Is Race a valid scientific category?

[Comrade Petrov]

People are divided in CLASSES not RACES!!

 

[Ygorcs]

The options are too limited. Yes, there is genetic structure and subsets of human populations who are much more related to each other than to others, forming clusters, but there is no way that a good scientific description of this reality can be done with a very simplistic "3 races" model. It's impossible to give a proper, sensible answer when the two options are opposite and equally unrealistic extremes.

 

[Garrick]

Race does exist, there is no point denying it. The proof being skin colour of people. It is not exactly the best way to classify people though.

We can see in popular sites or books that physical characteristics between of racial groups are differentiated according to: skin colour, stature, head, face, eye, nose, body shape etc.

We can see classifications with 3, 5, 7 races etc.

Nothing problematic but how is it realistic or better scientific?

American biological anthropologist Livingstone argues that variability between populations which make up the species does not conform to the discrete packages which popular we call races.

His claim is: "There are no races, there are only clines".

 

[Stuvanè]

In my medical file (for the use of doctors, people who do not have time to waste with the politically correct) there is written "Caucasian". Ditto for forensic anthropologists.

Inviato dal mio SM-J730F utilizzando Tapatalk

 

[Georgewalley]

There's one race and that's called the human race. Humans can be different and show certain characteristics to specific regions influenced by climate, diet and other natural environmental factors.

 

[IronSide]

Fst is useful I believe in determining races, the Sardinian in the first one is terribly wrong though, also Greeks are closer to Italians for example than they are to Iranians, the rest is accurate.

The largest human races are East Asian, Sub-Saharan African, and Caucasoid because they formed through massive migrations of farmers.

 

[Héloïse]

I think no

 

[Crank]

All populations are a mix. the population we came from was a mix of different people and the population of that population before that etc etc. Not sure about race but I read we migrated out of Africa later than thought and split into different routes and races later than thought.

 

[AlfonsoVIII]

Existence of races within the human species is a proven scientific fact, no matter how much the world dictatorship of political correctness bothers and tries to deny it.

 

[Sir Philip]

Existence of races within the human species is a proven scientific fact, no matter how much the world dictatorship of political correctness bothers and tries to deny it.

The fact that race is not a good criterion to apply to our species doesn't mean that humans are all the same. If someone said such absurdity, now that would be either politically correct or just straight up stupid, but here we're talking about biologists, not politicians or public figures trying to push an agenda.

Inviato dal mio SM-A405FN utilizzando Tapatalk

 

[Doggerland]

I have played so much around with all that that I favor the view that humans divided into 5 races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, Amerindian and Australoid) is nor valid. But there is not only one race, this is also false.
Why? Because it depends on the data and method, there is no ultimate answer.
There is a taxonomy discussion for many other species, so it is nothing special in general.

The genetic data we have today is very incomplete. We don’t know all functions of SNPs, don’t even have WGS data from enough people around the word.

The whole genetic thing creates more question than it creates answers. Bones are much more simple, but cannot tell the whole story. Also Haplogroups cannot.

What to measure? Measure everything? Then Cavalli Sforza is right (According to non-WGS data of today) and nothing makes sense anymore and groups are obsolete, individual genetics are more important. Measuring only physical traits? This is also very diffuse, because different SNPs causing the same adaptive traits but are not the same in terms of genetics.
Ancestry components? Does not say enough about the look of people and their personality.

People don’t agree at all, what race is. Social Sciences believe it has something to do with oppression and not biology. We can only measure things that we can define ourselves, we cannot define race beyond social construction. Measuring only isolated genetic traits, is a social construction of race too.

We can use Apes as a root for clustering and use cosine similarity with SNPs for physical, medical and psychological traits:



This represents the idea that Slavs are the most closest to Mesolithic HGs and that human migration happened on a route from Africa to Australia and after that into Asia.
This is the opposite concept to ancestry components, who place Aboriginal Australians far away from Africans. In this tree they can be seen as a subspecies(Sahulid) and close to Negroids and Paleo-Eurasians.
Sami are not related to Mesolithic Europeans, but Paleo-Eurasians and close to Mongoloids.
Yamnaya appears as Iranian related and not Slavic.
South Indians are not a separate race and most closely related to Iranian/Eastern Fertile Crescent people and not Sahulids. The South Indian sample is of very good quality and Kurumba in terms of ancestry components.

