>> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population.

Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that. My kids orthodontist even told me they align teeth in part based on race. The Asian arch is flatter across the front for example. I asked about this because an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth" which matched her ancestry, which he didn't know - just said that in response to my description of the crowding.

So YES, races have biological differences. If not, we wouldn't be able to tell where people are from. I get that it's not cool to discriminate based on race, but it's not OK or even practical to deny that it exists (see dentistry example above).

I think you're missing the point. "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best.

No one is going to argue that you get your traits from your ancestors and that regional groups have similar traits due to shared ancestry, it's the classification itself that doesn't match up well with reality.

I agree, but is it accurate to say that our concept of race amounts to labeling different clusters in an N-dimensional space (where the dimensions are largely biological traits)? I.e., while labeling clusters always entails some amount of approximation (clusters are inherently nebulous), we still label clusters because it's useful. For example, the boundaries between languages are imprecise, but we still bin/label them because it's useful to do so--is it roughly the same with race? Or is race categorically different for some reason that I'm not understanding?

I recently read a (non-fiction) book where exactly that kind of clustering was talked about. It's correct that you'll find clusters in each major continent, but with just 6 clusters one of them will be entirely devoted to a small, insular community in the north of Iran. To your eyes and our social consciousness this community would be considered "middle-eastern" when in reality they're about as genetically as different as "Black people" and "Asian people" are.

Since they're a small population, they don't matter for making generalizations about middle-easterners or whatever other larger classification you use.

I didn't make any comments on the utility of racial classification, just that the classification isn't perfect, leaves groups out, and where you decide to draw the lines between them is often arbitrary. Race is an oversimplification of a complex system, but even an oversimplification has value.

Seems like you have a pretty good grasp on my assertion here.

Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits (such as skin tone and eye shape) and a host of cultural considerations (such as region of birth, language spoken, etc. etc.) You can group people this way, but it's not really an approximation to anything. Nor is it useful in a non-circular way. The only real reason to keep track of people's race is to ensure that...they're not being discriminated against on the basis of their race.

> Racial categories are based on a very small number of superficial traits

Right, but genetic correlates are real. These superficial characteristics evolved along with a thousand other non-superficial characteristics, in mostly (with the exceptions of conquest, trade, and border settlements) isolated regions.

Your skin tone and eye shape are indeed cosmetic trivialities, but they correlate strongly with muscle fiber density, susceptibility to certain diseases, endocrine profiles, and a host of other things that very much do matter.

Yes, no-one is denying that racial categories correlate to various degrees with genetic characteristics. This is blindingly obvious – unless there are some people who think that ethnically Chinese people learn to have epithantic folds from their environment?

Where people err is in assuming that these sorts of trivial observations are sufficient to show that race has a biological basis. Racial groupings are not biologically natural. They are completely arbitrary from a genetic point of view. That is, there are no sensible biological criteria according to which humans can be grouped neatly into a handful of 'races'.

See for example the following comment regarding sickle cell anemia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525697#:~:text=azalem... Yes, 'black' people are statistically more susceptible, but that's not because of any property of 'black' people as a group. It's just because regions with Malaria happen to have dark skinned populations.

Our concept of race is way too course-grained to make it useful in this sense. And those clusters of features you mention would not correlate to what we consider a race.

Indeed. I heard one of the PIs on the 100,000 genomes project [1] giving a talk in which they flat-out said that anyone whose four grandparents were white and irish is basically a clone compared to anyone whose four grandparents were from sub-saharan africa. The whole point is that there's so much variability within each societal clustering that it tends to make not that much sense to talk about it -- and the degree of homogeneity is different, too, mostly depending on ancient geography (hello Iceland, as an example).

There are lots of "exceptions" to this, like sickle cell anaemia, for example [2], which is used as a teaching example of an Mendelian autosomal recessive disease. But note that it goes hand-in-hand with a historical pattern of malaria, covering a fairly large and inhomogeneous blob of africa, the middle east, italy/turkey/greece and india. Our social construct of race varies quite substantially over those places.

[1] https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/about-genomics-england/the...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease

So which "race" is the child mentioned above, German or Irish? Sure, they have aspects of both, but they can be in only one cluster.

The utility of clusters is nebulous, too.

> but they can be in only one cluster

I don't think this is true, logically or socially. We have dense clusters that are slowly merging as the world enjoys this extremely new concept of travel and intermingling world populations. I've seen many people describe themselves as "mixed race", directly or indirectly by describing their ancestry. Of course, the number of basis vectors required to accurately describe a person is increasing with time, but it seems that medical science has chosen to ignore this "easy" way to describe and treat people for some reason. But, is it all that surprising, considering not even women were represented fairly in medical trials, even 15 years ago?

