I'm hoping somebody on this board can answer this question

genetic distance is a social construct

People of different races clearly has different traits.
You can't deny reality, because reality offend you.

Only minor ones like physical appearance.

Why would only genes that control physical appearance and the like differ between racial groups? How would natural selection and genetic drift make sure only things like skin color changed? Magic? Flying gender non-conforming spaggetti monsters?

Why would natural selection only work on traits humans find desirable or for traits that fit your political narrative?

Yes, that was what I was asking you.

The problem is you don't understand evolution. It's not guided. It doesn't make things smarter or stronger or faster or other things human like. No organisms are less or more evolved than others.

Unfortunately for you when have a very good understanding of evolution and specifically the evolution of humans.

So, you find it absurd to think that hunters and gathers in cold climates, where food is more scarce and harder to get, might evolve higher intelligence and motivations? I am just wondering what exactly you are referring to. This seems like drivel.

All environments on earth have varying seasons. None is "more difficult" than any other. They are just different.

Again, evolution is not guided.

It doesn't matter, those "hunters" didn't develop modern medicine and farming technology the gap in IQ can be directly linked to these two factors.
Specifically Poverty and infant mortality People in Africa are literally living in the past when it comes to almost every technology.
The first scientific advancement (fire) split us from every other animal on the entire planet other advancements divide us from our own species.

It's because libturds misinterpret what the term "social construct" means.

A social construct is, as its name indicates, a construct made by humans. HOWEVER, it does not mean that it does not describe an underlying biological reality.

For instance, distinguishing between mammals is a social construct, since there is no clear boundary between mammals and plants. But mammals are obviously different in very significant ways from plants.

Not him but think about what you just said for a second. If food scarcity, harsher environment and/or the cooler climate was really the trigger for increase intelligence why is this only present in humans? There are plenty of animals around the world where they live in even harsher conditions than humans but somehow humans were the only ones that were affected by this? No. Higher intelligence (or lower in some cases) is from nutrition that promotes neurological growth and population bottlenecks where the outliers create divergent populations.

That's a good question- it has to do with how we define race on a fast and loose basis. Right now, we define race, socially, as having to do with geographic origin of recent(ish) ancestry, along with certain phenotypes like skin color and skeletal structure- quantitatively it doesn't really work out.

The genetic diversity within populations is greater than between populations of humans, so what you'd essentially see if you were to try to create a 'race map' where you had clusters of races based on genetic similarity matched to a geographic location, is a bunch of motley patches that have nothing to do with the large scale phenotypes we've come to associate with race- you'd get people with lots of differences in terms of some mutations, but that look almost identical because the mutations could happen to control for internal development or something of the sort, and have those people be classified as separate "races", while you'd have people who look completely different, yet only differ in a few spots that just happen to have large impact on physiology that are the same.

We can track haplotypes to certain geographic locations by looking at sort of 'landmarks' in the DNA, but that doesn't trace it back to race- just likely geographic location based on the match of those landmarks. In a sense yes we can tell race by that- but that's because we're matching our socially constructed concept of race with the empirical concept of geographic origin, if that makes any sense.

In the end, race isn't a problem of biology or genetics- human DNA and genetic variation just isn't that way due to large amounts of genetic flow and a relatively short period of time (in the scheme of life) that human populations have diverged. We can take certain traits and arbitrate them, saying they have a higher 'weight' in trying to differentiate or classify, but that's arbitration to the point where it's still, at that point, just a socially constructed designation.

>then why are we able to tell the the race of people by DNA?

I'll give you an analogy:
Countries are social constructs. They didn't exist in dinosaur times; they're something created by human society. Countries are often separated by physical boundaries like mountain ranges. Mountains are not social constructs; but countries still are. DNA is like mountains. Race is like countries.

The genes that effect skin color and a few other obvious physical traits are not social constructs. How we've broken people into groups based on these specific genes is a social construct. For example we could call Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese separate races or lump them all together as Asian. In either case you can tell the difference with genetics. Blacks have so much genetic diversity it's really egregious for them to all be the same race. If Whites, Asians, and Latinos are all separate races there should be dozens of different black ones.

Who says they don't? It is a lot easier to test the intelligence of humans than other animals, though. And, like you seem to infer, one being true does not mean the other is, and vice versa. I am a little confused why you made this point.

This is just sophistry. The first point is false. Empirically false. The second is a hypothesis with no evidence.

>The first point is false. Empirically false.
Do you not know what the words "empirically" and "false" mean? Or are you just doing a proof by refusal of facts?

>Only minor ones like physical appearance.
How do you know this for sure? There is nothing worse than people who believe they know everything.
As a man who respect science you must doubt literally everything, not polluting science with your beliefs and ideology.

Anyway even physical appearance is more than enough to justify racial theory.

