Rod,
You claim you aren't an essentialist when looking at race, but then you continue to demonstrate essentialist thinking on the subject.
You need to read this piece by a geneticist to get a better grasp of the subject. Race is a valid biological construct, and populations naturally come out of the data.
Which is precisely why traditional races fail miserably when trying to explain human variation, because the reality is that its an extremely arbitrary set of people whose defining characteristics evolved so long ago than its virtually worthless nowadays due to increased diversity and back migration.
No. It just means you can split these human groupings up indefinitely. Your brother is genetically closer to you than your uncle (50% compared to 25%), and both are genetically closer to you than your cousin (12.5%), who is in turn closer to you than your second cousin (3.1%). So does that mean "family" as a biological concept doesn't exist because family is continuous? Because that is the same stupid point you're making about race.
Race is nothing more than a large extended family of genetically related individuals. Now how you choose to split race up is arbitrary, just as how you talk about your family is sometimes arbitrary. You can do it by continents or by small subgroups of tribes. Both are valid.
You can even do it by the degree of admixture, as Razib Khan shows.
But the way you reason, Rod, you have to believe there is no such thing as a family.
Im not an essentialist, and the fact that there are admixed populations certainly makes the classical definition obsolete, since these "admixed" populations need to be redefined and given a proper taxonomical group.
No, most people in the world are not admixed by recent continental origin. 95 percent of Chinese are 100 percent Asian. And I'd guess that is low compared to other East Asian countries standards, like South Korea or Japan.
Similarly, I bet more than 90 percent Africans are entirely African by recent continental origin.
Even the vast majority of White Americans are still 99+ percent European by their recent continental origin.
Perhaps because you are Mexican, you tend to view continental admixture as more common than it really is. It's not common, even today.
Intracontinental barriers sometimes where greated than intercontinental, yet a lot of these genetically diverse groups are thrown into the same lot, like amerindians, put into the mongoloid group...
Yeah, sometimes that happened. Categorization was hard for scientists who didn't have much information other than phenotype to work with. So it shouldn't be too surprising that they made mistakes.
Biologists even had problems categorizing many large animals. Look at the trouble they had categorizing the Great Panda. Was it a bear or rac****? Finally, modern science was able to end the debate: The Giant Panda is a bear, although distantly related from the other existing bear species.
Still, the early scientists who categorized humans generally got more right than they got wrong - and their conclusions were more tentative than is sometimes appreciated.
...then apparently given their own group despite the fact that even among themselves diversity is simply too much.
It's not. It's just more diverse than originally thought.
Not to mention diversity among black people.
I assume you mean sub-Saharan Africans, since many black people are not closely related.
Yes, there's a lot of diversity in Africa, which is not too surprising since hominids and modern humans evolved there longer than anywhere else on the planet.
Define caucasoid and negroid, we are just arguing in circles, any classification, even as fuzzy as it may be, must still have some essential qualities that may united different groups, ike vertebrata having a backbone despite the massive diversity of said species.
None of that is true. Hagfish don't have a backbone, and they are vertebrates. And I bet if I researched it more deeply than Wikipedia, I would find other examples.
This is mistake you continue to make. You keep thinking there's something hard and fast (i.e., essential) about these categories.
Caucasoid and negroid were just two terms used by the old physical anthropologists to describe, in the case of the caucasoids, the related people inhabiting Europe and West Asia, and in the case of negroids, the people of sub-Saharan Africa and what's assumed to be relict populations in South Asia and Australia.
Whats the essential definition of white or caucasian, when does someone stops being white and starts being something else?
There is no ESSENTIAL definition for race. When are you going to learn?
i can assure you that whatever definition of white you put forward wouldnt fit traditionally white populations of today, either it will be broad enough to put Indians and east africans or too tight that it will leave out north africans and maybe mediterranean folk.
No, we can separate admixed populations like the East Africans pretty easily, just as African-Americans in Razib Khan's chart have their own grouping which is neither African nor white.
And Indians, too, are an ancient admixed population that is distinguished quite easily from Europeans, but are still genetically closer to Europeans than to East Asians or Africans, as you would expect by their geography.
Check out the clusters
You can draw essentialist characteristics that will separate nearly all polar bears from brown bears.
No more than you could between Western Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans.
These conundrums are extremely rare in nature, because of ecological niches, animals cant really leave their niche as easily as man can, a polar bear is not constrained from moving into brown bear territory because of geographical reasons, but because of ecological reasons, they cant range in brown bear territory as efficiently as they do on their own.
These conundrums aren't rare at all. They happen all the time. And polar bears often interact with brown bears.
The reason why these things are happening its not because their intermixing was common, its because of AGW forcing the polar bear out of their natural territory.
Sort of like the Age of Discovery, when changes in human technology suddenly brought populations into close proximity who had never seen each other before and sometimes hadn't even been aware they had existed before.
Or maybe human diversity is greater than we originally thought and so was the founding of the americas and evolution among people in the Americas, but as long as people try to force the data into the model, science cant really move forward.
Nobody is forcing anything into the models. The only reason we can see that the founding of the Americas was more complicated than we imagined was precisely because we had clear ideas of population groups that we could work with.
