Is race just a social construct?

[Northener]

isn't every race model to some degree based on pure types? else we wouldn't use terms like "mixed". what race is someone from central asia?

Yes and there it's were it fails, there is no such thing as "purity" on the European level, see Angela: "Given how similar all human beings are, "races" have to correspond to source areas separated from one another for a long enough time that enough differences attributed to selection based on environment as well as happenstance can accumulate. That leaves you with, as Reich put it, continental breeding populations."

@Riverman, that would be the method we draw a fence about "La Tene" and "Jastorf" in a given time and we call this population "pure"?
Ok suppose we are able to have enough samples. First of all the question is, if this "delivers" a coherent auDNA position.

Take for example the Westfrisian case. This is a very, very small restricted area. But already in IA there it was autosomal differentiated, not restricted to one specific close core area on the PCA's etc.

But even if we could restrict is to a certain area with close autosomal results (could you in the case of La Tene or Jastorf??? I see no signs).
Then I still can't see that the "Germanic world" the folks from Leeuwarden in Frisia to Bergen in Norway, Stralsund in Germany can be drawn back to the Jastorf auDNA. The same with the "Celtic world"....and La Tene.

Leaves in both cases the social construct.....

 

[Riverman]

Yes and there it's were it fails, there is no such thing as "purity" on the European level, see Angela: "Given how similar all human beings are, "races" have to correspond to source areas separated from one another for a long enough time that enough differences attributed to selection based on environment as well as happenstance can accumulate. That leaves you with, as Reich put it, continental breeding populations."
@Riverman, that would be the method we draw a fence about "La Tene" and "Jastorf" in a given time and we call this population "pure"?
Ok suppose we are able to have enough samples. First of all the question is, if this "delivers" a coherent auDNA position.
Take for example the Westfrisian case. This is a very, very small restricted area. But already in IA there it was autosomal differentiated, not restricted to one specific close core area on the PCA's etc.
But even if we could restrict is to a certain area with close autosomal results (could you in the case of La Tene or Jastorf??? I see no signs).
Then I still can't see that the "Germanic world" the folks from Leeuwarden in Frisia to Bergen in Norway, Stralsund in Germany can be drawn back to the Jastorf auDNA. The same with the "Celtic world"....and La Tene.

You gave the answer yourself. I think of Germanic and Celtic being on all the mentioned levels part of a related continuum.
What separates their respective cores was much less a fundamental, essential difference, but rather other groups of people of their own in between them. Like Proto-Celtic A, unknown B, unknown C, Proto-Germanic D.
They were no direct neighbours initially, in their proto-stage.
The same was or even still is true for many races and subraces or populations, which, just like this case, didn't have to be fundamentally different, but simply had no direct contact and overlap.
Like in Europe, with the usual PCAs, its the same with populations and types. Some do overlap, others do not or at least much less so. Like Germans and English do overlap, for many obvious reasons, so do Greek and Albanians. But Finns and Greeks usually don't overlap on a PCA.
That principle of affinity, neighbourhood, overlap or simply biological relatedness is key in all these matters which concern "race" and biological differences.
The more you go into detail, the more blurred it gets, while if you zoom out, the pattern is clear.
That's also why post-1968, Marxist inspired "New Archaeology" focused on as detailled as possible small scale research, while abandoning the bigger picture in large parts of the publications ("end of great explanations"). Its a way to blurr the bigger picture for the recipients, by deliberately ignoring the general patterns and observable principles, while at the same time refusing accountability: They could declare and claim all kind of things by just focusing on a small scale regional pattern, while ignoring context.
That way, instead of "Beaker folk", they spoke about a "Beaker cultural phenomenon" of prestige goods and social habits. Fortresses became "central social places" and weapons "social signals" (only).
And that was also the reason why the archaeologists following that kind of arbitrary reasoning opposed ancient DNA research, because they knew the truth but just wanted to hide it. It made their nonsense theories accountable again! Now they couldn't just claim crap like "same people just different pots" and hide behind miserable theoretical constructs (that are real "social constructs" or better scientific misconduct), but had to face hard data from the natural scientific approach (again).

Leaves in both cases the social construct.....