> "Race" is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation, overlap, and blurry lines that make any sort of classification a social approximation at best.

The same is true of "species". Last I checked, there were at least 24 different definitions of "species", all of which have some overlap and none of which are perfectly precise. You don't see people going around saying "species is a social construct". Then again, maybe they will soon, I suppose anything is possible these days.

That said, you are correct that "race" is merely a rough statistical correlation for some cohort, not some precise measure. If we can categorize more precisely, then we should, and we only fall back to "race" as a last resort (if it's applicable).

The second sentence of the Wikipedia article for “species” reads:

> A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.

This is the definition I’ve always heard, and it’s certainly more rigorous than any definition of “race” that I’ve encountered, and makes no reference to any arbitrary social constructs.

Conversely, the definition for “race” is explicitly arbitrary and social:

> A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.

> This is the definition I’ve always heard

It's not as precise as you think, because fertility isn't transitive. Consider members of a species, M1, M2, F1, F2. M1 might be fertile with F1, M2 with F2, but M1 may not be fertile with F2. Are they all really members of the same species?

Read up on the species problem for more information (there are now 26, not 24):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

I can’t admit I have any qualifications to speak about biology, and I know HN is known for proposing reductive “solutions” based on oversimplified models of reality.

That being said, it seems to me that it makes sense that a species would include the entire connected graph whose nodes are members and whose edges represent the ability to have fertile offspring.

I found [1] which is an interesting example of a very large graph, but nevertheless, all the examples seem to be within altogether very similar groups.

I think a reasonable definition for casual use doesn’t need to require the graph of a species to be fully connected, only fully reachable.

There are certainly leaks to any abstraction of species, but they are empirical cases of exceptions. They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

> They don’t inject arbitrary social categories into the definition. Definitions of “race” have no empirical basis on which to be proved or disproved in the first place.

That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category.

So to the extent that we find "species" a meaningful category when applied correctly, then we should also find "race" a meaningful category when applied correctly. The key in both scenarios is to apply them correctly, and we should abandon them when we find more precise metrics.

That said, you are correct that there are also numerous cultural and social properties that are sometimes lumped in with race in a manner that we don't see with species, mainly because "species" hasn't been politicized. That doesn't imply that there's nothing "there" once you tune out that baggage.

> That's simply not correct. The literature abounds with all sorts of correlates with race, like propensity for sickle cell anemia, vitamin D deficiencies, susceptibility to alcohol, and morphological differences. These are just as empirically justified as any classification of species, and just as with species, not all of those properties need apply to every single member in that category

I think this is the thing people misunderstand about race being a social construct, is that race is a bucket, by nature there need to be correlations between people in that bucket in order to actually place people into that bucket in the first place.

There will likely be other correlations between people in said bucket, who are in this cause usually more closely related and share more recent common ancestors.

The size of that bucket and how we put people in it is arbitrary, but the fact that correlations exist when you put people in buckets isn't.

That doesn't work because the graph for humans would go all the way back to those ancient apes by many connected edges and back down to modern apes, making us all the same species.

This is another problem with species - where is the transition where one species evolves into another?

IIRC, there are two species of birds, A and B, in the North Atlantic that cannot interbreed. But A can breed with C which has a range to the east, and C can breed with D again further east. And so on, around the arctic circle, until you get to Q which can breed with B.

A modern definition of "species" generally gives a set of objective criteria that you can use to determine if two organisms are the same species (such as "can they produce fertile offspring"). Is there any definition of race like this? Genuine question, I don't think I've ever seen a definition of race more specific than "a collection of people with similar physical characteristics" or something like that, and I can't find one now. There's lots of definitions of what all the different races are, but none of what a "race" actually is.

Is there any definition of race where, given two people, you can apply some criteria to determine whether or not they are the same race? The criteria can't be "look at the definitions of each race and categorize the two people" because that's circular, how were those particular categories chosen? With species, you can determine that a bird and a fish are different species without knowing what birds and fish are.

The imprecise definition of "species" is exactly what I was describing. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept

I agree we don't have a perfect definition of species, but I'm wondering if we have literally any definition of race. Has anybody even tried? Is there any criteria more specific than "if two people look very different then they are different races"?

