Which do you think is more common, based on your quoted stats?
a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who has white skin (disregarding albinism)
or
b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child who is tall as an adult
Literally, news articles are written and go viral about "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who is only 5'5""
If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more common to see two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more common to see two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race?
If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen at about the same rate", then you should question what exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted about the heritability of height vs skin tone.
The feeling I get is that many people really, really don't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real, then you can't say there are differences among the races. So, they will argue against common sense and try to say things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black parents don't give birth to white babies.
I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that way.
I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race".
To put the two into the same category, you could compare "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative frequencies of such events.)
The other way to resolve the category error, if you prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially prior to modern travel and migration patterns.
But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?"
Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty large, too.
Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a social construct and the difference between the Irish, southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European isn't a big deal today.
Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly, to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are simply made up to enforce your superiority to the individual.
As a result, race is either not real, or real but completely uninteresting. Any other option is intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it leads to poor outcomes.
Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.
With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest here. And that goes to my point about people wanting race to not be a social construct. I believe you're lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case.
> But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?"
Exactly. You don't want race to be real, you think it might be misused if it was real, and so you argue that it isn't real. That is not a compelling basis for an argument. A good argument for the earth being round is not that you're scared of people punching you in the nose if you say it is flat.
> Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.
Yes, I can see how they would prefer that. But it has no bearing on the reality of whether being gay is genetic, or a choice, or possibly both, and really has no place in scientific analysis of sexuality.
What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else?
And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way?
If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon
Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people.
Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way?
This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!
Humans have a myriad of visible characteristics: height, weight, skin color, eye color and shape, hair color and type, shapes of facial features, and so on.
All these characteristics vary continuously.
If you see that data as points filling a high-dimensional cube, there's not going to be an empty space there.
Some areas are going to be denser than the others, but there are no gaps there.
What you try to do with "race" is you're trying to cluster this data.
But there really is only one cluster. Might as well call rand() a million times to get a bunch of points in 0..1, and cluster that.
Oh, but you've see black people! And white people!
Well yeah, but it's all those people filling the spaces in between any two points that make it impossible to draw the line.
The only way to draw the line is to make a call on where to draw it — that is, to make an arbitrary choice. Without it, your clustering algorithms would fail.
Yes, there are high-density peaks on this data, especially if you look at any single characteristic.
Yes, you can separate the peaks. But deciding on where to put the the threshold is choice — a social construct — that can leaves a lot of points without a "race" label (which race is Irish - Mexican?) and/or change which peaks make the cutoff (are Armenians a race, or noise in the dataset?).
>Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective
The scientists have two options:
A) Look at the original data which you used to assign the race label (skin color, hair type, etc), and see if there's any correlation of that data with diseases
B)Look at the data, cluster it using an arbitrary choice to be able to get more than one cluster, ignore a lot of people below the threshold, assign the labels, IGNORE THE RAW DATA, and then look for correlations between labels and diseases.
Which approach do you think is more scientific?
Or is it somewhere in between? Do you feel comfortable marking the line where life possibly begins? If you mark it before birth, aren't you just giving ammunition to anti-abortion advocates to take away freedom from women? Should we just say that life begins at birth, and shut down anyone who asks otherwise, because anything else is dangerous and possibly arbitrary and not 100% accurate in rare cases?
What's the continuous variable here that you are measuring to assign the discrete label (alive/not alive) to?
If you want to do that based solely on one variable, time from conception, then you get bad science. People can become dead at any point in time.
Yes, it's not possible to assign the "alive" label based on time from conception alone.
We do have plenty of discrete characteristics based on which to assign the alive/not alive label.
The Bible, for example, assigns the discrete label "alive" based on discrete label "breathing" in at least one case[1].
The definition I use is "does not need to be within a human body to sustain activity in brain cells".
Hope that makes things clear.
[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202%3A7...
You on your own definition of life would apparently want to restrict the rights of women relative to what they have currently. This is a dangerous idea and should not be allowed.
I chose my definition from the rights-of-women perspective. My understanding is that a fetus is generally non-viable outside of a host body, and thus not "alive" by my definition.
On the other hand, we havd C-sections and incubators. If a baby can be safely extracted with a C-section, placed in an incubator, and survive, my understanding is that the choice to abort is no longer available.
Of course, I can be wrong here.
My point was that at least I can make a definition here that does not depend on a choice of an arbitrary value of a continuous variable. My definition of "alive" depends on the choice of which variables to look at, not on arbitrary thresholds. And I don't insist on it being The Truth.
Another example:
"Heart rate" is a continuous vafiable, but the distribution of its values has a large gap between 0 (no heart rate) and nonzero values (the lowest observed was 27bpm). So you don't need to make a choice for a clustering algorithm to work. You can run K-means on "heart rate" and get these 2 clusters: 0 and everything else.
This allows one to make a definition of "alive" based on heart rate. That's not my definition, but it's a usable one.
This is not feasible with race if we use the variables commonly understood to be associated with race: skin color, height, nose shape, etc. There are no gaps in those variables.
Even eye color varies continuously [2], and it's not clear how to assign labels [1].
Color in general is a good analogy for race. You see the colors vary in a rainbow. You can tell the difference between red, green, and blue.
But you can't run K-means on a rainbow to get 7 colors out. Or any number but 1, for that matter.
You need to make a call yourself where to draw those lines.
This reflects in languages. Russian has distinct words for what we'd call "blue" in English; But also English has words like cyan, turquoise, navy, etc., which other languages may not have.
Color, in end, is a social construct.
And I notice you cannot answer any of my questions as to how you would define races.
I have no idea how you would define race. I don't know why you would expect me to. I also have no idea how you specifically define certain other aspects of biology that you probably accept as real and accurate, because I'm not a biologist or a geneticist.