Why must they lie?
There’s a saying—if you pick two chimpanzees in the same forest, you are likely to find more genetic differences than if you pick two humans on opposite sides of the world. Genetic diversity within a given racial group is much larger than the genetic differences between different racial groups, which makes it very difficult (at best) to come up with some kind of genetic criteria for defining race.
Does skin color not diverge between racial groups, or is it not a significant genetic divergence?
If skin color seems too trivial to be genetically "significant", then what about racial differences that confer an advantage or disadvantage to malarial resistance?
One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. It would be difficult to come up with some kind of genetic basis for that category that is somehow useful to science, somehow includes most black people, and somehow excludes most non-black people.
It is more useful to talk about genetics in terms of (recent) ancestry. Ancestry is reasonably useful for things like screening for genetic conditions. You want to screen for sickle-cell anemia? Recent African ancestry is a reasonable thing to look for; blackness is a poor proxy. Recall that skin pigmentation is more about what latitude your ancestors are from, and not about what specific part of the world they are from.
(I’ve used the term “African ancestry” to refer both to long-term ancestry and more recent ancestry here, I hope that the usage is clear from context.)
Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.
I mean, that’s a good analogy, the term “fish” is even worse than “race”. Fish is paraphyletic, just like “tree”. There’s also the colloquial sense of “fish”, which is even less clear.
In casual speech, you can certainly look at an animal and say "this is a fish", or look at a plant and say "that is a tree", but if you actually start to look closer, you find that there's no clear way to define either of those terms that includes everything we think should belong in them, and also excludes everything we think shouldn't.
"Races" among humans are similarly hard to pin down by any kind of genetic taxonomy.
science is for describing what is, and in detail, but science's failure to do that just means we need more science, not that we should quit and claim the above words have no meaning.
Yet show me a picture of any of them and I am confident I could roughly point to the region in Europe where their ancestors have toiled for the last thousand generations. Put them and a dozen Congolese in a group and a 5 year old could easily separate them into their two respective racial groups.
There is clearly a common genetic 'core' among people of the same racial group. There may be much diversity within it, too, but to use that to deny the existence of this shared heritage is downright subversive and disingenuous.
The race classification of humans is racist. As the term implies.
Many people arriving to the US are shocked to be asked their 'race', as if we were dogs. I never know what to answer, are arabs white? Are spaniards latin? Are ouzbeks from Caucase asian? Etc... This is non sense racist shit.
I'm guessing you're older than five, so you probably should adjust to the shock and make an attempt to advance your understanding of the world beyond the level of a child who can't even tie their shoes.
Also, population mixing and movements across time doesn't preclude the existence of more or less distinguishable groups inside the said population.
So while an individual cannot decide who they descended from, they can choose whether or not to accept a set of cultural norms. People routinely change religions, learn other languages, or follow other traditions outside the ethnic cultural norms they were born into.
The TFA states that ethnicity is only one of many potential "population descriptors" and recommends that researchers "use multiple descriptors rather than a single, overly broad category".
I think you substitute race with precision. If a cluster of different genes or characteristics are commonly found together, say which ones you're talking about, how often they're found together (as opposed to apart), and why you think that's relevant. Talking about race is honestly often ultimately handwaving in the vague direction of 19th century biblical scholars.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-gui...
Because ethnicity is commonly understood and has been defined fron the beginning as a social category (that’s what, historically, differentiates it from race.) So using it to describe a social category doesn't have the problem that using race for that purpose does.
> And, can people choose their ethnicity or is it determined at birth?
That’s a false dichotomy, and the answer is “not exactly” to both.
Dumb question… why would using ethnicity (which is accepted) solve any issues? And, can people choose their ethnicity or is it determined at birth? Complicated, I bet.