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I'm generally a fan of "blurry" definitions where something can qualify as X if it fulfills a few of many criteria. I think trying to create hard rules around blurry areas like race and culture is fool's errand, and Scott does a great job laying out how overly strict definitions can go wrong.
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Notes -
Do you also dispute the wavelength basis of color? It fits in perfectly:
Put plainly, everything is a fuzzy socially-defined category, even the categories used in the hardest of hard physics. Bringing up this argument for genetics only is an isolated demand for rigor.
I am not sure what your counterargument is for. I am not disputing the existence of genetic variation in different populations. I am pointing out race (mostly Western system) is a social construct. I am not even disputing the utility of these categorizations. I am just saying Scott makes the conflation that social construct means it doesn't exist.
For your example... Color is a spectrum. It's not that one color definitely ends here and starts there. Language is a limiting factor. There are terms for different types of colors that aren't existent in Anglo Saxon. Useful categories, but doesn't mean they aren't socially defined. Socially defined doesn't necessarily mean there are no differences between a certain part of the spectrum compared to the other.
Though I understand you are just using an example, it's not a very good one since genetic differences between races aren't always clear. I am pretty sure ethnic differences are larger within one race than between different races. Way less clear than physical phenomena in hard sciences. Defining it by skin color or certain phenotypes is just one way of doing it.
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I mean everything is a social construct. Rape is a social construct. Property is a social construct. Google is a social construct. The Internet is a social construct. Love is a social construct. Anti-racism is a social construct. Yet we still have uses for all of these, they're in fact extremely important, and can debate the way we act on them in the exact same way Scott is doing. It's reasonable to say that I probably shouldn't consider the entirety of San Francisco to be "my property", even though it's a social construct, because it's not very useful and may have negative effects. It's similarly reasonable to say that maybe it's better to consider "race" to just mean "ancestry" than to jump between "group membership/identity social construct" and "ancestry" depending on the situation, leading to the plight of the professor in the OP.
I don't think he is?
You mean genetic differences. There are a lot of technical arguments here but ... sure, why not. There are many white people with lower IQ than the average black person. This doesn't mean that the average black IQ isn't lower than the average white IQ, and it doesn't mean that doesn't have a genetic component to its cause.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and-list-share-cta&comments=true&commentId=51163221
Do you have any strong evidence that controls different factors (socioeconomic, historical, cultural and even diet) for the claims of IQ? When I looked, most of these differences between IQ are overblown or if the data does show differences, it often is more complex and can't be taken by face value. This isn't exclusive to just IQ of course but even other traits like skeletal structure and even height.
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That's a very common conflation in my experience, which makes it a valid target for counterarguments.
The socially constructed definition of race includes genetic information, which means that it is a physically-grounded system instead of an arbitrary one. This puts limits on how much society can change the definitions without going off the rails.
First, differences between colors aren't clear either. Light with uniformly-random wavelengths is widely agreed to be "white". What about light with 1/3 each 450 nm, 550 nm, 650 nm? It might appear identical or different depending on the situation, so we've created the color rendering index to deal with that. What about fluorescent objects? They reflect visible light in a way that's easily-describable using standard terms, but they also create some extra by converting UV light. Category differences not being clear is completely normal, and there's nothing special about genetics in that sense.
Second, it doesn't look that bad? Look at the graphs Scott included just above your quote: they sure look like clusters to me, and the line-drawing isn't too egregious. Also remember that we're looking at a 2D projection of an N-dimensional analysis, so some more differences will show up in the later principal components.
I've heard that statement before, but I still haven't got a good explanation of what the factual claim is supposed to be. My attempts all end up in nonsense.
My first thought was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of non-coethnics humans", which seems trivially false. My second was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of archetypal members of each race", which seems like a category error for the comparison and also plausibly false (see the graph again: races have size 0.2ish, while the distances between their centers are 0.35ish).
What do you mean in a hard statistical sense by that statement?
