Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 8

message: isnt race concluded by simple experiments?
like a horse and a donkey reproducing, they can do it, and out will come a diffrent animal, a mule, but this mule cant reproduce itself, so horses and donkeys are diffrent races.
i think its a valid explanation of "race".
you all know any human who is fertial can have fertile babys with any other humans, so there are no human races, even if there is small genetical diffrences from diffrent regions, the diffrences arent that large to prevent the offspring to be fertile.
P0M: Hi, whoever you are. (Please sign your postings so we can keep track of who is talking.) It's a little more complicated than that, at least if one wants to keep the neutral point of view that is part of Wikopedia policy. Genera are divided into species, and the criterion for whether two creatures are in the same species is, as you say, whether they can produce offspring that are in turn capable of reproducing. Sometimes within a species it is convenient to speak of sub-species. Sub-species generally occur when two branches of one species are separated by a natural barrier and each continues to evolve to meet local conditions. After a time, enough differences accumulate that it becomes easy to determine by examination which area a sample of each group comes from.  Take honey bees, for instance. There are actually at least two species of Apis that are kept commercially for honey production and/or pollenization of crops. In the Americas, Europe, and Africa, the honey bees all belong to the same species. However, bees from different areas have different characteristics. For instance, the bees in Cypress and the bees in Italy are, geographically, not very far separated from each other. However, bees almost never travel more than a mile or two when they swarm, and it would be truly rare for a swarm from Cypress to make it to the mainland. It would be even more rare for a swarm from the mainland to fly out over the Mediterranean and just happen to go in the right direction to land in Cypress. (Bees are believed to send out scouts to find a place to build a new hive, so the only reason that a swarm might land on Cypress would probably be that a huge storm had blown them there.) Despite the close physical difference, bees of the Italian lineage are bred and sold all over the world to people desiring to keep bees. There is no market (except perhaps to geneticists, breeders trying to incorporate desirable traits into a commercial line, etc.) for Cyprian bees. The reason is that Italian bees are gentle (i.e., much less likely to fly out and sting when the beekeeper has to open their hive to check for diseases like American foulbrood), industrious (i.e., they a single hive may harvest hundreds of pounds of honey per year), and not terribly likely to swarm (leaving the colony depleted to the point that it cannot make much honey production). As far as I know, the main reason that no commercial breeders have tried to sell Cyprian queens or bees by the pound to start a new hive with is that they are rather likely to sting.
P0M: In the world of commercial beekeeping, what scientists classify as sub-species of bees are called "races" of bees. 
P0M: Prior to the arrival of the first Western sailors in Australia, the aborigines living there would have been rather in the same position as the bees in Cypress. But the bees in Cypress have probably been isolated far longer than the humans in Australia. Whether the Australian aborigines evolved any significant different characteristics, characteristics other than adaptations to disease, intensity of solar radiation, amount of fine sand in the air on a daily basis, etc., etc., I do not know. Perhaps significantly, I have never heard anyone interested in promoting the idea of {race} trumpeting the unique adaptations of Australian Aborigines. 
P0M: Usually, or maybe I should say inevitably, human populations are not well isolated. In the years B.C., when traders made their way over the Silk Route, it seems highly unlikely to me that no children were sired along the way. The differences between peoples are clinal, which just means that there is no sharp line between the appearance of people in Europe and China, even though if you flew directly from London to Beijing you would see a major difference in skin color, eye shape, etc., etc. That being said, if you looked carefully you would find some Chinese people without the epicanthic fold in their eyelids, some without shovel-shaped incisors, some with wavy black hair, etc.
P0M: So the general tendency of people who are forced to deal with the realities of the situation is to speak of "populations" -- because you can then say something that is statistically grounded and of practical utility, e.g., in conducting famine relief among members of this population, milk should not be shipped because a high percentage of these people are lactose intolerant and much diarrhea, dehydration, and even deaths would follow if they were forced by hunger to eat milk products.
