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There's really only one rigorous approach to all of this: as long as you're married to a homo sapiens sapiens, you're not in an interracial marriage. Everything else is nitpicking
What makes homo sapiens sapiens more rigorous than racial categorization?
It's a lot less blurry at the edges, if nothing else -- at least ever since Neanderthals passed to the greater number. There's still ambiguity around the beginning and the end of life (e.g. fetuses, vegetative states) but there isn't much doubt on whether something is Homo sapiens or not.
I don't see how it's less blurry. With every new fossil that comes to light you have a repeat of what constitutes a homo sapiens debate. Regardless of that I don't see how that relates to rigor. It's not for a lack of rigor that this happens, it's because of a lack of information.
Diachronically, it's not, as you point out, and arguably even worse; but at the present time, all evolutionary edge cases are extinct. Just imagine the kind of culture-war discourse there would be about Homo erectus personhood, but we don't have to care about it, because they're all long gone. You're correct that it's not much an issue of rigor, but a pragmatic one.
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Because race is an extremely noisy and inconsistent proxy for other things we might care about like culture and genetics. As I asked above, I'm genuinely unclear what OP means by "race" and what qualifies as interracial. This is because the concept is so un-rigorous.
It's like if I decided to separate all dogs into four "races" of dogs as follows:
Race 1: yellow labs
Race 2: black labs
Race 3: dogs with short tails
Race 4: all other dogs
Technically this is a valid way to classify dogs into 4 categories. And these categories are undeniably correlated with things like genetics. But the correlation is tenuous and arbitrary to the point that this classification schema has minimal utility.
Racial classifications aren't arbitrary. Even the folk classifications corresponded roughly to now teased out classification derived from DNA.
In 19th century, based on appearance alone, people theorised that native Americans and Asians shared ancestors.
Paleogenetics showed that to be true.
As to racial differences, David Reich who led the large-scale paleogenetic efforts wrote a book about the topic.
If you don't want to read an entire book, here's a blogpost by Jerry Coyne
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/04/01/geneticist-david-reich-responds-to-critics-of-his-views-on-race/
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I can make up a nonsensical version of speciation too. That doesn't mean its relevant to anything. The reason I asked the question is that speciation as a categorization method is no more noisy or inconsistent than racial categorization in humans since racial categorization is just speciation by another name. In fact, speciation in humans is less noisy and more consistent since we have studied the humans a lot more than most other animals.
The only thing here that is unrigorous is your understanding of the concept of race.
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