Talk:Race (classification of human beings)

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    [edit] A good point muted

    In the section on "Scale of race research" there is a very instructive point that gets pretty well muted for lack of a few words of explication that I believe would be justified by the original material quoted.

    The writere quoted uses the verb "to sample," which is fine in context of a professional journal, but it may suggest a rather trivial process of "taking a taste." That's not really what is being described here. The author is looking at the difference in characteristics, e.g., the palette of skin tones, that one would get by following two procedures. The first would consist of drawing a line from Sweden to Indonesia, drawing 1000 equidistant dots along that line, and taking a human specimen from each point on that line — which would result in an obviously clinal picture. The second would result from drawing four equidistant points on the line and taking 250 individuals from each of those four points. You would end up with a new population that could pretty reliably be divided into four groups of people with very similar characteristics. The author is saying that in the United States we find a population that is largely drawn from a few centers that are remote from each other. That fact may have practical consequences for public health policy and other such activities, e.g., "Devote part of the money to the white ones for skin cancer scanning and part of the money to the black ones for sickle-cell anemia scanning.


    In other words, by taking people only from the peaks and valleys we artifically obscure the fact that there are inclines between those two kinds of extremes. We create a "clearly different kinds of people" from what was in fact a clinal distribution, and until the U.S. population reaches genetic equilibrium there will be some utility in treating people as though they belong to discrete groups.

    Is there some way we can economically emend the text to bring out what the original researchers were trying to get across? P0M 07:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)


    There may be a way but it is going to be hard to come across. -Michaela M. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.217.24.127 (talk) 20:07, 12 September 2007 (UTC)


    [edit] Darwin spelling?

    ..."but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them." Should it not be shows or is that the magnificent wording of the time in where no one really gave a stuff? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.173.4.56 (talk) 12:46, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

    From memory,he spelled a lot stuff that way and that was not a singular typo but how he spelled "show" throughout at least two of his works. You can see the original scans and check for yourself with Google books. [usemasper] 65.8.157.26 (talk) 23:11, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Revert war regarding Harpending's criticism of Venter

    The revert war is over the following addition to the second paragraph of the article: "This despite the fact that the human code analyzed was of only one person, hence could not, by definition, show any variation.[1]". The claim of those reverting this sentence is that the link is to a discussion group and that this is therefore not a "reliable source". The wiki article "WP:RS" is cited as the guideline for "reliable source". That article, however, states: "Reliable sources are authors >OR< publications regarded as trustworthy or authoritative in relation to the subject at hand." and the source of the quote is Henry Harpending of the National Academy of Sciences -- specialist in population genetics. No one disputes the authenticity of Henry Harpending's comment and it would be unreasonable to do so since Harpending has been participating in the evolutionary psychology group for years and that group is among the highest traffic groups with the most reputable participants. Moreover, what Harpending is saying, on the face of it, can't be disputed by any reasonable person and therefore hardly requires citation. As Harpending says "my little kid can figure out that that makes no sense." The only reason it might be disputed is the whole point of the second paragraph of article -- which is that people like Venter are so averse to being caught up in the controversy over "race" that they can go to great lengths, in this case making absurd statements to highly regarded publications like the Washington Post, which then makes them the basis of major stories it carries. The whole intellectually dishonest situation is reflected, of course, in this revert war which makes up rules about "reliable sources" as it goes along to suppress the simple and obvious facts of the subject matter regarding "race". Jim Bowery 22:20, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

    You can only read it if you join the group. Can anyone maybe find an alternative source for the same thing? Anyhow, removing the sentence instead of just putting up the "citation needed" tag is kind of odd. Funkynusayri 22:24, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    Not only that you have to join the group, a message board is NOT a reliable source! Who knows the true identity of any of its contributors? If the quote is true, and from the "Nation Academy of Sciences", then get it from there, or another reliable source. Until then, it does not belong in the article. - Jeeny Talk 22:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    Exactly. This fails at least two requirements for sources. Completely black and white, clear as crystal there in the text, unless you can come up with a WP:RS, do not add something. --Longing.... 22:41, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    What is crystal clear -- black and white -- is that I provided the text from WP:RS that supports my citation and neither you, nor any of your cohorts, have done anything but to argue by assertion. Jim Bowery 23:09, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    This is an encyclopedia, a collaborative effort -- "cohorts"? That's what people are supposed to do, discuss, or "argue" as you say, unreliable and questionable material added to articles that are not backed up by reliable sources. Reliable sources are not on message boards! Therefore your source is not a reliable one, meaning it does not support your citation per WP:RS, as you say. Read my post above why it fails WP:RS, and then read WP:RS AGAIN! How many times does one have to say that to you for you to understand that? - Jeeny Talk 23:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    You are again arguing by assertion. Stop it. Quote text from WP:RS as I have. The only quotes from WP:RS provided thus far support my position. You are merely asserting your position over and over again. Moreover -- let's get real here and use a little common sense. If Ian Pitchford's evolutionary psychology group is so unreliable then why did Salon do a feature article about it mentioning participants like Dawkins by name? [2]Jim Bowery 23:42, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
    Your insertion did not have a reliable source! You stop it. Use something from that article you just linked to promote your idea then, and use that as the ref if you want. I haven't checked it, though, if it's reliable or not. That's your job to do the research on information you insert in the article. - Jeeny Talk 23:52, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

    See WP:CIV, WP:AGF, and WP:TINC. Also see WP:RS, which like I have said, you are in violation of. If you continue this hostile and anti-policy behavior and rudeness towards other editors, you could be blocked from editing. You might want to read WP:UHB, but refrain from making ad hominem attacks --Longing.... 23:58, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

    Looks like I have to quote from WP:RS so he may understand. Here's one:

    "Exceptional claims require exceptional sources

    Shortcut:
    WP:REDFLAG
    See also: Wikipedia:Fringe theories

    Certain red flags should prompt editors to examine the sources for a given claim.

    • Surprising or apparently important claims that are not widely known.
    • Surprising or apparently important reports of recent events not covered by reliable news media.
    • Reports of a statement by someone that seems out of character, embarrassing, controversial, or against an interest they had previously defended.
    • Claims not supported or claims that are contradicted by the prevailing view in the relevant academic community. Be particularly careful when proponents say there is a conspiracy to silence them.
    Exceptional claims should be supported by multiple high quality reliable sources, especially regarding scientific or medical topics, historical events, politically charged issues, and in material about living people."

    - Jeeny Talk 00:06, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    No, that doesn't cut the mustard. It is *not* a "fringe theory" that it requires more than one genome to quantify variability. It is so *by definition* of "variability". Now, you can *try* making the argument that it is a "fringe theory" that Venter's conclusions were based on only one genome since there is, within the cited Washington Post article, the claim that he based his conclusions on genome sequences from differing racial groups and that a widely recognized authority in population genetics variability is not sufficient authority to counter the WP's report of Venter's claim. If so, I can produce subsequent reports from the New York Times that corroborate Harpending's claim that Celera's analysis was primarily based on just one genome -- the genome of Venter himself. This is controversial mainly in that *Venter's ethics* were questionable in using himself for the primary source of genomic data.[3] Venter's questionable ethics are consistent with Harpending's assertion that Venter was posturing against the biological reality of race for commercial if not political advantage. Jim Bowery 00:19, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    Both of you, stop this. Jeeny, this is not necessarily a fringe theory, and Jabo, this is not a reliable source. You don't need to go flinging shit around at each other, it's just making you look bad. Now calm down, go reread WP:AGF, WP:CIV, WP:RS and WP:NPOV a few times, this applies to both of you, you need to calm down and get a better understanding of policy --Longing.... 00:32, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    OK. I'll add another quote from the guidelines.

    The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material. All quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged should be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation. When content in Wikipedia requires direct substantiation, the established convention is to provide an inline citation to the supporting references. The rationale is this provides the most direct means to verify whether the content is consistent with the references. Alternative conventions exist, and are acceptable when they provide clear and precise attribution for the article's assertions, but inline citations are considered "best practices" under this rationale. For more details, please consult Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_cite_sources. The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question.

    Your original insertion was not backed by a verifiable source, it was a message board, one that people had to join a group to read. - Jeeny Talk 00:47, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    Cite the passage in WP:RS that disqualifies "message boards". Cite the passage in WP:RS that disqualifies "registration". I've already shown sources such as Salon used elsewhere in Wikipedia that have cited Ian Pitchford's evolutionary psychology group as having authoritative comments from such widely recognized public figures as Dawkins. Registration is required for the New York Times and that is not disqualified. Jim Bowery 00:56, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    Apparently I was thinking of WP:EL, but still, a forum is not a WP:RS, unless the forum in question is the subject of the article, and the post illustrates a notable part of it's history. If you really want this on the article, ask the person to have it published in a journal of some type, or at least post it on their web page --Longing.... 01:11, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    I'll cite this one from Wikipedia:Verifiability#Questionable_sources:
    Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for fact-checking or with no editorial oversight. Questionable sources should only be used in articles about themselves. (See below.) Articles about such sources should not repeat any contentious claims the source has made about third parties, unless those claims have also been published by reliable sources.
    I would say this qualifies as a "questionable source". Furthermore, the claim that the human genome is mostly derived from one individual and through a single source is in my eyes a very contentious claim and likely to be false unless backed by a very authoritative source. A single person claiming to be a well-known researcher on a user newsgroup certainly doesn't qualify as such.--Ramdrake 01:13, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    No, but you're getting close to a good argument. However, Harpending _is_ a recognized authority in the subject matter and the Wiki policy on self-publishing does say Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources_.28online_and_paper.29 "Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications." This allows for self-published statements on race by recognized authorities like Harpending. A good argument might be constructed from the next sentence: "Self-published sources should never be used as third-party sources about living persons, even if the author is a well-known professional researcher or writer; see WP:BLP." Venter is a living person and Harpending is basically saying something about Venter. I'll accept this argument -- tenuous tho it is -- for the purposes of this discussion and proceed to find another source for Harpending's claim that Venter really didn't have the data from the other racial groups he needed to make the claims made by him via the Washington Post article. When I do -- and I believe it is likely due to Harpending's reputation and the growing body of peer-reviewed research contradicting Venter's statements to the press -- I'll provide the appropriate cite(s). Jim Bowery 02:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    Also this one: "Are web forums and blog talkbacks reliable sourses?", which is linked in Questionable sources; which says:
    "Web forums and the talkback section of weblogs are not regarded as reliable. While they are often controlled by a single party (as opposed to the distributed nature of Usenet), many still permit anonymous commentary and we have no way of verifying the identity of a poster." - Jeeny Talk 01:20, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    That's not even a guideline, let alone a policy -- and even if it were it wouldn't be applicable to the present instance since Harpending's identity in Pitchford's group has been verified multiple times as has the identity of even more well-known public figures in the same group. 02:53, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    I think Harpending's criticism is simplistic. Human Genome Project indicates that there have been several independent projects sequencing the human genome, including Venter and Celera Genomics. These iclude International HapMap Project, Applied Biosystems, Perlegen, Illumina, JCVI, Personal Genome Project, and Roche-454. I do not think we should give undue weight to an argument over one study that is from a forum. Also whose genome was sequenced gives an indication that there were several people sequenced.Muntuwandi 03:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    No Harpending was not disputing the well known fact that there have been many sources of genome data other than Venter. He was disputing Venter's claim that Celera's genome data was supportive of the "no biological race" claim made by Venter to the Washington Post. Moreover, the data that has come out of the other projects you cite directly contradict Venter's claim because phylogenetic clustering does show genetic groups that match with virtual perfection self-identified race -- so we have additional reason to distrust Venter's early claims made via the WP cited in the second paragraph of the Wiki article on race. Jim Bowery 03:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    That whole section needs to be removed from the lead and placed in the genetics section. There is no need to get into the debate of whether the human genome gives information on the existence or non-existence of biological races in the lead section.Muntuwandi 03:23, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    I disagree for the simple reason that the heart of the race debate is the historic classification of people into groups currently going by the name of "self-identified race" and there is now a clear trend in the peer-reveiewed literature analyzing genomic data vindicating the traditional taxonomy. Jim Bowery 03:55, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    That is very much your opinion. Ask another scientist and they'll opposite. In fact new data is beginning to reveal that populations have been mixing significantly in the past for example when whites prove to be black. Muntuwandi 04:04, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    It's much more than my opinion. No one reputable buys into Lewontin's Fallacy anymore and the news article you cite is just a sensationalist rehash of that fallacy for circulation appeal. No one reputable disputes Lewontin's claim that there is more variation within than between races when one looks at a single locus and no one reputable disputes that there has been a lot more admixture than many racists would like to believe. But I suspect even Venter would like people to forget the stuff he said to the WP -- which is all the more reason to keep it up front of this article. Yes it is terrible that so many people were mislead by Lewontin -- but their beliefs, however cherished, don't change the facts of the human genome and the biological validity of traditional racial taxonomy. Jim Bowery 04:39, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    Find an expert who says the same thing from a reliable, verifiable source, and it can go in, properly attributed. Nobody here has a real problem with what was said, just with the how and from which sources.--Ramdrake 14:31, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] second paragraph

    I am very skeptical of this sentence: "whereas a new opinion among geneticists is that it should be a valid mean of classification, although in a modified form based on DNA analysis.[12][13][14][15]" The sources are newspapers, which at best tells you what journalists think geneticists claim. But this aricle itself cites a variety of recent peer-reviewed articles by geneticists and few if any of them advocate the validity of race, and when they do, they make it clear that they are not claiming that race is a valid way of classifying groups of humans. Some of the articles start with race as a way of classifying humans (in their sample) and then show how mtDNA or Y-linked haplogroups actually cut across self-defined racial lines. Slrubenstein | Talk 16:14, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

    The above has been up for almost a month with no comment. Does anyone object if I delete the sentence? Slrubenstein | Talk 14:07, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Be my guest.--Ramdrake 14:12, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Newspapers, including press releases, often get things wrong, certainly in the fields in which I have expertise. Be that as it may, the press release makes a pretty narrow claim - at least the sentence ought to be rewritten to reflect the source more precisely and accurately. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:19, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Then you should prove that they "get it wrong" before removing it, don't you think? I haven't heard about a Wikipedia policy that supports your request. And check the first link, plenty of references to published studies. Funkynusayri 14:27, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    I'd say Alun has already done a good job of prooving them wrong. Be that as it may, I would not exclude them as sources. But i would be accurate: they represent not necessarily what scientists think, but how science is being represented by the media. That itself is notable, but it should be presented as such. I don't have to prove them wrong since Wikipedia is not about truth, and I am not asking you to prove them right. I am saying that they reflect the views of journalists and in the case of the press release a corporation (University), which is different from the nature of views expressed in peer-reviewed journal articles. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:39, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Then again, which Wikipedia policy would justify that you remove these sources? And as I mentioned already, the articles use peer-reviewed articles as references. Read these references and point out how they have been misrepresented, otherwise I don't think there is a problem. Funkynusayri 14:42, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    What these articles demonstrate is that racial self-identification correlates with the distribution of certain genetic markers, and that it might be useful for certain epidemiological considerations. It doesn't speak about any "validity" of racial categorization. This isn't what that second paragraph sentence is saying.--Ramdrake 14:47, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • I quote from the first article: "Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view." Please at least read the articles before dismissing them.Funkynusayri 14:54, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Actually this is simply stating that people from different parts of the world are detectably genetically different. So what? No one has ever claimed, to my knowledge that people are genetically homogeneous throughout the world. In the USA the main contributing groups to the modern population come from relatively isolated parts of the world. West Africa, North America and Europe. One would expect that people sampled from extreme distance would display a greater level of differentiation relative to people sampled from proximate regions. The authors of this article take self described categories which do not cover a very broad spectrum of the global human population, and show they are genetically different. Big deal. The article makes no claim for any taxonomic value to the concept of "race". Furthermore the people who wrote the computer programme used in the study, STRUCTURE, have stated that people are partitioned into clusters on an ad hoc basis, and that any results should be considered as a guide and a trial of the programme that used idealised data showed that structure has a tendency to underestimate the true number of clusters. Indeed Witherspoon released a paper only this year showing that it is possible for two people to be closer to each other than to the norm for their "cluster" and still be correctly assigned to their "cluster" which shows that in fact the clustering does not have any value in epidemiological studies. "We chose the most widely used clustering program (structure) to represent this class of analyses. The authors (Pritchard et al. 2000; Falush et al. 2003) admit that the procedure to estimate the number of populations is ad hoc and recommend that it be used only as a guide, but these caveats are often ignored." and "The complete inability of structure to correctly estimate the true number of populations using Low mutation markers is somewhat surprising but in agreement with previous observation regarding the factors primarily responsible for statistical power to detect population differentiation."[4] Witherspoon states of clustering analyses "For example, an African individual x with qx=0.52 will be more similar to a European y with qy=0.60 than to another African z with qz=0.4. Yet that individual x will still be closer to the population mean trait value for Africans (qA ~ 0.48, the African centroid) than to the mean value of Europeans (qB ~ 0.68). It follows that many individuals like this one will be correctly classified (yielding low CC and CT) even though they are often more similar to individuals of the other population than to members of their own population (yielding high v)." and "Thus the answer to the question ‘‘How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?’’ depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, v, can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is v=0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, v = 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘‘never’’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations. On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase v. This is illustrated by the fact that v and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of 10,000 polymorphisms....In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations may be impossible."[5] If you want to accurately present Risch's data then you need to explain that this is not a taxonomic excercise, you also need to explain that these samples represent relatively isolated populations and that they only apply to the USA, you also need to state that these samples do not represent a fair and accurate representation of the clinal nature of global genetic variability because they are not taken from an unbiased sampling of the global human population. Indeed to be fair all you can really say about these data is that they show than the populations used in the study are different, you cannot extrapolate to make a global conclusion. You should not attempt to introduce this citation if you do not fully understand what they mean. You should also avoid quote mining. You have tried to make this paper say something it does not, no geneticists are calling for human subspecific classification, these people are saying that self described race/ethnicity might have something useful to say regarding medical treatment, they do not discuss taxonomy, nor do they even attempt to define what they mean by "race" or "ethnicity", something that would be fundamental for rational taxonomic purposes. Folk concepts of race have no biological validity, and even if populations in the USA show a certain level of differentiation, this cannot be extrapolated to the global human community due to the considerations of the clinality of variation.. Also you wanted to know why you should not use newspaper citations, it is because in science try to avoid citing the popular press. Alun 16:59, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Again: I quote from the first Stanford article (http://genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007): "Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view." Please at least read the articles before dismissing them. It's crystal clear. If you don't agree, it doesn't matter, both POVs are represented. Funkynusayri 14:54, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    I've read it a thousand times. It does not say what you want it to say. Besides you are wrong in saying that "whereas a new opinion among geneticists is that it should be a valid mean of classification". Classification is taxonomy. Where does this article discuss taxonomy? Read my response and also read the article sI have linked toy. You cannot possibly have done that. You do not seem to want to present genetic data in a neutral manner. This quote is not a consensus opinion amongst geneticists, let alone among scientists, you are merely misrepresenting the science. This appears to be little more than POV pushing. A single quote from a single paper is not proof of anything Alun 17:17, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Categorising is taxonomy. If you don't like the word "classification", I'll change it. Simple as that. Funkynusayri 17:22, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    • I see you removed it, Wobble. According to which Wikipedia policy? Funkynusayri 17:47, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Alun did not remove any content. he corrected it. he made sure that it provided a more accurate account of the research, and actually added well-sourced content. You can't cault an editor for clarifying and adding content. (I am not commenting on category vs. class, but the representation of current research by geneticists). Slrubenstein | Talk 18:03, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Dobzhansky misrepresented

    Rubenstein reverted my last edit and replaced it with his false interpretation of the differences between Livingstone's and Dobzhansky's positions. Dobzhansky does not say in the paper that the "race concept" is "a matter of judgement." His actual views are more accurately expressed in his comment to UNESCO:

    The Biological Concept of Race. Race as a biological term expresses the fact that there are populations of mankind like those of Africa and of Europe, for example, which differ in some of their hereditary characters. Anthropologists reserve the term “race” for those groups of mankind which regularly show extensive physical differences. Race, based on hereditary group differences has thus become a device for classifying and thereby describing in simpler terms the great variety existing in mankind. Biologists also recognize racial differentiation as a part of the process by which local populations become fitted or adapted to their environment. Race as a biological category is thus based on the most universal of biological processes, that of evolution. MoritzB 18:02, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000733/073351eo.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by MoritzB (talk • contribs) 18:03, August 29, 2007 (UTC)