P0M: The people who favor using the term "race" seem to me to have a reason for favoring it over "population," a reason that they seem unwilling to specify. In the past, however, the color of a person's skin was frequently asserted to be a sign of their intelligence, morality, etc. Strangely, the qualities asserted to be associated with different skin colors (other than white) seem to me to have been almost always negative. 
P0M: Anyway, the task is to explain the phenomenon, and a full historical case study would be valuable. Recently some people have tried to bolster the idea of {race} by pointing out that there are significant genetic differences between people living in widely separated areas of the world -- as though we did not already know that there had to be genetic differences to account for skin color, inborn lack of wisdom teeth, etc., etc. And other people are pointing to {race} as a necessary tool to identify people with higher likelyhood of suffering from things like sickle-cell anemia -- without knowing that sickle-cell anemia follows malaria and crosses {race} divides. Simply stating, "Race is a myth," as I was once inclined to do, will not be sufficient to immunize people against tendentious reasoning.
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P0M: On another subject, it's time to archive again. I'm inclined to archive everything except whatever comes after the anonymous comment above. Any objections?
:just a question. Do you consider anonymous comments are not welcome on wikipedia ? Why would not they be archived ?
::To the above anonymous user: Who said the anonymous comments are not welcome on Wikipedia?  The anonymous comments should not be archived because they initiate a new thread.  If they were archived, then POM's response would be out of context.  I agree with POM that we should not archive the anonymous comments, they ought to remain on the talk page!  By the way, one can respond to those anonymous comments in a far more succinct way than POM's response: horses and donkeys are of different species, not different races. Slrubenstein
P0M: Thanks, Slrubenstein, for fixinng my inadventant miscommunication. I meant to archive everything before the anonymous question/comment. Working at 4 a.m. sometimes does not bring out the best in me. And thanks for archiving the older stuff.
P0M 04:11, 3 Feb 2004 (UTC)

message: To stop the edit war I have protected this page. I was tempted to block the anon (since 195 was deleting text) but protected the page instead. 195 - this is your opportunity to try to convince others that your version is better. If you can't, then you must follow the consensus reached on this talk page. And everybody - please be nice to each other. Saying things like 'Get a life' in edit summaries and talk pages is not acceptable. --mav
:I have made numerous efforts to convince others. I was ignored. --195.92.168.174 22:39, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page protected 

message: Here are the revised topic sentences for the present article. I would like to make the minor changes to make one small step forward. What does everyone think?
Preface: Race is a type of classification used to group living things based on such elements as.... 
The term “race” is rarely used in contemporary scientific classification, but is sometimes used within, and often outside of, the scientific community in much the same sense as the terms subspecies, population or breed are used in biology. 
I. Overview (changes made)
:A. Many people believe that physical characteristics of various Homo sapiens justify the classification of humanity into various races. Such characteristics include... but do not include... 
:B. In the early-to-mid 20th century many scientists began questioning the heretofore accepted causal relation between biological and cultural attributes, and some scientists also began questioning the taxonomic validity of race attribution. 
:C. In biology, a race was defined as a recognisable group forming all or part of a monotypic or polytipic species. 
:D. Humans clearly vary considerably -- enough to make early scientists accept the view of Carrolus Linaeus that humans should be divided into several sub-species 
:E. However, a distinct difference is only one of the two conditions that must be satisfied before a different form can be classified as a sub-species or even as a race -- lack of significant gene flow between populations. 
:F. Historians are apt to describe the notion of race as it applies to human beings as a “social construct”, preferring instead the to use the concept of “population”, which can be given a clear operational definition. 
II. History of the term  (changes made)
:A. The definition of race, before the development of evolutionary biology, was that of common lineage, a vague concept interchangeable with species, breed, cultural origin, or national character. 
:B. The word race, interpreted to mean common descent, was introduced into English in about 1580. 
:C. This late origin for the English term is consistent with the thesis that the concept of “race” as defining a very small number of groups of human beings dates from the time of Columbus. 
:D. The first published classification of humans into distinct “races” seems to have been Francois Bernier’s Nouvelle division de la terre par les differents especes ou races qui l’habitent, published in 1684. 
