/sci/ - Science & Math

Taxonomical labels are that, labels. Certainly there are physically identifiable differences and criteria by which we may separate species and subspecies, but the reason that we do so tends to be for the convenience of identifying common phenotypes, geographical distribution, ancestral origin, etc.

It is of no debate that the ancestral origin of some people is closer to the ancestral origin of other people, or that there are concomitant phenotypic variations well-documented in medicine, like the frequency of some diseases among other things, that exist in people of some ancestral extractions more commonly than others.

The reason we don't use the taxonomical classification of subspecies that we label animals with for convenience is that human classifications have a meaning and a relevance outside of the biology or taxonomy book, as we understand by a history in which those classifications were used as the basis to legislate differently and endow more or less rights to some groups on the basis of these biological, or pseudobiological classifications (I say this because there isn't and wasn't in the past a single consensus classification scheme for human "subspecies," which allows for arbitrariness in classification.)

Because as a scientific community that is part of greater human society we believe that, even if ancestral extraction has a certain predictive power (which is always disputable and difficult to ascertain because gene-environment interactions are hard to pin down and quantify) we should safeguard the rights of every Homo sapiens so that they may reach whatever their potential is, we abstain from making those classifications to protect their human dignity and prevent previous trespasses upon that dignity from from becoming reality once more.

It's lazy and delays the conversation, leaving the work of reading and interpreting the link to someone else when you could just have added what it says and how it supports your argument. It's the same reason publication intros aren't just a string of links to previous research.