    His actual views are more accurately expressed in his UNESCO comment? What kind of BS is that? YOU provided a citation for a Current Anthropology article and I am referring to that article. In that article he refers to the race concept, which he uses to refer to whether or not races are named and if so how many there are and he states, explicitly, that this is a matter of judgement. I did not delete a point of view. I just represented the exchange between the two scholars more accurately. They agree on some things and disagree on others. I made it clear what they agree on, and what they disagree on, and I included quotes from the article. I am not changing the meaning or interpreting anything. By adding material that you left out, I simply provide a fuller and more accurate view of the exchange. So suddenly Dobzhansky's own comment in one of the most prestigious anthropology journals in the world no longer represents his own views? You cite one statement by Dobzhansky and provide one quote that supports your POV. I add quotes and summarize the entire comment so people have an idea of everything he wrote, and suddenly the text YOU initially chose no longer represents his views? I am sure that when Dobzhansky wrote that he was fully capable of expressing his views. You are just going to have to accept that he wrote what he wrote. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:13, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    No, the text you wrote does not represent Dobzhansky's views. You took a quote out of context. You deleted the Dobzhansky quotes I added which allowed you to misrepresent Dobzhansky's views.
    Dobzhansky's clear opinion is that "race differences" are a biological fact and races remain useful categories.
    Unlike you claim Dobzhanski does not say that "the use of the race concept to classify people is a matter of social convention". He defends the use of the racial concepts like Negroid or Caucasoid in science. MoritzB 19:08, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    My version states clearly that TD believes that racial differences are biological, so you are agreeing with me. But you are disagreeing with TD who does say that the decision to name races and the decision about how many races there are is a matter of judgement. That is his view, like it or not. Do not censor Dobzhansky's view. TD ALSO believes that in his judgement races are worth naming and my version says this too. But he makes it clear it is ajugement call. his judgement is just different from Livingston's. Your version is a bad faith edit and violates our policies. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:23, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    Actually, your edit was the bad one as Dobzhansky clearly does not say that "the use of the race concept to classify people is a matter of social convention." He defends the biological concept of race. MoritzB 21:11, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    So what is the "biological concept of race" that he is defending? One of the problems with the biological concept of "race" is that there is no agreement about what it is. So actually he must be defending a specific version of the biological conception of race. Look at all the edits I have made at Talk:White people about this. During Darwin's time the number of "biological races" varied from 2 to 60 odd depending on which classification system one favoured. Physical anthropologists in the USA were some of the main defenders of a "biological race" concept for a long time, but even they gave it up because they realised that the number of "biological races" is arbitrary. Carlton Coon, who you seem to be a fan of was the President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, but this Association now disavows the existence of any biological races, this is for practical and scientific reasons and not for any politically correct reason as is so often claimed by proponents of "biological race". The AAPA "Statement on Biological Aspects of Race" is one of the best and most thoughtful statements on this subject available, and the fact that it's from the AAPA makes it more relevant than many other similar statements.[6] Whether a group of people is considered a "race" is fundamentally dependent on the criteria used to determine what a "biological race" is. Stating that humans vary genetically and physically over geography is not the same as supporting any concept of "biological race". So if you want to claim that Dobzhansky is supporting a "biological race" concept, you need to be clear about which concept he is supporting, and also about the criteria used in this concept for classification purposes. If he is simply stating that human diversity is geographically distributed, then this is a different thing altogether. Alun 05:32, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    According to Dobzhansky races are defined as populations differing in the incidence of certain genes, but actually exchanging or potentially able to exchange genes across whatever boundaries (usually geographic) separate them. MoritzB 15:35, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    By this definition any local group of people could be considered a "race", it depends on the extent of differentiation, without specifying what extent delineates a different "population" or "race" we are really only discussing geographic variation. Which genes does he suggest should be used in this process? This implies that whether a "biological race" exists is dependent on which genes are studies. Different genetic elements give different results. If you use genes that have known to be adaptive then the result would be different to when you use selectively neutral polymorphisms. This is not a very good answer. Besides the section you gave for Dobzhansky seems only to be discussing the fact that there is variation and that it can be measured. Even showing that humans can be grouped together does not "prove biological race". One can classify people by eye colour, that does not make all people with blue eyes a single "race", any more than having dark or pale skin does. Variation is not evidence of discrete populations. Besides your edit was totally incomprehensible. I could not understand it because it was so badly written and expressed. Alun 18:28, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    You're entitled to your opinion; unfortunately, a simple reading of the reference proves your opinion wrong.--Ramdrake 21:26, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Exactly what is wrong in what I say?
    MoritzB 15:34, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    User:Slrubenstein summed it up already.--Ramdrake 15:36, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    Actually, he didn't even attempt to address my arguments. Unlike Rubenstein claims Dobzhansky does not say that "the use of the race concept to classify people is a matter of social convention". He defends the use of the racial concepts like Negroid or Caucasoid in 'science MoritzB 16:56, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

    MoritzB is simply ignorant. H does not realize that it is possible for Dobzhansky to claim that racial nomenclature is a matter of social convention, and for him to argue for using a certain nomenclature. In fact, he does hold both positions, and I present both positions in my summary of his view. He makes it very clear that the race concept - whether people name races, and how many races if any people chose to name, is a matter of the judgement of a comunity. He further argues that in his judgement, his community ought to use a certain nomenclature. This is a reasonable argument, even if others do not share his judgement. But MortizB wouldn't recognize a reasonable argument if it bit him - evident in the fact that MoritzB has never made a reasonable argument at Wikipedia, just repeats dogmatic assertions. No wonder he misunderstand Dobzhansky. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:21, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] User:User11111

    Okay, whose sock is it now?--Ramdrake 19:31, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    What do you mean? I'm noone's sock. User11111 —Preceding unsigned comment added by User11111 (talk • contribs) 20:00, August 29, 2007 (UTC)

    Then, can we have a discussion as to why you keep reverting, so we can address your concerns rather than wasting everybody's time reverting each other? Thanks!--Ramdrake 20:04, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    The talk page says that he is Aleksei from Moscow. Are you familiar with WP:BITE and WP:AGF?
    MoritzB 20:03, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    Let's discuss it. Rubenstein made a bad edit and I wanted to change it back. User11111.

    I agree with him.MoritzB 20:06, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    I believe Slrubenstein's edit put the matter more in perspective. The alternate phrasing, looking at the original source, looks like selective quoting to me, and that's forbidden by WP:NPOV policy.--Ramdrake 20:08, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    No, the problem is that Rubenstein's text uses selective quoting and is in a logical contradiction with the source.
    MoritzB 20:10, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

    Ramdrake, I have read Dobzhansky's article and SIRubenstein's version was inaccurate.

    Yes, we agree. Please type four tildes to sign a comment with your own name. It is also good to make edit summaries before you edit. MoritzB 20:18, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    You're obviously agreeing with yourself. I'm not falling for that one.--Ramdrake 20:19, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Again these stupid accusations although you are the one confirmed to use a sockpuppet in RFCU.MoritzB 20:33, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    I totally agree with the first part of your sentence. It's funny that all your "friends" have been confirmed to be the most dangerous form of abuse of sockpuppetry. - Jeeny Talk 22:11, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
    Not my puppets.MoritzB 00:17, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

    What do you mean? I'm not MoritzB. User11111 20:22, 29 August 2007 (UTC) Sock-puppe or not, you clearly have not read the comment - it is not an article which leads me to think you really have not read it - and you certainly did not understand it. It is an exchange between two scholars, and the agree on some points and disagree on others. You cannot fully and accurately represent either position just by singling out what they disagree on, you need to be clear about what they agree on too. This is simple, accuracy. The only motive I can imagine anyone would have for deleting any mention of areas of agreement is if someone just wants to stir up conflict. Is that what you want? Don't say you want all points of view represented because the recent edits by me and Alun kept the points of view you refer to, and merely added more contextual information and other points of view. So you are not motivated by any love of NPOV. So is that what is motivating you, a desire to stir up conflict? If that is your motive please go away. If it is not, please make constuctive suggestions about edits we can all agree will improve the article, rather than simply reverting any edit to something you put in. NO ONE owns this article. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:11, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

    Please, don't bite the newcomers. MoritzB 16:57, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
    MoritzB, you're no newcomer.--Ramdrake 18:01, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Witherspoon

    I added some information of their study: "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups; the overlap in genetic similarity between these groups is ~ 0%"

    "The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group."

    http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1893020 MoritzB 03:50, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes. Muntuwandi 03:55, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes. Also, The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group. MoritzB 04:02, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    both statements are correct from the article but you have cherry picked only one statement that does not illustrate everything about the article. Muntuwandi 04:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    MoritzB is yet again quoting out of context with no attempt to be neutral or to actually present what the Witherspoon article states in anything like a balanced way. The article cannot be summed up in the simplistic ways that either Muntuwandi or MoritzB have suggested. The following quote from the article contains the basic conclusions of the research. I have highlighted the points that contradict MoritzB, his quote is deliberately misleading and biased to try and misrepresent the work in order to push a point of view this research does not support.

    Thus the answer to the question ‘‘How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?’’ depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, v, can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is ~0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, v ~ 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘‘never’’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations.
    On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase v. This is illustrated by the fact that v and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of 10,000 polymorphisms (Table 1, microarray data set; Figure 2D). In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations may be impossible. However, those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question (see Rosenberg et al. 2005).

    Alun 04:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    However, European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African populations are geographically separated, not closely related or admixed. It was clear that Witherspoon was talking about these populations. "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups; the overlap in genetic similarity between these groups is ~ 0%." You are welcome to add a comment about the closely related and admixed populations. The mixed populations do not belong to any traditional racial categories either. MoritzB 04:49, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Witherspoon's paper is clearly a response to Risch and Edwards, it addresses an important question regarding the similarity between individuals from different groups. The paper is disputing the claims by Risch and Edwards that clustering analyses have any medical application, Risch states "Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view." and Edwards claimed "It is not true that 'racial classification is .. . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'. It is not true, as Nature claimed, that 'two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world', and it is not true, as the New Scientist claimed, that 'two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races'" But Witherspoon shows that these observations are not as conclusive as Risch/Edwards claim, indeed Witherspoon shows that it is true that two individuals from very distinct geographic regions are quite likely to be similar to each other (even using 1000 polymorphisms two individuals from very different geographical regions are 10% more likely to be similar to each other than to someone from the same region), especially if one only uses 300 odd polymorphisms as Tang et al and Rosenberg et al. did. Witherspoon states this explicitly

    The population groups in this example are quite distinct from one another: Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians. Many factors will further weaken the correlation between an individual’s phenotype and their geographic ancestry.... The typical frequencies of alleles that influence a phenotype are also relevant, as our results show that rare polymorphisms yield high values of v, CC, and CT, even when many such polymorphisms are studied. This implies that complex phenotypes influenced primarily by rare alleles may correspond poorly with population labels and other population-typical traits (in contrast to some Mendelian diseases). However, the typical frequencies of alleles responsible for common complex diseases remain unknown. A final complication arises when racial classifications are used as proxies for geographic ancestry. Although many concepts of race are correlated with geographic ancestry, the two are not interchangeable, and relying on racial classifications will reduce predictive power still further.
    The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes.

    It is clear that clustering analyses do not account for the very real similarities between people from different clusters. Therefore it shows that medical treatment should not be based on "cluster" membership, because for significant proportions of the population these clusters are irrelevant. If you want to claim that individuals from geographically distinct regions can be perfectly discriminated from each other using >10,000 polymorphisms then please make this claim, but in order to be neutral you absolutely need to include the other qualification, or else it is merely taken out of context and POV pushing. You do not address my concerns about your obvious bias at all in your above post, which is that you are not giving a proper account of the article and you are taking quotes out of context. Indeed you seem to be proud of the fact that you are distorting this research by the use of contextomy. I wouldn't be, this is a clear case of POV pushing, and you have been constantly warned about this. It is not being clever to take quotes out of context, it is not being clever to try to imply some research supports a position when it is clear that the research actually supports a completely different conclusion, and it is not being clever to ignore the findings of the research in order to promote your personal beliefs. Alun 05:39, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    No, I read the whole article and the quote is not in any manner inconsistent with it.
    Their conclusion:

    Thus the answer to the question “How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?” depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is 0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes “never” when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations.

    This means that when the whole genome is taken into account "Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups; the overlap in genetic similarity between these groups is ~ 0%." MoritzB 07:00, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Having arrived here from ANI, I took a look at the passage in dispute:

    "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups; the overlap in genetic similarity between these groups is ~ 0%."[7]

    The flaws of this passage are that 1) the second clause is very misleading 2) it is not attributed, but stated as a fact.

    "Other geneticists however have shown that even when classification in such a way is possible it does not accurately reflect the clinality of global human genetic diversity and claim that classification of continuously sampled populations may be impossible."[8]

    The flaws of this one is that 1) it misrepresents a (well-warranted) caveat as the central finding of the paper, which judging from what has been presented here, it is certainly not, but rather a caution against reckless construal of the central finding, 2) it falsely attributes (by footnote, as the in-text attribution is weasel worded) to Witherspoon et al. a conclusion that they mean to rebut:

    In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations may be impossible. However, those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question."

    Proabivouac 08:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Actually they are not attempting to rebut Serre and Pääbo, they say that continuous sampling would increase ω and that Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) draw conclusions that are in a similar vein. You missed out the sentence immediately prior to the quote you give

    This is illustrated by the fact that ω and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of >10,000 polymorphisms (Table 1, microarray data set; Figure 2D). In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Pääbo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations may be impossible. However, those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question (see Rosenberg et al. 2005).

    So they are concuring generally with these papers, that their observation regarding continuous sampling is in a similar vein to these previous papers. Then they state that the previous studies lacked the statistical power to answer the question. They did not state that the question could not be answered, or that the conclusion of these previous papers was wrong. Indeed Witherspoon goes a long way to support this assertion. What neither Witherspoon nor the previous studies have done is to obtain samples that are continuously sampled. To claim that Witherspoon is attempting to rebut these papers that they obviously agree with is incorrect. Alun 10:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    OK. The authors state that "at ω = 0, individuals are always more similar to members of their own population than to members of other populations."
    Further, they state that "when comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups ω approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group."

    Proposal: When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups according to Witherspoon et. al. (2007).MoritzB 08:56, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    You are just attempting to use weasel words to hide the fact that a thousand or so loci are required. Indeed this is loci not alleles. Therefore we say what they say, that when a thousand loci are considered for individuals from geographically distant populations such as Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans and east Asians then these individuals are nearly always more like individuals in their own population than to individuals from a different population. We also say that this is probably not true for continuously sampled populations, which is what Witherspoon states. This represents evidence for isolation by distance, and has a big impact upon the validity of clustering analyses for making medical and public policy decisions. It shows that individuals can be categorised into the correct clusters and still be quite likely to be more similar to other individuals from different clusters than to individuals from the same cluster. This is explicitly stated in Witherspoon et al. It is probably worth mentioning the observation that it is probably impossible to classify continuously sampled populations, which is also stated in the paper, and is also supported by several anthropological texts such as Ossorio and Duster,

    Anthropologists long ago discovered that humans’ physical traits vary gradually, with groups that are close geographic neighbors being more similar than groups that are geographically separated. This pattern of variation, known as clinal variation, is also observed for many alleles that vary from one human group to another. Another observation is that traits or alleles that vary from one group to another do not vary at the same rate. This pattern is referred to as nonconcordant variation. Because the variation of physical traits is clinal and nonconcordant, anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered that the more traits and the more human groups they measured, the fewer discrete differences they observed among races and the more categories they had to create to classify human beings. The number of races observed expanded to the 30s and 50s, and eventually anthropologists concluded that there were no discrete races (Marks, 2002). Twentieth and 21st century biomedical researchers have discovered this same feature when evaluating human variation at the level of alleles and allele frequencies. Nature has not created four or five distinct, nonoverlapping genetic groups of people.[9]

    and by Darwin and his coauthor Alfred Russel Wallace. This observation is not new and continues to be the most important consideration when discussing human variation, whether it is physical variation or genetic variation. Alun 10:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    No, regarding admixed and intermediate populations Witherspoon states that "ω reaches an asymptotic value of 3.1%". According to Witherspoon Europeans, East Asians and sub-Saharan Africans are indeed distinct, nonoverlapping groups of people. However, when considering only some number of loci there is potential for misclassification. MoritzB 10:56, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Actually this is not what Witherspoon says at all. The paper nowhere claims that any groups are "non-overlaping". This seems to simply be your bias. What Witherspoon actually says is much more nuanced than your opinion of what he says. What Witherspoon says is that in order for an individual from a group to always be more similar to another individual from the same group it is necessary to examine at least 1,000 loci. Furthermore this only applies to individuals derived from populations that are from geographically distant regions. For individuals from more geographically proximate regions this level of accuracy is not possible even with 10,000 loci, and may not be possible at all. Indeed the paper is explicit about this, humans variation is gradual and characterised by isolation by distance. Sampling from extremes will always maximise differences, sampling human genetic variation by geography indicates that change is gradual. This paper does not support your assertions whichever way you try to cut it. Its conclusions are precise and nuanced, you either do not understand this paper, or more likely you are trying to spin it to reflect a racialist point of view that it clearly does not support by any objective reading. Alun 13:13, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Witherspoon:

    We contrast two choices: sets of populations that have been relatively isolated from each other by geographic distance and barriers since the earliest migrations of modern humans out of Africa and sets that include populations that were founded more recently, are geographically closer to one another and therefore more likely to exchange migrants, or have recently experienced a large genetic influx from another population in the set. Sampling only from the more distinct populations yields lower -values, as expected. Figure 2, A, C, and E, shows the results of using only the three most distinct population groups (Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans). Figure 2, B and D, expands the samples used in Figure 2, A and C, to include recently founded and/or geographically intermediate populations (Indians in the insertions data set and New Guineans, South Asians, and Native Americans in the microarray data set) and “admixed” populations (i.e., those that have recently received many migrants from different populations, such as the African American and Hispano–Latino groups in the microarray data set). With just 175 loci, choosing to sample distinct populations vs. more closely related ones makes only a modest difference (insertions data set, compare Figure 2A to 2B; Table 1). The effect of population sampling becomes more pronounced when ≥1000 loci are available. In the microarray data set, drops to zero at 1000 loci if only distinct populations are sampled. With geographically intermediate and admixed populations added, however, reaches an asymptotic value of 3.1%, CC remains well above zero, and even CT does not reach zero (microarray data, Figure 2, C and D; Table 1).

    MoritzB 13:01, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Do you have a point? This does not address the fact that you have consistently misrepresented this paper. The quote above clearly demonstrates that there is always overlap between geographically proximate regions, and guess what, all populations are geographically proximate to someone, so we get a pattern of isolation by distance. This quote supports what I am saying, not what you are saying. Alun 13:17, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    The point is that there isn't overlap between European, Sub-Saharan African and East Asian populations traditional physical anthropologists. The majority of humanity do belong to some of those populations. The overlap between geographically proximate or admixed populations investigated was only 3.7%. MoritzB 14:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Again you have completely missed the point, or possibly ignored it to promote your POV. The populations sampled were not geographically proximate, they were intermediate. Geographical proximity and intermediate are different things. Witherspoon found a 3.7% difference in intermediate populations that were still really very geographically distant. Sampling continuously would not compare very different populations and some intermediate populations, it would compare continuous populations. The point is we know that Europeans are very different to Indians who are also very different to east Asians. What we don't know is how this difference changes between geographically close regions. If one sampled every 100km or so, then one would get an idea of how proximate populations vary. This would be equivalent to continuous sampling, and this would show that there is probably no such thing as an "east Asian population". Indeed it is just plain wrng to stste that Europeans form a "population" because they clearly do not, the chances of any two randomly chosen Europeans reproducing together are very small because populations are local, not continental. Alun 19:41, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    This discussion is absurd. Witherspoon et. al. are talking about "populations," which are unequivocally not races or ethnic groups. Europeans do not constitute one population, Europe itself (and Africa and Asia) are divided into many populations. MoritzB, stop using the word group, which is imprecise, and use the word population, which is precise. Slrubenstein | Talk 11:12, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Witherspoon et. al. talk about major population groups: Europeans, East-Asians and sub-Saharan Africans. When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups. MoritzB 11:18, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Also, they state that the purpose of the article is to debunk certain claims surrounding the issue of race:

    "DISCUSSIONS of genetic differences between major human populations have long been dominated by two facts: (a) Such differences account for only a small fraction of variance in allele frequencies, but nonetheless (b) multilocus statistics assign most individuals to the correct population. This is widely understood to reflect the increased discriminatory power of multilocus statistics. Yet Bamshad et al. (2004) showed, using multilocus statistics and nearly 400 polymorphic loci, that (c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population. If multilocus statistics are so powerful, then how are we to understand this finding? All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and “race.” In particular, the American Anthropological Association (1997, p. 1) stated that “data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.” Previously, one might have judged these statements to be essentially correct for single-locus characters, but not for multilocus ones. However, the finding of Bamshad et al. (2004) suggests that an empirical investigation of these claims is warranted. In what follows, we use several collections of loci genotyped in various human populations to examine the relationship between claims a, b, and c above. These data sets vary in the numbers of polymorphic loci genotyped, population sampling strategies, polymorphism ascertainment methods, and average allele frequencies. To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero. Classification methods similarly yield high error rates with few loci and almost no errors with thousands of loci. Unlike ω, however, classification statistics make use of aggregate properties of populations, so they can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci."

    —Preceding unsigned comment added by MoritzB (talk • contribs) 11:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Correct: they confirm that the model developed by population geneticists, which makes populations their object of study and category of analysis, is scientifically valid and racial taxa are not scientifically valid. All this article does is demonstrates the robustness of the population concept and supports the calim made in the article that virtually all scientists have rejected as unscientific the concept of race in favor of population. So? Slrubenstein | Talk 11:43, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Racial taxa are scientifically perfectly valid if major populations like sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans and East Asians form distinct clusters which don't overlap. Therefore, if a scientist seeks to prove that races do not exist he needs to show that these clusters overlap significantly, i.e. that a "Caucasian" person can be genetically more similar to a "Negroid" person than to another Caucasian. Many scientists have so far believed that this is the case but Witherspoon debunks that theory.MoritzB 12:39, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    You are mixing up geographically circumscribed/defined populations and race. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:33, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    No, because the study confirms that the Europeans, East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans form distinct genetic clusters. Thus, they are phylogenetically distinct and according to standard zoological criteria different races. See: O'Brien SJ, Mayr E. Bureaucratic mischief: recognizing endangered species and subspecies. Science. 1991;251(4998):1187-1189
    MoritzB 14:43, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    There is no standard criteria for races, all criteria used for defining races are arbitrary. Some propose an Fst of 25%, and human race has Fst of 10-15% for which they recognize a subspecies at Fst of 25%. But even these criteria are arbitrary and man made. The existence of race is in the eye of the beholder. Muntuwandi 16:31, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Mutuwandi is right, but FST can also be misleading. Some species have very low FST and some subspecies have relatively high. The criteria for subspecific classification are quite arbitrary and vary from species to species. There is, however, a consensus that human genetic diversity is far too superficial, our species far too recent and the level of gene flow between populations far too great, for us to be classified into coherent subspecies, when we are compared to classifications in other mammal species. It is a mammoth leap of faith to assume, against all academic opinion and extant subspecific classification systems, that any observed difference between populations is ipso facto proof of significant differentiation for subspecific classification. Indeed MoritzB's opinion is certainly not supported by academics, we are not classified into subspecies, we are all Homo sapiens sapiens, and this is a citable fact. In this case MoritzB's opinion is irrelevant to the article, and this is POV pushing and OR. Alun 16:46, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Ernst Mayr's paper does not support your view when the method is applied to Witherspoon's data. Mayr himself writes: "And the geographic races of the human species - established before the voyages of European discovery and subsequent rise of a global economy - agree in most characteristics with the geographic races of animals. Recognizing races is only recognizing a biological fact." http://www.goodrumj.com/Mayr.html

    However, we simply report what Witherspoon says and make no conclusions about subspecies. Proposal: "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups. according to Witherspoon et. al. (2007) When more recently founded, geographically intermediate or admixed populations like New Guineans, South Asians, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispano–Latinos are considered the size of the overlap in similarity is 3.7%." MoritzB 17:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Mayr is entitled to his opinion. But I don't see how he can not support my view, because I have not presented my view. I clearly stated that the criteria for defining subspecies tend to be arbitrary and different from species to species. Sometimes distinct genetic differences are used, sometimes subsepcies are genetically homogeneous and are classified by a few prominent physical features. This is one of the reasons why many biologists reject the concept of subspecies altogether. Some species are practically indistinguishable on the genetic level, whereas some subsepcies have a great deal of gentic differentiation within the species. Subspecies are classified on an arbitrary basis, that is what I said. I recently read a paper in which 36.1% of Leopard genomic differentiation was at the continental level, whereas only 63.9% of the variation was within continent, furthermore 68.9% of mtDNA variation was between continents with only 31.1% within continents.[10] These figures dwarf the equivalents for humans 15% between continents for genomic and 24-27% between continents for mtDNA.[11] Regardless of this humans are not classified into subspecies for very good biological reasons. Mayr may not agree with these reasons, but he is in the minority in this case, there is no subspecific human classification, and that is a fact, like it or not. You can huff and puff about it, but it is still a fact.