Do you know what the seasons are? No, not all climates have all seasons. Empirically false. No, the seasons in different climates are not the same. Empirically false. I am tired of your sophistry.

You replied to two posts with one line, The first of which had nothing to do with seasons, At least try to keep track of who you are replying to or learn how to communicate.

...

>One must be careful when interpreting such information due to muddying variables that may affect IQ such as nutrition, environment culture or poverty.

>But it's totally race ugize I swear them darkies gon make everyone dumber if we let em.

SNPs and inherited epigenetic modifications

>t's not completely a social construct - it consists or metabolic traits, skin tone traits, facial structure traits, etc. But the culture people typically associate with a race is a social construct.

I completely disagree with the ethnonationalists but you seem to be asserting that although physical traits differ there is no reason to suspect that the brains are different between the races. You handwave a few clearly sociocultural things as proof of this dreadlocks etc.

This is incredibly poor reasoning. I don't think that the differences in cognitive abilities and faculties between the races will be that different (for a number of reasons which I could elaborate on but isn't really the point of this post so I won't) but you seem to infer some racial blankslatism on really superficial grounding. There may very welll be cognitive differences between the races that then affect things at the level of the sociocultural the honest answer is we don't know and do not have sophisticated enough measures to test these things as well as any analysis being muddied by the fuckton of environmental factors that at this point are difficult to account for. One of the reasons I don't think we'll see much cognitive difference (although not necessarily none) is just how recently the races diverged in evolutionary time.

I feel that people get worried that the second we have discussions like this they are instantly in the realms of justifying racism and to that I point out two people having different cognitive abilities does not necessarily indicate which is a better person so why should we necessarily jump to such a conclusion when we come to group analysis?

>traced to certain points in time
What?
>which give us a clue as to which groups split off genetically from others at what times
No. That's not how it works at all. If you test an African's dna it doesn't give you their fucking gps coordinates and a map of where they've been.

>dreadlocks and beanies
You are confusing race with culture. Race is not a social construct, it is a non-electable like eye colour or what sex you are. Culture is a social construct, but it is also based on other things like geography and race. So you could get away with saying that culture is a racial construct, but you can't ever say that race is a social construct; Unless you are willing to discard a basic understanding of genetics and reality.

Hello newfag. Veeky Forums pushed this line for years before /pol/ called it on its shit and set it straight.
inb4: back to Pol Polack...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Y-chromosome_DNA_haplogroup#Chronological_development_of_haplogroups

>Haplogroup
>Possible time of origin
>Possible place of origin
>Possible TMRCA

These are the only "DNA-based" clues for guessing "race". They are "traced to certain points in time" and their sole importance is to "give us a clue as to which groups split off genetically from others at what times"

How do we keep people from abusing their ignorance of statistics, user?

>The problem is you don't understand evolution.
The frickin calling card of the fedora retard.
>It doesn't make things smarter or stronger or faster or other things human like.
This is blatantly false. Pumas are faster than ferrets, eagles are able to see further than dogs, dogs smell better than horses or whatever.
The same can be seen in humans. The black race is generally stronger and more athletic than white people. Asian people are generally smarter and Whites are more innovative and build better societies. Take what you get, improve the rest.
>It's not guided.
Statements like these require proof, proof that you are incapable of providing. So don't do that.

Are you retarded? Even if you decide to only break people into 5 categories, modern algorithms in quantitative genetics will immediately cluster people based on what is quaintly, and rightly, referred to as 'race.'

No, user, he's right. You don't understand evolution- you're only half correct with regards to natural selection, but evolution can happen for a few reasons- of which I'll discuss two here.

The first, and the one people are most familiar with, is selection. Selection occurs when there's any factor in an environment that creates differential success for members of a population that have a certain genetically heritable trait. That doesn't mean necessarily smarter/faster/stronger on any kind of objective basis- often times, when selection pressures favor resource conservation due to scarcity, members of the population that build fewer muscles are selected for, and that eventually becomes the dominant trait for the population. That doesn't actually mean they're specialized for the best though- in fact, often times, species end up being better in other environments than the one it evolved in- at that point we call it an invasive species, but that's more tangential.

The second possible route, and one that demonstrates the fallacy of evolution = natural selection is genetic drift. I used this example in another thread, but for the sake of argument let's say there are 4 turtles that get stranded on an island full of resources and low on predators- 2 female, 2 male, and 1 of each is blind by genetic disease, recessive.

Assuming breeding is random, it's completely possible for the ability to see being randomly bred out- just looking at the first generation, 3/4 of the potential progeny would have the blind allele, 1/4 would be blind, and 1/4 would be nonblind. At low population sizes with large amounts of resources, selection pressures wouldn't be heavy, so we can assume equal chance of success- and you could easily see blindness either bred in totally or out totally.

If you had a species of turtle that was 100% blind on an island, it's not to say blindness was the process of natural selection- sometimes it really is chance, which affects low populations a lot.

