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Originally Posted by Ustwo
Raven, go look up with a 'ring species' is, because thats what my next post in here is about.
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I’m sure your post will be very informative about gulls, salamanders, and butterflies (maybe we’ll finally get the sunspot kind too if we’re lucky), but unfortunately it will be not be relevant whatsoever to Homo sapiens, because H. sapiens is not a ring species.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
That graph is really meaningless as it applies to race, and you could get the same graph for different SPECIES.
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Willful refusal to understand?
Of course it would be different. Every mixed pair would spike towards positive infinity.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
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.
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How would you divvy up your “races” then if all you have is a genetic continuum? How would you show that one classification is any better than any of a million others? Why would european/asian be better at dividing eurasia than, say siberian/indian? Or anything else?
Of course you need discrete genetic units above local families. Otherwise you’ll just work up a sweat waving your arms around and squinting your eyes to separate shades of gray. That ain’t scientific inquiry, I’m afraid.
Tell you what. Go ahead and propose the criterion set that is commonly used by evolutionary geneticists for delineating species boundaries, or subspecies boundaries, or racial boundaries. Use any ring species you want, if that works for you.
Then I’ll be happy to take your criterion set and show that it is flat-out useless in delineating any genetic races in humans.
Or, try this. Tell us what you believe all the races are in humans. Then I’ll show that your groupings are arbitrary and have absolutely no objective, quantifiable basis in genetics.
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Originally Posted by Ustwo
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 Australia
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This is the most revealing thing you’ve written in this entire thread.
Here is exactly the arm-waving that I’m talking about. You have an internalized, personal, arbitrary, and subjective preconception of how different a face must be to qualify as a different genetic race. And you think your personal, subjective preconception is somehow the biological truth, and can be quantified. I hate to have to break this to you, but your personal hunch is not science. It’s not quantifiable. It’s not objective. It’s just a garden-variety taste, like whether you like salt on your peas or not.
And let’s also keep in mind that humans are experts at recognizing tiny differences in faces, practically from birth. That means that what registers psychologically as a “very large” difference in facial dimensions or expressions, can be nothing more than a twitch of a muscle, or a change in one DNA base pair out of billions.
If you want to make a coherent argument about human evolutionary genetics, I’m afraid you’ll have to do a bit more than this.