Racial categories aren’t useful for science, though.
Au contraire
Black people are at a much higher risk for mutations in the hemoglobin gene responsible for SCA. Researchers believe the reason lies in how this condition has evolved.
Over time, sickle cell conditions have evolved to protect against malaria, a parasitic infection spread by mosquito bites. Malaria is common in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world that also have a high prevalence of sickle cell. Having SCT — but not SCA — helps reduce the severity of malaria.
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.
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.
White people have higher tolerance for lactose, so a milk-heavy diet is worse for other races.
Except the other highly tolerant cluster is West Africans, with smaller ones in places like Pakistan and Arabia.
Even though there is a broad scientific agreement that essentialist and typological conceptions of race are untenable, scientists around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing ways. While some researchers continue to use the concept of race to make distinctions among fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behavior, others in the scientific community suggest that the idea of race is inherently naive or simplistic. Still others argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic significance because all living humans belong to the same subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Despite the fact that races do not exist in the genetic sense, in some cultures racial categories are used as a form of cultural expression or identity, or a means of reflecting shared historical experiences. This is one aspect of the concepts of “ethnicity” or “ancestry”.
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.
Yeah but it's still obvious bullshit. Bad science is bad science no matter what level of authority does it.
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.
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.
According to who? At this point unless you're a genetics expert yourself it's starting to sound like a conspiracy theory.
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.
A haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent,[1][2] and a haplogroup (haploid from the Greek: ἁπλοῦς, haploûs, "onefold, simple" and English: group) is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation.[3] More specifically, a haplotype is a combination of alleles at different chromosomal regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together. As a haplogroup consists of similar haplotypes, it is usually possible to predict a haplogroup from haplotypes. Haplogroups pertain to a single line of descent. As such, membership of a haplogroup, by any individual, relies on a relatively small proportion of the genetic material possessed by that individual.
That's race! That's the definition of race! Fucking university types just don't like the word!
Haplogroups can be used to define genetic populations and are often geographically oriented. For example, the following are common divisions for mtDNA haplogroups:
African: L0, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6
West Eurasian: H, T, U, V, X, K, I, J, W (all listed West Eurasian haplogroups are derived from macro-haplogroup N)[10]
East Eurasian: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, Y, Z (note: C, D, E, G, and Z belong to macro-haplogroup M)
Native American: A, B, C, D, X
Australo-Melanesian: P, Q, S
They are describing race! It's super fucking obvious if you get rid of whatever white guilt stupidity makes you get the ick when you hear the word "race".
You'll notice letters appear more than once, and there's more than one letter for every group. Also, that's mtDNA, and if you actually cared about biology you'd know that's only one type on DNA, inherited one way, and you can completely mix and match with the Y haplogroups.
I get it, you hate wokes. I don't really think cultural disgruntlement is a good basis for defining "science", though. I suspect there's no more useful information to exchange here.
And I just don't think that's happening. Science moved away from race long before it was cool. The first steps happened over a century ago; Hitler was already doing pseudoscience. (I guess there is actually something to add)
Science moved away from phrenology, but we're not going around claiming that skulls are a social construct. It's ridiculous. Just because something has been misused by bigots, doesn't mean we should pretend the thing doesn't exist.
Phrenological propensities are were a social construct. Skulls and variation within them exist. Ditto for human biological variation in other things. You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say "the milk drinking race", and words don't have fixed meanings independent of how they're understood.
Sorry if I came off as a little abrasive there, that wasn't my intention, I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.
I was basically just saying we should agree to disagree at some point.
I'm afraid I can't settle for that. This idea that race is some made up thing is offensive to me. I have to correct people who say they agree with it.
You can call that race, but nobody else thinks of Senogambia when you say “the milk drinking race”,
There it is. That's actually what this entire discussion turns on, every time I have it. First, I have to get the other person to admit that inherited physical characteristics exist, which can be a chore for some people. Then, when they admit that, they say some variation of "but that's not the definition of race / that's not what people mean when they say race".
This is actually the more important thing that you have to shake loose of. Certain academic institutions claim this, but they are overwhelmingly wrong. When people talk about race, they do not talk about some vague abstraction. They almost always are referring to specific inherited characteristics usually tied to the physical place a person's ancestral group is from.
The irony is, the only people who could be operating under the delusion that when people talk about race they're referring to some vague social thing are people who don't interact with a lot of different people. This idea that race is a social construct is quarantined to one very specific social stratum, because anyone who gets more worldly experience very quickly realizes it's bunk.
It's pretty intuitive when once you realize it. It's very basic, very "what you see is what you get". When people talk about race, they talk about the very surface-level, most obvious, simplest definition. No deeper meaning. People are not subconsciously philosophizing. People are not closet racial supremacists. They're just describing what they see. "Inherited physical characteristics" is the simplest definition of race, and trying to find some deeper meaning of the term is a red herring.
To go back to the phrenology example, the existence of race does not require bigotry. Which is probably why academia came up with this absurd idea, they were scared of bigotry. The existence of skulls does not require phrenology to be true. It's bunk, and it's racist.