that tomatoes are fruits or that dolphins are mammals. The scientific conception of race can be traced through Kant, Blumenbach, and Darwin. They were very much based on data, especially Blumenbach's analysis of non-metric skull traits to infer ancestry. And we keep seeing the same African/Caucasian/East Asian divisions through morphological and genetic analysis. This strongly suggests a natural division exists. If not, why do multiple lines of analysis keep throwing up the same divisions? Why did no scientist ever group South Asians with East Asians? North and Subsaharan Africans? No offence but you appear to be asserting the history of research in this area with no knowledge of it. To claim it was "not based on biological data or research" is just a transparent falsehood. And throwing in the cultural/geographical term "Hispanic" is just cheap.

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Reich explains how recent genetic analysis shows that people’s genes cluster in ways that correspond pretty well with old-fashioned notions of ‘race’. He prefers to talk about 'ancestry', because (in his view) the word 'race' is too ill-defined and loaded with historical baggage. Whatever.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/

Edited April 8, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[CharonY]

Actually, if you talk about modern population genetics and have to drag out Darwin, who knew nothing about genetics and Blumenbach, whose main thrust was that human diversity was less than folks in his time believed (and was strongly opposed to the concept of scientific racism) , then you make quite it quite clear that you are not interested in learning (or even discussing) but rather try to sell your viewpoint. As such it does not seem worth mine or anyone's time to continue this discussion as I do not have the patience for prolonged gish galloping.

20 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Why did no scientist ever group South Asians with East Asians?

It is almost funny. The same Blumenbach you cited decided that there are five races (and again, at a time where folks just defined species in a new way and considered black folks to be of a different, inferior type). One of them being Ethiopian (or black) which includes sub-Saharan Africans. So who is confused now? But as a final remark, for others who may actually be interested in reading up on the topic, the overall genetic structure of the human populations is mainly clinal (change gradually over geographic areas, see Pääbo et al 2004 ). There are some special cases which have been looked at, but that would require quite a bit of work to explain.

[Stevie Wonder]

6 minutes ago, CharonY said:

Actually, if you talk about modern population genetics and have to drag out Darwin, who knew nothing about genetics and Blumenbach, whose main thrust was that human diversity was less than folks in his time believed (and was strongly opposed to the concept of scientific racism) , then you make quite it quite clear that you are not interested in learning (or even discussing) but rather try to sell your viewpoint. As such it does not seem worth mine or anyone's time to continue this discussion as I do not have the patience for prolonged gish galloping.

What? You referenced the history of research in this area and misrepresented it.

You said

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these are indeed social constructs as they were derived and modified in a specific historic context and not based on biological data or research.

which is false. Whether or not Blumenbach opposed "scientific racism" whatever that means.

Edited April 8, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[koti]

14 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

I agree. The problem is we do not have this technology yet, let alone widespread access to it, making racial categories useful.

At least two other members expressed interest in you explaining this further, including a resident expert. I for one am far from being an expert on this subject so I’m curious what the usefulness of racial categorizing you talk about would be. Please explain.

[StringJunky]

5 minutes ago, koti said:

At least two other members expressed interest in you explaining this further, including a resident expert. I for one am far from being an expert on this subject so I’m curious what the usefulness of racial categorizing you talk about would be. Please explain.

After disingenuously asking a question and it's turning out he has his own ideas - nothing new there - it's high time he put them out here.

[Stevie Wonder]

1 hour ago, koti said:

At least two other members expressed interest in you explaining this further, including a resident expert. I for one am far from being an expert on this subject so I’m curious what the usefulness of racial categorizing you talk about would be. Please explain.

