Talk:Race (human categorization)

Lead sentence

To me having 'as a social construct' in the first sentence implies that there are more ways to define it that will be discussed in the article. For that reason I find it odd that it is included in the first sentence because it seems like it is cherry picking one definition. I think it would be better to split the phrase 'as a social construct' into a second sentence to explain that race being a social construct is the most common, albeit not only, way of thinking of it. That also has the advantage of a sentence corresponding to the first subsection. Something along the following I think would be an improvement.

'Race is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics. Whilst some scholars argue that race correlates with biological traits, there is wide consensus that the racial categories used in everyday usage are instead socially constructed'

Thoughts? Hollth (talk) 14:02, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Before a change can even be considered, you need to first cite reliable sources that support the points being made by your proposed second sentence. As far as I can see, the current lead sentence is supported by reliable sources. Also, I recommend that you take a look at the recent archive of this talk page to view the previous discussions of this issue. danielkueh (talk) 17:32, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I knew it would be contentious, hence posting it before putting it in. My proposal is just an amalgamation of the lead sentence and the first paragraph of the definitions subcategory. Both are already sourced so that shouldn't be an issue. Hollth (talk) 06:09, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Given the discussions at Talk:Race (human classification)/Archive 33 about initially defining race as a social concept and the #Race is religious, and/or social affiliation. discussion above, I think that the current lead is a good compromise. It's also standard on Wikipedia to have the most common definition first, just like it's often or usually the case that dictionaries and other encyclopedias give the most common definition first. Flyer22 (talk) 14:39, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

It is not common to have the basis for a definition nested in commas as it currently is, much less so if the basis is one of several, nor is it uncommon to have the definition by function (grouping similar looking people) in a separate sentence than the reductionist definition, which is what I would like. To be clear, I'm not trying to change the meaning, I just find it really, really jarring the way it is phrased. If you feel it is undue, I'd be fine with the second sentence being changed to not include scholars arguing that it correlates to biological traits. Hollth (talk) 08:45, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

I notice that the book "Race" by Prof John R. Baker, Oxford University Press, 1974, which was once in the bibliography, has been deleted. Any reason for this? 24.44.181.147 (talk) 15:06, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Possibly because it is worthless as a source on the topic. ArtifexMayhem (talk) 11:26, 17 February 2015 (UTC)

It seems to me that the issue (if there is one) being discussed here is mainly about style (the way the lead sentence is written) rather than substance (what the lead sentence actually says). I don't know whether the present format of having "the basis for a definition nested in commas" is common or not. What I do know is that it is not wrong or unorthodox. For a few examples, see the lead sentence in France, Ivory Coast, world, sports, and atheism, just to name a few. Plus, the present lead is consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines on formulating lead sentences (see WP:LEADSENTENCE). I think separating the present lead into two sentences is not an improvement, even if weasel words such as "whilst some scholar argue..." were removed. In fact, it disrupts the otherwise smooth transition to the next sentence, which discusses the historical development of the word race. Anyway, I will let other editors to weigh in and come to a consensus. danielkueh (talk) 17:26, 18 February 2015 (UTC)

I fixed up Race (biology) to show it's a social construct. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 03:40, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

And it's been reverted. The race and species concepts are social concepts, for example tomatoes can be fruits or vegetables, and dolphins can be fish or mammals. I think it's important to point out that everything is a social concept, and if people take that to mean "never scientific" that's their problem. It's nobody's intention to deceive the masses for some nefarious purpose after all. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:53, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedias' 'nefarious purpose' is to base article content on material verifiable in published reliable sources, rather than on facile analogies concocted by POV-pushing 'contributors' who clearly don't have a clue what they are writing about. Go find a forum somewhere, and promote your tinfoil-hattery there. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:15, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

The lead sentence is problematic because it implies the biological concept cannot be applied to humans. The purpose of Wikipedia is to base article content on material verifiable in published reliable sources, rather than on cherry picked fallacies and sources selected by POV-pushing 'contributors' who clearly don't have a clue what they are writing about. Go find a forum somewhere, and promote your tinfoil-hattery there. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 17:21, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

"Let me begin with race. There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races." Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms 11 subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably in this taxonomic literature."

Mayr 2002 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Captain JT Verity MBA (talk • contribs) 17:49, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

I reverted an edit by Captain JT Verity MBA because it was not supported by the sources in the lead sentence and there doesn't appear to be consensus for this change. danielkueh (talk) 19:37, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

It's supported by Mayr above. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 19:42, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

I think you're missing the context here. Race, as it is used by Mayr, refers to "breed" or "varieties". The Mayr reference is more applicable to the Race (biology) article. Also, this reference was published in 1953, before the days of the human genome. If we're going to rely on quotes by scientists, then at least use a recent one such as this quote by another biologist, Craig Venter, who described race as follows:

"Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."[109].

danielkueh (talk) 19:50, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

You are looking at an article that discusses race applied to humans, you tell me he means "breeds and varieties" when he uses the word race, when he explicitly states he is talking about the word race, and you say "I think you're missing the context here". I think you are missing simple comprehension, intentionally or no. The article is from 2002. Here's another from 2002.

"Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry - namely African, Caucasian (Europe and Middle East), Asian, Pacific Islander (for example, Australian, New Guinean and Melanesian), and Native American." (Risch, 2002)

Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 19:57, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT. You're right, it is published in 2002. But my point about its relevance to this article still stands. As you know, this article is separate from the Race (biology) article. If they are one and the same, then yes, we would define race differently. Hence, "context" is important. "Breeds" and "varieties" are common subspecies classifications. danielkueh (talk) 20:05, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

The point of Mayr's article is that they are the same in a biological context. Try reading it again. In a social context race may of course be different. Breed and variety are infrasubspecific categories, as is race. Therefore to claim race is always "social" is just false. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 20:12, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT, then you're asking the wrong question. The question you should be asking is why are there two separate articles? Until you get that resolved, there is really nothing more to discuss. danielkueh (talk) 20:18, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Because one is about the biological race concept in general and one is about the race concept applied to humans biologically and socially. I take though that since such a huge problem exists I can edit the first sentence? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 20:21, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT, You're missing my point. You need to figure out why the word "race" is defined differently in both articles. For starters, take a look at Webster's dictionary on race [1]. You will notice there are multiple definitions of race, depending on the context. Try to figure out which definition fits here and which definition fits there [Race (biology) article]. danielkueh (talk) 20:30, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

It wouldn't be defined differently if the POV pushers on this article put in the biological race concept applied to humans. And we include any other social definitions and POVs, including race is biological meaningless. Multiple definitions and POVs are possible in an article. This is what NPOV is about. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 20:38, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT, Really? So there is only one definition of race? And one commentary by Mayr trumps everybody else? Interesting. So why do we have two articles again? danielkueh (talk) 20:43, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

At this point I am reporting you for wilfully misunderstanding me. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 20:45, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT, Ok, good luck with that. :) danielkueh (talk) 20:47, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

@Captain JT Verity MBA: Supposed the qualifer, "as a social construct," was removed, resulting in a more straightforward lead sentence as follows:

Race is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics.

Would this slight modification address your concern? I'm asking this question in good faith (WP:AGF). danielkueh (talk) 06:51, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

That is not a possible definition since it is a direct contradiction of the mainstream viewpoint and the vast majority of sources. Mayr was certainly a good biologist, but he was working in a period where a very different understanding of race was current - his view has primarily historical value.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 10:25, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: How is it a contradiction? It doesn't say it is not a social construct. Plus, the second lead paragraph makes that point. danielkueh (talk) 12:50, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Because most mainstream research does not see phenotypical traits as causally defining the construction of racial groups at all - lots of other factors play a role in defining those groups as well including economy, politics, ethnicity etc. By taking phenotype as defining racial groups it de facto suggests a biological rather than constructionist model. The current definition flatly contradicts at least one of the references that is used to supprt it, namely the Smedley and Smedley that states directly that races are not characterized by any distinct biological traits. Besides this entire discussion is futile since it does not actually build on any sources but just personal musings. It is a discussion we have had countless times here, and we cannot reboot it every time a race realist surfs by and wants to redefine the concept to fir their preconceptions. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:00, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

• The "as a social concept" parenthtical needs to be removed as it adds nothing but unnecessary hedging.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:04, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: I am confused by the last statement. Are you saying it should be removed or are you making a larger point?

I am saying it should be removed. The larger point, namely that a definition needs to be based on reliable sources, is in the preceding statement in response to you.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:14, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: I take your point about basing the lead definition on reliable sources, which it is. With or without the qualifier "as a social concept." I am just confused because I had assumed that you wish to retain the qualifier. Now you're suggesting that it be removed. Is that correct? danielkueh (talk) 13:20, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

No it is not based on reliable sources - it contradicts them. And no, the "qualifier" suggests that there is a "biological" AND a "social concept" which is not the case. The vast majority of scholars, both in the social and biological sciences, consider race to be a social concept thamay or may not correlate significantly with biological variables. Saying "race, as a social concept" is meaningless, whereas "race is a social concept" is the standard view.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:24, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus: Actually, it is. It is based on three sources cited in the lead definition. A lot of things are social concepts. Color and gender identity for instance. The lead definition in those articles don't explicitly mention social concepts. I guess the larger question would be should we rename this page from Race (human classification) to Race (social construct), so as to better distinguish it from Race (biology)? danielkueh (talk) 13:36, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

It is not a meaningful thing to say that a definition is based on a source whose definition it contradicts. So no, it actyually isn't based on reliable sources. And yes, all concepts are social concepts. Which is why we do not need to add it, and why it adds nothing to the definition and needs to be removed. Having a POV fork is not a solution to anything. And renaming it "social construct" is not possible either since scholarship is not unanimous in their acceptance of the lack of biological basis for race - there are of course still proponents of biological race in different ways. It is unlikely we will find a consensus for another title. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:52, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: Ok, now I am really confused. Are you saying we should not even mention "social concept" in the lead definition at all? Is that right? danielkueh (talk) 13:59, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Not if the definition is worded right, which it is not currently since it is worded in a way that suggests the concept is biologically defined. A better definition would be "Race is a system used to classify humans into large groups based on different combinations of biological and cultural features including phenotype, ancestry, ethnic markers and socio-economic factors." ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:22, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

A majority of biologists and anthropologists think the race concept applied to humans is a physically meaningful and objective biological concept. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 14:18, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Source? AndyTheGrump (talk) 14:19, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

That is 100% counter factual and shows that you are either entirely ignorant of the literature or willfully misrepresent it.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:22, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: But adding "cultural features" would directly contradict the sources in the lead. danielkueh (talk) 14:26, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

If you think that then you have either not read them or not understood them. It is the entire point of the Smedley source that cultural factors play a role in racialization (quote: "It is the culturally invented ideas and beliefs about these differences that constitute the meaning of race (A. Smedley, 1999b).") Smedley in fact defines "race" not as a concept but as a social and political ideology which emerges from and supports a racist society. This is a quite extreme version of the cultural constructionist view - although not necessarily a fringe view. But in addition those three random sources are not the best at all for a definition. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:28, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: It is silly to even suggest that I did not read or understand the sources. The first two sources especially are quite clear. See p. 6 of source 1, p. 63 and 65. of source 2. danielkueh (talk) 14:38, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

The Race Question is from 1950 and suggesting it has something other than historical value for describing how we understand race today is what is silly. I have not read Sharma and Sharma, but being a text book published in India in 1997, it is not a particularly good source and I have no clue why anyone would have chosen it. Honestly even referring to those shows poor judgment, and limited knowledge of the field.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:41, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: The UNESCO reference has not been systematically refuted or disproven (e.g., see p. 75 of [2]). If you haven't read Sharma and Sharma, then you cannot discredit it or make the claim that the lead definition contradicts the source. Also, just because the book is published in India or in 1997 does not make it an inferior source. To suggest that it is on that basis IS silly. danielkueh (talk) 14:51, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

