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I think we should refer to views like Razib Khan's (gene expression blog) or Steve Hsu (infoproc.blogspot.com) and not only ideologically determined Lewontinians, what do you think? Because other wise it will just be one sided. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.26.112 ( talk) 12:31, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Take a look at this arcticle — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.26.112 ( talk) 12:37, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
I don't object with including the figure that 67% of biologists accept biological races. I just don't understand why other information has to be removed for the sake of inclusion of this figure. The poll format in the section "Other fields" completely differs now to the section above it. The outline should be similar to the section "U.S. anthropology". Which included both the disagreed figure and the agreed figure right below it. The "Other fields" section should be using the same outline. Is there any reason why it shouldn't when the data is coming from the exact same source?
The line "while only 50% of physical anthropologists did so." is redundant. The previous section already stated that 50% of physical anthropologists agreed. There's no need to repeat this information in the following section. Physical anthropologists would not be a "other field". Just like it'd be unnecessary and redundant to insert the exact same biologists agreed figure in the "U.S. anthropology" section.
Also why was the developmental psychologist figure removed? BlackHades ( talk) 21:08, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
In the 1985 poll (Lieberman et al. 1992) the results for biologists and developmental psychologists were:
biologists 16% developmental psychologists 36%
mean? How is the reader supposed to understand that, especially when the next bit says 67% of biologists accept biological races? BlackHades, since you replaced it you must have read it, so please give the context to that figure. If you didn't actually read it yourself you should not have replaced it. Dougweller ( talk) 22:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Regarding the most recent edit by Maunus, this version seems satisfactory. Although I am somewhat puzzled why this version doesn't contain the 67% figure when the editing war appeared to be over this figure. I went ahead and fixed some grammar errors that were in the latest version. BlackHades ( talk) 00:10, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
I included the following to the lead which was reverted by Maunus:
Based on the following secondary sources:
“The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning.”
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr, 2011.
"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
Race, once the central concept in physical anthropology worldwide, now varies in the degree of support it receives in different regions."
Lieberman, L, et al. (2004). The race concept in six regions: variation without consensus. Collegium antropologicum, 28(2), 907-921.
Maunus, if you want to include a more nuance summary of Morning that's fine. I wouldn't object to that but there was no reason to get rid of a line that every meta analysis on the perception of race by the science community clearly states. You've also previously agreed that there was no broad scientific consensus across disciplines in regards to race so I don't understand your issue with the text. There's nothing inaccurate about the text itself. The status of the overall scientific community exists in the lead of just about every wikipedia article on a controversial scientific topic. (e.g. global warming, evolution, genetically modified food, etc) This article should not be an exemption. There is absolutely no reason why this article should be any different. BlackHades ( talk) 22:41, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
The current lead is extremely problematic. I would encourage editors here to read the current lead from beginning to end. It's an utter mess. It comes off as trying way too hard to convince the reader that race is a purely social instruct by repeating the exact same talking points over and over unnecessarily. Biological essentialism is obsolete in one paragraph and for some reason it must be repeated that it is untenable in the very next paragraph. I also don't understand why the lead is currently implying that only the scientists that believe race is a purely social construct are the only ones that accept that all humans belong to the same species and subspecies. When in actuality, this would be universally accepted.
This lead needs to be blown up and recreated. It should include the history of the term, the status of the overall scientific community, the differing positions that exists in the scientific community, the variations in definition, and the current uses of the classification by the scientific community. All of which actually exists in the main body. But the current lead instead of summarizing the main body like it should as stated by WP:LEAD, is rather written like an opinion piece as if the title of the opinion piece is "Why you should accept race is a social construct". BlackHades ( talk) 05:45, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
“ | This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.
Consequently, at the beginning of the 21st century, even as a majority of biological anthropologists favor the reality of the race perspective, not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship. |
” |
I'm happy with the little crumbs, as long as they get the point across. Achieving perfect neutrality on an English article on Race is simply impossible. As the surveys show, race denial is incredibly high in America (jab at Maunus: entirely due to political correctness - it's got nothing to do with science, whereas China is accused of being "politically incorrect" for their acceptance of race, and if as you claim this is due to Chinese nationalism, the reverse is true for America: it is due to political socialism), and the article will make this clear, whether you like it or not. There is no escape from their bias on Wikipedia.-- Kobayashi245 ( talk) 10:33, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
Sigh. The discussion on my suggestions for improvement seems to be getting derailed. I would like to get feedback from other editors on improving the lead as a whole. Regardless of anyone's personal position on the subject matter, I think we would all agree the current lead reads terribly. It's excessively repetitive and WP:LEAD should be summarizing the main body and it doesn't appear as though it's doing so in its current state. If there are no objections, I would like to at least add the "broad scientific status" text to the lead. BlackHades ( talk) 10:41, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
They are listed in the other talk here (and they're not all of them): [2] "looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist" and even in its article itself it says: "the misclassification probability becomes close to zero if enough loci are studied" and "When they analysed three geographically distinct populations (European, African and East Asian) and measured genetic similarity over many thousands of loci, the answer to their question was "never"." It's basically Lewontian pseudo-scientists who conclude races are biologically meaningless when they use insufficient loci. I already made the jigsaw puzzle analogy somewhere: you don't see the whole picture when you only have one puzzle (Lewontians), but when you put many puzzles together, you can see the picture (actual scientists). Since that is an irrefutable fact, Lewontian scientists are forced to play the semantics game to try to tone down the significance of that: "populations do not equal races!" (we have one of the actual scientists from one of the studies affirm that ancestry/populations=races). Quite funny if you ask me. I'm just glad such madness hasn't reached Russia or China. And again, please provide a direct quote from that historian where he states Chinese anthropologists of today are unscientific.-- Kobayashi245 ( talk) 09:33, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
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help)Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. The Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine 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 sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."
Ideal sources for such 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.
The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that 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."
On the topic of what recent human population genetics research says about classification of human populations, a widely cited primary research article is a 1972 article by Richard Lewontin, which I have seen cited in many of the review articles, monographs, and textbooks I have read over the years.
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Some Wikipedia articles give weighty emphasis to a commentary essay published years after Lewontin published his primary research article on human diversity, when Lewontin's primary research results had been replicated in many other studies and his bottom line conclusion that "about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups" had been taken up by many textbooks on genetics and medicine. In 2003, A. W. F. Edwards wrote a commentary essay in the journal BioEssays
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help)in which Edwards proposes a statistical model for classifying individuals into groupings based on haplotype data. Edwards wrote, "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification," pointing to his own work with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the author of the book
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help)which I read soon after it was published in 1994. In general, Edwards cites a lot of publications from his collaboration with Cavalli-Sforza, and mentions that collaboration prominently in his subsequent review article
in which he describes their method for tracing ancestry with genes. Edwards even shows a photograph of Cavalli-Sforza with him in 1963 in his 2009 article, emphasizing their scholarly friendship.
So I wanted to look up Cavalli-Sforza's current views as well while I traced citations of the Lewontin 1972 article and the Edwards 2003 article in subsequent secondary sources. Through searches with Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, both from my home office computer and from a university library computer, I found a number of books and articles that cite both the Lewontin paper and the Edwards paper. Through a specialized set of wide-reaching keyword searches (for example, "Lewontin Edwards") on the university library's vast database subscriptions, I was able to obtain the full text of many of those articles and of whole books that discuss what current science says about grouping individuals of species Homo sapiens into race groups. I also found more up to date discussions by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Listed here are sources that have the following characteristics: (1) they cite both previous articles by Lewontin and the 2003 article by Edwards, discussing the underlying factual disagreement between those authors, (2) they are Wikipedia reliable sources for medicine (in particular, they are secondary sources such as review articles or textbooks rather than primary research articles), and (3) they are available to me in full text through book-buying, library lending, author sharing of full text on the Internet, or a university library database. They are arranged in approximate chronological order, so that you can see how the newer sources cite and evaluate the previous sources as genetics research continues. The sources listed here are not exhaustive, but they are varied and authoritative, and they cite most of the dozens of primary research articles on the topic, analyzing and summarizing the current scientific consensus.
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help)The Whitmarsh and Jones (2010) source has several very useful chapters on medical genetics.
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]).
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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.'
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help)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.
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help)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.
Lewontin's conclusions have stood up remarkably well, across diverse kinds of genetic markers, but this produces an odd paradox.
An author who is intimately familiar with Edwards's statistical approach, because he has been a collaborator in fieldwork and co-author on primary research articles with Edwards, is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 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, but cites different previous publications.
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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.
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.
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.
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link)Other current review articles related to human population structure include
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.
I invite my fellow Wikipedians to dig into the most current medically reliable sources to see how the new molecular genetic understanding of the human population is influencing biological approaches to human classification. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 20:03, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
The extensive source dumping occurring on the talk page right now is not in any way constructive. While I understand that everyone wants to share everything they have, it just creates more noise. If someone has specific content that they think is not properly represented, the best way to introduce it is to find 2-3 of the highest quality, most independent, tertiary sources, so that the proper context and weight can be evaluated. Asking other editors to review dozens of technical articles published in scientific journals is not going to work. aprock ( talk) 04:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
Don't have time to do anything with this currently but perhaps another editor will:
Killer Chihuahua 15:10, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
The notice that has long been posted on this article talk page reminds us, "The article Race (human classification), along with other articles relating to the area of conflict (namely, the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour, broadly construed) is currently subject to active arbitration remedies, described in a 2010 Arbitration Committee case." The notice links to the case. I ask uninvolved administrators who happen to surf by to keep an eye on the talk page discussion here and whether or not it is aimed at building an encyclopedia based on Wikipedia core content policies. The article topic here is very contentious, and a related article that was the main article that triggered the ArbCom case is one of the ten most edit-warred articles on all of English Wikipedia. Precisely because the topic of this article is contentious, it is the subject of ongoing research around the world, and new books on the general topic of this article are published every week in English from countries all over the English-speaking world. There is no excuse not to develop article text here in light of reliable sources for medical topics, many of which have already been suggested on this article talk page. I hope that the role of adminstrators looking on will be to promote the Wikimedia Foundation goals of improving content quality and increasing participation by editors who have the tools and inclination to continually improve content quality. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 17:08, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
I see some other editors are working hard at looking up and citing reliable sources to improve this article. I'm looking on at the recent edits, and they appear to be more in accord with the sources (and thus more in accord with core Wikipedia policies) than many of the previous versions of this article have been. Keep up the good work. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 01:06, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
To lay out my concerns:
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. Nonetheless, it is clear (editorializing) that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. (bolded statements are confusing to read together as they seemingly contradict each other, statements should be presented together in a cohesive manner)
The statement that races are social constructs, which is widely accepted by scholars (unnecessary and argumentative), describes the fact (argumentative editorializing) that race membership is primarily a social rather than biological fact (argumentative editorializing). People may be classified differently depending on social and cultural conventions, and depending on which social and or biological markers are considered to be most important in a specific social and historical context. A person who could be classified as "black" under the American one-drop rule, might be classified as "colored" in Apartheid South Africa, or as branco (white) in Brazil, or as White in Uganda or the contemporary United States. (where do these comparisons come from exactly? Are they necessary?) Being a social construct does not mean that race isn't real, nor that racial categorization does not affect the lives of people - and it also does not exclude the possibility that the social construction reflect some underlying biological reality (whole sentence seems like defensive editorializing). But it does mean (editorializing) that biological criteria are not in themselves sufficient to establish racial categories, but that social evaluations always underlie schemes of racial categorization. A minority of scholars reject the notion that race is primarily a social construction entirely, and argue that human biological variation is structured into well defined racial groupings. A more common view is that socially constructed racial groupings are also biologically meaningful because they correlate meaningfully with genetic variation, even though no racial grouping can be biologically (incomplete?).
