Just for context: The wider context for this post is what James White recently said about black people. However, I don't discuss White or his remarks in this post. Steve Hays and Peter Pike have already done so: Black abortion, Identity politics for me but not for thee, Victim mentality, Feedback loop, and As Huxley is to Darwin. Instead I thought I'd try to tackle a more basic question - what is race?
1. To my knowledge, the two major positions regarding race are (a) race is fundamentally a social construct or (b) race is fundamentally a biological (genetic) concept. I presume each of these could be further delineated.
A third position is race doesn't exist, but I'll leave that aside since it seems most believe race exists.
2. However:
a. If race is fundamentally a social construct, then (prima facie) that doesn't seem to explain group-distinctive physical features which are hereditary, from generation to generation.
b. If race is fundamentally a biological concept, then (prima facie) that doesn't seem to explain how there's typically more genetic variation within races than there is between races.
3. There are few higher authorities on human genetics than Francis Collins. I think Collins makes a sensible case for what race is from the perspective of a medical geneticist, though I'm not suggesting it's the final word or anything like that:
Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual's grandparents all came from the same part of the world. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry because of multiple other nongenetic connotations of race, the lack of defined boundaries between populations, and the fact that many individuals have ancestors from multiple regions of the world...On the genetic side of the diagram, race is an imperfect surrogate for ancestral geographic origin, which in turn is a surrogate for genetic variation across an individual's genome.
4. Suppose (arguendo) race is fundamentally a biological (genetic) concept. Nevertheless that still doesn't get us to the inference that races necessarily share similar mental, psychological, behavioral, and/or moral traits due to their genetics (e.g. IQ, work ethic). A further connecting argument would be needed.
Moreover, such similarities could be due to cultural and/or other factors.