>evolution did not affect the brain and by extension intelligence, emotional traits, ect
>"Bro everyone knows evolution only changes fur in animals"

Brainlet

This is all guess work based upon from a prior assumption
>that we all came from Africa
There is no temporal marker with any of these haplogroups, which means that you could take a haplogroup from Russia and claim that that is the original DNA code and then look at all deviations from this code as mutations of the original code and thereby build up an entirely different picture of the tree.
It also doesn't account for lateral cross migration of code, which would skew results.
The truth is these variations in the genome (or mutations) have a purpose, some of them result in curly hair or different shaped eyes or eye colour and all of these things do have a baring on what race you are. It is simple genetics. You are attempting to divorce genes from their actual biological function as protein manufacturers and instead claim that they are simply temporal markers. This is intellectually disingenuous and scientific fraudulent.

I have a few problems with this. First of all, I didn't mention Natural Selection. Nor did I mention that any of the animals were "better than" another animal, merely different. So you are arguing with yourself. The rest of your post is irrelevant. A blind turtle will die out because it won't be able to feed itself or escape predators. End of story.

That's absolutely not the case, unless you set arbitrary weights to certain alleles. The genetic variation between populations of Africans, Asians, and Europeans for example is often smaller than the genetic variation within the populations themselves. This would mean that any algorithm would cluster groups that we do not at all associate as belonging all to one race- white people would be clustered with black people, black people would contain many more races, it wouldn't conform at all to our understanding or classification of race as it is- it'd be essentially useless. That's why race is ultimately socially determined.

That's not what that user is trying to do. It's the issue of trying to use some quantitative means to determine race that is impossible to do without weighing traits over others. Yes- there are populations that contain certain alleles in common that are easy to spot, like curly hair or dark skin or long noses or whatever it might be. The issue there is that doesn't cluster in terms of total genetic difference, with the gradient of traits being too fine to differentiate into the classes of races we define today.

Also going back to what I was saying earlier, you're retarded and you understand neither genetics or biology if you genuinely think all traits must necessarily have a function. Like I explained with the turtle example in post, there are often times events where populations get segmented into very small clusters, at which point mutations that are neutral or even negative to fitness could, by chance, become the only allele variant of that kind in the population.

Read your comment back and try to convince yourself that it doesn't sound like someone talking out of their ass. I can't even address half of what you said because it's more or less just a random hodgepodge smart-soundy words thrown together

>The truth is these variations in the genome (or mutations) have a purpose
At least I can understand what you mean here, and I promise you you're exactly 100% wrong. Go and read the Wikipedia page I linked on this topic you apparently understand so much about. These mutations only serve as markers, and don't have any physiological consequences, especially not in traits as complex as hair and eyes.

>You are attempting to divorce genes from their actual biological function
Not all information in genes is useful information, biologically speaking. Is this news to you? Look into organisms that have significantly larger genomes than humans to grasp how little "storing information genetically" has to do with "using genetic information to program an organism's physiological traits"

>I didn't mention Natural Selection
I didn't mean to make it sound like you did- the idea however that there's some kind of comparative measure for biological traits is related to the mechanisms of optimization due to natural selection.

You responded that it was blatantly false to say that it 'doesn't make things stronger, faster, smarter, etc.', which I've shown in my post with the turtle example to be wrong. Using blindness is just a simple thought experiment- you could use any slightly negative trait, like lowered shell thickness or even some digestive tract mutation that made digestion more difficult. Assuming the island they end up on has such an abundance that they won't immediately die off, it could be that the new variant (the new species that may very well take hold) has some step backwards in terms of being 'stronger, faster, etc.' just due to genetic drift.

I'm not arguing about trait differentiation in populations of humans- I however will argue with the perception that evolution is always a positive process.

>Muh more variation within than without meme

So a computer should not be able to tell the difference between a chimpanzee and a human, genetically speaking?

>All environments on earth have varying seasons. None is "more difficult" than any other.
The degreeto which they vary is the entire point of needing more intelligence. You don't need a high iq to save food during a mild winter, but you need a high iq to save enough food during a harsh winter.

So yes, some environments are genuinely more difficult to survive than others. This is obviously true I can't see how you could even try to say that all environments have the same degree of severity, try living on Venus and tell me how it goes for you.

>If you test an African's dna it doesn't give you their fucking gps coordinates and a map of where they've been.
>a map of where they've been.
>tfw the user who believes race isn't a social construct also doesn't understand evolution or biogeography

If there were more variation genetically within populations of chimpanzees than between populations of chimpanzees than humans (protip: There isn't.), then either the natural conclusion is that there are multiple species present in the population you're using to define 'chimpanzees', or you'll get the expected, which is that they are discretely separate species based on how we define species as a certain level of differentiation of genotype.

