Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 2

message: Perhaps my praise was too unconditional.  Consider the first sentence:
“Race is a taxonomic principle used to group living things based on common heredity, physical attributes and behavior, where all members belong to the same species yet appear to warrant further classification.”
If the above statement were true, one would speak of different races of horses, cows, dogs, and other similar animals. Instead, we have different breeds of those animals, and those breeds are maintained by deliberately and rigidly excluding out-group matings and culling individuals that are atypical is some undesirable way – especially now that geography no longer slows out-group matings of, e.g., Manx cats. 
:Very interesting comments. I'll discuss them hopefully without too much of a "Look, I'm right" tone. But so far, I still think the sentence you quote is a good definition of the concept of race. You're obviously not too fond of the concept, but I think an overriding aim of any such article is to state how the term developed and was generally understood until our own era. Your objection about 'horses, cows, dogs, and other similar animals' is cleared up when one reflects on the fact that these are all domesticated variants. By convention, the varieties of domesticated animals have been referred to as "breeds" rather than as "races", and I think it is a good convention because it follows the important distinction between artificial and natural selection. It's pretty shocking to realize that in the space of perhaps 2800 years man took a gray wolf and spun both toy poodles and Great Danes out of its genome (man and dog probably go back much further, but I think most of the fancy breeding started around then). By a simplistic definition of "species" these two dogs would be separate species (a far wider gulf than breed or race) because they cannot, on a sheer mechanical level, reproduce. But when looking at dogs and wolves, as when looking at humans, the species barrier has to be on both a functional and qualitative level. If you artificially inseminated a female Great Dane with toy poodle sperm you would get viable offspring, and this puts them under the umbrella of a single species. Artificial Selection upon the wolf genome was not fundamentally different than Natural Selection (though it happened in a temporal hyperdrive), but we like to think of ourselves as such unique actors in this world that the results of our fiddling calls for unique names-- so we have "breeds" instead of "races". Functionally these terms are quite close, and evolutionary pressure has been exerted in both. In the case of the toy poodle, the pressure seems to have been the satisfaction of a wacky aesthetic predilection in man, but it's an evolutionary pressure nonetheless. However fast Artifical Selection moves, 2800 years hasn't been enough to forge separate species out of the wolf genome-- but surely you would admit that important changes have been brought about and that these differences merit a word. In domesticated animals that word is "breed", in humans and non-domesticated animals that word was "race". Did the divergent evolutionary pressures that were obviously at work upon separated human groups over the last 80,000 years lead to functional and qualitative differences that merit a word? I happen to think so, although I hope "race" is decisively replaced by something better. In any case, 'members of the same species that warrant further classification' seems to sum it all up pretty well to me... Yikes, I gotta run. Hopefully more sub-commentary later. JDG
If there were a “taxonomic principle”, then one could state it.  The problem with the word “race” is that a principle cannot be stated according to which people are to be divided into "races." We have a mish-mash instead. 
The implication of the quoted sentence would appear to be that the “principle” by which individuals are grouped into races is “common heredity, [common ?] physical attributes, and [common ?] behavior” that sorts out “all members [that] belong to the same species”. 
The problem with “common (=belonging equally to) heredity” is that except for identical twins no individuals have a common heredity, not even identical twins share common physical attributes or common behavior. If one began with one set of parents and traced out the sharing out of their genes and the admixture of genes from outside that line of descent through ten generations, and then went back and traced out the genetic transmissions of all the individuals who mated with the children of the tenth generation, one would find an incredibly complex tapestry being painted in the “colors” of different genes.  If ten pairs of humans were put in isolation and their progeny were examined after ten generations, would those tenth generation humans be judged to have a “common heredity”? What if a hundred pairs of foundation stock took part in this experiment?  What if 10,000 pairs of founders produced a “race” of tenth generation individuals? 
To put the problem in another way, how much diversity would there have to be in this population for individuals in some generation to be judged not to share a “common heredity”?
The problem with “common physical attributes” is that we have to ask, “Which attributes count?”  If we look at height, we would group Northwest Europeans with the Tutsi, Nuer, and Shilluk groups of Africa as the tallest ones, and Bushmen and Maya/Quechuo (American Indians) among the very short ones. If we look at the mean dimensions of the lower first molars then American Whites and American Negroes belong in the large toothed group and Bushmen and Lapps belong in the small-toothed group. 
