I don’t think those analogies work. The key to the original argument, which I don’t think is emphasized enough, is that there is more difference between people within the group we call “black” than there is between some members of the group and all other people. There is a group of black people who are more genetically similar to white people than they are to many other black people because they are presumably the progenitors of white people. So the “race is bullshit” point is that from a genetic perspective, races look like this:
From a genetic perspective a more natural grouping would be to put that red square in with the white people. We don’t do that because “race” is not a genetic categorization, it’s a “how it looks to me” categorization.
There is more variance within insects than there is within mammals, but no insects are more similar to mammals than they are to other insects.
Similarly, the difference between plants and animals is vast (considerably more vast).
For a good biological analogy, it like the “there’s no such thing as a fish” issue. Lungfish are more closely related to mammals than they are to rays. “Fish” just means “animal in the water” (excluding a few things we decide are not fish). It’s more of a culinary term than a genetic one.
Democrats and republicans, from a genetic perspective, are obviously the same. The point of this article is that it may be that Democrat vs. Republican is just as valid a genetic categorization as black vs. white.
Racial categories were deliberately manufactured for the purposes of imperialism, slavery and white supremacy. It was never about skin and hair, really. Take away one underclass and they’ll make another.
To get away from the consequence, you need to address the real cause.
Except, of course, it was never meant to be. It’s like some astronomer pointing out that there’s nothing in the cosmic microwave background that implies English. Sure, but that’s because English is a social category, and so’s race. Things that are socially derived are still things.
I think there is still controversy over the 2002 definition of Carrion Crows and Hooded Crows as separate species, and I can’t find the scientific papers that supported the change.
As a side point, I get annoyed when people do artwork of Cú Chulainn or Morrígan with black crows. These are the corvids associated with those stories.
The hoodie/carrion crow offspring are reproductively viable, although they are considered to be less so than their parents (again, I haven’t seen the papers that say this).
One of the reasons given for making them separate species was that they don’t voluntarily interbreed, which might be true on the European borders of their territory, but isn’t true on the Scottish border (not to be mistaken for the human Scottish Borders). At least, the crows around Kirkcudbright would willingly do so occasionally in my observations in the early to mid 90’s.
I think it depends on whether it’s a specimen label or not, but I’m probably wrong. I haven’t been inside a real systematic collection or herbarium in years.
Dog breeds are far, far more inbred with far less genetic diversity than any demographic group of human beings. Artificial selection works a whole hell of a lot faster than natural selection because it involves intelligent direction. Thankfully, human beings are not the subjects of an alien breeding program which means our diversity of appearance is only skin deep.
I’m not sure it was never meant to be. The concept of race exists mostly to enable racism, and racists often try to emphasise genetic differences between their supposed races, claiming white people are in some way inherently superior, or some other groups are inferior for whatever reason.
Shouldn’t be the case: The Codes are the Law. They apply to labels as well as to books and papers. But note the plural: a botanical collection confuses zoologists to no end. We don’t do numbers, for example. And the bracketing works completely different.
Also, the codes changed over time, and their application wasn’t universal, so you might find a lot of specimens and literature doing it wrong - but in fact right at the place and time when written.
Of course, you also get errors and idiosyncrasies, but that’s scientists for you.
You and @Medievalist are probing the concepts of species here. Before you start arguing further, I would like to interject that species concepts vary for good reasons, the most important of all that the species we are taking about don’t give a flying fart how we categorised them. Species concepts are artificial, and science is just striving to make them (still plural!) more natural.
Importantly, there will be no perfection, no one species concept for every organism. Frankly, even most biologists don’t understand this.
I agree with what you said, but I still stand by what I wrote. Let me explain: Yes, racists gesture towards science, sure, but they aren’t beholden to it. If they can use it or its trappings, all’s well. If not, out it goes.
I mean, imagine if a massive study analyzed the human genome with such (science-fictional, I confess) granularity that they can say that there’s not a lick of difference in how human brains are formed: whatever we may look like, we’re the same on the inside.
Do you imagine many racists would go: “Oh. Well. That’s that then. Sorry everyone. False alarm.”
So, no, I don’t think it was ever meant to be a part of genetics, because genetics is a science and science is falsifiable and alterable. Racism is, by and large, a fixed belief which you generally can’t argue people out of.
I read the book Sapiens earlier this year and it was pretty great. It did a nice job of talking about all the reasons that our species outlasted all the other species of humans. We aren’t a very nice species.