That's incorrect. There could be some kind of hormonal response that evolves, adapted from a pre-existing response pathway that triggers during cold weather that decreases apetite, which would then increase likelihood of saving food if all else is the same. This is 0 change in IQ, but is still an adaptive trait for the climate. It's not at all the case, for this example, that the species would need a high IQ.

How do you someone misunderstand such a simple concept like this? Genetics is more complicated than two people being "similar" or "not similar"

If you cluster people according to very certain traits, you might get something close to what people understand as race, but cluster them according to others and you'll get groups that look nothing like what we see as "race".

Why is "race", in your eyes, determined by (presumably) skin color and not blood type, which is determined just as genetically as anything to do with the skin or hair?

>The genetic variation between populations of Africans, Asians, and Europeans for example is often smaller than the genetic variation within the populations themselves.
This statement reminds me of pick related. How are you measuring the order of difference here? Do you use a different criteria for race as you do for ethnicity?
>unless you set arbitrary weights to certain alleles.
How do you define arbitrary? It is only arbitrary if you have decided that race doesn't exist and is a "social construct" which is [precisely what we are debating here.
As a way of approaching the problem, think of it like a game of "Guess Who?". If we have the genes that code for a number of traits which we associate with a particular race then if a person tests positive for a high degree of those traits then you will always arrive at the correct race in the end.
>e gradient of traits being too fine to differentiate into the classes of races we define today.
Think of it like an ascending tone. The gradient is fine. But if we stop ascending and play the note, we arrive at a C. Move up again, we arrive at G and so on. When we look at things all together it can be hard to see any sense in these classifications. But when we take the notes singularly we are able to classify them as different and so to create beautiful music.
>That's why race is ultimately socially determined.
So now haplogroups don't matter anymore?

>brings up genetic drift
>does not realize that genetic drift could explain pockets of really dumb and really smart people (ethnicities)

*pic related
Forgot pic

The genetic variation between populations of Africans, Asians, and Europeans for example is often smaller than the genetic variation within the populations themselves.
Need more specifics on this. Are you suggesting that there is for example a greater amount of genetic diversity among whites (greens eyes, red hair, blue eyes, blonde hair etc) compared to the amount of genetic diversity seen in Africans and Asians (brown hair, brown hair), because while that might make sense when you run it from the African and Asian to the European side, but it breaks down when you run it the other way.

It totally could! I'm not making any kind of argument about populations or pockets of people having differential intelligence or traits, merely trying to explain to that user how fucking retarded he is.

You measure the order of difference based quantitatively on the number of bases that are different in the entire genome- or, an alternative approach is to take markers spread out evenly (thousands of them) across the whole genome of 3 billion bases, and then you compare the differences between members of the same population, and members of different populations. Sometimes the exact methods can differ- for example a one base insertion will shift everything over 1 base, so the methods usually just test the spots with context. Recently the tests have been done wholesale, comparing the entire genome, with the same results as when they used to do them with the markers (called SNPS- pic related is what's called a 'snip-chip', which is a fantastic little tool for checking allelic variants and halplotypes).

Arbitrary would be to say "Okay let's take the genes for X, Y, and Z, and say that people who have variants A, B, and C are all in one cluster". You can do that, and it might be useful, but it's still arbitrated by what you decide are "important genes", and is not a quantitative measure for absolute classification, rather an arbitrarily set classification.

That music example made my head hurt.

Do you even know what a haplogroup is? They're groups of alleles, usually looking at the SNPs discussed before that we look at and sort of walk backwards mathematically with to determine relative heritage. What you would essentially be doing if you tried to use haplotypes to determine race is say that people who diverge in haplotype by X% from a standard are a different race- which would be retarded as all hell because you would again run into the problem of the absolute divergence being unrelated to how we classify race in modernity.

k what categories of races are there?
what's the difference genetically?
where do mixed people fit (aren't we all mixed to some extent)?

You're talking about phenotypic difference which has honestly no way to quantify.

For example, how do you know just by looking that two people have a difference in a protein's structure that only impacts things on a microscopic level?

It's actually interesting because it turns out to be the other way around, where separate populations in Africa will end up being more genetically different than Europeans will- this is thought to be because many aberrant weather events in Africa have caused fracturing of populations into smaller ones that have diverged from those points, often due to genetic drift rather than natural selection.

>How do we keep people from abusing their ignorance of statistics, user?
We remove their ignorance with education.

> the absolute divergence being unrelated to how we classify race in modernity.
>How we classify race in modernity
Do you not classify race as a social construct? How on Earth are you going to use genetics to classify anything about a person if you are of the opinion that all of their genetic traits come about solely by how others treat them and interact with them?
>I'm not making any kind of argument about populations or pockets of people having differential intelligence or traits,
Pockets of people are able to have different traits such as intelligence but larger groups aren't? This is truly retarded and demonstrably false.