Can't say to be honest, I don't have that much interest in the topic of race beyond its informal use to define cohorts in studies. More than likely someone could start from ethnicity and expand it from there, but the whole endeavour is likely doomed from the start given the sensitivity of the subject.

You're so, so close to getting it. And then you decide to just hop over the point :(

See my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28527329

I admire the confidence of someone who can say in the same paragraph that there are 24 different definitions (constructions) of "species," then deny that they are a social construct at all.

I fundamentally disagree with a definition of "social construct" that would have to exclude species as a meaningful category.

Edit: but even if I did agree with the definition, if "race" is as useful a category as "species" despite being socially constructed, all of the people calling race a social construct have utterly failed to make the case that we should stop using it.

I strongly dislike (almost despise) this argument. Race is a surrogate variable for genetic history. The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry.

Approximation it may be, imperfect it may be, construct it may be, but its utility is very much real. Attempts to handwave it away do not change the fact that race and genetics are very much linked as it is used today.

> The classification itself indeed matches with reality, as it is generally made on ancestry.

I would dispute that claim.

Due to population bottlenecks among the first 'out_of_africa' groups, a black passing south indian is genetically a lot closer to a white as milk finnish person than various african subpopulations are to each other. (Africans are orders of magntitude more diverse than the rest of the world, in a genetically quantifiable way)

Race markers like latin american and hispanic betray the fact that some countries (argentina, chile) are almost entirely white, others are have denisovan dna (natives) or are racial frankenstien's monsters due to slave trade (Brazil). It makes no sense to use these umbrella race denominations.

Race as an overloaded term for sociological, antropological, genetic and medical use is stupid. It just becomes a terrible tool for each. Genetics has smartly stopped using race much, but the others still continue to do so, despite the inconveniences it brings.

There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.

>There is utility to race , only because we refuse to cut the middle man and identify clusters directly from genetic data. No one needs a cockerel to wake you up, when alarm clocks have been invented. Honestly, typing this comment has just made me want to invest in these 23nme-like companies.

There's a reason for this, and that reason is cost. Even the relatively cheap microarray based tests that 23 & me uses are expensive at scale. Race, imperfect as it is, serves as a low-cost, reasonably effective proxy in many (but not all) cases.

Remember, for medical logistics, it's not about getting perfect care (are you sequenced yet?). It's about getting cost effective care, lest you bloat costs to high heaven.

Does anyone really believe that medical logistics is the most common or most impactful use of "race"?

With regard to this topic, where we're literally discussing lk race in an xray?

"Latin American" and "Hispanic" aren't race markers. They're a regional identity and an ethnicity, respectively, which exist alongside race.

What's the "genetic history" behind being black? If it means basically anything other than that your ancestors came from Africa in the past 100k years, you're missing many groups commonly considered "black" like Australian aborigines and Negritos. If that is your definition, then basically everyone is black.

Where's the utility in that?

> its utility is very much real

What's the utility of the concept of race?

Low cost variable for modulating medical treatment? It's often used in such scenarios.

> is an attempt to put people with different biological traits into 'buckets' but in reality there's variation

But this is true for everything. For example "night and day" - these are just buckets, but nobody would argue that there are no differences between night and day because of that.

random side note: glasses for example, bought RayBans my nose bridge isn't the right shape for it sucks

could be genetic I suppose but I wasn't aware of this as a thing eg. Asian fit sunglasses

Blue is a color. Yellow is a color. The fact that green exists doesn’t mean those colors aren't real.

Is magenta a color? A real one? We perceive it as such, but there is no place on the electromagnetic spectrum corresponding to magenta. If you went hunting for magenta photons, you'd be hunting for quite a long while. What that says to me is that our intuitive mental construct of color isn't very reliable, even though it feels so real. Likewise, maybe we should be less trusting of our intuitive labels for other phenomena.

Tigers are real. Lions are real. The fact that Ligers exist doesn’t mean they’re not two different populations.

The point is that just because two categories can mix doesn’t automatically mean that those categories don’t meaningfully exist.

The differences between blue, yellow, and green are pretty minor compared to radio or gamma radiation.

No, I don't know what the point of this comment is. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the parent comment either.

So you're saying there is an Asian race spanning 4.5 billion people from China to India to Iran and there are also German and Irish races. I guess the question is how can Germans and Irish be different races, but Chinese, Indians and Iranians are the same race?

Africa is going to be similarly diverse as Asia.

I would say this is an observation that the labeling isn't nearly granular enough in those very large regions. From my experience, people from those regions will use much finer labels, to describe people, than the "this side of the planet" labels of "Asia" and "Africa".