And what of "common behavior"?  As someone who has lived in a very different cultural area from my native land for 7 years, and who has traveled extensively in S.E. Asia, India, Nepal, etc., I would say that it would be far easier for me to list the differences between, e.g., American Whites and Malays,than to say what American Whites have in common and what Malays have in common, and then try to figure out where the two sets do not overlap.  And, guess what, most of the differences I can think of are cultural.  Off the top of my head the only group difference in behavior that I can think of that is not cultural (and this is based on book learning, not personal experience) is the direction of thrust in intercourse in a certain group of people – and that is because of the average angle assumed by the erect penis in that group, a biological factor.  
The laws of probability work out this way:  If people have 1 in 24 chances of having red hair, 1 in 5 chances of being over 6 feet tall, and 4 in 5 chances of having wisdom teeth at some time in your life, then the chance that a certain individual would have all three characteristics would be 1/24 X 1/5 X 4/5 =   .04 X .20 X .80 = .64%  
If you have 9/10 probability for each of 6 characteristics, then you will get slightly more than * probability that one person will have all of those characteristics.  If you have 13 characteristics that count to make a “race”, then you have only about * probability that one person will have all of those characteristics. Or, in other words, if you started with a city of 40,000, each member of which had a 9/10 probability of having each of the 13 salient characteristics, you would find that you had only 10,000 people who were “legitimate” members of that “race.”  If it takes only one factor to establish a “race”, then an Ainu and a Swede belong to the “white race,” and a Shan and a Tutsi belong to the “black race.” If you add too many factors then you and your mother end up being of different races. The number of factors to be considered is purely arbitrary. So there goes your "principle" if a "principle" is to be anything other than an arbitrary rule of thumb.
If we look at the ways that people really decide who is in one “race” and who is in another, I doubt that we will find many cases where any such tedious point-by-point discrimination is made. A Chinese person from Guangdong is very likely to be taken for a Navaho – especially by people who have something against Navaho people.  If a baby from Guangdong were adopted by a Navaho family and raised without anybody in the community being let in on the secret, I suspect that the Navaho community would judge the child’s “race” to be Native American. 
So, as for the beginning sentence in the article,
“Race is a taxonomic principle used to group living things based on common heredity, physical attributes and behavior, where all members belong to the same species yet appear to warrant further classification,” I cannot agree with two components of the forumulation:  “taxonomic principle,” and “common heredity, [common] physical attributes”, and, especially “[common] behavior.”
Patrick0Moran 02:17, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Point by Point Critique

message: (Some of the following was written in parallel with Patrick0Moran's 2:17 25 Nov commentary above, so there is some overlap, but the fact that we have independently zeroed in on the same problems is itself noteworthy, so I decided not to revise my comments. In any case, the critique we have highlights one of the main issues here - that what may seem like a NPOV to some may not appear so neutral to others, and that therefore using the hammer of reversion to preserve something that has been appropriately challenged is generally to be avoided.)
The remainder of this note is addressed to JDG and Slr:
On the one hand, I understand the frustration of authors whose work is mangled by others, and I have great respect for the time and effort that has gone into many parts of this article. (I also think that Wikipedia will need to change in some way to protect good articles from getting worse.  For example, an enhanced versioning system, based on empirical stability, would be an improvement that wouldn't compromise the current set of core Wiki principles.)
:I'm not sure how 'empirical stability' could be measured-- how could a prog distinguish between a rarity of edits due to current quality and the same due to obscure subject matter? I think Wikipedia will have to do something to preserve writing that is particularly good-- for now maybe just a flashing text warning on the edit page saying something like: "Wait! This article has been designated as a standout Wikipedia entry. Are you sure your change is an improvement?". JDG
On the other hand, current Wikipedia policies are clearly opposed to the idea that changes must be pre-approved (especially by self-appointed guardians). Furthermore,
you must understand that would-be contributors to this particular article seem to be caught in some kind of Catch 22 situation:
if one attempts to fix some major problems by 
adopting a minimalist, co-operative approach, the changes are reverted because the results are still imperfect; and if one does attempt to make extensive changes, they will be undone on the grounds that they are too extensive.