For the people in this thread arguing that race is based in genetics and not social constructs:

Where does one race "begin" and another "end"? Assuming genetic differences alone, do indicate race, how do we define one race as distinct from another? What "distance" is genetically significant enough to call two people parts of different races? What about people who genetically tread the "boundaries" between races? Does it make sense to call two people "racially distinct" if their genetic "distance" is very small but their backgrounds simply aren't very, say, "white" or "asian", but somewhere genetically between the extremes?

Why is race a set of categories and not a spectrum, if it really is based entirely in genetic differences vs genetic similarities? How come it makes sense to say there's maybe six races and not six hundred? What about seven billion, if we want to up the accuracy a bit? What draws the line, exactly?

Are you sure you would call those determining factors inherently scientific, and not social constructs? Why?

>How on Earth are you going to use genetics to classify anything about a person if you are of the opinion that all of their genetic traits come about solely by how others treat them and interact with them?

What in the fuck are you talking about? I'm a geneticist- I never said a thing about genetic traits arising from social norms; I'm merely making the argument that there's no way to draw a line genetically around "races" while maintaining a non-arbitrary stance of taking the genetic differences- you'd have to cluster them based on certain predefined traits or genes.

>pockets of people are able to have different traits, but larger groups aren't.

I've never said anything to contradict this. You genuinely are retarded and don't understand evolution- I'm making the claim that "race" as we know it does not correlate to any kind of attempt to take quantifiable genetics and split people into non-arbitrary groups.

I see what you mean now. You aren't saying that the differences between people i.e. their skin colour and differences in overall intelligence and physical strength etc are not produced by social interactions, rather you are saying that our distinctions between these groups create races which don't exist and then these groups of people or our perceptions of these groups then become social constructs within our society.
This is therefore a semantic argument and not one based on real science. It goes back to my analogy about music. See You are arguing against something which is visibly evident before our eyes and then attempting to retroactively explain it away by recourse to a wholly abstract framework which is open to bluster and nonsense. I could for example say that all speech is fundamentally the same because it is all just air being pushed through our voice boxes and that therefore no word means anything as distinct from any other word. That is what you are doing now, you are denying the lived experience of humans over generations by reducing it down into an absurdity.
> if their genetic "distance" is very small but their backgrounds simply aren't very, say, "white" or "asian"
You should specify what you mean by asian here, as Europeans sometimes lump asians in with orientals. But assuming that you are talking about some groups of Arabs, like Iranians there is a precedent that these groups are racially similar. We can trace much similarities in language and culture. However over time these groups experienced different pressures from invading groups from Africa and elsewhere.

You're still not getting it. The only argument being made is that race, and how we look at it is socially constructed. Nobody is saying it's worthless, nobody is saying that there aren't clustered traits. The argument he and I are making is that race isn't a scientific concept- it's a social concept that applies some scientific concepts in a socially arbitrated manner.

It's like nobody would say that Nations themselves aren't socially constructed, because they most obviously are. Borders are socially constructed as well, but we set them often with geographic, factual traits like rivers or mountains- not as a codified set of rules for border-making, but because they are apparent and convenient. Like this, we define race in a socially constructed manner, often times employing traits that aren't necessarily linked to create easy to make classifications.

>you'd have to cluster them based on certain predefined traits or genes.
Wow. Just like we do everyday when we come into people of another race, we classify them based on a set of traits that we have predetermined. This is what is known in science as a 'concept' and it is a very basic term. Perhaps you as geneticist could start apply it to your work. You know like how a mathematician or an evolutionary biologist will fill in data according to its particular range or phila?
>I've never said anything to contradict this
Well perhaps you should have.
>I'm making the claim that "race" as we know it does not correlate to any kind of attempt to take quantifiable genetics and split people into non-arbitrary groups.
And yet
dailycaller.com/2017/04/25/man-refuses-to-accept-hes-no-longer-black-after-dna-test-results/
youtube.com/watch?v=MsEZBSTc3a0
It happens everyday.

>You aren't saying that the differences between people i.e. their skin colour and differences in overall intelligence and physical strength etc are not produced by social interactions, rather you are saying that our distinctions between these groups create races which don't exist and then these groups of people or our perceptions of these groups then become social constructs within our society.
Right
>This is therefore a semantic argument and not one based on real science
Sure, I'll call it that. I think when we're dealing with race it's hard to avoid that because we're dealing with something that, on some level, even if we want to explain it with science, boils down to someone's judgement
>You are arguing against something which is visibly evident before our eyes(...)
No, I'm not denying people are different. I'm not denying groups are different, even. I'm calling the big, concrete distinctions between those groups abstract and probably even faulty. I'm not abstracting things to the point of claiming people are all the same, I'm trying to explain why the idea of "a race" in this context is wishy-washy. No matter how you slice it, if you try to categorize humans in any way, you're coming up with some sort of arbitrary distinction, be it hair color, blood type, haplogroup, genetic difference, or skin color, to define this "race" and I want to ask "why that factor specifically?" Isn't that a human choice? A "social construct?" This is what that means. It certainly isn't hard physics, right. It's not a distinction that exists concretely without our willingness to make it *the* distinguishing factor at play

