The American Anthropological Association now wants to pretend that there are not two biological sexes, which is even more appalling than the group’s earlier decision to pretend that there is no such thing as race (never mind the genomic evidence revealing five distinguishable races).
Is there such evidence? My understanding of the science is in accord with this National Academy paper. As far as I know, all attempts to define race or account for it scientifically have failed for all the hundreds of years it’s been attempted.
This isn’t a matter of fashion, and therefore unlikely to be the result of cognitive bias, either. At one time all the Wise believed in race, and couldn’t account for it; now none of them do, and still can’t. In the early 20th Century the same people who advocated for Darwin also were committed to race theory; generations before aristocracy used it to explain their commitment to slavery as a sort of humanitarianism. Now scientists are mostly on the Left (social science up to 44-1 Dem/Rep), and they want to use race too, for “anti-racist” action. It’s still not definable.
Is that understanding challenged by new evidence? I’m genuinely not aware of whatever this co-blogger is so confident in referencing.
One can divide people into groups genetically at just about any desired specificity. Then you can call those groupings whatever you want. No matter how you do this, there will be leakage at the edges. Some boundaries will be more permeable than others. If you want to divide humanity into two groups on the basis of genetic distance, you can have the San and everyone else. Three groups? The San, the Khoi, and everyone else. Those two really are that different from each other and the rest of us that much.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to divide by continent of recent ancestors' origin, you can get five solid genomic groups, yes. You can call them races, or ancestral groups, or bumpsies, if you want. Some names are provocative. There has been some mixing in the last 500 years and it is increasing, but "mixed-race" is still a small category as a percentage of humanity. There are measurable differences in those groups, and you can make some broad statements about them. The question then becomes "Why would you want to?" There is some reason to do so for medical purposes, but we will soon be able to distinguish with even finer granularity and won't need to.
The only time I ever point out the group genetic differences is defensively, when people with power to regulate others insist that X is caused by some environmental factor when it clearly is not. This is because such people will immediately start making me do things, or at least pay for them doing things that are expensive and useless, in order to "fix education" or whatever. Up until that point, I see no compelling reason why group differences should substitute for much more pronounced individual variation.
The "Ancestry.com" and "23&Me" results claim to tag genetic results with percentage of group heritage by much smaller regions than continents. "Scandinavian" or "Sub-Saharan African" or "Indo-Asian".
ReplyDeleteAlso, interestingly, percentage "Neanderthal".
On one hand, the typical genetic spectrum tends to suggest EVERY client of such services is "mixed race". On another, we're somehow disassociating genetics from "race" altogether.
AVI,
ReplyDeleteThank you. I had not heard of any of that research; I had to look up who the San and Khoi were.
"If you want to divide humanity into two groups on the basis of genetic distance, you can have the San and everyone else. Three groups? The San, the Khoi, and everyone else. Those two really are that different from each other and the rest of us that much... If you want to divide by continent of recent ancestors' origin, you can get five solid genomic groups, yes. You can call them races, or ancestral groups, or bumpsies, if you want."
Interesting, then, that the further subdivision would leave the provocatively-titled 'black race' closer to the 'white race' than to the two other sub-Saharan African Khoi and San groups. That's definitely not what the common language usage of the term suggests. (To say nothing of the obvious differences between West African populations and, say, Kenyans; and to say even less of the difference between them and the Australian Aborigines. But here we see even greater-distance among people physically not that far away.)