That is an absurd comment. You are clearly not capable of judging the quality of sources in this field. Are you seriously claiming that there has been no changes in how scientists view race over the past 75 years? And yes an 20 year old Indian textbook can not in anyway be considered likely to represent the mainstream of anthropology 25 years later. They are crap sources. The only relatively useful source of the three is Smedleys, but even that is not useful for provding an acceptable general definition. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:54, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: Commenting on my ability to judge sources or using disparaging remarks such as "absurd comment" will not advance your argument. Right now, you're just shifting the goal post. First, you made the claim that the sources contradict the lead definition but you haven't provided specific paragraphs and sentences in these sources to support your claim. In fact, you haven't even read one of the sources, or the other one that I suggested, which undermines your argument. Second, now you claim that the sources are crap. To support your claim, you point to a location of publication (India). That is elitist and irrelevant. The burden of proof is still on you. danielkueh (talk) 15:07, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

No, I said that the definition is not based on RS. Two of the sources are not reliable at all and the third which is contradict the definition given. Someone clearly fucked up big time when they wrote the definition, cherry picking to antiquated sources and adding a third without reading it. And location of publication is of course extremely relevant - because science is international and publishing in international presses is one of the hallmarks of good current mainstream science - especially in terms of race where some local traditions have been very slow to adopt the consensus view. And the fact that you show yourself entirely unable to recognize a reliable source is also extremely relevant for future discussions. Your statement about the Unesco statement not having been "disproven" is particularly ludicruous as it shows you havent even read the article about the statement, or you would have known that the statement was heavily criticized and three further revised statements were published in 1951 1967 and 1978 - none of which reflect the current state of knowledge either.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 15:13, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: The third source does not contradict the lead sentence. It merely states that race is not meaningful as a way of classifying groups of people, which is consistent with the first two sources and with new sources. Furthermore, its description of race, from its historical origins to its present day use, is consistent with the first two sources. The UNESCO reference has been criticized, but for different reasons. I have the read the Sharma and Sharma reference. You haven't. And to suggest that a publication is inferior simply because it is published in India is not a tenable argument, which is why I am perplexed why you would even suggest that. And your last statement on my ability to recognize source is also irrelevant. You're not debating the contents of the sources. And you have not offered a source to support your alternative definition above. In fact, you are resorting to cheap tricks (e.g., personal attacks), which I have to say, is very disappointing, given our previous collaborations in other WP articles. danielkueh (talk) 15:28, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

I am not going to keep up this conversation. You are either not willing or able to understand the arguments of the sources you use or the arguments I have presented as to why they are inadequate. That is such a fundamental problem of competence that I can think of no way to actually make you get what is wrong with your approach. I will however restate the problem: The lead is based on three sources, one of which is a 75 year old statement that has since been revised three times and which has no way of reflecting anything useful about current understandings of race. The second is a textbook published in India 25 years ago - and which did not even represent what was the mainstream view in 1997. The third is an article that uses a radical view of race that contradicts 100% the view that it is used to support. That you can spend several screens defending that state of affairs, means tha at this point I have little hope of ever having a rational conversation with you. Hence I shall waste no more time. ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 16:38, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

@Maunus and Snunɐɯ: I don't know you have access but here are three journal articles from the American Anthropologist:

1. Caspari (2003). From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association. American Anthropologist, 105: 65-<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.65/abstract
2. Visweswaran, K. (1998). Race and the culture of anthropology. American Anthropologist, 100: 70-83. <http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1525%2Faa.1998.100.1.70?r3_referer=wol&tracking_action=preview_click&show_checkout=1&purchase_referrer=onlinelibrary.wiley.com&purchase_site_license=LICENSE_DENIED_NO_CUSTOMER>
3. Cartmill (1998). The status of the race concept in physical anthropology. American Anthropologist, 100:651-660. <http://pages.ucsd.edu/~jmoore/courses/anth42web/CartmillRaceConcept1998.pdf>

We can add these sources to the lead but they won't change a single thing because their descriptions of race are consistent with the other three sources. We can even add more.

So far you have only made baseless assertions without pointing to concrete specific examples to support them. You haven't presented any source for discussion. It is your prerogative not to continue this discussion on this talk page. But I would like to remind you that WP policies still stand: WP:consensus, WP:own, WP:OR, WP:RS. If you wish to initiate an RfC for a new lead. Fine, that is something I can support. But if you wish to edit this article without regard to the views and comments of the other editors but your own, then you are potentially initiating an edit war WP:Edit_warring. danielkueh (talk) 16:55, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Multiple sources have been presented on this talk page supporting race as a biological concept. It is simply incorrect to describe it only as a social construct in the lead, and a clear case of POV editing. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:36, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Problematic opening

From the opening entry: "Although still used in general contexts, race has often been replaced by other words which are less ambiguous and emotionally charged, such as populations, people(s), ethnic groups, or communities, depending on context."

- This is misleading and incorrect because the "race = population" was a failed 1950-60s re-definition attempt by Theodosius Dobzhansky who didn't want to abandon the race concept when it was being abandoned at the time. As Montagu wrote:

"It seems to me an unrealistic procedure to maintain that this late in the day we can readapt the term “race” to mean something utterly different from what it has always most obfuscatingly and ambiguously meant." - Montagu, A. (1962). "The concept of race". American Anthropologist. 64(5:1):919-928

Clearly populations exist and no one denies them - so its inaccurate to state "race" has simply been replaced with this other word when breeding populations have nothing to do with race in the first place. Are the Amish then a race? Ralph Roadrash (talk) 19:02, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Basically my point is the opening reads as if human races are actually real and that through politically correct semantics or word-play "race" has been replaced with "population" or "people groups" etc. This is false, and is actually an argument racist hereditarians or "race realists" use like Richard Lynn. Ralph Roadrash (talk) 01:29, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you are right. Unfortunately it is partly the case that some people who continue to believe in races as discrete biological entities have simply adopted population as a euphemism. However of course sensible folks realize that a population (not breeding population, just a collection of individuals) has very different implications than the idea of races as discrete biological or evolutionary units. Several analyses show that in the literature the term "population" is often used in ways that are indistinguishable in implications from the traditional race concept, leading to equally problematic conclusions and analyses.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:57, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

No, that's exactly what happened. "Population" is a very broad term. "Race" groups by ancestry, or genetic or phenetic similarity. It is a precise defined term with predictive validity. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:56, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Nonsense.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 13:59, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Who is currently checking sources for this article?

I see that there have been quite a few edits to this article recently that cite no source, and on the whole this article still needs much better sourcing to meet the expected standard of Wikipedia articles. Since 2010, I have been compiling a source list for this article and articles on related topics, and I'd be delighted to hear from other active editors here what other sources you know that fit the Wikipedia content guideline on reliable sources and especially the Wikipedia content guideline on reliable sources for medical topics. I think if we look at reliable sources together, we will be able to resolve many of the recent issues that have come up in editing this article. Please let us know what you recommend that we read to follow Wikipedia policy and guidelines to improve this article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:50, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

It is claimed in the article that forensic scientists can identify someone's race (= ancestry by continent) with high accuracy, almost 100%. This is simply false and is challenged in numerous recent studies, e.g. Henneberg who found as low as < 30% accuracy:

• Sierp, I., & Henneberg, M. (2015). "Can ancestry be consistently determined from the skeleton?". Anthropological review, 78(1): 21-31. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/anre.2015.78.issue-1/anre-2015-0002/anre-2015-0002.xml?format=INT

Note the 100% claim from the page is using Sesardic as a source. Sesardic is a philosopher not a physical anthropologist. Ralph Roadrash (talk) 23:18, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

You are right, although forensic textbooks still claim to be able to identify race with high accuracy. The claim in the article was inserted as a concession to some "race realist" editors who used to be actively editing the page. It is of course true that forensic anthropologists are partly overstating their case (because they would be mostly out of a job if they claimed it was hard to identify race) and partly using some leaps of reasoning (i.e. identifying aspects of ancestry and then making claims about race based on how their society relates race and ancestry). I would be open to a rewriting with newer and better sources.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 17:15, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

This quote is probably relevant:

"The claim of 90% accuracy that has been reported for “race”- determination methods is unsubstantiated. Despite the relatively high-allocation accuracies (often more than 80%, but rarely more than 90%) and the strength of the statistical significance that are noted when various methods are first described, the comprehensive independent tests of “race”-determination methods consistently result in low-allocation accuracies." - Albanese, John, and Shelley R. Saunders. "Is It Possible to Escape Racial Typology in Forensic Identification?". (2006). In: Forensic Anthropology and Medicine. Humana Press: 281-316.

What Sesardic (2010) never took into account was the lack of consistency between different methods when applied to the same skeleton, e.g. "For example, one unknown was classified as “Black” with the Giles and Elliot method, “White” with the Gill method, “Japanese” with FORDISC using the FDB data, and “from the Philippines” with FORDISC using the Howells’ data." (Ibid). So when you look at a number of methods (Henneberg looked at 9) the overall accuracy for racial assessment of a skeleton is moderate to low, nowhere near the 80-90% claim cited commonly in forensic literature, or the 100% figure by 'race realists'.Ralph Roadrash (talk) 20:57, 12 May 2015 (UTC) :"What Sesardic (2010) never took into account was the lack of consistency between different methods when applied to the same skeleton"

Shouldn't that read "What Sesardic (2010) never took into account was the lack of consistency between different methods when applied to one cherry picked skeleton" 222.106.76.3 (talk) 04:33, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Struck post by block-evading racist Mikemikev. Dougweller (talk) 13:36, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

No. See Henneberg's study: "In 14 cases (70%), various methods identified the same individual as belonging to all three racial classes. This suggests that the existing methods for the determination of ‘race’ are compromised." 70% of of Henneberg's skeletal samples were identified as White, Black or Asian depending on the method. This is nothing new, and is what happens when you apply different methods to the same skeleton. As the 2006 study notes: "comprehensive independent tests of “race”-determination methods consistently result in low-allocation accuracies." Ralph Roadrash (talk) 07:22, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

The reason for the above is that there is far more variation within continental populations than between them: "We have shown that even with 20 non-fragmented sets of skeletal remains none could be consistently placed into a single racial category. Individual variability may have played a significant role leading to inconsistency of the results found in this study, which further confirms the ideas of Brace and Ryan (1980), Henneberg (2010) and Lewontin (1976); that most human variation occurs between individuals of the same population rather than being attributable to geographic distribution." (Sierp & Henneberg, 2015). Ralph Roadrash (talk) 07:38, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Cherry picked sources

Going through this article the sourcing is disgraceful and cherry picked to support the "race is biologically meaningless" POV. Where is Mayr, Dobzhansky, Rushton, Dawkins, Strkalj, Sesardic, Risch, Witherspoon etc.? Instead we have only Smedley, Keita, Montagu, Dorothy Roberts, Marks, Graves, Templeton, Brace, Lewontin etc., all referenced again and again with what can only be described as a censorship of contrary points. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 19:49, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Mayr and Dobzhansky should be mentioned for historical reasons. Rushton, Sesardic and Risch are irrelevant fringe nonsense. Strkalj used to be included. Dawkins is not a specialist in either race or human population genetics and his few highly publicized opinions on the matter are irrelevant to this article.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:03, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Why are they "irrelevant fringe nonsense"? Because you don't like them? You're seriously suggesting we reference Dorothy Roberts over Dawkins on biological taxonomy? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 14:31, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Race is not about biological taxonomy, regardless of whether Dawkins think it is. Dawkins has not published anything about race, and therefore is not a reliable source on the topic except for his own point of view which happens not to be notable here (he just restates Edwards view which is notable and included). As for Rushton he is irrelevant fringe nonsense because he are not considered serious reputable scientists by anyone in the field. Sesardic is a philosopher. And Risch is not generally taken seriously in relation to race (same goes for Cochran and Harpending which is presumably your next suggestions).·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:49, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

You seem to have this strange conception of "the field" as "those people that agree with my POV". Rather than providing any kind of objective analysis your statements amount to little more than gratuitous name calling. Isn't Dorothy Roberts a law professor? How is Sesardic the philosopher of biological science less relevant? Risch is not generally taken seriously in relation to race: by whom? Those people that agree with you or those people who approve his work to be published in top biology journals? Is Graves taken seriously? Is this why his work is referenced by nobody? Is Graves to be taken more seriously than Rushton? Why? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:02, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

I now understand your agenda. J. Philippe Rushton was one the most notorious racists in modern science. Not even the species concept is well-understood in modern evolutionary biology. Yes, there is genetic variation across populations within a species. When applied to humans, race is largely a social construct (largely associated with skin color and geographic region), but this social notion of race does not map nicely into genetic variation. --I am One of Many (talk) 22:29, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

