100% of biologist agree race is a social construct. Prove me wrong /pol/tards

I think hes telling the OP to go make this thread in Veeky Forums

It's humanities related.

You are bringing legality into it. I did not say the definition we have in western society (granted, I should have been more clear with that, then again biology is a western "social construct" as well and some african shaman probably has very different definitions of species, race, and so on) has the same acceptance and legal status everywhere else.

My point is, the definition we have, and that is a very clear one in first world as far as I see it (namely by looking at the legal ones and they're pretty much the same everywhere, and disregarding individual opinions) can be applied to all societies in order to judge whether an act is rape by this definition.

And my greater point is, literally every word you type is a "social construct". Something being socially constructed is not an argument for or against everything.

So why do leftist think "race is a social construct" means anything negative? We can easily develope clear cut definitions of race within our own society even if it doesn't have global implications.

>You are bringing legality into it. I did not say the definition we have in western society

We get even more vague when we take out legal definitions and substitute social definitions. How many times do you hear the whole "She was asking for it", because it's not "really" rape if the girl's a slut or got off on it? How many people still don't think female on male rape can "really" exist?

>My point is, the definition we have, and that is a very clear one in first world as far as I see it (namely by looking at the legal ones and they're pretty much the same everywhere, and disregarding individual opinions)

Not really, no. Do you remember Julian Assange's rape accusations? In Sweden (as well as most Scandinavian countries), sex without a condom after the woman indicates that she wants you to wear a condom is rape. It isn't in any country in North America I'm aware of, nor is it in most of Europe. In Israel, for example, having sex with someone under false social pretenses (claiming to be a famous celebrity you resemble but are not in fact that person) is rape. In Germany, having sex with someone while not disclosing you have an infectious STD is rape.

The definition we have in the first world is not clear. Hell, not even all the states in the U.S. have the "forced to penetrate" language in their rape statutes, so while in New York, women can rape men, in Georgia, they can't.

>can be applied to all societies in order to judge whether an act is rape by this definition.

So? We can do the same thing with biology and race. I'm not a biologist myself, and don't really know the lingo, but you could apply an arbitrary set of genetic markers and deviations from that to be a "race" and outside to be a different "race", and it would be the exact same thing. You can always make universal standards, they'd just be stupid and arbitrary.

>Something being socially constructed is not an argument for or against everything.

Oh, most definitely.

It doesn't have a clear definition even today. Some people argue that two drunk people fucking is actually rape.

Borders are social constructs but still they define almost everything. So i'd dare to argue it doesn't really matter if it's a social construct.

You are wrong leftypoltard

Science isn't a democracy

Beep beep coming through.

100% of biologists should agree that
>In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)

I'm a legal scholar and I've never once heard that

And pray tell, oh wise legal scholar, how you can define rape in a way that isn't socially constructed?

No, they would agree that race is socially constructed but NOT that it is "only" a social construct. How society constructs its categories of race is NOT arbitrary, but rather is keyed to phenotypical variations.

What I don't understand and is, to people who claim there is no such thing as race, what do they suppose would constitute a race if such a thing existed?

Race is not a social construct; it's the scientifically verified diversity within the human race. I ain't saying this as some /pol/tard who hates blacks, Jews, etc, but I am saying that I accept that there are differences between people based on their ancestry. You should accept it, too.

Lay off. It ain't the alleged legal scholar's fault you can't get pussy any other way.

Consent is a social construct. Quite a fundamental and important one, precious even, but no less artificial. Why should that bother you? Is there something wrong with social constructs?

What are those differences?

>Prove me wrong /pol/tards.
>Posts on Veeky Forums

No, but there are Eves.

Which we could consider as races.

But that's wrong, you fucking retard.

sci-hub.io/10.1002/tea.3660290308

Some people are fucked in the head and believe that social constructs aren't real since they don't share the same ontological features as, say, the moon in so far that the moon isn't dependant on our mind while stuff like the US dollar, national borders and consent are mind-dependant.

t.John Searle.

Bone structure, skin color, face shape, and probably some other unimportant but still discernible qualities.

What are social constructs?