My issue is with how this is worded more than any question of accuracy.-- The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 01:48, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Current wiki says that race has no biological or genetic basis - which is nonsense when we can see features differentiated as Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, Dravidians and Sinhalese among others. I lack the background to correct this but someone should.
miklos@sympatico.ca ( talk) 17:43, 12 December 2013 (UTC)Miklos Legrady, December 12, 2013 legrady@sympatico.ca
There is no consensus among scientists on whether race has biological significance or if race is a purely social construct. [3] [4] Scientists continue to often treat racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. [5] Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetics are strongly associated. [6] Others argue that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences between groups do not exist. [7]
"Many naturalists, including Blumenbach, struggled with the biological meanings of racial categories in some of the same ways that we do today. He acknowledged that morphological variation varied widely within each race and often overlapped with variation observed in other races, that boundaries between races were not discrete and that races could not be defined solely by geographical boundaries between continents or otherwise. But scientists have continued to often treat groups identified by commonly used racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetic differences are strongly associated, justifying the use of race as a proxy for POPULATION STRUCTURE in the design of experiments and medical application. Specifically, they contend that individuals who are assigned to the same racial category share more of their recent ancestry and therefore are more similar genetically to each other than individuals from different racial categories, and that the accuracy of race as a proxy for ancestry is good enough to be useful as a research variable. But others argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device, and even that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences among human populations do not exist. Many people prefer to use ‘ethnic group,’ frequently defined as a group that has shared religious, social, linguistic and cultural heritage/identity, instead of race, but the two terms suffer from the same conceptual and heuristic problems and questions."
Bamshad, M., Wooding, S., Salisbury, B. A., & Stephens, J. C. (2004). Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(8), 598-609.
In the absence of empirical data that can offer a definitive statement regarding racial conceptualization among today’s 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. The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning. Surveys, interviews, content analyses, and ethnographies have not pointed to cross- disciplinary rejection of the biological vision of race. Instead, the empirical question outstanding seems to be whether the academy is divided when it comes to thinking about the nature of race, or whether scientists are fairly unified in their essentialist, biological conceptualization of race.
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. pg 47. University of California Pr, 2011.
The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning. Surveys, interviews, content analyses, and ethnographies have not pointed to cross-disciplinary rejection of the biological vision of race. Instead, the empirical question outstanding seems to be whether the academy is divided when it comes to thinking about the nature of race, or whether scientists are fairly unified in their essentialist, biological conceptualization of race. The survey studies fielded by Lieberman and colleagues suggest the former (as do many observers— see for example Braun 2006; Gissis 2008; Goodman 1997; Olson 2001; Wadman 2004), while the ethnographic and small interview studies described above that point to the traditional race notions embedded in scientists’ research and analysis could be taken on the whole to suggest the latter.
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. pg 47. University of California Pr, 2011.
“The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning.”
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr, 2011.
"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
Race, once the central concept in physical anthropology worldwide, now varies in the degree of support it receives in different regions."
Lieberman, L, et al. (2004). The race concept in six regions: variation without consensus. Collegium antropologicum, 28(2), 907-921.
“Biomedical scientists are divided in their opinions about race. Some characterize it as “biologically meaningless” or “not based on scientific evidence”, whereas others advocate the use of race in making decisions about medical treatment or the design of research studies.”
Jorde, L. B., & Wooding, S. P. (2004). Genetic variation, classification and 'race'. Nature genetics, 36, S28-S33.
“Some have argued that the sequencing of the human genome and related research have provided evidence that the notion of race is biologically meaningless and therefore useless. Others, however, have made the opposite argument, namely that recent studies show that genetic clusters correspond closely with groups defined by self-identified race or ethnicity or by continental ancestry.”
Mountain, J. L., & Risch, N. (2004). Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among 'racial' and 'ethnic' groups. Nature Genetics, 36, S48-S53.
“Some commentators have argued that these patterns of variation provide a biological justification for the use of traditional racial categories. They argue that the continental clusterings correspond roughly with the division of human beings into sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans, western Asians, and northern Africans; eastern Asians; Polynesians and other inhabitants of Oceania; and Native Americans. Other observers disagree, saying that the same data undercut traditional notions of racial groups. They point out, for example, that major populations considered races or subgroups within races do not necessarily form their own clusters.”
Race, E. (2005). The use of racial, ethnic, and ancestral categories in human genetics research. American Journal of Human Genetics, 77(4), 519.
“..scientists have continued to often treat groups identified by commonly used racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetic differences are strongly associated, justifying the use of race as a proxy for POPULATION STRUCTURE in the design of experiments and medical application. Specifically, they contend that individuals who are assigned to the same racial category share more of their recent ancestry and therefore are more similar genetically to each other than individuals from different racial categories, and that the accuracy of race as a proxy for ancestry is good enough to be useful as a research variable. But others argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device and even that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences among human populations do not exist.”
Bamshad, M., Wooding, S., Salisbury, B. A., & Stephens, J. C. (2004). Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(8), 598-609.
BlackHades ( talk) 21:31, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
No clue what you're talking about BlackHades. I responded to a comment of yours that presented seven sources, not two. You are likewise source dumping below as well. If the two sources you suggest are the sort of high quality reliable sources that can serve as a basis for the article, please collapse all the other source dumps, and focus on those two sources. aprock ( talk) 05:47, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
“Two arguments against racial categorization as defined above are firstly that race has no biological basis, and secondly that there are racial differences but they are merely cosmetic, reflecting superficial characteristics such as skin color and facial features that involve a very small number of genetic loci that were selected historically; these superficial differences do not reflect any additional genetic distinctiveness. A response to the first of these points depends on the definition of 'biological'. If biological is defined as genetic then, as detailed above, a decade or more of population genetics research has documented genetic, and therefore biological, differentiation among the races. This conclusion was most recently reinforced by the analysis of Wilson et al. If biological is defined by susceptibility to, and natural history of, a chronic disease, then again numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races. In this context, it is difficult to imagine that such differences are not meaningful. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of 'biological' that does not lead to racial differentiation, except perhaps one as extreme as speciation.”
Risch, N., Burchard, E., Ziv, E., & Tang, H. (2002). Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease. Genome Biol, 3(7), 1-12.
“Current controversies in the field of genetics are provoking a reassessment of claims that race is socially constructed. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's model of how to analyse scientific controversy, this article argues that race is ‘gaining in reality’ in such a way that renders claims about its social construction tenuous and uncertain. Such claims can be seen as failing in two key regards. The first relates to changes in the way genetics is practised and promoted, which are undermining the stability of fundamental assertions that there is ‘no biological basis for race’ or that ‘race does not exist’.“
Hartigan Jr, J. (2008). Is race still socially constructed? The recent controversy over race and medical genetics. Science as Culture, 17(2), 163-193.
“It is not true that ‘‘racial classification is . . . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance’’.
Edwards, A. W. (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. BioEssays,25(8), 798-801.
“However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance.”
Dawkins, R. (2005). The ancestor's tale: a pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“Because traditional concepts of race are in turn correlated with geography, it is inaccurate to state that race is “biologically meaningless”.
Jorde, L. B., & Wooding, S. P. (2004). Genetic variation, classification and 'race'. Nature genetics, 36, S28-S33.
“As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection.”
Collins, F. S. (2004). What we do and don't know about 'race', 'ethnicity', genetics and health at the dawn of the genome era. Nature genetics, 36, S13-S15.
“Hamilton's analysis immediately falsifies the widely-circulated argument by geneticist Richard Lewontin that the race concept should be abandoned as of no scientific value since 'only' 10-15 percent of genetic diversity exists between populations while 85-90 percent exists within populations. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, a 12.5 percent genetic variance between two populations implies within-population kinship equivalent to that found between grandparent and grandchild or between aunt and nephew. Lewontin's genetic estimate is not only compatible with the existence of high ethnic kinship, it is a rough measure of it.”
Salter, F. (2003). On genetic interests. Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main ua. pg. 92
BlackHades ( talk) 21:31, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
"although the simplistic biological understanding of race and ethnicity associated with the eugenics movement may be dead, the far more subtle presumption that racial and ethnic distinctions nonetheless capture “some” meaningful biological differences is alive and flourishing..It was hoped by some that the sequencing of the human genome would undermine the view that racial and ethnic classifications have biological significance..Ironically, the sequencing of the human genome has instead renewed and strengthened interest in biological differences between racial and ethnic populations, as genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility (Collins and McKusick 2001), environmental response (Olden and Guthrie 2001), and drug metabolism (Nebert and Menon 2001) are identified, and frequencies of these variants in different populations are reported."
Foster, Morris W., and Richard R. Sharp. "Race, ethnicity, and genomics: social classifications as proxies of biological heterogeneity." Genome Research 12.6 (2002): 844-850.
"The study of genomics has resulted in a dizzying back-and-forth stance on race - first denial of any racial difference at the level of DNA, to later focusing attention on these differences...This renewed interest in the biology of race is surprising given that representatives of an array of natural and social sciences, including leading geneticists, once whole-heartedly denounced prior racial biomedicine."
Bliss, Catherine. "Racial taxonomy in genomics." Social Science & Medicine 73.7 (2011): 1019-1027.
"These ongoing practices have found new legitimacy in recent reanalyses of human genetic variation that seem to reverse Lewontin's claims. The completion of the Human Genome Project has facilitated large-scale genomic analysis of human populations, much of which uses "ancestry" to map genetics onto traditional racial categories (see Bolnick et al. 2007; Dupré 2008; Nelson 2008). This all contributes to what Troy Duster (2005) has identified as the molecular reinscription of race."
Whitmarsh, I., & Jones, D. D. S. (Eds.). (2010). What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. MIT press.
“Partly due to advancements in the Human Genome Project and related technologies, the idea that race/ethnicity does have a genetic basis is enjoying a resurgence. A rise in the use of race in genetic studies has left many researchers who are committed to a social conceptualization of race at a loss regarding how to evaluate these developments.”
Frank, R. (2007). What to make of it? The (Re) emergence of a biological conceptualization of race in health disparities research. Social science & medicine, 64(10), 1977-1983.
BlackHades ( talk) 07:12, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Source quotes that refute the claim that humans can be divided into "races"
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1. "By emphasizing the close genetic affinities between members of different groups, researchers can reduce the widespread misconception that substantial genetic differences separate groups (Wilson et al. 2001; Olson 2002; Jorde and Wooding 2004)."
(Berg et al. 2005)
2. "There is broad consensus across the social and biological sciences that groups of humans typically referred to as races are not very different from one another. Two individuals from the same race could have more genetic variation between them than individuals from different races. Race is therefore not a particularly useful category to use when searching for the genetics of biological traits or even medical vulnerabilities, despite widespread assumptions."
(Hayden 2013)
3. "Most researchers who examine genetic differences between populations take care to point out that the differences they observe reflect the geographic origins, reproductive history and migrations of these groups, not markers of some essential differences between them."
(Hayden 2013)
4. "There has been a relatively stable cross-disciplinary consensus on the ontology of 'race', described thus by Gannett: 'The apparent consensus view among academics from diverse disciplines — the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences — is that biological races do not exist, at least in humans. Biological race is a socially-constructed category".
(Smart et al. 2012 at 31)
5. "The widely accepted consensus among evolutionary biologists and genetic anthropologists is that biologically identifiable human races do not exist; Homo sapiens constitute a single species, and have been so since their evolution in Africa and throughout their migration around the world. Population genetics provides the best evidence for this conclusion: The genetic variation within a socially recognized human population is greater than the genetic variation between population groups.
