[ExI] A few thoughts on races [was: Re: Race Biology]

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Mon Mar 24 23:29:12 UTC 2008


On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>
wrote:
>  By "properly" I assume you mean "reliably" or "replicably" rather
>  than "appropriately." The distinction is important. What  canon of
>  criteria, independent-of-human-history, does the automaton use to
>  select the major traits it uses to characterize individuals into 3,
>  30 or 300 "human races"?

- The answer is: *any* criterium. According to Dobzhansky, a race was "the
abstraction of the identifying features of secondary Mendelian populations
within the same species". I think this is still a good definition.

- The study and discussion of racial biology in general is best performed,
whenever possible, with regard to species other than Homo sapiens, where
much less emotional baggage and ideological or personal bias in one sense or
another are involved.

- Are "races" a cultural construct? Sure. As are species and phyla for that
matter, and taxonomy in general. "The mammals" do not exist, there is only a
number of organisms (with all necessary caveats regarding the concept itself
of "organism") that I may find comfortable to classify under this label for
one purpose or another, "the bipeds" or "the predators" being sometimes more
relevant and practical sets. What else is new? Moreover, with regard to
human races, this is true in a few more senses, namely that on one hand what
has produced racial differenciation in the past (drift, segregation,
oriented selection) has had much to do for our species with cultural
differentiation, which in turn depends only partially on environmental or
"natural" differences; and on the other what is popularly meant by "race" in
the US seems to have more to do with tribal affiliations than with any
anthropological concept (see the phenomenon already noted in the list, and
by Dawkins in *The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution*,
where recent African ancestry seems memetically to be a dominant trait, an
Europoid ancestry a recessive trait).

- Unless one loves entropy, biodiversity is good per se, and the idea of
objectively "superior" races or racial traits implies a universal scale of
values the foundation of which ultimately can only be metaphysical and at
odd with any evolutionary prospective. Genetic differences and genetic
variance should be protected, if not deliberately developed along multiple
and possibly diverging lines, rather than reduced in view of some elusive
"optimality" or Platonic fixist ideas. Unfortunately, while this may appear
obvious to many of us, monoculturalism and globalisation need not be
officially "racist" to risk to lead us in the opposite direction at many
levels. Transhumanism and technology remain however the best bet IMHO
against such a diversity loss.

Stefano Vaj
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