I am very confused because it seems there is confusion between map for territory. You talking about genetic material being different between different populations and sub-populations doesn't mean that race is not socially constructed. It seems we agree that social construction of race is not useless nor does it mean that there are differences between groups of people?
A black man and a white man has more similarities in genes, just different expressions of phenotypes, which often is what is used to classify race to begin with.
My understanding is also that differences within one race are higher than between. African populations have more genetic diversity within different sub-populations as an example.
https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker-archive/new-study-confirms-africans-are-most-gen/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12493913/
Of course it is, just like everything else. The mere fact that a category is socially constructed is utterly unremarkable. If you want to build policies from that, then you need a stronger grounding. Is it arbitrarily socially constructed, and therefore easy to change? Are there unprincipled exceptions in the social construction, that should be rectified? Is it too complex (or variable across regions and cultures) so it can't be used to communicate clearly? If you could argue that something is a bad social construction, then I'd listen to your ideas about what a good one is.
It has uses (I'll leave whether it's net useful unanswered), and the causation flows the other way: genetic differences caused racial classification, the classification didn't affect the genes.
What is "more" referring to?
If it's a comparison of the average black+white vs. white+white, then I'd say it's plainly incorrect.
Thanks for the link. It's an interesting find, but the comparison is nigh-meaningless and shouldn't drive your decisions.
Using that same within/between comparison can lead you wildly astray: The income differences within genders are higher than between, but the wage/earnings gap is still a live issue. The life expectancy differences within countries are higher than between, but it's still used as a key indicator of progress. The temperature changes within a year are higher than between, but climate change is still concerning.
Comparing the variance between different individual things to the variance between different large aggregates will practically always say that the individuals are more distinct.
That's a neat bit of trivia, but not remarkable either. Sticking with the color example, there's more diversity in wavelengths in "Red" (130 nm) than in "Green", "Yellow", and "Orange" combined (125 nm). Groups aren't always the same size, so "African" being more diverse than "European" and "Asian" combined isn't (wouldn't be?) notable.
EDIT to add: Yes, the category is socially constructed, and yes, the tea has quantum mechanical effects inside your body.
In addition, the elision between discussing West/Central black African genetics (from which black Americans draw the majority of their ancestry) and African genetics as a whole is another common and classic tactic to distract, when the Western discourse is centered around black Americans. Africa contains populations such as North Africans who are more closely related to other Mediterranean populations (albeit with some more recent black admixture related to reasons such as the slave trade and/or Arab expansion), Ethiopians (who have significant Arab ancestry), Khoisan (who were the first to branch off from the rest of humanity), African pygmies (the second to branch off from the rest of humanity), the Malagasy (who were originally Austronesian).
It'd be like trying to poo-poo the genetic differences between birds and non-Avian dinosaurs because the majority of Archosaurian genetic diversity is found within crocodilians, pterosaurs, and non-Avian dinosaurs.
On a side note, African pygmies have long been on the wrong side of systematic replacement, genocide, rape, and even cannibalism from their West/Central black African neighbors, persisting to this day. Somehow, this phenomenon remains largely undiscussed in mainstream Western discourse.
Joke: a black African caught a pygmy and cooks him on a spit. An European walks by, sees it and says "No, you cannot eat people!". The African in surprise responds he doesn't. The Europeran points to the pygmy and asks "What's this?". -- "AAh, but it itsn't a human"
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It's an old feel-good rhetorical device to cope with and minimize the importance of differences across races, a device possibly older than most of us participating on this site.
Obviously, when it comes to genetic differences, this can't be true from a smell test alone, as about 15 years ago it was already possible to assign Europeans to their country of origin based on solely their genetic information, and it's much easier when it comes to races. Any of us can download publicly available genetic data, run a PCA on Europeans, East Asians, and Sub-Saharan Africans to get a clean triangle with each of the three populations on a node.
