Humans have not stopped evolving, and races biologically exist

[Bomb#20]

Yeah, I got that point. And it's true. So what? It doesn't provide any logical support for your contention. All it shows is that we cannot infer, from only the fact that Mayr said it's a phenotype group, that he also thinks it's a genotype group.

So.. the reason why I'm disagreeing with you that Myr's discussion of a phenotype group shows that it is a genetic group is because I don't agree that it does show that, not because I'm supporting some rival contention. We now appear to agree.

No, we really don't. "Said it's a phenotype group" does not equal "discussion of a phenotype group". It was some of the other things he said in his discussion of a phenotype group that show he thinks it's also a genotype group. On the other hand, if the rival contention you made is something you're no longer supporting, that would appear to be agreement.

A race isn't just any old phenotypical grouping; it's a phenotypical grouping with the additional properties of differing taxonomically from other populations...

So are many phenotypical groupings. Alcohol resistance, for example.

Huh? Are you suggesting that if somebody proposed a human taxonomy in which people were grouped by the presence or absence of alcohol resistance rather than by complexes of many correlated characteristics, this would be accepted by biologists as valid taxonomy?

In short, the computer recognized what is almost the exact category called "Caucasoid" in traditional pre-PC physical anthropology. How did this happen, if there's no such thing as a biological Caucasian? Coincidence?

Quite possibly, yes. If the 150 markers being used are the same ones that drive the phenotypical characteristics that drove the comparison in the first place, then all that's being measured is the same phenotype grouping that was initially selected.

"If", you say. So does that mean you're desperately clutching at straws, or do you think that's actually what happened? Do you believe we know which genes are responsible for most of the many visible anatomical differences anthropologists use to judge race? For instance, do you think we know what genes cause an epicanthic fold? And do you think, what's more, that we already knew about all those genes over 20 years ago, when the Human Genome Project was barely underway? And out of all the biochemical markers Cavalli-Sforza et al. could have studied, do you imagine they picked the particular ones that drive visible phenotypical race characteristics, and forgot to mention it?

In any event, what HGHG says about the particular 42 populations and 120 markers they chose is that they collected all the published marker frequency data they could lay their hands on -- data about hundreds of markers and hundreds of population groups -- and then they eliminated populations for which too few genes had been reported and eliminated genes for which too few populations had been reported; and in some cases they grouped two neighboring populations together; all with the goal of driving the problem of holes in the Gene-by-Population matrix down to a manageable level. About a quarter of their chosen alleles were from white blood cell antigens alone -- lots of data about those genes' ethnic correlations is available, because it's been been studied up the wazoo, because they're what determine tissue compatibility for transplants.

Similarly, if you look into the pariwise comparisons, what you're seeing are between groups measures and intragroups measures. While it's tempting to simply line them up and compare the relative strength, that's not in itself a demosntration of genetic coherence.

Not in itself, that's true. You also have to run tree construction algorithms over and over with random variations in which genes you include and check whether the results are repeatable. The closest the Caucasoid group came to not showing genetic coherence is that the Berbers of North Africa sometimes got grouped with Negroids instead of with the rest of the Caucasoids -- with a probability of 2%.

Social constructs exist only in the brains of human beings. Does the Fixation Index formula mathematically read their minds?

It could easily be, yes. For example, if you create an entirely arbitrary phenotype group, then you're going to find some genetic markers that they have in common, and which other groups do not have in common. In that sense, the formula is reading your mind, because all it's doing is confirming that within the group you've a priori chosen as signfiicant, there are features you can use to carve out some genetic similarities, that establish the group you've chosen as significant. All it's doing in that case is reinforcing your intiial assumption.

But that could only happen if you applied the formula only to carefully chosen genetic markers that you know in advance control the specific phenotype features you sorted by, along the lines of your speculation above. It's not going to happen if you just run the formula on whatever markers you have available.

Anyone claiming "Caucasian" is a social construct resulting from drawing arbitrary lines across a featureless terrain of human genetic variation has an awful lot of explaining to do.

Yes, such as 'why are you made of straw?', and 'how did you come to repalce the people who actually disagree with me'.

Are you accusing me of writing something four years ago, to some third party, in an FRDB thread I don't recall you participating in, that is retroactively an attempt to misrepresent your current views?

If the position you are arguing for when you say race is not a genetic grouping is substantively different from the opinions the race denialists in that thread were advocating, feel free to expand upon your own position, draw my attention to the significant differences between your view and my summary of their views, and tell us why there's no prima facie incompatibility between races not being genetic groupings and the facts reported in HGHG.