Everything is a social construct and nothing for our species. The concept of a "human race" is as much a construct as that of race XY or a species of butterflies, which only exists in the head of an entomologist.
There is biological reality and then there is our human ability to grasp and describe it.
For any sort of biological categorisation, the number one quality proof is that the method being as simple as possible and its replicability.
Replicability means in this context that a properly educated person would be always able to come to similar conclusions and classifications.
Like if an entomologist concentrated on a small variation of color in the wing of a butterfly which is barely visible and not generally common in the regional subpopulation, it would be at best a regional frequency trait, but constitute no distinct species, race or type of its own.
The same applies to all living organisms, including human. And its equally true for the phenotypical or genetic categorisations.
In the case of Germanics and Celts, the first and foremost difference is quite obviously the language and everything else follows at a distance...

 

[Northener]

You gave the answer yourself. I think of Germanic and Celtic being on all the mentioned levels part of a related continuum.
What separates their respective cores was much less a fundamental, essential difference, but rather other groups of people of their own.
They were no direct neighbours initially, in their proto-stage.
The same was or even still is true for many races and subraces, which, just like this case, didn't have to be fundamentally different, but simply had no direct contact and overlap.
Like in Europe, with the usual PCAs, its the same with populations and types. Some do overlap, others do not or at least much less so. Like Germans and English do overlap, for many obvious reasons, so do Greek and Albanians. But Finns and Greeks usually don't overlap on a PCA.
That principle of affinity, neighbourhood, overlap or simply biological relatedness is key in all these matters which concern "race" and biological differences.
The more you go into detail, the more blurred it gets, while if you zoom out, the pattern is clear.
That's also why post-1968, Marxist inspired "New Archaeology" focussed on as detailled as possible small scale research, while abandoning the bigger picture. Its a way to blurr the bigger picture for the recipients, by deliberately ignoring the general patterns and observable principles.
That way, instead of "Beaker folk", they spoke about a "Beaker cultural phenomenon" of prestige goods and social habits.
And that was also the reason why the archaeologists following that reasoning opposed ancient DNA research, because they knew the truth but just wanted to hide it.
Everything is a social construct and nothing. The concept of a "human race" is as much a construct as that of race XY or a species of butterflies, which only exists in the head of an entomologist.
There is biological reality and then there is our human ability to grasp and describe it.
For any sort of biological categorisation, the number one quality proof is that the method being as simple as possible and its replicability.
Replicability means in this context that a properly educated person would be always able to come to similar conclusions and classifications.
Like if an entomologist concentrated on a small variation of color in the wing of a butterfly which is barely visible and not generally common in the regional subpopulation, it would be at best a regional frequency trait, but constitute no distinct species, race or type of its own.
The same applies to all living organisms, including human. And its equally true for the phenotypical or genetic categorisations.
In the case of Germanics and Celts, the first and foremost difference is quite obviously the language and everything else follows at a distance...

I like the bigger picture, but I don't see the link with marxism, not that I'm a Marxist but Marx was sincere the man of a bigger picture, not mines, but still. I see that after WW2 the archeology was more concentrated on pots than on people. We know very well that it's because pre WW2 archeologist from Kossina to Sprockhoff or Schwantes (coined Jastorf), had a clearcut (Nordicist) political agenda. I guess in reaction to that archeology became 'sterile' fully concentrated on 'pots' and the details about that....migration became almost out of the picture indeed.

Like if an entomologist concentrated on a small variation of color in the wing of a butterfly which is barely visible and not generally common in the regional subpopulation, it would be at best a regional frequency trait, but constitute no distinct species, race or type of its own.
The same applies to all living organisms, including human.

Agree.
Indeed but that we can speak about "certain clines" doesn't it?

And about language....mmmm than we are definitive in social-cultural category....I guess.

Last but not least I guess that "purity claims" are no longer at stake doensn't it?

 

[Ailchu]

Yes and there it's were it fails, there is no such thing as "purity" on the European level, see Angela: "Given how similar all human beings are, "races" have to correspond to source areas separated from one another for a long enough time that enough differences attributed to selection based on environment as well as happenstance can accumulate. That leaves you with, as Reich put it, continental breeding populations."

there is no "purity" needed to create racial models based on pure types though. the only thing you need is genetic difference on population level. you can then always just take the populations that are furthest from each other as pure types or older populations that do not exist anymore but contributed to modern populations. would you say that a 80% westeurasian 20% easteurasian population is the same race as a 20% westeurasian 80% easteurasian population? maybe, but you could also seperate them even if a 100% westeurasian and a 100% easteurasian population didn't exist anymore. i just don't think that europeans are a real exception for this. certainly not when people think the same could be done on a westeurasian scale. and i mention this specifically because i see how people do that over and over again.