More diverse, there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside of it.

> Clearly people are biologically different based on race and the AI here is picking up on that

I think the parent is saying that it's possible (likely even) that the AI isn't picking up on biological features, but some other artifact. For example, perhaps the quality of x-ray machines or technicians correlate with race (race and "access to higher quality radiology" both correlate with wealth) and the AI is really picking up on the quality of the imaging. The fact that the AI still worked when the imaging quality was reduced across the board (pixelated into 8x8 squares) suggests that this particular hypothesis is unlikely, but this is the kind of error we're discussing.

>> an engineer I worked with had a father in dentistry and told me my kid had "German teeth in an Irish mouth"

Off topic, but this sounds very engineery, indeed. Was the conversation polite?

Don't forget Sinodonty.

Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin, but let's not pretend that such an obvious visual variation as skin tone would be overlooked.

White cat, tabby cat, grey cat, etc? We don't try to say one sort of cat is better than other, but we can tell them apart very well.

Maybe what you're saying is that the aliens would not have the same prejudices associated with that marker as we have.

No, I am saying that skin tone would not be as important a feature.

For example, lining up those dead bodies by skin tone alone would have Central Africans mixed in with South Americans, Austronesians, and South Asians, Northern Europeans mixed in with East Asians and Inuit, Southern Europeans mixed in with Indians,Central Asians, Native Americans, and Arabs, etc etc.

But it's not limited to skin tone. Have you never been able to identify an albino African as African?

But you're moving away from the premise of the GP.

I don't see how.

That depends on the Alien's primary mode of sense. Which may not be sight. Sight is particularly strong for humans. But what if the Aliens primarily distinguish based on smell like many animal species with poor colour vision?

> Aliens may as well sort us by the colour of our pants as soon as the colour of our skin

This made me chuckle. But it is a good example. I bet there is a lot we can infer from people based on their common go-to colors for clothing.

I never realized how odd the concept of "blue jeans" were until I travelled outside the US.

Supposing there are Aliens FWIW I don’t know that they would perceive the same visible spectrum that we do, which might effect their ability to differentiate by color. And they might not even perceive colors at all perhaps focusing on patterns or perhaps use some sort acoustical sonar system of high pitched shrieks or an electrocapacitive perception captured by elongated dactyltennae hands with which they can sense the world around them.

The alien is hypothetical, a proxy point of view that's theoretically unbiased and has no awareness of human social context, history, etc.

Sure, but aren’t they just extending that to remove the “bias” of human-sensory-organs ? :P

"But I take higher ground. I hold that, in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by colour, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good," John c. Calhoun said.

"Nonsense," replied the thistleglorb. "You both have exactly the same capacitance."

> People are not 'race x' or 'race y' biologically, as if race is some discrete set of features common to a whole population. Every individual has a set of biological features inherited from their ancestors which, theoretically, could include any or all so-called 'races'. Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'.

Exactly. One of the people I'll always point to as evidence that race is a social construct is Barack Obama. He was the "first black president". In reality he is, genetically, as "white" as he is "black". We still call him black because of the color of his skin.

If people insist for long enough that racial categories are inherently biological you'll eventually end up in one-drop judgement territory. Not a great place to have a discussion.

One does wonder how the AI would do by the 1/16th legal definition.

That race is mostly a social construct, does not abnegate the fact that it can also exist physiologically.

'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.

(Edit: when I say 'immediately' I'm indicating this would be an obvious, first order thing to do from the first pictures they have of us, not an 'Enlightened Alien' scientific form of categorization).

If all they had were 'pictures' of us, the race categories we use would be the obvious grouping, or something resembling that.

They would see that most of the people in Sub Saharan Africa looked quite different from those in East Asia. (And difference between Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians is more than 'melanin').

There's a 'continuum' between every biological grouping, that doesn't mean those categories don't exist. It just means we're going to argue a lot about where and how to draw the lines.

Race as a 'Social Construct' relates to all of the other attributes that we associate with race, and individual lived experiences due to how they are perceived etc..

To your point, Aliens wouldn't immediately pick up on the 'Social Construct' bit, at least not right away and so they wouldn't have the prejudices that we do, but if they could only observe from afar, they would see exactly what we see, and visual distinctions would be the 'first order of separation' even if it was, after further understanding (i.e. genetics) a less important distinction as you hint.