:What you describe as a Catch-22 seems to me to just be an inevitable happenstance in the lifecycle of a Wikipedia entry. As intensive collaboration ups the quality of an article to a certain pitch, the desire to preserve what is already good will intensify in parallel. You can look at it as the heavy-handedness of 'self-appointed guardians' I suppose, but it looks more to me like a predictable and basically positive impulse to maintain hard won excellence. It's a good thing that good articles have guardians, and in Wiki Land they couldn't be anything other than 'self-appointed'. (JDG)
Thus, I believe that the above considerations alone imply that the appropriate thing to do in this particular instance would be to restore my last version and allow the normal incremental give-and-take to proceed.
:I just disagree. The appropriate thing, especially for someone aware of the amount of work already put into the piece and the recognition it has received, would have been to put aside the urge to insert an all-new extended opening and propose moderate changes here. The real heavy-handedness was your wholesale reordering of something already finely tuned. And how else can a large change that one judges to be deleterious to the article be dealt with other than by another large change back?... Ultimately, you believe your modifications were an improvement while I (and Slr) do not. I know it's not just a petty pride thing on my part because I can hardly count the changes to my work on Wikipedia that I recognized as changes for the better and let stand... Having said this, I'll reiterate that much of what you wrote was, in my judgment, worthy of inclusion-- but not as the first block in the article. (JDG)
However, at least one of you has expressed some puzzlement about the major problems that I and others have been trying to rectify.
This is itself a bit puzzling, as previous comments on this Talk page, together with my own additions and alterations, make it fairly clear what the major concerns are, but perhaps it will help to be more explicit.
Let's start with the first five words of the current preamble:
  "Race is a taxonomic principle ..."
The three main problems with this as an introductory definition are:
# the implication that any other conception of race in this context is invalid, whereas this particular conception is just one of several, even in this specific context; (Comment: Not really sure what you're saying here. Encyclopedias aren't generally meant to present exhaustive semiotic analyses of subject terms. The first thing the reader wants is a tight dictionary-like definition of the term as it is commonly understood, followed by some semantic discussion as called for throughout. The concept of Race, as actually used by actual taxonomists, was first and foremost a taxonomic principle. It had to do with delimiting one bunch from another based on perceived genotypic and/or phenotypic differences. If we don't establish that with the reader (especially the young reader), none of what follows is sensical. Note that it is called a "principle" rather than a "category", which connotes that Race never did achieve the uncontested status that "genus" or "species" did. Principles can be erroneous, and much of the remainder is dedicated to showing how this one is. We can't pretend the 19th century never happened, no matter how off the mark we think their usage was. Before the 19th century the term was not fixed and served in a number of loose contexts. In the 19th century Anthropologists and Ethnologists chose to employ the term in a strict taxonomic sense. We inherited that sense, but demoted the term. All of this has to be explained. (JDG))
# the reference to taxonomy, which is problematic in a number of respects. For example:
## it suggests that races are always defined scientifically, whereas Example 2 shows that this is not the case; (Comment: No, it suggests that races were held to be defined scientifically, perhaps erroneously. Are you saying that during the term's heyday (about 1750 to 1950), only crackpots used it in the taxonomic sense? Not so. All the leading people used it, including Darwin and Boas. Most of us now disagree that human group variation can be so precisely delineated, but it's misleading to pretend this has always been the case. (JDG))
## it suggests that race is a currently used term in taxonomy, which so far as I can tell, is not the case, especially in zoology; (Comment: You pointed that out previously and, heavy-handed as we are, we included it in the opening (JDG).)
## it suggests that the mutual exclusion usually associated with taxonomic categories must apply (see also my writeup on 'Taxonomy on Race'). (Comment: The controversy over Race and the horrific applications of the concept of Race cannot be understood unless one understands that both scientists and lay people did ascribe this mutual exclusion to human groups. The article rightly describes how the term was understood and used in reality, not how you believe it should have been. (JDG))
# the use of the word "principle" here is literally correct but inappropriate given that its use here is at best difficult to correlate with any one specific definition in the American Heritage Dictionary (a URL for the online AHD definition of taxonomy is given below).  In everyday usage, a principle means something like a rule or law, especially related to good behavior, but that is presumably irrelevant here. The closest definition in the online AHD seems to be Number 4, but look carefully at what it says:
    A basic or essential quality or element determining intrinsic nature or characteristic behavior.
