[hasenj]

Honestly, I think calling something "a social construct" is meaningless political rhetoric.

If humans and Neanderthals interbreed for a long enough period without annhiliating each other through war, wouldn't their offspring converge over time?

Some ethnicities are more susceptible to certain diseases. Is that a social construct?

[mikeash]

Our standard conceptions of race are also meaningless political rhetoric, so calling race a social construct seems entirely appropriate then.

We still, at least subconsciously, apply the "one drop rule" in all sorts of situations, including describing the race of the current US president. Sub-saharan Africa contains more genetic diversity than everyone else, yet we lump them all together in one "race."

Yes, there are distinct genetic differences between various groups of people, and many of those differences have real-world consequences. But the relation of those groups with what we call "race" is almost zero.

[fdsaaf]

> But the relation of those groups with what we call "race" is almost zero.

The everyday races correspond to real, observable genetic clusters. There are real characteristics shared by members of these large groups, e.g. the epicanthic fold in East Asians.

The genetic phylogeny doesn't lie. The Sub-Saharan diversity you're mentioning --- e.g., between Bushmen and the Igbo --- is about large-separation clades within the larger continental grouping.

[mikeash]

There are some real characteristics shared by some members of those large groups. Certainly not all of them, considering the arbitrary rules. 10% of American "blacks" have majority white ancestry. Are you telling me that they still have all of the real characteristics shared by others of the "black" group?

This stuff does not line up neatly. To the extent that there are genetic differences between groups of humans, the dividing lines don't match our concepts of race.

[cygx]

Some ethnicities are more susceptible to certain diseases. Is that a social construct?

Obviously not. But quoting Wikipedia[1], an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, whereas [a]pproximately 10% of the variance in skin color occurs within groups, and ~90% occurs between groups, which indicates that this attribute has been under strong selective pressure.

When defining human race, we hone in on a few easily identifiable characteristics that have remained stable due to selective pressure (eg skin colour) and overblow their significance. Eg we suspect that humanity went through a genetic bottleneck when it left Africa, decreasing diversity. And yet, we generally lump the rather diverse African population that did not go through it into a single race.

It's probably more useful to just look at specific genetic traits of interest instead of drawing somewhat arbitrary boundaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation

[fdsaaf]

> 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations

That's Lewontin's Fallacy [1]. There's no logical reason to think that genome-wide diversity within populations somehow proves that large-scale impactful allele frequency differences between conventionally understood races do not exist.

They do. You can measure them. Given someone's DNA, you can identify his content-scale race. (You can actually narrow someone's ancestry much more narrowly too. Race is a cakewalk.)

[1]:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.10315/abstra...

"In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example."

[notahacker]

There is also no logical reason to believe that allele frequency differences betwen conventionally understood races are in any way "impactful" relative to the heterogenity of respective groups or relative to allele frequency differences between populations not generally understood as distinct races.

We can reliably identify haplogroups associated with certain phenotypes popularly categorised as "races", but we can also [more] reliably identify genetic markers associated with other phenotypical differences which have little or no correspondence with haplogroups. The presumption of greater significance of haplogroup-associated differences is the social construct here.

[alphonsegaston]

It's not at all meaningless but reflective of the fact that notions of race (or something like it) are entirely subjective and variable across cultures, even across time within cultures. Whites, as an American example, did not in our recent past include all kinds of people from countries in the Mediterranean or Eastern Europe. The same is true of ethnic categorizations.

And yes, some ethnicities being susceptible to diseases is a social construct because ethnicities follow the same shifting standards. Your talking about the intersection of an imprecise categorization with biological understanding that is only dependent on the latter to remain true. It's useful today because (in some societies) it can signal aspects of biology. But human societies in the future could have entirely different notions of race and ethnicity that change or renders the overlap meaningless.

[scatters]

Poor people are more susceptible to certain diseases than rich people. That doesn't stop money being a social construct.

[TeMPOraL]

"Being poor" isn't directly expressed in genes. Skin colour and body shape is.

Sad thing about humanity - we love to politicize facts and deny reality because it doesn't match some ideology.

[scatters]

So? Skin colour and body shape are determined by environment as well as by genes, and race is determined by social factors as well as by skin colour and body shape. It's at least as convoluted a process to get from genes to race as it is to get from genes to wealth.

You're accusing me of politicizing facts, but seeing race in and around normal human variation is itself a political act, even if it is an innate prejudice.

[hasenj]

This proves that poverty is a real thing and not some figment of imagination.

[scatters]

How do you get from "social construct" to "figment of imagination"?

[jerf]

It is dialectically true that "social construct" and "figment of the imagination" are two different things. It is rhetorically false; in rhetoric calling things "social constructs" is clearly an attempt to simply label them as figments of the imagination.

[scatters]

Huh. You really believe that people who say that race is a social construct are trying to label it as a figment of the imagination? That's not my intent, at least, and I doubt very much that it is the intent of anyone who makes that claim in good faith. I'm not trying to argue using rhetoric; I'm saying that if one tries to segment human variation into races ignoring societal attitudes, one will either fail entirely or will arrive at "races" that do not correspond neatly if at all to society's conception of race. That is the sense in which race is a social construct.