[fdsaaf]

> Could you list what races you think exist, and some kind of paper that establishes a scientific method for where the dividing lines in the genetic gradients are drawn and why such a line needs to be drawn at all?

Let's define our terms. By "race", I mean the classic continental groupings of people whose ancestors come from areas centered on Europe and the near east, east Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. When we say "race", we're talking about that category to which people readily self identify and to which we can easily assign others. When we say "race exists", it means that these categories are not arbitrary.

More generally, they're big ancestor clusters. You can see the clusters yourself if you take genome corpuses and run principal component analysis (or other grouping algorithms) on them. If you select k=3, the classic continental races come out of the data.

I'm not sure how much more real a taxonomic classification scheme can get. We use the same genomic approach for organizing the rest of life.

With more groupings, you get finer-grained population clusters nested inside the larger ones. If you look for enough clusters, you start seeing an "Irish" grouping. Can we agree that, say, the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs are distinct hereditary groups? Can we agree that they're more similar to each other than, say, the Irish are to the Pygmies?

You could, in principle, put everyone into her own cluster. Sure, at k=7e9, race doesn't exist. But that's not a very useful classification scheme, because it ignores the reality that there are high-level classifications that we can see with our own eyes.

> How do you convince yourself you're not one of them and therefore actually the cause of the very problem you lambast scientists for?

That's an excellent question. Epistemology is hard. The best we can do is try to explain observations using the best-predicting theories we can find. I reject the "race does not exist" theory because it fails to explain observable facts about the world. This theory requires, in order to explain our observations, elaborate systems of oppression. It's full of epicycles. Even so, it fails to predict the result of studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.

The "race corresponds to allele clusters" theory makes better predictions. It explains heritable and persistent differences in measurable characteristics. It agrees with genomic observations. It requires no hidden assumptions. This latter theory isn't politically correct, but this status can't affect its truth value. We delude ourselves about things all the time.

Look: the traditional continental race classification scheme is a crude folk theory. It's very embarrassing for science when even a crude folk theory makes better predictions than the best theory to come out of the academy.

Eppur si muove.

[ZeroGravitas]

So you seem to agree more with the "race is a social construct" people than it first appears since all the boundaries you talk about are fuzzy and arbitrary, you even suggest that people must be able to distinguish them with their own senses for them to be meaningful, and that if it's not a useful tool to humans then it's pointless. All of which sounds very social construct-ish to me.

Possibly you're just talking past each other, and don't fundamentally disagree at all.

[fdsaaf]

When you take a big corpus of genomes and split them using impartial mathematics into similarity-clusters, you get clusters that almost perfectly match the continent-scale races that people self-report. That's not "arbitrary". Furthermore, people in these groups differ in characteristics that are measurable and important.

When I say that "race exists", I mean that there are real differences between the k={3,4,5} groupings and that almost always tell someone's group affinity by sight alone. The existence of marginal cases doesn't somehow invalidate the reality and utility of the high-level groups.

When people say "race doesn't exist", the general public reads that as "there are no differences on average between people from the various continents", and this claim is not only false, but it's so false that one doesn't need sophisticated instruments to tell.

I believe that this confusion is deliberate and is part of a misguided attempt to eliminate bigotry by delegitimizing the classification schemes upon which bigotry is built. This strategy is doomed, because you can't take away people's eyes and ears.