(Lee, Mountain & Koenig 2001)
6. "Debates about race and ethnicity have changed in one important respect—today nearly all geneticists reject the idea that biological differences belie racial and ethnic distinctions. Geneticists have abandoned the search for "Indian" or "African" genes, for example, and few if any accept racial typologies."
(Foster & Sharp 2002)
7. "In the opinion of biologists and medical professionals, race is scientifically meaningless."
(Hall 2010)
8. "Current genetic data also refute the notion that races are genetically distinct human populations. There are no gene variants that are present in all individuals of one population group and in no individuals of another. No sharp genetic boundaries can be drawn between human population groups. However, frequencies of genetic variants and haplotypes differ across the world."
(Bonham, Warshauer-Baker, & Collins 2005)
9. "Given the long history of gene flow among various groups that make up Homo sapiens, the notion that one could precisely define a subset of individuals and say that they are somehow separate from the rest of the human race is clearly not scientifically defensible. The history of the human species over the last 100,000 years is sometimes depicted as a branching tree, but this image implies that the branches are separated from one another. We are much more of a trellis than a tree; or perhaps a wisteria vine is a better metaphor."
(Collins 2010 at 154)
10. "Data from many sources have shown that humans are genetically homogeneous and that genetic variation tends to be shared widely among populations. Genetic variation is geographically structured, as expected from the partial isolation of human populations during much of their history. Because traditional concepts of race are in turn correlated with geography, it is inaccurate to state that race is "biologically meaningless." On the other hand, because they have been only partially isolated, human populations are seldom demarcated by precise genetic boundaries. Substantial overlap can therefore occur between populations, invalidating the concept that populations (or races) are discrete types."
(Jorde & Wooding 2004)
11. "Race remains an inflammatory issue, both socially and scientifically. Fortunately, modern human genetics can deliver the salutary message that human populations share most of their genetic variation and that there is no scientific support for the concept that human populations are discrete, nonoverlapping entities."
(Jorde & Wooding 2004)
12. "Modern human genetic variation does not structure into phylogenetic subspecies (geographical 'races'), nor do the taxa from the most common racial classifications of classical anthropology qualify as 'races'".
(Keita et al. 2004)
13. "Careful analyses have demonstrated that definitions of racial and/or ethnic variables in biomedical research are inconsistent, and are based on mixtures of biological, social and economical criteria. It is unclear whether there might be practical advantages in describing humans as if they were divided into biological races, even though we know they are not, but the burden of proof is now on those who say so.
(Barbujani & Colonna 2010)
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"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
The last two sentences of the "Complications and various definitions of the concept" section ( permalink) do not seem to be supported by the source provided:
Nonetheless, it is clear that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
— Bamshad et al., Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race
Where does Bamshad makes the claim that "racial categories correlate with biological traits" or that there is "no consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance?" All I see is the suggestion that "In some cases, the accuracy of these inferences [race or ethnicity] might be adequate" but in many cases they will "lessen the predictive value of clinical inference." Am I missing something in the source that supports the text? — ArtifexMayhem ( talk) 02:31, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Also this edit here [8] appears to be editor synthesis. There is not a single citation for the entire paragraph. Per WP:NOR and WP:BURDEN, I have to revert this paragraph. Maunus, I hope you don't take this the wrong way because I do think there are several good points in your paragraph that should be mentioned in the article in some form, but it should be in a way consistent with wikipedia policy. BlackHades ( talk) 04:45, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Its interesting experiment to replace all the occurrences of "race" word with "melanilistic colour variant" or "breed"... and thus throw away majority of the emotions coined with the word race. What the article could look like then ? Do people have melanilistic color variants like wolves ( black wolf) or big cats ( black panther) ? Could we distinguish groups of people based on that trait like we do with other species ? Or maybe our species has breeds like dogs horses etc ? And final question what really should be a definition of race ? That is a phenotypical or genetical concept. There could be population very diverse genetically, even to the point of different species ( Animals That Seem Identical May Be Completely Different Species) or there could be a very distinctive groups within one species that have only a few difference in genes , but all those different alleles are producing different characteristics like color or adult animal size and also maybe to the point that two of these populations do not mix. Next, I know historically the race concept has been drifting with meaning and with time encompassing bigger and bigger cohorts of people. But I think this is the effects of how people knew with time what is the extent of human variation. If in our times there would be other sub-species of humans living in Africa or Indonesia like Homo erectus etc. with clearly different mental capability and other phenotypic traits but they could mix with all other people living as that must be a reality some time ago then I think we consider all variation that we have now a one race and these now extinct subspecies as another races. Or if there would be in the past a successful experiment (or accident at the very distant past like 6 thousand years ago) to kill all black or non-European descent people ( Tuskegee syphilis experiment). Then the variation would diminish and people (especially if that would be a long time in the past) would coin a new 'race' boundaries that would be similar to the original concept. Likewise in maybe some isolated island on pacific there would be concept of race (before white people came in) distinguishing phenotypes that for someone who didn't grow up with the people would be identical and not "worth" of categorizing. So in my opinion race is not a social construct in its all entirety - it is just measure of known human variation. It is the same like let's say in other species. Suppose that we discover a new specimen of lets say a tree/frog/monkey in some inaccessible part of rain forest in Congo or Brazil and first we see some population and we could draw a distinction between them (and we know that these are the same species) and give to them some Latin third name like in us Homo sapiens *sapiens*. And no one sees anything wrong with that. But then as we go deeper in the forest we see individuals with more diverging features and they diverge in the same extent that our initial known population - so we change the boundaries of race/breed/variant/subspecies and call our initial population as one and then (until of course we encounter again similar situation) we proceed to divide the rest based on updated knowledge about all intra-species variability we know. And there is also in-group variability. If we see a new plant or rodent species that their individuals are very different like in melanin content or size, but they live as one population and are breeding between them, we would not call the differences a VBRS (variant/breed/race/subspecies) but if there would be a feature of the habitat like a river or mountain that these individuals cannot easily cross (even if there would be some areas of mixing) then we do our distinctions. So in case of humans there were situations all over the world where one tribe or nation consider people living on the other side of river or forest or mountain to be not "like them" a different kind of people or even not people at all. But these people living amongst themselves cannot have knowledge that there are vastly different populations on earth and in comparison to them their distinction does not hold up. The case with VBRS is to have a relatively small number of them, otherwise we run in to paradox that every individual is VBRS on itself. But now we do know the whole earth, we do now what human variability is in terms of genotype and phenotype. So now coined distinctions are not prone to the same mistakes as those in the past. But if we want an answer to question are there human races or not we must first determine to what definition of race we are answering. Are we considering phenotypes as these are now, or are we considering the human migration process, genetics, etc... Or maybe a law is the criterion like in USA when you have populations that are phenotypically different like AA/blacks together with those based on culture like Hispanics... This are a very distinct concepts that are to itself like concept of fruit based on biological features and concept of fruit that is in EU law where carrot is considered a fruit. When I read such articles of discussions about race I feel like I'm reading quarrels where there are distinct categories fruits and vegetables or all things we eat are equal and everyone who thinks different is an ignorant foodist. So people in their heads are holding very different conceptions of race and what it shouldn't be. So if they read any scientific paper where the word is used and it is not debunked in the same paragraph (but surprisingly against our species only, we are blind of dog racism or horse racism... we aren't ashamed that we ignorantly categorize these equal beings into a races, yes ?) the person who writes it, if such person is in scientific position he risks his job very much because people already know what is a race and only thing what they need is a prayer from scientific community that is pedestal to their beliefs.
And there is another question of ethics. It's like with the question: "Can we make a ham sandwich from Dalai Lama?" The answer is yes of course. It could be done with the same tools that we use to work on pigs or cows in our slaughterhouses. There is nothing in reality, in laws of physics or logic itself to make this endeavor impossible like it is impossible with let's say a perpetuum mobile of the second kind (not to say the first). There would be none of cosmic string destroying the apparatus to make meat from human flesh ( Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?). But question - is it ethical to do so, may have a very different answer. So is it ethical to distinguish races of our species is different question of that if it could be coherently done. But people really want that there would be some feature of the world that would prohibit making races of human beings. But that thing would also prohibit of making such disgust to dogs and horses. pwjb ( talk) 12:35, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
Nicholas Wade's view on race is a mainstream pro-race view that should be added in for our articles on race and proponent views. 174.95.171.228 ( talk) 20:23, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
Primarily this section does not do what its title suggests. It seems nothing more than an opinion piece from what would be termed in the United States a left wing political slant.
"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.[17][18][19][20][21][22]" [Emphasis added]"
This statement is either false or misleading, depending on how it is read, on account of the last portion of the sentence. There is no "consensus" that human racial groups could not be biologically defined; I provide references below. Whether common groups which are called races in e.g., the U.S. can not be is a distinct matter.
I am going to rewrite this as:
"There is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]; many argue that racial categories as used, for example, in the U.S. are socially constructed and cannot be biologically defined.[17][18][19][20][21][22]".
If there are any objections to this let me know. 174.97.231.103 ( talk) 18:27, 28 March 2014 (UTC)John
Kaszycka, K. A., Štrkalj, G., & Strzałko, J. (2009). Current views of European anthropologists on race: Influence of educational and ideological background. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 43-56.
Kaszycka, K. A., & Strzałko, J. (2003). Race: Tradition and convenience, or taxonomic reality? More on the race concept in Polish anthropology
Lieberman, L., Stevenson, B. W., & Reynolds, L. T. (1989). Race and anthropology: A core concept without consensus. Anthropology & education quarterly, 20(2), 67-73.
Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr.
Štrkalj, G. (2007). The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthrop
Strkalj, G., Ramsey, S., & Wilkinson, A. T. (2008). Anatomists’ attitudes towards the concept of race. South African Medical Journal, 94(2), 90.
Wang, Q., trkalj, G., & Sun, L. (2003). On the concept of race in Chinese biological anthropology: alive and well. Current anthropology, 44(3), 403-403.
I will post my proposed edits here. If no one objects within 24 hours I will finalize the edits. I expect to fight an editing war on some of these issues, but I hope we can more or less agree on others.
Section: "Complications and various definitions of the concept".
Edit #1. 3/28/2014
Original: "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.[17][18][19][20][21][22]"...
Note for edit 1: I changed this because the original was either misleading or false depending on how it was read. The original implied that there was a consensus against the existence of biological races. This is false. What is true is that many people agree that certain commonly used racial categories in the U.S. e.g., Asians do not characterize biologically scientifically defined races. Hippofrank ( talk) 19:05, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Hippofrank
Edited Version: While there is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], it is agreed that gene frequencies vary among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether traditional racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. [6]. There is a consensus that certain commonly used racial categories as used in certain countries, for example, Asians in the U.S., are socially constructed and cannot be biologically defined [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]. Regarding these non-biologically definable racial categories, some scholars argue that they correlate with biologically conditioned traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree and therefore can be genetically informative.
Edit #2. 3/28/2014 3:26 Eastern
Original: " When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved.[29] In this sense, races are said to be social constructs.[30] These constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations.[31] While race is understood to be a social construct by many, most scholars agree that race has real material effects in the lives of people through institutionalized practices of preference and discrimination."
Note for edit 2: This statement is fairly confused, so it needs to be changed. First, the term "social construct" is ambiguous; in common parlance it can mean "not a biological entity" while in philosophical parlance it can mean "not a natural kind". For example, in the philosophy of biology species are often said to be social constructs.