    'Race' is a legitimate taxonomic concept that works for chimpanzees but does not apply to humans (at this time). The nonexistence of 'races' or subspecies in modern humans does not preclude substantial genetic variation that may be localized to regions or populations. More than 10 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) probably exist in the human genome. More than 5 million of these SNPs are expected to be common (minor allele frequency >10%). Most of these SNPs vary in frequency across human populations, and a large fraction of them are private or common in only a single population. Other genetic variants are also asymmetrically distributed. This makes forensic distinctions possible even within restricted regions such as Scandinavia. Anonymous human DNA samples will structure into groups that correspond to the divisions of the sampled populations or regions when large numbers of genetic markers are used. This has been demonstrated with autosomal microsatellites, which are the most rapidly evolving genetic variants. The DNA of an unknown individual from one of the sampled populations would probably be correctly linked to a population. Because this identification is possible does not mean that there is a level of differentiation equal to 'races'. The genetics of Homo sapiens shows gradients of differentiation.[12]

    Your proposal is no better than before, it lacks any attempt at impartiality because it does not discuss Witherspoon's conclusions, it only gives a few results. It is inappropriate to present the results of a research paper without also presenting the conclusions the authors have drawn. It also presents these results in a misleading manner. What Witherspoon does is claim that clustering analyses mask a great deal of similarity between individuals from geographically distant regions and show that a great deal more loci are required to produce anything approaching differentiation at the level of the individual, even from geographically distant populations. When intermediate groups are sampled this amount of loci is insufficient, and even 10,000 loci are insufficient to produce a very good distinction. But intermediate groups do not represent continuous sampling. Witherspoon concludes that the only way to fully understand the extent of variaion and how human groups relate to each other is to sample continuously, something no one has ever done. He also speculates that attaining anything like discrete populations may well be impossible if sampling continuously were to be done. The discussion and the introduction of any research paper are the key sections, not the results section. The only reason to go to the results section is to present the data in a misleading or confusing way and to avoid the uncomfortable (for you) conclusion that human populations do not form discrete groups. Alun 18:30, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups. according to Witherspoon et. al. (2007) When more recently founded, geographically intermediate or admixed populations like New Guineans, South Asians, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispano–Latinos are considered the size of the overlap in similarity is 3.7%. Witherspoon et. al conclude that "given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin". However, "even when hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population". Thus, Europeans, East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans do form discrete populations" when considering the entire genome, not just "hundreds of loci". MoritzB 19:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    This is another classic example of you taking quotes out of context. The fact that certain grops of people frm discrete populations is not evidence of the existence of "race". Given enough polymorphisms just about any group, down to the family group can be considered a "discrete population". It si perfectly possible for myDNA to be used to distinguish me from every single other person in the entire world, this is the basis of DNA fingerprinting. It is still incorrect to state that I am a "race" just because my DNA is unique. Witherspoon explains how it is possible to show that two individuals from very distant parts of the world are always more different to each other than to an individual from the same part of the world. Of course people from different parts of the world are from different populations. But then an Italian is from a different population to an Irishman. It is just much more difficult to show that an Italian will always be more similar to another Italian than to an Irishman. This is not evidence for the existence of "race", and Witherspoon et al. do not make this claim. Only you are making this claim. The existence of human populations is not disputed. The existence of genetic difference between populations is not disputed. What is not accepted is that the difference between human populations amounts to any concept of subspecies. You really are grasping at straws. You can repeat yourself ad nauseum but the paper does not state what I think you are stating. Indeed it is unclear what you really are trying to say because you seem to be ignoring the conclusions of this paper. All you are doing is saying that geographically disparate groups are more different from each other than they are to geographically proximate groups. No one disputes this. The problem is that you are extrapolating this observation to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about "race" that Witherspoon does not make. Your personal beliefs are not important, but you keep trying to introduce them into the article, and you keep trying to take quotes out of context to support your personal beliefs. It is clear that you want to use these data to promote your own personal crusade, in doing this you ignore main conclusions of the article. If you want to include information from this article then you need to say what the paper says, and not what you personally want it to say. Your POV pushing and tendentiousness has recently been discussed on ANI, you appear to be conciliatory there, while continuing with tendentious editing and POV pushing here. Alun 19:27, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    I am afraid you misunderstood Witherspoon's study. The value of ω depends on what populations are compared. When comparing Europeans, Africans and East Asians the value was 0. When the article compared other populations ω reached an asymptotic value of 3.6%. When comparing Italian to Irishmen the value may be e.g. 20% because of the proximity of the groups. Thus, your claim that "given enough polymorphisms just about any group, down to the family group can be considered a "discrete population" is false. Members of European populations can be more similar to members of other European populations than to members of their own population. This is not true in the case of Europeans, Africans and East Asians which was proven by Witherspoon.MoritzB 19:45, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    I'm afraid I understand Witherspoon's study all too well, and you know that I do. I also think you understand Witherspoon but do not like their conclusions, and are choosing to make unfounded claims about it. For example just above you state "The value of ω depends on what populations are compared. When comparing Europeans, Africans and East Asians the value was 0." This is simply not true. Witherspoon does not say this anywhere. What Witherspoon actually says is that the value of ω depends both on the populations studied, the number of loci studied and the type of loci studied. So actually for these three groups the value of ω is not 0, the value of ω is dependent on the number of loci used in the study. The value of ω is only 0 when the number of loci is high enough. Furthermore your comment about intermediate populations reaching ω=3.1% is for the microarray data, this is a result for a specific type of locus, as type of locus also has an effect on results, SNPs give different results to STRs for example: "In the microarray data set, ω drops to zero at 1000 loci if only distinct populations are sampled. With geographically intermediate and admixed populations added, however, ω reaches an asymptotic value of 3.1%, CC remains well above zero, and even CT does not reach zero (microarray data, Figure 2, C and D; Table 1)." Likewise the value of ω would also be dependent on the number of loci used when comparing Italians to Irishmen. It certainly would be 20% at some point, but when it reaches that figure is dependent upon the number of loci studied. It might even be the case that it can never reach as low as 20% between these groups however many loci studied, because individuals in these groups are naturally going to be more similar to each other than they are to say Han Chinese individuals. Conversely it may be possible for ω=0 between Italians and Irishmen if millions of loci were used. The article states that ω reaches 3.1% when geographically intermediate and admixed populations are added, but these intermediate populations are still a very large distance apart. Besides ω=3.1 for the whole sample when geographically intermediate populations are added, showing that when these populations are added it is impossible to perfectly distinguish between individuals for the whole set. "Thus, your claim that "given enough polymorphisms just about any group, down to the family group can be considered a "discrete population" is false." This is a non sequitur, it does not follow that populations are only populations when ω=0, Witherspoon does not make this claim. Populations can be defined in many different ways, Witherspoon's paper does not imply that there is no gene flow between these groups and that this is the definition of a population, as you seem to believe. Irish people and Italian people are different populations due to the fact that they are historically, linguistically, geographically and socially distinct, all of these factors makes it much less likely for an Italian to meet an Irish person, they are distinct populations because they are not panmitic, i.e. because there needs to be migration between these groups in order for genetic mixing (thinking about a small island model). Indeed your claim that "Members of European populations can be more similar to members of other European populations than to members of their own population." is also true of Europeans and east Asians according to Witherspoon himself, it is entirely dependent upon the number of loci used in the study. When 10 loci are used an east Asian individual and an European individual are more similar each other than they are to a person from their own population 30% of the time, when 100 loci are used it is 20% of the time and using a thousand loci it is 10% of the time.

    Thus the answer to the question "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?" depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, ω, can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is ω~0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, ω ~10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘‘never’’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations.

    Your claim that I do not understand this paper is condescending and without merit. Indeed what you wrote following this statement displays a distinct lack of understanding of the paper yourself. You do not appear to even understand the simple fact that ω is dependent upon the number of loci studied. Alun 20:54, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    I said hours ago that ω is dependent on the number of loci studied: "However, 'even when hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population". Thus, Europeans, East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans do form discrete populations" when considering the entire genome, not just 'hundreds of loci'" -MoritzB 19:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Quite, and later you just state that ω is 0 for these three populations, which is not true. If you wntr to make a point, then make the correct point, do not make incorrect assertions. Alun 07:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
    Witherspoon says that ω approaches zero for these populations.

    In what follows, we use several collections of loci genotyped in various human populations to examine the relationship between claims a, b, and c above. These data sets vary in the numbers of polymorphic loci genotyped, population sampling strategies, polymorphism ascertainment methods, and average allele frequencies. To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero. ... The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group. In general, CC and CT decrease more rapidly and to lower values than ω

    When taking the whole genome into account ω reaches an asymptotic value >>0 in the case of closely related populations. When Europeans, East Asians and Africans are compared it approaches zero. You make the error of confusing an empirical measurement and biological reality. In empirical measurements ω >> 0 when a small number of loci are studied. However, in biological reality ω approaches 0 in the case of Europeans, East Asians and Sub-Saharan Africans. The study makes a methodological suggestion that hundreds of loci may not be enough to reliably determine the geographic ancestry of an individual. It also states that :"The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group."
    • When taking the whole genome into account ω reaches an asymptotic value >>0 in the case of closely related populations.
    This is incorrect. You are not addressing the point of the paper. Besides the paper does not use "populations" it uses "population groups" because it pools data derived from different populations. see below.
    • How can you possibly say so? I am just trying to help you understand the study. ω reached an asymptotic value 3.7%>>0 when the more closely related populations were compared. ω always reaches an asymptotic value when closely related populations are compared.
    • You make the error of confusing an empirical measurement and biological reality.
    This statement is irrelevant.
    No. The methodology of population genetics and biological reality are two different things.
    • The study makes a methodological suggestion that hundreds of loci may not be enough to reliably determine the geographic ancestry of an individual.
    • No it doesn't, the study is discussing the genetic similarity of individuals to other individuals
      "It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population."
    • It also states that :"The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms.
    For microarray data, not for all data.
    The ω curve of all data sets did not reach an asymptotic value when comparing Sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans and East Asians.
    • This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group.
    No it says that when three very geographically distant groups are studies then individuals will nearly always" be more similar to other individuals in their own group than to individuals in other groups.
    Always was the word Witherspoon used, not nearly always. Witherspoon was also right. :"The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group."
    • Comment. You clearly do not understand what this paper is actually saying. The purpose of this paper is to answer the question How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations? This question cannot be answered directly because we do not have the data. In order to model this question it is necessary to look at the data that are available, this means changing the question somewhat. In order to do this Witherspoon et al. have produced two data sets, one in which they model three very distinct groups of populations (not populations) and another in which they modeld eight groups, the original three and some other less distinct groups. The paper finds that when very distinct population groups are modeled, individuals are nearly always more similar to other individuals from their own population group than to individuals from a different population group when a large number of polymorphisms are used (>1000 "Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is ω ~ 0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, ω ~ 10%". Witherspon et al. then go on to model this same question for eight less well geographically distinct population groups, though these population groups do not represent anything like a continuously sampled population. In this analysis it is very much more difficult to to show that any individual is nearly always more similar to another individual from their own group than to an individual from a different group, even though these groups are still relatively different from each other. The original question cannot, as yet be answered, this is because it can only be answered by continual sampling. This is obvious because if we want to understand whether a randomly sampled individual from the entire human population is more similar to their an individual from their own population than to a randomly sampled individual from the rest of the human population will increase ω to a very much greater extent. They then go on to say that this observaton is "In a similar vein [to] Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) [who] have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations maybe impossible. The results of this paper depend on the value of ω, but this statistic is shown to be very innert, and the addition of even a small number of intermediate populations affects the statistic quite dramatically. The conclusions are obvious, to show that an individual is always more similar to someone from their own population than to someone randomly sampled from the global population requires continuous sampling, this involves a very large effect on ω, which means that many more than a few thousand, or even a few tens of thusands of loci need to be studied. The question is not, and never was, how often in an individual from one distinct population more similar to an individual from another distinct population than to an individual from their own population? this is just an artifact of the study design. Witherspoon makes no claims regarding the relevance of being able to distinguish individuals from such distinct populations such as you are claiming. He does not make any claim other than what is already known to any person with eyes in their head, whcih is that people from very different parts of the world tend to be more different from each other than people from the same part of the world. Your conclusions are unwarranted and not supported by the this paper in any way shape or form. This paper is not about "race", it is not about distinguishing "populations" and it does not make any claims for "racial" classification. You are misrepresenting this paper and ignoring it's main conclusions to draw biased and incorrewect conclusions which are entirely your own and are not made in the paper whatsoever. Alun 07:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
    • I reported Witherspoon's conclusions almost exactly. "The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes."
    • Witherspoon clearly informs the reader that an aim of the study was to provide answer to the question how often in an individual from one distinct population more similar to an individual from another distinct population than to an individual from their own population which was different from the previous opinion of AAA. He thus shows that the established view of the non-existence of races was based on false foundations and major human populations form completely distinct genetic clusters which don't overlap at all.

    DISCUSSIONS of genetic differences between major human populations have long been dominated by two facts: (a) Such differences account for only a small fraction of variance in allele frequencies, but nonetheless (b) multilocus statistics assign most individuals to the correct population. This is widely understood to reflect the increased discriminatory power of multilocus statistics. Yet Bamshad et al. (2004) showed, using multilocus statistics and nearly 400 polymorphic loci, that (c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population. If multilocus statistics are so powerful, then how are we to understand this finding? All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and “race.” In particular, the American Anthropological Association (1997, p. 1) stated that “data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.” Previously, one might have judged these statements to be essentially correct for single-locus characters, but not for multilocus ones. However, the finding of Bamshad et al. (2004) suggests that an empirical investigation of these claims is warranted. In what follows, we use several collections of loci genotyped in various human populations to examine the relationship between claims a, b, and c above. These data sets vary in the numbers of polymorphic loci genotyped, population sampling strategies, polymorphism ascertainment methods, and average allele frequencies. To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero. Classification methods similarly yield high error rates with few loci and almost no errors with thousands of loci. Unlike ω, however, classification statistics make use of aggregate properties of populations, so they can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci.

    Witherspoon establishes that three major human populations are genetically completely distinct and there is no overlap between them except in studies which examine too few loci to reliably determine the population membership of an individual belonging to aforementioned three major human populations. MoritzB 12:11, 9 September 2007 (UTC)



    A new compromise: "When enough loci are considered, Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans always are more genetically similar to members of their own group than to those of the other groups. When more recently founded, geographically intermediate or admixed populations like New Guineans, South Asians, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispano–Latinos are considered the size of the overlap in similarity is 3.7%. Still, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, enough genetic data is needed to assign individuals of European, East Asian or sub-Saharan African ancestry correctly to their populations of origin." Witherspoon et. al. (2007) MoritzB 21:27, 8 September 2007 (UTC)


    given enough loci any a person from one village will always be more similar to members of his own village than to members of a village that is 1000 miles away. Does that mean the two villages are separate races. Muntuwandi 19:57, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    That is simply not true as in that case 0<ω.MoritzB 20:03, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    Why do you hinge your information on fringe theories. OK say hypothetically Race does exist, so then what. Most of the traits that make us human vary so much between individuals within the same race that racial classifying them as one race in this regard may seem pointless. Unless you say that all humans are robots to their race. That is everyone in a particular race, acts the same, behaves the same, thinks the same. Most people I know behave differently even from their own siblings or parents. To imply that race exists indicates that people have little individuality and are dependent on their race for their character ,personality or physical ability. I am sure MoritzB that you don't even agree with most people in your own "race", whichever one that may be. Of course in different cultures certain behaviors are emphasized but these are cultural not necessarily genetic. So then what use is subspecies classification other than for social reasons.
    The definition of a species is simply a population that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. Humans are one species, they have never had any problems interbreeding, historically human populations have actually been very eager to interbreed whenever two groups encounter one another. Just take a look at Latin americas 600 million people, the majority are of mixed ancestry. What this means is that even if race existed, it is not a stable entity, since all it has taken is less than 500 years to produce new mixed populations that number in the hundreds of millions. following the invention of the airplane genes can criss-cross around the globe in days, so a fundamental breakdown is expected in the coming millennium for the rigid geographical racial structures that existed in the past. So what does one hope to gain by classifying races other than boosting one's ego with the right to belong to the "best race". Muntuwandi 17:56, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    One more thing the idea, that there was no contact between the races prior to European discovery is also incorrect. Contact between the races has waxed and waned throughout time. For example the Banana is indigenous to Oceania, but somehow it reached West Africa long before European Exploration. There has always been contact between Africa and Europe through North Africa, so genes have been exchanged through this route several times. Haplogroup E3b (Y-DNA) arose in Africa and spread to Europe in the Neolithic for example and 25% of Southern Italians have the y chromosome of an African man. Chinese pottery has been found at the Great Zimbabwe etc. The mystery of the Sweet potato as well, It originated in South america, but is found 3000 miles away in the polynesian, all this prior to European discovery[13]. Muntuwandi 18:06, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    Thank you Rubenstein for introducing Mayr's opinion although it was different from your personal point of view.MoritzB 18:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

    I think if we are going to introduce Mayr's opinion we should introduce more of what he said rather than just the he argues for the geographic race. My understanding of the article is that he is arguing against the existence of races. Muntuwandi 18:28, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
    MoritzB, you are welcome. Muntuwandi: he is not arguing against the existence of races. But he is arguing that geographic races, understood biologically, have nothing in common with 19th century notions of race, and cannot be understood hierarchically. He is definitely arguing against racism - but not the idea of race itself. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:40, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Witherspoon in the current version

    Let's examine this version and compare it to what Witherspoon actually says:

    Conversely Witherspoon (2007) has shown that while it is possible to classify people into genetic clusters this does not resolve the observation that any two individuals from different populations are often genetically more similar to each ther than to two individuals from the same population: Discussions of genetic differences between major human populations have long been dominated by two facts: (a) Such differences account for only a small fraction of variance in allele frequencies, but nonetheless (b) multilocus statistics assign most individuals to the correct population. This is widely understood to reflect the increased discriminatory power of multilocus statistics. Yet Bamshad et al. (2004) showed, using multilocus statistics and nearly 400 polymorphic loci, that (c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population. If multilocus statistics are so powerful, then how are we to understand this finding? All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and "race"...The Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that "two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world."[14] Risch et al. (2002) state that "two Caucasians are more similar to each other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian", but Bamshad et al (2004) used the same data set as Risch to show that Europeans are more similar to Asians 38% of the time than they are to other Europeans. Witherspoon et al. conclude that the answer to the question "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?" depends on the number of genes studied. With ten loci and three distinct populations the answer is about 30%, with 100 loci it is about 20% and with a thousand loci it is about 10%. For individuals from within a group to never be more different to each other than to members of a different groups, thousands of loci need to be studied form geographically separated populations. Witherspoon also concludes that if the world population were studied with it's many closely related groups varying clinally, the use of even 10,000 loci does not produce the answer "never". Witherspoon also makes the observation: "In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and there fore closely related) populations may be impossible."[14]

    "Conversely Witherspoon (2007) has shown that while it is possible to classify people into genetic clusters this does not resolve the observation that any two individuals from different populations are often genetically more similar to each ther than to two individuals from the same population: Discussions of genetic differences between major human populations have long been dominated by two facts..."

    Witherspoon really says that these major populations are completely distinct and two individuals from different major populations are never genetically more similar to each other than to two individuals from the same populations except in studies which fail to use enough loci to be reliable.

    No he doesn't, I can find no statement that supports this claim in Witherspoons paper.. No human groups are completely distinct. This claim would be treated with derision by the scientific community. No human populations can be completely distinct. For one thing all human are very similar to each other by dint of our recent common origin, all humans are very similar because there is evidence of large amounts of gene flow between groups of people and the levels of genetic differentiation within the human species are very low, which is why hundreds of loci are needed before any differentiation can be detected between groups and tens of thousands are required for differentiation between individuals. If these populations were as distinct as you seem to think Witherspoon is claiming, then it would require only a few loci and not tens of thousands. Witherspoon makes no claim that these populations are "distinct". Your claim is absurd and is drawn from you bias and bizarre attempts to push unwarranted racialist nonsense. You either do not understand this work or are deliberately misrepresenting it to promote your own personal agenda. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Please, ad hominems and original research don't help.
    Quite, lease stop introducing OR. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    As I already explained major human populations are completely distinct because according to Witherspoon because ω approaches zero when comparing them and never reaches an asymptotic value and their members can thus be classified correctly to their populations of origin. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    This is not a definition of a distinct population, and Witherspoon does not claim this, only you do. It is therefore your opinion, it does not derive from an correct understanding of Witherspoon. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Individuals cannot be correctly classified to their populations of origin if the populations are not genetically distinct. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    Witherspoon's actual results: "The power of large numbers of common polymorphisms is most apparent in the microarray data set, comparing the European, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African population groups (Figure 2C). approaches zero (median 0.12%) with 1000 polymorphisms. This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group. In general, CC and CT decrease more rapidly and to lower values than ω."

    A single result, this is not "whitherspoons results". It is unwarranted to take a single result from a paper and claim that this is representative of the paper as a whole. This is at the very least dishonest. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Unless Witherspoon made a mistake when writing the sentence your position is logically unsustainable. "This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group." MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes and? When enough loci are examined individuals from any group will be genetically more similar to their own group, when geographically isolated groups are examined. It may also be true for populations that are geographically close if enough loci are examined. It does not follow that these are "completely distinct", and Witherspoon does not make this claim. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Then we say simply that when enough loci are considered individuals from the major population groups will always be genetically most similar to members of their own group. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    Discussion: Thus the answer to the question “How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?” depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared. The answer, can be read from Figure 2. Given 10 loci, three distinct populations, and the full spectrum of polymorphisms (Figure 2E), the answer is 0.3, or nearly one-third of the time. With 100 loci, the answer is ~20% of the time and even using 1000 loci, 10%. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes “never” when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations. If genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes “never” when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations."

