Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 14

message: We need to clean up the article. The sections should only treat what it says they do in the section title. For example, there shouldn't be a paragraph "
:"In everyday speech, race is often used to describe populations that are better defined as ethnic groups..."
at the end of "History of the term". Nor should the "Anthropology and genetics" section, being placed after the history section, i.e. we are through with the historical aspect now, begin with 
:"In the 19th century many natural scientists made three claims about race: ..."
(i.e. this bit still belongs in the 'history' section). Also the case studies (USA, Brazil) should either be exported to special articles, or at least be placed after the more general phylogenetic subsection. Somebody should read the entire article and weed out repetitions, too. dab 17:24, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: § The von Luschan scale was a manufactured set of standard tiles that were colored so that a researcher could in relatively rapid order sort through his/her tiles and find the one that came closest to matching a given subject's skin color. Essentially the same method is still used today, at least in this increasingly anti-scientific nation, by dentists who want to match ceramic material used for making fillings with the color of their patient's tooth. They have a little cabinet full of ceramic "teeth" on little spindles. Each specimen has a different combination of hue and brightness from the others. Although one could easily create an electronic device to measure these factors to tighter tolerances, the low-tech device seems to meet professional standards. Similarly, given the fact that a subject's skin color could vary considerably due to contingent factors such as season and weather patterns, the von Luchan tiles probably provide all the accuracy that is useful. P0M 03:10, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Von Luschan scale 

message: seeing that we have to really muck out this article, moving and cutting whole paragraphs, I think it is very evident now that this article is unfairly listed as 'featured'. Would you support listing it for defeaturing, and re-featuring it once it becomes stable again? dab (ᛏ) 19:50, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I would support defeaturing. Frankly, I was quite shocked to find this article was featured in the first place. -- Schaefer 20:53, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: did it, see WP:FARC. Would be nice to see it re-featured soon, too. dab (ᛏ) 10:42, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: um, btw, FA...