Edit #3. 3/28/2014 3:30 Eastern
Original: "[1] Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. [2] [32] Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior.[33] [3] As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes.[34] [4] Racism has led to many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide.[35]
Note for edit 3: This whole paragraph needs to be rewritten. The first statement above is disputed. It has not been established that views of race, per se, have caused "considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial". This, rather, is a theoretical model. The second statement is somewhere between conjectural and inflammatory; members of defined outgroups (e.g., "their family), in general, are not preferenced; this is only tantamount to seeing them as "morally inferior"; this second statement also confuses moral inferiority with trait inferiority; the third statement is circular because " groups possessing relatively little power" and "excluded or oppressed" are typically operationalized the same way. The fourth statement is problematic because "racism" has no one definition; there is no consensus on what it is. One can only say "racism in some senses".
Proposed Edited Version (for edit 2,3): Regardless of the biological status of race, many scholars believe that the act of racial categorization can have socially significant effects on the lives of people through, for example, institutionalized practices of discrimination. [31] They believe that the act of employing racial classifications has led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. From this perspective, racial classifications reinforce tendencies to discriminate on the basis of ingroup and outgroup, tendencies which can lead to the oppressed and exclusion if the groups being discriminated against possesses relatively little power. These scholars have also argued that beliefs about the biological reality of race condition racism, understood as the belief in inherent racial superiority and inferiority.
While there is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [13] [14] [15] [16] [17], it is agreed that gene frequencies vary among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings [18]." Hippofrank ( talk) 22:31, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Hippofrank
[13-17]
Kaszycka, K. A., Štrkalj, G., & Strzałko, J. (2009). Current views of European anthropologists on race: Influence of educational and ideological background. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 43-56.
Lieberman, L., Stevenson, B. W., & Reynolds, L. T. (1989). Race and anthropology: A core concept without consensus. Anthropology & education quarterly, 20(2), 67-73.
Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr.
Wang, Q., trkalj, G., & Sun, L. (2003). On the concept of race in Chinese biological anthropology: alive and well. Current anthropology, 44(3), 403-403.
Štrkalj, G. (2007). The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review. Anthropologist, 9(1), 73-78.
[18]
Hochman, A. (2013). Racial discrimination: How not to do it. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44(3), 278-286.
"Advances in human genome research brought about an increasing number of discoveries of mutated alleles responsible for various metabolic changes, whereas the frequency of these alleles has displayed interpopulational differences. If there were differences between the “white” and “black” U.S. residents—for example, alleles of genes called PCSK9 (Cohen et al. 2006) or ApoE4 associated with LDL metabolism and indirectly the risk of heart disease—they were easy to label as “racial” differences (Burchard et al. 2003).... In that the argument proposed that knowledge of the frequency of alleles in individual distinguishable populations was of practical importance in the treatment of some diseases, it was quite correct, although this still did not make a population a race (Hoffman 2005). Thus, interpopulational diversity of the contents of the human genome discovered during the research is not an argument for the existence of races but merely for polymorphism, the range and determinants of which are worth investigating also for medical purposes (Jones 2001; Rotman 2005; Schwartz 2001)."
The idea is that it's trivially true that the populations called races differ in gene frequency. But whether these populations constitute biological races is a more complex and contentious issue. So, I will just change that to:
"There is no consensus as to whether there are biological races in the human species [19] [20] [21] [22]. And there is widespread consensus that many commonly used racial categories are socially constructed in the sense of not being biologically delineated [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that those groups which are called races vary in gene frequencies. Because of this, there is no current consensus as to whether these groups can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. [29]"
These are excellent edits based on the best, mainstream sources. Go ahead. 74.14.29.177 ( talk) 06:10, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
If they all say the same thing, then I would suggest using the highest quality source, include page numbers, and an excerpt of the text you are paraphrasing. aprock ( talk) 00:49, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
(a) There is little agreement as to whether there are human biological races. (b) There is much agreement that some/many common racial categories are not biologically defined. (c) There is general agreement that groups called races differ in genes frequencies. (d) There is no agreement as to whether groups called races have have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
A more elaborate discussion is really needed, one which distinguishes between the various debates about race. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hippofrank ( talk • contribs) 01:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
Please pick a couple secondary sources (your excerpt above lists at least seven). Please include page numbers for each source. If you feel up to it, please consider adding an excerpt from the sources you think are the highest quality sources that you are basing your content on. aprock ( talk) 04:10, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
::Please note that Maunus is inserting his personal opinion based on a single source and ignoring international surveys of experts on the question.
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
10:15, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::Surveys are the ideal source for gauging opinion on scientific questions. What else do you propose? Editor:Maunus's personal opinion?
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
12:11, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::::You are wrong and surveys are a better gauge than one source.
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
16:19, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
While the scientific consensus is human races do not exist today, it is very much the opposite for the past. The current article fails to touch upon this. At least, most palaeo-anthropologists consider there to have been human races as "morphologically distinct populations" that existed throughout the Pleistocene:
"To see true 'racial' variation in humans, one has to go to the fossil record. It is the Neandertals, the Ngandong people, the archaic East Asians, and possibly others that reflect the original regional Eurasian adaptations of humans." - Smith, F. H. [2010]. "Species, Populations, and Assimilation in Later Human Evolution". In: A Companion to Biological Anthropology. Larsen, C. S. (Ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
"Human geographic variation obviously exists, but it is not racial. Modern paleoanthropology and genetics are among the disciplines that have shown that there is no taxonomy in the human species below the species level. They also show that the present poorly reflects the past. Neandertal morphology and genetics, and genetic evidence of other distinct groups, suggest far more population structure in the past. It is likely that for much of the Pleistocene the human species had races. But, whether or not races appeared in the past, they did not persist. With only some exceptions, much of the Pleistocene human variation did not survive the enormous population expansions and replacements of the latest Pleistocene and Holocene. Geographic variation today is not well related to the past because of the large number of recent adaptive mutations and the differential survivorship of Upper Pleistocene and Holocene populations." - Wolpoff, M. H., & Caspari, R. [2012]. "Palaeoanthropology and Race". In: A Companion to Paleoanthropology. Begun, D. R. (Ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
While living (or recent historic) populations are highly heterogeneous in morphology - 90% of cranial variation for example is found within populations, Pleistocene human variation had a reverse geographical structure where most skeletal variation was found between populations. In that sense there were once human races.
Palaeoanthropologists are not in agreement when races disappeared during the Pleistocene. Some argue there were races (or even subraces) as recent as the Upper Palaeolithic e.g. Ferembach (1986) splits (Palaeo)Europeans into: "Cromagnoids" and "Combecapelloids". FossilMad ( talk) 13:21, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
I see there are some new (to this article under the screen names we are seeing here, but perhaps not new to Wikipedia) editors who are joining the talk page discussion here. Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. he Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine 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 sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."
Ideal sources for such 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.
The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that 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."
On the topic of what recent human population genetics research says about classification of human populations, a widely cited primary research article is a 1972 article by Richard Lewontin, which I have seen cited in many of the review articles, monographs, and textbooks I have read over the years.
{{
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help)As Wikipedians, we can evaluate where the findings in Lewontin's article fit in the current understanding of the topic of human genetic variation by reading current reliable secondary sources in medicine.
Some Wikipedia articles give weighty emphasis to a commentary essay published years after Lewontin published his primary research article on human diversity, when Lewontin's primary research results had been replicated in many other studies and his bottom line conclusion that "about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups" had been taken up by many textbooks on genetics and medicine. In 2003, A. W. F. Edwards wrote a commentary essay in the journal BioEssays
{{
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help)in which Edwards proposes a statistical model for classifying individuals into groupings based on haplotype data. Edwards wrote, "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification," pointing to his own work with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the author of the book
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help)which I read soon after it was published in 1994. In general, Edwards cites a lot of publications from his collaboration with Cavalli-Sforza, and mentions that collaboration prominently in his subsequent review article
in which he describes their method for tracing ancestry with genes. Edwards even shows a photograph of Cavalli-Sforza with him in 1963 in his 2009 article, emphasizing their scholarly friendship.
So I wanted to look up Cavalli-Sforza's current views as well while I traced citations of the Lewontin 1972 article and the Edwards 2003 article in subsequent secondary sources. Through searches with Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, both from my home office computer and from a university library computer, I found a number of books and articles that cite both the Lewontin paper and the Edwards paper. Through a specialized set of wide-reaching keyword searches (for example, "Lewontin Edwards") on the university library's vast database subscriptions, I was able to obtain the full text of many of those articles and of whole books that discuss what current science says about grouping individuals of species Homo sapiens into race groups. I also found more up to date discussions by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Listed here are sources that have the following characteristics: (1) they cite both previous articles by Lewontin and the 2003 article by Edwards, discussing the underlying factual disagreement between those authors, (2) they are Wikipedia reliable sources for medicine (in particular, they are secondary sources such as review articles or textbooks rather than primary research articles), and (3) they are available to me in full text through book-buying, library lending, author sharing of full text on the Internet, or a university library database. They are arranged in approximate chronological order, so that you can see how the newer sources cite and evaluate the previous sources as genetics research continues. The sources listed here are not exhaustive, but they are varied and authoritative, and they cite most of the dozens of primary research articles on the topic, analyzing and summarizing the current scientific consensus.
{{
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help)This first book (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008) is useful because it includes a chapter co-authored by Richard Lewontin in which he updates his views.
{{
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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]).
{{
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help)Like Whitmarsh and Jones (2010), the Krimsky and Sloan (2011) source has several useful chapters on medical genetics.
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.'
{{
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help)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.
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.
Lewontin's conclusions have stood up remarkably well, across diverse kinds of genetic markers, but this produces an odd paradox.
An author who is intimately familiar with Edwards's statistical approach, because he has been a collaborator in fieldwork and co-author on primary research articles with Edwards, is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 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, but cites different previous publications.
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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.
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.
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.
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link)Other current review articles related to human population structure include
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.
I invite my fellow Wikipedians to dig into the most current medically reliable sources to see how the new molecular genetic understanding of the human population is influencing biological approaches to human classification. This article will be the better as more editors look up more of the better sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 14:55, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::They aren't, you know that,[delete personal attack]. The view that race is a valid taxonomy is the majority view as shown by surveys of experts.
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
03:22, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
This
edit request to
Race (human classification) has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
Spelling mistake in text
Please correct heidelgergensis to heidelbergensis (replace g with b)
Rrjmaier ( talk) 05:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
Done Thanks for spotting that - Arjayay ( talk) 09:01, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | Archive 32 | Archive 33 | Archive 34 | Archive 35 |
I think we should refer to views like Razib Khan's (gene expression blog) or Steve Hsu (infoproc.blogspot.com) and not only ideologically determined Lewontinians, what do you think? Because other wise it will just be one sided. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.26.112 ( talk) 12:31, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Take a look at this arcticle — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.26.112 ( talk) 12:37, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
I don't object with including the figure that 67% of biologists accept biological races. I just don't understand why other information has to be removed for the sake of inclusion of this figure. The poll format in the section "Other fields" completely differs now to the section above it. The outline should be similar to the section "U.S. anthropology". Which included both the disagreed figure and the agreed figure right below it. The "Other fields" section should be using the same outline. Is there any reason why it shouldn't when the data is coming from the exact same source?
The line "while only 50% of physical anthropologists did so." is redundant. The previous section already stated that 50% of physical anthropologists agreed. There's no need to repeat this information in the following section. Physical anthropologists would not be a "other field". Just like it'd be unnecessary and redundant to insert the exact same biologists agreed figure in the "U.S. anthropology" section.
Also why was the developmental psychologist figure removed? BlackHades ( talk) 21:08, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
In the 1985 poll (Lieberman et al. 1992) the results for biologists and developmental psychologists were:
biologists 16% developmental psychologists 36%
mean? How is the reader supposed to understand that, especially when the next bit says 67% of biologists accept biological races? BlackHades, since you replaced it you must have read it, so please give the context to that figure. If you didn't actually read it yourself you should not have replaced it. Dougweller ( talk) 22:13, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
Regarding the most recent edit by Maunus, this version seems satisfactory. Although I am somewhat puzzled why this version doesn't contain the 67% figure when the editing war appeared to be over this figure. I went ahead and fixed some grammar errors that were in the latest version. BlackHades ( talk) 00:10, 3 November 2013 (UTC)
I included the following to the lead which was reverted by Maunus:
Based on the following secondary sources:
“The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning.”