    Quite. This does not support what you claim. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    It does as I am simply reporting Witherspoon's findings honestly. It is hardly relevant in this article what kind of population genetical methods (how many loci) are needed to establish that the dissimilarity fraction approaches zero when comparing major populations. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Of course it is relevant how many loci are used. The number of loci is important because it is possible to distinguish any group given enough loci and only a few groups. It may not be possible if continuous sampling is used, however many loci are studied, though this cannot as yet be tested. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    And conclusions:"In what follows, we use several collections of loci genotyped in various human populations to examine the relationship between claims a, b, and c above. These data sets vary in the numbers of polymorphic loci genotyped, population sampling strategies, polymorphism ascertainment methods, and average allele frequencies. To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long. It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero. Classification methods similarly yield high error rates with few loci and almost no errors with thousands of loci. Unlike ω, however, classification statistics make use of aggregate properties of populations, so they can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci."

    Quite, this supports what I have been saying. No mention of "major populations being completely distinct" as you claim.Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    If the genetic clusters of populations are not completely distinct individuals cannot be correctly assigned to their populations of origin as the possibility for misclassification remains. Witherspoon concludes that they can be correctly assigned. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    This is not a clustering analysis. Witherspoon does not discuss clusters, he discusses individual differences. Witherspoon does not claim that "they can be correctly assigned. Individuals are not assigned to clusters in Witherspoons data, they are compared to other individuals. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    "The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them."

    Again no mention of population groups being completely distinct. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    If the genetic clusters of populations are not completely distinct individuals cannot be correctly assigned to their populations of origin as the possibility for misclassification remains. Witherspoon concludes that they can be correctly assigned. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    This is not a clustering analysis. Witherspoon does not discuss clusters, he discusses individual differences. Witherspoon does not claim that "they can be correctly assigned. Individuals are not assigned to clusters in Witherspoons data, they are compared to other individuals. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    Discussions of genetic differences between major human populations have long been dominated by two facts: (a) Such differences account for only a small fraction of variance in allele frequencies, but nonetheless (b) multilocus statistics assign most individuals to the correct population. This is widely understood to reflect the increased discriminatory power of multilocus statistics. Yet Bamshad et al. (2004) showed, using multilocus statistics and nearly 400 polymorphic loci, that (c) pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population. If multilocus statistics are so powerful, then how are we to understand this finding? All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and "race"...The Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that "two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world."[14]

    Quite, he is saying that multilocus allele clusters are not as powerful as claimed. If they are not as powerful as claimed, then what advantage do they have in medicine? Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    He is precisely disputing these claims. See the article. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Seen it lots of times, he shows that multilocus allele clustering hides a great deal of between individual similarities. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)


    Here Witherspoon describes certain established views he intends to prove false. They are not Witherspoon's views although the article attributes them to Witherspoon.

    He continues:

    All three of the claims listed above appear in disputes over the significance of human population variation and “race.” In particular, the American Anthropological Association (1997, p. 1) stated that “data also show that any two individuals within a particular population are as different genetically as any two people selected from any two populations in the world” (subsequently amended to “about as different”). Similarly, educational material distributed by the Human Genome Project (2001, p. 812) states that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world.” Previously, one might have judged these statements to be essentially correct for single-locus characters, but not for multilocus ones. However, the finding of Bamshad et al. (2004) suggests that an empirical investigation of these claims is warranted. ...

    In what follows, we use several collections of loci genotyped in various human populations to examine the relationship between claims a, b, and c above.

    This is not a conclusion, it is their method, hence in what follows Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Exactly and the use that method to debunk the above claims you claim they are supporting.
    You claim this si a conclusion, it clearly is not. What do you mean by "debunk"? Which claims are "debunked"? It is unclear what you are talking about. Be precise. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    The claim c that "pairs of individuals from different populations are often more similar than pairs from the same population".
    MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    These data sets vary in the numbers of polymorphic loci genotyped, population sampling strategies, polymorphism ascertainment methods, and average allele frequencies. To assess claim c, we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population.

    So not defined as individuals from geographically distinct populations then. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    The same artifact can be used when comparing geographically distinct populations and all kinds of other populations. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    It is not clear what you are talking about. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    We show that claim c, the observation of high ω, holds with small collections of loci. It holds even with hundreds of loci, especially if the populations sampled have not been isolated from each other for long.

    It breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations:

    But ω is not defined like this, ω is defined as you show above, as :we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population.
    Please don't shout. ω can be used and is used in the article when comparing any populations.MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    ω is defined in a specific way. It has a different value due to sampling strategy and study design. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes. Thus, claim c breaks down, however, with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations:MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    In such cases, ω becomes zero. Classification methods similarly yield high error rates with few loci and almost no errors with thousands of loci. Unlike ω, however, classification statistics make use of aggregate properties of populations, so they can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci.

    Meaning that they mask a lot of between group identity, because classification with only a few hundred loci, such as Tang and Risch use (approx 350) is not sugfficient to differentiate between the similarities between individuals, even from extreme geographical regions.
    Nonsense.MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Good answer, you obviously can't dispute this comment. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    It was nonsense because Witherspoon precisely says that classification statistics which make use of the aggregate properties of populations can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci. They approach 100% accuracy and don't mask anything. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    "Risch et al. (2002) state that "two Caucasians are more similar to each other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian", but Bamshad et al (2004) used the same data set as Risch to show that Europeans are more similar to Asians 38% of the time than they are to other Europeans. Witherspoon et al. conclude that the answer to the question "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?" depends on the number of genes studied.

    No they don't, it depends on the number of genes studied and the distinctness of the populations studied.: "With ten loci and three distinct populations the answer is about 30%, with 100 loci it is about 20% and with a thousand loci it is about 10%. For individuals from within a group to never be more different to each other than to members of a different groups, thousands of loci need to be studied form geographically separated populations.
    Thousands of loci are needed to empirically measure it which doesn't change the biological fact that individuals from within a major population group are never be more different to each other than to members of other major population groups.
    No it doesn't, but this is not the question, the question is between population and within population identity, and not between distinct populations. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    Witherspoon also concludes that if the world population were studied with it's many closely related groups varying clinally, the use of even 10,000 loci does not produce the answer "never".

    No he concludes that 10,000 lloci are not enough even for the small set of intermediate and admixed populations used here, "This is illustrated by the fact that equation M48 and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of >10,000 polymorphisms (Table 1, microarray data set; Figure 2D)." This is refering to this study, which does not sample the "world population" Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Now you are confused. According to Witherspoon "with geographically intermediate and admixed populations added, however, ω reaches an asymptotic value of 3.1%, CC remains well above zero, and even CT does not reach zero." He does not conclude that 10 000 loci are not enough. They were perfectly enough to prove that ω reaches an asymptotic value 3.1%. However, in the case of major populations his conclusion is that ω approaches zero. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    I think it is you who is confused. ω reaches the value of 3.1% for these specific loci and population groups. This does not represent anything other than a result for these data, he does not claim that this datum can be extrapolated to the inclusion of other populations. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Very true and thus this data should not be extrapolated to the inclusion of all human populations in the article.MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    Witherspoon also makes the observation: "In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and there fore closely related) populations may be impossible."

    This refers to the excellent observation Witherspoon makes: "On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase This is illustrated by the fact that and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of >10,000 polymorphisms."

    Of course, when comparing any closely related and admixed populations like Germans and Englishmen ω >> 0. This is a trivial issue in the context of this article.

    This seems to be where you are hopelessly confused. Witherspoon is not saying that it is more difficult to distinguish between close geographical populations (although it obviously is). He is saying that if all human groups are included in the same analysis, then it would increase ω because ω is not defined as how similar two people from defined geographically distinct populations are from each other, or two people from close geographical populations are from each other. we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population. So if the whole of humanity is sampled (that is continuously sampled, therefor including individuals from all populations), this figure becomes very high, because each individual is compared to every other individual in every other population to see if they are more different to that population than to their own population. This means that an English person would need to be compared to every person from every single other population, including all European populations, all African populations, all Asian populations etc. ω is the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population.. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    These are your conclusions. Witherspoon's study does not give any support to your claim that the dissimilarity fraction would become "very high" when the whole of humanity is sampled. He simply notes that "on the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase the dissimilarity fraction". The effect of the possible inclusion of these populations depends on their size which was not studied by Witherspoon. MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    These are not "my conclusions", this is what Witherspoon states clearly. "On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase ω. This is illustrated by the fact that ω and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of >10,000 polymorphisms....The population groups in this example are quite distinct from one another: Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians. Many factors will further weaken the correlation between an individual's phenotype and their geographic ancestry. These include considering more closely related or admixed populations, studying phenotypes influenced by fewer loci, unevenly distributed effects across loci, nonadditive effects, developmental and environmental effects, and uncertainties about individuals' ancestry and actual populations of origin. The typical frequencies of alleles that influence a phenotype are also relevant, as our results show that rare polymorphisms yield high values of ω CC, and CT, even when many such polymorphisms are studied." Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    The observation that the dissimilarity fraction rises when admixed and intermediate populations are taken into consideration is trivial and Witherspoon does not even empirically examine this question in the paper. You are mistaken if you think that the passage quoted is some kind of counter-argument to Risch's findings. Your own conclusion is based on your belief that lower values of dissimilarity fraction are obtained in the US than in the world which is original research. Witherspoon never says so and the largest admixed populations in the world (African Americans and Hispanics) are included to Risch's study. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    No anthropologist has ever claimed that such closely related and admixed populations don't have common racial elements. The question is whether the racial definitions of traditional physical anthropology (Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid) are consistent with the findings of modern population genetics. Witherspoon conclusions regarding them are clear: the major populations of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia form discrete genetic clusters. MoritzB 14:15, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

    He nowhere makes this claim, indeed these are not his conclusions, they are your conclusions, because you want to push a racialist pov. Where is your quote here? Why can you not quote Witherspoon's paper to support this comment? You claim these are Witherspoon's conclusions, well if this is correct, then you should be able to quote the section in the article where he concludes that the major populations of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia form discrete genetic clusters. I've read Witherspoon's paper several times, and I can find no conclusions regarding these groups forming distinct clusters. Please quote this "conclusion". If it is made, then it should be easy to quote, it should be explicitly stated. It is not, because these are not Witherspoon's conclusions. Alun 06:12, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    No, the paragraph above related to the general structure of the article: 1) Traditional racial definitions, 2) Whether modern population genetics supports these definitions. It didn't relate to Witherspoon's study.MoritzB 08:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    You clearly state in the paragraph above that these are Witherspoon's conclusions. But they are not. Alun 08:56, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Indeed, Witherspoon did not mention this Wikipedia article in his study. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Hey Moritz, why don't you just cut and paste the whole article here? I am being sarcastic: you can quote as much as you like but unless you quote the entire article -which is patently absurd - you are quoting selectively. So what is above is not wha Witherspoon et. al. "actually said," it is part of what they said. And what it means depends on the context in which the article was written. As long as you just quote selectively you can quote all you want and you are violating NOR. To represent a source accurately we need to understand its context and only use it in the article to make the point that the authors were making, not a point you want to make by selectively quoting. Now, stop wasting space on this page, or we will have to archive every day. Slrubenstein | Talk 16:14, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
    Please read the paper to confirm that Witherspoon was indeed misrepresented. As Wiki is not paper I quoted enough to make this fact clear to those who read only the talk page.

    http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1893020 MoritzB 17:08, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

    In all honesty witherspoon presents nothing new. Using enough loci any two endogamous groups can be distinguished from each other, even if they are within the same race. Two groups living on separate islands after a several generations can be easily distinguished. Just as one can distinguish any two individuals with enough loci. That is the basis of DNA fingerprinting. You can use this technology to distinguish two families, or for paternity testing. It does not change anything. The fact is that people who live nearer to each other will in general be more related than those who live further away. With enough loci there would be no overlap. One could probably distinguish the chinese from the Japanese, or North Chinese from Southern chinese. Does that mean that these groups are all separate races, well if you believe Moritz. Nobody disputes that there is human variation, it exists or that europeans and africans and east asians will have different gene frequencies. But if we apply any standard for race, then we will find that there would be several races within the so called races. Muntuwandi 17:40, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

    Simply untrue. For example, comparing Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans, New Guineans, South Asians, Native Americans, African Americans and Hispano–Latinos the size of the overlap in similarity is 3.1% and it cannot be smaller regardless of how many loci are used according to Witherspoon et. al. 2007. MoritzB 17:54, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
    You really don't get this at all do you? The size of ω is 3.1% for the microarray data used by Witherspoon he does not claim that these data represent an absolute value that can be extrapolated. Besides this is not the size of any overlap. Witherspoon is not discussing populations, he is discussing individuals. This has got nothing to do with overlap. This figure shows that for microarray data and these samples 3.1% of the time an individual will be more like another individual from a different group compared to an individual from their own group. It has got nothing to do with overlap because this is about individuals and not about populations. Indeed you are wrong to claim that it cannot be smaller. I would bet money that for this set of data the use of say a million loci would produce better resolution. It can be smaller because as Witherspoon says in his paper ω depends on the number of loci used and the distinctness of the population groups. For less distinct groups we just need more loci. For continuously sampled groups it mmay be impossible to get ω to zero, but it may not if we used tens or hundreds of millions of loci. Alun 06:32, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Are you familiar with a mathematical concept called asymptote? Witherspoon says that "With geographically intermediate and admixed populations added, however, the dissimilarity fraction reaches an asymptotic value of 3.1%". You are saying that Witherspoon was wrong which is original research.MoritzB 08:37, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    So it will never reach less than 3.1% even for relatively distinct populations that are used in this study. Which rather undermines your argument. If more populations are included this figure will rise, so it may well be impossible to distinguish any individual from any group if more populations are studied. Alun 08:59, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Two hours ago you still had the opinion that the size ω could be smaller if more loci were used. Now you change your opinion to different factual interpretation of the article because this particular view of facts seems to suit your present argument best. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. MoritzB 12:23, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    Blah blah blah... This looks like talks from ALUNatic asylum. Is there anybody, who can grasp it with common sense? Can't you understand that people, who share common ancestry and exchanged their genes due to geographical isolation are more related to each other than to people from other groups? Am I more related to my brother than to an Eskimo? Yes. Am I more related to the vast majority of people from my country than to an Eskimo? Yes. Since race is a form of an extended family, this blah blah blah hogwash has no practical sense. The findings of modern genetics show that phenotypic differences described by traditional anthropology have very deep roots going to the Middle Paleolithic - for example, Khoisan, Nilotes, Pygmies and Somalis actually make up separate racial groups. The two main migrations originating from Africa 50-60 000 years ago gave rise to modern Caucasoids on one hand and to Australoids and Mongoloids on the other hand. From their occasional mixture, several intermediate groups came into being (Polynesians, Papuan highlanders, American Indians). This is evident from the haplogroup lineages. But why is there such a silence around it? I have never read a scientific article that would try to analyze it. Do we really live in ALUNatic asylum? Centrum99 82.100.61.114 04:56, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

    What piece of research would clarify and simplify this article? What is the question that needs answering? —Preceding unsigned comment added by David Witherspoon (talk • contribs) 22:08, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

    This article basically needs no research. It is a sophistry lesson led by Mrs. Alun and Slrubenstein. Between two human races, you can find Fst values exceeding 0.25, yet they can't be considered as races, because humans are not animals. Do you understand? Everybody, who disagrees with this is a troll. Centrum99 (talk) 02:01, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
    Well, basically, this article would need a basic information like this:
    Fst distances based on 150 autosomal genes (Cavalli-Sforza 1994):
    Danish-Basque 0.02, Danish-Southern Chinese 0.13, Danish-Malaysian 0.16, Danish-Pygmy Mbuti 0.15, Danish-Bantu 0.17, English-Bantu 0.23, Australian-Bantu 0.33, Australian-Pygmy Mbuti 0.43, Australian-Eskimo 0.20, Korean-Bantu 0.27, Bantu-Thai 0.34.
    Tishkoff, Kidd 2004:
    "Estimates of FST (or equivalent measures) within and between main geographic regions (Africa, Europe and Asia) typically range from 0.11 to 0.23 for protein polymorphisms, blood groups, RFLPs, SNPs and autosomal microsatellites..."
    FST comparisons based on 369 SNPs for pairs of populations within and across global regions:
    Africa-Europe 0.15 (0.11-0.20), Africa-East Asia 0.23 (0.18-0.28), Africa-America 0.23 (0.17-0.31), Europe-East Asia 0.12 (0.09-0.18), Europe-America 0.16 (0.08-0.23), East Asia-America 0.16 (0.09-0.23).
    FST within regions:
    Africa 0.05, Europe 0.02, East Asia 0.04, America 0.09.
    Yang et al. 2005: Fst based on 199 "ethnic difference markers", i.e. genetic markers best distinguishing racial clusters:
    European Americans-Africans (Nigerians) 0.33, -East Asians (Californian Asians) 0.39, -American Indians (Maya) 0.31, -US Indians 0.08. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Centrum99 (talk • contribs) 16:04, 12 February 2008 (UTC)
    However, humans are not animals and Fst values of this sort can't be taken into account. Do you understand? (I don't. However, I am a minority, so it doesn't matter. Furthermore, I am a troll.) 15:27, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] HUP 2-3-4

    These long-winded passages on this talk page could be avoided and more beneficial work could be accomplished in other ways in Wikipedia if editors would recognize the fact that the strongest people on earth are able to make whatever claims about race that they please because the weak people cannot control what the strongest people say or do.SgtVelocicaptor 11:21, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] I support Moritz

    Let's not turn this into an edit war. Moritz seems to have the most reasonably worded position.

    71.197.5.27 15:53, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

    • Me too. But sadly, it all comes down to POV, not facts, when it is about topics like this. Funkynusayri 16:19, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
    User:71.197.5.127 has been blocked. You do choose strange bedfellows. --Mathsci 18:31, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
    • I expressed support for Moritz, not anon. What's it to you? Some people who share the simple view with me that biological race exists might also have other, more unsympathetic views, which they do not share with me. I don't give a damn, because I'm not supporting said opinions simply if I support this one. Funkynusayri 18:34, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
    Thanks. I just added a lot of new information. MoritzB 22:53, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Klein and Takahata on human races

    "The proposal to scrap the concept of race altogether is currently only one extreme in a range of views. It is certainly not shared by all anthropologists and is by no means the majority opinion of the public at large. It appears to be a conclusion reached more on the basis of political and philosophical creeds than on scientific arguments. Correspondingly, anthropologists who do hold this opinion often attempt to shout down their opponents rather than convince them by presentation of facts. Their favored method of argumentation is to label anybody who disagrees with them as racist. The public, however, seems unimpressed by their rhetoric."

    "Where Do We Come From? The Molecular Evidence for Human Descent, 2002, p. 384"

    I will add their comment. MoritzB 18:23, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

    • Heh, that citation pretty much summarises our problems here. Funkynusayri 22:59, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yeah. "There is less mtDNA difference between dogs, wolves and coyotes than there is between the various ethnic groups of human beings" -- James Serpell: "The Domestic Dog", p. 33 MoritzB 00:44, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

    Isn't that kind of specious? Artificial selection and natural selection are apples and oranges. The dog and the wolf are classified in the same species; it's not surprising that there is little variability in dogs compared to humans, which do make up a species of their own. FilipeS (talk) 19:57, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

    Quite, the domestication of the dog occurred a mere ~10000 ybp, so not a great deal of time for much genetic divergence to be established. On the other hand classification of Canis lupus familiaris into a separate subspecies from Canis lupus lupus makes some sense from a biological point of view. Although these subspecies can and do interbreed and produce viable (i.e. fertile) offspring (proving they are the same species) there is some evidence that some behavioural and anatomical differences have restricted gene flow. So on the one hand we see little genetic difference between the groups, but on the other we see limited gene flow due to the ecology of the organisms. When one thinks about groups of organisms that may be undergoing a parapatric speciation event, it is clear that the first isolated populations must always be more genetically similar to each other than different. Or to think of it another way, at the point when gene flow ceases between two populations (basically one definition of a speciation event, the two groups of organisms do not interbreed at all), these populations are still genetically very similar, but over time these populations will become much more diverged, due to a lack of gene flow and differential selective pressure. This is obvious. Domestic dogs have been selectively bred for specific behaviours and anatomy, they do not represent a natural population and can never be used as anything like a representative model for how selection functions in natural environments. None of human ecology, culture, social organisation, anatomy and the distribution of human genetic variation can be claimed to be represented by any model derived from artificial selection. Indeed wolves represent a paraphyletic group to dogs, but an artificially selected group that is not the product of nature. This applies to all domesticated organisms, they exist because we invented them. Alun (talk) 07:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
    • and is by no means the majority opinion of the public at large.
    So when has the "public at large" ever had a say in science? Science is not a democracy, creationists cannot claim that "intelligent design" is true just because most people in the USA believe it. Lay people with little understanding of scientific principles cannot claim that "wave particle duality" doesn't make sense so we are going to say it doesn't exist. Alun (talk) 07:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Their favored method of argumentation is to label anybody who disagrees with them as racist.
    This is untrue, there is a consensus amongst anthropologists that "race" as a biological phenomenon is simply a very poor model for they way human diversity, both genetic and physical, is distributed. Only the ignorant would make the claim about racism, because clearly they have never really investigated the evidence fully. The fact is that the large majority of anthropologists (about 2:1) who reject the concept of biological race do so from the point of view of a thorough scientific investigation of the facts, and the facts are that what little variation exists in human populations is gradual and clinal, not discontinuous and clustered, classifying people therefore becomes arbitrary and subjective. One can have as many "races" as one likes, and one can draw one's "racial boundaries" where one likes. I can see no evidence of "name calling" in this analysis. Clearly the authors have no sensible response to these observations and so revert to ad hominem attacks. Alun (talk) 07:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Anthropology?

