22 May 2024 3:43 pm
People like to talk about 'race' being a 'social construct'...but as anyone investigates this lone of reasoning it always turns out to be a purely semantic argument. Primarily this stems from people who feel uncomfortable with race being a word used to describe a biological thing. They feel the need to redefine words because particular combinations of sounds make them feel sad or something.
you won't find many people (although some do exist) who will assert that there is no genetic difference between a bantu and a Dutch person. Some people will insist the dna difference only exists outside the brain...and all brains are identical while admitting that there can be differences in skin color, nose shape, and perhaps resistance to malaria etc. That point of view seems rather implausible if we point out that over 85% of our DNA does have some impact on the brain, which is our most recent evolution and our most 'expensive' organ. But whatever. Clearly a lot of this nonsense is a product of people's devotion to liberal political ideas overwhelming their ability to be objective.
but anyway...I just want to generalize the concept of race and apply it to life in general rather than specifically humans and relate it to fundamental truths about evolutionary biology.
quite simply, I will say a race is the result of genetic adaptation to a particular way of life..whether or not that way of life is imposed by necessity or collectively agreed upon.
As a trivial example, europeans historically had a large amount of dairy in their diet. As a result a 'white' person is more likely to be lactose tolerant than a non white person. This of course is not the only difference between Europeans and other races, but it is one that has had genetic consequences.
to move away from humans, there are 2 basic 'kinds' of orca: those who primarily eat fish and those who primarily eat seals. Hunting for fish and hunting for seals requires slightly different traits and talents, so this has divided orca into 2 distinct races whoch are each fine tuned to their own specific activity. Because orcas migrate a lot, these 2 kinds often encounter eachother in the wild, but scientists have noted that they never breed with eachother. This is probably because if they did, the offspring would lose the genetic fine tuning to each of their respective activities...the offspring would not be particularly evolved to anything.
If that genetic isolation continued over a long enough time, it would be possible for orca to split into 2 distinct species...although there is no hard rule for when exactly that occurs. Genetically speaking there can be a very minor and almost indetectable genetic change that drastically reduces the chance of producing viable offspring. But it is plausible that this is the primary cause of speciation...because life does get more diverse over time rather than less...and only mass extinction events reduce the diversity of life in natural history.
you won't find many people (although some do exist) who will assert that there is no genetic difference between a bantu and a Dutch person. Some people will insist the dna difference only exists outside the brain...and all brains are identical while admitting that there can be differences in skin color, nose shape, and perhaps resistance to malaria etc. That point of view seems rather implausible if we point out that over 85% of our DNA does have some impact on the brain, which is our most recent evolution and our most 'expensive' organ. But whatever. Clearly a lot of this nonsense is a product of people's devotion to liberal political ideas overwhelming their ability to be objective.
but anyway...I just want to generalize the concept of race and apply it to life in general rather than specifically humans and relate it to fundamental truths about evolutionary biology.
quite simply, I will say a race is the result of genetic adaptation to a particular way of life..whether or not that way of life is imposed by necessity or collectively agreed upon.
As a trivial example, europeans historically had a large amount of dairy in their diet. As a result a 'white' person is more likely to be lactose tolerant than a non white person. This of course is not the only difference between Europeans and other races, but it is one that has had genetic consequences.
to move away from humans, there are 2 basic 'kinds' of orca: those who primarily eat fish and those who primarily eat seals. Hunting for fish and hunting for seals requires slightly different traits and talents, so this has divided orca into 2 distinct races whoch are each fine tuned to their own specific activity. Because orcas migrate a lot, these 2 kinds often encounter eachother in the wild, but scientists have noted that they never breed with eachother. This is probably because if they did, the offspring would lose the genetic fine tuning to each of their respective activities...the offspring would not be particularly evolved to anything.
If that genetic isolation continued over a long enough time, it would be possible for orca to split into 2 distinct species...although there is no hard rule for when exactly that occurs. Genetically speaking there can be a very minor and almost indetectable genetic change that drastically reduces the chance of producing viable offspring. But it is plausible that this is the primary cause of speciation...because life does get more diverse over time rather than less...and only mass extinction events reduce the diversity of life in natural history.