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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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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/

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.