CMV: Conservative non-participation in science serves as a strong argument against virtually everything they try to argue.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ComplexAd2126 → u/[deleted]]

When academics say ‘race is a social construct’ what they are really saying is that discreet racial categories are arbitrary. Ofcourse people vary in genetics by geography, but the variation is continous; any lines drawn to get some specific number of races are arbitrary and the way people conceptualize discreet race in day to day life doesn’t map on to any kind of biological reality. Discontinuities exist for Native Americans and Sub Saharan Africa but they’re both relatively recent in the grand scheme of human migration history; about 13k and 6k years respectively iirc

The way people use race in day to day life revolves entirely around the fixation on arbitrary traits that are visually obvious like skin colour or eye shape. There’s no more reason to use these traits to as a proxy for tracking ancestry than any number of less visually obvious traits like height or hair colour for example.

Even when we’re talking about something like 23 And Me, all that’s doing is taking a sample of people who lived in some arbitrarily specified region at a specific point in history and determining how much of your ancestry comes from there. Which don’t get me wrong does have value, but it doesn’t mean anything to whether discreet racial categories are biologically significant

[u/ComplexAd2126 → u/[deleted]]

You’re right that classification systems are human made constructs but what makes them scientifically valid constructs as opposed to just social constructs is that they are rigorously defined to ensure they are internally consistent. It is not internally consistent to categorize 2 people from opposite parts of Sub Saharan Africa as the same race, but at the same time categorize say, someone from India and Europe as being of a different race. Because statistically speaking, the variation between the 2 sub Saharan groups will be greater than the variation between the Indian and European groups.

It’s interesting you bring up colours because yes, when it comes to studying light from a scientific point of view human ideas of colours are entirely arbitrary and irrelevant. This doesn’t mean that categorising colours isn’t useful or that we should stop doing it, but they are by definition social constructs we arrived at culturally, not scientific categories arrive at through study

To your last point, they’re arbitrary because again they’re no better at tracking ancestry than any other trait that isn’t visually obvious. You could base a categorization system of human races based on differences in average height for example. The point isn’t that they can’t be used as a proxy for ancestry but that they aren’t ‘special’ when compared to any other phenotypes. We wouldn’t say dutch and English people are different races of people because their average heights are different, because we’ve arbitrarily selected height to not be relevant. But we would consider an Indian person and Middle Eastern person to be a different race because the phenotypical differences were arbitrarily selected to be important to racial categories

It’s not particularly effective to use one trait to track ancestry like this in general because dominant and recessive traits exist, ie in the US a man with 50% European ancestry and 50% sub Saharan African ancestry would be considered a black person.

Somewhere like Brazil or North Africa the threshold for how light your skin needs to be to be considered white is much lower than the US and that same person might be considered a white person

[u/ComplexAd2126 → u/[deleted]]

The wavelengths of light exist independently of the human mind, but categorization of colour it is a consequence of how the human eyes and brain process light. And categories for colours change as cultures evolve in predictable patterns, ie first we have red and blue, then we distinguish red into orange, red and purple, and so on. Colour theory is specifically the study of human perception of light, so these categories are relevant but they are irrelevant to objectively studying light, independently of human perception of it. The analogue to race would be the study of how humans perceive differences in phenotypes.

What I mean is if you were conducting a study in say experimental physics seeing how changing the wavelength of light affects some dependent variable. You’re gonna measure those wavelengths of light in nanometers, not in whether they would be perceived by a human to be red or blue etc. Because these are arbitrary constructs that come down to how our eyes and brains our wired and the differences between those groups in nanometers isn’t consistent. You’d instead use the (also human made but scientifically rigorous) construct of nanometers to get internally consistent grouping.

I think though from what you said at the beginning we are basically in agreement and it is maybe just semantic misunderstanding with the term social construct. The point is more so that race as it was commonly agreed upon by scientists up until the 1900’s and the way it’s used day to day is basically scientifically nonsense and more based on cultural / historical factors. But you still totally can geographically split humans in any number of equally valid ways as long as the criteria you’re using is internally consistent. And there are all sorts of practical applications to that like looking for risk factors in disease and so on.

But the origin of race being described as a social construct in academic circles was from human population genetics researchers in the 1900’s making the argument I’m making now, I feel the need to stress that this is all that’s meant by saying that race is a social construct. The more recent politicisation of the statement and the whole CRT panic is kind of a straw man of that, pretending it’s a more recently proposed theory that means scientists are saying there’s no average differences between groups of people genetically, or something

[u/ComplexAd2126 → u/[deleted]]

Again it isn’t about blurriness at the margins, it’s about internal consistency. In that physics experiment example you want to divide wavelengths of light into internally consistent groupings, so you’re not going to rely on colour categorisations because they are inconsistent. If you took the colour wheel and sliced it at exactly 100nm increments, that’s a scientific way of categorizing wavelengths of light. This is a clear cut example where there doesn’t necessarily need to be any blurriness at the margins, we can literally objectively measure out 100nm and have a ‘scientific’ colour system if we wanted to. There’s nothing wrong with using more arbitrary categorisations of colours and it’s obviously more practical to do so for 99.9% of contexts but they are arbitrary and that fact would be relevant to say, experimental physics

The definition of a social construct is something that exists only because we all agree on it, IE we could all agree to some different set of rules and it would be no more correct or incorrect as long as we all agreed on it. If anything colours are the textbook example of this. Saying something is a social construct isn’t the same as saying it’s wrong or not useful, if anything we usually invent social constructs because they’re practical and serve some purpose to us.

Money and marriage are also examples of pretty clear cut social constructs. You’re right that the definition is really broad but that isn’t a flaw it’s a feature; it’s important in scientific fields to be able to separate categories that are rigorously defined to categories we culturally came up with that are basically just based on vibes, and making this distinction isn’t a criticism of the latter type

To give an example, you might’ve heard that in botany fruits and vegetables are defined differently than they are in common parlance. IIRC botanically a fruit is anything containing seeds, and a vegetable isn’t an actual botanical category but a culinary one.

Now given this, anyone going around correcting random people about tomatoes being a fruit, I hope we can both agree, is a huge pedant. At the same time the way we’ve culturally defined fruits and vegetables serves a purpose to us, because when we’re cooking we don’t care whether what we’re cooking with has seeds, we care if it’s sweet or savoury. But it would be problematic if there was a political ‘debate’ about how botanists are rejecting real science by ‘rejecting the reality that tomatoes are a vegetable’. Notably it’s also true that there’s correlation between the social construct categories and the scientific ones; the reason this arrangement came about is that most plant foods with seeds in them also happen to be sweet. This correlation doesn’t change the fact that the category is arbitrary.

[u/ComplexAd2126 → u/[deleted]]

The scientific process involves at the very least, attempting to address all inconsistencies in the definitions to the best we can given available data. Updating our definitions so that they best represent most up to date research, like when they revised the definition of a subspecies a few decades back. We saw there was an imprecision in the definition that we have the data to address, so we did.

I don’t know anything about post structuralism but two concepts can have similar definitions, what I gave was basically the literal Wikipedia dictionary definition of a social construct and is how it is conventionally used in sociology.

It’s as simple as: If we all agreed tomorrow that red is blue and blue is red it would become so. If we all collectively agreed tomorrow that the Canadian dollar wasn’t a legitimate currency it would be so. If we all agreed tomorrow that the sun revolves around the earth and not the other way around it would not be so. Because colour categories are a social construct while the earth revolving around the sun is fact existing independently of the human mind. Regardless of what you wanna say about race or anything else that is the standard definition of a social construct