>I could for example say that all speech is fundamentally the same
Weird analogy, I think. What I'm asking is more like asking "What's the hard, defining feature that separates one language from another, if that is such an easy thing to do" which actually happens to also be a valid question that isn't simple to answer, linguistically. Off-topic, though

>If "Race" is a social construct like people seem to imply then why are we able to tell the the race of people by DNA?
We can tell the difference between Iberian, Germanic, and Saxon with DNA as well. Yet they're the same "race." It's all about how you define what you're looking for. If you find the Germanic DNA, then you define it as white. You didn't find "white DNA."

I think if you are willing to admit differences in people within a population, but deny differences on a greater scale, then you are either twisting reality to suit your argument, or you are thinking about the entire idea of what makes us human on a basic level in an entirely alien way.
>"What's the hard, defining feature that separates one language from another, if that is such an easy thing to do"
Interesting. But again it is the wrong question to ask. If I say that English is different from French and you disagree and head off to France without bothering to learn the language you won't get very far. Similarly you can't expect to introduce an entirely new culture into America for example and expect people not to notice the very obvious racial, biological and cultural differences between these sets of people. The only reason to do this would surely be to speed up some kind of process of assimilation in the first place, which sounds like a conflict of interest between your political views and those of your scientific aspirations.

>Just like we do everyday when we come into people of another race, we classify them based on a set of traits that we have predetermined.

Please stop this. That's the exact argument I've been making, that it's a socially constructed classification. You have some kind of reason for defining a range or for defining weights- for any kind of genetic overlay with race, however, how would that be decided?

Do we define it by weighing traits that have large structural changes? How would that be measured, by # of genes that change structure? Would we go through the entirety of all 20,000 protein coding genes in the human genome and assign some kind of weight to which ones are more "important" for diversifying people into segments? Would there be some kind of council that decides on the weight by using extrapolated sets of data and coming up to a judgment by expert...

Oh
that's exactly what arbitration is. It's arbitrary. It's an arbitrary, socially constructed classification. It's a social construct you fucking mong.

People cant really tell the race by the genes.

>"What's the hard, defining feature that separates one language from another, if that is such an easy thing to do"
Essentially what you appear to be pleading here is the 'limits of knowledge' or "we can't known anything when dealing with arbitrary components in an arbitrary world". But that is literally what everything is in the whole world essentially and yet we are able to know things and say things with certainty especially when in reference to that which we experience in the world. This is basic philosophy.

>We can define German, but we can't define white.
Now that's arbitrary.

It's not about what people are willing to "admit" on an origami appreciate image board.

The reality is there are no great genetic differences between all humans.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24032721

Dude nobody here is saying arbitrary = bad or arbitrary = untrustable. People are just saying that this issue is ultimately arbitrated socially, thus it's a social construct rather than a scientific one. Nobody is making value judgments except that you're a retard who meanders around with your statements pretending to know about shit you're obviously clueless about.

>Do we define it by weighing traits that have large structural changes? How would that be measured, by # of genes that change structure? Would we go through the entirety of all 20,000 protein coding genes in the human genome and assign some kind of weight to which ones are more "important" for diversifying people into segments? Would there be some kind of council that decides on the weight by using extrapolated sets of data and coming up to a judgment by expert...
I would answer a 'yes' to all of these. You sound like you don't want to do because it would be too much work. Actually it sounds like you don't want to do it because it would be impossible to attempt without political and international will behind it, which is precisely what we don't have because people are stuck on the arbitrary social concept that race is some kind of arbitrary social concept.

>I think if you are willing to admit differences in people within a population, but deny differences on a greater scale
Not what I'm doing. I'm conceding people are genetically different across continents and nations and all of that. I'm saying deciding which groups of people are similar enough to be called a "race" and which aren't ultimately comes down to a non-scientific choice. Anyone can define a race to be as broad or narrow as they please and it still satisfies the "genetic difference" argument. The distinction is a social construct. We make it based on our personal perceptions and interactions and mentalities

> If I say that English is different from French and you disagree and head off to France without bothering to learn the language you won't get very far
Really? I'm gonna play devil's advocate here and say you have no real, definite reason to say that. English and French share about 35% of their vocabulary, and a significant bunch of the English grammar is either identical or clearly derivative of French and its Indo-European roots. If French is a different language than English, why isn't American English a different language than British English? Because they share a higher percentage of words? What percentage is that, exactly? Why that percentage? What about the grammar, or the phonology? How similar do those have to be to make two languages "the same?"