    I undid an edit with the commentDon't remove authentic anthropological plates from the relevant section section. That is vandalism. They are not. It is not. Cygnis insignis 23:01, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

    They are authentic anthropological plates. Why did you remove them? They should be in the article. MoritzB 23:10, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    They are antiquated images from a select document. They are being used to advance one POV. Why should they be in the article? Cygnis insignis 23:18, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    And you are being disruptive in returning them. Cygnis insignis 23:21, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    I haven't returned them. They illustrate historical, 19th century racial concepts which are relevant. MoritzB 23:37, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    For one, the plates are not in English. Two, it doesn't state which race is which. They, do though, included different ethnicities, which is different from "races". They are not authenic anthropological plates on races. - Jeeny Talk 23:25, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
    'Some people ...'; overly simplistic statements followed by a baffling invocation of irrelevant terminology; better throw in some pictures and distribution maps to give the reader the 'right' idea. All critics will be met with circular arguments, claims of censorship, and personal denigration by enlightened edit warriors. A model of bias and manipulation of editors, and the reader. This fugitive position is being reinserted, into various pages of the document, in a cycle that is causing significant disruption. It is an embarrassment that it should appear in an encyclopedia. Cygnis insignis 00:05, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    Hi, I wanted to tell those who are knowledgeable in Anthropology to help out in the whole Race discussion. Please, if you know about Anthropology, do a little section on the four major races (Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid and Australoid) and edit anything that suggest "Latino" being a RACE. So many folks are confused about what is a Race versus a Cultural/Linguistic group and they end up pouring all their confusion on Wiki. So let's try to do a nice discussion on the four races. Thanks. Prophetess mar (talk) 07:02, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] The phylogeographic concept of subspecies

    Jeeny deleted it and said that it was "POV-pushing" which is strange because most mainstream biologists use that concept in taxonomy.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Race&diff=157493085&oldid=157486104 MoritzB 23:44, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

    You used that material and added your POV by telling the reader that "...subspecies is widely accepted today, rather than let the sources do that. It was better to delete it all, rather than claiming races are separate species. It is more complex than that. The whole paragraph needs to be re-written to support the sources in that complex way. Therefore I saw it as POV pushing in that cherry picking sources, and taking little bits from them, to support your view that races are separate species. - Jeeny Talk 00:33, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes, the phylogenetic concept of subspecies is widely accepted today and generally used in animal taxonomy. Your comment that it supports the view that "the races are separate species" is misguided. MoritzB 00:39, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    A 2006 paper using the definition: http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03397.x
    MoritzB 00:44, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    The way it was written read as if it was speaking of human being populationss, and races as subspecies is widely accepted today. Unlike the next paragraph that says organisms, as in non-human. Don't be coy. - Jeeny Talk 00:49, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Is that how a layman understands that paragraph? Then I change it to: "The phylogeographical definition of subspecies is widely accepted in animal taxonomy" MoritzB 00:57, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    The finest accepted level for a taxon is species, as subspecies implies. BTW, red is not blue either. But there is a bluey-red position being advanced here. Is this an elaborate sociological experiment? Or are you for real? Cygnis insignis 01:28, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    See: subspecies.MoritzB 01:33, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Why? Cygnis insignis 01:36, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    He's trying to pretend he knows biology, science, et. al. Look at his contributions. They're all there to POV push that white people are superior, over other races, species, etc. And being coy as to say "is that how the layman understands it? LOL. Who else is going to read this crap? - Jeeny Talk 01:40, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Sociological experimenting, or British colonialist hegemony. Take your pick. Cygnis insignis 01:46, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    LOL. Thanks. :) - Jeeny Talk 01:48, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    What kind of problem do you have with Ernst Mayr's definition of subspecies? MoritzB 02:16, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    Phylogeography is the most accepted way to identify subspecies in modern taxonomy. It uses systematics and a range of evidence to support the existence of subspecies. It has greater validity over previous systems because it requires so much more evidence for subspecies to be recognised. Both genetic and morphological data are required, together with evidence for the subsepcies being geographically circumbscribed. The best definition I have come across goes:

    • "Members of a subspecies share a unique geographic range or habitat, a group of phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters, and a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species. Because they are below the species level, different subspecies are reproductively compatible. They will normally be allopatric and they will exhibit recognizable phylogenetic partitioning, because of the time-dependent accumulation of genetic difference in the absence of gene flow. Most subspecies will be monophyletic, however they may also derive from ancestral subspecies hybridization." O'Brien and Meyr. (1991)

    On the other hand there is the Phylogenetic Species Concept, which is gaining popularity in taxonomy. In this concept the idea of subspeces does not exist at all, only species exist, but there would be many more species. All species would have to be geographically restricted though. In this concept all humans would be the same species, and no subspecific classifications would exist at all. I think we should change the section on "subspecies as clade" to a discussion about the phylogeographic subspecies concept. The main thing about the phylogeographic subspecies concept is that it is not a "one size fits all" concept, evidence that is relevant for some populations may not be for other populations, there are no hard and fast criteria, it recognises that species of organisms are all ecologically unique, and so we cannot use the same set of criteria for all classifications. hence discussion about what is the appropriate level of FST to identify differentiation are pointless, the level of differentiation both morphologically and genetically that is considered significant will depend on the environment and ecology of the populations being studied. Alun 06:54, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] pov images

    Let us avoid using pov images in this article, there will just be an unnecessary distraction from the article. If users have expressed concern, they are better off not used. The insistence on using these photos is counterproductive. Muntuwandi 18:27, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    The images are encyclopedic as long as they are put in their historical context. In that way, they are in no way POV. Wikipedia is not censored.--Strothra 18:31, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    However, I'd like to point out that using 20th-century images (albeit early 20th century) to illustrate the concept as it was in the 19th century may not be the most appropriate thing to do. Also, since these are the only two images in the entire article, this gives them undue weight. That the only first illustrations this article carries of the concept of "race" is an illustration of an obsolete concept isn't appropriate. I believe this should be discussed further before the images are reinserted.--Ramdrake 18:37, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    That's why I moved the images to the 20th century section. Undue weight does not apply, these images are not the only images in the article. It wouldn't apply even if that were the case. The image is a description of the text and perfectly appropriate in that sense. You can't exclude images from an article simply because there are no other images there already. If that were the case, Wiki articles would never have any images unless you automatically had 5 or 6 to include all at once. --Strothra 18:41, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    the famous "wikipedia is not censored" should not be an excuse for the use of innappropriate photos. We should work on consensus, relevance, and stability.We have already had this debate, with some of the same users on other articles. If photos trigger an unnecessary emotional response, they are not valuable to the article and instead a distraction. The photos are in some cases gratuitous and stereotypical and are unworthy of a meaningful discussion on race. Also many of the editors who are supporting the use of these photos have dodgy trackrecords Muntuwandi 18:42, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    The images are appropriate. Note Wikipedia's content disclaimer. Wikipedia may contain items you find offensive. This same discussion was held over the Muhammad article due to its inclusion of images of that individual. The result was a long and heated debate where WP:CENSOR prevailed. Further, comment on content, not on editors - see WP:NPA. --Strothra 18:44, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes I have already heard that argument before, and my answer is if you had choice to have your coffee with sugar or coffee without sugar, what would you choose. Muntuwandi 18:50, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    I agree. Let's include the images. MoritzB 18:46, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    As I said before... the plates are not in English. Another, they do not state which race is which. They do, though, included different ethnicities, which is different from "races". They are not authenic anthropological plates on races, but compilations of ethnicities and a couple of races. They do nothing to help define the term "race" then or now. Not censored has nothing to do with the photos. Sheesh, they are not offensive, but they are not appropriate in an article about race. - Jeeny Talk 18:47, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    I would further add that they are not appropriate in an article on race where they are the only example of racial types (except for the US picture). They give undue weight to an obsolete view on race, and seem to be retained much more for shock value than for genuine educational purposes.--Ramdrake 18:51, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    There's actually a very good essay on offensive images at the Islam wikiproject here Wikipedia:WikiProject Islam/Images of Muhammad--Strothra 18:52, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    You're pulling for straws with the undue weight argument. It fits perfectly with the text and is set in an historical context and is not advocating anything, thus undue weight does not apply since it is not attempting to express a viewpoint. The image is also not adding anything excessive to the historical text on the subject. Rather, it is demonstrating it visually. --Strothra 18:56, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    We are comparing apples and oranges. In that topic it is directly about islam and various sensitivities about it. We do not even know the context associated with these photos since they are from some german publication. Just to give some context on some of the photo supporters.[14]Muntuwandi 18:59, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    It wasn't comparing apples to oranges since your comment was about their offensive nature, not their context. Seriously, again, stop trying to attack editors - it does not advance your argument. If you wish to participate in this discussion in any real sense then please comment substantively in regard to the article. --Strothra 19:00, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    You, Strothra, are pulling at straws. And comparing apples to oranges. The conection to Muhammad is insane. The images themselves are not offensive to me, but inaccurate and do not support the definition of races. Sheesh. - Jeeny Talk 19:04, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    Strothra, I have several issues with them. There is no associated text to know what they are talking about and what is defunct about their classifcation system. They are just a collection of old photos, many taken stereotypically. I am not attacking editors, they made those edits themselves, with their own fingers. I am just letting you know of the editors that you are agreeing with Muntuwandi 19:06, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    Um, Jeeny, I think that you're misunderstanding me. I pointed to the Muhammad article because Muntuwandi argued that the images were offensive and thus should not be included. He also stated that this had been argued before in other articles. The Muhammad article is an example of how offensive images were kept in the article due to WP:CENSOR regardless of how Muslim editors felt about it. --Strothra 19:09, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    Muntuwandi, making such references is a violation of WP:AGF and not relevant to this discussion. You don't see Mortiz making reference to your block log or the warnings on your talk page. --Strothra 19:10, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    AGF applies to newbies. I will assume good faith for you, since this is first time I have encountered you. But for the editors with known agendas it is not necessary. Muntuwandi 19:14, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    WP:DUCK If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.... There are ducks on wikipedia, I am not naming anyone though. Muntuwandi 19:16, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    I assure you, my only agenda is to apply policy to content. I do not in anyway condone pseudo scientific methods that are used in the contemporary present or that were used in the past. Note, however, that I am not a newbie, but WP:AGF does apply to everyone until they prove otherwise hence WP:DUCK (although it is not even a policy or a guideline). However, it might be wise for some individuals to refrain from calling the kettle black. --Strothra 19:19, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    • The images show what a book from 1932 presented as "human races" in a section about race in the 20th century. Could had been the section about the 19th century as well, because the ideas are clearly a left over from that time. Very appropriate. If the images had been moved to the section about the view on race today, it wouldn't have been inappropriate. It's as simple as that, if you ask me. Claiming that they're "stereotypical" is completely missing the point, yes, they are, but that's how they were made to be.

    Af for this argument: "They are not authenic anthropological plates on races, but compilations of ethnicities and a couple of races. "

    I can tell you, "Menschenrassen" means "human races" in German. And please trust me on this, and don't accuse me of making up false translations, which you have done before. Funkynusayri 19:50, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

    According to the information from the image upload log the book was published in 1932,(see Image:LA2-Blitz-0263.jpg) where does the idea come from that it is 1914? Alun 05:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    'Menschenrassen' certainly means 'human races'; however the word 'race' was essentially indistinguishable from the modern term ethnicity at the time. Paul B 23:54, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    I trust you that it comes from a German book, and I trust you that it illustrates races. But I have yet to hear any facts about who compile dthis book and for what audience. It could be the German version of Encart or Nazi propaganda or folk-beliefs or an anthropological treatise based on work by Virchow ... we need to know more about the source. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:40, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    I don't think the Nazi party existed in 1914. It's entirely mainstream. Paul B 23:57, 13 September 2007 (UTC)
    According to the upload log this book was published in 1932, not 1914, when the NSDAP certainly did exist and was close to the pinnacle of it's electoral success. See Image:LA2-Blitz-0263.jpg Alun 05:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • It's from a regular lexicon. This type of information was considered pretty objective back then, but if you want to check it, you can find the entire lexicon if you check the source of the images, just click 'em.
      Examples of "human races" in a German Lexicon from 1932 (1). This type of racial classification is considered discredited nowadays.
      Examples of "human races" in a German Lexicon from 1932 (1). This type of racial classification is considered discredited nowadays.
      Examples of "human races" in a German Lexicon from 1932 (2). This type of racial classification is considered discredited nowadays.
      Examples of "human races" in a German Lexicon from 1932 (2). This type of racial classification is considered discredited nowadays.
      Just for the record if the images are removed from the article again, the images in question are on the right. Funkynusayri 20:44, 13 September 2007 (UTC)


    I am somewhat ambivalent about the disputed photographs. On the one hand they serve to give an historical view of how physical types were perceived, on the other hand they may be seen as little more than presenting a group of individual people as "examples" of a given population or ethnic group, but it is known that there is great variability within group for all human groups. As an example of old fashioned anthropology that concentrated on "physical types" I think these photos could be considered appropriate, though it should be noted in the text that the concept of "physical types" is not currently accepted anthropological orthodoxy, I also suggest that this should be clearly stated in the caption to the photographs, i.e. that this is an out of date perspective. I wonder how it is necessarily so different to the set of photographs that exists in the Race in law enforcement section? On the other hand people complaining about Wikipedia being "censored" like Strothra does is inappropriate, Wikipedia works by consensus, if these is a consensus not to include these photographs then there is no point in complaining about "censorship". If an individual editor wants to include some point of view that is not supported by a consensus position, then they have to accept it, like it or not. Wikipedia is not censored in the sense that there are any rules banning any given point of view or image, on the other hand Wikipedia editors are entitled to omit any image or information if there is a consensus to do so. Alun 04:45, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    I still doubt that these pictures add any value. Naturally we all like to look at pictures but we have to ask whether this picture adds any value. It is in black and white, with low resolution and has tiny pictures. We can hardly make out anything. The people who have placed this image haven't even bothered to give a translation of the captions underneath each photo. So we do not know who belongs to what race. We have no idea of the context under which these photos were compiled. And the photos are not linked in anyway to the text from the headings. It is just random pictures of people. I can look out on the street if that is what I would want to see. Muntuwandi 05:19, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I understand your position, and you make excellent points. I think there are probably better examples of this sort of thing that could be added to the article to provide some historical perspective for antiquated anthropological concepts. Indeed it could well be argued that an image is not necessary to explain this in historical context. As I say I am ambivalent, I can see merits for both points of view. What I am absolutely opposed to is any attempt to clam that these are somehow accepted ideas of modern anthropology, and I think we need to state in an unequivocal manner that these classifications are derived from early twentieth century concepts of anthropology that were mixed up with all sorts of unsavory ideas like eugenics, segregationism and anti-miscegenation laws etc. I'm not strongly in favour of these pictures and I'm not strongly against, I am strongly in favour off putting them into the correct context if they are included. All the best. Alun 05:28, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Also the book may have been published in 1932, the lexicons and "words" (as the books intro page states) and many of it's sources are from different time periods. Again, using a source that is not in English causes confusion. Also, Paul B stated, and I also believe to be true, "race and ethnicity is interchangeable" in this book. It should not be used in the race article because they do not provide an accurate description of race, then or now. The book contains many other things, old and new at the time of publication, not only of races, but inventions, people, authors, zoology, and many others subjects. Again, because it is in German and not English it should not be included as a reference for anything. Please read the book, that is, if you understand German. Here is one page, I can't find the one on "races". Just look at the different dates. [15] - Jeeny Talk 05:42, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    The whole reason that the image is important is that it shows how race was understood at one time - which was, yes, conflated with ethnicity. Simply because the image does not show how race is understood today does not mean the image should be excluded, particularly from a section discussing historical methods of studying the subject. --Strothra 06:09, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    No it wasn't race that was understood at the time. This is the problem. There were only three races understood, at that time, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid. Ethnicities where different and were included in the different races, even then. Don't you see that? - Jeeny Talk 06:18, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Strothra what have you learned by looking at the picture. I haven't learned anything and I bet you have not either. It is always difficult explaining images because the only requirement for using an image on wikipedia is that it should be free. I may seem overenthusiastic about removing these images, and they may seem innocent to some. But you see when you look at many of the xenophobic websites out there on the web, these are the sort of images that are used by them. I could easily provide some links of some sites that I have stumbled across that use such images but I do not want to help the xenophobes spread their message. Wikipedia shouldn't resemble those xenophobic sites. Funkynusayri, the chief protagonist in this has a love affair with this ancient book and he keeps trying to propagate these obsolete images all over wikipedia. The unfortunate thing is that the book is free, so many will say it is free so there is no harm in using them. Muntuwandi 06:22, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Right, and those races are represented in the image. The work is comes from is a larger encyclopedic work at the time that describes these races and attempts to describe them by breaking them down into "types." Classification is common among even the most basic of scientific studies both pseudo scientific and otherwise. --Strothra 06:25, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Well at least how "race" was understood in Germany in 1932. The images may be from 1914, but the book was published in Germany during the rise of the NSDAP, this must have affected the way the image was portrayed. Does it reflect a general idea of how "race" was perceived in 1932, or does it reflect the way "race" was perceived in Germany at that time? I suggest that we try for a better image, there must be something that is more appropriate out there, something by Earnest Hooton for example? I think Jeeny makes a very good point. Alun 06:26, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I would agree with you, Muntuwandi, if it were placed in any other section or if it were being presented as fact or a representation of contemporary viewpoints. --Strothra 06:27, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    You maybe underestimating the power of an image. Why do you think the media is so powerful. Muntuwandi 06:29, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    There's actually a very good history on that period of Germany called "Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis" by Robert Proctor who among many other things shows that the scientific views of the period actually gave rise to the NSDAP's racial ideology as opposed to the other way around. Also, much of the scientific work conducted in Germany in this period and on this subject flowed from Germany through Europe and across the Atlantic to the states giving rise to global eugenics movements. This isn't a view limited to Germany. If you follow that argument, one would believe that works published in America represent only an American view--Strothra 06:32, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Muntuwandi, you are going back to your argument about the offensiveness of the image, which simply does not pull weight with WP:CENSOR. As much as you don't like it, it is still policy. --Strothra 06:33, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I don't think Germany needed to give any lessons to the USA when it came to eugenics. The USA had it's own very active eugenics movement as early as the turn of the century. Given the US history of exploitation of African and African American people for centuries, prior to this and US antimiscegination laws etc. it seems odd to claim that US eugenics derived from German eugenics. Indeed one of the main criticisms of the NSDAP's racism from the USA wasn't that racism was wrong, but that it was the German "version" of racism that was wrong. In the USA it was held that Jewish people were Caucasian for example, and so from a USA eugenic/anthropological point of view it made no sense to persecute them, on the other hand the USA eugenic movement thought that persecution of people of African origin was just fine. Jonathan Marks has a nice discussion of the US eugenics movement in his book "what it means to be 98% chimpanzee", it certainly wasn't learned from the Germans. Alun 06:42, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I never said that the US movement was completely derived from the European movements. The American one very strongly rose out of the American Progressive movement, many of its scientific underpinnings, however, were reinforced and advanced by German research from the 1920's on. During that period you find many American textbooks that cite German scientific literature. Although I do see where confusion could have resulted from my statement on giving rise to global movements. That was to imply that there are global connections, no scientific community in any country develops in isolation. --Strothra 06:45, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    See Eugenics for information regarding the compulsory sterilisation of people in the USA as early as 1907. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wobble (talk • contribs) 06:49, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Again, I never once stated that the U.S. did not create it's own eugenics movement and I even linked it directly to the Progressive movement which formed at the end of the 19th century. --Strothra 06:52, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes you did, sorry, we edit conflicted and I didn't read what you said properly before I posted this. On the other hand Marks claims that while eugenics was a large movement in the USA prior to 1929, it lost most of it's support after 1929. He claims that this was because many affluent people supported eugenics because it implied they were rich because they were "better". After 1929 a lot of people became very poor, and it became much less supportable to claim that wealth was gained for any other reason than due to luck. I can't comment on the veracity of this, just that this is Marks's thesis in his book. It therefore seemed unlikely to me that 1930's German eugenics could have had such a great affect on US eugenics, though I suppose quite a lot of people in the US still clung on to this belief even after 1929. Alun 09:00, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I think that Wobble's suggestion of a replacement image is likely going to be the best compromise here. I doubt that Muntuwandi will agree because he seems opposed to a graphic representation of historical viewpoints. However, if there is something comparable and in english then there is no reason to oppose. --Strothra 06:38, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • "No it wasn't race that was understood at the time. This is the problem. There were only three races understood, at that time, Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid."

    That's wrong. There were several sub-races of the main races too which scientists believed in then, even in America, where you have countless divisions of Caucasoids, for example. Back then, when this German book was published, only "Caucasoids" had been studied enough, and had been given "scientific names" (Nordid, Mediterranid, so on), other peoples (or "races" then) were just named after their ethnicity. So please, people, ask about the context instead of coming up with wrong interpretations.

    If you read the accompanying text in that German lexicon, the peoples on the images are referred to as sub-races of the three main-races, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid.

    To Wobble, the reason why we use a German image is because it's the only one we can use for free. There simply doesn't seem to have been released such books in English early enough for their copyright to have been expired, but the German plates are pretty much identical to what would had been in an English one, apart from the names (later, names like "Capoid" were invented, but not in the 30s). I've seen some in English, but they're all from much later. Funkynusayri 06:52, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    No it's not, we can use just about any image for free that is older than 70 years (so before 1937), this is US law and wiki servers are in the US. Given the very great age of much of this material we can certainly find better images that are equally ancient. Hooton and Coon published much work before this time, I'm sure there are plenty of examples in English that are available. Just about any encyclopaedia published before 1937 in any country with English as the dominant language will probably have similar pictures. Much info from the 1911 version of Britannica is used on wikipedia, I wonder if there are similar photographs in this encyclopaedia? I wonder how we could check? Alun 08:25, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    So far the only defense I see for including these images is that they illustrate a point of view. I have asked people to specify the point of view and have gotten only vague answers (like "mainstream") which I can only interpret to mean "I do not know." We need facts about the point of view. Who compiled the photos? Who wrote the article in which it appeared? Who edited the book in which it appeared? What do we know of its audience? How was the book marketed? Until we can properly identify the point of view it represents, i do not see how we can include it. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:37, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    • Wobble, I agree, find images from English sources if you can, but I repeat, they don't hang around everywhere. The book doesn't simply have to have been published 70 years ago, but the author has to have been dead for 70 years if the book can be considered to be in the public domain. This can't be said for either Coon or Hooton, and neither of them published such a book before 1923 (every American publication from before this year seems to have gone into the public domain in America), as far as I'm aware. Therefore, the German book is a perfect alternative. But again, just find other plates if you want.