Ducks, trucks, and dogs are all the same at the level of the quantum foam. Why differentiate them? Just because categories only exist within the rubrics of the head of the categorizer doesn't mean they're without merit.

it helps to divide and conquer poor people

forcible compulsion, impairment of judgement, impossibility of consent through factors of either age or developmental impairments

That's just off hand, I'm not even sure the verbatim

But even if it is a social construct, like justifiably of murder, or non-aggression principle, so what?

t. Alex Jones

>centuries out of date ideas
>poorly presented
>no effort
>ad hominim attack
>no sources

Alt Right AF

Race is used as an emotional battleaxe to assault science logic and ethics its not just a classification its an entire category of pseudoscience

neets on pol never went to college so things like reliability and legitimacy of sources is alien to them

>science logic and ethics
>ethics

actually Alex Jones mostly talks about impurities of his bodie's liquids he hates the middle class and common people says were all sheeple

>forcible compulsion, impairment of judgement, impossibility of consent through factors of either age or developmental impairments

All of those are socially constructed. What is enough of a compulsion to count as "forcible"? How much must judgment be impaired to count? How is that discernible from people who just have poor judgment in general even at their best? How do you determine how young is too young, or how impaired is too impaired, without the determination of society?

>But even if it is a social construct, like justifiably of murder, or non-aggression principle, so what?

If it is a social construct, why is using the term "Race is a social construct" considered to be a meaningful statement?

I am going to argue that human races exist, look at the most common arguments I hear in favor of race denialism, and explain why, ultimately, I think they are mistaken.

It is somewhat misleading to talk about whether or not races are “real”. A race of people is just a geographically defined set of populations which, in the past if not now, lived together and bred with each-other more than they bred with outsiders. Given this definition, it is obvious that races are real because it is obvious that people who descend from Africa, Europe, East Asia, etc, are real. A better question is whether or not it is useful to categorize people by race.

Of course, this brings forth the question “useful for what?”. Well, I will argue that race is a valid scientific category, and science is in the business of predicting and explaining the world. So, for race to be a valid scientific category it needs to help us predict and explain things. Categories help us predict things when there are differences between them. If objects in one category are heavier than objects in another, then we can predict an object’s weight using this categorization scheme. Categories help us explain things when knowing which category something is in will give us a clue about why that thing possesses some trait.

So, firstly, how do members of different races differ, if at all? Well, obviously, the races do not differ in the sense that every member of one race has some trait, or gene, that no member of another race has. However, they do differ in terms of what the average person from each race is like. For one, as we all know, the races differ in mean skin color and various other “superficial” traits such as hair color and hair type, the length and density of various bones, muscle composition, etc., (Garn 1951; Pollitzer and Anderson 1989; Connor 2012; Araujo 2010). Perhaps less well known is that these differences do not stop at the outside of the skull. Dozens of studies going back over a hundred years have shown that races differ in mean brain size and modern technology has recently revealed that races also differ in brain shape (Fann et al. 2015). Racial groups also differ in their frequency of various gene variants and the rate at which they possess various diseases (including genetic diseases) (Piffer 2015; Ebert et al. 2014; Mega 2015; Piel et al. 2014) .

As we’ve already discussed, differences allow for prediction. Researchers can predict someone’s self-identified race with more than 95% accuracy using measures of their skull, and over 99% accuracy by looking at their genome (Sesardic 2010; Rosenberg et al. 2002; Tang et al. 2005; Rosenberg et al. 2005; Bamshad et al. 2003; Guo 2015).

Races also differ in their mean levels of income, educational attainment, intelligence test scores, and many other variables (Walt and Proctor 2015; Census 2014; Roth et al. 2001) Because the races differ in such a wide range of traits, grouping people racially might be useful to people in an equally wide range of sciences.

So, racial categorization can definitely help us predict things. Can it also help us explain things?

>All of those are socially constructed.
So what? What's your point?

>What is enough of a compulsion to count as "forcible"?
Are you asking this ironically as if you don't know what forcible compulsion means? Do you know what coercion means? Mens Rea? Male in Se?

>If it is a social construct, why is using the term "Race is a social construct" considered to be a meaningful statement?
Because not all concepts humans make are equally valuable or make sense, some are more rooted in reality and sense than others, the whole race thing came only in the 1800's, and as we've discovered, were born totally from ignorance and pseudoscience like eugenics

Knowing someone’s race can help us explain things for at least three reasons: the races evolved in different environments, the average culture within each race is different, and people treat others differently based on their race. For instance, knowing that someone is White might help us explain why they have light skin (evolution), why they have a certain diet (culture), and why it is socially inappropriate for them to use the “n word” (race based treatment).

