“Margaret Sanger also used human breeding along with abortion.”

I don’t know much about Margaret Sanger but at least part of her agenda – abortion – has been adopted by the left. Before the rise of the Nazis human eugenics was quite popular in the United States and Europe. The left are still obsessed with race.

“The issue is that equality doesn’t exist. So there’s either one race, the human race, or there are various other factions that are subjectively unequal.”

So, what’s the problem with inequality? That’s another idea which for some reason obsesses the left. Personally, I relish the differences between humans. If someday humans are indeed reduced to a monotypical species that will be boring like combining the colors of a rainbow to produce a dull grey. I relish the differences between peoples of different regions and different cultures.

Rather than resenting inequality I love it. When I was a child in Africa, the Africans were extremely poor compared to Europeans, yet they were just as happy in their own way as any European. I don’t understand why the left is always looking for differences so that they can get the groups to fight each other rather than teaching people to embrace their differences and inequalities as reasons they should love each other.

The link on genetic variation of dogs was interesting. My information was picked up originally on the National Geographic special on dogs and their co-evolution with humans (yeah, we probably evolved with them) that came out a few years ago. I remembered the claim because it surprised me and was not what I expected. I’ve since seen it repeated and explained, but that is not to say that my information is correct. I will have to suspend judgment on that one until I learn more. Thanks for the link.

I certainly don’t consider racial “classifications invalid and wholly socially constructed.” There are people who do (maybe even someone in this thread, because I haven’t read every single comment in its entirety), but I am not one of them. I think there are biological elements to the idea of race, but that in terms of biology and science it is far more reasonable to talk about traits rather than races, and that “race” is not what most people think it is.

I’m written several threads about this recently, and at no point do I make a statement that races are wholly socially constructed. I believe (if I haven’t already made it crystal clear) that race is a word that has developed to describe a very real distribution of human traits, in which some combinations of traits are more common in certain human populations. But there is a great deal more variation within races than most people think, and many traits that people commonly think are limited to one race actually occur in more races than that. In addition, the idea of how many races there are and how to divide them keeps changing.

Although this is somewhat old, it represents the a discussion between the two sides of the argument about race.

In addition, about dog genetic variation vs. human genetic variation, you wrote “The genetic variation between human populations (races) is much greater than the genetic distance between all varieties of dogs.”

But see this lengthy article on the canine genome that appeared in a publication entitled Genome Research, which states the opposite:

However, the variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation between human populations (27.5% versus 5.4%). Conversely, the degree of genetic homogeneity is much greater within individual dog breeds than within distinct human populations.

In other words, genetically speaking, dog breeds are more different from each other than human races are different from each other.

The issue is that equality doesn’t exist. So there’s either one race, the human race, or there are various other factions that are subjectively unequal.

Ethnicities exist but eugenics isn’t about creating a strong culture the way previous ethnic cultures did.

Margaret Sanger also used human breeding along with abortion.

The point is, some people attach eugenics to the racial division warfare, when they see people talking about human breeding techniques.

Genetic techniques have been refined to the point where not only the historic races (Negro, Caucasian & Asian) can be identified, but also sub-groups such as different European groups and, in some cases, right down to a probable family surname. Advances in genetic science have confirmed rather than refuted the existence of races.

They’ve confirmed specific sequences that go back to migratory patterns. There is no theoretical framework that exists to explain why DNA protein patterns exist in one or more patterns for certain lineages, but even statisticians can find correlations. That doesn’t mean there’s a genetic theory or that the techniques have advanced much.

Most of the genes mapped in the human genome are unexplained and their combination factors or influences are also unexplained. So far people have arrived at correlations and explanations, but without being able to manipulate the expression and application of genes in an environment, why certain genes are the way they are, active or passive, is unknown. Merely a known unknown.

