PBS lies in an attempt to prove that race does not exist

[TCO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Nice idea, but your data is cooked.

IF you defined race by two and only two sets of characteristics (skin color and skull morphology), and the graphs for the whole human species gave you a large number of individuals with a staticstically significant variation in density at different loci on the graph, you could conclude that there were statistically significant numbers of people with similar skin color who also had similar skull morphology.

The questions still get down to:

(a) what particular use is this concept?

(b) what is so revelatory about the notion that if you take a bunch of people who more or less look alike, and they breed in isolation, most of their offspring will kinda more or less look alike too?

(c) why is skin color and skull morphology the two things you pick? Why not skin color vs. schlong size, or hair color vs. whether earlobes have that little crease in them, or thin to full lips vs. long thin fingers and toes to short stubby fingers and toes? In other words, what is the utility (other than it's easier to look at two dimensional graph) of picking just two features, and why do you pick the two you do?

1. Your same criticisms here could be made of dog breeds and in fact dog breeds are a result of some cluster method like what Ran decided on. I think Ran's point is important as a conceptual one. We can argue about how to segement the market, but some scheme like Ran's makes sense. And really...you can try it on dog breeds first.

2. I will readily agree that controlled breeding may produce quicker results than natural selection over time in different geographies or that the differences in dog breeds are probably wider than those in humans. But the basic point of the mutability of our characteristics remains. Humans are animals also after all.