When it comes to phenotypes, this would clearly be trait dependent and false in many cases. The variation in height between Western-born whites and East Asians is almost certainly less than the variation within them, but clearly the variation in lactose tolerance would likely be greater between than within them (it's like 90% one way and 10% the other). By cursory inspection, the variation in skin color is greater between than within European whites and Sub-Saharan blacks. The variation in facial and skeletal morphology is greater between than within whites, East Asians, and blacks, as can be found in forensic anthropology and x-rays.
Of course, just because the variation within groups is larger than the variation between them doesn't mean the differences between them aren't meaningful or important. Men are around two standard deviations taller than women and their within-group variances are similar; it's a coin-toss as to whether if even the variation in height between men and women is greater than the variation within them. For randomly drawn pairs, if the variances are equal at a 2SD average difference and normally distributed, the man will be taller than the woman over 92% of the time.
This is only exacerbated by tail effects, as discussed many times here. If whites have an average IQ a standard deviation higher than blacks and their within-group variances are equal at 15, e.g., 100 vs. 85, then when comparing equal sized populations of whites and blacks, the white population would have over 16 times more individuals with IQs over 130. Blacks would have 7 times more those with IQs under 70 than whites. A randomly drawn white would be smarter than a randomly drawn black about 76% of the time.
Species are also a social construct, as are genus, family, order, etc. and everything in between. What's considered the same or different species (or any group) can be reclassified over time as new information is obtained or as fads change. Yet, hardly would anyone deny the biological underpinning behind classifying organisms. Conservationists generally lean left, but are heavily invested in Organism BioDiversity. Suggest that we should just let gorillas, cheetahs, the red wolf, or the loggerhead sea turtle get replaced and go extinct (what's the big deal, we already have hominids, felids, canids, and turtles? They're all in this together) and see a conversationist react as an ardent purist that would make the most extreme Stormfront member blush.
If you get bitten by a King Cobra, you want King Cobra antivenom ASAP—at least mamba or synthetic Elapidae antivenom as a temporary stopgap—not some antivenom from a random Naja or much less other snake species. While paralysis and tissue necrosis ensues, you definitely don't want a lecture on how species and genera are a social construct and how the King Cobra is not considered a True CobraTM but more closely related to mambas nowadays, although it was considered a cobra at one point. Thus, any random snake antivenom should do. Many different so-called snake "species" can interbreed and can have tremendous overlap in morphology and geography. Are you even sure if it was a King Cobra, or if "King Cobra" is a valid group in the first place? Maybe you're just indulging in and promulgating negative stereotypes involving "King Cobras." After all, you're not some sort of weird bigoted extremist when it comes to snakes, are you?
It's more that there are many ways you could interpret it as an incredibly broad claim, and that some of them are technically true but misleading. I think it usually refers to Lewontin's claim in this article.
Lewontin's Fallacy also works here and usually I mention it in such discussions, but I was thinking about "differences" in a more colloquial sense from the perspective of how a layperson might think of it, before switching to variation when it comes to phenotypes (most people have an easier time imagining phenotypical than genetic variation, especially at a locus-level). Hence the smell test using something more readily visualized, especially since most people are already at least cursorily familiar with commercial ancestry kits like 23andMe.
At a given locus there might be more variation within groups than across groups (not true in many cases, for example, the loci associated with lactose tolerance and skin color would likely have more between-group than within-group variation when it comes whites vs. East Asians, and whites vs. blacks, respectively), but once you consider more and more loci you start to get clean separations. Hence the aforementioned exercise Europeans and PCAs when it comes to Europeans, East Asians, and Western Africans. A randomly selected young athletic man might on average be only about 10% taller, 10% faster, 50% stronger, and have a slightly faster reaction time than a randomly selected young athletic women, with both groups having substantial intragroup variation for each of those traits. However, in terms of overall athleticism, almost always the man will be more athletic than the woman.
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I have not performed this exercise, but my understanding is that the first two PCs you'd use as the axes of this plot will usually explain a negligible percentage of the total variance in a genomic dataset. PCA will always rank axes by variance, but that doesn't mean the top few PCs are any good, in an absolute sense, at reducing the data dimension while preserving structure. Even if the PCs that let us reliably identify these clusters happen to be the relatively 'best' PCs we could use to collapse the multidimensional data onto a graph, they could still suck, in an absolute sense.