That is an arbitrary distinction we make as we interact with society around us. It is a "social construct." Admittedly, it sounds ridiculous with English and French, but it's not as cut-and-dry with other cases. Take the Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese dialect-vs-language debate. There is no concrete definition for determining whether two languages are similar enough to be the "dialects" or "accents" or different enough to be "languages" in their own right. Same for races. What separates a "race" from an "ethnicity" from a "family"?

Of course race is a social construct. White people already made it to the finish line. The race has been over for thousands of years.

We've already done this a million times over. You can sequence an entire genome in less than a day, and we've done it with people from all over the world. We can already see all loci that vary around the world and what the patterns of variation are. Most genetic diversity is found within populations rather than between them. Less than 1% of alleles and less than 2% of haplogroups are restricted to any one continent.

Humans are a very homogeneous species.

You blabbering fool.
He never suggested or insinuated or assumed anything about cognitive differences. He only specified that culture is not genetic. You're just trying to seem intelligent but spouting irrelevant redpills

>Dude nobody here is saying arbitrary = bad or arbitrary = untrustable.
I never said it was either. You still need to learn basic philosophy about what is truth and stop all this vainglorious sophistry.

>diversity is found within populations rather than between them.
Presumably then you are averaging the differences between populations, as if you were to count all of the differences in one population, which you say is high and then compare it to all of the differences in another population which is also high, then the results would be astronomical. Therefore on what arbitrary basis are you averaging the results?

Let's say there are about 50,000 loci that are known to vary with significant occurrence in the human population. We can count how many times a variation occurs within a population. We can also compare those occurrences between populations, yes, and it is not arbitrary. A base pair can only be one of four nucleotides. If we were to pick a single spot on the genome, and we both have G in that spot there is nothing arbitrary about that. If you had C and I had an A, there is nothing arbitrary about that.

The fact is that most of that variation is shared between the entire population. A single human, on average, will only differ from another human on an average of 2-4 thousand base pairs.

Interesting. But it would appear that in your analysis you are only interested in what is different (or what remains the same) and not what the actual function of how these genes are expressed as what we would deem socially or otherwise as traits belonging to those races (populations) and so it would appear that your work is only part done and could not hope to come up to the level of what I am asking you for. It is essentially garbage in garbage out, unless I have the wrong end of the stick here.

Because the turtle population is so small, it cannot be considered to be evolving, according to Hardy-Weinberg principles. You didn't show anything. You didn't prove anything. You're spouting nonsense.

Obviously what he meant by refuting the "it doesn't make things stronger, etc." Is that natural selection favors traits that make an individual more fit in an environment. Which is accurate. You're just a blind fool.

Genetic drift is unpredictable nonsense that only occurs in isolated groups or after large population drops. It's not an occurrence that happens often. You're still a fool.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. We already know the patterns of genetic variation among humans.

You seem to be hoping that intelligence somehow breaks the norm of what we find in genetic variation. That is simply impossible. For one, intelligence is a trait that probably has thousands of genes that affect it. For that many genes to become clustered in what you call race would not work with what we know about the distribution of SNPs.

Another would be that with the statistical power of things like GWAS, if SNPs for intelligence genes were clustered in any significant way would have found them all already.

>Because the turtle population is so small, it cannot be considered to be evolving

God are you dumb- I agree that it's a peculiar case of proto-evolution and that typically we wouldn't look at a population of 4 and say "oh these are different, they're evolving!", but the thought experiment here is to imagine a scenario (which is likely to occur in nature) where speciation is kicked off by an aberrant population fragmenting event that instigates a situation with high genetic drift.

I'm not saying he's wrong by saying there's natural selection at play, and that those are the effects of natural selection- I was directly arguing that there are traits and genes in evolution that arise as artifacts of genetic drift, which are NOT natural selection. It does happen often- any time a species colonizes an island, every time there's been some kind of natural disaster- hell, it happens with humans historically an incredible amount. Settle in a new region with fewer than 50 people? Genetic drift is going to be a bitch.

That's the whole point of the argument. That it's not a genetic issue. If a sociologist were to come along and use genetic data and argue for as to why each gene studied is assigned a certain weight for "importance level" and then clustered alleles of that gene, and it ended up corresponding to what we might know as race- then that's great, good for them, it actually goes a long way towards explaining human diversity and can even go far in trying to normalize medicine and the like based on some framework like that.

There's nothing going against any of the tenants of philosophy here. There's just the notion that it's ultimately not an issue of genetics or biology, but a sociological effort of taking data, arbitrarily weighting it, and clustering to match a social convention, then working backwards to see what ends up getting clustered. But that's still a fucking social construct, and there's no mental gymnastics that can divert from that individual point.