Neo, I’d not put too much stock in that argument. It is true that for many genes all races share all the alleles but in different frequencies but there is no law which says that all alleles for all genes follow that pattern. Because the races have been fairly isolated until recently, it is highly likely that there are alleles of some genes which are unique to each race and are not shared with the other races except through interbreeding. An example of this type of allele is the alleles for skin color. I’m tired so I hope that I’m right that this link about the differing alleles for skin pigmentation will help clarify the issue. which are unique to each group.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/03/05/oca2-makes-east-asians-white-a/

Wikipedia is not particularly useful on politically sensitive subjects so I will ignore that article. Your link to Michael White’s Science 2.0 article was better and I wish you had noted this comment of his:

“By examining enough genes, we can reliably use just DNA to correctly assign people to ancestral geographical populations. Researchers can do it blindly – they can look at DNA sequence for 1,000 people whose identities are hidden, and use DNA information to assign those people to geographical populations. Once the assignments are made, the researchers take a peek at the true identities of their sample group, and it turns out that their assignments are extremely accurate.”

In other words, races can be identified by ‘blind’ genetic analysis without knowing anything about the individual who submitted the sample. I think that is what I have been saying all along.

The fact that there is more genetic variation within a race than between races proves nothing. Most genetic variation is essentially neutral. A few genes make an enormous difference. The genetic variation between human populations (races) is much greater than the genetic distance between all varieties of dogs. Yet look at the enormous variation in behavior, intelligence and physical abilities just those few genes make in the dog ‘populations’.

The fact that we assign words, classifications or races for human populations does not make the classifications invalid and wholly socially constructed. We do the same thing with geological times such as the Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, etc., where there is a lot of fuzziness and room for argument at the boundaries [Read: ‘The Great Devonian Controversy’] but on the broader scale the categories are legitimate and have a real world value.

Races exist, can generally be recognized by mere physical appearance, and by the article you linked above, can be identified by nothing more than a spot of DNA from a donor.

This has turned out to be an interesting discussion. My original post was that from a biological standpoint race is not too difficult to understand so please could we stop obsessing about it. From that post and one or two follow up posts some of the more perceptive readers here have discovered my secret that I sound like a Nazi. It’s hard to keep a secret these days.

The bottom line is that most categories of thought are somewhat nebulous. For example, what is the physical difference between a cat and a dog? Morphologically are dogs and cats exactly the same shape? Cats tend to have shorter faces, but some dogs also have short faces. Cats have retractable claws except when they don’t have retractable claws. So if I say I saw a cat, am I imagining things or is it possible to recognize the difference between a cat and a dog despite the overlap in almost every trait? This is the marvel of the human mind, that we are able to accurately identify classes of objects through experience and to recognize in which class most individuals belong even if the two classes have tremendous overlap in features in some instances.

See this:

…[T]here is a distinct statistical correlation between gene frequencies and racial categories. However, because all populations are genetically diverse, and because there is a complex relation between ancestry, genetic makeup and phenotype, and because racial categories are based on subjective evaluations of the traits, it is not the case that there are any specific genes, that can be used to determine a person’s race.

Research in genetics offers a means to classify humans which is more precise than broad phenotypically based racial categories, given that genetics can provide a much more complex analysis of individual genetic makeup and geographic ancestry, than self identified membership of a racial category. With a blood transfusion, for example, it is vital to know the genetically determined blood type of the donor and recipient, but it is not helpful to know their respective geographic ancestries. Most physical anthropologists consider race to be primarily a social category that does not correspond significantly with biological variation, but some anthropologists, particularly forensic anthropologists, consider race a useful biological category. They argue that it is possible to determine race from physical remains with a reasonable degree of certainty; what is identified is the geographic phenotype.

It is certainly true (as I’ve discussed in this post and the comments) that certain traits have a much higher frequency in certain races. That’s how races have come to be thought of as entities—they correspond to our visual observations, in general.

The genetic tests work in a similar fashion (frequency of traits) in that certain genetic markers have a much higher frequency in certain races. But they do not define a race, in that there is no marker that occurs in all members of that race and never in any members of any other race.

In addition, see this on human genetic diversity:

By the measure of genes though, humans are amazingly uniform. Humans are genetically less diverse than chimps, and both chimps and humans are much less diverse than a common species of fruit fly. Given our species’ long history of racial conflict, our genetic uniformity may come as a surprise. Not too long ago people in polite company would debate whether different human races really all belonged to one species. Our DNA tells us that our genetic differences don’t even come close to matching the variety found within a single, apparently monotonous fruit fly species…

Thus researchers like Richard Lewontin have argued that “As a biological rather than a social construct, ‘race’ has ceased to be seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species.” Race may be too imprecise to be biologically meaningful, but there has to be some biological reality behind the obvious physical differences in different human populations, right?