Ok, so you reckon race has predictive power? In the case of individuals? Can you give an example?

Of a prediction? Certainly. I predict that Obama is heterozygous for a -33T->C SNP in the erythroid promoter region of the FYB allele. If you mean an example of a prediction we can test here on TFT, no, of course I can't, since we don't have access to any individual's gene sequence. If you want to test the predictive power of race here on TFT, we'll have to do it with predictions about statistical characteristics of populations.

And similarly, testing genes in 150 dimensions* does not tell us much about the variations on the other few million.

Do you have an argument for that opinion, or is it just something you assume is true because you picked it up by osmosis from ideologically compatible people? If the latter, is it an opinion you're committed to, or is it an opinion you'd toss on the junk heap if you saw their beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact?

If you repeat your multivariate analysis in a different space, with a different hundred axes measuring a different hundred genes and phenotypical features, you'll get pretty much the same clusters, because there's only one history of who was making babies with whom, and that history created both clustering patterns.

Not following this, I'm afraid. Stars aren't random, and also only have one history.

Well, they're not random at the galactic level of grouping into spiral arms instead of amorphous clouds; but they're pretty random on the hundred-odd-light-year scale where we can resolve individual stars with the naked eye. The different stars in, say, Ursa Major, are at wildly different distances and got within a few degrees of each other in the sky by very different histories from very different origin points. In contrast, a typical Irishman looks more like a typical Italian than like a typical Korean because the Irishman and the Italian are Nth cousins, the Irishman and the Korean are Mth cousins, and N is a good deal smaller than M. Between N and M generations back, the Irishman's and the Italian's ancestors shared a history they did not share with the Korean's ancestors.

Are you saying that it doesn't matter which genes you track, you'll get the same results? Because that's not a claim I've seen in your sources...

Approximately the same, yes. If you include enough neutral and weakly selected genes to average out the statistical peculiarities every gene has, then the results will be repeatable. That is the whole point of modern taxonomy: repeatability is what makes it science. Did you think biologists switched from classifying organisms by subjective similarity to classifying them by common descent because Darwin made common descent fashionable?

The point I'm making is that it isn't enough to show that there is some sort of genetic group out there, but rather you need one that would make racial distinctions valid at least in theory, or else your banner headline (races are real) is at best highly misleading.

My banner headline?!? That's AA's banner headline. My banner headline, if that's what you want to call it, is merely that what Mayr wrote doesn't reinforce genetic race critics' contentions. Races being real is something I only argued for because you kept pressing me to. It's a question I think belongs in the natural science forum, where the expected standards of evidence are higher.

What happened is his data showed "Caucasoid", "Negroid" and "Mongoloid" correspond to natural features of the human gene pool. That looks to me like a relationship to races as the term is commonly understood. If that doesn't look to you like a relationship to races as the term is commonly understood, why doesn't it look that way to you?

Because for a 'race' to be a useful and valid signifier, it needs quite a few characteristics. It needs to be identifiable, which we have. It needs to have features intrinsic to the group, and features extrinsic to the group, such that membership of the group is a highly reliable predictor of the presence and absence of various traits outside of those used to identify the group in the first place, and so on.

I'm not following what you mean by a race having features intrinsic to the group and features extrinsic to the group. Is mostly having a C at a spot in the FYB gene where most other people have a T an "intrinsic" feature of the "Negroid" group? Is being widely perceived by Americans as "probably better than me at math" an extrinsic feature of the "Mongoloid" group? (An unfortunate name if there ever was one!)

Whatever intrinsic and extrinsic mean, there are millions of genetic features outside of those used to identify the groups in the first place that membership in any of the groups I listed is a highly reliable predictor of the presence and absence of. However, very few of these traits are as simple to describe as the above-mentioned T->C variation. The great majority of predictable traits are statistical ensembles of many genes. If you'd like, you can go discover one yourself.