I agree that typically scientists don't really dive into the epistemological or metaphysical enough. Trust me, I'm well aware of the fact that science itself is a systematic construct- but just like language is a systematic construct, and math is a systematic construct, there is a logic to it that is defined by the premises and operations within such systems- science is no different in its modern conception, but part of what needs to be done for the logical consistency to hold even a sliver of meaning is that issues that are fundamentally non-scientific; those things that we deem to be true on bases as thin as probabilistic truth decided on by some council, are kept out of the system for fear of building castles on sand.

user never stated that genetic drift did not occur or that natural selection is the only driving force behind evolution. You're argument started out of thin air. was wrong when he said genetic drift doesn't occur often, but this little banter started with saying that evolution doesn't make things stronger or faster, most likely meaning more fit. Evolution can and does do that. was merely saying that Natural Selection exists, not that genetic drift or gene flow doesn't exist.

What if social constructs are biological constructs?

>use genetic data and argue for as to why each gene studied is assigned a certain weight for "importance level" and then clustered alleles of that gene, and it ended up corresponding to what we might know as race-
We've already tried grouping all humans based on genetics. It doesn't work. Trying to cluster humans based solely on how different or similar they are to one another genetically does not produce what we culturally call race.

rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf

If we were to accept that based on genetics, we would have to say all PIE peoples, including those in the middle easy and india would count as one "race," and many other things /pol/ would never accept.

ho boy this is becoming a clusterfuck. The reason I brought up genetic drift, and though to talk about it as a key contributor to evolution, is that the discussion on evolution by that user was marked by implying that evolution is guided, and that there's some kind of necessary trend to evolution to move to being 'better'- which is true of selection given some kind of pressure to be better than (with betterness defined as fitness). However, I thought I'd tell the user that it can't be generalized as such. It's possible, however, I misinterpreted the part of his statement about things getting better.

Don't worry user, I'm actually fully in that position- I'm just in a head pounding, nearly circular argument over that exact same fact. That genetics can't be used quantitatively to produce groupings that correspond to what we refer to race, unless you arbitrate the "importance" levels of genes instead of dealing with bulk variation in the genome. But by the point you arbitrate it, it becomes a social construct- meaning that race is a social construct, not a biological or genetic concept.

If you put "muh" in front of it, something objectively true can be made false, right

Take a look at these two systems;
00010000
00010001
There is a difference of one 1 in between these two pairs which might represent some variation on a small scale within a population, which reduces into some range of physiological trait we associate with a race. In this case we are using the binary numbers 20 and 24 to signify this range or order of difference.
Now take a look at this case. This represents an order difference in loci from a different population.
01100000
01100100
You will notice that it has the same order of difference. So we can say that from one kind of statistical perspective there is very little difference between these two sets or systems and yet when we calculate the bottom numbers we see that they refer to 140 and 144 respectively, which is a totally different kind of order of difference and much much higher at that. If both of these four different values assess a range of some physiological racial parameter then of course your method od trying to extract meaningful differences between large populations is just going to skip over it.

Natural selection and evolution applies to animals but absolutely different kinds of people. How racist and absurd

muh If you put "muh" in front of it, something objectively true can be made false, right

>But by the point you arbitrate it, it becomes a social construct- meaning that race is a social construct, not a biological or genetic concept.
You can claim this same thing for humans and potatos. There is genetic continuity from a human to a potato, and the criteria used to distinguish the two is a social construct.

It's a retarded argument.

>we would have to say all PIE peoples, including those in the middle easy and india would count as one "race,"
Actually we already covered that here and that is deemed as OK. We have known that Europeans or people of European decent went down into the Indus valley and started the civilisation there before being set upon by invaders from some location in the South, possibly Africa or Somalia. And those people left and went to South America and onto Easter Island and finally New Zealand. Iranians have always been considered Aryans and in fact the word Iran is directly related to root words like Ireland. Similarly the language of the Pheonicians is at least phonetically indistinguishable from modern day Irish.

How do you do socially construct away this map?

>accumulate random mutations from being alive
>23andme says I'm Nigerian
>mfw I'm white

You could group people by genetic differences, but they wouldn't fall into common, socially constructed racial categories, which I'm guessing is what this thread has basically circle jerked it's way towards.

Yeah now we are getting down to it. The case you are using as your example is about different groups of caucasians running along the Carpathians down towards the himalayas and Afghanistan. There is no argument that these people are Caucasians. I remember when this was first discovered we were told "not to talk about it as it belittled the culture of India and was therefore racist". Can you believe that? Of course you can... Especially since you have grown up in a time when someone who criticises Islam (a religion) can be called a racist. Now those types of arbitrary markers are social constructs, which is the great irony in this whole debate. The Left are the ones who continuously cry foul of 'social constructs' in relation to race, when they themselves are the worst offenders of all. Project much?

In fact to say that we are not is a social construct.