    And Rubenstein, the images represent what the scientific opinion was at the time, which the text is also about. And yet again, you simply have to click on the images, and you'll be lead to the lexicon itself through them. But just to be sure, here is a direct link: [16] Funkynusayri 12:16, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    I followed the link, and I googled the Lexicon, and that di dnot give me the information I would need to make an educated judgement. Do you have the information, or not? It sounds like you do not. Clearly, one would have to do real research. Please tell mw how you know that the images represent scientific opinion at the time? Please tell me what scientists were involved in putting the chart together. Please tell me their methodology. Was the publication peer-reviewed, or did it have an editorial board? Who was on it? How about some facts? or are you just making it up when you claim, with no evidence, that the chart represents scientific knowledge at the time? NPOV asks us to identify the POV expressed. You can't just make it up. Whose POV does it express? really? Slrubenstein | Talk 12:22, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • What is it that you want me to do? It's a lexicon, not an anthropology book, the info in it just reflects the scientific opinion at the time. Your tone seems pretty hostile for some reason.

    Anyhow, here's an introduction to the lexicon, in German:[17] "Meyers Blitz-Lexikon ist ein sehr kompaktes Nachschlagewerk in einem Band, das mehrmals zwischen etwa 1928 und 1940 erschien. Hier wird die Ausgabe von 1932 präsentiert. Dieses Buch ist als gemeinfrei zu betrachten, weil es keine angegebenen Autoren oder Illustratoren hat und vor mehr als 70 Jahren erschien.

    Das digitalisierte Exemplar wurde in einem Antiquariat in Frankfurt während der Wikimania-Konferenz im August 2005 gekauft. Es kostete nur 12 Euro, ist aber sehr gut erhalten. Es hat an einigen Stellen Bleistiftanzeichungen, die nicht entfernt wurden, z.B. bei Österreich: "seit 1938 deutsch" — und danach wieder durchgestrichen!

    Die 443 Seiten wurden von LA2 in September 2005 als 300 dpi JPEG Farbbilder mit hohem Kontrast eingescannt und auf Wikimedia Commons hochgeladen. Die Papierseiten sind 155 mm breit, die Bilder etwa 1830 Pixel. Der Template:Vorlage:LA2-Blitz präsentiert sie 700 Pixel breit, einer Bildschirmauflösung von etwa 120 dpi entsprechend. Um die Bilder hoch aufgelöst zu sehen muss man zweimal auf sie klicken. Der OCR-Text ist noch korrekturzulesen. Als Hilfe dafür gibt es zwei Kategorien: völlig und noch nicht völlig korrigierte Seiten. Die Textmasse ist etwa 2,8 Megabyte (ohne Markup; 6,4 Kilobyte pro Seite), die Bilder sind zusammen 700 Megabyte (1,6 Megabyte pro Seite).

    Dieses Werk ist das erste, bei dem Wikisource mit Faksimile-Bildern kombiniert wurde. Das zweite ist The New Student's Reference Work, Chicago, 1914. Eine weitere Diskussion gibt es auf Meta, Digitizing books with MediaWiki."

    As for public domain templates: [18] [19]

    Funkynusayri 12:27, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    I do not speak German, but your link just send sme to an explanation of why it is fair use. My questions have nothing to do with fair use but rather with understanding what POV it represents and questioning your claim that it was mainstream science. Since this is English Wikipedia, would you be so kind as to answer my questions in English please? Slrubenstein | Talk 12:38, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • The captions of the images simply state that they are examples of human races in a German lexicon from 1932. That's what they are, no one claims they're anything more than that. I could see the problem if the caption was "examples of human races provided by objective scientists", but it isn't. Anyhow, all I can do is translate the explanation text I have provided, or you could get some native speaker of German to do it for you. Do you want that?

    And how is it only an explanation of why it is fair use? In short, it is described as having several authors, and just being a lexicon. I can't answer who wrote it, because of this. Funkynusayri 12:50, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    One grave concern: the text Funkynusayri provided states clearly that the authors and illustrators of the lexicon in question are anonymous: primary sources for the work are thus not indicated, and opinions and assertion can't be attributed either. I would very strongly doubt the fitness for inclusion of these illustrations based on WP:RS and WP:V, and we can't verify the original sources, or say whose interpretation of the original sources yielded that result.--Ramdrake 12:46, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    WP:RS or WP:V do not require to verify the author of a particular encyclopedia article. A mainstream encyclopedia is a reliable source. MoritzB 16:01, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Again, we're not showing factual illustrations, simply what the caption states, "examples of human races from a German lexicon", nothing more than that. That's what they are. This is besides the point, as we have already included a disclaimer in the caption, which states the images are defunct in any case. If it's a very big problem, I suggest you request that the entire lexicon should be deleted from Wikisource, and that all images used from it are removed from all Wikipedias, as any info from it would be useless according to you. Funkynusayri 12:50, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    Apparently, Funkynusayri has not done any research. All he knows is, "The captions of the images simply state that they are examples of human races in a German lexicon from 1932." If this is all we know, here is the solution I suggest: we work on a new section called "Social Construction of Race in Germany" and really find out what the different views were and how this discourse emerged out of the nationalist project with its origins in Herder and perhaps Goethe and Von Humboldt, and how it developed through the 19th century and debats among Germans in the early 1900s. This would provide a menaingful context for the image. I realize it would require actual research, but this is an encyclopedia after all so how could anyone object to that? Slrubenstein | Talk 13:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    • We could find another image if it's that much of a problem to use an image from a lexicon, but I've already explained why it's hard. And again, I suggest you go remove every image on all Wikipedias which originate in that lexicon, otherwise I'm not sure why your criticism should only apply to these particular images. Anyone up for a non-free image? We could use Coon's if no one objects. Funkynusayri 13:15, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    Man, you really seem to resist any suggestion that requires research - an odd view for someone who wants to write an encyclopedia. Anyway, you are missing the point. What point of view will the image illutrate? I see no reason to illustrate Coon's image of races in this article, given that his views are marginal (maybe in the article on Coon). if you want to illustrate scientific debates about race in the 20th century, we would need a variety of contrasting images to illustrate the multiple points of view effectively. Slrubenstein | Talk 13:36, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    No, they were not marginal in the 1930s. Coon's model was definitely one of the most popular typological models. MoritzB 15:56, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Hmmm, I've provided all info I could find about the images, and I don't think the pictures are important enough to justify creating a whole new section for them, so what's with the allegations? If you want to write a new section, feel free, I ain't stopping you. But for the sake of convenience, it seems that too many of the regular editors here object to having any images in the race related articles, and I simply don't care enough about the subject to keep putting them in, so if you want to remove them again, I can't stop you. Not because I find your arguments particularly valid, mind you.Funkynusayri 13:46, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Similar images. These pictures are from the Fischer Lexicon (1970 edition):

    http://www.amazon.de/Das-Fischer-Lexikon-Anthropologie-Gerhard-Heberer/dp/B0000BQZIH/ref=sr_1_1/303-5010161-7699429?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189785021&sr=1-1

    http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bilder/FischerLex1.jpg ~ http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bilder/FischerLex2.jpg

    http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bilder/FischerLex3.jpg

    http://www.snpa.nordish.net/bilder/FischerLex4.jpg

    MoritzB 15:51, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    These 1959/1970 images confirm that the images in Meyer's lexikon represented a mainstream point of view. MoritzB 15:59, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    No they don't, they just prove that some people held these points of view. Just providing images does not prove that they have ever been "mainstream". I could provide images from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it doesn't prove this is "mainstram", whatever that means. By the way these images are very funny, might as well introduce Lamarckian evolution or Spontaneous generation, after all both are relevant to evolution and Lamarckism is relevant to "race". Both were also seriously held scientific theories in the past. Alun 18:08, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Strothra, you see people are already fishing similar stuff from some of these xenophobic websites like Nordish.net. Just as I had mentioned earlier on. While wikipedia is not censored, it is also not a platform for promoting xenophobia or racism but a platform for education. I suggest that if we are to use an image, we can use a map of the world that does not show human faces.Muntuwandi 16:13, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    With regard to wikipedia not being censored once again, if you look at articles that could be potentially graphic such as pornography or sexual intercourse you will not find any graphic images in those articles. But if wikipedia is not censored why aren't there any. Because common sense dictates that such images distract from encyclopedic text, so the editors have opted for cartoons, artwork or diagrams instead. Nobody will complain about the use of such images. Strothra, I also hope you can see the kind of people who are heavily in favor of using such images. You may end up being guilty by association. Muntuwandi 16:21, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    One more thing Funkynusayri broke the 3rr rule on this article yesterday. Muntuwandi 16:23, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • There is an image of an erect penis on the penis page. There is an article called Nigger. There are images of Muhammad. Please stop your extreme calls for censorship, Muntu, if they only apply to the race related articles. Please be consistent. Funkynusayri 18:15, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    I believe this is a discussion to try to attain consensus on whether or not to include the images. While your point about censorship is taken, WP:CENSOR doesn't trump WP:CON, AFAIK. If the consensus of editors decide not to include the image, then that should be it, unless someone can produce an overwhelming reason (NFC, NPOV) why the images should be kept, but I haven't seen any of that so far.--Ramdrake 18:56, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    • The images have already been removed, and if the majority of editors here don't want an image which illustrates the text, well, there's nothing I can do about it. I find it bizarre that something so simple can stir up so many emotions in certain individuals, and I find it odd that this is suddenly a problem several weeks after the images were added to the article. So well, who gives a damn, end of discussion. Funkynusayri 19:06, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Ramdrake is correct, while Muntu's arguments regarding offensiveness are completely irrelevant due to WP:CENSOR, it seems that consensus is almost impossible to reach here. Regardless, WP:CON states, "Consensus decisions in specific cases are not expected to override consensus on a wider scale very quickly - for instance, a local debate on a Wikiproject does not override the larger consensus behind a policy or guideline. The project cannot decide that for "their" articles, said policy does not apply." Thus, WP:CON cannot override WP:CENSOR because a few editors on one article cannot override an accepted and preexisting policy that has been imposed by the larger community. Again, Wobble proposed the inclusion of a different image which I think is an appropriate suggestion. Also, the images were not removed, it's still there but was moved down to the 20th century section. --Strothra 22:23, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
    Actually, I beg to interpret this another way: it seems that there is no consensus for the inclusion of the image being discussed, and several editors opposing the inclusion have brought forward points that have nothing to do with censorship. Also, it seems there are slightly more editors against the inclusion than there are in favor (based on current info about the origins and documentation of this picture). Thus, I would say the motivations for exclusion aren't based solely on WP:CENSOR, but also on other arguments. However, I believe there needs to be a clearer consensus about the inclusion or not of these pictures so we can act on it. I don't think belaboring the point of WP:CENSOR helps in any way at this point, as there are other arguments against the picture's inclusion. I believe a consensus, even if non-unanimous would carry appropriate weight, though.--Ramdrake 03:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    Yes, I understand and agree with that point. The other arguments, if I remember correctly without scrolling up, involved the language of the source and accuracy in representing historical understanding of race. Those are worthy of discussion, which is why I'm agreeing with the suggestion that perhaps the image should be replaced with something else. --Strothra 04:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Hmmm, I see, I just assumed it had been deleted because Rubenstein did a revision where he wrote "okey dokey" or something like that, but seems like he just reverted my inclusion of "ethnic" instead of "ethnicity" for whatever reason. But the first half of the image which is still left shows supposed "Europäid races", not ethnicities, so the "racial/ethnic system", as I changed it to, is more correct. Funkynusayri 22:49, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

    I reverted to what the page was like when it was protected, no more, no less. Of course when the page is unprotected I want to see the image removed for the obvious reasons. Slrubenstein | Talk 00:34, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

    So we seem to have arrived at a situation where we are discussing whether we need consensus for removal or consensus for keeping the image. I'll give my opinion. Funkynusayri claims that these images have been on the page for some time and that it is strange that they should suddenly become a bone of contention. I'm not sure that this point is valid, these images have been on the page since the 20th of August,[20] and considering that this is sill a time of year when many people in the northern hemisphere are busy doing Summertime things I don't think one can claim that a couple or three weeks represents anything like a stable inclusion. On the other hand there seems to be no consensus one way or the other. Opinion seems about equally divided. Strothra's comments about censorship are totally irrelevant as I stated earlier, wikipedia works by consensus, it is illogical to claim that consensus doesn't overide censor because censorship is not the issue, consensus is the issue. It nowhere claims in the censor policy that a consensus not to include any image or text must violate CENSOR and therefore be included anyway, this is akin to claiming that anything, however irrelevant should be included because any objection to any inclusion is automatically censorship. Personally I suspect that it is best to keep the images out of the article until a better images can be included. I am relatively ambivalent about this, I don't think these images are particularly illuminating, except perhaps to illustrate the absurdity of the concept of "racial type", how can any single individual be considered "representative" of the whole gammut of local diversity seen in any human population? After all it is well known that diversity is greatest at the population level, however it is measured. But in this case the image should probably be used to illustrate the point about diversity in it's historical context, including a discussion about how environment affects morphology. This is a bad image because it comes from a "lexicon", which as far as I can tell just means encyclopaedic dictionary, these sorts of sources are not necessarily written by an expert, and may well be factually incorrect. In this case we do not even know what it is supposed to be illustrating not who actually wrote it. So some sort of primary source would be much better. On the other hand the utility of any such images is also important, what do they illustrate? How is it relevant? What is the political/historical/cultural background to the image? At the least I think we need to find a better example. Alun 06:31, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

    Thank you for stating what has already been said. --Strothra 13:20, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    Gentle reminder: Be civil. FilipeS 13:37, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    And, on that note, are there any actual suggestions for a new image? Preferably from an english source, the fact that these are generally too late for free use does not mean that can't be considered fair use because of that. --Strothra 13:45, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    Well quite, MoritzB has claimed that this point of view was mainstream in the first half of the 20th century, in which case it should be a doddle for those editors who think the inclusion of such images is important to find many free images. On the other hand if they can't find such images, possibly this point of view wasn't as mainstream as they claim, and if they are not prepared to do the research in order to find alternative images then the inclusion of such images cannot be that important to these editors. Alun 16:31, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    There are countless such images.
    Deniker's "Races de l'Europe" from 1899, including la race nordique.
    Deniker's "Races de l'Europe" from 1899, including la race nordique.
    MoritzB 17:11, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Heh, that's a pretty odd conclusion, the fact that free images of that kind are hard to find somehow means that they weren't mainstream? Doesn't make sense, but yes, such images exist in abundance, most were just published after 1923 (all the way up to the 70s and beyond), so they can't be used for free. Funkynusayri 16:56, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    Actually I didn't draw any such conclusion. Nowhere have I ever claimed that these ideas were not mainstream, neither have I ever claimed that they were mainstream. I am not an historian, nor an anthropologist and I certainly am not old enough to have been alive at that time. I simply state that if they were mainstream then they should be available in abundance. Indeed there is absolutely no reason why there should not be an abundance of pre 1923 English language images in this case. Besides MoritzB keeps including images of so called "European races" which are not really relevant. We need something that is relevant to humanity as a whole surely? Alun 17:34, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
    Thomas Huxley's map of racial categories from On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind.
    Thomas Huxley's map of racial categories from On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind.

    Take a look at this image on the left. If only the text on the image was readable. And here's a mirror of an older revision of this very page, seems to have had a lot of maps: [21] Funkynusayri 18:02, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

    That's a nice image and we know where it comes from, we can even read the full text of the article here. This sort of thing would be good to show the numerous different "racial" systems used at this time, I think the number of "races" varied from 2 to about 63 depending on the "authority", which is the reason people like Darwin rejected the concept of "race" classification altogether. Alun 04:46, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
    • Actually this is not an older version of the Wikipedia "Race" article, it is an older version of the Race (historical definitions) article. Recently these maps were removed,[22] from the article, but they do illustrate the difficulty people had with developing any coherent concept of "race" from "physical types". All the best. Alun 05:59, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
    I support the use of the map. Muntuwandi 18:18, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
         1: Bushmen      2: Negroes      3: Negritoes      4: Melanochroi      5: Australoids      6: Xanthochroi      7: Polynesians      8: Mongoloids A      8: Mongoloids B      8: Mongoloids C      9: Esquimaux
         1: Bushmen      2: Negroes      3: Negritoes      4: Melanochroi      5: Australoids      6: Xanthochroi      7: Polynesians      8: Mongoloids A      8: Mongoloids B      8: Mongoloids C      9: Esquimaux
    • Could anyone try to find a version in higher resolution? The text cannot be read. I'm searching myself. By the way, the reason the number of races increased so drastically is because different authors kept dividing them into sub-races, independently from each other, so after a while the systems simply didn't make sense in relation to each other.
    Well it's partly true, mainly the reason the number of races kept expanding is because the morphological types of a given feature may be distributed over different geographic regions to the morphological types of other features. So every time someone used a new feature to assign to a "race", they found that any particular morphological classification for this feature it was not necessarily restricted to any preexisting "race", but was spread about, meaning that more and more "races" had to be invented as more features were measured. This is a well known and documented phenomenon and is also seen in genetics. I think the one thing that almost everyone agrees on is the arbitraryness of "race" concepts, where one stops classifying or draws a boundary is always going to be a matter of opinion. It's ultimately why biological "race" concepts were abandoned by mainstream anthropology, and also why many biologists do not recognise the validity of subspecies in biology at all. Alun 06:12, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

    And hey, why don't we just revert this piece of crap back to the version which was featured? Funkynusayri 18:36, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

    I could have a go a redrawing the map, there are plenty of free use world map images available from the commons. I think it's possible to see how the colours correspond to the map, and the key has been added into the text of the article that I linked to above. Might take a couple of days though. Alun 06:00, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] The introduction

    The intro is a mess and Wobble just reverted the latest improved version I made. The current version is factually inaccurate (see discussion about Witherspoon's article) and far too technical for the general audience. MoritzB 10:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

    Improved? I don't think so, you have added your opinion and removed what the sources actually say.[23] For example you replaced the statement "It has also been suggested that accurate classification of continuously sampled populations may be impossible." with "Populations which exist at the boundaries of these continental divisions can be difficult to categorize simply." Presumably because you personally believe that there exist something like "discrete races" that "overlap" and that it is the regions that "overlap" that are difficult to "classify". But this is not the claim of the paper, it is your opinion. I note that you have consistently misrepresented sources to push your personal opinion, and that several editors have noted this behaviour of yours.[24][25] Please do not include your opinions and then cite sources that do not make these claims. When you cite a source you must say what the source says, you seem to think it is acceptable to include your opinion of what the source means, you cannot include your interpretation of a source in Wikipedia, this is original research and is not allowed. This has been a persistent habit of yours and you have been asked repeatedly not to push your own personal pov while editing Wikipedia. Alun 11:04, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    The source (Risch): "Populations that exist at the boundaries of these continental divisions are sometimes the most difficult to categorize simply".[26] My version: Populations which exist at the boundaries of these continental divisions can be difficult to categorize simply There is no misrepresentation and the other studies cited support this view. MoritzB 15:12, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    MoritzB's version states

    Populations which exist at the boundaries of these continental divisions can be difficult to categorize simply.<ref name="serre">''Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents.'' by David Serre and Svante Pääbo (2004) ''Genome Res.'' '''14''': 1679-1685 {{doi|10.1101/gr.2529604}}</ref><ref name="romauldi">''Patterns of Human Diversity, within and among Continents, Inferred from Biallelic DNA Polymorphisms'' by Chiara Romualdi, David Balding, Ivane S. Nasidze, Gregory Risch, Myles Robichaux, Stephen T. Sherry, Mark Stoneking, Mark A. Batzer, and Guido Barbujani1. ''Genome Res.'' (2002) '''12''': 602-612 {{doi|10.1101/gr.214902}}</ref><ref>http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=139378 Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease by Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang. Genome Biol. Volume 3(7); 2002</ref>

    which implies that the Serre and Pääbo (2004) supports this statement, he has used it as references for the statement after all, he states this above as well. But Serre and Pääbo (2004) state explicitly in their paper

    It is noteworthy that the discrete clusters described by Rosenberg et al. (2002) from analyzing more than one thousand individuals of the CEPH diversity panel might be caused by discontinuities in the sampling, because when samples that have equal numbers of individuals of each population are analyzed (Fig. 2), the inferred populations yielded by Structure do not match continents or geographical regions but represent theoretical “populations” in which all individuals show admixture to at least two such “populations.” Therefore, when the aim is to investigate genetic diversity on a worldwide scale, we recommend an approach in which individuals from as many localities as possible are sampled. Sampling schemes based on populations should only be used if the aim of the study is to unravel the history of these specific populations or their relationship with surrounding populations... It has recently been claimed that "the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level" (Risch et al. 2002). Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history.