Depending on the publication, they can get up to 30% from the first two PCs, although it can be low like high single digits.
Regardless of the number, they're not sucky nor negligible when you can do a PCA using 5,000 random SNPs from 300 random individuals (100 individuals each of the three populations of Europeans, East Asians, and West Africans) and get a clean triangle. Pick another 5,000 random SNPs from another 300 random individuals and you'll get another clean triangle. Rinse and repeat. Quite robust.
If anything, it's a testament to how different genetically Europeans, East Asians, and West Africans are, that one can get consistent, clean separation in such low dimensionality (e.g., 2), robust to using different individual and different loci. One can always add more PCs to get more total variation captured, but it's just unnecessary for separating those three populations.
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that is, assuming 1 gene corresponds to 1 trait and all traits are equally important. But suppose some trait (say, amount of melanin in skin) is determined by 10 genes and one population has 35% frequency of dark allele and other population has 65% frequency of dark allele. Most genetic variation is within populations but looking at their resulting color, they are visibly distinct. Height or intelligence are much more polygenic.
There are lots of genes related to immune system in which variants are no worse or no better, they just make it harder for germs to jump from one individual to another, and selection will favor diversity in this gene. Other genes would be selected in one direction and can reach fixation. Pick traits you are interested about, and then estimate how much PCs explain it.
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The original argument was about - is there a genetics-related meaning of "race", or is it just a social construct?
I'd argue that race is, genetically, as real as the color of a fruit or vegetable. If you had huge matrix with tens of thousands of low-level properties of various fruits, the 'color' variable would explain very little of the total variance, but color is still a property worth discussing, a common kind of variation. The question of how much of traits we care about race 'explains' is a different one with a higher bar for evidence, but the PC does show that "race" does have some meaning, even if a weak one. It rebuts "race is a social construct" when itself used as a rebuttal to more substantial arguments about race.
Undoubtedly there is a genetics-related meaning of race, in the sense that there are identifiable genetic markers that discriminate (heh) between people of different racial categories.
I should have made clear in my reply above that I was specifically questioning the implication, in the post I was replying to, that a PCA plot showing distinct racial clusters can rebut 'the old feel-good rhetorical device" that there's more genetic variation within than between. It does not necessarily do this, in the situation where the PCs showing those distinct clusters themselves explain a negligible fraction of overall variation.
But that's fine! Rebutting "more variation within than between" does not seem not necessary for race to have a genetic basis.
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genetic differences and variations exist, but race as a category is socially defined. Socially defined does not negate usefulness (as with many systems in our society). Money is a social construct, but we don't consider it useless. The genetic variation and differences are real, but you also need to keep in mind most of these broad claims about IQ or even physical characteristics fail to take it a step further and discuss the numerous factors that influence such differences (socioeconomic, environmental, cultural and geographical).
This is technically true, but I think what you mean to do is imply that the social construct "race" doesn't map perfectly onto "ancestry / genetics" in a way that affects our interpretation of things like "race and IQ are related". I think "race" and "ancestry" are close enough that it's not important to clarify you mean "ancestry's effect on genetics" when you say "race".
The sophisticated ones don't! It is true that BasedHitler1488 on twitter has a very inaccurate view of the literature on the heritability of IQ or the association of that with race, but that's pure a weakman.
The science on the topic of the heritability of IQ and physical characteristics among individuals is extremely clear and mainstream, and directly deals with factors "socioeconomic, environmental, cultural, and geographical!"
The race-causes-iq-differences arguments are not scientific consensus. Imo this is mostly because saying 'black people are dumber because genes' is something that most existing Americans, including most smart ones, (for various reasons) have extremely strong negative reactions to. But they do directly deal with "socioeconomic, environmental, cultural, and geographical" too.
For some intro reading, check out JayMan: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/jaymans-race-inheritance-and-iq-f-a-q-f-r-b/ https://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/
Note that JayMan is black!
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