What is also interesting is that Romans and Celts are linked, it was sometimes speculated that they originated both in the Alpine region.

Reduced version, excluding many samples that are strongly mixed/modern:

 

[Sir Philip]

I have played so much around with all that that I favor the view that humans divided into 5 races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, Amerindian and Australoid) is nor valid. But there is not only one race, this is also false.
Why? Because it depends on the data and method, there is no ultimate answer.
There is a taxonomy discussion for many other species, so it is nothing special in general.

The genetic data we have today is very incomplete. We don’t know all functions of SNPs, don’t even have WGS data from enough people around the word.

The whole genetic thing creates more question than it creates answers. Bones are much more simple, but cannot tell the whole story. Also Haplogroups cannot.

What to measure? Measure everything? Then Cavalli Sforza is right (According to non-WGS data of today) and nothing makes sense anymore and groups are obsolete, individual genetics are more important. Measuring only physical traits? This is also very diffuse, because different SNPs causing the same adaptive traits but are not the same in terms of genetics.
Ancestry components? Does not say enough about the look of people and their personality.

People don’t agree at all, what race is. Social Sciences believe it has something to do with oppression and not biology. We can only measure things that we can define ourselves, we cannot define race beyond social construction. Measuring only isolated genetic traits, is a social construction of race too.

We can use Apes as a root for clustering and use cosine similarity with SNPs for physical, medical and psychological traits:



This represents the idea that Slavs are the most closest to Mesolithic HGs and that human migration happened on a route from Africa to Australia and after that into Asia.
This is the opposite concept to ancestry components, who place Aboriginal Australians far away from Africans. In this tree they can be seen as a subspecies(Sahulid) and close to Negroids and Paleo-Eurasians.
Sami are not related to Mesolithic Europeans, but Paleo-Eurasians and close to Mongoloids.
Yamnaya appears as Iranian related and not Slavic.
South Indians are not a separate race and most closely related to Iranian/Eastern Fertile Crescent people and not Sahulids. The South Indian sample is of very good quality and Kurumba in terms of ancestry components.

What is also interesting is that Romans and Celts are linked, it was sometimes speculated that they originated both in the Alpine region.

Reduced version, excluding many samples that are strongly mixed/modern:

One point i'd like to stress is that human evolution and diversity is complex while race draws a very simplicistic scenario imo, hence the two things cannot stay together(this is not the only reason of course).

Inviato dal mio SM-A405FN utilizzando Tapatalk

 

[Olivia_19]

No, there is only one race, the human race.

 

[Wanderer]

No because if I share blood ancestry closer to spaniards and have no polish ancestors obviously it makes no sense to find myself identify closer with polish identity.

If a bulgarian person has children with turkish person it makes no sense for the bulgarian parent to feel closer to a italian person then their own child neither

 

[Asil]

I think it is

 

[gourd]

i think race exists but it is much more nuanced than what most people, who also believe in racial groups, think. i wanted to post this in another thread where someone asked for it, but it was locked so i will put this here. the question was if two random humans are 0.1% different genetically how does this change when we only look at humans that are of the same racial group. is it then 0.00001%?

the answer is no, the difference is not that big. 90% of the autosomal variation is present inside the racial groups. even in the same ethnic groups the percentages are not much different. so those 0.1% will only change slightly depending on whether we look at two humans of differnt racial groups or 2 humans of the same race, even ethnicity. now this is the difference of all autosomal genetics. i don't know much more about the coding regions.
i think in the coding regions even very slight differences, even between different ethnicities can have strong effects on the societies of these ethnicities. so much that the terms ethnicity and race can be swapped depending on what traits you are interested in.

 

[firetown]

"Race" is never and has never been a valid concept, especially among geneticists. Race is a political and social concept in order to categorize people. In 1980s Europe race was basically the differentiation between those who were from the country they are living in or a country equally or more economically healthy and those who immigrated from regions less well off. In America, we had 5 races at one point. The settlers, the natives, the southern neighbors, the slaves and the railroad workers. White, Indians, Hispanic, Black and Asian respectively. That was it. Not really a thorough genetic breakdown, isn't it?