That's very interesting. Would you like to explain how you define race, apply it to humans, and then explain why it "does not map nicely into genetic variation". Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:10, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

As a social construct, race is 'defined' by the particular sociocultural context. It has no external definition. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:29, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

How convenient. According to you race has no defnition. Unfortunately according to any number of biologists it is a valid concept. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:43, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

You seem to think that repeating something often enough makes it so. That is not the case. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:53, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

As a speaker of English, you are probably aware that words can have radically different meanings in different contexts. Race in social and cultural contexts has various meanings and is often applied based on superficial characteristics such as skin color, religion, region where a person was born. We don't know whether these social and cultural distinctions map onto genetic population differences population differences are biologically meaningful. I think to really understand the problems here, you need to take a careful look at the relevant literature in evolutionary biology, population biology, and quantitative genetics.--I am One of Many (talk) 18:06, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure race concepts based on "skin color" don't map onto genetic population differences very well. Species concepts based on "fur color" would probably be pretty useless too. Luckily no biologist in his right mind would apply such an absurd concept. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:40, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Franz Boas

See Franz_Boas#Physical_anthropology. His findings were far from "demonstrated" and are thought by some to have been fraudulent. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 14:48, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Please provide secondary sources (e.g., university textbooks, monograms, review journal articles, etc) along with page numbers and relevant quotes (See WP:SECONDARY). Thanks. danielkueh (talk) 14:52, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

No this is just a time wasting stratagem. You can see that the finding is disputed by top scholars and cannot be described as "demonstrated". Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 14:53, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

It's not a waste of time. It is Wikipedia's policy (See WP:RS), which we all (myself included) have to abide by. As for that wikilink, I see post hoc disagreements about his findings. But that is different from what you are trying to do. danielkueh (talk) 14:55, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

So you are trying to say that Jantz and Gravlee's papers are not RS? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:01, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

That is not what I said. What I said is you need to cite reliable secondary sources. See above for details. danielkueh (talk) 15:03, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Of course I don't. We have reviewed PNAS papers disputing Boas' claims. Why do those need to be repeated elsewhere to be valid? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:05, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

You're claiming that Boas committed fraud. That is a serious assertion, which requires evidence. The threshold here is a reliable secondary sources. Again, please familiarize yourself with WP's policies such as WP:V, WP:OR, and WP:RS. Believe it or not, having sources will only help you. danielkueh (talk)

No I was changing "demonstrated" to "claimed" when you started reverting me. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:12, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

He didn't just claim, he presented evidence, which is what the current source says. Also, you inserted additional wording about fraud. (See [3]). danielkueh (talk) 15:16, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

So you deny that I changed "demonstrated" to "claimed" and you reverted that? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 15:19, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't deny that. I reverted it because it gave the impression that that is all he did, which is not consistent with the cited source. I also reverted your other assertion that fraud was committed. Again, we go with the source. danielkueh (talk) 15:22, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

No not "again". You reverted with no idea what you were talking about. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 16:47, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

I call on any uninvolved administrator who is following the discussion here to be ready to impose the ArbCom discretionary sanctions that already apply to this article on Captain JT Verity MBA for his persistent disruptive behavior here. I will meanwhile, in a while in a new article talk page section, try to shed some light on the content issues here with links to current sources, some of which have yet to be cited in this article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 17:28, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Can you explain how I am disruptive and others aren't? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 17:37, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

I think if is clear POV to push for the inclusion of the scientific racist views J. Philippe Rushton and to remove the views of Franz Boas, one of the leading critics of Scientific racism.--I am One of Many (talk) 22:38, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

Whereas entirely censoring Rushton isn't POV, because he's "racist", whatever that means in this context. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 23:00, 21 June 2015 (UTC)

The word 'racist' has the same meaning in this context as any other, as far as I'm aware. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:30, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Could you define it so I understand the relevant point. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:40, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

No. This talk page is for discussions regarding article content. It is not a correspondence course in elementary sociology. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:56, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Are you also of the opinion that Rushton's view should be censored because it's "racist" (whatever that means). Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 08:47, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Racist views are fringe and in this context, they should be given no weight. --I am One of Many (talk) 17:57, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Can you point to the policy that forbids the addition of "racist" views (whatever they might be exactly). Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:31, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

See WP:WEIGHT and WP:FRINGE. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 04:09, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

There is literally nothing there about "racism". You are just making up policies. That's disgraceful. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 00:23, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

See also WP:COMPETENCE. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 10:36, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Does the incredibly cheap tactic of randomly naming policies which in no way apply and which you fail to demonstrate apply ever work out for you? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 00:21, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Sort it out here, page protected for 3 days

Get some other opinions. The two editors editing the article (you know who you are) are over 3RR. Doug Weller (talk) 15:30, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. danielkueh (talk) 15:31, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Discussion of useful sources for updating this article

Some other editors have requested discussion of reliable sources for updating this article, particularly from the biological point of view, and as I gather sources about that topic for updating this article and related articles on Wikipedia, I thought I'd mention some particularly new, good sources by expert authors published in professionally edited publications for use in updating this article. Other editors are of course very welcome to discuss other useful sources here. I gathered these sources in part by tracing references to some important earlier scientific journal articles (key articles that are already cited in this Wikipedia article) to see how those sources are viewed in late of subsequent genetic discoveries. Other sources listed here are simply new sources about the general article topic or important subtopics, also well informed by current research, that appear not have been used in this article yet. Several of those sources update sources by the same author(s) already cited in this article. I'll list some sources I think are worthy of use for this article in approximate chronological order of publication. I think we all agree that this article here on Wikipedia should be well sourced with current reliable sources.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza is a medical doctor who was a student of Ronald Fisher in statistics, who has devoted most of his career to genetic research. In an invited review article for the 2007 Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Cavalli-Sforza joins issue directly with the underlying factual disagreement among previous authors about how genetic data might or might not relate to race classification.

• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (September 2007). "Human Evolution and Its Relevance for Genetic Epidemiology". Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. 8. Annual Reviews: 1–15, . doi:10.1146/annurev.genom.8.080706.092403. ISBN 978-0-8243-3708-7. ISSN 1527-8204. PMID 17408354. Retrieved 23 November 2013. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

GENETIC VARIATION BETWEEN AND WITHIN POPULATIONS, AND THE RACE PROBLEM

In the early 1980s, Lewontin (11) showed that when genetic variation for protein markers is estimated by comparing two or more random individuals from the same populations, or two or more individuals from the whole world, the former is 85% as large as the latter. This means that the variation between populations is the residual 15%, and hence relatively trivial. Later research carried out on a limited number of populations and mostly, though not only, on protein markers has confirmed this analysis. The Rosenberg et al. data actually bring down Lewontin’s estimate to 5%, or even less. Therefore, the variation between populations is even smaller than the original 15%, and we also know that the exact value depends on the choice of populations and markers. But the between-population variation, even if it is very small is certainly enough to reconstruct the genetic history of populations—that is their evolution—but is it enough for distinguishing races in some useful way? The comparison with other mammals shows that humans are almost at the lower extreme of the scale of between-population variation. Even so, subtle statistical methods let us assign individuals to the populations of origin, even distinguishing populations from the same continent, if we use enough genetic markers. But is this enough for distinguishing races? Darwin already had an answer. He gave two reasons for doubting the usefulness of races: (1) most characters show a clear geographic continuity, and (2) taxonomists generated a great variety of race classifications. Darwin lists the numbers of races estimated by his contemporaries, which varied from 2 to 63 races.

Rosenberg et al. (16 and later work) analyzed the relative statistical power of the most efficient subdivisions of the data with a number of clusters varying from 2 to 6, and showed that five clusters have a reasonable statistical power. Note that this result is certainly influenced by the populations chosen for the analysis. The five clusters are not very different from those of a few partitions that had already existed in the literature for some time, and the clusters are: (a) a sub-Saharan African cluster, (b) North Africa–Europe plus a part of western Asia that is approximately bounded eastward by the central Asian desert and mountains, (c) the eastern rest of Asia, (d ) Oceania, and (e) the Americas. But what good is this partition? The Ramachandran et al. (15) analysis of the same data provides a very close prediction of the genetic differences between the same populations by the simplest geographic tool: the geographic distance between the two populations, and two populations from the same continent are on average geographically closer than two from different ones. However, the Rosenberg et al. analysis (16) adds the important conclusion that the standard classification into classical continents must be modified to replace continental boundaries with the real geographic barriers: major oceans, or deserts like the Sahara, or other deserts and major mountains like those of central Asia. These barriers have certainly decreased, but they have not entirely suppressed genetic exchanges across them. Thus, the Rosenberg et al. analysis confirms a pattern of variation based on pseudocontinents that does not eliminate the basic geographic continuity of genetic variation. In fact, the extension by Ramachandran et al. of the original Rosenberg et al. analysis showed that populations that are geographically close have an overwhelming genetic similarity, well beyond that suggested by continental or pseudocontinental partitions.

cont. "The number of groups to be distinguished depends on the differences among popula- tions that are really useful for some valid purpose, and we still have not decided on criteria to choose populations that we want to distinguish. Therefore, the real question remains: What do we want races for? Let us start by agreeing on what could be the most important reason for defining “races.” Incidentally, I am inclined to dismiss the word “race” because of its connection with the odious episodes of racism with which we are continuously con- fronted. The word “populations” is useful in statistics for defining the group from which we draw samples, but is in practice used arbitrarily, and perhaps the most neutral term could be that used by Rosenberg et al. (16): “clusters.” We want to define useful genetic clusters. But more than a term to be used, what I am looking for here is a general agreement on a good reason for doing research aiming to define a useful genetic stratification of populations, and it seems to me we can really find it in research that can be of help for medicine, that is for diagnosis and therapy.

The expression “ethnic groups” is also useful, but especially in situations in which it is not clear if the basic difference is of genetic or cultural (including socioeconomic) nature, or both." Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 05:02, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

A year later Cavalli-Sforza joined seventeen other genetics researchers as co-authors of a review article, published as an "open letter" to other scholars, on using racial categories in human genetics.

• Lee, Sandra; Mountain, Joanna; Koenig, Barbara; Altman, Russ; Brown, Melissa; Camarillo, Albert; Cavalli-Sforza, Luca; Cho, Mildred; Eberhardt, Jennifer; Feldman, Marcus; Ford, Richard; Greely, Henry; King, Roy; Markus, Hazel; Satz, Debra; Snipp, Matthew; Steele, Claude; Underhill, Peter (2008). "The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics" (PDF). Genome Biology. 9 (7): 404. doi:10.1186/gb-2008-9-7-404. ISSN 1465-6906. Retrieved 3 December 2013. We recognize that racial and ethnic categories are created and maintained within sociopolitical contexts and have shifted in meaning over time Human genetic variation within continents is, for the most part, geographically continuous and clinal, particularly in regions of the world that have not received many immigrants in recent centuries [18]. Genetic data cannot reveal an individual's full geographic ancestry precisely, although emerging research has been used to identify geographic ancestry at the continental and subcontinental levels [3,19]. Genetic clusters, however, are far from being equivalent to sociopolitical racial or ethnic categories. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |displayauthors= ignored (|display-authors= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)

• Koenig, Barbara A.; Lee, Sandra Soo-jin; Richardson, Sarah S., eds. (2008). Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4324-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)

This book (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008) is useful because it includes a chapter co-authored by Richard Lewontin in which he updates his views.

• Whitmarsh, Ian; Jones, David S., eds. (2010). What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51424-8. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)

The Whitmarsh and Jones (2010) source has several very useful chapters on medical genetics.