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr, 2011.
"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
Race, once the central concept in physical anthropology worldwide, now varies in the degree of support it receives in different regions."
Lieberman, L, et al. (2004). The race concept in six regions: variation without consensus. Collegium antropologicum, 28(2), 907-921.
Maunus, if you want to include a more nuance summary of Morning that's fine. I wouldn't object to that but there was no reason to get rid of a line that every meta analysis on the perception of race by the science community clearly states. You've also previously agreed that there was no broad scientific consensus across disciplines in regards to race so I don't understand your issue with the text. There's nothing inaccurate about the text itself. The status of the overall scientific community exists in the lead of just about every wikipedia article on a controversial scientific topic. (e.g. global warming, evolution, genetically modified food, etc) This article should not be an exemption. There is absolutely no reason why this article should be any different. BlackHades ( talk) 22:41, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
The current lead is extremely problematic. I would encourage editors here to read the current lead from beginning to end. It's an utter mess. It comes off as trying way too hard to convince the reader that race is a purely social instruct by repeating the exact same talking points over and over unnecessarily. Biological essentialism is obsolete in one paragraph and for some reason it must be repeated that it is untenable in the very next paragraph. I also don't understand why the lead is currently implying that only the scientists that believe race is a purely social construct are the only ones that accept that all humans belong to the same species and subspecies. When in actuality, this would be universally accepted.
This lead needs to be blown up and recreated. It should include the history of the term, the status of the overall scientific community, the differing positions that exists in the scientific community, the variations in definition, and the current uses of the classification by the scientific community. All of which actually exists in the main body. But the current lead instead of summarizing the main body like it should as stated by WP:LEAD, is rather written like an opinion piece as if the title of the opinion piece is "Why you should accept race is a social construct". BlackHades ( talk) 05:45, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
“ | This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.
Consequently, at the beginning of the 21st century, even as a majority of biological anthropologists favor the reality of the race perspective, not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship. |
” |
I'm happy with the little crumbs, as long as they get the point across. Achieving perfect neutrality on an English article on Race is simply impossible. As the surveys show, race denial is incredibly high in America (jab at Maunus: entirely due to political correctness - it's got nothing to do with science, whereas China is accused of being "politically incorrect" for their acceptance of race, and if as you claim this is due to Chinese nationalism, the reverse is true for America: it is due to political socialism), and the article will make this clear, whether you like it or not. There is no escape from their bias on Wikipedia.-- Kobayashi245 ( talk) 10:33, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
Sigh. The discussion on my suggestions for improvement seems to be getting derailed. I would like to get feedback from other editors on improving the lead as a whole. Regardless of anyone's personal position on the subject matter, I think we would all agree the current lead reads terribly. It's excessively repetitive and WP:LEAD should be summarizing the main body and it doesn't appear as though it's doing so in its current state. If there are no objections, I would like to at least add the "broad scientific status" text to the lead. BlackHades ( talk) 10:41, 13 November 2013 (UTC)
They are listed in the other talk here (and they're not all of them): [2] "looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist" and even in its article itself it says: "the misclassification probability becomes close to zero if enough loci are studied" and "When they analysed three geographically distinct populations (European, African and East Asian) and measured genetic similarity over many thousands of loci, the answer to their question was "never"." It's basically Lewontian pseudo-scientists who conclude races are biologically meaningless when they use insufficient loci. I already made the jigsaw puzzle analogy somewhere: you don't see the whole picture when you only have one puzzle (Lewontians), but when you put many puzzles together, you can see the picture (actual scientists). Since that is an irrefutable fact, Lewontian scientists are forced to play the semantics game to try to tone down the significance of that: "populations do not equal races!" (we have one of the actual scientists from one of the studies affirm that ancestry/populations=races). Quite funny if you ask me. I'm just glad such madness hasn't reached Russia or China. And again, please provide a direct quote from that historian where he states Chinese anthropologists of today are unscientific.-- Kobayashi245 ( talk) 09:33, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
{{
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help)Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. The Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine 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 sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."
Ideal sources for such 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.
The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that 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."
On the topic of what recent human population genetics research says about classification of human populations, a widely cited primary research article is a 1972 article by Richard Lewontin, which I have seen cited in many of the review articles, monographs, and textbooks I have read over the years.
{{
cite journal}}
: Unknown parameter |deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (
help)As Wikipedians, we can evaluate where the findings in Lewontin's article fit in the current understanding of the topic of human genetic variation by reading current reliable secondary sources in medicine.
Some Wikipedia articles give weighty emphasis to a commentary essay published years after Lewontin published his primary research article on human diversity, when Lewontin's primary research results had been replicated in many other studies and his bottom line conclusion that "about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups" had been taken up by many textbooks on genetics and medicine. In 2003, A. W. F. Edwards wrote a commentary essay in the journal BioEssays
{{
cite journal}}
: Unknown parameter |deadurl=
ignored (|url-status=
suggested) (
help)in which Edwards proposes a statistical model for classifying individuals into groupings based on haplotype data. Edwards wrote, "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification," pointing to his own work with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the author of the book
{{
cite book}}
: Unknown parameter |laydate=
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help); Unknown parameter |laysummary=
ignored (
help)which I read soon after it was published in 1994. In general, Edwards cites a lot of publications from his collaboration with Cavalli-Sforza, and mentions that collaboration prominently in his subsequent review article
in which he describes their method for tracing ancestry with genes. Edwards even shows a photograph of Cavalli-Sforza with him in 1963 in his 2009 article, emphasizing their scholarly friendship.
So I wanted to look up Cavalli-Sforza's current views as well while I traced citations of the Lewontin 1972 article and the Edwards 2003 article in subsequent secondary sources. Through searches with Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, both from my home office computer and from a university library computer, I found a number of books and articles that cite both the Lewontin paper and the Edwards paper. Through a specialized set of wide-reaching keyword searches (for example, "Lewontin Edwards") on the university library's vast database subscriptions, I was able to obtain the full text of many of those articles and of whole books that discuss what current science says about grouping individuals of species Homo sapiens into race groups. I also found more up to date discussions by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Listed here are sources that have the following characteristics: (1) they cite both previous articles by Lewontin and the 2003 article by Edwards, discussing the underlying factual disagreement between those authors, (2) they are Wikipedia reliable sources for medicine (in particular, they are secondary sources such as review articles or textbooks rather than primary research articles), and (3) they are available to me in full text through book-buying, library lending, author sharing of full text on the Internet, or a university library database. They are arranged in approximate chronological order, so that you can see how the newer sources cite and evaluate the previous sources as genetics research continues. The sources listed here are not exhaustive, but they are varied and authoritative, and they cite most of the dozens of primary research articles on the topic, analyzing and summarizing the current scientific consensus.
{{
cite book}}
: Unknown parameter |laydate=
ignored (
help); Unknown parameter |laysummary=
ignored (
help)This first book (Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008) is useful because it includes a chapter co-authored by Richard Lewontin in which he updates his views.
{{
cite book}}
: Unknown parameter |laydate=
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help); Unknown parameter |laysummary=
ignored (
help)The Whitmarsh and Jones (2010) source has several very useful chapters on medical genetics.
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]).
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help)Like Whitmarsh and Jones (2010), the Krimsky and Sloan (2011) source has several useful chapters on medical genetics.
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.'
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help)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.
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help)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.
Lewontin's conclusions have stood up remarkably well, across diverse kinds of genetic markers, but this produces an odd paradox.
An author who is intimately familiar with Edwards's statistical approach, because he has been a collaborator in fieldwork and co-author on primary research articles with Edwards, is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 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, but cites different previous publications.
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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.
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.
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.
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link)Other current review articles related to human population structure include
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.
I invite my fellow Wikipedians to dig into the most current medically reliable sources to see how the new molecular genetic understanding of the human population is influencing biological approaches to human classification. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 20:03, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
The extensive source dumping occurring on the talk page right now is not in any way constructive. While I understand that everyone wants to share everything they have, it just creates more noise. If someone has specific content that they think is not properly represented, the best way to introduce it is to find 2-3 of the highest quality, most independent, tertiary sources, so that the proper context and weight can be evaluated. Asking other editors to review dozens of technical articles published in scientific journals is not going to work. aprock ( talk) 04:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
Don't have time to do anything with this currently but perhaps another editor will:
Killer Chihuahua 15:10, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
The notice that has long been posted on this article talk page reminds us, "The article Race (human classification), along with other articles relating to the area of conflict (namely, the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour, broadly construed) is currently subject to active arbitration remedies, described in a 2010 Arbitration Committee case." The notice links to the case. I ask uninvolved administrators who happen to surf by to keep an eye on the talk page discussion here and whether or not it is aimed at building an encyclopedia based on Wikipedia core content policies. The article topic here is very contentious, and a related article that was the main article that triggered the ArbCom case is one of the ten most edit-warred articles on all of English Wikipedia. Precisely because the topic of this article is contentious, it is the subject of ongoing research around the world, and new books on the general topic of this article are published every week in English from countries all over the English-speaking world. There is no excuse not to develop article text here in light of reliable sources for medical topics, many of which have already been suggested on this article talk page. I hope that the role of adminstrators looking on will be to promote the Wikimedia Foundation goals of improving content quality and increasing participation by editors who have the tools and inclination to continually improve content quality. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 17:08, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
I see some other editors are working hard at looking up and citing reliable sources to improve this article. I'm looking on at the recent edits, and they appear to be more in accord with the sources (and thus more in accord with core Wikipedia policies) than many of the previous versions of this article have been. Keep up the good work. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 01:06, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
To lay out my concerns:
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. Nonetheless, it is clear (editorializing) that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. (bolded statements are confusing to read together as they seemingly contradict each other, statements should be presented together in a cohesive manner)
The statement that races are social constructs, which is widely accepted by scholars (unnecessary and argumentative), describes the fact (argumentative editorializing) that race membership is primarily a social rather than biological fact (argumentative editorializing). People may be classified differently depending on social and cultural conventions, and depending on which social and or biological markers are considered to be most important in a specific social and historical context. A person who could be classified as "black" under the American one-drop rule, might be classified as "colored" in Apartheid South Africa, or as branco (white) in Brazil, or as White in Uganda or the contemporary United States. (where do these comparisons come from exactly? Are they necessary?) Being a social construct does not mean that race isn't real, nor that racial categorization does not affect the lives of people - and it also does not exclude the possibility that the social construction reflect some underlying biological reality (whole sentence seems like defensive editorializing). But it does mean (editorializing) that biological criteria are not in themselves sufficient to establish racial categories, but that social evaluations always underlie schemes of racial categorization. A minority of scholars reject the notion that race is primarily a social construction entirely, and argue that human biological variation is structured into well defined racial groupings. A more common view is that socially constructed racial groupings are also biologically meaningful because they correlate meaningfully with genetic variation, even though no racial grouping can be biologically (incomplete?).