Suppose you want to make a novel prediction about somebody's genes, based on his membership in the Caucasoid group. You can do it pretty easily using Yale medical school's online database of gene frequencies, which is freely available to the public. All you need to do is click the "Sort by: #Pop" button to get the genes with the most data to the top of the chart, generate a set of random numbers, use them to select a bunch of well-sampled genes, and look up their frequencies in various populations. So if your random number generator says "1", you'd click on the first site, rs1801133, and click on "Frequency Display Formats: Table". Add up the numbers and get the average frequency of having an A instead of a G at that site across the Caucasoid populations, across the Mongoloid populations, and across the Negroid populations. (Eyeballing it, it looks like about 25% among Caucasoids, 35% among Mongoloids and 5% among Negroids. In a perfect world you'd weight the numbers by the size of the respective populations, to take into account that a random Caucasoid is way more likely to be French than Irish; but don't bother -- you won't need that level of precision to make reliable predictions.)

Now take a blood sample and find out if the guy's DNA has an A or a G at that site. Then calculate the "self-information", assuming he's in each of the three groups. (That's the logarithm of the reciprocal of the probability of the observation.) Then subtract the number from the group he's actually in from the other two numbers. So if his DNA has an A there, you get (log(1/0.35) bits - log(1/0.25)) bits, subtracting the Caucasoid number from the Mongolid number, and (log(1/0.05) bits - log(1/0.25)) bits, subtracting the Caucasoid number from the Negroid number. Conversely, if his DNA has a G there, you get (log(1/0.65) - log(1/0.75) bits and (log(1/0.95) - log(1/0.75) bits, respectively. Repeat this procedure over and over, on many randomly chosen genes, and add up the results. The prediction is that summing these formulas across lots of genes will give you positive numbers. This is because it takes more bits of information to describe how the guy's DNA is different from an average Mongoloid's or from an average Negroid's than the number of bits it takes to describe how his DNA is different from an average Caucasoid's.

So what are these formulas actually saying about the individual's genetic makeup? Instead of making a prediction about a single DNA base, what you're making is a prediction about a weighted average of what's in his DNA at many sites. In other words, this sort of prediction is rather like saying "Among these particular 100 sites, since this guy is a Caucasoid he probably has more than 32 C bases at these sites, a condition that's rare in a Mongoloid or Negroid.". But it's a more general class of prediction than that, since it lets you make a prediction about sums of As, Ts, Cs and Gs instead of sums of one type of base at a time, and since it doesn't require you to give every site equal weight toward the sum. A genetic trait like this is not, of course, a particularly interesting trait. But then interesting isn't what we were going for -- it's just an existence proof. Yes, membership of the group is a highly reliable predictor of the presence and absence of various traits outside of those used to identify the group in the first place. You can discover as many millions of such predictable genetic traits as you can generate sets of random numbers.

Because some of the men on the street are so ignorant they think an Australian Aborigine is a "Negro"? That is not a good reason.

Depends on what you're using it for. It is if you're using self-identifcation as your measurement criteria, or if you're advocating public policy.

Whether self-identification matches biology is going to depend on all manner of cultural influences. In the U.S. context a guy who's 3/4 Caucasoid and 1/4 Negroid may well self-identify as African-American even though there's nothing in biology to support treating "African-American" as if it were a dominant gene. But that's an atypical case -- commercial genetic ancestry tests usually back up people's self-identification.

As for public policy, what does that have to do with the question? If enough people are discriminating against Jews for it to be a problem then public policy needs to deal with that, regardless of whether the Jews are a race.

4) These races are pretty much the conventional races, as the term was commonly understood, by educated people, before ideological race-denialism spread disinformation about the topic;

Well hang on there. You've just defined race through 1)-3) as being genetic clustering with no reference to size other than 'suitably large'. So how big is a 'race', and why is it that size? Tradition? Or is there more to it?

Hey, English is full of nouns with "big" or "small" in their common-usage meanings, and there's rarely any hard-and-fast rule for how big something has to be to qualify. How big does a hill have to be before it's reasonable to call it a mountain? Such is life in an analog world with digital languages. The consequence of this for taxonomy is that biology is full of "splitter-joiner" arguments that are just disputes over words, not over facts. Don't be surprised if someday we decide the differences between Homo and Pan are too small to be "genus-level", so we rename chimpanzees "Homo troglodytes".

The point is, it's the tree structure of relations among subdivisions of H. sapiens that's scientific fact. Which of the levels in that tree we call "races", "sub-races" or "groups of related races" is just a matter of where people feel like drawing the line between hills and mountains -- there's no right answer to that type of question. In pre-postmodern anthropology, sometimes the American Indians were called a race and sometimes they were called a subgroup within the Mongoloid race. What difference does it make? A rose by any other name and all that. What's fact rather than mere terminology is that the American Indians form a natural division within the Northeast Asian branch of the human gene pool.