• Ramachandran, Sohini; Tang, Hua; Gutenkunst, Ryan N.; Bustamante, Carlos D. (2010). "Chapter 20: Genetics and Genomics of Human Population Structure". In Speicher, Michael R.; Antonarakis, Stylianos E.; Motulsky, Arno G. (eds.). Vogel and Motulsky's Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches (PDF). Heidelberg: Springer Scientific. pp. 589–615. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-37654-5. ISBN 978-3-540-37653-8. Retrieved 29 October 2013. Most studies of human population genetics begin by citing a seminal 1972 paper by Richard Lewontin bearing the title of this subsection [29]. Given the central role this work has played in our field, we will begin by discussing it briefly and return to its conclusions throughout the chapter. In this paper, Lewontin summarized patterns of variation across 17 polymorphic human loci (including classical blood groups such as ABO and M/N as well as enzymes which exhibit electrophoretic variation) genotyped in individuals across classically defined 'races' (Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, Australian Aborigines [29] ). A key conclusion of the paper is that 85.4% of the total genetic variation observed occurred within each group. That is, he reported that the vast majority of genetic differences are found within populations rather than between them. In this paper and his book The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change [30], Lewontin concluded that genetic variation, therefore, provided no basis for human racial classifications. ... His finding has been reproduced in study after study up through the present: two random individuals from any one group (which could be a continent or even a local population) are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world (see proportion of variation within populations in Table 20.1 and [20]). {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)

cont. "While it is an undeniable mathematical fact that the amount of genetic variation observed within groups is much larger than the differences among groups, this does not mean that genetic data do not contain discern- able information regarding genetic ancestry. In fact, we will see that minute differences in allele frequen- cies across loci when compounded across the whole of the genome actually contain a great deal of informa- tion regarding ancestry. Given current technology, for example, it is feasible to accurately identify individu- als from populations that differ by as little as 1% in F ST if enough markers are genotyped. (See discussion below for a detailed treatment of the subject.) It is also important to note that when one looks at correlations in allelic variation across loci, self-identifi ed popula- tions and populations inferred for human subjects using genetic data correspond closely [12, 53] . " Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 04:35, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

• Krimsky, Sheldon; Sloan, Kathleen, eds. (2011). Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-52769-9. Retrieved 31 August 2013. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)

Like Whitmarsh and Jones (2010), the Krimsky and Sloan (2011) source has several useful chapters on medical genetics.

• Tattersall, Ian; DeSalle, Rob (1 September 2011). Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth. Texas A&M University Anthropology series number fifteen. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-1-60344-425-5. Retrieved 17 November 2013. Actually, the plant geneticist Jeffry Mitton had made the same observation in 1970, without finding that Lewontin's conclusion was fallacious. And Lewontin himself not long ago pointed out that the 85 percent within-group genetic variability figure has remained remarkably stable as studies and genetic markers have multiplied, whether you define populations on linguistic or physical grounds. What's more, with a hugely larger and more refined database to deal with, D. J. Witherspoon and colleagues concluded in 2007 that although, armed with enough genetic information, you could assign most individuals to 'their' population quite reliably, 'individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own.' {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)

• Barbujani, Guido; Colonna, Vincenza (15 September 2011). "Chapter 6: Genetic Basis of Human Biodiversity: An Update". In Zachos, Frank E.; Habel, Jan Christian (eds.). Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas. Springer. pp. 97–119. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-20992-5_6. ISBN 978-3-642-20992-5. Retrieved 23 November 2013. The massive efforts to study the human genome in detail have produced extraordinary amounts of genetic data. Although we still fail to understand the molecular bases of most complex traits, including many common diseases, we now have a clearer idea of the degree of genetic resemblance between humans and other primate species. We also know that humans are genetically very close to each other, indeed more than any other primates, that most of our genetic diversity is accounted for by individual differences within populations, and that only a small fraction of the species' genetic variance falls between populations and geographic groups thereof.

The book chapter by Barbujani and Colonna (2011) above is especially useful for various Wikipedia articles as a contrast between biodiversity in other animals and biodiversity in Homo sapiens.

• Barbujani, Guido; Ghirotto, S.; Tassi, F. (2013). "Nine things to remember about human genome diversity". Tissue Antigens. 82 (3): 155–164. doi:10.1111/tan.12165. ISSN 0001-2815. The small genomic differences between populations and the extensive allele sharing across continents explain why historical attempts to identify, once and for good, major biological groups in humans have always failed. ... We argue that racial labels may not only obscure important differences between patients but also that they have become positively useless now that cheap and reliable methods for genotyping are making it possible to pursue the development of truly personalized medicine.

By the way, the Barbujani, Ghirotto, and Tassi (2013) article has a very interesting discussion of SNP typing overlaps across the entire individual genome among some of the first human beings to have their entire individual genomes sequenced, with an especially interesting Venn diagram that would be a good graphic to add to this article.

• Marks, Jonathan (October 2013). "The Nature/Culture of Genetic Facts". Annual Review of Anthropology. 42. Annual Reviews: 247–267. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155558. ISBN 978-0-8243-1942-7. ISSN 0084-6570. Retrieved 23 November 2013. Lewontin's conclusions have stood up remarkably well, across diverse kinds of genetic markers, but this produces an odd paradox.

• Hawks, John (2013). "Significance of Neandertal and Denisovan Genomes in Human Evolution". Annual Review of Anthropology. 42. Annual Reviews: 433–449, 438. doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155548. ISBN 978-0-8243-1942-7. ISSN 0084-6570. Retrieved 4 January 2014. The shared evolutionary history of living humans has resulted in a high relatedness among all living people, as indicated for example by the very low fixation index (F_ST) among living human populations.

• Barbujani, Guido; Pigliucci, Massimo (2013). "Human races" (PDF). Current Biology. 23 (5): R185–R187. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.01.024. ISSN 0960-9822. Retrieved 2 December 2013. What does this imply for the existence of human races? Basically, that people with similar genetic features can be found in distant places, and that each local population contains a vast array of genotypes. Among the first genomes completely typed were those of James Watson and Craig Venter, two U.S. geneticists of European origin; they share more alleles with Seong-Jin Kim, a Korean scientist (1,824,482 and 1,736,340, respectively) than with each other (1,715,851). This does not mean that two random Europeans are expected to be genetically closer to Koreans than to each other, but certainly highlights the coarseness of racial categorizations.

• Pickrell, Joseph K.; Reich, David (September 2014). "Toward a new history and geography of human genes informed by ancient DNA". Trends in Genetics. 30 (9): 377–389, 378. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2014.07.007. PMC 4163019. PMID 25168683. Retrieved 16 September 2014. However, the data also often contradict models of population replacement: when two distinct population groups come together during demographic expansions the result is often genetic admixture rather than complete replacement. This suggests that new types of models – with admixture at their center – are necessary for describing key aspects of human history ([14–16] for early examples of admixture models).

A new reliable source that was just published this year is the massive International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences published by Elsevier. It is available online by subscription and widely available in academic libraries. It has several articles about the topic of this Wikipedia article.

• Barbujani, Guido (2015). "Race: Genetic Aspects". In Wright, James D. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second ed.). Elsevier. pp. 825–832. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.82004-8. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5. Retrieved 10 April 2015. Race remains an important component of our social and psychological world, but envisaging humans as subdivided in genetically differentiated races leads to poor evolutionary inference and to errors in clinical practice. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysource= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help) – via ScienceDirect (Subscription may be required or content may be available in libraries.)

• King, Nicelma J.; Murray, Carolyn B. (2015). "Race: Ethnicity and Health". In Wright, James D. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second ed.). Elsevier. pp. 812–819. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.14036-X. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5. Retrieved 10 April 2015. A growing body of evidence indicates that the traditional conceptualization of race is flawed. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health, after writing a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, unanimously declared, that there is only one race – the human race (Angier, 2000; NCHPEG, 2014). Our current racial categories are more alike than different in terms of biological characteristics and genetics, and there are no scientific criteria to classify the human population unambiguously into discrete biological categories with rigid boundaries. Thus, racial taxonomies are arbitrary, and race is more of a social construct than a biological one. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysource= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help) – via ScienceDirect (Subscription may be required or content may be available in libraries.)

There are other recent popular books on this article's topic that deserve mention, but I'll pause here and let other editors suggest sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 16:29, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Very nice. Thank you WeijiBaikeBianji. danielkueh (talk) 18:06, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

::WeijiBaikeBianji seems to have collected every example of somebody parroting Lewontin's fallacy. I fail to see how useful that is, unless you want to add ten references to a single point. Yes indeed, there is more genetic variation within than between races (most of which is neutral). However, this is true between species.

"Sewall Wright’s fixation index F ST measured among samples of world populations is often 0.15 or less when computed as an average over many alleles or loci. To many, this result indicates that the genetic similarities among human populations far outweigh the differences. For example, a finding like this led Richard Lewontin to claim that human races have no genetic or taxonomic significance (Lewon - tin 1972). Despite the far- reaching proclamations that researchers make from F ST , few have questioned the validity of how it is applied or interpreted. Earlier in this decade, Rick Kittles and I took an unusually critical look at F ST (Long and Kittles 2003). We analyzed a unique data set composed of short tandem repeat (STR) allele frequencies for eight loci genotyped in both humans and chimpanzees (Deka et al. 1995). These data made it possible to see how F ST played out when no one could dispute taxonomic and genetic significance. The answer surprised us. F ST was pretty close to the canonical 0.15 shown so many times for human populations. In our analysis, F ST was 0.12 for humans, but for humans and chimpanzees together, F ST rose only to 0.18." Update to Long and Kittles’s “Human Genetic Diversity and the Nonexistence of Biological Races” (2003): Fixation on an Index Jeffrey C. Long"

So I fail to see how F ST impugns race unless you want to argue that the difference between humans and chimpanzees is a social construct. But sure, we can edit in that some people think Lewontin's fallacy is some kind of meaningful fact, as long as this fact follows it. In addition:

"The study of Ahn et al. (2009) suggests that the pairwise distances among three individuals, a Korean (“SJK”), Craig Venter and James Watson, measured by multilocus ASD, are roughly similar despite the distinct geographical origin of SJK in relation to Venter and Watson (see also their Fig. 2E). These results are surprising in light of our model for n, which predicts that for worldwide distant populations (FST > 0.13) the probability for such an occurrence is virtually zero given as little as 200 independent and informative SNPs (Appendix F, Fig. F.1). In fact, with roughly 3.5 million SNPs sequenced in each individual genome,the pairwise distances Venter–Watson and Venter–SJK (or Watson–SJK) must show substantial discrepancy, since the ratio of average pairwise distances RAD is above 1.3 already at FST = 0.10 (see Fig. 5A). The paradoxical result is most likely an artifact of the high error rate and low coverage in Watson’s SNP calling (Yngvadottir et al., 2009)."

It's pretty lame to rely on this early single case. It almost like it was cherry picked to conform to a POV. As Witherspoon showed:

"Thus the answer to the question “How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?” depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, equation M44 can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is equation M45 ≅ 0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ∼20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, equation M46 ≅ 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes “never” when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations."

So in short edit in Lewontin's fallacy and supposed genetic similarity between races, but please edit in the data which counters it. Anything else would be dishonest. Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 01:26, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Pro-biological race views are very relevant to this article and must be included.Wajajad (talk) 02:57, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

There seems to be a reading comprehension problem here. The great majority of the cited authors are medical doctors, geneticists, or other persons with specific biological expertise. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 14:51, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Views must be represented per WP:NPOV (i.e., ...in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources). "Pro-biological race" views (if I know what that entails) are a very low proportion of the viewpoints published in reliable sources, and thus are afforded very little weight. Other than that, did any suggestions for improving the article? — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 04:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

""Pro-biological race" views (if I know what that entails) are a very low proportion of the viewpoints published in reliable sources"

How did you work that out? Captain JT Verity MBA (talk) 05:05, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Reading and basic math. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 07:13, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Deleted posts by sock of User:Mikemikev that have had no reply, struck the rest. Doug Weller (talk) 18:14, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

A new "pro-race" source

This article based on recent population genetic advances by avowed geneticist Razib Khan is an excellent source for the pro-race views in this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wajajad (talk • contribs) 02:04, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

• Razib Khan is a graduate student. An opinion piece is not adequate for sourcing scientific claims. The article suggests that Ashkenazi Jews are a race. The POV of this opinion article is quite clear.--I am One of Many (talk) 02:18, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
• @Wajajad:, the term "avowed geneticist" doesn't even make sense in this context. People do not become acknowledged as geneticists by what they avow, but by what they publish in the peer-reviewed professional literature. For correctly sourcing this article, it is helpful to review the Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine, which provide a helpful framework for evaluating sources. The guidelines on reliable sources for medicine remind editors that "it is vital that the biomedical information in all types of articles be based on reliable, third-party, published secondary sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."

