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Originally Posted by abaya
Thank you, raveneye.
Out of curiosity, are you an anthropologist, biologist, geneticist, or anything of the sort? Most people around here seemed to just blink at me slowly when I mentioned clinal variation...
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Abaya, I’m a biologist and my research field is (non-human) evolutionary genetics. I’ve published a lot in population genetics, but haven’t cited myself here yet
I know what you mean about blinking slowly …. I like to ask people: if you start walking east from Berlin, when do you start saying people are Asian? And the answer is: in Berlin! The point being that we are mobile and 100% interfertile.
On the subject of the census in your later posts, it is interesting that the 2000 census allowed multiple answers on the race question, and almost 7 million people identified themselves as more than one race; 800,000 said they were both white and black.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/13/na...aa2721&ei=5070
Similar but slightly smaller numbers did the same on the 2005 census.
It’s probably controversial to say it, but I consider that progress. As more people become aware of the arbitrary nature of those categories, and of their own ancestry, they will continue to reject the idea that they must be pigeonholed in that way. It’s unfortunate that society seems to force the idea of racial singularity, which is absurd.
Tiger Woods calls himself Cablinasian (Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian). We’re all mixtures, and there are no boundaries.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
from here it'd be interesting to pose the problem of race as an ideology all over again, and link it to the notion of culture as a discrete, self-referential social space that interacts with the "outside" only tangentially and at the risk of contamination. the above gives a good material base for it. if you put the variables together, conventional wisdom begins to come undone.
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Yep. I would say that’s clearly the most profitable and (dare I say?) intelligent line of discussion from this point.