The depressing story of the American continent.

submitted by radicalcentristNational Centrism from self.debatealtright

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[–]DragonerneJesus is white 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Her claim is that we are using data that is meaningless and that the racial clustering is happening in the subset of the data that is meaningless. She wants to strip the data of meaningless data and then cluster based on the remaining meaningful data. Her implicit (never proven, never explicitedly stated) claim is that doing so would result in a clustering that does not correspond to the racial groups.

In the first part, she is saying that race as a concept is biologically real and in the second part, she is moving the goalpost and saying the concept is real but meaningless/worthless/without value.

[–]milkmender11 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That is definitely not my claim! As my superviser said, 'There is no such thing as bad data.' Of course that data is not meaningless it is very useful for tracking ancestry, and that is exactly what we use it for. But it is useless for making meaningful distinctions between groups of people, because the genes don't DO anything. At best, you can try to use them as a proxy to say, "Well, if these do-nothing genes can be shown to form haplotypes, maybe they correspond to do-something genes that are also predictably distributed!" And you know what, it IS possible to demonstrate predictable distribution of some genes along the same lines as ancestral SNPs. But only some genes. And usually NOT the genes we socially consider important when it comes to race, like skin or eye color. It's a pretty pitiful result, but only if people are expecting it to justify race. It is what it is scientifically. Not meaningless, but not as meaningful as many on this board would like.

I never said race was biologically real, I assumed the putative truth of my sparring partner's positon as a Socratic exercise in demonstrating that it cannot be right, even if I operate from his assumptions.