So, that’s my basic case. Race allows us to make predictions about, and to explain, human differences and thus is a valid scientific category. Now, let’s look at some common objections.

No Credible Scientists Believe in Race

Some people feel that they do not have the needed expertise to judge the validity of race. So, they defer to the experts, and the experts tell them that race does not exist. The problem with this argument is, even though the most vocal anthropologists and biologists deny race, academic surveys show that there is no actual consensus on this topic.

Obviously. Money is a social construct, as are nations. That doesn't mean these concepts aren't important.

A few things to note about these charts:

Researchers outside of Western Europe are more likely to believe in race
Biologists are more likely than anthropologists to believe in race
Young researchers are more likely to believe in race than middle age ones, and the use of race in textbooks is increasing, suggesting that belief in race is on the rise in academia
The only place that has a consensus on race is China. The consensus is that race exists.

There Are No Race Genes

A “race gene” is a gene that is present in every member of one race and only members of that race. Such genes do not exist and some people think that the non-existence of race genes shows that races don’t exist either. Obviously though, this has nothing to do with the notion of race that I am advancing here. Races differ in gene frequencies, but that doesn’t imply that “race genes” exist.

(By the way, I don’t know of any race realist in history that founded their concept of race on race genes. Prior to the 20th century, races were almost always defined by where your ancestors came from and what your hair, face, skull, skin color, and general anatomy, looked like (Hamilton 2008). In the 20th century, race continued to be tied to ancestry, but the traits scientists used to infer ancestry changed from observable physical traits to gene frequencies (Ayala 1985) (Reardon 2005 Chapter 2))

Races Cannot Be Important Because We All Share 99% of Our DNA

Following the human genome project, many people heard that we share 99.9% of our DNA, and so there just isn’t enough genetic variation among humans to cause significant differences.

First, we don’t share 99.9% of our DNA. The human genome project researchers that made that claim have sense retracted it (Levy et al. 2007) . But we do probably share around 99% of our DNA. That said, we also share 95-98% of our DNA with Chimps and, yet, there are some pretty big differences between us and chimps.

Is Veeky Forums a social construct?

>100% of biologist agree race is a social construct.

Hmmm, that means that we now know for sure that race is not a social construct.

...

>he accepts what scientists tell him 100% of the time, especially biology ''''''''''''''''''''''scientists'''''''''''''''''''''''

I'll bet you think theories are facts.

>Race is not a social construct; it's the scientifically verified diversity within the human race.

Wrong. Race is socially constructed on a biological basis, but there is no "black race" or "white race" in purely scientific terms.

scientific theories are reputable approximations of what we observe through the scientific method, derived from empiricism many years ago.

I'm confused, who do you trust for scientific analysis if not scientists or biologists in their respective fields? Online bloggers? 4channers?

Do you do the analysis yourself? With something other than the scientific method?

>What are social constructs?

A social construct is how societies categorize phenomena. These can be purely "memetic", like with religions, essentially biological as with gender, or some more complex mixture of the two, as with race. Something being "socially constructed" simply means that it's a category only humans care about, not something innate to the universe (like physics) or completely biological (as with aging or disease).

The point scummy leftists make isn't that social constructs are not important, but that if they're constructs then they should be deconstructed.

Personally I think that race is a social construct in that it artificially sets up boundaries between races, but it still reflects biological reality that human populations are different from each other.

>So what? What's your point?

The point I've been driving at all thread is that "X is a social construct" is a completely useless statement. Its primary function seems to be to discredit the idea of 'race' by dismissing it as merely a 'social construct', which can be turned on its head by claiming all sorts of other things, things that are considered sacred cows, are equally social constructs.

>Are you asking this ironically as if you don't know what forcible compulsion means?

No, I'm asking for a measurement. How much of a compulsion applied counts for it to invalidate consent? How can you say that X amount is not considered compulsion, but X+1 is, without some sort of social construction as to what's considered an acceptable level?

Example: You have a couple in a relationship. Guy wants to fuck, girl doesn't. He keeps nagging about how little they've had sex the past month, and eventually she opens her legs to get him to shut up. Is that rape? Maybe, maybe not, depending on what you considered compulsion.

> Mens Rea?

Except mens rea would not apply to rape, since the primary factor is the victim's state of mind, not the perpetrator's. In the above example, there is no mens rea on the part of the whining boyfriend.