 

[Northener]

there is no "purity" needed to create racial models based on pure types though. the only thing you need is genetic difference on population level. you can then always just take the populations that are furthest from each other as pure types or older populations that do not exist anymore but contributed to modern populations. would you say that a 80% westeurasian 20% easteurasian population is the same race as a 20% westeurasian 80% easteurasian population? maybe, but you could also seperate them even if a 100% westeurasian and a 100% easteurasian population didn't exist anymore. i just don't think that europeans are a real exception for this. certainly not when people think the same could be done on a westeurasian scale.

At the risk of becoming a tautological discussion, what is a race if all the minute genetic differences make a race?

 

[Riverman]

I like the bigger picture, but I don't see the link with marxism, not that I'm a Marxist but Marx was sincere the man of a bigger picture, not mines, but still. I see that after WW2 the archeology was more concentrated on pots than on people. We know very well that it's because pre WW2 archeologist from Kossina to Sprockhoff or Schwantes (coined Jastorf), had a clearcut (Nordicist) political agenda. I guess to that archeology became 'sterile' fully concentrated on 'pots' and the details about that....migration became almost out of the picture indeed.

Well, Marxist was no archaeologist, that's obviously not what I meant, which is why I spoke about "Marxist inspired", to make clear that not even all archaeologists applying those theories had to be "actual Marxists" sensu stricto. I just care for who is better in explaining reality, and that's a clear case. There were even basic morons which claimed "there was no warfare before the Bronze Age". I mean seriously. Such people are delusional, in comparison to that the people you mentioned were scientific geniuses, regardless of whether one agrees with everything they said or not. You can't miss the point and deliberately distort reality more than many of these "new archaeologists" did.

The pots or material culture was and always was just a tool, just like it was a tool for those people producing it. What's really interesting is what you can conclude from it. I mean they can beautiful, to reproduce with your own hands can be great fun and stuff, but from the scientific and societal perspective that was never the point, wasn't it? Not that the "new archaeology" was anything less political, even on the contrary, just in a different direction. The better and more objective archaeologists of post-WW2 times were not ideological at all, but being not ideological and just describing things as they appear, on the ground, was enough for being criticised, which speaks once more for itself.

Agree.
Indeed but that we can speak about "certain clines" doesn't it?

The question is twofold: Does a cline exist and if it exists, why does it exist? Like it makes a difference whether a cline was "naturally born" and "always present" or being the result of later mixture and gene flow between two originally separated populations. That makes a difference.

And about language....mmmm than we are definitive in social-cultural category....I guess.

Last but not least I guess that "purity claims" are no longer at stake doensn't it?

In which sense? Any kind of purity is case specific. Like if you say a water is "free from lead", is it "pure water" then? It might be otherwise contaminated, that its free from lead just tells you that and nothing more.
So you have always to define what you mean first.

Like in the concrete case of Celts and Germanics, they largely had the same source, they largely mixed later. The question is, what was in between? And there must have been something in between, because otherwise the Germanics wouldn't have been dominated by the two main haplogroups they got, I1 and R-U106 and they wouldn't have spoken two such different languages like Celtic and Germanic. In this case the very different tongue of Celts and Germanics is in itself a proof for their distinctiveness. Because closely related neighbours of the same stock don't speak languages that different within such a short time frame for no reason.

But to make it clear, I think I said it already much earlier: "Racial" or even genetic "purity" is not the issue. Because I think that Unetice, Tumulus Culture, Urnfield and Hallstatt elements influenced the ethnogenesis of both Germanics and Celts. This means they were part of a network, which includes gene flow. Difference doesn't equal "purity". Not in this case and not in any other. Purity is not even the main issue for animal species and subspecies all the time and people focusing on "purity" too much have some sort of issues from my point of view.
However, if I myself speak of "pure" vs. "mixed", its because of a specific context in which it has a concrete meaning. Like it could suggest someone has migrant ancestors because of genetically deviating in this or that way other members of the same community don't have.
That's also what we can do with ancient DNA, trace back migrations, gene flow, ethnocultural and linguistic shifts etc. But for doing so, we need to define A and B, for being able to trace it back in the first place. That's where "pure" vs. "mixed" makes sense for the practical purpose.
You need to define a population to asses the influence of another. Like how can we evaluate the influence Para-Celtic groups might have had on Proto-Germanics without having defined those populations in the first place? The same is true for every other such case, be it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Vietnam or whatever.

