[throwaway391003]

Ok but that can still be true (blonde hair, blue eyes) while there still being much more variations in the white population than in the black population.

I'm curious how many white people there are on earth vs how many black people there are, and other races. A couple google searches didn't give me any easy finds

[Impossible]

Black people can have blond hair and blue eyes also. Common in Melanesians but not unheard of in African Americans either. I had blonde hair when I was a baby and genetically I'm 83% African (average admixture across all Black Americans). An uncle of mine had blue eyes when he was born

[claudeganon]

That’s because “white” and “black” are loose, shifting, ideological constructions with little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation. Many “white people” weren’t considered “white” until fairly recently and Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

[cycomanic]

I always cringe when reading about "race" in the US, the term really (intentionally? ) gives the impression that there is a clear genetic demarcation between people based on skin color.

The US is the only country I am aware of who still uses this term, everywhere else was using some thinking like ethnicity to indicate different culture, origin...

[lowdose]

The UN pushed from the 1950 to replace race with culture. Many people around the world now say "But he is from a different culture." Instead of "But he is from a different race."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322050034783...

[centimeter]

> little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation

This meme dates back to a loose claim made by R. Lewontin back in the 70s. In fact, you can very precisely and reliably recreate the "intuitive" human racial categorization using unsupervised algorithms, like doing multi-dimensional clustering over fixation indices. (It does not work using single-dimensional clustering, which is what Lewontin was talking about.)

Modern biologists usually talk in terms of clines rather than races, but this is just using the first derivative instead of the zeroth - you'll get the same result either way.

> Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

SNP diversity has ~nothing to do with phenotypic variance.

[claudeganon]

Of course the question here is recreate whose “intuitive racial categorization” because all of that is historically and culturally specific. Saying it’s possible for a computer to recreate these categorizations presumes that the categorization has some objective reality outside of this when they’re just a variable heuristic determined by all those inputs.

[centimeter]

> all of that is historically and culturally specific

Not really - almost everyone can agree on "middle eastern/north african", "east asian", "south asian", "black african", "white", etc. If you force people to pick a single-digit number of major categories, they're probably going to come up with the same categories that k-means in fixation space would.

[claudeganon]

This is an evidence-free supposition, consistent with your pattern across this thread of making broad claims without anything to support them. You’ve provided no proof that k-means on a representative sample of phenotypic variation in the groups you cite would return this result.

That almost everyone can agree on these categories is also contrary to reality. For example, many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct both within their societies and from their nearby neighbors. Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

[centimeter]

It's not my job to provide detailed proof on every HN post I make; I'm just pointing out something relevant, and if it interests you, you can go ahead and find where people have already done this. I think I've been specific enough that you can find this stuff on your own. This took me about 1 minute to find: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/to-classify-humanity...

> many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct

That's why I specifically mentioned the number of racial categories involved. Obviously as the number increases you can have different clustering results.

> Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

Obviously not into any of them, if we're talking about a simple mechanical classifier with high separation.

[user982]

> Ok but that can still be true (blonde hair, blue eyes) while there still being much more variations in the white population than in the black population.

Even the man who coined "Caucasian" as a racial category recognized that there was more physical variance among African populations and individuals than compared with Europeans.

[Gibbon1]

I think there is by far more mitochondrial DNA variations inside Africa than outside.