> 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.

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 not sure how your link applies to this situation. That refers to an interesting way an AI encoded data in an image. The issue here is that this data _exists in the first place_. Whether the AI learned to compress the racial data into an 8x8 picture is besides the point.

The point is “the AI might not be doing what you think it is doing, because it doesn’t actually understand the goal”.

You're misunderstanding the context of the thread. At this point in the thread, we're talking about whether or not there is any biological basis for race, not about the AI example in particular. The premise here is that there is a biological basis--that race is a label applied to a cluster of genetic traits (various facial shape features, skin color, etc) which are almost certainly genetically constructed.

The comment I replied to stated "clearly there must be some biological basis for race, if an AI can determine race from an x-ray".

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.

Ah, my mistake.

There is a massive difference between there being a biological basis to some of the phenotypes associated with racial categories and there being "biological meaning" to identifying races.

"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...

The point of the article is that if you clustered people based on genetic or anatomical properties in a non-post-hoc way, you would not end up with the same system of racial categories that are commonly used in the USA (or indeed any other country). As another poster has pointed out, the most striking example of this is the category 'Latino', which while often treated as a 'racial' category obviously has no biological basis.

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.