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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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Others have done a great job calling out your professor's sophistry, so let me be a tiny bit charitable to one portion of his argument.

Objection 2: Scientific authority: Scientists don't talk of "races" but instead prefer to speak of "populations."

The classic definition of race was basically "a branch of the human family tree." From Webster's 1913:

  1. The descendants of a common ancestor; a family, tribe, people, or nation, believed or presumed to belong to the same stock; a lineage; a breed.

This turns out to not quite be true, at least for most groupings we commonly refer to as "races." What happens is that "populations" get separated from other populations, evolve a distinct set of characteristics, but then after a while they usually end up mixing with some other population nearby, and so what we commonly call a race, like "Han Chinese" is not a single branch of the human family tree, but rather an admixture of multiple populations.

Still, just because things are more complicated than the 1913 definition of "race", that is not a reason to say "therefore there is no biological basis for race." That is moving in the wrong direction, making things even more inaccurate. Honest critics should just work on making the definition of "race" more accurate. The simplest, accurate definition of race that matches a real phenomena and cuts reality of the joins and matches how people intuitively use the word is: "a race is cluster of relatedness." So even though "Han Chinese" is an admixture of several ancestral populations, that admixture forms a very distinct cluster of relatedness that is obviously different than Slavic White people, etc.