My issue is with how this is worded more than any question of accuracy.-- The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 01:48, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Current wiki says that race has no biological or genetic basis - which is nonsense when we can see features differentiated as Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, Dravidians and Sinhalese among others. I lack the background to correct this but someone should.
miklos@sympatico.ca ( talk) 17:43, 12 December 2013 (UTC)Miklos Legrady, December 12, 2013 legrady@sympatico.ca
There is no consensus among scientists on whether race has biological significance or if race is a purely social construct. [3] [4] Scientists continue to often treat racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. [5] Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetics are strongly associated. [6] Others argue that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences between groups do not exist. [7]
"Many naturalists, including Blumenbach, struggled with the biological meanings of racial categories in some of the same ways that we do today. He acknowledged that morphological variation varied widely within each race and often overlapped with variation observed in other races, that boundaries between races were not discrete and that races could not be defined solely by geographical boundaries between continents or otherwise. But scientists have continued to often treat groups identified by commonly used racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetic differences are strongly associated, justifying the use of race as a proxy for POPULATION STRUCTURE in the design of experiments and medical application. Specifically, they contend that individuals who are assigned to the same racial category share more of their recent ancestry and therefore are more similar genetically to each other than individuals from different racial categories, and that the accuracy of race as a proxy for ancestry is good enough to be useful as a research variable. But others argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device, and even that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences among human populations do not exist. Many people prefer to use ‘ethnic group,’ frequently defined as a group that has shared religious, social, linguistic and cultural heritage/identity, instead of race, but the two terms suffer from the same conceptual and heuristic problems and questions."
Bamshad, M., Wooding, S., Salisbury, B. A., & Stephens, J. C. (2004). Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(8), 598-609.
In the absence of empirical data that can offer a definitive statement regarding racial conceptualization among today’s 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. The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning. Surveys, interviews, content analyses, and ethnographies have not pointed to cross- disciplinary rejection of the biological vision of race. Instead, the empirical question outstanding seems to be whether the academy is divided when it comes to thinking about the nature of race, or whether scientists are fairly unified in their essentialist, biological conceptualization of race.
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. pg 47. University of California Pr, 2011.
The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning. Surveys, interviews, content analyses, and ethnographies have not pointed to cross-disciplinary rejection of the biological vision of race. Instead, the empirical question outstanding seems to be whether the academy is divided when it comes to thinking about the nature of race, or whether scientists are fairly unified in their essentialist, biological conceptualization of race. The survey studies fielded by Lieberman and colleagues suggest the former (as do many observers— see for example Braun 2006; Gissis 2008; Goodman 1997; Olson 2001; Wadman 2004), while the ethnographic and small interview studies described above that point to the traditional race notions embedded in scientists’ research and analysis could be taken on the whole to suggest the latter.
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. pg 47. University of California Pr, 2011.
“The empirical data that have been gathered on the topic, however, do seem to largely rule out one scenario: that scientists across the spectrum have reached a consensus that race is a purely social construct without biological underpinning.”
Morning, Ann. The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr, 2011.
"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
Race, once the central concept in physical anthropology worldwide, now varies in the degree of support it receives in different regions."
Lieberman, L, et al. (2004). The race concept in six regions: variation without consensus. Collegium antropologicum, 28(2), 907-921.
“Biomedical scientists are divided in their opinions about race. Some characterize it as “biologically meaningless” or “not based on scientific evidence”, whereas others advocate the use of race in making decisions about medical treatment or the design of research studies.”
Jorde, L. B., & Wooding, S. P. (2004). Genetic variation, classification and 'race'. Nature genetics, 36, S28-S33.
“Some have argued that the sequencing of the human genome and related research have provided evidence that the notion of race is biologically meaningless and therefore useless. Others, however, have made the opposite argument, namely that recent studies show that genetic clusters correspond closely with groups defined by self-identified race or ethnicity or by continental ancestry.”
Mountain, J. L., & Risch, N. (2004). Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among 'racial' and 'ethnic' groups. Nature Genetics, 36, S48-S53.
“Some commentators have argued that these patterns of variation provide a biological justification for the use of traditional racial categories. They argue that the continental clusterings correspond roughly with the division of human beings into sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans, western Asians, and northern Africans; eastern Asians; Polynesians and other inhabitants of Oceania; and Native Americans. Other observers disagree, saying that the same data undercut traditional notions of racial groups. They point out, for example, that major populations considered races or subgroups within races do not necessarily form their own clusters.”
Race, E. (2005). The use of racial, ethnic, and ancestral categories in human genetics research. American Journal of Human Genetics, 77(4), 519.
“..scientists have continued to often treat groups identified by commonly used racial and ethnic labels as biological categories. Proponents of such classification argue that race and genetic differences are strongly associated, justifying the use of race as a proxy for POPULATION STRUCTURE in the design of experiments and medical application. Specifically, they contend that individuals who are assigned to the same racial category share more of their recent ancestry and therefore are more similar genetically to each other than individuals from different racial categories, and that the accuracy of race as a proxy for ancestry is good enough to be useful as a research variable. But others argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device and even that genetic differences between groups are biologically meaningless or that genetic differences among human populations do not exist.”
Bamshad, M., Wooding, S., Salisbury, B. A., & Stephens, J. C. (2004). Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race. Nature Reviews Genetics, 5(8), 598-609.
BlackHades ( talk) 21:31, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
No clue what you're talking about BlackHades. I responded to a comment of yours that presented seven sources, not two. You are likewise source dumping below as well. If the two sources you suggest are the sort of high quality reliable sources that can serve as a basis for the article, please collapse all the other source dumps, and focus on those two sources. aprock ( talk) 05:47, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
“Two arguments against racial categorization as defined above are firstly that race has no biological basis, and secondly that there are racial differences but they are merely cosmetic, reflecting superficial characteristics such as skin color and facial features that involve a very small number of genetic loci that were selected historically; these superficial differences do not reflect any additional genetic distinctiveness. A response to the first of these points depends on the definition of 'biological'. If biological is defined as genetic then, as detailed above, a decade or more of population genetics research has documented genetic, and therefore biological, differentiation among the races. This conclusion was most recently reinforced by the analysis of Wilson et al. If biological is defined by susceptibility to, and natural history of, a chronic disease, then again numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races. In this context, it is difficult to imagine that such differences are not meaningful. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of 'biological' that does not lead to racial differentiation, except perhaps one as extreme as speciation.”
Risch, N., Burchard, E., Ziv, E., & Tang, H. (2002). Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease. Genome Biol, 3(7), 1-12.
“Current controversies in the field of genetics are provoking a reassessment of claims that race is socially constructed. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's model of how to analyse scientific controversy, this article argues that race is ‘gaining in reality’ in such a way that renders claims about its social construction tenuous and uncertain. Such claims can be seen as failing in two key regards. The first relates to changes in the way genetics is practised and promoted, which are undermining the stability of fundamental assertions that there is ‘no biological basis for race’ or that ‘race does not exist’.“
Hartigan Jr, J. (2008). Is race still socially constructed? The recent controversy over race and medical genetics. Science as Culture, 17(2), 163-193.
“It is not true that ‘‘racial classification is . . . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance’’.
Edwards, A. W. (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. BioEssays,25(8), 798-801.
“However small the racial partition of the total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance.”
Dawkins, R. (2005). The ancestor's tale: a pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
“Because traditional concepts of race are in turn correlated with geography, it is inaccurate to state that race is “biologically meaningless”.
Jorde, L. B., & Wooding, S. P. (2004). Genetic variation, classification and 'race'. Nature genetics, 36, S28-S33.
“As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection.”
Collins, F. S. (2004). What we do and don't know about 'race', 'ethnicity', genetics and health at the dawn of the genome era. Nature genetics, 36, S13-S15.
“Hamilton's analysis immediately falsifies the widely-circulated argument by geneticist Richard Lewontin that the race concept should be abandoned as of no scientific value since 'only' 10-15 percent of genetic diversity exists between populations while 85-90 percent exists within populations. However, as we saw in Chapter 3, a 12.5 percent genetic variance between two populations implies within-population kinship equivalent to that found between grandparent and grandchild or between aunt and nephew. Lewontin's genetic estimate is not only compatible with the existence of high ethnic kinship, it is a rough measure of it.”
Salter, F. (2003). On genetic interests. Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main ua. pg. 92
BlackHades ( talk) 21:31, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
"although the simplistic biological understanding of race and ethnicity associated with the eugenics movement may be dead, the far more subtle presumption that racial and ethnic distinctions nonetheless capture “some” meaningful biological differences is alive and flourishing..It was hoped by some that the sequencing of the human genome would undermine the view that racial and ethnic classifications have biological significance..Ironically, the sequencing of the human genome has instead renewed and strengthened interest in biological differences between racial and ethnic populations, as genetic variants associated with disease susceptibility (Collins and McKusick 2001), environmental response (Olden and Guthrie 2001), and drug metabolism (Nebert and Menon 2001) are identified, and frequencies of these variants in different populations are reported."
Foster, Morris W., and Richard R. Sharp. "Race, ethnicity, and genomics: social classifications as proxies of biological heterogeneity." Genome Research 12.6 (2002): 844-850.
"The study of genomics has resulted in a dizzying back-and-forth stance on race - first denial of any racial difference at the level of DNA, to later focusing attention on these differences...This renewed interest in the biology of race is surprising given that representatives of an array of natural and social sciences, including leading geneticists, once whole-heartedly denounced prior racial biomedicine."
Bliss, Catherine. "Racial taxonomy in genomics." Social Science & Medicine 73.7 (2011): 1019-1027.
"These ongoing practices have found new legitimacy in recent reanalyses of human genetic variation that seem to reverse Lewontin's claims. The completion of the Human Genome Project has facilitated large-scale genomic analysis of human populations, much of which uses "ancestry" to map genetics onto traditional racial categories (see Bolnick et al. 2007; Dupré 2008; Nelson 2008). This all contributes to what Troy Duster (2005) has identified as the molecular reinscription of race."
Whitmarsh, I., & Jones, D. D. S. (Eds.). (2010). What's the Use of Race?: Modern Governance and the Biology of Difference. MIT press.
“Partly due to advancements in the Human Genome Project and related technologies, the idea that race/ethnicity does have a genetic basis is enjoying a resurgence. A rise in the use of race in genetic studies has left many researchers who are committed to a social conceptualization of race at a loss regarding how to evaluate these developments.”
Frank, R. (2007). What to make of it? The (Re) emergence of a biological conceptualization of race in health disparities research. Social science & medicine, 64(10), 1977-1983.
BlackHades ( talk) 07:12, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Source quotes that refute the claim that humans can be divided into "races"
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1. "By emphasizing the close genetic affinities between members of different groups, researchers can reduce the widespread misconception that substantial genetic differences separate groups (Wilson et al. 2001; Olson 2002; Jorde and Wooding 2004)."
(Berg et al. 2005)
2. "There is broad consensus across the social and biological sciences that groups of humans typically referred to as races are not very different from one another. Two individuals from the same race could have more genetic variation between them than individuals from different races. Race is therefore not a particularly useful category to use when searching for the genetics of biological traits or even medical vulnerabilities, despite widespread assumptions."
(Hayden 2013)
3. "Most researchers who examine genetic differences between populations take care to point out that the differences they observe reflect the geographic origins, reproductive history and migrations of these groups, not markers of some essential differences between them."
(Hayden 2013)
4. "There has been a relatively stable cross-disciplinary consensus on the ontology of 'race', described thus by Gannett: 'The apparent consensus view among academics from diverse disciplines — the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological sciences — is that biological races do not exist, at least in humans. Biological race is a socially-constructed category".
(Smart et al. 2012 at 31)
5. "The widely accepted consensus among evolutionary biologists and genetic anthropologists is that biologically identifiable human races do not exist; Homo sapiens constitute a single species, and have been so since their evolution in Africa and throughout their migration around the world. Population genetics provides the best evidence for this conclusion: The genetic variation within a socially recognized human population is greater than the genetic variation between population groups.
