1. never signed up for anything like this,
  2. never donated to or signed up for emails from the DNC, et al.,
  3. political texts like this come all the time, and
  4. I hesitate to reply “stop” because I don’t want them to know this is a live number (is my instinct here outdated/inapplicable?)
  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    And we’re back!

    Yes, categories are useful but (outside of mathematics) imprecise. A car needs to be motorised and able to carry at least one passenger. Arguably, it also needs at least 4 wheels or to be 3-wheeled and enclosed, to include Reliant Robins. There’s still probably edge cases, but it’s fair to say it’s a subset of wheeled objects that generally applies and is needed both in economics and engineering, as well as everyday life.

    Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though. Did you know, for example, that most human genetic variety occurs within Africa, because of the common out-of-Africa ancestry everyone else has? Phenotypically, I have less information, but you have tiny pygmies as well as the Maasi (with an average male height of 6’4), and every skin colour from Sudanese literal black to Egyptian/Berber olive, so I’m guessing it’s the same.

    Maybe that’s the point of contention here. They’re relevant socially, but biology has moved on.

    • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though.

      Au contraire

      Black people are at a much higher risk for mutations in the hemoglobin gene responsible for SCA. Researchers believe the reason lies in how this condition has evolved.

      Over time, sickle cell conditions have evolved to protect against malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquito bites. Malaria is common in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world that also have a high prevalence of sickle cell. Having SCT — but not SCA — helps reduce the severity of malaria.

      https://www.healthline.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-black-people

      That’s just off the top of my head, I’m sure there’s many other examples. Health care for Black vs white vs Asian etc is slightly different. And it’s not due to social conditions alone - the same mechanisms that made people whose predominant ancestry is sub-Saharan African have darker skin, also caused this decreased resistance to sickle cell anemia.

      Another one that just came to me was lactose intolerance. White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

      Ignoring race is not only problematic societally, but is bad science.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        Yeah, Healthline is a source for laymen. That information is provided that way because people won’t know what Y-DNA haplogroup they’re in, but will generally know if they’re considered black. There’s public health research by race too, but again that’s related to social outcomes and data availability.

        White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.

        Except the other highly tolerant cluster is West Africans, with smaller ones in places like Pakistan and Arabia.

        Stolen from r*ddit, although you can find many similar ones elsewhere

        Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the scientific consensus:

        Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.

        And here’s what the World Medical Association has to say:

        Despite the fact that races do not exist in the genetic sense, in some cultures racial categories are used as a form of cultural expression or identity, or a means of reflecting shared historical experiences. This is one aspect of the concepts of “ethnicity” or “ancestry”.

        I tried to find something from the AMA, but it’s so well established all the recent stuff takes the non-biological nature of race as a granted, and talks more about the ethics of handling the social categories.

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          4 months ago

          Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.

          That information is provided that way because people won’t know what Y-DNA haplogroup they’re in, but will generally know if they’re considered black.

          So? Instead of “race” you’re saying “Y-DNA Halogroup”. Performative bullshit just to avoid the fact that race is real. You could call it “Mario Kart” instead of race, it’s still the same damn thing and it’s still real.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit.

            According to who? At this point unless you’re a genetics expert yourself it’s starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.

            Y-DNA haplogroups in no way correspond to race. They look a bit like the lactose map: Interesting, and unrelated to the traditional social categorisations. Pretty much all genetic maps are like that.

            • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              4 months ago

              A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: ἁπλοῦς, haploûs, “onefold, simple” and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together. As a haplogroup consists of similar haplotypes, it is usually possible to predict a haplogroup from haplotypes. Haplogroups pertain to a single line of descent. As such, membership of a haplogroup, by any individual, relies on a relatively small proportion of the genetic material possessed by that individual.

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup

              That’s race! That’s the definition of race! Fucking university types just don’t like the word!

              Haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically oriented. For example, the following are common divisions for mtDNA haplogroups:

              African: L0, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6

              West Eurasian: H, T, U, V, X, K, I, J, W (all listed West Eurasian haplogroups are derived from macro-haplogroup N)[10]

              East Eurasian: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Y, Z (note: C, D, E, G, and Z belong to macro-haplogroup M)

              Native American: A, B, C, D, X

              Australo-Melanesian: P, Q, S

              They are describing race! It’s super fucking obvious if you get rid of whatever white guilt stupidity makes you get the ick when you hear the word “race”.

              • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                11·
                4 months ago

                You’ll notice letters appear more than once, and there’s more than one letter for every group. Also, that’s mtDNA, and if you actually cared about biology you’d know that’s only one type on DNA, inherited one way, and you can completely mix and match with the Y haplogroups.

                I get it, you hate wokes. I don’t really think cultural disgruntlement is a good basis for defining “science”, though. I suspect there’s no more useful information to exchange here.

                • Cryophilia@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  4 months ago

                  I hate people who push bad science in service to an agenda. Especially when it’s doublethink levels of blatantly, obviously wrong bad science.

                  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
                    1·
                    4 months ago

                    And I just don’t think that’s happening. Science moved away from race long before it was cool. The first steps happened over a century ago; Hitler was already doing pseudoscience. (I guess there is actually something to add)