I've already told that whether or not race is useful the subject of this thread is whether it's a valid biological category vis a vis other taxa. I think I've sufficiently demonstrated that, although I doubt it will be admitted. I already stated one use of race: description. If I tell you somebody is Chinese that allows you to make predictions about their appearance. I could go on and on listing various traits which are predicted by racial categories. I could point how the concept is used in medicine and forensics, seems they didn't get the memo from American sociology, or dismissed it as obvious politically motivated pseudoscientific garbage applied only to human races and nowhere else in biology. I could point out various policies which would be informed by a race concept. One way mass immigration to only countries with largely European populations policies could certainly be informed by a race concept, as they are informed now by the supposed "equality" concept. But all of this is outside the scope of this thread and seems to be a way of dodging discussion of whether race is a valid concept. Feel free to open a thread on why the race concept is useful. Do you not have rules about sidetracking threads here, because "experts" want to ask random questions about stuff, as if the people that come and post here have some obligation to dance to their whims?

1 hour ago, StringJunky said:

After disingenuously asking a question and it's turning out he has his own ideas - nothing new there - it's high time he put them out here.

I'm disingenuous? That's rich. I'm not the one spewing PC fallacy after falsehood on a supposed science board.

10 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Why did no scientist ever group South Asians with East Asians?

 

9 hours ago, CharonY said:

It is almost funny. The same Blumenbach you cited decided that there are five races (and again, at a time where folks just defined species in a new way and considered black folks to be of a different, inferior type). One of them being Ethiopian (or black) which includes sub-Saharan Africans. So who is confused now?

I am. How does this little lecture on the obvious address my point? If race is divided arbitrarily why don't early and modern grouping techniques group East and South Asians versus West Eurasians? Blumenbach with his early methods put the hybrid Ethiopians in the Subsaharan group and that's not unreasonable, although modern genetic analysis shows they scatter between the Negroid/Caucasoid clusters.

http://www.scs.illinois.edu/~mcdonald/PCA84pops.html

Why didn't he include North Africans in the Negroid group? I'm asking why major clusters are always the same via different lines of analysis. And you're trying to contradict that by pointing out that there has been some disagreement about hybrids between the clusters, which is irrelevant.

Quote

But as a final remark, for others who may actually be interested in reading up on the topic, the overall genetic structure of the human populations is mainly clinal (change gradually over geographic areas, see Pääbo et al 2004 ). There are some special cases which have been looked at, but that would require quite a bit of work to explain.

You understand that we can divide continua? We do it in biology e.g. ring species. Is human variation a perfect continuum?

Take a look at this (from 2013 I believe, where available genomic data was massively increased) again.

http://www.scs.illinois.edu/~mcdonald/PCA84pops.html

If you had to divide that for description how would you do it? Maybe there is something wrong with my eyes but I don't see a continuum. I see an orthogonal pattern of variation hinging on classic race groups.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[Stevie Wonder]

11 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

And we keep seeing the same African/Caucasian/East Asian divisions through morphological and genetic analysis. This strongly suggests a natural division exists. If not, why do multiple lines of analysis keep throwing up the same divisions? Why did no scientist ever group South Asians with East Asians? North and Subsaharan Africans?

 

11 hours ago, CharonY said:

It is almost funny. The same Blumenbach you cited decided that there are five races (and again, at a time where folks just defined species in a new way and considered black folks to be of a different, inferior type). One of them being Ethiopian (or black) which includes sub-Saharan Africans. 

Maybe the source of your confusion is a lack of familiarity with this.

So when I ask why North Africans are never grouped with Subsaharan Africans, North Africans does not mean Ethiopia.

Also lol at the people downvoting my posts. I guess that's easier than refuting me.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[Prometheus]

1 hour ago, Stevie Wonder said:

I've already told that whether or not race is useful the subject of this thread is whether it's a valid biological category vis a vis other taxa. And that history is inferred from either morphology or genetics.

In this context valid means useful. By valid i guess you mean 'really exists in nature'? 

 

1 hour ago, Stevie Wonder said:

If you had to divide that for description how would you do it?

If you performed the same analysis on people based on sport you may see similar clusterings. Are they then different categories? Yes, they are in the categories according to sport.

If you want to call race a biological concept then you have to accept that the division by sport is a biological concept. We could even predict diseases based on sports based genetic clustering, just like race. I'm happy to call both of them biological concepts, or neither, but not cherry picking one over another.

 

1 hour ago, Stevie Wonder said:

I could point how the concept is used in medicine and forensics

Others already have, but you dismissed them as irrelevant so probably haven't noticed that they have been discussed at length. Does it's relevance to your topic depend only on whether you think it supports your case or not?