    This is at best dishonest. The concept of "clustering" is stated and cited in the introduction, this is a controversial concept that has it's critics as well as it's supporters, in order to maintain neutrality we need to put both points of view. MoritzB was attempting to remove the alternative point of view, while citing Serre and Pääbo (2004) as a supporting reference for Risch's statement, but Serre and Pääbo's paper clearly does not support Risch's statement. The argument is really about whether human genetic diversity is better represented as a small island model or by isolation by distance. A small island model would support clustering, isolation by distance would support clinality. The current understanding of human genetic variation is incomplete and different analyses support different conclusions. We need to present both points of view, and not ignore those points of view that we disagree with. It certainly cannot be considered impartial to claim that a scientific paper supports a position that it categorically contradicts. Alun 16:46, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    The article has a section on race in biomedicine; I think discussion of this study belongs there. Slrubenstein | Talk 15:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    The problem is that the introduction is unclear, inaccurate and too technical for the general audience:

    "...clustering analysis of 326 microsatellite markers can accurately place individuals in the USA into different groups.[12][13] Other geneticists, however, have shown that many more than 326 loci are required in order to show that individuals are always more similar to individuals in their own population group than to individuals in different population groups, even for three distinct populations" MoritzB 16:07, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

    Looks perfectly clear to me. You provide no evidence that it is inaccurate. This is the introduction, personally I don't think this level of detail belongs in the introduction, but I did not put this in the introduction, if it does go into the introduction then we need to put the work into it's correct context. This work is being used to support the concept of "biological human races", but it does not do so. It uses clustering analysis as a proxy for continent of origin for biomedical purposes. On the other hand "race" is a completely different concept in biological terms, and is synonymous with subspecies. Alun 16:46, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    Sorry, I forgot to remove the Serre reference when I edited the article. Anyway, the current version is in contradiction with the Witherspoon article. I will correct that now.MoritzB 20:02, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
    Actually it was not in contradiction to the Witherspoon article, only in contradiction to the tiny little part of the Witherspoon article you want to quote because you think it supports your racialist pint of view. Clearly it does not, Witherspoon states absolutely that his paper supports Serre and Pääbo. You are introducing primary data rather than relying on the interpretation of the data from the paper and we should avoid use of primary sources as they lack proper context, see Wikipedia:Primary sources. Your pov pushing and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific papers is damaging Wikipedia, you have been warned about this before several times by several editors. Alun 06:56, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
    Please see WP:LEAD for guidelines on the content of the lead. Muntuwandi 21:19, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] The Marketing of Race: genetic lineages as social lineages

    This page is huge, and this section is bloated; so, I'm proposing a split to Personalized genetic history and leave the section with a summary of the concept, but move the bulk of the detailed content onto its own page. Lemme know if you have any objections. Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 11:35, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

    Change that to merge... I just found Genealogical DNA test. I suggest it be moved there, instead. --slakr\ talk / 12:16, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
    Perhaps Genealogical_DNA_test#Ethnic_tests? --slakr\ talk / 05:58, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

    I am strongly opposed. This section is not about genealogical DNA tests. It is about discussions among anthropologists who see gnealogical tests as evidence of a new concept of "race" in the West, and is thus an essential part of this article. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:05, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

    Okay, then the name can be changed. What new article name do propose? There's clearly too much information to put all in one section, and the article is in serious need of being trimmed back. Keep in mind, I'm not asking that the information be stripped from this article, only that the main points be summarized and pointed to a new article (for people who want to print it out and read the full details). --slakr\ talk / 05:09, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
    I also restored the {{mergeto}} tag. Please allow it to remain for at least a week so that other editors can be alerted to the proposed change and consensus can be established. If other editors feel that the section, in its entirety, is absolutely essential/critical to the article, then I'm totally fine with leaving it. As for now, it's borderline ready for a {{quotefarm}} as well. The article is crawling toward 200kb (currently 174kb), and we should be aiming for 100kb or less. Please keep non-broadband users in mind. --slakr\ talk / 05:56, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Removed some text

    In an effort to trim the page back some, I removed what seemed like a philosophical blurb. Feel free to restore if it's crucial to the section, as I'm not an expert in this area. --slakr\ talk / 11:49, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Merge Race#Race_in_the_United_States to Race in the United States

    I added a {{mergeto}} for Race#Race_in_the_United_States to Race in the United States, as the former is absurdly long and needs to be summarized, with the detailed information being moved to Race in the United States. --slakr\ talk / 11:59, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] External links

    I hate to say it, but the external links section needs to go on a diet. Please keep in mind that wikipedia is not a repository of links, we're not a directory, not a textbook, and not a portal for opinions. Moreover, we don't publish nor help publish your research. Before adding more links, please discuss it first. --slakr\ talk / 05:45, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Bibliography section cleanup.

    I removed a bunch of sources that weren't referenced from the text. Also, I commented out (i.e., for non-html people, surrounded them in <-- html comment tags --> so they won't be displayed) a few that were questionable (or ambiguous), which will probably be deleted unless someone says something. If a particular source got deleted but you feel it should be in the text, please consider using footnotes so that I don't have to do this again (hehe, what can I say? I'm a slakr :P). Most of what remains should be referenced somewhere, so the next step is converting them to footnotes. Cheers. =) --slakr\ talk / 05:05, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Removed POV tag

    I noticed that the {{pov}} tag is still on the article, yet the pov image discussion (above) seems to have ended. I'll remove the POV tag for now, since on controversial topics (i.e., where someone will always have an issue with POV), I would argue that unless there's an active POV discussion, there shouldn't be a POV tag. Feel free to discuss/undo if this is horribly wrong or I missed something in the discussion page. Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 05:12, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Removal of research papers section

    I tried to remove eduspam but it was reverted by Ramdrake (talk · contribs). If the problem is with the two sources I left, those can easily be deleted as well, so long as the one that's mentioned in the text is added to the bibiography or footnotes section. Long story short, there are several reasons for this change-- some practical, some based on Wikipedia policies and guidelines:

    • Policy. Wikipedia is not a repository of links. The removed links were either already cited in the footnotes/bibliography sections or were not mentioned at all in the article. The ones that were left are accessible, relevant, simple, or referenced in the article (I added html comments).
    • Policy. Wikipedia is not a soapbox. If the research article/viewpoint that is linked is significant and relevant to the article, cite it in the article; otherwise, it doesn't warrant a link.
    • Guideline. Overlinking of research presents a conflict of interest for members of the academic community whose salaries depend on their research being noticed, so non-essential, non-referenced links should be removed if they're not cited in the text otherwise it's essentially edu-spam.
    • Guideline. Please see article size. The page is huge and urgently needs to be trimmed back. Redundant/unneeded things should be the first to go, and that includes trivial external links. Check out the external links sections in other general subject articles.
    • Guideline. Please see links normally to be avoided. I remember a couple of those links being direct links to magazines/portals that want money to view the article.
    • Practical. Cutting back the fat. There were four total places for references. One is in the article itself (frowned upon), another is in the bibliography section (less ideal), another is in the external links section (less ideal), and finally, the footnotes (the ideal place).

    If anyone has any other ideas, I'm all ears; otherwise, I suggest the links simply be removed. --slakr\ talk / 21:19, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

    Personnally, I wouldn't mind removing all the references (the choice of those two left behind seemed dubious to me). However, I'd like other people to give their opinion on this removal as well. If nobody care one way or another, we could remove them all so no one wonders why these particular two were left behind. Hope this makes sense.--Ramdrake 22:04, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
    Ah, nothing dubious. The only reason I left "The Race Concept: A Defense by Michael Levin" behind was because "Levin" wasn't mentioned anywhere else on the page as a reference (i.e., in formal cites) but it was in the article (hence the reason I added the html comment saying that). I hate doing cites myself, so it was one of those "argh, I'll do it later" kind of things. :P The other one was a *.gov thing that related to the human genome project and race, which I figured was safe to leave at cursory inspection, but I didn't really read the thing, so if it's inappropriate, we can yank it too. --slakr\ talk / 00:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
    By the way, I'm definitely not an expert on this subject, so if anything I do is horribly wrong, then please feel free to gimme a heads up. I'm mainly just trying to condense the page, since it's kind of turning into a novel. :D --slakr\ talk / 00:21, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Possible split: Race debate

    Again, going back to the large article size and possible pending splits, it might solve a lot of problems to simply split the modern race debate sections into a new article: Race debate-- much like what was done on Abortion to give rise to Abortion debate. There's simply too much detailed (well, more critical: excessively lengthy) information to cover in one article. See Wikipedia guideline on article size. --slakr\ talk / 21:56, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Models of Evolution Section

    The two paragraphs at the end of both the OOA section and MH section need to be removed, whether cited or not, because they are ultimately superfluous information—irrelevant to the majority of the article. In fact, I would argue that almost ALL of the sections discussing the two models on evolution should be removed and leave only a brief mention of what they are with links to the relevant pages of each model. This article is far too long the way it is.

    Furthermore the comment under the MH section is just all-out false: "The most important element of this model for theories of race is that it allows a million years for the evolution of Homo sapiens around the world; this is more than enough time for the evolution of different races."

    As stated in the comments, MH does not posit isolated populations independently evolving from H. erectus. Instead, it maintains that from the time H. erectus first expanded from Africa it has remained a single interconnected—albeit large—group. Because the populations are not isolated, they remain AS ONE, after ten years, ten thousand years, and a million years. Check the Wiki article on gene flow for more information on this. Whoever put the section together did a horrible job in the first place, as the MH section was originally a description of Polygenism. Wiki strives for objectivity; misrepresenting opposing view points to push an agenda is highly academically dishonest. I've also had to remove large incorrect portions of the OOA section. Neither one was well-done, and the whole section was sloppy, inaccurate, biased, and just all-out no good.

    Again, though, all of this is FAR too detailed for this article. It, and most of the rest of the article, needs to be removed, as most of the information can be found elsewhere on Wiki in much more detail—and much more accurate. Simple summaries and links replacing the large blocks of text in most areas will greatly improve the quality of this article. 172.136.165.82 12:05, 20 October 2007 (UTC)J

    The article cited, to which you refer, is one of the few recent discussions of the relevance to models of evolution to discussions of race and for that reason alone must be included; indeed, if we remove that material, we ought to remove all discussion of models of evolution. But we shouldn't: relatively recent scholarship discusses the relationship so our article should provide an account of that discussion. If you disagree with the article, go write your own article and get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. if you disagree about the importance of the article, buy yourself a time machine, travel back in time, become editor of American Anthropologist or whatever journal it is from, and reject the article. For you to remove it on any other basis is to violate our Wikipedia:No original research policy. As for details - Wikipedia is not paper, and I for one think it is good that there is one on-line source of information that is thorough and takes scholarship seriously. This is a complex topic and any claim that it is simple is pushing some POV at the expense of an NPOV article (another of our core policies) Slrubenstein | Talk 16:42, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
    That's all irrelevant. If the study really says what it is claimed to say, then it is a clear misrepresentation of the MH model. As composers of these articles, it is our duty to ascertain the relevance and quality of our sources that we cite. When we cite sources, or studies, that have been written or performed by groups with a clear bias, and that clear bias is represented in their misrepresentation of a particular model, then it is our duty to see to it that such low-quality information is not included in articles that strive for integrity, objectivity, and freedom from bias.
    Now, I just went and read the relevant portions of the study that had been cited, and as it turned out, the current Wiki write-up is a misrepresentation—what we lay people call a lie—of the otherwise reasonable and relatively objective study as cited in AA. I think you should also be pointed out to the fact that the AA article is cited before the final line of the paragraph: "Against these assumptions, they argue that regional variations in these features can thus be taken as evidence for long term differences among genus Homo individuals that prefigure different races among present-day Homo sapiens individuals, and do not necessarily support the multi-regional model."
    There is a reason this was done, I'm sure; it's because the information presented in that final paragraph appears no where in the original AA article. It was made up by the biased writer of the Wiki article and passed off as having come from the AA article so that the writer of the Wiki article could increase its credibility. What I will do, is include a verbatim quote from the original article that deals with the first part of the paragraph, and then remove that final sentence of the paragraph, and if anyone wants it to be added, they can read the article and show that it was actually part of the concluded findings of Lieberman & Jackson. Then, it can be included, and the superscript footnote reference can be moved to the end of the entire quote. I will do the same with the section on OOA; find the original part of the article that deals with it, give a quote of Lieberman & Jackson's actual conclusion, and remove the inaccurate parts. I think this seems to be a fair way of resolving the issue.172.133.41.117 19:52, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
    Please wait for more consensus for this. Jeeny (talk) 21:19, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
    How long will we wait?172.133.41.117 22:05, 20 October 2007 (UTC)J

    172 may be naive about how Wikipedia works. There is no one author. Since the AA article material was introduced these sections have been reworked by many authors. Thee is no reason to think that the current version is close to the original version. If the AA article is misrepresented it surely should be represented accurately, no one would argue against that. But you deleted the material three times because you think it is wrong. That is a simle violation of our policies. And do not tell us our policies are irrelevant. Violate them and you will be reverted every time, until you are banned. Do you want to stay and contribute? Follow our core policies. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:10, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


    How long will we wait? How about three or four days? that is very litle time but ought to be enough for others to read the article and propose aloternate edits or have an open discussion. Slrubenstein | Talk 22:10, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

    I could care less if the information is right or wrong; it is a misrepresentation of the article that it cites. Someone wrote something, then cited an unrelated article as support. The problem is that the information presented was not actually obtained from the article that has been cited. This is evident to anyone who actually goes and reads the cited article. In the end, I didn't delete anything. I simply quoted the actual part of the AA article that had supposedly been cited. The fact that it looked like a deletion/substitution is evidence that the original content was a complete misrepresentation of the article. I do wonder, though, have any one of you read the article yourselves? If not, on what grounds do you judge its relevance?
    But, we shall wait and see what comes of this. Likely, no one will care to respond and/or bother with this and the change will not get made; but let us hope that does not come to pass.172.133.41.117 01:13, 21 October 2007 (UTC)J

    Please be clear: are you objecting to the inclusion of the article, or claiming it was misrepresented? Above you claim that the article was misrepresented. But your actions suggest that you do not believe tis, because you did not edit the passage to make it more accurate, you simply deleted passages referring to the article. You claim that these passages misrepresent the article but they provide direct quotes with page numbers. Are you denying that Lieberman and Jackson state that the MH relies on three assumptions? You deleted that, and a page reference was provided for that. Are you denying that they claim that the sampling was biased? You deleted that, but a page number was provided. Are you denying that they said some people can use the data to support claims of racial difference? You deleted that but a quotation was provided and a page number. It seems obvious to me that you are so intent on pushing your own point of view that you will delete verifiable and reliable sources simply because you do not like them. Above, you wrote that Wikipedia policies are irrelevant to Wikipedia articles. I repeat: you are wrong. Our policies are very relevant. In this case NPOV and NOR. Keep violating them, and people will keep reverting you - not because people do not care. People care about producing a quality, NPOV and well-researched article. We just do not care about providing POV-pushes with space to publicize their own views.Slrubenstein | Talk 02:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

    It is looking as though there is only one reference to the article in the paragraph in question, not one for each point. In the AA article it says: "involves the time depth of a million or more years...", yet the current Wiki page says: "...a million years..." (emphasis added). The current Wiki page also says: "Against these assumptions, they argue that regional variations in these features can thus be taken as evidence for long term differences among genus Homo individuals that prefigure different races among present-day Homo sapiens individuals, and do not necessarily support the multi-regional model.", though this argument does not appear anywhere within the article that is cited.
    It appears that the article does state that the MR model relies on several assumptions, though these assumptions seem relevant only to the MR model, and do not really serve any function in linking it to the concept of race. It would be better, in my opinion, if this section of the Wiki article did not end up being a place to debate these two theories, and so discussing them in such depth seems unnecessary. Rebuttals made to each theory (OOA and MR) should be placed in the respective Wiki pages. As has been stated, it would be better if there were only a brief explanation of each theory, a summary of how they are related to race, and then relevant links to the more detailed (less controversial) Wiki pages on each theory. This view point, I believe, is also supported by the requests made for the page to be shortened; which all seem well-warranted considering its massivity at the moment. The section, in my opinion, should be formatted:
    Multiregional model is... xxx, based on studies in skeletal morphology. Mutliregional model says about race... xxx.
    Out of Africa model is... xxx, based on studies in population genetics. Out of Africa model says about race... xxx.
    Instead, we see detailed references to evidence regarding these two theories. From the MR side, we see references to fossils and physical features. From the OOA side, we see references to studies in population genetics. Such detailed references are not required, in my opinion, in this article.Esdraelon 05:30, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

    This article is not about MH or OOA, it is about race. And the only reason MH and OOA are in the article is because scientists - such as Liebeman and Jackson - published in prestigious journals have explored the relevance of these models to discussions of race. Let us not put the cart before the horse. In an article on human evolution, MH and OOA would be the horse, but in this article it is race, and the Lieberman and Jackson article (and any other recent article published in a notable journal directly addressing MH and OOA in relation to race). That said, of course Leiberman and Jackson's views on race vis-a-vis models of evolution should be represented accurately. As I said, this is Wikipedia - anyone can edit and while we hopt this leads to general improvement sometimes it leads to signal degredation. I welcome any constructive attempt to help clarify Lieberman and Jackson's views. But anon. user 172 was simply deleting them. And that is flat out wrong. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:08, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

    Very well, then. I am going to propose a change to the MR section, and if it is acceptable, I will make similar clean up of the OOA. I've gotten rid of most of the MR references to polygenism and the detailed evidence. I've also removed the section dealing with the assumptions of the theory, since that is better to have in the article about MR. Like you said, there is no reason to deal with the cart here in the horse's section. If you both like it, I will do likewise to OOA section. Enjoy.Esdraelon 21:35, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    Well, that was rather immature of you. Could you please explain why you keep saying that if the information is a misrepresentation of the source that the information should be changed, yet when anyone has made such attempts, you change it back? What was wrong with my changes? Can you explain why what is written in the current article is relevant? If you cannot explain why it is relevant, then it needs to be changed. Before you go and change things, you could also offer some insight in the talk pages as to why. Right now, no offence, but you're just acting like a troll.Esdraelon 22:53, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
    Now, I think it is only fitting that you leave my edits remain for a few days until we can get more comments on whether they show improvement over the old page or not.Esdraelon 00:20, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

    I agree with you, Esdraelon in that you have made the topic simpler to understand by proposing removal of the polygenism references. I am no expert in this field and need to be able to follow along with basic premises. Good job. 06:37, 22 October 2007 (UTC)(JCL)

    I would tend to say that SLRubenstein's version reads and flows better, and is just as accurate, from what I could check in the references. I'm concerned that Esdraelon's version removes explanations needed in this section; the fact that some of it may already exist in another article isn't really good enough, as most readers won't read the other articles to know what they're missing, and comparing both versions, I find that Esdraelon's removes important passages needed for understanding the section. The only caveat I would make would be that I would move the polygenism explanation to a footnote (rather than removing it altogether).--Ramdrake 10:51, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

    Can I ask if anyone who's commented here has actually read the article in question? And instead of saying "explanations needed in this section", can you explain why they are needed? I value your opinion, but only if you can add some reasoning to your view. I still do not think this should be a place to air out the scientific laundry of these two theories; there are other articles for that. This should tell the nature of the theory, its bigger arguments, and how that all relates to race. The hypotheses, assumptions, specific African exodus dates... all are totally irrelevant other than in the scientific aspects of the theories, which this article is not meant for. Furthermore, the article is so blasted long (even the section in question has been flagged) that it's completely false to state it is more readable the other way; the sliver-sized scroll bar and the endless block of text of this article make it extremely off-putting the way it is. If it's not shortened, you're bound to have even fewer people who even read this article, let alone the others.

    "most readers won't read the other articles to know what they're missing" Good. What they're missing has no relevance to the race article. There's lots missing in this article—when was the first Viking conquest? Who's the president?—but to include such things is not justified simply because some readers don't want to have to click their mouse to do further research. If the readers come to learn about race, then that is what should be included. If they want to learn about the science, then there are links plenty for them to do so.

    Also, as has been said numerous times: "Against these assumptions, they argue that regional variations in these features can thus be taken as evidence for long term differences among genus Homo individuals that prefigure different races among present-day Homo sapiens individuals, and do not necessarily support the multi-regional model."

    This sentence implies that Lieberman and Jackson have argued against these assumptions, though anyone who has read the article can see that that is clearly not the case. If nothing else changes, that sentence must be deleted, as if violates the Wikipedia verifiability rules. Plain, and simple. Esdraelon 16:29, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


    Slrubenstein, I am asking you to please provide argumentation indicating why you keep reverting the article back to its older form. Your argumentation should show that you have read the article in question. Your argumentation should show that you understand the context of the report and can therefore judge relevance of materials. Your argumentation should be in support of the current article version; simply attacking the edits I have suggested does nothing to validate any other versions. Your argumentation should relate to the content of the article, and should not address things such as how it sounds, or how it flows—such superficial details can be dealt with later.
    If you cannot come to the discussion and present this information, then I can view your re-edits as nothing more than trolling, no offence. Wikipedia guidelines maintain that you should provide a summary indicating the reasons behind your edits. Please allow the page to remain for some time so that more opinions can be given. Thank you,Esdraelon 21:25, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
    I think there is some need to differentiate between the two multiregional models. Clearly the modern concept of multiregionalism is different to that accepted in the past. In the past multiregionalism represented the evolution of Homo sapiens independently in different regions, this is what Templeton calls the "candelabra" model. Indeed Templeton points out that the candelabra model for multiregionalism is similar to the RAO model, except that the RAO model posits a very recent migration out of Africa by AMHs, whereas the multiregional candelabra model posits a very ancient migration out of Africa, followed by the evolution of full AMHs independently from H. erectus. The modern multiregional hypothesis (which isn't strictly speaking multiregionalism because it does not propose independent evolution of modernity, but rather treats the whole Hominin population as a single massive interbreeding population with gene flow between these groups continuing over long periods of time) is characterised more as a trellis model by Temleton. I think Templeton's 1998 paper can serve some purpose to clarify here. See Templeton (1998) Human Races:A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective. [27] Is it clear which model Jackson and Lieberman are referring to? I'm currently plodding through this paper and may have more to say when I get some time to finish reading it. Cheers. Alun 05:33, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
    Alun, I encourage you to add the distinction if you have verifiable sources AND if the distinction is relevant to discussions of race. I think Leiberman and Jackson identify MRH mostly with Wolpoff. The key thing is to focus on what if any rlevance these models have to do with race. That is the focus of Lieberman and Jackson. if, after plodding through it, you can improve upon what we have in the article - kudos!! Slrubenstein | Talk 11:45, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


    [edit] Proposal for renaming

    Because "race" in the sense of "social construct" is not the primary definition of "race", readers typing race in the search box should not end up on this page but on the disambiguation page where their first look at the word is not a POV. This would help encyclopedic principals and the principal of least surprise.
    Consider this a Call for name change proposals--Tallard 16:54, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    Tallard, what do you figure is the primary definition of "race"?--Ramdrake 16:56, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
    I think I may have answered your question at the Wikipedia helpdesk.--Ramdrake 17:21, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    According to Collins dictionary, 1.race noun, competition, 2.race verb, competition, 3.race human grouping. Yes it important to anthropologists, but the vast majority of wikipedia readers typing «race» want the event, not the humanities :) So we should not artificially impose this anthropoligical debate as the primary definition of the word.--Tallard 18:22, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    hahahaha! Okay I think I agree. I was in a foot race last sunday and I was thinking about just this when I was working in the wiki afterwards. BUt then what the hack to we call this page? futurebird 18:32, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    Well because this article is for humans only, we need to distinguish it from any biological sense, and let race on its own be a disambiguation page. Here are some ideas to start:

    • race (social construct) user:Leebo (copied by tallard from the help page)
    I prefer this one--Tallard 19:25, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
    • race (grouping)
    • race (humanities)
    How about disambiguating between Race (competition) and Race (anthropology)? It's not obvious to me that one should have unqualified preference to the term, so I would qualify both terms. How about it?--Ramdrake 19:46, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
    That seems very reasonable IMO, with race on its own being disambiguation :)--Tallard 20:04, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    I am not convinced that more people come to WP interested in articles on race (competition) than race (category of people). That said, obviously we don't want to mix people up. Currently, the article leads with a link to a disambiguation page. It sounds to me like the solution fo Tallard's concern would be to have "Race" go straight to the disambiguation page. We would need to make no other changes. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:23, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    You read my mind! :) --Ramdrake 20:50, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
    I went ahead boldly and did it.--Ramdrake 21:04, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

    I even more boldly changed the name to race (classification of human beings) for three reasons: First, I think this is a more direct and accurate descrition of what the article is about: it is about a concept, race, that is used to classify human beings. It is not about some strictly anthropological concept of race - race is a concept that has ong been studied by anthropologists but it is not an anthropological conept as such. Second, the article does not rely exclusively on anthropological sources. It relies heavily on anthropological sources for obvious reasons, but it also relies on evolutionary biologists, molecular geneticists, historians, and sociologists. Third, one could argue that anthropologists and historians and evolutionary biologists look at race in slightly different ways (I think there is a strong mainstream view shared by scientists, which is why there are vast areas of agreement - but different discipines focus on diffeent questions and apply different methods and in these ways we can say they take specific points of view) - but Wikipdia prohibits POV forks. race = competition versus race = classification of humans is an entirely permissible content fork, but race (social sciences) versus race (natural scientists) vesus race (humanities), or anything like ths, would be a POV fork and against policy. I think "classification of human beings" is clear enough so that anyone interested in this topic will have no problems zeroing in on the right article. Slrubenstein | Talk 01:12, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

    Agree, I like the new title. futurebird 02:19, 30 October 2007 (UTC)


    I'd like to suggest a slightly different approach. I think we should have two separate articles. One article would be Race (social construct), the other Race (biological). In the first article would be all the information from the current article that deals with race in terms of as a social construct, based on the superficial features such as skin colour, hair colour, etc. and how that has impacted society. In the second article would be race in terms of morphological differences and regional variations, such as average height, skull shape, etc. and how that has altered scientific understandings of race. Then, have a third article Race, that introduces race as being applicable to either, gives a summary of both with links to their main pages, and then concludes with information on how the two ideas relate and have been impacted by one another.

