Comment on Is this just how it’s gonna be till Election Day?
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months agoAnd 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.world 4 months ago
Au contraire
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.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 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.
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:
And here’s what the World Medical Association has to say:
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.world 4 months ago
Yeah but it’s still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.
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.org 4 months ago
According to who? At this point it’s starting to sound like a conspiracy theory. All the actual evidence has been laid out for you, including in pretty infographic form.
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.