Ideal sources for biomedical content includes literature reviews or systematic reviews published in reputable medical journals, academic and professional books written by experts in the relevant field and from a respected publisher, and medical guidelines or position statements from nationally or internationally recognised expert bodies. Primary sources should generally not be used for medical content.

To become an Avowed Geneticist, you have to be a member of the Holy Faith Church of Our Lady of the Chromosomes, I think. LOL  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:47, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

• The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that all "All Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources." (Emphasis in original.) They helpfully define a primary source in medicine as one in which the authors directly participated in the research or documented their personal experiences. By contrast, a secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources, usually to provide an overview of the current understanding of a medical topic. The general Wikipedia guidelines let us know that "Articles should rely on secondary sources whenever possible. For example, a review article, monograph, or textbook is better than a primary research paper. When relying on primary sources, extreme caution is advised: Wikipedians should never interpret the content of primary sources for themselves." There are a large number of sources that meet all these criteria already cited on this talk page that deserve to cited in the article. If one young author's opinion piece ignores some of that published professional literature, that has very little weight for deciding how to edit this article to reflect the sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 15:02, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

I had hope to find some help in interpreting a remark in another article that Amerinds are "Eurasians" which did not seem helpful to me.

Clearly the longer skulls and more open pores of Africans is useful to dispel heat. A darker skin to repel harmful uv rays. Likewise, the lighter skin of Caucasians was useful to allow the absorption of Vitamin D from the sun. The squarer heads and closed pores (and extra fat) of Asians was supposed to help to conserve heat. They have since moved south in Asia, rendering these differences nearly useless! Making this article PC seems a nuisance to those who need a clear, general level of demarcation. I've found there are other articles and will use one of those, I suppose. Student7 (talk) 17:44, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

Actually, many of those claims you made are simply false and many such claims are little more than Old wives' tales. People vary in indefinitely many biological characteristics. We can arbitrarily use any biological characteristic to define groups. We could create "racial" groups based on eye color or height. So you see, the POV pushed by pro-racers is simply an attempt reify their subjective racial views in arbitrary biological characteristics. --I am One of Many (talk) 17:58, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

::::Rushton (1998): "Diamond's classifications, however, are nonsensical. They are far more arbitrary than the traditional classifications because the traits he singles out for classifying have little, if any, predictive value beyond the initial classification. Such schemes are not only confused, but dishonest."

"The empirical reality appears to refute decisively the claim so confidently advocated by many philosophers that "as the number of traits increases, racial classification becomes increasingly difficult" (Andreasen 2004, 428), or that "multiplying phenotypic racial traits has the result … that … they correlate with one another in no particular order, throwing the alleged features for biological racial reality into an unorganized mess" (Glasgow 2009, 88). This is exactly backwards: multiplying relevant phenotypic racial traits brings more order and structure, and indeed lays ground for an objective biological classification." (Sesardic, 2010). Zhang500 08:26, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

I'll add another source to discuss here since there is a dearth of biological race sources in this article. Neil Risch et al. 2005 is a good source and a strong pro-race source confirming the existence of biological race through random SNPs with near 100% accuracy.Wajajad (talk) 08:45, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

Two sources for perceptions of race and genetics

Link 2 Link 2 The above two papers are good recent sources for perceptions of race and related science (eugenics, genetics, behavior genetics) among the public. Very few seem to hold to the race denial position. Wajajad (talk) 12:14, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing the links. It's not clear why a primary source about a survey conducted by a political science professor of the general public should influence how Wikipedians edit this article according to the established content guidelines here. The first sentence of the abstract of the 2013 paper notes "Most American social scientists and legal scholars now concur that the concept of race (like that of ethnicity), boundaries between groups, and purported racial characteristics are socially constructed, with minimal or no biological basis," and maybe we should think about that a little harder before proceeding to edit article text. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 13:49, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

"Abstract:

Most American social scientists and legal scholars now concur that the concept of race (like that of ethnicity), boundaries between groups, and purported racial characteristics are socially constructed, with minimal or no biological basis."

Emphasis added. Zhang500 21:58, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

Further POV editing. From the article:

"There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined."

This statement is referenced to Marks, Templeton three times, and the executive board of the AAA (not the members) going on about Lewontin's fallacy and skin color in 1998. Various international surveys in fact show a majority of relevant scholars hold the opposite view. Please can we remove the lie that there is a "consensus"? Zhang500 07:26, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

The thread below, at #"Consensus" of social construction demonstrates that even opponents of the idea concede that, yes, it is a general consensus, even if it has its challengers.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:11, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 27 July 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved per below. @My very best wishes: COMMONNAME is for the title, not the dab. However, this is an important enough article that if this move violates broader consensus we'll soon hear about it. — kwami (talk) 21:47, 4 August 2015 (UTC)

---

(non-admin closure)

Race (human classification) → Race (human categorization) – "Classification" implies a classifying system, but much of the article demonstrates that there's not anything systematic about it, and that quasi-systematic attempts at it have been mutually inconsistent. It is clear that it's categorization, which doesn't imply anything systematic. I think "classification" lends a false veneer of credibility to an idea that has been rejected by the sciences (physical anthropology, zoology, genetics, etc.) as a social construct, a cultural fiction. The present name is both a WP:NPOV and WP:NOR problem. Oh, and "human classification" is also confusable with "social class"; a disambiguator that introduces a new ambiguity is a failure.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  10:51, 27 July 2015 (UTC)

• Support. This is a good suggestion. I saw that a new discussion of a requested move of this page had appeared in my watchlist, and I feared that the suggested move would be tendentious and not based on sources. But I actually like this suggestion very much after reading your rationale, SMcCandlish, and I support this requested move. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 13:35, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
• Support - good eye. Red Slash 18:14, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
• Support per nom. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 19:43, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Seems entirely reasonable. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:03, 1 August 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose. (1) Yes, it is precisely the point that the page is about (pseudo)scientific classification of humans. This is reflected in current title. (2) No, the wording "classification" does not necessarily imply any scientific basis; people classify objects in everyday life. (3) Some concepts or ideas are highly controversial, and this is one of them, nothing special. The title should be constructed simply based on WP:Common name. If one can make a case that new title is better in this regard, then let's rename, but I do not see it at all. My very best wishes (talk) 20:23, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

"Consensus" of social construction

I'm being reverted[4] for changing an unsupported statement that social constructionism is the consensus view of race. The sources referenced do not support that claim. The burden is on those who would support that claim to demonstrate it. Zhang500 05:29, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

A good new source on the topic is a popular book by a professor of genetics, Fairbanks, Daniel J. (7 April 2015). Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1-63388-019-1. Retrieved 20 July 2015. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help) -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 12:56, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

The footnotes/bibliography in any first-year physical anthropology textbook should provide dozens of sources. Same goes for any work on human genetics, or on the sociology of "race". This term has lingered in the popular imagination, but a biological basis for what we socially construct as "races" has been rejected by biological and social sciences for a few generations now. The genetic truth is far, far more complex than this nonsense, since human population largely do not stay put, nor distinct, and haven't for at least tens of thousands of years. Classification of people by skin tone is absurd; East Africans who are all dark have more genetic diversity between neighbors than exists between the Irish and the Japanese. Peoples from the tropics tend to be darker as an evolutionary defense against the same increased solar radiation at those latitudes, not because they're all closely related.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:38, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

@WBB You've totally failed to support your position. I will therefore revert your edit. Zhang500 23:41, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

@Zhang500: WP:LMGTFY: [5] Some additional material I found in seconds, without even checking journal sites that have paywalls:

• Machery, Edouard; Faucher, Luc. "Social Construction and the Concept of Race" (PDF). Retrieved 31 July 2015. A dominant view about races today is the so called 'social constructionist' view.... [F]rom the 1970s on, it has been widely recognized that the biological concept of subspecies, that is, of populations of conspecifics that are genetically and morphologically different from each other, could not be applied to humans. ... Researchers agree that racialism has not been [evolutionarily] selected for: it is a byproduct of an evolved cognitive system, which was selected for another function. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

  This paper actually outlines some of what the critiques of social constructionism are, and illustrates why this "social constructionism is a lie!" nonsense is nonsense; social constructionism is simply not the be-all and end-all to the question, for everyone in every field. The the sub-thread below, I'll explain why this is of little present concern to Wikipedia.

• Secondary source: Wade, Nicholas (9 May 2014). "What Science Says About Race and Genetics". Time (Online ed.). "The Weekend Read" section. Retrieved 31 July 2015. A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis.

  This op-ed actually criticizes social constructionism; but it recognizes that it is a long-standing consensus, which is the question at issue here.

• Secondary source: Harris, Tom (13 May 2015). "Is Race a Social Construct or Scientific One?". WO Magazine. Retrieved 31 July 2015. It is of general consensus among various scientific groups that race is purely, entirely a social construct.

  Coincidentally, the piece rationally approaches medical critiques of social constructionism in precisely the way I do in the sub-thread below (using the same sickle cell disease example I picked!), demonstrating that this "social constructionism must be wrong because a few diseases are more prevalent among particular 'races'" idea is neither new, nor any kind of smoking gun. Frankly, the evolutionary psychology angle (also detailed below) is a more cogent critique, and it's just a partial one, a please to add evolutionary psychology approaches to the question.

• A science (not journalism) secondary source: Mukhopadhyay, Carol C.; Henze, Rosemary; Moses, Yolanda T. (11 December 2013). "The Fallacy of Race as Biology". How Real Is Race?: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. p. 5. ISBN 9780759122741. Retrieved 21 July 2015. Most scientists now reject the validity of biological races, yet the idea persists in the wider culture.

  There's an entire chapter devoted to this topic, over 70 pages. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:45, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Zhang500, demanding sources for content while at the same time making unsourced assertions in your own edits (i.e. the statement that "A minority of biologists hold the view that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed...") is inadvisable in relation to any article - and even more so when the article in question is subject to discretionary sanctions. I suggest that you take the time to actually look at the sources which have been provided (or indeed at any recent relevant textbook on the subject) before making further edits. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:00, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

"AndyTheGrump (talk | contribs)‎ . . (183,914 bytes) (-528)‎ . . (Undid revision 674005483 by Zhang500 (talk) rv undue promotion of fringe POV)"

What sources demonstrate that what is a majority POV is a "fringe" POV. You are lying. Zhang500 00:22, 1 August 2015 (UTC),

You are on very shaky ground here - I suggest that you redact that personal attack, before it gets reported. And then read the sources you have been given. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:26, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

A couple of magazines asserting this or that doesn't demonstrate a consensus in the relevant scientific field. Try again. Zhang500 00:42, 1 August 2015 (UTC),

Again: WP:LMGTFY: [6] Hint: That's a Google Scholar search, not "magazines". But we're able to rely to an extent on secondary, journalist sources for something like this, anyway. Whether there's a consensus on something is a social question, not a laboratory data question. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:45, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Note:Zhang500 has been blocked as a sock puppet of banned User:Captain JT Verity MBA. No surprises there... AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:44, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

Rationally approaching dissent regarding the general consensus in science

Really, we have three views to cover:

1. The general consensus, which does in fact clearly exist
2. The view that this consensus is shaky, which needs due but not WP:UNDUE coverage
3. The anti-consensus WP:FRINGE viewpoint, that the social construct is a lie, and that "race" is biological; this needs minimal coverage.

Let's look at the middle of these. Clearly it is not true that there is no dissent at all about the consensus. The dissent is simply not the prevailing view, so while it can be covered, it has to be within the bounds of WP:UNDUE. And it has to be covered accurately. I present three randomly selected examples below, the first reputably published examples I came across. Note that in none of these cases is a claim being made that consensus runs the other direction, but rather that the consensus may not be as clear as some think it is. All of the quotes I'm using here are too long for our own article, and one is nested, but they hint at where we need to go in explaining what the dissenting view of the consensus is.

