Name: Anonymous 2019-01-07 18:50
Science doesn't recognize the intuitive, non-strict idea that are "races of humans". Numerous attempts to define races of humans have failed to achieve even the basic standards expected of science.
Among the failed attempts of racialism, there was an idea that people intuitively identified as same "race" tend to have lower average distance than people intuitively identified as different "races".
This idea is completely useless for actual classification, as it doesn't work the other way around. There is no good way to go from genetic distances to "races" without getting a truckload of both false positives and false negatives.
Even more naive attempt would be to define a canonical examplars of "whiteness", "blackness", "yellowness" and so on, then classify people based on genetic distance from those ur-Aryans, ur-Nubians, ur-Huns. Even without getting into the whole fact that "genetic distance" is not a well defined term on its own and different measures give different outcomes, this idea would be extremely fragile and full of false positives and false negatives.
No matter how much racialists shriek that "but muh orange doesn't prove muh red and muh yellow don't exist!", science stands firm and keeps demanding a workable definition of race.
Until then, "human races" aren't not scientific ideas in any shape or form. At best social, at worst pseudoscientific.
Among the failed attempts of racialism, there was an idea that people intuitively identified as same "race" tend to have lower average distance than people intuitively identified as different "races".
This idea is completely useless for actual classification, as it doesn't work the other way around. There is no good way to go from genetic distances to "races" without getting a truckload of both false positives and false negatives.
Even more naive attempt would be to define a canonical examplars of "whiteness", "blackness", "yellowness" and so on, then classify people based on genetic distance from those ur-Aryans, ur-Nubians, ur-Huns. Even without getting into the whole fact that "genetic distance" is not a well defined term on its own and different measures give different outcomes, this idea would be extremely fragile and full of false positives and false negatives.
No matter how much racialists shriek that "but muh orange doesn't prove muh red and muh yellow don't exist!", science stands firm and keeps demanding a workable definition of race.
Until then, "human races" aren't not scientific ideas in any shape or form. At best social, at worst pseudoscientific.