zip accident wrote:Race is not important, but it is a thing that exists.
Yes, but it's a social / cultural construct.
There is no biological definition by which you can cleanly divide the tribes of man. No genetic nor anatomical boundary that can be neatly drawn.
Basically, there is more genetic variation found within a "race" than exists between "races". The number of genes that define your unique face, which we all have, massively dwarfs the tiny number that define your melanin expression or whether you have a "Jew nose" and so forth.
Wikipedia wrote:Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partly based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.
And, like, this isn't "woke" nonsense. It's just genuinely the underlying scientific reality of it.
It is in this sense that, previously, I said "there is no such thing as race in biology". To state it more precisely, "race" is not a scientific term used in the field of the subject of Biology. And it's not used because it really has no useful biological definition; there is nothing you can objectively measure to conclude "this is an Irishman". It is an arbitrary grouping - a social construct - only to be determined statistically, as there are no hard boundaries.
To come at this from a different angle, in the hopes to get what I mean across, let's consider that you have 2 parents. And each of your 2 parents had 2 parents - so 4 grandparents. And each of them had 2 parents - so that's 8 great grandparents. And each of them had 2 parents - so we're at 16 great great grandparents.
It's a "power of two" sequence: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 35536, 65536, etc. - yeah, I'm a coder, so, like, I know these numbers off the top of my head (at least up to 64K).
So, if we go back 32 generations, then you'd reach a generation where you have over 4 billion "great x 30" grandparents - and, cumulatively, if we add up all your ancestors (2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32...) then that's 31 ones in binary, which is one less than the over 4 billion figure, so going back 32 generations, you have just shy of over 8 billion ancestors.
But wait a minute. Because if we take "a generation" to mean 30 years (this is standard measure of how long "a generation" is, as we're talking roughly "at what age does one generation start having children") then 32 x 30 years = 960 years.
Let's round up and call it 1000 years. So we're talking going back to (very roughly) 1025. Just slightly before the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest in 1066. About 190 years before the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede.
This is the "wait a minute" here. Because how can you have around 4 billion "parents" - and cumulatively 8 billion ancestors from now, back to this point in history - when the entire human population of the time was less than 4 billion? Indeed, only since the discovery of "germ theory" and the Industrial Revolution has the human population been over 1 billion.
Ah, well, the simple answer is that we're double counting (triple counting, quadruple counting, etc.) your number of ancestors. Put another way, your fifth "great great..." grandparent on your mother's side is also your sixth "great great..." grandparent on your father's side, if we worked out the whole family tree.
This leads to a simple, but fascinating, mathematical conclusion. Go far enough back in anyone's family tree and you'll find an individual that we're
ALL related to. Go a few more generations back and we find a generation where everyone alive today is related to everyone in that generation (whose family line didn't terminate in the intervening period).
Here's an actual professional mathematician to practically take you through the logic of this, using the roll of dice and graph paper, to show you how this works:
And what this means is that if you pick a historical figure sufficiently far back in the past - Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, etc. - then, so long as their family line didn't die off between then and now, it becomes statistically closer and closer to certainty that you're genetically related to them. That you, me and everyone else reading here is genetically related to them.
Which makes sense if you think of it in terms of Darwin's "tree of life". That, eventually, all of us are related to the first Homo Sapiens, the first hominids, the first primates, etc. and this, by the way, is also what they mean by "genetic Eve". There are certain historical individuals - dubbed "Eve"s, after the Biblical story - to which we're all related. If you like, genetic "bottlenecks" through which we must all be related (as there have been periods of history where the human population - or, before that, the hominid population - has gotten extremely low, down to a few thousand people, before building back up again).
So, like, in this context, following this simple mathematical progression of our genetic legacies, it rapidly becomes apparent - nationality, race, etc. all becomes meaningless. This stuff only makes sense locally. A certain branch of your family tree for so many generations. But, eventually, all family trees join Darwin's "tree of life".
Indeed, that's the beautiful Darwinian revelation. All family trees - if we could only freely plot them all the way back - become the same family tree. Become the single unified "tree of life".
To express this in yet another way: Thrace, Phrygia, Lydia, Parthia, Bactria, Carmania, Arachosia, Gedrosia, Cappadocia, etc.
