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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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who counts for these categories

Self-identification, genetics and identification by an unrelated observer generally have very high concordance, so any of those will do fine. One of the biggest issue is when dark-skinned asians and indians are thrown/put themselves into the same bin as african blacks, but the majority of them correctly infer that the term "blacks" actually implicitly means "african black".

and what attributes do they share within their category that distinguish it from the other two?

You know you can google this, right? I'm a postdoc studying the genomics of diseases, primarily cancer, so I can tell you that even just the basic caucasian-black-white classification has a huge predictive value on almost any disease. The most trivial example is sickle cell anemia, which is extremely common for blacks and relatively rare for other groups, and based entirely on genetic adaption. Plenty of cancers vary greatly in rarity between the races as well. For a somewhat recent overview on cancer and race: https://www.cell.com/trends/cancer/fulltext/S2405-8033(17)30040-7?sf66683340=1&code=cell-site

But there's plenty of other examples; one of my favorite recent papers is Tobler et al: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213061120

They analysed ancient eurasian genomes and found a number of hard sweeps in the population that is the ancestor of almost all non-africans, and in particular showed that the loci they found are almost entirely absent in contemporary africa. These loci are associated with a large range of basic attributes. In a first category are cilia formation, skin structure and obviously skin color, all of which are most probably directly related to cold adaption. In a second category are neurological adaption, the result of which is, let's say controversial, but possibly also simply related to cold adaption. At last there are metabolic differences, relating especially to fat formation (also mentioned in the paper on cancer & race). And to repeat, all of these are purely genetic differences, that are present in almost all non-african populations, and almost entirely absent in african populations.

Between asians and caucasian, there's primarily the denisovan and neandertal admixture, respectively, but also some other differences. I won't expand on them since frankly I think there is already a pretty large effort difference in this discussion. You can trivially look them up however.

No, I am no expert on africa but I'm pretty sure that hausa are closer to other west african groups than they are to ethiopians, just going off by appearance.

Depends on whether you look at east hausa (for example in chad and sudan) or western hausa (for example in nigeria). Sudanese Hausa are almost half haplotype R1b, which are atypical for other subsaharan africans, but not unusual for the afroasiatic groups (and actually primarily associated with europeans). Nigerian Hausa have more typical subsaharan E1b1a as the modal haplotype, though still a significant R1b minority. But I'm also no african expert, and we're really getting off-point here.

Which brings me to the point that alot of these race realists like to talk about races in parts of the world that they don't understand at all with a false confidence that exemplifies the dunning kruger effect.

I think the interested reader may decide for themselves here who is exemplifying the dunning kruger effect.