this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Mildly Infuriating

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No category is absolute. By your logic, it's impossible to call anything a car, because cars have wheels but suitcases ALSO have wheels, therefore the entire idea that cars exist is just a made up social construct.

Or for a less ridiculous example: is a battery-powered bicycle actually an electric moped? Or the ever classic, is a hotdog a sandwich? We can discuss these questions without questioning the validity of concepts such as bicycles, mopeds, hotdogs and sandwiches. Categories exist. They are useful descriptors despite the existence of edge cases and blurry boundaries.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

And we're back!

Yes, categories are useful but (outside of mathematics) imprecise. A car needs to be motorised and able to carry at least one passenger. Arguably, it also needs at least 4 wheels or to be 3-wheeled and enclosed, to include Reliant Robins. There’s still probably edge cases, but it’s fair to say it’s a subset of wheeled objects that generally applies and is needed both in economics and engineering, as well as everyday life.

Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though. Did you know, for example, that most human genetic variety occurs within Africa, because of the common out-of-Africa ancestry everyone else has? Phenotypically, I have less information, but you have tiny pygmies as well as the Maasi (with an average male height of 6’4), and every skin colour from Sudanese literal black to Egyptian/Berber olive, so I’m guessing it’s the same.

Maybe that’s the point of contention here. They’re relevant socially, but biology has moved on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though.

Au contraire

Black people are at a much higher risk for mutations in the hemoglobin gene responsible for SCA. Researchers believe the reason lies in how this condition has evolved.

Over time, sickle cell conditions have evolved to protect against malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquito bites. Malaria is common in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world that also have a high prevalence of sickle cell. Having SCT — but not SCA — helps reduce the severity of malaria.

https://www.healthline.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-black-people

That's just off the top of my head, I'm sure there's many other examples. Health care for Black vs white vs Asian etc is slightly different. And it's not due to social conditions alone - the same mechanisms that made people whose predominant ancestry is sub-Saharan African have darker skin, also caused this decreased resistance to sickle cell anemia.

Another one that just came to me was lactose intolerance. White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

Ignoring race is not only problematic societally, but is bad science.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, Healthline is a source for laymen. That information is provided that way because people won't know what Y-DNA haplogroup they're in, but will generally know if they're considered black. There's public health research by race too, but again that's related to social outcomes and data availability.

White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

Except the other highly tolerant cluster is West Africans, with smaller ones in places like Pakistan and Arabia.

Stolen from r*ddit, although you can find many similar ones elsewhere

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the scientific consensus:

Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.

And here's what the World Medical Association has to say:

Despite the fact that races do not exist in the genetic sense, in some cultures racial categories are used as a form of cultural expression or identity, or a means of reflecting shared historical experiences. This is one aspect of the concepts of “ethnicity” or “ancestry”.

I tried to find something from the AMA, but it's so well established all the recent stuff takes the non-biological nature of race as a granted, and talks more about the ethics of handling the social categories.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah but it's still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.

That information is provided that way because people won’t know what Y-DNA haplogroup they’re in, but will generally know if they’re considered black.

So? Instead of "race" you're saying "Y-DNA Halogroup". Performative bullshit just to avoid the fact that race is real. You could call it "Mario Kart" instead of race, it's still the same damn thing and it's still real.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit.

According to who? At this point unless you're a genetics expert yourself it's starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.

Y-DNA haplogroups in no way correspond to race. They look a bit like the lactose map: Interesting, and unrelated to the traditional social categorisations. Pretty much all genetic maps are like that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: ἁπλοῦς, haploûs, "onefold, simple" and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together. As a haplogroup consists of similar haplotypes, it is usually possible to predict a haplogroup from haplotypes. Haplogroups pertain to a single line of descent. As such, membership of a haplogroup, by any individual, relies on a relatively small proportion of the genetic material possessed by that individual.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

That's race! That's the definition of race! Fucking university types just don't like the word!

Haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically oriented. For example, the following are common divisions for mtDNA haplogroups:

African: L0, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6

West Eurasian: H, T, U, V, X, K, I, J, W (all listed West Eurasian haplogroups are derived from macro-haplogroup N)[10]

East Eurasian: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Y, Z (note: C, D, E, G, and Z belong to macro-haplogroup M)

Native American: A, B, C, D, X

Australo-Melanesian: P, Q, S

They are describing race! It's super fucking obvious if you get rid of whatever white guilt stupidity makes you get the ick when you hear the word "race".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You'll notice letters appear more than once, and there's more than one letter for every group. Also, that's mtDNA, and if you actually cared about biology you'd know that's only one type on DNA, inherited one way, and you can completely mix and match with the Y haplogroups.

I get it, you hate wokes. I don't really think cultural disgruntlement is a good basis for defining "science", though. I suspect there's no more useful information to exchange here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I hate people who push bad science in service to an agenda. Especially when it's doublethink levels of blatantly, obviously wrong bad science.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

And I just don't think that's happening. Science moved away from race long before it was cool. The first steps happened over a century ago; Hitler was already doing pseudoscience. (I guess there is actually something to add)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Science moved away from phrenology, but we're not going around claiming that skulls are a social construct. It's ridiculous. Just because something has been misused by bigots, doesn't mean we should pretend the thing doesn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Phrenological propensities ~~are~~ were a social construct. Skulls and variation within them exist. Ditto for human biological variation in other things. You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say "the milk drinking race", and words don't have fixed meanings independent of how they're understood.

Sorry if I came off as a little abrasive there, that wasn't my intention, I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.

I'm afraid I can't settle for that. This idea that race is some made up thing is offensive to me. I have to correct people who say they agree with it.

You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say “the milk drinking race”,

There it is. That's actually what this entire discussion turns on, every time I have it. First, I have to get the other person to admit that inherited physical characteristics exist, which can be a chore for some people. Then, when they admit that, they say some variation of "but that's not the definition of race / that's not what people mean when they say race".

This is actually the more important thing that you have to shake loose of. Certain academic institutions claim this, but they are overwhelmingly wrong. When people talk about race, they do not talk about some vague abstraction. They almost always are referring to specific inherited characteristics usually tied to the physical place a person's ancestral group is from.

The irony is, the only people who could be operating under the delusion that when people talk about race they're referring to some vague social thing are people who don't interact with a lot of different people. This idea that race is a social construct is quarantined to one very specific social stratum, because anyone who gets more worldly experience very quickly realizes it's bunk.

It's pretty intuitive when once you realize it. It's very basic, very "what you see is what you get". When people talk about race, they talk about the very surface-level, most obvious, simplest definition. No deeper meaning. People are not subconsciously philosophizing. People are not closet racial supremacists. They're just describing what they see. "Inherited physical characteristics" is the simplest definition of race, and trying to find some deeper meaning of the term is a red herring.

To go back to the phrenology example, the existence of race does not require bigotry. Which is probably why academia came up with this absurd idea, they were scared of bigotry. The existence of skulls does not require phrenology to be true. It's bunk, and it's racist.

Racism is bullshit.

Race exists.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Well then, I guess I break this off unilaterally at some point. Debate doesn't work, you can't browbeat someone into believing something (well, on soft topics anyway, you can with math). Most people just know that, I had to learn the hard way. Maybe you will eventually too.

I personally am neither rich nor fancy. I live in the country; I've never lived anywhere else as an adult. Believe me, specific races are a real thing where I live, and probably in the city too. It's not some thing made up by a spooky cabal of academics. It's strange you could even think that, with all the evidence from recent history to the contrary, including laws referencing the separate races, and how much mixing of them was acceptable. You could argue I'm not worldly enough, but my family is rather international, which should count for something. I'm kinda academic now, but that's because I just was born an egghead. If it's class that's the issue, I'm not in the picture.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Debate is for the audience, not for your opponent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think the audience cares either, past a point. The shit that gets a response is factual, and getting facts out is, along with basic respect for you, the reason I'm here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Upvote/downvote totals matter. Seeing a ton of push back in the comments matters.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Well, you pushed, and I pushed. We're deep in enough most people have stopped reading anyway. Goodbye, nice chatting with you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Fair enough, have a great day.