The "pure" reference is always specific for the given time and place only, it could and most likely was the result of earlier admixture processes, that's not even the point but something everybody should have just realised up to this point. So a "pure Proto-Germanic" would be just whatever the original Jastorf-Germanics was, they define themselves. How mixed or closely related they were to other people needs to be evaluated based on their own profile and the comparison with others, we don't know it beforehand. Probably they were more or less distinct from the respective "Proto-Celtic" core, we don't know without having the data.

 

[Northener]

Well, Marxist was no archaeologist, that's obviously not what I meant, which is why I spoke about "Marxist inspired", to make clear that not even all archaeologists applying those theories had to be "actual Marxists" sensu stricto. I just care for who is better in explaining reality, and that's a clear case. There were even basic morons which claimed "there was no warfare before the Bronze Age". I mean seriously. Such people are delusional, in comparison to that the people you mentioned were scientific geniuses, regardless of whether one agrees with everything they said or not. You can't miss the point and deliberately distort reality more than many of these "new archaeologists" did.

The pots or material culture was and always was just a tool, just like it was a tool for those people producing it. What's really interesting is what you can conclude from it. I mean they can beautiful, to reproduce with your own hands can be great fun and stuff, but from the scientific and societal perspective that was never the point, wasn't it? Not that the "new archaeology" was anything less political, even on the contrary, just in a different direction. The better and more objective archaeologists of post-WW2 times were not ideological at all, but being not ideological and just describing things as they appear, on the ground, was enough for being criticised, which speaks once more for itself.



The question is twofold: Does a cline exist and if it exists, why does it exist? Like it makes a difference whether a cline was "naturally born" and "always present" or being the result of later mixture and gene flow between two originally separated populations. That makes a difference.



In which sense? Any kind of purity is case specific. Like if you say a water is "free from lead", is it "pure water" then? It might be otherwise contaminated, that its free from lead just tells you that and nothing more.
So you have always to define what you mean first.

Like in the concrete case of Celts and Germanics, they largely had the same source, they largely mixed later. The question is, what was in between? And there must have been something in between, because otherwise the Germanics wouldn't have been dominated by the two main haplogroups they got, I1 and R-U106 and they wouldn't have spoken two such different languages like Celtic and Germanic. In this case the very different tongue of Celts and Germanics is in itself a proof for their distinctiveness. Because closely related neighbours of the same stock don't speak languages that different within such a short time frame for no reason.

But to make it clear, I think I said it already much earlier: "Racial" or even genetic "purity" is not the issue. Because I think that Unetice, Tumulus Culture, Urnfield and Hallstatt elements influenced the ethnogenesis of both Germanics and Celts. This means they were part of a network, which includes gene flow. Difference doesn't equal "purity". Not in this case and not in any other. Purity is not even the main issue for animal species and subspecies all the time and people focusing on "purity" too much have some sort of issues from my point of view.
However, if I myself speak of "pure" vs. "mixed", its because of a specific context in which it has a concrete meaning. Like it could suggest someone has migrant ancestors because of genetically deviating in this or that way other members of the same community don't have.
That's also what we can do with ancient DNA, trace back migrations, gene flow, ethnocultural and linguistic shifts etc. But for doing so, we need to define A and B, for being able to trace it back in the first place. That's where "pure" vs. "mixed" makes sense for the practical purpose.
You need to define a population to asses the influence of another. Like how can we evaluate the influence Para-Celtic groups might have had on Proto-Germanics without having defined those populations in the first place? The same is true for every other such case, be it in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Vietnam or whatever.

The "pure" reference is always specific for the given time and place only, it could and most likely was the result of earlier admixture processes, that's not even the point but something everybody should have just realised up to this point. So a "pure Proto-Germanic" would be just whatever the original Jastorf-Germanics was, they define themselves. How mixed or closely related they were to other people needs to be evaluated based on their own profile and the comparison with others, we don't know it beforehand. Probably they were more or less distinct from the respective "Proto-Celtic" core, we don't know without having the data.

If they were Marxist inspired they would have been focused on the social-economic conditions doesn't it....Imo and I stuck to that the archeology after ww2 was also reaction to the fact that is was 'misused' in the period before because of political/ideological agenda's.