>Mala in Se

What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Mala in Se has to do with the justification for the act of making something illegal, not whether or not you've met the threshhold for committing a crime.

>Because not all concepts humans make are equally valuable or make sense, some are more rooted in reality and sense than others, the whole race thing came only in the 1800's, and as we've discovered, were born totally from ignorance and pseudoscience like eugenics

That doesn't answer the question at all; and eugenics is hardly pseudoscience, as is demonstrated if you or anyone you know owns a domesticated pet, or eats food made from domesticated animals or plants.

>100% of biologist agree
I bet I can find a biologist who has not been asked whether they agree with that notion or not. If I can, that statement is wrong as silence does not imply consent.

>race is a social construct
There's only one reasonable interpretation of that statement, namely that the differences we perceive between humans usually attributed to race are a product of social interaction rather than genetic/physical traits. Clearly that notion is complete and utter nonsense, as, for example, a black person's skin tone will not transform to white regardless of the social interactions around him (except maybe whatever Michael Jackson had that changed it, but clearly the change cannot be attributed to the social properties of these events). There are many traits correlating with race that are not of genetic/physical origin, but there are clearly also many that are.
Therefore the statement is false or incomplete in its scope.

Then again, why does race being a social construct imply anything about the validity of using race as a classification?

>If it is a social construct, why is using the term "Race is a social construct" considered to be a meaningful statement?

Because people with an ideological axe to grind take this to mean "it's not real". Social construction is a universal feature of human societies, it IS a non-argument to claim something is socially constructed but ideologues aren't interested in truth, they are driven to reconcile reality to the memes controlling them.

>Because not all concepts humans make are equally valuable or make sense

Okay but this is irrelevant since ALL concepts humans make are socially constructed. It's not a measure of an ideas "truthyness" but pointing this out is not an argument because the same exact "objection" can be made to both sides in the debate.

>Except mens rea would not apply to rape, since the primary factor is the victim's state of mind, not the perpetrator's.
glad to see you don't actually study law
>not understanding why mala in se would be part of what defines rape
You need to be over 18 to post here kiddo, even a community college attendee could grasp such basic concepts

Not actually relevant. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

Not really, humanities is more about art and real political science, not sperging on about racism.

>Okay but this is irrelevant since ALL concepts humans make are socially constructed. It's not a measure of an ideas "truthyness" but pointing this out is not an argument because the same exact "objection" can be made to both sides in the debate.
autism.jpg

& humanities was a mistake, somehow weirdos find their way here to post irreverent shit like this

>There's only one reasonable interpretation of that statement, namely that the differences we perceive between humans usually attributed to race are a product of social interaction rather than genetic/physical traits.

I would have thought that the only reasonable interpretation of the statement is that while you can clearly measure biological differences between population groups, there is no real scheme for classification into racial groupings that isn't rooted in social notions, as opposed to biological notions. How much of a prevalence of marker X do you need to be part of racial group Y?

How is that irrelevant? Are you illiterate? I directly addressed your point that some ideas aren't as good as other ideas by pointing out that despite this being the case, ALL ideas are social constructs and therefore attempting to dismiss a position by pointing out that it's a social construct is a red herring. Antiracism is a social construct. I guess that means racism must be true, according to your "logic"?

This board needs to be deleted

>irrelevant
nice reading comp, shut the fuck up for the rest of the thread if you can't handle basic english

So you weren't talking about me when you called my post irrelevant? That was just an unrelated comment, addressed to the air?

>glad to see you don't actually study law

I know quite a bit more about it than you do. Mens Rea is a wrongful intent of action in the mind of the perpetrator.

The difference between conversion (a tort) and theft (a crime) is in Mens Rea. If you and I have identical coats, and I mistakenly take yours thinking it's mine, I've committed the former but not the latter, I had no wrongful intention to deprive you of your coat, I just thought it was my coat and was wrong.

Only when I develop a mens rea, that I intend to deprive you of your coat without some sort of justification, does it rise to a criminal level of theft, or more precisely some form of larceny.

Turning to rape, we very much do not need mens rea to commit rape, and no legal code I'm aware of requires it. The inquiry into mental state is aimed at the victim, not the perpetrator. If I blackmail a girl into having sex with a third party, who is unaware of my doing so, he has still committed rape despite having no mens rea.

