mercredi 26 août 2015

Is race a valid concept, at all?

So, I have an unfortunate tendency to get on my racial soapbox in a lot of threads and it is rightly considered a derail sometimes. It does not come naturally to me to start fresh threads, but I really want to have a good discussion about whether race is a valid concept or just a mere "social construct" as so many people say nowadays.

A couple things I'd like to analyze in this thread are:

1.) What do people actually mean when they say race is a social construct? TO what extent are they denying it has any roots in biological reality?

2.) Do people honestly believe all of humanity is completely interchangeable with no differences beyond the level of trivial appearance (skin color, facial features, hair, etc.) ???

Or is saying "race is a social construct" (or similar things, like "race isn't a valid concept") just a knee-jerk auto-response people use to try to avoid having to face unpleasant realities, and try to invalidate certain lines of discussion?

To get the ball rolling I'm going to paste most of a post I made in another thread earlier today, and which I wouldn't be surprised to see end up removed from that thread for being too off-topic there... I think there's some good info here which demonstrates that there ARE important differences with implications for the viability of multiracial societies. So I want to make sure people get a chance to see some of these links, etc:

New York Times - Adventures in Very Recent Evolution

Quote:

"Scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute last month discovered another striking instance of human genetic change. Among Tibetans, they found, a set of genes evolved to cope with low oxygen levels as recently as 3,000 years ago. This, if confirmed, would be the most recent known instance of human evolution."
Forbes - The DNA Olympics

Quote:

"The trends are eye opening: Athletes of African ancestry hold every major male running record, from the 100 meters to the marathon...

...Over the last seven Olympic men’s 100-meter races, all 56 finalists have been of West African descent. Only two non-African runners, France’s Christophe Lemaire, who is white, and Australia’s Irish-aboriginal Patrick Johnson, have cracked the top 500 100-meter times. There are no elite Asian sprinters..."
ScienceDaily: How your brain reacts to emotional information is influenced by your genes

Quote:

"The ADRA2b deletion variant appears in varying degrees across different ethnicities. Although roughly 50 per cent of the Caucasian population studied by these researchers in Canada carry the genetic variation, it has not been found to be prevalent in other ethnicities. For example, one study found that just 10 percent of Rwandans carried the ADRA2b gene variant."
DailyMail: Is YOUR baby racist?

"Children as young as three months old have been found to have a bias towards women who are the same race as themselves."

Wikipedia: Monoamine oxidase A (Warrior Gene)

Quote:

"An association between the 2R allele of the VNTR region of the gene and an increase in the likelihood of committing serious crime or violence has been found"

"The frequency distribution of variants of the MAO-A gene differs between ethnic groups. 59% of Black men, 54% of Chinese men, 56% of Maori men, and 34% of Caucasian men carry the 3R allele. 5.5% of Black men, 0.1% of Caucasian men, and 0.00067% of Asian men carry the 2R allele."
Now, a lot of people do like to argue that "race" is a muddy term because it isn't exact. I'd say in response to that that almost nothing in biology is exact, even species. There are animals which are considered entirely different species and yet they can reproduce with one another, such as lions and tigers.

Even horses and donkeys which have a different number of chromosomes can reproduce despite this:

Quote:

"Mules and hinnies have 63 chromosomes, a mixture of the horse's 64 and the donkey's 62. The different structure and number usually prevents the chromosomes from pairing up properly and creating successful embryos, rendering most mules infertile."
And you can see that even despite being different species AND having a different number of chromosomes, some of the offspring are even fertile!

Of course, all taxonomic distinctions are human constructs. They represent biological realities, but there will always be a certain degree of subjectivity and blurriness on matters like this. It's the nature of using a human created framework to think about a messy gradient type of thing like biology.

"Race" has been considered a valid taxonomic idea for a long time now, and as you can see... it is STILL considered valid and used quite extensively in major news publications such as what I've linked above.

What I'd really appreciate most of all are for some of the people who are fond of dismissing race as a valid concept, or fond of asserting that all humans are interchangeable, to REALLY, ACTUALLY respond to the links above and say what, if any, implications they think these things might have for the viability of a society and whether societal viability could be dependent on the frequency of certain traits which vary by genome!

Could society be a much more delicate thing than most people appreciate? Could it be entirely dependent on staying within a certain band of frequency for different traits?


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1fGvBSX

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