And you know as good as I do that it's no coincidence that racialist were fond of "pure" and "unmixed", "impure" has bad connotations. And they had a preference for continuity. In the romantic thought people, folks, nations even had a 'soul'.

I guess there there is no pure state that is an idee fix. Yes you can freeze a folk in a certain time and place and consider or call it pure. Matter of definition. But a pure state is in human genetic sense nonsense....

So a "pure Proto-Germanic" would be just whatever the original Jastorf-Germanics was, they define themselves.

Self definition, as we now it, is not there in a pre historic state.....it's modern, identity think....

 

[Riverman]

They had an identity, like most ethnic groups. It can get lost by growing and diversifying though.
But even if they would not, as unlikely as that would be, their language and culture would distinguish them. Its linguistically impossible that they were one people in one population.

 

[Northener]

They had an identity, like most ethnic groups. It can get lost by growing and diversifying though.
But even if they would not, as unlikely as that would be, their language and culture would distinguish them. Its linguistically impossible that they were one people in one population.

Not in modern sense. It's anachronistic to suppose this for pre-historic tribes.
And even more in the pre-historic language case because we have no single source (no books, no tapes so we can't pinpoint how they spoke. High danger of projection (afterwards).

 

[Ailchu]

At the risk of becoming a tautological discussion, what is a race if all the minute genetic differences make a race?

it's entirely subjective. you can swap the term ethnicity with race or race with ethnicity, we don't even have to use racial categories at all. and Doggerland gave good examples, i think humans are not genetically programmed to use racial groupings like for example "white", "black","asian", that is a social phenomenon that is taught to people.

when i asked my mother who was quite old already at that time and less influenced by american culture, who are "white" people, she didn't know, she laughed and said probably everyone who isn't "black".

 

[Jovialis]

it's entirely subjective. you can swap the term ethnicity with race or race with ethnicity, we don't even have to use racial categories at all. and Doggerland gave good examples, i think humans are not genetically programmed to use racial groupings like for example "white", "black","asian", that is a social phenomenon that is taught to people.
when i asked my mother who was quite old already at that time and less influenced by american culture, who are "white" people, she didn't know, she laughed and said probably everyone who isn't "black".

If there were races riots, people are not going to stop and have a discussion on the nuances of what makes some people different. For example, during the 1992 riots in LA, light skinned Hispanics, who likely don't identify as white were attacked too in the street. The same could happen to anyone that is light-skinned. It could happen to an Arab, it happen also to Asians. Many racist blacks say they're the real jews, and the "white jews" are the imposters.

 

[Angela]

Not in modern sense. It's anachronistic to suppose this for pre-historic tribes.
And even more in the pre-historic language case because we have no single source (no books, no tapes so we can't pinpoint how they spoke. High danger of projection (afterwards).

You'll never convince people who believe there were (or are) "races" in Europe, and that they can identify them, usually by "appearance" and imputed language, the latter of which is an impossible to prove back projection, and the former of which not even the so called physical anthropologists could agree upon and which is completely discredited.

The science is clear. Autosomes (NOT "appearance" alone or even prominently) reveal three continental "breeding" populations, and admixtures from that.

Europeans are too similar for there to be "races" among them. Indeed, one could argue that is the case for all West Eurasians.

@Ailchu,

I've rarely heard anything quite so untethered to reality. If I put a European man, a Chinese man, and a SSA man in front of a two year old I assure you they can tell the difference. They don't need to be told.

Plus, did you miss the PCA of world populations? Did you not see the three clearly defined poles of separation?

This is why WOKEDOM will be the fall of modern civilization: it's the substitution of reality for ideology.

 

[Riverman]

If there were races riots, people are not going to stop and have a discussion on the nuances of what makes some people different. For example, during the 1992 riots in LA, light skinned Hispanics, who likely don't identify as white were attacked too in the street. The same could happen to anyone that is light-skinned. It could happen to an Arab, it happen also to Asians. Many racist blacks say they're the real jews, and the "white jews" are the imposters.