• Hartigan, John, Jr. (June 2008). "Is Race Still Socially Constructed? The Recent Controversy over Race and Medical Genetics" (PDF). Science as Culture. 17 (2): 163–193. Retrieved 31 July 2015. A controversy is growing over long-established claims that race is a social construct rather than a biologically based concept. The primary site where this contest is being waged—in the field of genetics—is notable in that, until quite recently, genetics provided a firm ground for critiquing racial thinking and racist beliefs about linkages between an individual's phenotype and their personal characteristics and abilities. But challenges to the apparent scientific consensus on the biological insignificance of race are also emerging from the practice of clinical medicine, and they have the potential to impact how epidemiological research and public health interventions are conducted. This controversy, as well, is enveloping the very notion of social construction, which has been fundamental both to work in science studies and to numerous political claims concerning a variety of naturalized identities.1 Savvy political commentators are taking new findings by geneti- cists and directly assailing both social constructionist perspectives and their alleged influence in shaping policies redressing racial inequalities. ... I raise the prospect that social constructionist assertions are not effectively formulated in relation to race. ... [A]ssertions that race is socially constructed need to be drastically rearticulated.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

  So, Hartigan argues not against the idea, but against the present formulation of it, and is relying primarily upon a medical basis. We'll return to that in a moment.

• A secondary source simultaneously tells us that the consensus does exist and is already regarded as "the old orthodoxy" (as long ago as 2005!), while also hinting at where the confusion lies: Holt, Jim (11 December 2005). "Madness About a Method". The Way We Live Now. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 21 July 2015. For the last three decades, the scientific consensus has been that 'race' is merely a social construct, since genetic variation among individuals of the same race is far greater than the variation between races. Recently, however, a fallacy in that reasoning – a rather subtle one – has been identified by the Cambridge University statistician A.W.F. Edwards. The concept of race may not be biologically meaningless after all; it might even have some practical use in deciding on medical treatments, at least until more complete individual genomic information becomes available. Yet in the interests of humane values, many scientists are reluctant to make even minor adjustments to the old orthodoxy. 'One of the more painful spectacles of modern science,' the developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi has observed, 'is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups."' 

  The thing is, "ethnic group" and "race" are not synonyms. The concept "black" in the racialism sense includes over 100 distinct ethnic groups, some of whom are more distantly related than Norwegians are to Indonesians, genetically. The fact that, e.g., the genetics that lead to malarial resistance among Africans are also linked with sickle-cell anemia doesn't actually prove any kind of special close relation between distinct ethnic groups in Africa that we already know are very widely divergent; all it does it tell us something about that particular gene (or group of genes; I'm not a geneticist, much less a specialist in that condition, and don't presume to lecture on its exact mechanisms, but am making a general point).

  Later note: This (as is clear by the citation to Leroi) is a decade-later followup to a previous NYT op-ed: Leroi, Armand Marie (14 March 2005). "A Family Tree in Every Gene". New York Times. Retrieved 31 July 2015.. Like most "social construct denialism" [I don't feel bad calling it that, since Leroi calls his opponents "race denialists"], it relies on medical research arguments that have an intrinsically unsound basis (see elsewhere on this page when I cite sources that go into this). But Leroi doesn't go as far some people think he does. He suggests race, in a modern reconceptualization, could be a beneficial "shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences." I.e., he explicitly realizes it is, and advocates it as, a social construct, just a different one from the old version! This Leroi piece itself was immediately shredded by others. Some took it apart in detail, e.g.: Wallace, Robert (2005). "A Racialized Medical Genomics: Shiny, Bright and Wrong". Race – The Power of an Illusion. PBS. Retrieved 31 July 2015. [M]uch of Leroi's article unravels his own argument. .... [he] recognizes these complications, but still asks us to ignore them in favor of, ironically enough, a social construct. ... Leroi and the new racialists are trying to get around population thinking by correlating aggregations across loci, as a set of emergent essentialisms. Funny, though, that within the very medical framework they are attempting to define, as they live by the sword of correlation, so must they die by that sword. When we correlate putative racial continua across diseases, the same groups are time and again imputed the most susceptible alleles. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |work= (help)

  The especially interesting thing to me is that Leroi is himself an evolutionary developmental biologist, yet we know (see elsewhere in what I've written here over the last couple of hours) that current thinking in evolutionists' peer-reviewed papers, ten years after Leroi's op-ed, is that their approach isn't contradictory to social constructivism, but complementary to it, and that they need to be combined. PS: This response piece by Wallace also happens to outline three, not just two, approaches to the entire question, which is precisely the conclusion I've come to in skimming the low-hanging fruit in the available literature. I'll be very surprised if other sources, then, don't also confirm this.

  This pieces refutes Leroi's on more basic conceptual and reasoning grounds: Hammonds, Evelynn M. (7 June 2006). "Straw Men and Their Followers: The Return of Biological Race". Race and Genomics. Social Science Research Council. Retrieved 31 July 2015.. Hammonds makes the keen point that, as with Herrnstein & Murray's widely debunked but widely influential The Bell Curve, ideas like Leroi's are influential, despite their flaws, because they are felt to naturalize and rationalize pervasive social inequities. [Side point: These warring op-eds also clearly illustrate why op-eds are primary sources, not secondary: They are non-neutral opinion pieces by subject matter experts, which are published primarily to generate debate, which sells more newspapers and magazines. If you think "it was in a newspaper, so it must be secondary", you're making a mistake.]  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:43, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

• Next, another secondary source questions the consensus, but does so in a way that doesn't seem particularly useful: Morning, Ann (24 June 2011). The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach About Human Difference. University of California Press. pp. 47–48. ISBN 9780520950146. Retrieved 31 July 2015. In the absence of empirical data that can offer a definitive statement regarding racial conceptualization among today's [2011] scientists, a wide range of scholarly opinions flourish. Some observers believe that scientists have overwhelmingly rejected a biological concept of race, while others are persuaded that scientists have largely retained such essentialist views.

  Morning essentially acknowledges that from one approach to studying science, a consensus emerges, while from another approach, one does not. She therefore doesn't think there's really a consensus. But her data is surveys of questions asked of scientists choosing to respond to the surveys. This really isn't comparable to a literature review of what the peer-reviewed, reputably published consensus is at all. WP basically doesn't really care what the aggregate personal approach is among scientists in their private thoughts that they choose to share in anonymized surveys; the encyclopedia cares what the actual science says according to scientific reliable sources.

Followup: Let's look again at a source mentioned in the parent thread:

• Machery, Edouard; Faucher, Luc. "Social Construction and the Concept of Race" (PDF). Retrieved 31 July 2015. The cognitive and evolutionary approach to racialism is a needed supplement to the social constructionist approach. ... Thus we are confronted with two explanatory approaches to racial categorization that are symmetrically incomplete. This point has been recognized by several evolutionary-minded researchers. Indeed, they have paid lip service to the project of integrating the constructionist approach and the cognitive/evolutionary approach in the domain of race (e.g., Hirschfeld 1996). However, in the domain of race, few have walked their talk. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

  This is very important for the Wikipedia analysis: It is absolutely not WP's job to try to wade in on current topics of scientific conflict, per WP:NOR; all we can do is accurately report what these conflicts are and what the conflicting sides have to say, within the bounds of encyclopedic coverage. It's highly dubious that elaborating in great detail this particular inter-field dispute, a presently moving target, is an encyclopedic enterprise.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:18, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

This is an issue that encyclopedia editors (that is, professional encyclopedia editors) have already been grappling with for years. I'll cite some encyclopedia articles here as I expand this edited reply. From a human geneticist: Barbujani, Guido (2015). "Race: Genetic Aspects". In Wright, James D. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second ed.). Elsevier. pp. 825–832, 825. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.82004-8. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5. Retrieved 10 April 2015. Abstract: Genetic research has shown that all individuals and populations are different, but no agreement has ever been reached on the number and definition of human races, with proposed races numbering from none to 200. Human genetic differences are patterned in geographical space, but each population harbors a large proportion of the species' diversity and shares with other populations most of its genetic variants. Race remains an important component of our social and psychological world, but envisaging humans as subdivided in genetically differentiated races leads to poor evolutionary inference and to errors in clinical practice. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysource= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help) – via ScienceDirect (Subscription may be required or content may be available in libraries.) -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 03:20, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

The Leroi piece I just added a citation to above makes essentially the same point, despite being opposed to social constuctionism: "[I]f a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia – more or less the major races of traditional anthropology. ... Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups". (As noted above, Leroi's often missed point is that he just disagrees with the extant social construct, and argues for a new one; so he's not a true anti-social-constructionist anyway.) This is one of the reasons the Wallace response to that article, also cited above, criticizes its conclusions because Leroi undermines his own argument; Wallace: "Even as population biologists [like Leroi] use differences in averages to heuristically distinguish populations ... by race ..., individuals clearly vary in all traits and can be reaggregated from trait to trait." I.e., the aggregations are arbitrarily correlated, depending on what it is you're looking for. It's actually mathematically absurd to suppose that, by averaging data about every phenotypic criterion we can think to include, and coming up with 5 geographical correlative lumps after that number-crunching, that these are, as groups, somehow intrinsically separate (i.e. "races" in any meaningful sense).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:43, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Funny how various phenotypic and genetic methods all produce the same clusters and how your data detached imagination is just that. 211.45.220.24 (talk) 12:48, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

"Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups"

Yeah, that would be various levels in a hierarchical taxonomy. Strange how such childish fallacies work when people are falling over themselves to be "not racist". 211.45.220.24 (talk) 12:50, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

No, it wouldn't be. It would be meaningless trivia. There is no use of any kind for a "hierarchical taxonomy" of a single species down to 1,000 different groups. And biological taxonomy is not simply genetic groupings, though certain cladists would like it that way; they are missing the forest for their one specialist tree. A gene in isolation is relatively insignificant most of the time, and they're highly mobile between populations. It's the collections of genes in a group that result in consistently heritable traits that make up an identifiable population. And one trait (e.g. really dark skin) generally doesn't make one. It's an assemblage of genetically heritable phenotypic traits that make a population worth classifying taxonomically. The stupidity of the racialist hypothesis is the very fact that neighboring African peoples often have greater genetic diversity between them than do the Irish and the Japanese. It's literally impossible for the Africans to be a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:13, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

On the "ethnicity and race are not synonyms" question, there's plenty of literature on this, too. Just one example, found near the top of the Google Scholar search in the parent thread, and which points out severe problems in the inaccurate uses of theses words in medical research in particular (i.e., the very field that is the main one purporting to be challenging social constructionism!):

• McKenzie, K. J.; Crowcroft, N. S. (20 July 1994). "Race, ethnicity, culture, and science: Researchers should understand and justify their use of ethnic groupings". British Medical Journal. 309 (6950): 286–287. PMC 2540908. Retrieved 31 July 2015. Race and ethnicity are commonly used variables in medical research. Each year about 2500 papers are indexed under the headings 'ethnic groups' or 'racial stocks' on Medline.... Patterns of disease ...are increasingly being explained in ethnic or racial terms.... However, substantial problems exist with this burgeoning literature. The categories of race or ethnic group are rarely defined, the use of terms is inconsistent, and people are often allocated to racial or ethnical group, arbitrarily. [One major medical research fund] classes all disadvantaged groups as 'black populations', believing that the experience of racism is paramount.'

  The paper outlines many other problems with these usages, especially in medical research in particular. How can a field which is mix-and-matching, and intentionally incorrectly categorizing people as "black" for social reasons that have nothing to do with genetics, then be taken to claim, in the aggregate, to be challenging the notion of social contructionism? Medicine is clearly an integral aspect of the constructing to begin with.

Morning (2011) is more critical of social constructionism than what I quoted would suggest; I wasn't trying to encapsulate her views, just address her approach to the topic. She says elsewhere in the same material that "The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic [of what scientist's surveyed views are], however, do seem to largely rule out ... a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning". I've already addressed why her assessment of what scientists admit about their personal views is less (if at all) relevant to WP as what research they publish. One thing that's not been addressed is the straw man latent in such arguments, the "purely" caveat. To what extent science tells us (or there's a consensus that science tells us) that "race" is primarily a social construct has not even been approached yet in this discussion. The idea that no one can be counted in favor of social constructivism unless they agree that it is the 100% total answer to all relevant questions about race is a red herring, as well as obvious original research; the evolutionary psychology approach is concrete proof that such an assumption is WP:BOLLOCKS.