(Lee, Mountain & Koenig 2001)
6. "Debates about race and ethnicity have changed in one important respect—today nearly all geneticists reject the idea that biological differences belie racial and ethnic distinctions. Geneticists have abandoned the search for "Indian" or "African" genes, for example, and few if any accept racial typologies."
(Foster & Sharp 2002)
7. "In the opinion of biologists and medical professionals, race is scientifically meaningless."
(Hall 2010)
8. "Current genetic data also refute the notion that races are genetically distinct human populations. There are no gene variants that are present in all individuals of one population group and in no individuals of another. No sharp genetic boundaries can be drawn between human population groups. However, frequencies of genetic variants and haplotypes differ across the world."
(Bonham, Warshauer-Baker, & Collins 2005)
9. "Given the long history of gene flow among various groups that make up Homo sapiens, the notion that one could precisely define a subset of individuals and say that they are somehow separate from the rest of the human race is clearly not scientifically defensible. The history of the human species over the last 100,000 years is sometimes depicted as a branching tree, but this image implies that the branches are separated from one another. We are much more of a trellis than a tree; or perhaps a wisteria vine is a better metaphor."
(Collins 2010 at 154)
10. "Data from many sources have shown that humans are genetically homogeneous and that genetic variation tends to be shared widely among populations. Genetic variation is geographically structured, as expected from the partial isolation of human populations during much of their history. Because traditional concepts of race are in turn correlated with geography, it is inaccurate to state that race is "biologically meaningless." On the other hand, because they have been only partially isolated, human populations are seldom demarcated by precise genetic boundaries. Substantial overlap can therefore occur between populations, invalidating the concept that populations (or races) are discrete types."
(Jorde & Wooding 2004)
11. "Race remains an inflammatory issue, both socially and scientifically. Fortunately, modern human genetics can deliver the salutary message that human populations share most of their genetic variation and that there is no scientific support for the concept that human populations are discrete, nonoverlapping entities."
(Jorde & Wooding 2004)
12. "Modern human genetic variation does not structure into phylogenetic subspecies (geographical 'races'), nor do the taxa from the most common racial classifications of classical anthropology qualify as 'races'".
(Keita et al. 2004)
13. "Careful analyses have demonstrated that definitions of racial and/or ethnic variables in biomedical research are inconsistent, and are based on mixtures of biological, social and economical criteria. It is unclear whether there might be practical advantages in describing humans as if they were divided into biological races, even though we know they are not, but the burden of proof is now on those who say so.
(Barbujani & Colonna 2010)
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"It would appear that two conclusions strongly emerge from research on the status of the race concept in biological anthropology: there is still no consensus on the race concept and there are significant national/regional differences in anthropologists’ attitudes towards ‘race’...Research shows that there is as yet no consensus on the status of the concept among biological anthropologists."
Štrkalj, Goran. "The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review." Anthropologist 9.1 (2007): 73-78.
The last two sentences of the "Complications and various definitions of the concept" section ( permalink) do not seem to be supported by the source provided:
Nonetheless, it is clear that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree, and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
— Bamshad et al., Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race
Where does Bamshad makes the claim that "racial categories correlate with biological traits" or that there is "no consensus about whether racial categories can be considered to have significance?" All I see is the suggestion that "In some cases, the accuracy of these inferences [race or ethnicity] might be adequate" but in many cases they will "lessen the predictive value of clinical inference." Am I missing something in the source that supports the text? — ArtifexMayhem ( talk) 02:31, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Also this edit here [8] appears to be editor synthesis. There is not a single citation for the entire paragraph. Per WP:NOR and WP:BURDEN, I have to revert this paragraph. Maunus, I hope you don't take this the wrong way because I do think there are several good points in your paragraph that should be mentioned in the article in some form, but it should be in a way consistent with wikipedia policy. BlackHades ( talk) 04:45, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Its interesting experiment to replace all the occurrences of "race" word with "melanilistic colour variant" or "breed"... and thus throw away majority of the emotions coined with the word race. What the article could look like then ? Do people have melanilistic color variants like wolves ( black wolf) or big cats ( black panther) ? Could we distinguish groups of people based on that trait like we do with other species ? Or maybe our species has breeds like dogs horses etc ? And final question what really should be a definition of race ? That is a phenotypical or genetical concept. There could be population very diverse genetically, even to the point of different species ( Animals That Seem Identical May Be Completely Different Species) or there could be a very distinctive groups within one species that have only a few difference in genes , but all those different alleles are producing different characteristics like color or adult animal size and also maybe to the point that two of these populations do not mix. Next, I know historically the race concept has been drifting with meaning and with time encompassing bigger and bigger cohorts of people. But I think this is the effects of how people knew with time what is the extent of human variation. If in our times there would be other sub-species of humans living in Africa or Indonesia like Homo erectus etc. with clearly different mental capability and other phenotypic traits but they could mix with all other people living as that must be a reality some time ago then I think we consider all variation that we have now a one race and these now extinct subspecies as another races. Or if there would be in the past a successful experiment (or accident at the very distant past like 6 thousand years ago) to kill all black or non-European descent people ( Tuskegee syphilis experiment). Then the variation would diminish and people (especially if that would be a long time in the past) would coin a new 'race' boundaries that would be similar to the original concept. Likewise in maybe some isolated island on pacific there would be concept of race (before white people came in) distinguishing phenotypes that for someone who didn't grow up with the people would be identical and not "worth" of categorizing. So in my opinion race is not a social construct in its all entirety - it is just measure of known human variation. It is the same like let's say in other species. Suppose that we discover a new specimen of lets say a tree/frog/monkey in some inaccessible part of rain forest in Congo or Brazil and first we see some population and we could draw a distinction between them (and we know that these are the same species) and give to them some Latin third name like in us Homo sapiens *sapiens*. And no one sees anything wrong with that. But then as we go deeper in the forest we see individuals with more diverging features and they diverge in the same extent that our initial known population - so we change the boundaries of race/breed/variant/subspecies and call our initial population as one and then (until of course we encounter again similar situation) we proceed to divide the rest based on updated knowledge about all intra-species variability we know. And there is also in-group variability. If we see a new plant or rodent species that their individuals are very different like in melanin content or size, but they live as one population and are breeding between them, we would not call the differences a VBRS (variant/breed/race/subspecies) but if there would be a feature of the habitat like a river or mountain that these individuals cannot easily cross (even if there would be some areas of mixing) then we do our distinctions. So in case of humans there were situations all over the world where one tribe or nation consider people living on the other side of river or forest or mountain to be not "like them" a different kind of people or even not people at all. But these people living amongst themselves cannot have knowledge that there are vastly different populations on earth and in comparison to them their distinction does not hold up. The case with VBRS is to have a relatively small number of them, otherwise we run in to paradox that every individual is VBRS on itself. But now we do know the whole earth, we do now what human variability is in terms of genotype and phenotype. So now coined distinctions are not prone to the same mistakes as those in the past. But if we want an answer to question are there human races or not we must first determine to what definition of race we are answering. Are we considering phenotypes as these are now, or are we considering the human migration process, genetics, etc... Or maybe a law is the criterion like in USA when you have populations that are phenotypically different like AA/blacks together with those based on culture like Hispanics... This are a very distinct concepts that are to itself like concept of fruit based on biological features and concept of fruit that is in EU law where carrot is considered a fruit. When I read such articles of discussions about race I feel like I'm reading quarrels where there are distinct categories fruits and vegetables or all things we eat are equal and everyone who thinks different is an ignorant foodist. So people in their heads are holding very different conceptions of race and what it shouldn't be. So if they read any scientific paper where the word is used and it is not debunked in the same paragraph (but surprisingly against our species only, we are blind of dog racism or horse racism... we aren't ashamed that we ignorantly categorize these equal beings into a races, yes ?) the person who writes it, if such person is in scientific position he risks his job very much because people already know what is a race and only thing what they need is a prayer from scientific community that is pedestal to their beliefs.
And there is another question of ethics. It's like with the question: "Can we make a ham sandwich from Dalai Lama?" The answer is yes of course. It could be done with the same tools that we use to work on pigs or cows in our slaughterhouses. There is nothing in reality, in laws of physics or logic itself to make this endeavor impossible like it is impossible with let's say a perpetuum mobile of the second kind (not to say the first). There would be none of cosmic string destroying the apparatus to make meat from human flesh ( Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?). But question - is it ethical to do so, may have a very different answer. So is it ethical to distinguish races of our species is different question of that if it could be coherently done. But people really want that there would be some feature of the world that would prohibit making races of human beings. But that thing would also prohibit of making such disgust to dogs and horses. pwjb ( talk) 12:35, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
Nicholas Wade's view on race is a mainstream pro-race view that should be added in for our articles on race and proponent views. 174.95.171.228 ( talk) 20:23, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
Primarily this section does not do what its title suggests. It seems nothing more than an opinion piece from what would be termed in the United States a left wing political slant.
"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.[17][18][19][20][21][22]" [Emphasis added]"
This statement is either false or misleading, depending on how it is read, on account of the last portion of the sentence. There is no "consensus" that human racial groups could not be biologically defined; I provide references below. Whether common groups which are called races in e.g., the U.S. can not be is a distinct matter.
I am going to rewrite this as:
"There is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [],[],[],[],[],[],[],[]; many argue that racial categories as used, for example, in the U.S. are socially constructed and cannot be biologically defined.[17][18][19][20][21][22]".
If there are any objections to this let me know. 174.97.231.103 ( talk) 18:27, 28 March 2014 (UTC)John
Kaszycka, K. A., Štrkalj, G., & Strzałko, J. (2009). Current views of European anthropologists on race: Influence of educational and ideological background. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 43-56.
Kaszycka, K. A., & Strzałko, J. (2003). Race: Tradition and convenience, or taxonomic reality? More on the race concept in Polish anthropology
Lieberman, L., Stevenson, B. W., & Reynolds, L. T. (1989). Race and anthropology: A core concept without consensus. Anthropology & education quarterly, 20(2), 67-73.
Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr.
Štrkalj, G. (2007). The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthrop
Strkalj, G., Ramsey, S., & Wilkinson, A. T. (2008). Anatomists’ attitudes towards the concept of race. South African Medical Journal, 94(2), 90.
Wang, Q., trkalj, G., & Sun, L. (2003). On the concept of race in Chinese biological anthropology: alive and well. Current anthropology, 44(3), 403-403.
I will post my proposed edits here. If no one objects within 24 hours I will finalize the edits. I expect to fight an editing war on some of these issues, but I hope we can more or less agree on others.
Section: "Complications and various definitions of the concept".
Edit #1. 3/28/2014
Original: "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.[17][18][19][20][21][22]"...
Note for edit 1: I changed this because the original was either misleading or false depending on how it was read. The original implied that there was a consensus against the existence of biological races. This is false. What is true is that many people agree that certain commonly used racial categories in the U.S. e.g., Asians do not characterize biologically scientifically defined races. Hippofrank ( talk) 19:05, 28 March 2014 (UTC)Hippofrank
Edited Version: While there is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], it is agreed that gene frequencies vary among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings. For this reason there is no current consensus about whether traditional racial categories can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. [6]. There is a consensus that certain commonly used racial categories as used in certain countries, for example, Asians in the U.S., are socially constructed and cannot be biologically defined [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]. Regarding these non-biologically definable racial categories, some scholars argue that they correlate with biologically conditioned traits (e.g. phenotype) to some degree and therefore can be genetically informative.
Edit #2. 3/28/2014 3:26 Eastern
Original: " When people define and talk about a particular conception of race, they create a social reality through which social categorization is achieved.[29] In this sense, races are said to be social constructs.[30] These constructs develop within various legal, economic, and sociopolitical contexts, and may be the effect, rather than the cause, of major social situations.[31] While race is understood to be a social construct by many, most scholars agree that race has real material effects in the lives of people through institutionalized practices of preference and discrimination."