Indeed. A good example for that pattern would be an incident which happened in Rwanda, when the son of a Hutu politician was killed because he looked like a Tutsi. There were many such cases in Rwanda and Congo, where people which looked like Tutsi were murdered by the mob regardless of their "personal ethnic identity". If it gets bloody and nasty, people often identified quickly who was on their side and whos not, without too much thinking. I know of a case of a Northern European looking Afghan which got asylum also because he claimed the Taliban and IS would identify him with European occupants.
Another such case comes from an Uyghur woman, which experienced first hand how the Chinese talked about "her people" because she was well educated, spoke without an accent and did look Chinese, so the fellow Chinese conversational partners did instinctively assume she is "one of them".
Or the numerous cases of German looking Jewish people which did better in hiding their identity in various day-to-day situations whereas some Germans might have been mistaken for Jewish without being one.

Humans being hardwired and calibrated for recognising biological differences instinctively. That they might be wrong occasionally doesn't change anything about it and it usually ONLY happens between people with some sort of genetic overlap or the unlikely but possible cases of convergent evolution. There are e.g. some Melanesian subpopulations which even some experts would, by just looking on a photograph, confuse with some Subsaharan African people. But these cases are known and result from similar mixtures or convergent, analogous evolution. But that's not restricted to humans anyway and can even cross species and genera:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

That's why taxonomic classifications based on phenotypes only can be difficult in some cases. There were a couple of correcations in zoological taxonomy based on genetic results also, which revealed different relationships than originally assumed based on phenotypical similarity.

 

[Angela]

Indeed. A good example for that pattern would be an incident which happened in Rwanda, when the son of a Hutu politician was killed because he looked like a Tutsi. There were many such cases in Rwanda and Congo, where people which looked like Tutsi were murdered by the mob regardless of their "personal ethnic identity". If it gets bloody and nasty, people often identified quickly who was on their side and whos not, without too much thinking. I know of a case of a Northern European looking Afghan which got asylum also because he claimed the Taliban and IS would identify him with European occupants.
Another such case comes from an Uyghur woman, which experienced first hand how the Chinese talked about "her people" because she was well educated, spoke without an accent and did look Chinese, so the fellow Chinese conversational partners did instinctively assume she is "one of them".
Or the numerous cases of German looking Jewish people which did better in hiding their identity in various day-to-day situations whereas some Germans might have been mistaken for Jewish without being one.

Humans being hardwired and calibrated for recognising biological differences instinctively. That they might be wrong occasionally doesn't change anything about it and it usually ONLY happens between people with some sort of genetic overlap or the unlikely but possible cases of convergent evolution. There are e.g. some Melanesian subpopulations which even some experts would, by just looking on a photograph, confuse with some Subsaharan African people. But these cases are known and result from similar mixtures or convergent, analogous evolution. But that's not restricted to humans anyway and can even cross species:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

All you've done is proved that the Tutsi and Hutu weren't separate races, and the Uighers are mixed, i.e. Eurasian, with some looking more West Eurasian and some looking East Asian.

As I said before, look at the PCA. Everything you need to know concerning "races" is there.

 

[Riverman]

All you've done is proved that the Tutsi and Hutu weren't separate races, and the Uighers are mixed, i.e. Eurasian, with some looking more West Eurasian and some looking East Asian.

As I said before, look at the PCA. Everything you need to know concerning "races" is there.

Indeed, the more overlap in autosomal genetics, usually, the more similar the phenotypes. But in a lot of cases, just like in Uyghurs, its later mixture of originally separated populations. The main exception to this rule is the mentioned convergent evolution.

 

[ThirdTerm]

Indeed. A good example for that pattern would be an incident which happened in Rwanda, when the son of a Hutu politician was killed because he looked like a Tutsi. There were many such cases in Rwanda and Congo, where people which looked like Tutsi were murdered by the mob regardless of their "personal ethnic identity".

It was a class struggle similar to the Russian Revolution. "Hutus" were people who farmed crops, while "Tutsis" were people who tended livestock. Most Rwandans were Hutus, who were genetically identical with Tutsis. Gradually, these class divisions became seen as ethnic designations. The Hutu ethnic majority aimed at wiping out each and every member of the minority Tutsi group which represented the kulaks in Rwanda. The "liquidation of kulaks as a class" was a name of the Soviet campaign of political repressions.

The Tutsi are largely of Bantu extraction (60% E1b1a, 20% B). The frequency of E1b1b1 associated with the Horn of Africa is under 3% in their paternal DNA, which they inherited from earlier inhabitants from the north who were fully assimilated. Generations of gene flow obliterated physical distinctions that may have once existed between these two Bantu peoples as the Tutsi adapted to Bantu culture.

