Race: Social construct or biological

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Is race a social construct or is it biological?

Last edited by Signs654 on 02 Apr 2009, 10:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think it is mostly social.

Race is a social construct, yes. Specifically, constructed by Europeans in the 19th century to justify the oppression of colonized peoples.

We're all the same race--human.

I think it's biological. Some races tend to be taller, some shorter, some tend to be more athletic, some more intellectual, etc.

ASDs and Neurotypicals?

Jews and Gentiles?

People who can roll their tongues and People who can't?

Where's the polls to cast a vote?

Category error! Being Jewish or Gentile has nothing to do with biological inheritance. It is in the realm of culture which is learned, not hard wired like head shape or hair color.

ruveyn

Well, the question of how to classify people is *much* more interesting and complicated than that. There are features which vary from area to area, obviously, although it tends to be more or less continuous. Some have suggested fairly recently that race be interpreted as a way of understanding human lineages. Bear in mind that several human population groups have undergone exponential growth over the past 10K years as a result of the Neolithic Revolution. There have been various claims over maybe the past decades that you can find a close correspondence between traditional concepts of race and some genetic clusters. This would not be *terribly* surprising if people had split into sparsely distributed populations with low admixture which then underwent a large expansion fairly recently; although the lineages might become increasingly fuzzy at the interface of these populations' ranges, of course.

Race is pretty widely disregarded in the kinds of simply forms it has been understood as in the past, although there is currently non trivial debate over the significance of some analogous classification scheme, it is my impression.

For example, "race" is pretty widely used among forensic anthropologists, but then again whether this is really indicative that "race" is a good scheme or just something that's convenient when you have a population comprised of disparate groups with low intergroup mating resulting in fairly discontinuous distribution of some morphological features is really the question.


Well, that's human variation (although the last one is rather dubious as a biological trait ), sure, but that doesn't necessarily imply the existence of biological "races". The problem with traditional race is that it's more or less an arbitrary categorization based on superficial characteristics, and it remains to be shown that this corresponds to any more "natural" classification. Of course, the problem might be with this is that classifications are all *essentially* human constructs (inasmuch as concepts in general are), so it really is a matter of what we want in a classification. So I suppose it's really just a problem of definition.

In which the whole thing really becomes a philosophical cluster-fuck.

Last edited by twoshots on 01 Apr 2009, 8:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Modern medicine recognises and uses the standard race classifications

What is the point in classifying people?
We are humans from Earth is all that matters to me.
It seems that these "races" cause problems......

They can be useful medically and forensically.

Either way, I love how everyone reverts to "why bother thinking" when the topic of race comes up. Ain't got the intellectual fortitude, do we?

Why classify different subspecies of animals? Why differentiate between an apple and an orange?

Well, the last time I checked, differentiating between golden delicious and red delicious did not have a negative impact on the social order of the orchard.

Exactly. Differentiating between subspecies of humans is no different than differentiating between the different varieties of apples. Ignoring genetic and biological differences is not going to make them disappear.

Well, no, it is. Although first of all I'm pretty sure no one argues that there are any more than one subspecies of H. sapiens still in existence. But aside from that, classification is a construct, ergo, something we project onto reality, and it is potentially questionable why we should project such a thing if it leads to problems.

Without classification, you have lost the objective of language. Without descriptive differentiating terms, there would be no meaningful communication. Why can a person's race or even subrace be determined by genetic testing? Why is it that the probability of having certain diseases is often correlated with race or ethnicity? Why is it that your body will be less likely to reject a bone marrow transplant from one of the same race? Even in different species of animals there are variations one can't ignore.