 

[fromderinside]

The point is, it's the tree structure of relations among subdivisions of H. sapiens that's scientific fact. Which of the levels in that tree we call "races", "sub-races" or "groups of related races" is just a matter of where people feel like drawing the line between hills and mountains -- there's no right answer to that type of question. In pre-postmodern anthropology, sometimes the American Indians were called a race and sometimes they were called a subgroup within the Mongoloid race. What difference does it make? A rose by any other name and all that. What's fact rather than mere terminology is that the American Indians form a natural division within the Northeast Asian branch of the human gene pool.

First your analog 'tree' isn't appropriately drawn. A genetic switching mechanism determines when a branch will arise. Its physical, it has some aspect of randomness about it, and it depends on strict evolutionary rules. No willy-nilly branching on a tree.

Now a person might randomly assign a branch here and branch there because it looks good but that isn't scientifically determined. Just because you can see color differences, eye differences, typical facial features (pretty doubtful on that typical thing though), etc, you haven't found why they are different nor have you found what their expectation will be for the future. Scientists say the human species is browning as we intermingle from recent isolation of groups so there goes your color problem. Facial features vary very obviously generation to generation within groups so that measure is suspect. Phenotype as you've looked at them are no better than what Adler used for his typology. its no better at predicting either.


Your typifying postmodern anthropology depends on how scientific the anthropologist happens to be. Calling indians a race can't be supported, nor can be calling them a group, or calling them part of some other unsupportable designation. Geez a mongoloid Indian. How racist is that?

Time to align yourself with compatible references based on what actually determines the becoming of or the description of a race.

We're not elitists because we live near water in cities nor are we bumpkins because we farm in relatively dry areas, yet, these seem to be the kinds of data you'd jump on to do just that.

 

[Bomb#20]

The point is, it's the tree structure of relations among subdivisions of H. sapiens that's scientific fact. Which of the levels in that tree we call "races", "sub-races" or "groups of related races" is just a matter of where people feel like drawing the line between hills and mountains -- there's no right answer to that type of question. In pre-postmodern anthropology, sometimes the American Indians were called a race and sometimes they were called a subgroup within the Mongoloid race. What difference does it make? A rose by any other name and all that. What's fact rather than mere terminology is that the American Indians form a natural division within the Northeast Asian branch of the human gene pool.

First your analog 'tree' isn't appropriately drawn. A genetic switching mechanism determines when a branch will arise. Its physical, it has some aspect of randomness about it, and it depends on strict evolutionary rules. No willy-nilly branching on a tree.

How do you figure a 'digital' tree comes into existence if it doesn't start out as an 'analog' one? Are you suggesting tree structure springs forth fully formed as if from the brow of Zeus? The genetic switching mechanism is simply inbreeding, caused by some degree of reproductive isolation, caused in turn by geographic isolation or, more rarely, assortative mating. It's exactly what one would expect to happen if a population is split due to some of its members going for a short walk down a long ice-free Bering land bridge.

Now a person might randomly assign a branch here and branch there because it looks good but that isn't scientifically determined.

True. So what does that have to do with the topic at hand? Are you saying that's how the well-known Caucasoid/Mongoloid/Negroid branches were assigned by anthropologists and that's how a mathematical tree construction algorithm reconstructed them from a matrix of genetic distance coefficients? If you're saying those branches were as a matter of historical fact randomly but unscientifically assigned because they look good, what evidence do you have for that hypothesis?

Just because you can see color differences, eye differences, typical facial features (pretty doubtful on that typical thing though), etc, you haven't found why they are different nor have you found what their expectation will be for the future. Scientists say the human species is browning as we intermingle from recent isolation of groups so there goes your color problem.

I don't recall expressing any expectation that the current racial differences among H. sapiens have a long-term future; and it would be lovely if there goes your color problem; but I'm not seeing what that has to do with the topic at hand.

Facial features vary very obviously generation to generation within groups so that measure is suspect.

So now that we have, so to speak, better paternity tests, we can measure racial differences with far more precision than in the bad old days when facial features were the best we had to go on in figuring out who was related to whom.

Phenotype as you've looked at them are no better than what Adler used for his typology. its no better at predicting either.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're talking about. What is "phenotype as I've looked at them"? What I looked at was allele frequency data in human DNA.