I could do this all day (the Google Scholar search alone digs up dozens of additional directly relevant sources, just in the first few pages of results, and that's without even checking more specialized journal search sources). But this is enough for the shepherds of this article to work with; I've even formatted the citations for you.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:30, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

PS: An additional bit: Leroi (2005) above suggests that "The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist" and a follow-up by the same writer "a few years later"; probably wouldn't be hard to dig up these exact sources if necessary. We know that idea is much older, pre-dating WW2, but this is a reliably-enough published statement, and one specifically about the dominance of the idea rather than its origin, that we can probably include it. This one even comes from someone opposed to the social construct theory; if the idea's opposition considers it "dominant" and can even trace where the dominance starts, I think we've conclusively answered the question of whether it's dominant.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:43, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

PPS: Here's another one: Gannett, Lisa (June 2004). "The Biological Reification of Race". British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 55 (2): 323–345. Retrieved 1 August 2015. A consensus view appears to prevail among academics from diverse disciplines taht biological races do not exist, at least in humans, and that race-concepts and race-objects are socially constructed. The consensus view has been challenged recently by Robin O. Andreasen's cladistic account of biological race. ... [F]rom a scientific viewpoint there are methodological, empirical, and conceptual problems with Andreasen's position, and ... from a philosophical perspective, Andreasen's adherence to rigid dichotomies between science and society, facts and values, nature and culture, and the biological and the social needs to be relinquished. There's an entire section titled "Consensus view: biological races do not exist". Papers like this (and there are many, in multiple fields) are a clear indication that a) it is a generally accepted consensus; b) there are challenges to it, enough to attract repeat but often negative attention in journals (i.e., the contrarian view is notable enough we should cover it, within the bounds of WP:UNDUE.)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:54, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Specific proposal on how to proceed

This article should document:

1. The consensus in favor of social constructionism, as at least the principal process behind the conceptualization of "race", both exists and is widely recognized, within science and in general-audience writing about science. (Note: The authors of a paper cited above have previously done a literature review on this topic that should probably be consulted in depth: Machery, Edouard; Faucher, Luc (24 December 2005). "Why Do We Think Racially? Culture, Evolution and Cognition". In last=Cohen, Henri; Lefebvre, Claire (eds.). Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 1009–1033. ISBN 978-0080446127. {{cite book}}: Missing pipe in: |editor1= (help). I don't have a copy of this, and it's a very expensive textbook, so should probably be obtained via interlibrary loan. The relevant pages are not included in the Google Books preview.
2. The field of medical research in particular has raises some challenges to this consensus. But it has in turn been challenged on its own conceptualization of the issue, because of inconsistent use and definitions of key but distinct concepts, and its own injection of social considerations into the midst of non-social science work. Evolutionary psychology posits that some of its findings and approaches need to be integrated with social constructionism for the approach to be more sound, but that this integration work has barely begun as of August 2015.

That should be entirely sufficient for this article's purposes, as of this point in time. I suggest further that:

3. The state of this material should be reviewed annually, at least, to see whether there's been any sea change, e.g. strides in integrating the dominant genetics and physical anthropology approach with nascent evolutionary psychology material, in a cross-discipline way.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:30, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

• I think the subject of this page is poorly defined. Is it about "race as a social concept" (first phrase) or is it about classification of humans into different ethnic groups and populations? Are we telling that different human ethnic groups and populations do not exist? In other words, after reading this page one might conclude that there are no genetic differences between different human populations or that human populations do not exist. Not so according to population genetics as far as I remember. My very best wishes (talk) 21:07, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

How does a concept being defined, constructed, and used socially and sociologically translate into "does not exist"?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:04, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Some editors have paid good money to trace their ancestors, female-all-the-way back, or male-all-the-way back, to discover that their ancestor orginated in Europe or Asia or Africa, having migrated there from Africa. National Geographic has such a site. They could hardly do this without recognizing differences in mitochondria or whatever for men. There are differences observable to science. Once assimilated, the ancestor-all-the-way back stays the same, however, regardless of assimilation. So it may be deficient in describing the person whose DNA was submitted.

But what about sickle cell deficiency, apparently evolved to resist malaria? These, and other differences, are scientifically observable.

Anyway, ancestry is already incorporated in a number of articles about colonized areas in the Caribbean and South America. Student7 (talk) 20:01, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Four historical sources, 1966–1973

This paper was originally presented at the AAAS symposium "The Utility of the Construct of Race", Washington, D. C., December 30, 1966. Baker, Paul T. "The biological race concept as a research tool [reprint]". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 27 (1): 21–25. doi:10.1002/ajpa.1330270104. Retrieved 10 August 2015.

Abstract: In present day research in human biology, the validity of the concept of biological race rests on its utility as a research tool. The methodology of this research into human biological variability is a multidimensional application of the comparative method, utilizing, as one dimension, genetic distance. The body of this paper suggests two generalizing principles for the establishment of genetic distance. Genetic distance may occur due to physical or temporal isolation or in conjunction with environmental differences. A brief analysis of the fifteenth century human populations examines the relationship between these principles and presently used racial taxonomic systems. It is concluded that race may be defined operationally as a rough measure of genetic distance in human populations and as such may function as an informational construct in the multidisciplinary area of research in human biology.

The first page of the slightly-over-4-page paper is previewable here, and given its age may be available elsewhere.

For some critical context on the scramble in US and UK genetics to backpedal away from race in wake of WWII and nazism, see this 1973 piece (full, short text): Provine, William B. (23 November 1973). "Geneticists and the Biology of Race Crossing: Geneticists changed their minds about the biological effects of race crossing". Science. 182 (4114 pages=790–796). doi:10.1126/science.182.4114.790. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Missing pipe in: |number= (help) An abstract is available here. The paper goes into some detail about changes in scientific views on this question between the 1930s and the 1970s.

Some other sources, from 1979 to 1999, are listed below the abstract as having cited this, and two of them seem like "likely suspects" to use for this article: "Science and Race" in American Behavioral Scientist (1996), and "The Controversy Between Biometricians and Mendlians: A Test Case for the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge", in Social Science Information (1980).

While I'm pretty firmly in the social constructionist camp (modulo some evolutionary psychology approaches to why we seem to want so badly to racialize), we need sources like this to elucidate how the approach changed, when, and why. Even as late as 1973, there was resistance to such a change in thinking in the scientific mainstream, largely on the basis of "lack of new data", when what was going on was a fundamental shift in framing the relevant questions. Obviously we've come a long way since then in getting new data.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:02, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

Orthodox views

Adding sources..."The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs" - Even If tend to agree with supportive findings, it must be pointed out that social scientists will say something to make you smile and another day to make you cry. It worthwhile to note that the statement is a "orthodoxy" and that is mostly held by social scientists (TIME May 9, 2014/ http://time.com/91081/what-science-says-about-race-and-genetics/). There is no AMEN in science RudiLefkowitz (talk) 22:52, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

Given all the above material on this, someone who wants to really work on this article in depth can used what's been provided in this and the above thread or two to build a section summarizing the nature of this consensus/orthodoxy. It is widespread, it's challenged from some quarters, and some of these challenges are weak, some may not be, and some are not really challenges but tangential and modifying. There's also the matter that just because something is an orthodoxy and resistance to changing the view is strong and hidebound and politicized, doesn't mean it's wrong. That the moon landings were not faked is a strong orthodoxy, for example.

Aside from that, we need to keep clear the anthropological views and the "social science" views (whatever that means), even if they somewhat converge. This lead shouldn't commingle them without discussion and a clear idea where we're going with that. There seem to be several ways to approach this (and I'm paraphrasing, not using exact wording):

1. There's a consensus in anthropology, and it's shared by several fields classified as social sciences, including sociology ... (My preference, FWIW. Sources needed for each field claimed.)
2. There's a consensus in several fields classified as social sciences, including anthropology, sociology ... (This is a re-scope, away from race as anthro topic, and to the consensus itself as a topic, a consensus that is allegedly shared [are we sure? is it the same or just similar?]. I think that would need an RfC. Main downside is that if the scope is broadened, it will open a floodgate of PoV pushing – "anything goes now". Also, not all anthro. disciplines are properly classified as social sciences. Sourced needed for each field claimed, and for the idea that they're in agreement - putting them together this way would be OR without secondary RS doing so.)
3. There's a consensus in anthropology, and it's shared across the social sciences [plural] (This is a very broad claim; extraordinary sourcing required, as there's high OR danger of conflating not-quite-comparable views.)
4. There's a consensus across the social sciences [plural], including anthropology and sociology (The same kind of re-scope noted above, plus the same very broad claim. RfC; OR danger; plus lumping all of anth. into social.)
5. There's a consensus in anthropology, and it is shared by "social science" [i.e. sociology and some disciplines closely related to it]. (This would not need to be in the lead sentence or even the lead. It's too much like "Elizabeth II is the queen of the United Kingdom. Elizabeth I was, too.")

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:55, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

"Race" in non-human contexts (specifically, botany): request redoing 1 short paragraph

Under the heading "Biological classification" (currently 3.2), a paragraph now reads:

In biology the term "race" is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally when it is used it is synonymous with subspecies.[63] For mammals, the taxonomic unit below the species level is usually the subspecies.[64]

I think this needs improvement. Here's an example citation from a work of scientific botany, discussing the Douglas-fir, a tree of major commercial importance:

Although the races described above were statistically significantly different, a degree of intergradation was evident. Thus, the northern inland race and coastal race intergrade in central British Columbia, northeastern Washington, and northern Idaho as well as in the mountains of central and east central Oregon. The coastal race intergrades with the Sierra Nevada race in coastal and northern California.

I prefer to let others edit the present article, Race (human categorization). I recognize that the word "race", as it is used in botany, isn't the main topic of this article. I commend the article for citing published sources (I haven't checked them). But I doubt that the cited sources considered usage in botany, which is part of biology. Thus my conclusion is: The paragraph that I'm flagging needs redoing. Oaklandguy (talk) 22:45, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

@Oaklandguy: You've not identified any actual problem in the text, though this example might be useful over at Race (biology). The quote isn't inconsistent in any way with what the present article says. Probably all that really should be done is removing the second sentence, since it's misleading (the unit below species is subspecies in all of zoology, not just for mammals), and off-topic (this isn't the article about that stuff, and "race" is used in biology with the same "more or less a subspecies, that we're not going to bother to classify in more detail" meaning. It's most often used in botany in the subdiscipline of phytopathology to classify fungal varieties that evolve too fast to bother formally describing and naming them as subspecies. They're only of interest as pathogens in commercial agriculture, and it's not necessary for be more formal about them than "Race N1 responds really to this fungicide, race N2 doesn't, and here's how to tell which one you've got in your greenhouses."  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:15, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I was able to do a minor rewrite that corrected and preserve that bit while adding the botanical summary without getting into details. It's covered at Race (biology) in detail, and the section now links there:

The term race in biology is used with caution because it can be ambiguous. Generally, when it is used it is effectively a synonym of subspecies. (For animals, the only taxonomic unit below the species level is usually the subspecies; there are narrower infraspecific ranks in botany, and race does not correspond directly with any of them.)

Does this resolve the issue to your satsifaction?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:09, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I think this is a fine revision. Oaklandguy (talk) 19:35, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

References

Race as social construct

The very first sentence - "Race, as a social construct, is a group of people who share similar and distinct physical characteristics" needs to be explained better. I had a real difficult time wrapping my head around the entire concept of race being a social construct since were that true than forensic anthropologists (trained to determine the race/gender from human skeletal remains) would be akin to fortune tellers or psychics, (which is not the case). I looked online for a better explanation that's easier to understand and found one that should be included somewhere in this article:

"Take two people from Rwanda. One is Hutu, the other is Tutsi. In Rwanda these are separate races in conflict, with genocide in the recent history. Take those same two people and put them in downtown Los Angeles. The Hutu/Tutsi divide is meaningless in the USA, to the residents of LA both people are one race: black. How can two people be different races in one culture, but the same race in another? Because their race is not an intrinsic property, but a construct of their society and context." - The above quote is found on this page : [[7]], a rephrased from another source.

