/lit/ - Literature

>>12738216
>Wrong. Race isn't based on IQ or jawline or anything like that. You'll never have your race tested by getting an IQ test. Similarly an Albino negro from Africa is not a white man because he has pale skin.
I consider those arguments in favour of my case. The genes that explain variance across those dimensions can be present or not present in any person of a given race, there being no non-arbitrary cut-off point.

>genetic clustering and lines of descent.
Finding genetic clusters requires multifactorial analysis. Like I said above there isn't a set of genes that is present in everyone that belongs to a race nor a set of genes that, if present, disqualify someone from being of a certain race. Rather, racial categories are usually derived ad-hoc from phenotype observations which are subsequently correlated to genomes, and the former factor injects much subjectivity into the categorization. If actually started from the factor of genetic variation alone, you could run a multifactorial analysis and derive any number of groupings between 1 (all of humanity) and 7 billion+ (one for every human being minus twins and clones) because the gradient of genetic variation can be spread for all loci - or whichever loci you choose.

Interestingly, the analysis that seek to link genetic variance to geographic positions of different populations, are similarly bound by the analysts' arbitrary choice of scale. You could divy up humanity in 5 groups like Rosenberg, or over a thousand if you were as precise as this map here for the whole world.

>Well some people might mistake it for orange or others call it yellow, therefore there's no clear category of yellow or orange right? And it's therefore arbitrary? No. Obviously that's wrong and when that same logic is applied to race it's still wrong.
But that isn't how colour classification works. Firstly, the labeling we do is indeed arbitrary unless you consider our cultural conventions on what colours are different colours and what colours are shades of the same colours. Secondly, the scientific classification of colours is quite precise. Wether something is orange or not is simply a matter of checking if the wavelenght interval falls between 590nm 625nm. Anyway, the spectrum of colour is the same from the begining of time until the end of it, while the specie is perpetually changing (as are the subspecies that we chose to consider), so even if you can be as precise at defining race as you can be with colour (which is a pretty high bar to set, and unfair IMO, but I wasn't the one to bring it into conversation), it would have to be open to constant revision like a dictionary.