And why do you keep bring up (Alfred, I presume) Adler? I take it what you're getting at is that his theory of personality types doesn't provide better-than-random predictions and you think racial classification doesn't either. If that's what you mean, what makes you think it doesn't? Are you saying you spent the two days between posts #121 and #122 following my instructions for generating predictions based on the Yale DNA database and people's racial classification, and the predictions were wrong?

Your typifying postmodern anthropology depends on how scientific the anthropologist happens to be.

I lost you. Where did I typify postmodern anthropology? I think the only thing I said about it is that classifying people by biological race is no longer in fashion among anthropologists. What of it? It's perfectly possible to do anthropology scientifically without saying a bloody thing about race, for the same reason it's perfectly possible to do physics scientifically without saying a bloody thing about semiconductor band gaps: you just study a different problem.

Calling indians a race can't be supported, nor can be calling them a group, or calling them part of some other unsupportable designation. Geez a mongoloid Indian. How racist is that?

See? This is what I'm on about. This is why we shouldn't even be talking about this topic in the first place in the "Social Science" forum. In "Social Science" there are no goddamn standards of evidence. "Social Science" is a cesspool of belief in three-valued logic, where its possible for a scholar to divide empirical claims into "true", "false" and "racist", argue with a straight face that an assertion can't be supported because it's racist, and not be laughed right out of the profession.

Time to align yourself with compatible references based on what actually determines the becoming of or the description of a race.

"Compatible references"? Compatible with what? Your ideology?

If you want to seriously advocate the proposition that American Indians aren't genetically Mongoloid, you should have no trouble proving it. Once again, here's the link to the genetics database:

http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/sitesWithfst.asp

Knock yourself out.

 

[fromderinside]

Since everything you wrote in your post stems from misunderstanding to an apparent insistence that race is useful i'll just concentrate on these two items.

The misunderstanding. I referred to tree, actual trees when I posed my digital analogy to your claims. Each tree branch is digitally proclaimed. As for analog versus digital digital wins because genetic biochemistry is digital.

Now to the utility of race in human sociological or anthropological study.
The Concept of Race in Anthropology
https://www.academia.edu/831938/The_concept_of_race_in_anthropology. concludes:

The same situation holds in anthropology:we can (and must) investigate the various dimensions of race, describing and critiquing the concept as we do so. This involves, among other things, examining whether biological race concepts are appropriate models for investigating variability among human beings. This has been one preoccupation of physical and biological anthropology for more than a century now, and it appears that the answer to this question is “No.”The typological race models that had held sway in anthropology through most of the existence of the discipline are not good descriptions of how human biological variability works. The implications of populational models, on the other hand, are so far removed from popular understandings of the term“race”—with hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of “micro-races” dotted around the globe—that use of the term in such cases does nothing more than risk needless confusion.Science is not an exercise in nostalgia: when a term progresses from being burnished by long use to being made obsolete by increasing knowledge,it needs to be discarded. The concept of biological race in anthropology is at that point.

That conclusion is based upon a thorough analysis of the utility of race in anthropology with a whole shitload of references.

Go ahead and wave your scientismic (see thread for full impact of sneer) race banner some more. The notion of race is beginning, ne, it's a tattered shred, messing up anthropology for most of the discipline's existence. Time to move on.

We aren't arguing because race is spouted its shit. We're spouting that since the science behind the race spouted is shit it needs be excised from scientific discourse.

 

[Bomb#20]

Since everything you wrote in your post stems from misunderstanding to an apparent insistence that race is useful i'll just concentrate on these two items.

The misunderstanding. I referred to tree, actual trees when I posed my digital analogy to your claims. Each tree branch is digitally proclaimed.

I have no idea what it means for a branch to be "digitally proclaimed". Do you have any idea what it means?

As for analog versus digital digital wins because genetic biochemistry is digital.

In the first place, there is no "wins". There isn't any competition, any more than a larva is in competition with the adult it becomes. Every species -- every discrete all-or-nothing branch on the tree of life -- starts out as a partial branch with fuzzy boundaries, an approximation to tree structure that gets more and more distinct as speciation proceeds.

And in the second place, that genetic biochemistry is digital is no more to the point than that an actual wood tree is made of discrete atoms. Sure, the continuum from trunk to branch is in some sense broken by the gaps between the atoms, but that's so far below the scale at which we see tree structure that we might as well disregard it. Likewise, the tree structure in patterns of relatedness among the animals in a population shows up in the correlations among dozens or hundreds or thousands of genes, so many that they can be effectively analyzed with floating-point algorithms, so treating relatedness as analog rather than digital costs us nothing and simplifies calculations. To object to this on the grounds that genetic biochemistry is digital is no different from objecting to talk of "temperature" and insisting on being given a list of momenta of individual molecules.