:Yes, this is how Race was understood-- and the article is worthless if it doesn't get that across. (JDG)
So one interpretation of the first five words of this article is that we are being told that race is destiny!
:Yes, there was a strong element of that in the traditional concept of Race. Once again, it must be acknowledged, then challenged. (JDG)
Put it all together, and the preamble comes across very strongly ("The Lady protesteth too much!") as being biased towards a single POV - that race, properly understood, is a scientific concept that, when applied to humans, allows us to categorize them in a way that allows one to determine intrinsic nature or characteristic behavior.  
:Not at all. The article is simply stating how Race was used. It carried its own POV. We kow you don't like it. The article doesn't advocate it, but it doesn't pretend it never existed, which seems to be your preference. (JDG)
This particular POV happens to come very close to "scientific racism," so to give it the status of being just about the only valid conception is both incorrect and contrary to Wiki NPOV policies.
:Again you are confusing description of historical use with some kind of advocacy. (JDG)
Please note that several of the contributors to this Talk page have expressed the view (similar to the US Government view in my proposed Example 2, which is why I gave it) that there are conceptions of race that allow the word to be used without the baggage of scientific racism.
There are also some lesser problems with the current version of the preamble. For example, there is a whole sentence on 'variant', but this term is used in botanic taxonomy. I am not sure that this is relevant at all, but I cannot see any reason to give it pride of place in the preamble.
So, in summary, please consider undoing the reversion and allowing the process to move forward; alternatively, if you have already come up with something that addresses the various concerns listed above, and includes most of the new material that I added, then we could go from there.
:I think Slr worked in a few of your statements without diverting the entire flow of the piece, and I think more should be worked in. This is definitely the way to do it, as opposed to a slow chipping away at a large block that (sorry) was not an improvement en masse. (JDG)
=== Footnote ===
The AHD URL on "principle" is http://www.bartleby.com/61/39/P0563900.html
Peak 05:31, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  On Reversion 

message: The AHD URL on "principle" is http://www.bartleby.com/61/39/P0563900.html
Peak 05:31, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Footnote 

message: It is my understanding that the tropics/race stuff is at best speculative,
and at worst wrong. (If everyone's ancestors originally came from the tropics (going far enough back in time), then it would be wrong to say that "All people whose ancestors lived in the tropics ... have dark skin.")
:I agree that section has been a little weak, but I wouldn't just blow away the Vitamin D issue. At some point you Social Construct dudes have to face the physiology involved. If you manage to handle surface stuff like skin color, you can try your chops on something really serious-- like all the mutation based illnesses and predispositions that clearly fall along ethnic and racial fault lines. JDG
Anyway, are there reputable references to support the claims made in the article?
Also, much of what is written about Jensen/Gould already appears in the Jensen article.  Any objections to eliminating most of what is redundant, and perhaps consolidating as appropriate?
Peak 05:25, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Peak, you're way off base accusing Slr of vandalism. Don't you understand he's the leading contributor to an article that, before you began disfiguring it, has been considered by many Wikipedians to be one of the top articles on the site? I don't think "vandalism" applies to anyone in this latest tussle, but Slr is easily the furthest from it.... It's refreshing that you finally came out and plainly stated you believe the article is racist. Few other things would explain your tenacity in trying to overhaul such a well received piece. Can you conceive of a scientist, like Luigi Cavalli Sforza, who believes in the objective reality of meaningful phenotypic clusters and who is yet far from being a racist? If you can't, you'd better start expanding your habits of thought. This article describes the uses the term Race has been put to. If simply describing them registers as racist to you then you're nothing other than an enemy of quality history. If those who believe in the reality of certain phenotypic differences while shunning an overall valuation of superior/inferior also register as racist to you, then you're an intolerant would-be demagogue of the worst kind. This article needs to be protected from you, just as truth and accuracy themselves need to be protected from revisionists of the right or the left. We're a small step away from appealing to an admin on this. JDG 01:53, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vitamin D etc