Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?

• Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  No category is absolute. By your logic, it’s impossible to call anything a car, because cars have wheels but suitcases ALSO have wheels, therefore the entire idea that cars exist is just a made up social construct.

  Or for a less ridiculous example: is a battery-powered bicycle actually an electric moped? Or the ever classic, is a hotdog a sandwich? We can discuss these questions without questioning the validity of concepts such as bicycles, mopeds, hotdogs and sandwiches. Categories exist. They are useful descriptors despite the existence of edge cases and blurry boundaries.

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  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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    • Cryophilia@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

      healthline.com/…/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.

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      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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.

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