This is not true. I had a college professor explain the "race is a social construct" idea, and her position was staunchly that there was _no_ biological basis for race. See also this article by the scientific american[1]:

> Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning.

This is the idea that GP is responding to - clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

Not necessarily; they could easily reflect societal differences. Bone density could be affected by diet, or medical care received, or environmental factors in poor neighborhoods, which might easily vary by race without there being a genetic cause for that variance.

If it were a simple "all black people have a bone density of 3; all white people have a bone density of 2" you could pretty solidly conclude a biological component, but we're in the realm of small variances and probabilities that confound things quite a bit.

I think the most likely explanation for these results is something like https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-fr..., personally. Especially with the 8x8 pixelation example.

I'm pointing out that's not necessarily true. First, we have to prove that the AI is determining race from an x-ray. It's effectiveness at doing it via 64 pixels makes me skeptical that it is.

After that, we get into sticky territory determining whether any biological differences we can identify between races are caused by genetics, or environmental/societal factors like disparities in healthcare, diet, neighborhoods built over old SuperFund sites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal), etc.

"Black" represents a wide range of genotypes, many which differ more from each other than from "white" individuals and populations, even if there may be other tendencies like bone density and novel genetic features that appear more commonly or exclusively in some subsets of the "black" population. The skin colour phenotype being (usually) darker just happens to be very easy to notice and have acquired a lot of socially constructed meaning. Except in the narrow context of skin tones, it isn't biologically meaningful to consider "black" people as a particular group though, particularly not compared to more specific genetic markers that don't have the same socially constructed meaning...

This does not entail that no biological traits are correlated with race – biological traits are correlated to varying degrees with all kinds of subgroups of people. It does, however, mean that racial categories have no scientific basis.

To expand on this, imagine a Martian scientist studying human biology in isolation from human culture. Such a scientist would not subdivide humans into groups that match common racial categories, as these groupings are arbitrary from a biological point of view.

That said, assuming the paper is just wrong is simply bias.

If there is an identity associated with race, there is no reason to think it doesn’t impact biology. There is no reason to assume it’s genetic.

False. Diet and behavior affect biology amongst other things.

> Also there is a more than hundred year history of scientific research and no genetic (or other) grounding for race has been found.

We didn’t have machine learning or big data 100 years ago.

Yeah, so if a South-Asian orphan is adopted into a Swedish family, he magically ceases to be of whatever race were his parents and becomes white. That's... not how the concept of human race works.

And it’s entirely possible that if he was adopted at a young enough age, whatever this AI is detecting would read him as white too, assuming his habits and diet affected his development, as they might.

Indeed that would be consistent with your claim that there is nothing genetic about race.