An excellent analogy to illustrate what is meant by social construct and race and clear up misconceptions that should be added to this article. Cheers! Meishern (talk) 19:48, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Off-topic

This is like saying different breeds of Dogs is a social construct since as dogs, they are obviously are different but as animal, they are all dogs, therefore, different breeds of dogs are social construct!! They are no doubt that not all Blacks are the same, but that doesn't mean Blacks are a group doesn't exist. There are race and sub races(sub groups). Race obviously exists. Wiether you like it or not. Pretending it doesn't will not do you any Good. If People with Blond hair and White skin living in Northern Europe exist in your opinion, I don't see why would a wider race classification would be a problem. if you admit there is a Hutu and Tutsi, What's the problem with a black race(Group). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.52.201.176 (talk • contribs) 06:44, 7 January 2016 (UTC) Thank you for proving the case against yourself. Dog breeds are a social construct. No two major cynological organizations have the same list of breeds, they all define each breed (even the ones they list in common) differently, and classify them into groups differently. Moving on: It does mean that Blacks as a group don't exist, in any objective sense. It's just a classification based on skin color and a few other traits that are the result of the same evolutionary, environmental pressures on people with widely different actual genetics (more diverse than anywhere else in the world). It's like saying "I can observe that a bunch of dogs are tan, so I say all tan dogs are the Tans and they form a race of dogs, and you can't tell me that's not real, because I'm looking at them right now." That's approximately a 6-year-old's reasoning. A cat bit me once, therefore cats are mean and I hate them. Same pattern of "logic". Moving on again: the Hutu and the Tutsi are cultures, not races in any scientific sense; their existence isn't an "admission". The fact that they treat each other as wholly different "races", with a great deal of animosity, while to most people elsewhere they're essentially indistinguishable without blood samples and genetic testing, makes the point: Race is a social idea, a label we stick on people based on patterns we perceive. Humans are very good at this. We've created an imaginary herb "race" called "oregano", populated with Mexican oregano, Cuban oregano, and American oregano, all based on their scent and flavor similarity to real or Mediterranean oregano; some of these are not even in the same botanical family at all; the perceived similarity is simply incidental, and not genetically supportable. People with light skin and hair also exist in Japan (see Ainu) and in various other places, including Central Asia (various), and high in the Andes (see Chachapoya culture), without being closely related to Central and Northern Europeans. Peoples who are, on average, darker than many African groups live in southern India (various) and insular Southeast Asia (see Negritos). See also any of a number of photo-essays like this one for people as dark as average for Africans but often having features more in common with Europeans or northern Asians; note that they all live pretty close to the equator or derive fairly recently from ones that did. Polar bears, arctic foxes, and arctic hares (etc.) are all white; it's because they converged on that trait, through different genetic paths. It's not because white canines and snow rabbits have been mating. It's environmental pressure on entirely different gene pools to select for similar traits.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼  16:06, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

@Meishern: That sounds like a really good idea, though we should either use the original RS version if it's findable, and makes a good quote, or work from the original to paraphrase it in WP's own idiom. We can't use some Reddit post as a source. I wholeheartedly agree that a plain-English explanation like this would be a great help in this article.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:26, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I finally found a source for the Hutu/Tutsi story. Analogy used by Dr. Troy Duster in a NYT article [8] and the text from the article reads "As Duster sees it, race is a relationship, largely dependent on social context. Take a Tutsi and a Hutu and set them down in Los Angeles, he says, and they're both the same race, both black. But put them back in Rwanda, and they're two different races, different enough to slaughter each other." Cheers! Meishern (talk) 05:04, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

yea, dogs are social constructs like you say. so are fish (see below). So is virtually everything we classify. So it seems totally redundant to point this out and focus so much on this on the article for race.ArmyMenRTS (talk) 00:09, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

A Hutu and a Tutsi may look the same, but they are different peoples, not races. I don't know the current PC terminology, but it's set up as Aryan, Mongoloid, and Negroid. That's not something that would confuse you if they were plopped down in LA. If race is instantly discernible, and not because Group A wars with Group B (English and French must have been different races several hundred years ago), it's not a social construct. A preference for baguettes in and of itself doesn't distinguish you genetically from someone that hates them. What is arguably a social construct is looking at someone of mixed race, and slapping one on them, even if it's not a majority constituent. I.e., President Obama is considered to be black by most. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.162.33.175 (talk • contribs)

Except they consider themselves different races... The Germans considered Jews a race. The English considered the Irish a different race. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 23:02, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah. I'll outdent and put a new subtopic heading on this, since there's a lot to cover about why this "national race" stuff is part of the proof that race is a social construct.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:27, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

A crash course in why it's a social construct

The entire idea of "the Three Races" is genetically ignorant. The underlying truth is really haplogroups and their interrelation. They are not constrained by national boundaries, do not correspond to linguistic groups, and are not chained to things like skin tone or nose shape, which are the product of combinations of different traits in various haplogroups and their subsequent mixing, statistically clumped geographically and sometimes by social constraints (like caste breeding, and other forms of xenophobia). Humans are innately geared for pattern recognition, to such an extent that we'll exaggerate patterns that do exist, and mentally invent them when they're not actually there.

A good demonstration of this is that Indian, Pakistani, Persian, Semitic, and Arab people with albinism are regularly mistaken for Russians, Scandinavians, etc., by appearance. The "characteristic" features of these populations (e.g. a certain range of skin tones, nose shape, cheekbone shape, etc.), are not actually characteristic, but shared by other groups. Regional populations tend to aggregate particular ranges of these traits (determined by intermingling of certain haplogroups with certain others, but not with those (much) that are not native to or heavily introduced into the area; various of these traits are preserved in other populations, just not in exact same combination, and it's usually skin tone we key off of. And we do it poorly. Different haplogroups and the genes most commonly found in them can result in the same trait; various southern Asian groups, Australian Aborigines, Papuans, etc., are darker on average than many African groups. But the "African" nose is also commonly found (with more "Asian" features) in much of China, and among Central and South American indigenous peoples. A "beak" nose associated with Mediterraneans is also common in Japan, which is also home to the Ainu, a population of pale-skinned people. And so on. Anyone who believes there really are Caucusoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid "races" simply doesn't study ethnology, or travel much.

The term "race" (and its cognates in all the Germanic and Romance languages) originated as a synonym of "breed" (of domestic animal), and was used metaphorically as a national term ("the race of Germans", etc.). After Darwin and the rise of taxonomic nomenclature, it was borrowed by early biologists to mean a biologically definable group within a species, but this was later replaced with the term subspecies (and some even finer divisions like forma in botany). "Race" (or raza in Spanish, etc.) is still used in both the "breed" and metaphoric "people of a nation" sense in some languages, and rarely still in English. The idea, unfortunately, took hold in the public imagination in the Victorian era that humanity was divided into "races", i.e. subspecies, and early anthropologists (to their eternal shame) went along with this and promoted the idea, despite their being no scientific basis for it (much of the fin-de-siecle passion for anthropometry was a field-wide attempt to provide this evidence. It failed.) They certainly do not use this term today. With modern genetics, it's proved to be complete hogwash.

"Race" in biology today is only used to refer to sub-specific populations that are not subspecies but even narrower, and identified by a very specific, defining, innate characteristic. One example is an insect group with a unique mating chirp, both made and responded to, that causes them to only mate with others in the same population and not intergrade with other, otherwise identical, populations in the same area, which will over enough time cause them to speciate (or die out through lack of hybrid vigor and its genetic diversity). Another is a species of fungus that infects one cultivar of melons virulently, is barely and weakly seen on a few other varieties, and does not flourish at all on others (there are lots of these, and they mutate so quickly that no one bothers to try to formally classify them as subspecies or whatever; by the time the trinomem was official, the race might not even exist any longer). Another is an animal that feeds on only one particular subspecies on plant and cannot be distinguished from others of the same species in the same area, even chromosomally, other than by observing what they will eat. Another is plant or animal population found only in a very constrained environmental niche that they cannot move away from it. And so on. There's nothing at all like this among humans. There is no human population that does not sexually respond to other humans unless they have an exact voice tone and speak only at a certain time of day. There are no human populations innately incapable of thriving in another human group's environment or eating their foods, until they produce enough mutant offspring adapted to the change.

So, if humans aren't artificially and selectively bred livestock (inbred royal families notwithstanding); do not have traits that are innately and literally, not metaphorically or politically, defined by national boundaries; are not subspecies; and are not races by modern biological definition of that word, then there is nothing left that "race" applied to humans can possibly be but a social construct.

And it obviously is such a construct. Everyone with dark complexion and a broad nose is "black" to Americans, but actual Africans can tell their groups apart by features very easily (including the fact that some actually have thin, cartilaginous noses), while to them any African-American (or Afro-British, etc.) is a mixed-looking "coloured" (i.e. part-European) person. If you spend a lot of time (and pay attention) in a place with a lot of Asians of different backgrounds, like San Francisco, you can learn to tell Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and South-east Asians apart on sight with reasonable accuracy; but to someone from Idaho, Ireland, or Nairobi they'll all just look "Asian". Negritos, who are closer related to New Guinean and Maori peoples, were named that by European explorers because they were dark and broad-nosed, and the visitors just couldn't figure out they weren't misplaced Africans, though today few if any of us would fail to see the distinction and recognize them as Asian–Pacific by the features we're "trained" culturally to look for. The "there must be races because I can tell the difference between black and white and Asian" argument, a form of "I know it when I see it" fallacy, is in fact provably fallacious, because people have felt that way throughout history, yet if you just wait a few hundred years, the categorizations they come up with mismatch. It is therefore demonstrably non-objective. They're simply looking for and applying different culturally determined criteria with which to categorize. Less than a century ago, the peoples of Turkey and what are now

What is going on here is humans innately categorize things, and begin doing so early in the language acquisition process, but exactly how they categorize isn't innate. Sometimes it's very subjective. Early English settlers in New England divided Native Americans into two "races", the "savages" versus the "Five Civilized Tribes", based on behavior and social organization level, without any realization that genetically there was less distinction between any of these groups than between English people from Devon versus York. Meanwhile, there's actually more genetic diversity between neighboring peoples in Africa than there is between Danish and Nepalese. The Three Races hypothesis is untenable. It's closely akin to the medieval idea that there are Man, animals, birds, fish, and plants. All of us who are not African are descended from a single one of the multiple population groups of Africa, just as fish and birds are really animals.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:27, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

List of races

Would this article benefit by having a list of human races? Margolis-Marmite (talk) 10:34, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the article makes it clear why such a list can't be made, or rather that it would only be one point of view. Doug Weller talk 17:46, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Yep. We should probably have an article on attempts at such lists however, as there have been many, some quite influential, their bases have been different, and the categorizations they produce are inconsistent. I think it would be too much material to add to this article as a section. It should not be a "list of races" in Wikipedia's voice, but an article on various approaches to trying to racially categorize.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  15:18, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Redundant to point out race is a social construct

Can you name something that isn't a social construct? Virtually everything is per this definition:

"social construct. noun. a social mechanism, phenomenon, or category created and developed by society; a perception of an individual, group, or idea that is 'constructed' through cultural or social practice." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/social-construct

"To take it one step further, we may ask: What is an animal outside of culture? As sociologist Keith Tester wrote, “'A fish is only a fish if you classify it as one'” (1991:46)." (DeMello, 2012)

Shall we put social construct on fish too? ArmyMenRTS (talk) 23:55, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

The purpose is to distinguish it as a non-biological trait (which many readers think it is). EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 00:11, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

??? I don't get what you mean. No one denies race = biological. Race as a social categorization still captures biological information.ArmyMenRTS (talk) 01:18, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Perceptions of biological information. Doug Weller talk 08:33, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Gravity is not a social construct. Neither is septicemia. I can probably continue listing things that are not a social construct until the end of the decade, and then keep going. As the amount of argumentation on this page proves, many people labor under the confusion that race is not a social construct, that it's an immutable biological fact like cats not being able to produce offspring with rabbits, and the fact that our nervous systems run on internally generated electricity. So, yes, our article should continue to state it. Not only do the sources state it, they even get deep into why it's important to do so.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

It would make more sense to say that it is an arbitrary social construct, if that makes it clearer for you. Maybe we ought to change it to that. This is evidenced by the fact that anthropologists really could never agree on how many races there were. Classifications ranged from there being only one to over a hundred races. AlwaysUnite (talk) 15:58, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Scientists cannot agree on the number of languages. Does it make language an arbitrary social construct? Same goes for colours, another social construct. Are there three major colours, or are there 500, or are there different sub-types of colours? Everyone comes up with their own classification scheme. --Humanophage (talk) 13:02, 23 April 2016 (UTC)