:E. The 19th century concept of race was based primarily on morphological and cosmetic characteristics such as skin color. 
:F. Because people of different races can interbreed, this method of classification is "weak" in the sense that it can be difficult to determine to which categories some borderline individuals belong.
::(Contrast the difficulty of determining to which group a child of mixed parentage belongs with the much more clear-cut decisions involved in determining membership in species.) 
:G. Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier,... 
:H. In Blumenbach’s day, physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., went hand in hand with declarations of group moral character, intellectual capacities, and other aptitudes. 
:I. Modern criticism of the biological significance of “race” can be dated to the publication in 1935 ... 
III. Politics of race   (changes made)
:A. The concept of race was applied at the time of Blumenbach by political theorists such as... to nationalist theory to develop a militant ethnic nationalism. 
:B. Inequalities based on presumed racial differences have been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country’s founding. 
:C. Religious leaders active in the United States began to decry segregation and discrimination based on race in the latter half of the 20th century. 
IV. Anthropological and genetic studies of race   (changes made)
:A. In the 19th century many natural scientists made three claims about race: 
:B. Since human beings are the most complex entities we know of, the empirical study of man is in many ways the most difficult of all, making problems in fields like physics and chemistry look elementary in comparison. 
:C. A rejection of 19th century assumptions was initiated by Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology.<<Remove the question mark originally found here.>> 
:D. By the 1950s, anthropologists had come to question the very existence of race as a biological phenomenon. 
:E These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race. 
:F. The "populationist" view does not deny that there are physical differences among people; it simply claims that the historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly useful in accounting for these differences scientifically. 
:G. Since the 1960s, some anthropologists and teachers of anthropology have re-conceived "race" as a cultural category or social construct, in other words, as a particular way that some people have of talking about themselves and others. 
:H. Two examples, one from the United States and one from Brazil, further illustrate the majority view. 
:I. One of the most striking consequences of the Brazilian system of racial identification was that parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. 
:J. So although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the USA, there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices. 
V. Race and intelligence   (changes made)
:A. Lately people have tried, once again, to associate intelligence with race. 
:B. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould makes three criticisms of Jensen's work. 
VI. Phylogenetic representations   (changes made)
:A. Recent genetic analyses have enabled the concept of race to be represented in somewhat cladistic terms. 
End of proposed topic sentences. P0M 00:29, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: A good question, and alas I do not have a good answer.  But I do have a good observation: this is precisely why Wikipedia must be a collaborative act, and no article can be authored by one person.  But I do have some practical advice (which I sometimes don't follow myself!  But I try to.) -- whenever asserting a fact or making a proposition, frame it as clearly as possible and be as precise as possible.  If you are generalizing from cases from the United States, precede general statements with "In the United States..."  If you are using cases from the US and UK, say something like, "In the West..."  If you are representing a scholarly view, give the attribution: "According to Stephen J. Gould ..." or "According to Western philosophers" or "According to biologists" or whatever.  Not only does this communicate more information, it leaves room for someone who can add other views or examples. Slrubenstein
Since I do not understand exactly what "But people in many countries believe that race is real -- and do not necessarily conceive of it in pysical or biological terms." means, I will leave it to somebody who does understand it to draft changes. Meanwhile, I will fix the topic sentences as indicated above. That won't make any difference to the meaning. P0M 21:06, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

text: Sounds good.  Just to be clear, the sentence "Many people believe that physical characteristics of various Homo sapiens justify the classification of humanity into various races" is true, meaningful, and important -- nevertheless, this section should not be written in a way that suggests that physical characteristics are the only way people have justified classification of humanity into races.  This is just one application of a general point, to be careful not to write in sweeping generalizations.  If you read further down in the article, you will see that people in Brazil justified the classification of races by economic and educational differences and not just (or not even) physical characteristics. Slrubenstein
The term used in Brazil is not "race" per se: "In Brazil, people are labeled not by race, but by 'tipo,'" 
P0M 03:49, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:     Topic Sentences