Can Racism be Based on Science?

submitted by MagicMike from self.debatealtright

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[–]raven9 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Tell that to the forensic anthropologists that routinely identify the race of skeletal human remains for law enforcement.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 3 fun1 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

So you've read about this, have you? Perhaps you've read:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1738862/

It is maintained in this paper that the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed 'racial' category. A specimen may display features that point to African ancestry. In this country that person is likely to have been labeled Black regardless of whether or not such a race actually exists in nature.

Or perhaps you've read this:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26270337/

Accuracy for these techniques varies from 57% to 95%, depending on the sample and technique used.

Or this:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98485&page=1

He says it is the complexity of human variation and its geographical ties that make archaeological finds like the Kennewick Man important to study.

As you will have seen in these and all other articles on the subject:

...there will never be a concensus among scientists on which genes constitute one race or another. (There is too much variation. Anyone who would try to catagorize people into races will have to develop a system that determines which percentages of each potential ethnicity or geographic origin would apply, and in any event, this the data is far too complex to make any sense, and the categories would remain social categorizations, not reliably scientific.)