 

11 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

So the history of living things is a metric of them and thus a biological construct. And that history is inferred from either morphology or genetics.

Yes, i see the 'off the top of my head' definition of a biological construct was too broad. What i usually had for breakfast 10 years ago is a topic in history not biology, don't you think? Psychology and sociology both attempt to measure living things and despite overlap we consider them separate disciplines. 

So then is race a biological or social construct? 

If that history really exists in the genes, as i'm sure it does, then why do you need to look into history books to make the traditional categories fit. Just perform an unsupervised clustering and divide it up as you see fit for the purpose you want. The purpose you want is usually a social construct - such as choosing to prioritise response to treatments. If you want to call that a biological concept rather than a social one, knock yourself out, it doesn't really change anything: we could just as well debate whether to call something an apple or a pingguo. 

 

12 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

You realise your same sophistry could be used to deny that genus was a biological concept? Do you?

Come now, you insisted on focusing on the OP to the exclusion of corollaries such as how classifications are made in oncology. If it's 'irrelevant' for me to bring in corollary examples, surely it is for you too. Answer my questions on oncology and i'll answer your questions on genus - that's only fair.

[Stevie Wonder]

24 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

In this context valid means useful. By valid i guess you mean 'really exists in nature'? 

I already gave an example of predictive validity in description. Ad nauseam attempt to ignore responses.

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If you performed the same analysis on people based on sport you may see similar clusterings. Are they then different categories? Yes, they are in the categories according to sport.

If you want to call race a biological concept then you have to accept that the division by sport is a biological concept. We could even predict diseases based on sports based genetic clustering, just like race. I'm happy to call both of them biological concepts, or neither, but not cherry picking one over another.

I already agreed dividing people by sports habit was a valid biological construct.

12 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

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So then i take two distinct groups. jockeys and basketball players, measure their genes

Fine. That's a biological construct.

Ad nauseam attempt to ignore responses. Lying.

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Others already have, but you dismissed them as irrelevant so probably haven't noticed that they have been discussed at length. Does it's relevance to your topic depend only on whether you think it supports your case or not?

No, it has no relevance because natural biological divisions exist whether or not they are "useful". I've already pointed out one use, description, and that is enough for the purposes of this thread. Ad nauseam red herring.

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Yes, i see the 'off the top of my head' definition of a biological construct was too broad. What i usually had for breakfast 10 years ago is a topic in history not biology, don't you think? Psychology and sociology both attempt to measure living things and despite overlap we consider them separate disciplines. 

Psychology and sociology are subdisciplines of biology, the study of living things. What you had for breakfast 10 years ago is both history and biology.

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So then is race a biological or social construct? 

Both.

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If that history really exists in the genes, as i'm sure it does, then why do you need to look into history books to make the traditional categories fit. Just perform an unsupervised clustering and divide it up as you see fit for the purpose you want. The purpose you want is usually a social construct - such as choosing to prioritise response to treatments. If you want to call that a biological concept rather than a social one, knock yourself out, it doesn't really change anything: we could just as well debate whether to call something an apple or a pingguo. 

You're confusing your nonsense about what you had for breakfast with how we infer ancestry. Terms have meaning. Calling something a social construct is meant to imply it's not a biological construct. And this is false.

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Come now, you insisted on focusing on the OP to the exclusion of corollaries such as how classifications are made in oncology. If it's 'irrelevant' for me to bring in corollary examples, surely it is for you too. Answer my questions on oncology and i'll answer your questions on genus - that's only fair.

Obviously some supposed parallel cases are relevant and some aren't. The fact that some concepts in oncology have several different definitions is irrelevant, they are all biological concepts. We are examining why some concepts are biological and some aren't. There is no question to answer. The question of why you deny the race concept is biological because according to you, laughably, it falls under the discipline of history, but genus does not, is highly relevant. Why the transparent double standard? The reason you cannot answer it is because it exposes your sophomoric and disingenuous sophistry. But I think everyone can see that.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[Prometheus]

3 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

I already agreed dividing people by sports habit was a valid biological construct

Apologies if i missed that. 