Yes, there are genetic differences between different human populations, but the big surprise is this: genetic differences between human populations are few compared to the differences within human populations.

Here is what that means:

If you compare my genome with that of a Chinese grad student down the hall from me, you’ll find that only tiny fraction of the 2-3 million differences between us tells you much about our ancestry. Among Chinese, there may be a tendency to have a DNA base ‘G’ at position XYZ in gene ABC on chromosome 12, while among Europeans (where my ancestors came from), there is a tendency to have an ‘A’ at that same position. What we find though, in almost all cases, is that these tendencies are not absolute: 90% of Chinese may have base ‘G’, while the other 10% have base ‘A’. And maybe 70% of Europeans have base ‘A’ at position XYZ, while 30% have base ‘G’.

So in other words, the fact that my Chinese friend has base ‘G’ at position XYZ in gene ABC does not tell you with certainty that he’s Chinese. In fact both my Chinese friend and I may have the base ‘G’ at that same position, even though it is less likely in my case. If you look at any one gene, you don’t get enough information to make an accurate call…

In order to really see differences among human populations, you have to look at many genes (or any place in the genome where humans vary – it doesn’t have to be a gene). In the Chinese population, base ‘G’ may be common at position XYZ on chromosome 12, base ‘T’ may be more common at position TUV on chromosome 6, etc., etc. So once you look at dozens or hundreds of informative positions, you can say with high confidence, ‘this person is Chinese, and that one is European.’ (And of course we could all be American or Canadian or British by birth – we’re obviously talking about ancestral populations here.)

By examining enough genes, we can reliably use just DNA to correctly assign people to ancestral geographical populations.

Those tests work, when they work at all, by combining the analysis of many allelles to form a strong probability that a person is a member of a certain race.

“I suspect that over time as genetic testing progresses we will probably find that there are indeed unique alleles among each race which are not found in the other races except in instances in which members of one race breed with members of another race. In other words each group may indeed have unique characteristics which are not shared with anyone else at the molecular level and possibly higher. If this occurs it will be interesting to watch those who deny that human races exist scramble for a new reason to support their position.”

Actually, Dennis, you are entirely correct except for one small point regarding ‘over time’. We don’t need to wait; it can already be done. Not only can major races be identified by genetic analysis (Ancestry.com has a service that will do it for you for about $90) http://dna.ancestry.com/ but for some populations it has been refined to the point that different sub-populations (in Europe) can be identified and often even family groups. There is talk of police using it forensically to determine the probable surname of a criminal who has left DNA behind. The actual science is far ahead of the conversation here. Races exist objectively; they are not pure social constructs. Even if we didn’t have a word for race or its polite alternatives, we would have to invent one to keep up with genetics. And yeah, the dog argument really is silly. Cocker Spaniels can’t mate with dingos because they are separated by thousands of miles and can be brought together only with human intervention. The argument regarding size is about like that.

Also, here’s information about Pygmy women having children with men of normal stature (which historically has been Bantus). The gist of it is that such interbreeding has been going on for thousands of years, and it usually involves a Pygmy woman and Bantu man rather than the other way around. There is no mention of any particular sort of problem with the pregnancies:

The Pygmy and Bantu populations separated genetically about 60,000 to 70,000 years ago; then roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, they started interbreeding.

Some Pygmy women, after having sex with a Bantu man, have given birth to half-Bantu babies, a phenomenon that integrates Bantu genes into the Pygmy population. These women and their offspring stay in the Pygmy village, and so don’t mix with the Bantu. However, offspring resulting from mating between a Pygmy man and Bantu woman are rare, so the Bantus don’t have many Pygmy genes.

The researchers analyzed the genomes of 67 Pygmies and 58 Bantus for changes that would provide information about an individual’s ancestry. These changes are small, nonharmful misspellings in the code (the chemical bases A, C, T and G) that makes up the genome. For example, a Bantu might have an A where a Pygmy has a T.

By analyzing large numbers of these changes, researchers can tell how much of an individual’s genome is Bantu and how much is Pygmy…

The data revealed height had a genetic component related to Bantu ancestry: The more Bantu ancestry an individual from the Pygmy tribe had, the taller that individual tended to be.