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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 -
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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