Race is defined by ancestry inferred from genomic similarity or phenetics. This is a simple and unassailable definition and all of your attacks on the concept are strawmen or non-sequitur. Your non-sequitur assertion that is has no utility is simply false. The simple informativity of the statement "he looks Chinese" shows what nonsense it is, let alone myriad other predictions. It's quite easy to debunk reality deniers, they rely on the same cheap category fallacies. Boas started the ball rolling with his "heads change shape" cherry picking fraud study nonsense. Doubtless you agree with that.
A breeding population is "the most narrowly restricted group of individuals that interbreed a majority of the time". West Eurasians are not a breeding population, e.g. how many Scots marry Greeks, or how many Latvians marry Spanish? Mating between these ethnic groups isn't at all common. And yet bizarrely you want to cluster all these peoples together with Arabs, Turks and even Levantine Jews who you claim to despise.
You are making a strawman argument and not addressing the definition of race which is classification by shared ancestry. Are you claiming we cannot classify people by whether or not they share ancestry versus others? Do Arabs share ancestry with Europeans relative to Negroids or not?
"he looks Chinese" has no utility. There are diverse ethnic groups native to China, or have a long history there. There is no average Chinese "look" which captures them all. And this is the problem with race. The groups are too heterogeneous to be useful. The average Swede (fair hair, blue eyes etc.) don't look like Italians (dark hair, brown eyes etc.) why should they be clustered? The only people doing this are white nationalists.
I must admit when I look at Lupita Nyong'o ("12 Years A Slave") and Mama June Shannon ("Here Comes Honey Boo Boo").... I find it very hard to believe they are the same species.
Chinese ethnic groups: http://www.chinadiscovery.com/ethnic-minority-culture-tour/ethnic-minorities-in-china.html Pretty Chinese looking. How's that reality working out for you? Also since most Chinese are Han that further cements the utility. Did you ever go to China BTW? I'm especially interested if you went to the North and the South. Because I have this theory that many race deniers are total ignoramuses.
It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way ‘‘race’’ was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now fashionable and widely regarded as cogent. These criticisms often arbitrarily burden the biological category of race with some implausible connotations, which then opens the path for a quick eliminative move. However, when properly understood, the biological notion of race proves remarkably resistant to these deconstructive attempts. Moreover, by analyzing statements of some leading contemporary scholars who support social constructivism about race, I hope to demonstrate that their eliminativist views are actually in conflict with what the best contemporary science tells us about human genetic variation. Those who subscribe to the opinion that there are no human races are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Ernst Mayr, 2002 https://www.google.com/search?clien...c+variation.&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://commons.ln.edu.hk/sw_master/715/
Philosophers of science widely believe that the hereditarian theory about racial differences in IQ is based on methodological mistakes and confusions involving the concept of heritability. I argue that this "received view" is wrong: methodological criticisms popular among philosophers are seriously misconceived, and the discussion in philosophy of science about these matters is largely disconnected from the real, empirically complex issues debated in science. http://commons.ln.edu.hk/sw_master/2359/
I go by reliable physical anthro data. Here's data on shovel-shaped incisors (females): Shoveling % Northern Chinese 69% Southern Chinese 27% "It could be said that the Southern Chinese shows a lesser degree of shoveling than the other Chinese population." - Ling, J. Y. K., Wong, R. W. K. 2008. "Incisal Morphology of Southern Chinese". The Open Anthropology Journal. 1: 19-25 So what use is grouping ethnic groups from South China with North China, if they show large frequency disparities like this?
You said it had no utility. A probabalistic prediction is utility. And that's just looking at your cherry picked single trait, rather than multiple trait correlations resulting from shared ancestry, such as those that make people "look Chinese". Fail.
Once again semantics. Like Dobzhansky, Mayr defined race as a breeding population. No biologist (not even Lewontin) denies breeding populations, but they aren't races and shouldn't be confused with them.
Nonsense. He defined it by genetic similarity rather than ancestry. Neither of which have anything to do with your strawman "breeding population" definition.
So what is useful about grouping things that are not similar? That goes against the purpose of classification. Do librarians put books about mathematics in the same library section as zoology? The photo you posted shows a diverse range of phenotypes. There is no "Chinese look". Also, North and South Chinese don't cluster in genetic studies.
Mayr (2002) only provides an example of two breeding populations as races: "Still, if i introduced to you an Eskimo and a Kalahari Bushmen I won't have much trouble convincing you that they belong to different races." So this is a semantic problem. Inuit and Bushmen are not races, but breeding populations. I don't see any claptrap about Mongoloids or Caucasoids in Mayr's literature.
Similarity is relative. Things are more or less similar. Your reality denying false dichotomy strawman garbage grows tiresome. - - - Updated - - - You just keep saying "breeding populations" trying to define your opponent's term to construct a strawman. You also lie about sources and facts. You are a waste of time.
Ernest Mayr on Race Just as there are great differences among individuals, there are average differences, usually much smaller, between groups. Italians and Swedes differ in hair color. Sometimes the differences are more conspicuous, such as the contrasting skin color and hair shape of Africans and Europeans. But, for the most part, group differences are small and largely overshadowed by individual differences. . . . The evidence indicating that some diseases disproportionately afflict specific ethnic and racial groups does not ordinarily provoke controversy. Far more contentious is the evidence that some skills and behavioral properties are differentially distributed among different racial groups. http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001951.html
Sure you did... *facepalm* I guess the idea that you can put names to human variation is from the past like flat earth theory, which makes it wrong. Also the idea that water is wet and birds fly. What other reality denying sophistry do you want to waste everybody's time with?
You keep saying 'straw man', but I only see you use the same one over and over... I'm not sure who you think denies categorizing human variation. What scientists are against is racial categorization. Look at the population samples in Lewontin (1972), he has no problem with categorizing breeding populations. There are other ways to categorize humans, e.g. ecotypes, but they aren't racial. Caucasoid for example wouldn't qualify as an ecotype because it groups together very different climatic phenotypes - so it has no use.
You claim human genetic variation is discontinuous when it is continuous. I refuted you on this in Oct-Nov 2013 when I showed any slicing/dividing of genetic continua is arbitrary. When you lose debating, you resort to calling people "Marxist Jewish Boasians" or then joining other sites/forums to slander your opponents. You did this to Mathesci on Encyclopaedia Dramatica (whose page you created) since he refuted you on Wikipedia, and to me on Anthroscape, after I refuted you on Metapedia.
Who cares? Nothing you say impugns classifying people by ancestry or similarity. You are just opposed to the word race because it is the common term for human taxonomy, a la Darwin, and you just parrot the pseudoscientific arguments of the Jewish anti-White "mix yourself out of existence White goyim" zeitgeist. Who cares what other systems there are? You are not refuting the race concept, because it is defined by shared ancestry or genomic similarity. Do you deny shared ancestry or genomic similarity? Lol: fail.
Are twins (two individuals) a race? They're very similar genetically. Your definition is not how race is commonly defined. Like John Fuerst you are re-defining race because you cannot defend it. "Thus, while some minimal revision to the meaning of 'race' (as for all definitions, of course) is allowable in the search for biological backing for race, we must stay fairly close to the vest, or we risk not talking about race at all." - Glasgow, J. M. (2003). "On the New Biology of Race". The Journal of Philosophy. 100(9): 456-474