[EForEndeavour]

> The partitions that you imagine as dividing people aren't actually backed by any particular observable or experiment. Meanwhile, cultural markers do exist: We can measure what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.

I'm having genuine difficulty wrapping my mind around this argument.

I don't mean to inflame tempers or anything here, but would we agree that any operational definition of "race" probably needs to include some mix of both cultural and phenotypic attributes (including but certainly not limited to skin color)? If so, then:

- aren't the cultural aspects of race just as measurable as you just pointed out -- what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.?

- aren't variations in human bodies (differences in phenotype) arguably even more measurable than that? It's easy for me to determine from a low-res photo that someone is of East Asian descent. It's nigh impossible for me to tell whether they're culturally Chinese, rural Texan, Jamaican, etc.

To claim that race "literally" doesn't exist while in the next sentence pointing out that cultural markers exist just seems really dissonant to me, and I'm honestly not sure what part of my model of the world needs changing to become compatible with these two claims.

Are you saying that you could chat up a person, maybe interview them, and conclude that they're probably indigenous to Tibet, but phenotypic markers (or whatever your definition of "racial," or even genetic? [1]) are guaranteed to be uninformative toward this conclusion?

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/16/4189

[Kednicma]

No worries. It sounds like you don't have a problem with the latter part, just the former part, so we'll focus on that.

You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though? Probably some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East Asian can carry the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian can carry a set of genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an appearance which is reliably recognizable. (This isn't specific to East Asia, of course.) So, whatever you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but also at least some of your biases, which lead you to think that your classification rate is better than it actually is.

Phrases like "cultural aspects of race" are meant to excuse bigotries beyond racism, I think. As soon as we draw a hard line between genes and memes, and agree that they have different mechanisms of action upon people, then suddenly we need to have a very hard look at anything we do which conflates genes and memes.

I'm saying that, when chatting up a person, their genetic history is extremely irrelevant. Maybe their country of origin matters (as for spies), maybe their religious beliefs matter (as when handling dietary restrictions at a dinner), maybe their accent matters (just when trying to chat!) but their genetics, and thus any notion of race, are not germane.

Keep in mind that genes are affected by pedigree collapse but memes are not. We are one race partially because we do not have enough ancestors to have more races; however, this limitation doesn't apply to cultural knowledge.

[EForEndeavour]

> You say that it's "easy" for you to determine whether somebody is "East Asian", just by looking at a photo. What are you looking for, though? Probably some sort of appearance affected by genetics. However, no East Asian can carry the complete gene pool from their region, so no East Asian can carry a set of genetic markers which is guaranteed to produce an appearance which is reliably recognizable.

It feels like this discussion is disproportionately weighted toward exceptions to demonstrably real correlations between a person's ancestral origin and their appearance and genes. Why would every member of a given cluster of related people be required to carry every one of the criteria that define the cluster? In my mind, that defeats the whole purpose of clustering in the first place, and seems especially out of place given that normal people in normal situations make fuzzy, heuristic classifications of people based on incomplete information.

Also, doesn't this "nobody carries the complete pool from their region" argument apply equally to any conceivable definition of culture? Not every rural Texan espouses exactly the same cultural values as each other, or cultural memes, or what have you. Despite the inherent fuzziness in defining what it means to be rural Texan, you can still make the definition meaningful. The ability to define a Sherpa culture seems equally plausible as the ability to characterize Sherpa genotypes and phenotypes. The fuzziness of a classification does not negate the fact that fuzzy classification is still possible.

> So, whatever you're seeing in that photo, it's not just their genes, but also at least some of your biases, which lead you to think that your classification rate is better than it actually is.

That makes sense to me.