[asianthrowaway]

All dog breeds are part of the same species, and dog breeds are fundamentally a social construct. Does this mean that we need to stop categorizing dogs into breeds?

I find it hard to understand how some people still cling to 1960s "there is no such thing as race" arguments while in the real world you can send a swab of spit to 23andme or similar services and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.

[DanBC]

> and get a precise breakdown of your ethnic background down to the percentage.

No, you can't. You can get bullshit geneology which you shouldn't take seriously.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21687013

> But in a public guide, published by Sense About Science, Prof David Balding and Prof Mark Thomas of University College London warn that such histories are either so general as to be "personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence".

> The scientists say that genetic profiles cannot provide accurate information about an individual's ancestry.

> They say "the genetic ancestry business uses a phenomenon well-known in other areas such as horoscopes, where general information is interpreted as being more personal than it really is".

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/04/home-dna-kit-f...

>Ancestry’s DNA expert Mike Mulligan (93% Irish – everyone’s email at Ancestry gives their ethnicity breakdown) admits that the ethnicity percentage is a “top line” estimate derived from just a very small part of our DNA, a couple of letters long in the 3bn letters that make up our DNA, and that there are a lot of “inferences” made from the data. Precision is still a problem for DNA kits. Mulligan says that the Irish, Scots and Welsh are “almost indistinguishable from a DNA point of view”. Meanwhile, when it comes to western Europe “it is the most traipsed-about part of the planet The amount of DNA that has been blurred together is incredible”. Remarkably, DNA testers can’t really tell the difference between German and French DNA.

https://gizmodo.com/how-dna-testing-botched-my-familys-herit...

> I suspected the error might lay not in my family narrative, but in the DNA test itself. So I decided to conduct an experiment. I mailed my own spit samples to AncestryDNA, as well as to 23andMe and National Geographic. For each test I got back, the story of my genetic heritage was different—in some cases, wildly so.

etc etc.

[aluren]

"Race" is just how you look to other people and how that ties to your status. Its categorization is very much country dependent - Hispanic people are often not considered white in America, while no one would be making that distinction in Europe. On the contrary, Europeans often don't consider Arabs white, even though they often look white. The US and Europe have things like 'white', 'black', 'asian' but Latin Americans are much more nuanced. There are people that would be considered 'white' in Brazil and 'black' in the US. There are also things like passing [1] and so forth.

All I'm saying is, this has nothing to do with the results of a 23andme sequencing run, which would provide details about your ancestry. Race (in the US sense) correlates pretty weakly with ancestry, e.g. all the early humans for most of human history were black.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity)

[jacobwilliamroy]

I agree in the real world, I can send a swab of spit to 23andme and get a guess as to where my ancestors were. I could also send a swab of spit to ancestry.com and get a completely different guess. These services are not precise, and even if they were, race and ancestry are not tightly coupled. Race is phenotypes, color of skin, shape of nose. Gene expression is a crapshoot, with the number of genotypes often dwarfing the number of phenotypes, racial features can skip generations or disappear entirely. My grandfather had white skin, a sharp nose, yet none of these features were passed on to me. Ancestry (genetics) and race (gene expression) are not tightly coupled.

I do think that ancestry can provide valuable insights into one's self, however I'm still not sold on the necessity or reality of race. Ancestry is not written on a person's face.