What am I listing? Well, these are placenames on a map from the time of Alexander the Great. And the point I'm driving at is that none of these names exist anymore. Unless you're a historian - or you know your musical "modes" (which are named after ancient Greek tribes, so you have Phrygian, Lydian, Aoelian (a.k.a. the minor key) and so forth) - then you've probably never even heard these names before.
And that's ~2300 years ago. The implication being that, in another 2300 years, there'll probably be no such places as "France", "Germany", "Italy", etc. either, as the tribes of man spread around, change politics, form new nations, etc. - well, okay, as nations are more formally and officially defined these days, it might take a bit longer to happen.
But hopefully you get the gist. In this "big picture" view of human history, then notions such as "nations" and "races" are a very fleeting parochial view of things. A misunderstanding of how this all actually works.
And, for example, the Nazi notion of "racial purity"? Complete nonsense. An idea so stupid and impossible, we really should all just point and laugh our heads off at the very idea. Also, historical note, of all the places in Europe to look for "racial purity", Germany certainly ain't it - as its the central "crossroads" of the entire continent.
Hopefully I'm at least slowly getting the point across to you. "Race" is this ultimately meaningless thing. I mean, yes, it exists, in the sense that we can point and say "that's a Frenchman" and that person over there is "African". And so forth. But, like, it soon becomes "I'm Scottish and Greek and a bit Egyptian". Then you're doing one of those silly DNA tests that tells you that you're 4% "Sub-Saharan African" and 14% Scandiwegian or whatever.
This is what I'm getting at. Biologists do not use the term "race" at all in a scientific context, because it's just not a useful word. It does not represent anything objectively measurable.
It's a "social construct", in that we - locally, parochially, in a limited context of time - like to divide ourselves up as "French" or "Asian" or "Caucasian" or whatever, but there's no actual genetic thing you're referencing there. No actual biological boundaries between peoples.
Like, I'm not a racist, not because I want to "be nice" and not say nasty things about other people. It's not some "woke agenda". I'm not capable of being a racist - except in a very limited parochial way (like "bloody yanks are all idiots for voting for Trump") - simply because I understand enough about how this all works - scientifically, historically, etc. - to realise that it is not in reference to anything objective and measurable.
It is in that sense that I previously said that "there no such things as race in biology". More precisely, "race" is not a scientific term in the field of Biology, because it's not a thing that has any objective measurable backing. It's not used because it's semantically meaningless in the wider biological context.
But, yes, I mean, "race" is definitely a thing in a limited parochial way of noting that, like, that bloke over there visually has black skin and that woman over there visually has white skin, so I can see this very dramatic visual difference between them. But, yes, in the grand scheme of things, though I'm a white man, it's perfectly possible that I'm more closely related - down our respective family trees - to the black man over the white woman.
But, ultimately, Darwin's "Tree of Life" brings us to a startling conclusion.
Look out the window. Do you see that tree? That's your cousin.
And that's not being poetic or anything - that's your actual familial relationship to all other life on this planet. Like, it's your "cousin" goodness-knows-how-many-generations distant, and goodness-knows-how-many-times removed. But if we could plot the overall "tree of life" as one gargantuan family tree, then I could go down one branch to a shared common ancestor then walk back up another branch to get from any individual lifeform to any other individual lifeform... and that's "cousins".
It's not a poetic thing to say that everyone - bar your very immediate relatives, for which we have special words like "mother", "brother", "uncle" - and every living thing is your "cousin".
In the same way that, astronomically, all heavy elements are forged in stars and supernovas and the collision of neutron stars that it is not poetic to say, as Carl Sagan famously did, that "we're all made of star dust". Because, like, that is absolutely literally true. That's the only place the heaviest elements we're made out of can come from. A star - or two or nine - lived and died, and exploded its guts across space. And these big dust clouds collapse under gravity, and become star systems.
So I say unto you, cousin, understand that these petty divisions of humanity only have this tiny limited parochial meaning. In the big view, "race" and nationality and all that is completely meaningless. Not really "a thing" in any useful sense. And racism really does not help anyone's cause.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