>not understanding why mala in se would be part of what defines rape

What you've just written there is so confused I'm not even sure how to classify it as wrong. Mala in se IS used to define rape, as well as to justify it. It is NOT used to determine whether or not a specific sexual encounter is rape or not. Is that clearer?

Are you actually retarded

I'm pretty certain you are.

He said irreverent not irrelevant you illiterate nigger.

I assumed he miswrote, since irreverent would be meaningless in that context. But if you want to insist that he's just an illiterate then okay I guess.

>So why do leftist think "race is a social construct" means anything negative?
I don't know about "leftists," but there was a thread about this like two days ago, and I kept banging my head against a brick fucking wall explaining to the "race realists" in that thread that when anthropologists make claims like "race is a social construct," they're not denying that

>there are, on average, certain biological differences between people from different parts of the world
or that
>social constructs can be useful sometimes

Claiming that "race is a social construct" has no implications for equality at all! Now, most scientists believe the 3 following things (publicly, anyway)

>race is a social construct
>people should be treated equally regardless of their "race" or genetic background
>there's no population of people that's on avg just genetically less intellectually capable

Those 3 things are ENTIRELY SEPARATE CLAIMS. Of them, #3 is the most arguable factual claim, #2 is a moral/ethical belief and not a factual one, and #1 is inarguable -- disagreeing pretty much means you haven't understood the claim.

It's entirely possible to believe "race is a social construct" and be racist as fuck! Shocking, I know. In fact, I've known several archaeology/anthropology grad students who wholeheartedly believed "race is a social construct" (because they weren't dumbfucks and they understood that was almost a fucking tautology) but pretty coolly accepted the possibility that, e.g. people of African ancestry MIGHT POSSIBLY on avg be less intelligent than people of European ancestry (& it's not like those beliefs went away magically when they graduated, it's just easier to voice controversial opinions when you're a nobody.)

>Wrong. Race is socially constructed on a biological basis, but there is no "black race" or "white race" in purely scientific terms.
Yes. Thank you. People need to reread
>socially constructed on a biological basis
until they fucking get it.

>no u

subiq manlet plz stay in ur containment board

So I'm teh retard for saying no u to a simple insult? Go fuck yourself, moron.

>disrespectful and disregarding of seriousness

You're retarded user, just give up

>I'm teh retard
At least you got one thing right

Please explain what part of my response was disrespectful, and what idea, exactly, I am showing undue reverence towards.

Then I would have suggested the wording to be somethings along the lines of "(Individual) Races are a social construct" or "The concept/idea of individual races are a social construct". It's phrased ambigiously.
That being said,
> while you can clearly measure biological differences between population groups, there is no real scheme for classification into racial groupings that isn't rooted in social notions, as opposed to biological notions.
That might very well be accurate, especially for modern homo sapiens. But I think this is more a question of systematics (in the biology sense), you know, like what a species or a subspecies is, or if it makes sense to make groups of species in the first place.*

* which it doesn't apart from an organisational aid, as I learnt from my paleontology professor a few years ago. You know, the hierarchy thing like pic related? People concerned with Taxonomy don't use that anymore [citation needed], because it's got nothing to do with how Evolution works.

this is bait, and also objectively false.

minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=4&lvlID=33

milk.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000661

Just because a concept is misused doesn't mean that it's wrong.

>Then I would have suggested the wording to be somethings along the lines of "(Individual) Races are a social construct" or "The concept/idea of individual races are a social construct". It's phrased ambigiously.

Not that other faggot but race by any metric is socially constructed. So is the hierarchy of life you posted, yes every grade of categorization is based on empirical criteria but those criteria exist in our classifications, not "in nature". Species is certainly not "only" a social construct, but it IS socially constructed, albeit on an empirical and logical basis.

>So is the hierarchy of life

>socially constructed
Stop while you're ahead user, not everything a human makes is a social construct

You don't understand what social construction means. It DOESN'T mean "arbitrary" or "fictitous", it just means "interpreted by humans".

You're gonna care when they deny you grant funding

So you wanna say I'm the same as a chimp, harambe or an orang-utan prostitute from borneo?

>HURR

"Laws are social constructs, therefore murder is the same as jaywalking!"
t.polturd

You are as separate from the other great apes as each species of Darwin finches is from one another.
On the other hand, individual species display huge variation (see humans).