I can't believe I'm starting a race thread...

[samsonite2100]

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Is 'pit bull' a social construct? I know exactly what it means when I see the name. I don't give a rip if the genetic difference between a pit and a poodle is tiny, the information in the pit bull designation is quite valuable. I know that this small segment of the species correlates with certain behaviors. Ignore this at your peril.

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Good point. It is a valuable construct for avoiding sneaky Chinamen, greedy Jews, violent blacks, etc.

[Rduke55]

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Clearly a construct. I have two different 'species' until I put them in geographical proximity and they interbreed.

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Did you miss the point that they cannot produce fertile offspring?

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Identification of members of the species most likely to share my genetic material, and hence to create offspring that tend to reproduce my genes.

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Kin selection is dependent on close relatives. You're drifting into Washburn's fallacy here. "Race as an extended family" for the purposes of kin selection has been rejected by evolutionary scientists. Look at Maynard Smith's stuff or Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for explanations.

[Rduke55]

I like the fix.

[HeavilyArmed]

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Is 'pit bull' a social construct? I know exactly what it means when I see the name. I don't give a rip if the genetic difference between a pit and a poodle is tiny, the information in the pit bull designation is quite valuable. I know that this small segment of the species correlates with certain behaviors. Ignore this at your peril.

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Good point. It is a valuable construct for avoiding sneaky Chinamen, greedy Jews, violent blacks, etc.

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Well done. Backhandedly lable me racist and ignore my post's content. Very progressive. You're in good company.

[luckyme]

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Isn't the latter just restating the former?
"reproductively isolated" = "cannot make fertile offspring".

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I intentionally restated it to pre-empt the liger argument.

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'Race' as a classification suffers from tha lack of useful definability.
Black Race - has black skin.
"what's different about them"
Their skin is black.

We can categorize anything, but until there are some spin-off information that is meaningful to us, that's all we've done is create a category.

'Species' as tough as it is to define, serves us by making evolutionary and genetic study easier to work with.

To use the Pit Bull example . To divide them into Brown and Black Pit Bulls, while it's an identifiable category, doesn't give us anything to work with because nothing comes with it. We merely end up looking at two groups of dogs, one brown on black.

Race is much worse. Coming up with a clear definition seem next to impossible and by the time it's broad enough to cover the groups involved it loses most ( all?) of it's secondary information and we are essentally left at the 'Black people are black' starting gate.

luckyme

[samsonite2100]

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Is 'pit bull' a social construct? I know exactly what it means when I see the name. I don't give a rip if the genetic difference between a pit and a poodle is tiny, the information in the pit bull designation is quite valuable. I know that this small segment of the species correlates with certain behaviors. Ignore this at your peril.

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Good point. It is a valuable construct for avoiding sneaky Chinamen, greedy Jews, violent blacks, etc.

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Well done. Backhandedly lable me racist and ignore my post's content. Very progressive. You're in good company.

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I'm sorry, I interpreted your quote in roughly the following way, "I don't really care about the particulars of genetic classification--racial divisions based on skin color are useful because people with those skin colors behave in certain ways." If this isn't a fair paraphrase, please explain the subtleties I missed.

Also, I'm assuming that the "in good company" remark refers to the irritating habit liberals have of correctly identifying someone as a racist when they're behaving that way. I'm sure you must be sick of it.

[vhawk01]

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Race is a social construct because it is an oversimplification of human genetic diversity.

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So are species (we arbitrarily decide how much or what kind of difference it takes to call two different animals a different species).

So is every human concept. They're arbitrary forms of classifications designed for a particular use.

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Right, but in this case they were either designed for sinister uses or are being misapplied. The idea that intragroup variation is higher than intergroup variation is what people mean when they say race does not exist. That is all.

[ill rich]

race is a social construct.

[gdsdiscgolfer]

I find myself agreeing with everything Rduke has said in this thread.

It seems to me that the only purpose race serves is racial profiling. So if you agree with the latter, then race is a necessary social construct.

[HeavilyArmed]

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I'm sorry, I interpreted your quote in roughly the following way, "I don't really care about the particulars of genetic classification--racial divisions based on skin color are useful because people with those skin colors behave in certain ways." If this isn't a fair paraphrase, please explain the subtleties I missed.

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You're not too far off. I'm more than content to use all the information at hand even if it fails the PC racist test. Do you have any doubt about the correlation of American blacks and violent crime? Causation is not the issue, personal safety is. Do you doubt white flight? Can all those whites be making the same wrong assumption, that avoiding urban American blacks makes for a safer life? It's statistically sound, PC poison. I'll stick with the obvious, you are welcome to the social constructs.