 

[Ailchu]

You'll never convince people who believe there were (or are) "races" in Europe, and that they can identify them, usually by "appearance" and imputed language, the latter of which is an impossible to prove back projection, and the former of which not even the so called physical anthropologists could agree upon and which is completely discredited.

The science is clear. Autosomes (NOT "appearance" alone or even prominently) reveal three continental "breeding" populations, and admixtures from that.

Europeans are too similar for there to be "races" among them. Indeed, one could argue that is the case for all West Eurasians.

@Ailchu,

I've rarely heard anything quite so untethered to reality. If I put a European man, a Chinese man, and a SSA man in front of a two year old I assure you they can tell the difference. They don't need to be told.

Plus, did you miss the PCA of world populations? Did you not see the three clearly defined poles of separation?

This is why WOKEDOM will be the fall of modern civilization: it's the substitution of reality for ideology.

you use the term "ethnicity" right? you could swap it with race, but you don't because you think "race" is for populations that are more differentiated. but that is your definition and the definition of the society you live in. the term has never been defined clearly and it was used different in the past too.

you say that race is not based on appearance but on autosomes, then why should it be that hard to seperate europeans and identify races? just use pca clustering et voilà.

if you argue that europeans are too similar you not only could, you basically HAVE to argue that the same is the case for all westeurasians.

 

[Ailchu]

If there were races riots, people are not going to stop and have a discussion on the nuances of what makes some people different. For example, during the 1992 riots in LA, light skinned Hispanics, who likely don't identify as white were attacked too in the street. The same could happen to anyone that is light-skinned. It could happen to an Arab, it happen also to Asians. Many racist blacks say they're the real jews, and the "white jews" are the imposters.

what would be the first few important differences between racial groups that are important to note and need to be discussed in american society? how important are they in a society that doesn't use racial groupings?

 

[Angela]

you use the term "ethnicity" right? you could swap it with race, but you don't because you think "race" is for populations that are more differentiated. but that is your definition and the definition of the society you live in. the term has never been defined clearly and it was used different in the past too.

you say that race is not based on appearance but on autosomes, then why should it be that hard to seperate europeans and identify races? just use pca clustering et voilà.

if you argue that europeans are too similar you not only could, you basically HAVE to argue that the same is the case for all westeurasians.

Could you PLEASE read more carefully? Didn't I say at least three times that you could argue one of the "races" is "WEST EURASIAN"? Do you get it now?

The only way that Europeans can be separated from one another on a PCA is when you put ONLY Europeans on a PCA, of which there are many. Please go back to the GLOBAL PCA which I posted. When you look at ALL human variation it's abundantly clear that there are THREE major autosomal groupings of human beings, and they are very separated in space and time.

I'll give you another example. If you look at a European PCA it becomes quite clear that it can be difficult to distinguish between, say, English people from eastern England and Dutch or Belgian people. However, if you do a PCA ONLY of England, as does POBI group, then you can pick up MINUTE differences between different groups of English people based on geography.

IT'S A QUESTION OF SCALE; of percentages.

That's what I meant when I said the animosity in Northern Ireland is mind boggling, given that these people are indistinguishable from one another with the naked eye. Yet, if you looked at very small differences, you could probably find a few between Irish people and Lowland Scots, who are the ancestors of most of the Orange Lodge Protestants in Ulster.

Do you understand?

If you're going to talk about RACES you're talking about subdivisions of the HUMAN race, and you have to look at it from a global perspective.

IT IS NOT MY DEFINITION. It is the definition of population geneticists.

As for a question you asked elsewhere, there is no society, as I implied before, which wouldn't see major distinctions between Europeans, Japanese and Nigerians.

I don't understand why Europeans think this is only an American problem. The thing is, Europeans are actually MUCH less inclusive than Americans. Even racist Americans would accept a Chechen as part of the "family". The same would go for a lot of Near Easterners. White is just a short hand for generally European looking here. There's much less animus against Near Easterners than there is in Europe.

Even the Boston Bomber set the "hearts" of some idiotic teenage girls aflutter.

 

[Ailchu]

IT IS NOT MY DEFINITION. It is the definition of population geneticists.

population geneticists certainly didn't define the term. it has no biologically meaningful definition. it can be enough that 2 populations of a species are genetically distinguishable and they are already two different "races". it can have other meanings. in german literature the term isn't used not only because of it's connotation, it's also because it has no clear value.

what you call race is not defined by geneticists but by the current society.