[scottshamus]

Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races but have merged into the "white" race. Have the genetics of Ireland changed drastically in the past 100 years? Or was it the social construct of "race" that changed? Why do some countries consider certain groups a different race and other countries view them as a socioeconomic class e.g. gypsies? Humans migrate and interbreed with different genetic groups and have been doing so for a long, long time. We are really a spectrum of genetic differences and not really a bunch of grouped individuals.

https://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white13.htm

[factsaresacred]

> Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races

To whom? Outside of America this is ridiculous. Maybe that's it - The US has so many hangups about race they changed the definition.

Race: "differences in genetic ancestry based on different geographic origin". Just because people exploited the term and used it incorrectly does not mean it does not have an exact definition.

In the middle ages people who carried out trepanning claimed to know about medicine. People who called the Irish non-caucasian claimed to know about race. They didn't (or in the latter case, they did but were prejudice).

Neither medicine nor race need be discredited by past ignorance.

[fredch]

This is one of the weak points of the author's presentation. He's meaning "race" as ancestral origins grouped at the level at which there was relatively little external gene flow during premodern times, e.g groups separated by large geographic barriers like the Sahara or Pacific. Apparently, and this was the point of the article, there are significant AVERAGE genetic differences based on these groupings.