You know screw ring species, I don't think that will get to the real issue here. Lets cut to the chase. I will only use that if you continue to think that 'clumping' would be required for races when it isn't even required for species.
And roachy keep posting with that smug superiority, I'd feel sad if you stopped, even when you know nothing about the topic.
What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
By Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Published on: Jun 07, 2006
Joseph L. Graves, Jr. is University Core Director and Professor of Biological Sciences at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research concerns the evolutionary genetics of postponed aging and biological concepts of race in humans. He is the author of The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994.
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Conclusion
Human genetic variation is real. It is best described by isolation by distance, meaning that individuals who have ancestry in particular geographic regions are more likely to share genes than those from disparate regions. The overall amount of measured human genetic variation, however, is very small, yet this does not mean that it cannot be categorized. This is facilitated for individuals by using multiple loci particularly when they are examined at the level of DNA sequence variation. This greater “signal,” while allowing the ancestry of individuals to be readily determined, may be discordant with any particular phenotypic trait (physical features) of interest, especially since much of the classification salience originates from DNA that does not influence the phenotype.
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But lets see why the word 'race' is really opposed....
Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. He is president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.
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In summary, there is no good scientific reason beyond word length, convenience, and maintenance of the status quo (laziness in short), to continue to racialize human variation. Moreover, doing so may cause harm. In this way, using “race” as shorthand for biological variation is a form of ideological iatrogenesis. Real human suffering may result from poor conceptualization of human variation. Yet, race is real as lived experience.
It is time, at least, to ask the right question. This question is not whether race is real, but in what ways do we make it a reality?
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We shouldn't use the term race, because of racial prejudices.
And again....
Evelynn M. Hammonds is professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical, and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a book called The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990.
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We are in the middle of a debate about the power and authority of genetic information and the meaning of race. Can genetic research tell us who we really are, where we come from, who we are related to, or why we get sick without resorting to concepts of race that confound and distort these very questions? Leroi is among those who are using race as biology as a ruse for making progress on health disparities. When one scratches the surface of his argument, one sees that it is little more than a thinly guised continuation of a long tradition of using biology to explain racial differences in order to claim that such disparities are due more to genetics than to the societal forces that have historically disenfranchised people of color within the US health care system. If we want to avoid this naturalization of the inequities of our current health care system and make real progress toward understanding the underlying causes of health disparities, then we must abandon any use of race that fails to capture the true complexity of human genetic variation . In the end, there can be no simple answer to the problem of race in genetic research—until we confront the problem of race and racism in America and understand that they are not the same thing.
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Again, the problem is that finding racial differences is bad due to the inherent racism, not that there are no racial differences.
The AAA has the same stance in their position paper...
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Historical research has shown that the idea of "race" has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that "race" as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
From its inception, this modern concept of "race" was modeled after an ancient theorem of the Great Chain of Being, which posited natural categories on a hierarchy established by God or nature. Thus "race" was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used "race" to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences.
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Early in the 19th century the growing fields of science began to reflect the public consciousness about human differences. Differences among the "racial" categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes.
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Note whats not being argued is are there racial differences, but is the CONCEPT of race good. Scientists are not arguing that their are not racial differences, but that the idea is bad.
Depending on who you look at only 6-15% of the variation found in the species is divided on racial lines. I have said so myself when I pointed out that pretty much all of human diversity is found in any given race (minus that %). That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with using race as a catigory, unless of course you are afraid at what others will do with them.
You know the more I research this the more political and less scientific it becomes. Is there a racial 'blurring' where land overlaps, is there only a small amount of human variation compared to other mammals found in humans, are the racial differences small? I'd answer 'duh' to all of those and have done so in this thread already. But that being said there ARE real racial differences, they ARE able to be quantified, they are a clear as the faces of a native of Britain next to a native of Australian (not of criminal descent) yet because everyone is so worried about racism we are being TOLD by scientists to pretend they don't exist, lest a racist public use it for nefarious purposes.
The last thing anyone wants is biologic excuses for racism, but putting ones head under the sand and pretending there is only one race is asinine.