message: Most of the semantic problems in this article seem to stem from the confusion of race as a general form of subspecies classification, and race as it pertains to human beings. In my non-expert opinion, these aren't the same thing, as human races were defined by people who didn't know that genes existed, and those are the racial groupings people are going to continue to use regardless of what population biologists say. Declaring multiple definitions of race and specifying which version of the word race some object to is not the way to go. I honestly think we should have separate articles for race as a taxonomic classification, and race as it pertains to humans. If someone argues that race truly doesn't exist (id est, not even in honeybees), it can go in the former article. If someone argues that commonly used human races (Black, White, Asian, etc.) don't correspond to what biologists would consider to be races, then that goes in the latter.
I planned to clear up confusion regarding this with subsections and eventually good introductions, which is why I titled the section "Validity of human races". I don't think this is sufficient. Having a table of definitions to which later sections of the article can refer says to me as a reader, "This article is actually about two things with the same name, so here's a table showing the different things being discussed so we can keep them separate." It's not a bad idea, and I'd take it as a second resort to splitting the article, but I'd like to reach some consensus on this before major rewriting is done. -- Schaefer 22:52, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Your idea may have some merit.  However, please note that the point I made above, that there are many biologists who do not use the term race and many who do not use the term subspecies, applies both to humans and non-humans.  The various approaches to race Rik. suggests could apply equally to humans or non-humans.  Slrubenstein
I disagree. The real problem is that conceptualizations make a small number of categories (the preferred number is 2) into which large numbers of diverse individuals are divided. People are introduced to categories that are named in the language(s) they learn, and insist that the categories are the realities and the diverse individuals are more-or-less perfect members of these sets. This attitude is very Platonic, and has been a plague on clear thinking ever since it first appeared. 
The people who try to decide which bees are Apis mellifera meda (centered around Iraq), Apis mellifera anatolica (centered around Turkey), Apis mellifera carnica (centered in S.E. Europe), Apis mellifera ligustica (centered around Italy), Apis mellifera mellifera (centered in Germany), etc., have the same difficulties that face those who try to decide which humans are Semitic, which humans are Turkic, which humans are Caucasians, etc., etc.  If you look at a bee from a typical hive in the geographical center of Italy, you will find a "textbook" yellow-and-black striped Italian [race] bee, and if you look at one from a typical hive in the center of Germany, you will find a "textbook" black bee.  If you start investigating the hives in the in-between zones, you will find in-between bees, just as if you look in Khazakstan you are likely to find someone who looks mid-way between an Icelander and a Japanese.  In the case of bees, people still talk about subspecies and are if anything more happy with the murkier word "race." But the reason seems to be because they need a way to make quick generalizations about the behaviors (defense behaviors, nectar gathering efficiency, pollen productivity, tendency to lacquer everything with propolis, etc., etc.) of bees that may be encountered in different parts of the world. "True" Italians are generally easy to get along with, productive of nectar, good pollenizers, etc. "True" Cyprians are generally very hard to get along with, which is about as much as the average beekeeper cares to know about them when he is searching for a new [race] of bees to try in his home environment. 
When people find a hive of bees somewhere on the borderland between Italy and Yugoslavia, a bee that is darker than an Italian and lighter than a Carniolan, they tend to categorize it as a "mixed breed," assuming that there is really something called a "pure Italian" and something called a "pure Carnolian." They do not assume that there is a "bee map" upon which the central Italian type is an arbitrary point, and the central Slovenian (Carniolan) type is also an arbitrary point, and that the hive they are looking at is nothing more than one more arbitrary point that somebode might have defined as an official arbitrary point for some other [subspecies] of bee.  Among the bees that I have mentioned, the one kind that is most clearly defined is the Cyprian -- and that is because its hives were quite thoroughly isolated from breeding with mainland bees by the Mediterranean up until the time when beekeepers started to import queens or colonies that were likely to be more suitable for commercial production.  
The issue of genetics is not relevant to the definitions of [races] of bees. People have long been aware that characteristics such as those used to differentiate Italian bees from Cyprian bees are hereditary. In fact there is a facetious remark in one of the early Chinese classics wherein somebody says something to the effect that 'this kind of citrus fruit was always sweet until it was transplanted to the country under your rule (you monster).' And that remark came thousands of years after people in Eurasia and people in the Americas were systematically breeding better horses, tastier maize, etc.  They knew that the characteristics they sought were hereditary.
Nobody doubts that many of the characteristics used to categorize things by [race] and/or [subspecies] are hereditary; the problem is twofold: (1) Language/concepts take precedence over reality. (It's a Carniolan, so you can open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil or a smoker.) (2) What is not hereditary is mixed in with what is hereditary in the form of a social construct. (It's a hive of Italian bees, so under no conditions could you open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil and a smoker, and you'd best have bicycle clips on your trouser legs, heavy gauntlets, and be sure to rub all over with peach leaves before you put your clothes on.)
It is very useful to keep the two examples of fuzzy thinking in the same article because most people have strong emotional sets to defend their ideas of race. (Those XXXs are all YYY, as anybody with any sense can clearly see.) While they do have strong emotional commmitments to being "of the finer class of human beings," most of them do not have equivalent emotional forces involved that would prevent them from understanding that, e.g., the belief that Cyprian bees are loyal to their beekeepers is a kind of fairy story that probably performs some social function but has no basis in the realities of apian behavior.  (In Cyprus it is said that the colonies of bees belonging to a particular beekeeper will know about it when he dies, will mourn for him, and, as was reported in at least one case, may even swarm out of their hive and land, 50,000 or so strong, on the casket of the deceased as it is waiting on the wagon to be moved to the graveyard. Probably Cyprian beekeepers need consolation for dealing with bees that defend their hives with great fortitude -- which is good for the bees but punishing on the beekeeper. "But those bees really love me," says the myth.)  P0M 00:54, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: Does this mean you agree with what I wrote above, in The recent cleanup and some suggestions?  I am trying to come up with a very brief way to make the point.  What you suggest here is way too much detail for the article.  We need to focus on improving the article. Slrubenstein 01:29, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article split as a solution for clearing ambiguities 

