Q: do human races exist?
ChatGPT: The concept of race is a social and cultural construct that has been used to categorize and distinguish people based on physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair type, and facial features. However, the idea of race is not supported by scientific evidence.
The human species, Homo sapiens, is a single biological species with a common ancestry and a shared genetic history. While there are physical differences between people, these differences do not align with traditional racial categories and do not reflect fundamental biological distinctions. In fact, the genetic variation within a racial group is often greater than the variation between racial groups, meaning that people who are considered to be part of the same race can be more genetically diverse than people who are considered to be part of different races.
In other words, while people may be physically distinct in various ways, there is no scientific basis for dividing humans into distinct racial categories. Rather than reflecting biological realities, race is a social construct that has been used throughout history to justify discrimination, segregation, and other forms of inequality.
- How was race constructed in the US in 1850, and what was the hierarchy?
- In Germany in 1940?
- In Japan in 1940?
- In colonial Britain?
- Etc.
What was the scientific evidence at the time?
There was a genuine area of study, eugenics, which addressed these issues. Although the conclusions reached were inconsistent between the four above, and nonsense with what we know in today, they were addressed with a great deal of scientific rigour for the respective eras and there were scientific conferences, papers, and journals. There were real hierarchies, placing some groups above others (much deeper than just "X good / Y bad"), and with many axes.
If you read eugenics literature, there are scientific anatomical measurements, p-values, and error bars, and the language has all the intellectual trimmings one expects from quality research. This comes from scientists speaking with complete confidence, coming from esteemed institutions like Princeton and Harvard. If you put yourself in a 1930 mindset (for example, pretending you've never heard of DNA, let alone gene sequencing), complete nonsense reads like robust, scientific fact.
Those are genuine and interesting social science and scientific methodology questions and important if we don't want to repeat mistakes of the past. It's almost ridiculously easy to do this kind of bad science reaffirming our stereotypes. Understanding how that was done before can help us not do it again today.
As a footnote, I think there are a few domains of science where we are doing this again, which will embarrass us in another hundred years or so.
Funny to see it repeating the debunked (but regime approved) Lewontin's Fallacy almost verbatim. There's a reason why a DNA test is 99+% accurate at identifying your ancestry down to 500 mile radii from genetic markers alone. From there you can make generally true statements about "race" (European, Sub-Saharan African, East Asian, etc.).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lew...
If I collect the dust from your car, I can (in abstract) place where it's been with 99% accuracy too. For example, I can pick of pollens, and sequence them down to a specific tree. That doesn't mean if it has pollens from one place or another that it's significant in any meaningful way, or that you can make statements about a car based on that.
Most of the differences we know about account for things like skin color (which, in turn depends on vitamin D versus cancer for a given latitude), local diseases immunity, and similar things. Some account for random things which have no impact on natural selection (e.g. aesthetic details like hair color or thickness).
We have no evidence for things related to personality, intelligence, or anything associated with classic constructs of race and racism. Given that we would expect beneficial mutations to have evolutionary pressure to spread around the world, it's unlikely that ones which matter would stay constrained to one region for extended periods.
If you picked the dust from a person you could make this exact same discovery.
>That doesn't mean if it has pollens from one place or another that it's significant in any meaningful way, or that you can make statements about a car based on that.
You can make statements on where they've been, but not what they are. You can look into a car and see it's a V-6 with a CVT, and you can make a lot of statements on its actual performance, how large it is, how it accelerates, etc. This is the same as looking at the DNA of a person.
>Most of the differences we know about account for things like skin color (which, in turn depends on vitamin D versus cancer for a given latitude), local diseases immunity, and similar things. Some account for random things which have no impact on natural selection (e.g. aesthetic details like hair color or thickness).
And height, and lactose intolerance, and how well alcohol is digested, and baldness, and everything that makes a human human.
>We have no evidence for things related to personality, intelligence
This is extremely wrong. Intelligence is something like 70% inherited, it is directly related to your DNA. Tendencies between groups for suffering from things such as schizophrenia are also inheritable and different between races and smaller ethnic groups.
>or anything associated with classic constructs of race and racism
There are generally true statements to make between different ethnic groups, and different races that still match classic constructs: East Asians are more likely to be lactose intolerable, Black Americans are more likely to have sickle cell, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to be schizophrenic, White Europeans are more likely to suffer from melanoma, etc.