Now to the utility of race in human sociological or anthropological study.

Why to there now? Where the heck have I "apparently insisted that race is useful"? In post #100 I just proposed that people stop caring about it. What I said is that categorizing people into the conventional races allows us to make reliable predictions; whether those predictions are of any value is a matter of taste. A science doesn't have to be useful to be a science.

The Concept of Race in Anthropology
https://www.academia.edu/831938/The_concept_of_race_in_anthropology.

I read the whole thing (only I skipped the section on sports due to my being unable to give a damn.) Yet another typical denialist exercise in hoping if you throw enough crap at a wall some of it will stick. A dozen different arguments against race, each of them feeble. What in that essay are people supposed to find persuasive? The ad hominems? The attempts at guilt-by-association? The criticisms of ideas that the science of biological race had in its infancy in the 19th century? The insinuation that recognition of types involves metaphysical commitment to belief in Platonic Forms? The false dilemma between "typological" and "population" concepts? Or the unrelenting conflation of questions about terminology with questions about facts on the ground?

concludes:

... The typological race models that had held sway in anthropology through most of the existence of the discipline are not good descriptions of how human biological variability works. The implications of populational models, on the other hand, are so far removed from popular understandings of the term“race”—with hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of “micro-races” dotted around the globe...

That conclusion is based upon a thorough analysis of the utility of race in anthropology with a whole...

So, that would be the false dilemma and the conflation, then? Feel free to go through the essay and find whatever you regard as the single strongest argument against the biological reality of human races, and I'll be happy to provide a detailed critique.

Go ahead and wave your scientismic (see thread for full impact of sneer) race banner some more. The notion of race is beginning, ne, it's a tattered shred, messing up anthropology for most of the discipline's existence. Time to move on.

I'm puzzled as to why you and so many anthropologists seem to think sneering at an idea is a substantive way to refute it.

 

[fromderinside]

The Concept of Race in Anthropology
https://www.academia.edu/831938/The_concept_of_race_in_anthropology.

I read the whole thing (only I skipped the section on sports due to my being unable to give a damn.) Yet another typical denialist exercise in hoping if you throw enough crap at a wall some of it will stick. A dozen different arguments against race, each of them feeble. What in that essay are people supposed to find persuasive? The ad hominems? The attempts at guilt-by-association? The criticisms of ideas that the science of biological race had in its infancy in the 19th century? The insinuation that recognition of types involves metaphysical commitment to belief in Platonic Forms? The false dilemma between "typological" and "population" concepts? Or the unrelenting conflation of questions about terminology with questions about facts on the ground?

Wow. A critique containing nothing more than labels, which I illuminate as bold after bold after bold, sans evidence.

After all this where do you come down on the question posed in the OP. Have humans stopped evolving? Or, is your concern with race just another chestnut.

 

[Bomb#20]

Wow. A critique containing nothing more than labels, which I illuminate as bold after bold after bold, sans evidence.

Exactly which part of "Feel free to go through the essay and find whatever you regard as the single strongest argument against the biological reality of human races, and I'll be happy to provide a detailed critique." didn't you grasp? I don't have the bandwidth to do a thorough debunking of a dozen different bad arguments. And considering the level of open-mindedness you've displayed on the topic, if I did go to all that effort on your behalf you'd probably just sneer at me again without ever explaining any error in my reasoning. Conversely, if I debunk one argument for you as a free sample you'll just tell me I picked the weakest one. So you choose. Or don't. Your option.

After all this where do you come down on the question posed in the OP. Have humans stopped evolving?

Obviously not. Duh. Humans will stop evolving when either (a) humans go extinct, or (b) every government forces every one of its subjects to have 2.0 children.

Or, is your concern with race just another chestnut.

On what planet is an argument that races biologically exist a "Thread Hijacked" in a thread titled "Humans have not stopped evolving, and races biologically exist"?

 

[fromderinside]

On what planet is an argument that races biologically exist a "Thread Hijacked" in a thread titled "Humans have not stopped evolving, and races biologically exist"?

I believe that would be on the planet where evolution is scientifically agreed to be continuing according to pretty elegant collated findings which include metrics for the specification of what constitutes a race.