Edit: someone provided this like I'd like to also include it [1] which illustrates some of the current debate over the notion of race, and that it's clearly politicized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

It’s a social construct because the lines aren’t drawn along genetic lines. For example Americans call someone that’s 3/4th white and 1/4th black a black person.

Further features that seem very important to us like the shape of our eyes or skin tone may seem irrelevant to a creature which doesn’t have a face and sees the world in a different color spectrum than we do. They might group based on smell or habitat marking groups of urban, suburban, and country dwellers.

Part of it is social and part of it is genetic.

From a social PoV, in Cuba, someone as you describe 3/4 one and 1/4 the other would be likely be put in the category of the 3/4. In some places an albino is just someone with different genetic characteristic, in other places they are a creature that brings bad luck and suffer violence.

Dog and cat breeds are distinguished throughout the world. It's genetic and socially constructed as well.

"the lines aren’t drawn along genetic lines. "

Race is definitely drawn along genetics lines - you've just demonstrated that in your example.

The 1/4 black - 3/4 white person was not identified as 'Asian' in your example, but rather, in the mixed physical scenario was crudely categorized as one or the other, in the example you gave, Black.

(FYI I tend to disagree a bit about the category though: I believe people will be categorized mostly for how they actually look, not so much the 'ratio' of anything. There's a lot of 1/2 Filipino 1/2 White people on TikTok who 'look' 100% White and make funny videos about the fact nobody believes them about their heritage).

Your example shows that race is definitely a social construct, but that it also has underlying genetic realities.

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the grouping we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.

An alien taxonomist, perhaps.

We humans go "bug! whale! snake! cow!" most of the time even for species found here on our own planet.

Yes, and if we were to most crudely distinguish between sub-groups of 'bugs whales and cows' we would do it first and foremost based on immediate appearance.

We would even name the sub-groups firstly the artifacts that differentiate them physically.

Blue Whale, Grey Whale

Black Bear, Brown Bear.

As we develop a better understanding, we'd also probably later determine that the genetic differences may not map very well to the physical attributes ... but due to historical groupings based on visual cues, we'd continue to overstate/understate the differences in the textbooks and in pop culture.

I'd tend to hope a species capable of interstellar travel would have learned the same lessons already about not classifying based on mere outward appearance.

They'll presumably have had things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation happen on their own world.

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today

I wonder about that... I can't tell the difference between, say, a male octopus and a female octopus, but octopi can. Maybe the differences that seem so obvious to us are actually almost imperceptible outside of our species.

> 'Aliens' visiting Earth would immediately categorize us into groups very crudely resembling the groupings we use today, because our visible characteristics are the most immediately obvious artifacts of our existence.

Whatever categorization they came up with would most certainly not resemble what we consider racial categories today.

"I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus." -- Agent Smith

> Human beings have a continuum of features that is heavily interlaced amongst all the 'races'.

That doesn't mean race doesn't exist any more than the fact that height is a continuum doesn't mean that short people and tall people don't exist.

"That doesn't mean race doesn't exist"

Exactly, although not in the traditional sense. There are many many overlapping genetic aspects in humans; We subdivide for political or social reasons, not strictly biological ones. To make the height comparison more fair, it would be as if we divided people into "bigs" or "littles" arbitrarily and formed political parties around it, etc. Height is one biological aspect and even then what is "tall" is subjective.

For example, the US viewpoint of white or black(~=african) is a relatively recent way of looking at race. People don't slot neatly into X or Y buckets.

I recommend reading the wikipedia article on Race [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

But I've think you've gotten looped around here to a stance that fails to account for the original context. It wouldn't be that surprising if an AI could categorize people into "tall" vs "short" from pixelated medical images; certainly nobody would say, as the parent comment did, that the AI must be cheating because there's no such thing as being biologically tall.

But no one would argue that the definitions of "tall" and "short" weren't social constructs, even as the fact of human length from heel to crown clearly is not a social construct.

Funny, I read this immediately after leaving a comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28525122) using height categories as an example of a social construct.

Race is socially constructed, just like the idea of who is short and tall is. The objective things in each case are genes and height, which are not socially constructed.

This is an error on two counts: it conflates a spectrum on a single qualiry with spectra across multiple qualities, and it presumes the existence of people who are the “most” of their race (the way that there is a tallest and a shortest person). The first isn’t what race is, and the second is absurd.

Does it? I'm 6'5" (196cm in Roman Catholic[1]); in Amsterdam I'm at the upper range of normal while in many other places I am Godzilla and have to watch my step to avoid crushing things.

[1] A humorous reference. Sorry.