message: Possibly another cause of ambiguity in this article is that it seems to not be consistent as to whether the question is race as a world-wide phenomena or race as it is used in the US. I'm not sure how to handle this problem. --Rikurzhen 02:14, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
I think that is another very useful example of what I have been talking about.  Most people in the U.S. see the people who live in China as one [race]. Hardly any of them would identify Taiwanese aborigines as anything other than as Chinese. Someone who know about genetic studies that have been done would see the Han Chinese as being divided into a northern group and a southern group. The average Chinese person, however, would lay an entirely different set of [quasi-racial] categories down on the same population. Most of them would not use the word "race", but they would nevertheless categorize Chinese by regions/provinces and also by language (recognizing that some groups like the Hakka are spread out over province lines, have their own language (with several dialects), and have cultural features that mark them as "different").  
Again, the point is that we have several billion individuals with only identical twins being identical in terms of genotype, and very very many systems of categorization -- systems according to which somebody who lives in one of the crossroads regions might end up in very many different [races] or other categories depending on who was doing the dividing.
Even if somebody believes as a matter of religious faith that there are X numbers of [races] identified by Y number of characteristics, once s/he realizes that somebody else just as assuredly believes in W number of [races] identified by Z number of characteristics, then s/he has to face the question: Can one determine that one system of categorization is "more true" than some other system of categorization.  P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another source of ambiguity -- US vs world 

message: Based on what P0M has written, perhaps yet another distinction to be made early is between definitions of race based on genotype (and ancestry) and those based on phenotype. --Rikurzhen 03:41, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
:All of the ideas about [race] that I can think of involve some idea that [race] is a matter of heredity -- even when the major discernible differences are linguistic and/or cultural. What a cobweb of ideas. Which node is the real spot where the spider should sit? 
Last night I got started on drafting an outline. With the echoes of past debates in my mind, it is difficult to say anything, knowing that somebody will surely object. P0M 18:19, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genotypical vs phenotypical definitions 

message: [P0M]: I was in the midst of trying to straighten out another problem when something I read about a long time ago came to mind. I think it offers a concept that may help to clarify our longstanding problems with ideas about [race].  In English, the years-ago article said, we have the word "typical."  If we say, e.g., "John was a typical 30s something accountant," we mean to indicate nothing very special about John in relation to accounting.  However, the article said, if we say in German that something is "typische" we mean that it stands as almost the Platonic ideal of its kind.  Saying that John is a typische accountant would then indicate that he was everything that one would expect an accountant to be: accurate, meticulous, responsible, etc.
[P0M]: If you take your pick from among a few dozen inhabitants of a little village in Malawi you might fing the typische African of a certain group (not a typische San, however).  If you took a comparable group from some village in Iceland, you might find the typische Caucasian, and so forth.  There would be an arbitrary element in all of this, of course.  Why not select somebody from a little town in Hungary and make him or her the typische Caucasian? (Now we can all have a flaming war about where to pick our exemplary types. ;-)  
[P0M]:  Once we selected our typische humans we could look at samples from, let's say, half way between Malawi and Iceland.  We could grade these individuals on the number of points away from the "ideal" each of them came from the standard Icelandic human and the standard SE African human. Somewhere along the line we might find an individual who was halfway between on all the measures, but probably nowhere would we find an exact match for one of our standards (unless we just happened to pick one of a pair of identical twins).
[P0M]: To me, this idea is only interesting because it formalizes what I believe has been the thinking of many of the people who want to preserve the idea of [race].  It also happens, by making the idea less murky, to make clear what the diffiiculties with using the concept must be.  P0M 11:12, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: re, German, that sounds like the 19th century meaning of the word (when, I imagine, also the English meaning was still closer to etymology). In modern German, I think, typisch has exactly the same meaning as typical. dab (ᛏ) 11:28, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  A possibly relevant German concept