Note for edit 2: This statement is fairly confused, so it needs to be changed. First, the term "social construct" is ambiguous; in common parlance it can mean "not a biological entity" while in philosophical parlance it can mean "not a natural kind". For example, in the philosophy of biology species are often said to be social constructs.
Edit #3. 3/28/2014 3:30 Eastern
Original: "[1] Socioeconomic factors, in combination with early but enduring views of race, have led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. [2] [32] Racial discrimination often coincides with racist mindsets, whereby the individuals and ideologies of one group come to perceive the members of an outgroup as both racially defined and morally inferior.[33] [3] As a result, racial groups possessing relatively little power often find themselves excluded or oppressed, while hegemonic individuals and institutions are charged with holding racist attitudes.[34] [4] Racism has led to many instances of tragedy, including slavery and genocide.[35]
Note for edit 3: This whole paragraph needs to be rewritten. The first statement above is disputed. It has not been established that views of race, per se, have caused "considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial". This, rather, is a theoretical model. The second statement is somewhere between conjectural and inflammatory; members of defined outgroups (e.g., "their family), in general, are not preferenced; this is only tantamount to seeing them as "morally inferior"; this second statement also confuses moral inferiority with trait inferiority; the third statement is circular because " groups possessing relatively little power" and "excluded or oppressed" are typically operationalized the same way. The fourth statement is problematic because "racism" has no one definition; there is no consensus on what it is. One can only say "racism in some senses".
Proposed Edited Version (for edit 2,3): Regardless of the biological status of race, many scholars believe that the act of racial categorization can have socially significant effects on the lives of people through, for example, institutionalized practices of discrimination. [31] They believe that the act of employing racial classifications has led to considerable suffering within disadvantaged racial groups. From this perspective, racial classifications reinforce tendencies to discriminate on the basis of ingroup and outgroup, tendencies which can lead to the oppressed and exclusion if the groups being discriminated against possesses relatively little power. These scholars have also argued that beliefs about the biological reality of race condition racism, understood as the belief in inherent racial superiority and inferiority.
While there is no consensus as to whether there are human biological races [13] [14] [15] [16] [17], it is agreed that gene frequencies vary among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings [18]." Hippofrank ( talk) 22:31, 29 March 2014 (UTC)Hippofrank
[13-17]
Kaszycka, K. A., Štrkalj, G., & Strzałko, J. (2009). Current views of European anthropologists on race: Influence of educational and ideological background. American Anthropologist, 111(1), 43-56.
Lieberman, L., Stevenson, B. W., & Reynolds, L. T. (1989). Race and anthropology: A core concept without consensus. Anthropology & education quarterly, 20(2), 67-73.
Morning, A. (2011). The nature of race: How scientists think and teach about human difference. University of California Pr.
Wang, Q., trkalj, G., & Sun, L. (2003). On the concept of race in Chinese biological anthropology: alive and well. Current anthropology, 44(3), 403-403.
Štrkalj, G. (2007). The status of the race concept in contemporary biological anthropology: A review. Anthropologist, 9(1), 73-78.
[18]
Hochman, A. (2013). Racial discrimination: How not to do it. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44(3), 278-286.
"Advances in human genome research brought about an increasing number of discoveries of mutated alleles responsible for various metabolic changes, whereas the frequency of these alleles has displayed interpopulational differences. If there were differences between the “white” and “black” U.S. residents—for example, alleles of genes called PCSK9 (Cohen et al. 2006) or ApoE4 associated with LDL metabolism and indirectly the risk of heart disease—they were easy to label as “racial” differences (Burchard et al. 2003).... In that the argument proposed that knowledge of the frequency of alleles in individual distinguishable populations was of practical importance in the treatment of some diseases, it was quite correct, although this still did not make a population a race (Hoffman 2005). Thus, interpopulational diversity of the contents of the human genome discovered during the research is not an argument for the existence of races but merely for polymorphism, the range and determinants of which are worth investigating also for medical purposes (Jones 2001; Rotman 2005; Schwartz 2001)."
The idea is that it's trivially true that the populations called races differ in gene frequency. But whether these populations constitute biological races is a more complex and contentious issue. So, I will just change that to:
"There is no consensus as to whether there are biological races in the human species [19] [20] [21] [22]. And there is widespread consensus that many commonly used racial categories are socially constructed in the sense of not being biologically delineated [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28]. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed that those groups which are called races vary in gene frequencies. Because of this, there is no current consensus as to whether these groups can be considered to have significance for understanding human genetic variation. [29]"
These are excellent edits based on the best, mainstream sources. Go ahead. 74.14.29.177 ( talk) 06:10, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
If they all say the same thing, then I would suggest using the highest quality source, include page numbers, and an excerpt of the text you are paraphrasing. aprock ( talk) 00:49, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
(a) There is little agreement as to whether there are human biological races. (b) There is much agreement that some/many common racial categories are not biologically defined. (c) There is general agreement that groups called races differ in genes frequencies. (d) There is no agreement as to whether groups called races have have significance for understanding human genetic variation.
A more elaborate discussion is really needed, one which distinguishes between the various debates about race. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hippofrank ( talk • contribs) 01:37, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
Please pick a couple secondary sources (your excerpt above lists at least seven). Please include page numbers for each source. If you feel up to it, please consider adding an excerpt from the sources you think are the highest quality sources that you are basing your content on. aprock ( talk) 04:10, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
::Please note that Maunus is inserting his personal opinion based on a single source and ignoring international surveys of experts on the question.
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
10:15, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::Surveys are the ideal source for gauging opinion on scientific questions. What else do you propose? Editor:Maunus's personal opinion?
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
12:11, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::::You are wrong and surveys are a better gauge than one source.
PlasticSpatula5 (
talk)
16:19, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
While the scientific consensus is human races do not exist today, it is very much the opposite for the past. The current article fails to touch upon this. At least, most palaeo-anthropologists consider there to have been human races as "morphologically distinct populations" that existed throughout the Pleistocene:
"To see true 'racial' variation in humans, one has to go to the fossil record. It is the Neandertals, the Ngandong people, the archaic East Asians, and possibly others that reflect the original regional Eurasian adaptations of humans." - Smith, F. H. [2010]. "Species, Populations, and Assimilation in Later Human Evolution". In: A Companion to Biological Anthropology. Larsen, C. S. (Ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
"Human geographic variation obviously exists, but it is not racial. Modern paleoanthropology and genetics are among the disciplines that have shown that there is no taxonomy in the human species below the species level. They also show that the present poorly reflects the past. Neandertal morphology and genetics, and genetic evidence of other distinct groups, suggest far more population structure in the past. It is likely that for much of the Pleistocene the human species had races. But, whether or not races appeared in the past, they did not persist. With only some exceptions, much of the Pleistocene human variation did not survive the enormous population expansions and replacements of the latest Pleistocene and Holocene. Geographic variation today is not well related to the past because of the large number of recent adaptive mutations and the differential survivorship of Upper Pleistocene and Holocene populations." - Wolpoff, M. H., & Caspari, R. [2012]. "Palaeoanthropology and Race". In: A Companion to Paleoanthropology. Begun, D. R. (Ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
While living (or recent historic) populations are highly heterogeneous in morphology - 90% of cranial variation for example is found within populations, Pleistocene human variation had a reverse geographical structure where most skeletal variation was found between populations. In that sense there were once human races.
Palaeoanthropologists are not in agreement when races disappeared during the Pleistocene. Some argue there were races (or even subraces) as recent as the Upper Palaeolithic e.g. Ferembach (1986) splits (Palaeo)Europeans into: "Cromagnoids" and "Combecapelloids". FossilMad ( talk) 13:21, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
I see there are some new (to this article under the screen names we are seeing here, but perhaps not new to Wikipedia) editors who are joining the talk page discussion here. Wikipedia has a lot of interesting articles based on the ongoing research in human molecular genetics that helps trace the lineage of people living in various places on the earth. On the hypothesis that better sources build better articles as all of us here collaborate to build an encyclopedia, I thought I would suggest some sources for improving articles on human genetic history and related articles. I've been reading university textbooks on human genetics "for fun" since the 1980s, and for even longer I've been visiting my state flagship university's vast BioMedical Library to look up topics on human medicine and health care policy. he Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources in medicine 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 sources and accurately reflect current medical knowledge."
Ideal sources for such 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.
The guidelines, consistent with the general Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, remind us that 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."
On the topic of what recent human population genetics research says about classification of human populations, a widely cited primary research article is a 1972 article by Richard Lewontin, which I have seen cited in many of the review articles, monographs, and textbooks I have read over the years.
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Some Wikipedia articles give weighty emphasis to a commentary essay published years after Lewontin published his primary research article on human diversity, when Lewontin's primary research results had been replicated in many other studies and his bottom line conclusion that "about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups" had been taken up by many textbooks on genetics and medicine. In 2003, A. W. F. Edwards wrote a commentary essay in the journal BioEssays
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help)in which Edwards proposes a statistical model for classifying individuals into groupings based on haplotype data. Edwards wrote, "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification," pointing to his own work with Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the author of the book
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help)which I read soon after it was published in 1994. In general, Edwards cites a lot of publications from his collaboration with Cavalli-Sforza, and mentions that collaboration prominently in his subsequent review article
in which he describes their method for tracing ancestry with genes. Edwards even shows a photograph of Cavalli-Sforza with him in 1963 in his 2009 article, emphasizing their scholarly friendship.
So I wanted to look up Cavalli-Sforza's current views as well while I traced citations of the Lewontin 1972 article and the Edwards 2003 article in subsequent secondary sources. Through searches with Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books, both from my home office computer and from a university library computer, I found a number of books and articles that cite both the Lewontin paper and the Edwards paper. Through a specialized set of wide-reaching keyword searches (for example, "Lewontin Edwards") on the university library's vast database subscriptions, I was able to obtain the full text of many of those articles and of whole books that discuss what current science says about grouping individuals of species Homo sapiens into race groups. I also found more up to date discussions by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Human Genome Diversity Project.
Listed here are sources that have the following characteristics: (1) they cite both previous articles by Lewontin and the 2003 article by Edwards, discussing the underlying factual disagreement between those authors, (2) they are Wikipedia reliable sources for medicine (in particular, they are secondary sources such as review articles or textbooks rather than primary research articles), and (3) they are available to me in full text through book-buying, library lending, author sharing of full text on the Internet, or a university library database. They are arranged in approximate chronological order, so that you can see how the newer sources cite and evaluate the previous sources as genetics research continues. The sources listed here are not exhaustive, but they are varied and authoritative, and they cite most of the dozens of primary research articles on the topic, analyzing and summarizing the current scientific consensus.
{{
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{{
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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]).
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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.'
{{
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help)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.
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.
Lewontin's conclusions have stood up remarkably well, across diverse kinds of genetic markers, but this produces an odd paradox.
An author who is intimately familiar with Edwards's statistical approach, because he has been a collaborator in fieldwork and co-author on primary research articles with Edwards, is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 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, but cites different previous publications.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
I invite my fellow Wikipedians to dig into the most current medically reliable sources to see how the new molecular genetic understanding of the human population is influencing biological approaches to human classification. This article will be the better as more editors look up more of the better sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji ( talk, how I edit) 14:55, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
::::They aren't, you know that,[delete personal attack]. The view that race is a valid taxonomy is the majority view as shown by surveys of experts.
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Spelling mistake in text
Please correct heidelgergensis to heidelbergensis (replace g with b)
Rrjmaier ( talk) 05:00, 12 May 2014 (UTC)
Done Thanks for spotting that - Arjayay ( talk) 09:01, 12 May 2014 (UTC)