 

6 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

The question of why you deny the race concept is biological because...

Wait now, i already said if your willing to accept sport as a valid biological concept then i was willing to accept race as a biological concept. I won't argue with your point anymore, i'm happy if you are being consistent. As psychology and sociology are sub-sets of biology, every social construct is also a biological construct. That's fine, if that's how you want to look at things. We could go on to discuss the usefulness of this, but you want to focus only on the classification so we can just leave it there.

Why do you get so emotional about this subject? It's just a question of how we choose to classify and label things.

 

3 minutes ago, Stevie Wonder said:

Obviously some supposed parallel cases are relevant and some aren't.

Obviously based on what your supports your position, since you seem not interested in exploring parallels. Unless you are already an adept in the field of oncology  - would explain how you can so confidently declare all classifications within the subject are biological. But i guess it no longer matters  - even if there are possible psychological/social classifications within oncology, since these subjects are a subset of biology they are also biological. That's fine, maybe not useful, but it's consistent, and since we're not discussing usefulness we can leave it here since we have reached agreement.

[Stevie Wonder]

11 minutes ago, Prometheus said:

Wait now, i already said if your willing to accept sport as a valid biological concept then i was willing to accept race as a biological concept. I won't argue with your point anymore, i'm happy if you are being consistent. As psychology and sociology are sub-sets of biology, every social construct is also a biological construct.

In some sense yes all social constructs are biological constructs, since they are a feature of living things. But the usual meaning of "social construct" is something created arbitrarily for human convenience, with no reference to natural phenomena. In this view race is not always a social construct, since one definition of race is based on patterns of shared ancestry, which is a natural phenomenon.

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Why do you get so emotional about this subject? It's just a question of how we choose to classify and label things.

This disingenuous garbage is used as a stick to beat White people, e.g. the pseudoscientific AAA statement in the OP where it is claimed the race concept was developed to justify slavery. Disgusting anti-White fabrication.

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Obviously based on what your supports your position, since you seem not interested in exploring parallels. Unless you are already an adept in the field of oncology  - would explain how you can so confidently declare all classifications within the subject are biological. But i guess it no longer matters  - even if there are possible psychological/social classifications within oncology, since these subjects are a subset of biology they are also biological. That's fine, maybe not useful, but it's consistent, and since we're not discussing usefulness we can leave it here since we have reached agreement.

I am not interested in exploring irrelevant supposed parallels. The fact that concepts in oncology have different definitions is just totally irrelevant and I don't know why you keep bringing it up. There is no question to answer.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Stevie Wonder

[Ten oz]

13 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

It seems you fail to understand the meaning of the word predict. Your "exceptions" response was entirely predictable lame sophistry. "Chinese" allows one to make several correlated predictions. Really your responses have been so consistently lame and disingenuous that you aren't worth responding to. I've heard all of the pop fallacies before. 

Black hair is the most common hair color in the world. It is found on all continents and all human carry genes for it. Predicting one has black hair is not a useful. I can predict a Chinese person will have two eyes, two ears, two legs, two arms, one brain, one heart, and etc. 

12 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

No, because race is a different biological construct defined by shared ancestry, not sports habit. It's a different construct which allows different predictions.

You keep referencing "shared ancestry" but then ignoring that fact all humans have shared ancestry. A person has 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and etc. By the 10th generation one has over a thousand direct great grandparents and that's just going back a couple hundred years.  Just within those thousand/couple hundred years the diversity is enormous. Your point about "shared ancestry" isn't nearly specific enough to be useful when all humans are basically cousins.

12 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

The scientific conception of race can be traced through Kant, Blumenbach, and Darwin. They were very much based on data, especially Blumenbach's analysis of non-metric skull traits to infer ancestry.

The data one would use in 2018 in genetics. Kant, Blumenbach, and Darwin weren't geneticists. 

2 hours ago, Stevie Wonder said:

I already stated one use of race: description. If I tell you somebody is Chinese that allows you to make predictions about their appearance.