    This would help in trying to name an article that deals with somewhat of a topic too wide to pin to one aspect, as well as shortening the current article and solve the length problem. Any takers?Esdraelon 10:37, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

    Unfortunately, that would be very much a POV fork, at least as applied to humans. There is I believe an article about race (biology) that discusses race as a subspecies concept (but one which is not applicable to humans).--Ramdrake 11:25, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    Definitely agree with Ramdrake, it is a total POV fork and forbidden. We are not talking about two kinds of races, we are talking about two approaches to or understandings of race. inter alia I am not concerned about the length of this article as long as it is properly introduced and clearly organized. Wikipedia is not paper, and while we have an optimal size for articles we shoul dnot be surprised that some are far shorter and others far longer. this is a complex and controversial topic and the article ought to be longer than the optimal. Slrubenstein | Talk 11:40, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    "we are talking about two approaches to or understandings of race."
    Exactly, we are talking about a biological approach and a sociological approach, which is why they should have two separate articles, with the main race article serving as a connecting device between the two. When biologists talk about race (humans), they are referring to things that are scientifically rooted based on the evolutionary history trend of a particular group of people. When sociologists talk about race, they are talking about stereotypical assumptions people make and groupings they make based on superficial physical/cultural/religious/etc. characteristics. These are two different understandings of race, and to include them in the same article is to confuse the two, and is why this article is so long and messy, and frankly, impossible to read or organise.Esdraelon 12:32, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    Actually, the very existence of race as a meaningful biological construct for humans is controversial at best, and actually largely discredited by modern science. There is basically no biological basis for the existence of "races" among humankind, based in part on the fact that genetics has foudn more variation within "races" than between them, and also on a better understanding that the traits by which we usually define "race" tend to have a clinal variation. The best analogy is this: walk from Oslo to Nairobi, and tell me when people stop being "white" and start being "black". You can't, as it's a gradual variation.--Ramdrake 12:43, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    Esdraelon, what you call the "biological approach to race" sociologists of science call a social construction. You seem to think that biologists are not human beings. They are, they belong to society, they have culture, and they are as involved in social constructions as other people. You may reject this point of view but it is a valid point of view and you cannot remove it from the article. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:50, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    according to your line of argument, then, physics must be a social construction because physicists are human? dab (𒁳) 13:43, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    It is not my line of argument, it is the strong version of the social constructionist argument. And whether yo like it or not, it is a notable view that needs to be included in the article. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    the "strong version of the subjective constructionist argument" is solipsism, and we don't dedicate a section to that in every article: this would be absurd. dab (𒁳) 16:31, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    Do not change the topic. I am talking about social construction, I did notuse the word "subjective" which is not relevant to this approach, nor am I talking about solipsism. And the argument that races are social constructs is a very important POV. Say whatever you want but it will be represented in this article. Period. You will do nothing to take it out. And do not keep changing the subject, we are talking about this article on this talk page. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    this is a misunderstanding then. I wouldn't dream of disputing that aspects of the notion of "race" include social constructs. There are biological facts, and then there are social constructs involving these facts. The notion of "race" involves both aspects, even though they can be discussed independently. dab (𒁳) 17:35, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

    No way. Total POV fork. Keep it all in one place. futurebird 13:25, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

    • race (anthropology) seems best: this still includes both biologist and sociological approaches. futurebird is right that the two aspects cannot be split as if they were orthogonal: any forking must be by WP:SS (branching out sub-articles), not disambiguation. The current title (classification of human beings) is certainly correct and well intentioned, but it is unwieldy and sounds clumsy. dab (𒁳) 13:42, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    No, anthropology is one academic discipline; this article draws on research from a varity of disciplines because different disciplines offer different views of the same phenomenon. An article should be on one phenomenon, and include multiple views of that phenomenon. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
    Nope, point ov view forks are against policy, and with good reason. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:20, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Concerns about POV forking

    Section break from directly above.

    I support dab's motion to, at the very least, chop'n'summarize up the article (hence, the original reason I placed the split tags and article length concerns up on several sections in the first place). Furthermore, I can assure you that my only POV bias on this article is trimming it down, as I'm totally disinterested in the article's subject matter. I mean, not to denigrate other peoples' interests here, but bones, lineages, and race, in general, is boring to me. I'm a computer programmer and a wannabe doctor, and anthropology and sociology is relatively boring to me. But, that's the exact reason why I'm trying to help here.

    So, while it might not be worth anything for me to say it, as some people might assume bad faith, I assure you that I could very much care less which point of view is correct or incorrect, but a simple fact remains: less needs to be said about all of them on this page. Check out the Manual of Style entry on summarizing sections and forking them for more info on how this is done.

    As it stands, there are a few things we need to keep in mind:

    1. There might be a conflict of interest. Several editors here, judging by some contributions to the talk page and the article in general, may have a vested interest in keeping citations to their works in the most highly-visible locations. This article appears to be a heavily academic article, and, from what I know of the world of academia, things like tenure and citation counts factor in heavily to a researcher's self interest. As such, I would implore all academics involved in editing this article to critically read Wikipedia's conflict of interest policy so that actual work can be done on the article without objections based on perceived devaluing of one's contribution to the field.
    2. The main concerns in forking are article size and accessibility. In my opinion, this trumps neutral point of view policy allegations temporarily, because people can't even be subjected to a neutral (or alleged non-neutral) point of view if they can't even load the page. Don't get me wrong-- I do not support content forking one viewpoint over another, but rather the entire content area of a viewpoint (like "Race in the United States" needs to be forked, but not solely John Doe's research on it). NPOV allegations should more come during the summarizing phase, as it is frequent that the end summary might over-emphasize one field or another, use an inappropriate tone, use weasel words, or any number of other things. However, the actual fork of these huge section blobs of highly-detailed information should not be viewed as a POV-related fork any more than splitting a long paragraph into smaller paragraphs in a novel should be either-- just so long as there isn't clear bias in the forking lines.
    3. There is a main article fixation as some have pointed out. That is, there is a tendency for editors on extremely general, highly-visible topics (like Race) to over-emphasize the importance of highly-detailed minutiae rather than simply summarizing it, making a new page, making a subsection on the parent page, and potentially placing it in an article series. If someone is interested in creating an article series, I'd be more than welcome to get the ball rolling and/or help you out, and I was considering doing it myself anyway once we chop back the main article and the dust settles.

    --slakr\ talk / 00:37, 31 October 2007 (UTC) I agree with the concept of chopping down the article for improved readability. Most of the articles are already in existence, all that is required is to summarize and move the content. We could create a race template that shows all the race related articles. Muntuwandi 01:15, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

    I don't have any issue per se either against splitting out viable sub-articles, as long as all viewpoints are presented on debated issues wherever applicable, i.e., that WP:NPOV is respected throughout. And just as a side note to Slakr, NPOV is one of the five pillars of Wikipedia and as such, far supersedes any concerns of size and even supersedes accessibility. For the record, I would, however, specifically and strongly object to splitting out this article into one of "race is a social construct" and one of "race is a biological construct", as it would be a very obvious POV fork.--Ramdrake 11:45, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
    What are the POV forks? In other words, how do you see it as a POV fork? Also, the article at its current length is unreadable. It would be one thing if it were simply long, but it presents such a wide and detailed aspect of the issue that it's just impossible for any reader to digest. I find the idea of splitting and creating an article series to be terrific, and the best chance of cleaning this article up.Esdraelon 18:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
    Exactly. Believe me, I totally already know the importance of NPOV (lol), but this is my point exactly. Even I don't have the patience to sift through the article to learn more about it and why particular things might be POV over another (in its current state), because it's hard to even discern between the subjects and what they're all talking about and what biases each might have. Section two is particularly ridiculous in size and incomprehensibility. That's what I'm talking about when I say that NPOV takes a passenger seat to accessibility, because when even potential POV issues can't even be discerned amidst the hodgepodge of information, there's a big problem.
    Most importantly, I cannot emphasize this enough: any information removed from this article should be summarized with a link to the new article. That is, I would not argue that this article be dissolved and two new articles be formed. Instead, the goal is to summarize the various divisions (there could easily be more than three-- in fact, there probably will be) into a paragraph or two, then stick the highly detailed information into the new pages, providing a clear link (either through an article series table placed at the top of the page, or simply using {{seealso}} and its relatives.
    Again, the goal is not to dissolve this article, only to make it shorter and move important, topic-specific details into their own articles for better and more encyclopedic accessibility.
    As a side note, the article titles wouldn't be "race is..." but almost certainly "race as...," as the titles would avoid thesis-like presentation, since I agree, saying "race is" would, no matter what the topic, be POV, much like saying "abortion is (moral|immoral|whatever...)." Thus, I definitely understand concerns about article wording. On the upside, it's easy to change article names by simply moving them, so we shouldn't have to worry too much about the name, so long as we present all relevant viewpoints within the particular article fairly.
    Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 20:56, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Article series template

    FYI, I went ahead and made a starting point template for an article series using {{Race}}. Feel free to edit accordingly. Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 04:47, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Major revamp

    Since nobody else volunteered to do it, I've made a very bold series of edits to the page. In sum, it took around two straight hours of cutpaste. Basically, I gutted it, moved highly detailed information elsewhere, and summarized it as best as I could. Before knee-jerk reverting, please take a few minutes to look over all of the things I did. I can't really enumerate every edit, but long story short, the page is now in line with WP:ACCESS and should hopefully eliminate nearly all NPOV concerns with this page.

    This is by no means a complete/final edit, and everyone is encouraged to help make it better. However, if you do have an objection, instead of reverting and spending the next few months arguing, simply go and fix it yourself (see {{sofixit}} for the gist of what I'm trying to say). I'll summarize what was done:

    • Split all of the anthropological stuff into new article Race debate and left behind what looked like some sort of summary/tie-together. I figured that this was the only way to make the split as neutral as possible. Feel free to edit as necessary, but please keep the specific details in the Race debate article.
    • Merged "marketing of race" section into Race debate article. I wasn't 100% on that one, but I figured it was detailed enough to assume some sort of genetic point of view or something, so I stuck it there. Feel free to move or whatever.
    • Demoted regional sections toward end of page (as general race issues trump local race issues).
    • Sectionified "Race in law enforcement". I don't really know what to do on this one. Neither Racial profiling nor Race and crime really apply, so I considered splitting it into a new article. I'm undecided. Maybe someone else has an idea?

    I think that's most of it. Check out the articles, make changes, etc. Again, ideally, use this as a starting point and readd/delete information from here. I selfishly say this because I don't want to have to sift through mounds of text again. :P We're sitting at 57 kilobytes total page size, which is ideal for accessibility. The edges are still a bit rough, but I'm hoping we can smooth it all over, since we've got a lot of bright experts editing this page. In my opinion, with only a small bit of extra work from here, we can get this article back to featured article status.

    Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 01:54, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

    Its a bold effort, I question the term Race debate and whether the article really reflects a debate, rather than scientific concepts. In principal I am for shortening the article. Muntuwandi 01:57, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
    Ah, feel free to change, obviously. I simply fashioned it on Abortion debate. I'm not familiar with all of the points of view with regard to the various theories, so I figured I'd just assume it was some sort of debate *shrug*. :P --slakr\ talk / 02:04, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
    Just brainstorming: maybe "Modern race theories"? --slakr\ talk / 02:07, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
    Granted that we will not agree on everything, I think you did a pretty good job! Thanks! Just a few points:
    The historical definition of race was an immutable and distinct type or species, sharing distinct racial characteristics such as constitution, temperament, and mental abilities. These races were not conceived as being related with each other, but formed a hierarchy of inherent value called the Great Chain of Being with Europeans usually at the top.
    The word "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, were products of European imperialism and colonization during the age of exploration. (Smedley 1999)
    Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest much more importance in familial or tribal affiliation than with one's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992[Cite]; Goldenberg 2003[Cite]). Ancient Greek and Roman authors also attempted to explain and categorize visible biological differences among peoples known to them.
    I think the chronoloy of this account is messed up and needs fixing. I think "th historical definition of race" is vague and vulnerable to being understood in too broad a sense. There is considerable evidence that the Romans did not think of rae as immutable ans as a distinct type or species. This so-called historical definition in fact, fits better with the second (one sentence) paragraph describing the concept of race as it emerged in the 16th-17th centuries.
    I think it is espeically important to be clearer about the chronomolgy and the historical framnework within which races were seen as biologically immutable - that period is as the second sentence suggests largely associated with the time of European colonial expansion, but just as importantly, it is before Darwin - because it helps us better understand and perhaps more appropriately name and describe) the "race debate." The race debate is actually two (or three) debates. The first debate was a debate over whether races are biologically immutable among scientists and during the time of the rise of evolutionary theory i.e. a period of major transition - a paradigm shift - in the biological sciences. This debate largely was resolved among scientists with the rise of the modern synthesis (the resolution being, no, races are not biologically immutable). However, this debae continues outside of scientists or at east outside of evolutionary scientists i.e., it may include some scientists who are not specialists in evolution, but it mostly involves a popular audience (so is it the first debate continued, or a second debate?). The other major debate - if we are limiting ourselves to scientists, then the second debate, is not over the meaning of race, but rather over how best to account for biological variation among humans. This second debate is very similar to the first debate and non-specialists can easily be confused by it, which is why i think some people including myself are uncomfortable with the phrase "race debate." it is similar because on both debates people are talking about human biological variation. But it is ultimately fundamentally different for a couple of reasons: (1) in the 19th century debates, race was assumed and accounting for human variaton was a problem that needed explaining. But within the Darwinian framework, biological variation is not a problem at all but indeed normal and desirable. In the Darwinian framework, understanding human variation is ultimately linked to explaining how species - not just subspecies (arguably, race for 19th century biologists = subspecies) but whole species - are mutable and further all related to one another. (2) the first debate (especially in its 20th century popular form) is about the meaning of a word, "race," whereas the secoind debate (20th century scientists) is relatively unconcerned with the word race, let alone its meaning, and rather focuses on mapping human phenotypic and genotypic variation and accounting for it. This is not really a debate for or against race; it is a debate about the relative roles of natural selection and drift, the relationship between environment/geography and phenotype (important in natural selection) and the history of interbreeding populations (important when drift is more salient). IF "race" is a way of talking about immutable groups, this second debate has nothing to do with race. IF "race" is a way of talking about phenotypic variation and mutability, the second debate is related to race. In other words, it is ambiguous, an ambiguity involving semantics, and this ambiguity perhaps could be explained better. Slakr, you have put a lot of good work into it recently and if what I wrte makes sense to you I would invite you to make the changes (and feel free to cut and paste anything I wrote but I think for the sake of consistent style, you should rewrite what i wrote.
    My third issue is, I think tht more of the material on the social construction of races - case studies - need to go in because i think these case-studies actually get to theheart of what race is today. So, my initial comments on Slakr's efforts. Slrubenstein | Talk 02:52, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
    Eek. Sorry if I made any errors or misunderstood anything. If you see stuff that needs changing, is incorrect, vague, or otherwise could do with differentness, please definitely change it up. Even if the tone is inconsistent, the more important part is that the information reflects the research/text. For me, it's a whole lot easier to go back and copyedit and correct for manual of style-type things, just so long as the information is correct. :P So, obviously, if there's something that needs changing, I'd rather defer to someone who knows a bunch about the field. I just wanted to get the ball rolling. :D So again, if you find something that needs changing, please change. I'm much more of a fixer-upper anyway. :P Cheers =) --slakr\ talk / 22:02, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

    I appreciate your being bold but I tried my best to improve it and came to the conclusion that we need one omnibus article, see explanation below. If sections of this article should be linked to other sections - on population genetics, on molecular genetics, on the social construction of race - we should not remove content from this article to those. Rather, those articles should go into much more detail and be much broader than what has been written in these articles. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:24, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] let's slow down

    I have spent the past month going over all of the various spin-offs of this article and have concluded that while they were very well-intended, it was a big mistake. Race is a controversial topic and we simply have to expect an article to be longer than articles on simple and non-controversial topics (i.e. there cannot be an absolute standard for the length or simplcity of an article; the length and simplicity of an article is an index of the simplicity or complexity of the topic).

    I do not think there was sufficient consensus for the split of an article that was fairly stable given the controversy of the topic. Also, some material was lost in the split. In my view, many of the spun-off articles were poorly organized and unclear - i do not say this to disparage Slakr or anyone else, who I am sure had good intentions, I just think that it was a failed experiment; it produced smaller articles at the sacrifice of clarity and quality. Finally, the split could function as a POV fork, providing people with a way to read about material from their own point of view without seeing its relation to other points of views.

    I am convinced that the current structure provides the best framework for a high-quality NPOV article on a very complex and controvesial topic. I am trying to add to this article things that were recently added to the spin-off articles that comply with NPOV, V and NOR and hope others will help. Slrubenstein | Talk 17:47, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

    I think splitting the biological information from the "social" information is, mostly likely, a POV fork already. It will only get worse over time. futurebird (talk) 18:51, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
    I agree with Slrubenstein. This is a very difficult, complicated, controversial topic, and should be in one place to avoid the POV forks that have sprung about. It deserves to be longer, because, heck, it covers the human race! Not branched off into other articles to apply another POV. I don't have the patience to work on this right now though. There has been too much controversy and backlash from all the POV fork articles as it is -- so much so, that I have become disillusioned, and caused myself a poor reputation on Wikipedia as a "disruptive, problematic user". Yes, lets slow down. - Jeeny (talk) 05:00, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] When you say "race"

    When a person says race it can mean one of many things. The "controversy" is over what the "true" meaning of race really is. Hence we can't split these things up--There isn't an academic consensus that there is something called "biological race" and something else called "socially constructed race" rather there is an academic argument where a small minority still supports "biological race" but the majority view race as socially constructed, beyond that, among those who see it as constructed there is another equally important argument about its usefulness in disciplines such as medicine: this is an argument about the usefulness of socially constructed race in medicine. We need to cover all of that in one article and not give the impression that the terms are really split-- they aren't the argument is about if there is a split, by splitting this up we're representing the POV that such a split is possible and makes sense. futurebird (talk) 18:57, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

    Nice analysis. Alun (talk) 20:10, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

    Hi. I don't know if this is where Futurebird was heading, but I think it's dangerous to reduce this debate to a matter of semantics. There are differences of opinion and perception, to be sure, but there is a little light that science can shed on the matter, too. Preconceptions and reactions to race are definitely social, subjective, and fluid, but claims about race can sometimes be made testable, and judged against the evidence (in which case they invariably end up getting convicted). When we say that "there is more physical variation within large human populations than between them", this isn't just semantics. It's factual, it's scientific, and it's biological. My fear is that reducing the discussion simply to a he-said-she-said "different people have different ideas about what race should be" might obscure the important fact that many people have believed, and still believe, in notions of "race" that cannot be. FilipeS (talk) 20:32, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

    Yes we definitely need biological research here. The biological research done into human variation generally contradicts concepts of racialism. Indeed racialists have started to cling to the fig leaf of clustering analyses, even though these analyses are really about how a very tiny amount of variation is distributed. Currently the problem is more about how to sample human populations in an unbiased way. The HGDP has had all sorts of problems due to it's insistence on sampling by "ethnic group", which has produced biased results. If we include a balanced discussion of clinality, clustering and gene sharing between groups then the reader can make an informed decision about how human variation is distributed. On that note I have just done a big revamp of the clustering section and the lineage section, these almost certainly need copy editing (I found it quite challenging and much of the info may need further clarification). I have tried to keep all of the relevant info in the section, while removing redundant text and adding further relevant information. On another note we probably need to have a section about haplotypes. There has been quite a lot of work recently on this subject and it is relevant to genetic variation. Especially interesting is a paper about a specific segment of DNA on the X chromosome. I'll have to have a bit of a read about it and see what is pertinent. I'm glad this article is back together again, it makes much more sense to keep it all together. Cheers, Alun (talk) 09:11, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
    In other words, clustering studies don't confirm your silly fantasies, so you must find some way, how "to sample human populations in an unbiased way" and get politically correct results. A brief look at world's populations could tell you that except some intermediate mixed groups, the racial areas are not touched by any significant gene flow from other racial areas, so the racial clusters will always be clearly separated and your hopes are futile. But you can't obviously use common sense, because you don't have any. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 03:33, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
    "A brief look" - and that is your "scientific method?" Hah hah!! You must be joking. Clustering studies are very clearly about a small amount of information. That is no fantasy. I don't know what you mean by adding the word "politically" - correct results are correct results and this article needs to avoid original research and report accurately, even if it disturbs your view of the world, based, as it is, on only a "brief look" at all the populations of the whole world. Slrubenstein | Talk 13:54, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
    Your only "advantage" in this dispute is your ignorance of human interracial differences. You probably think that all racial differences are limited to skin color, hair form or the form of the nose. If you knew something about anthropology, you would know that even groups that show to be very similar in clustering studies represent the largest physiological opposites documented on Earth (e.g. West Africans x Nilotes). Since I have studied this topic for many years, I know how large these differences are in muscle development, muscle distribution (or even muscle type!), bone structure and density, hormone levels, hemoglobine concentration, lung capacity, fat distribution, and the whole body structure - from body widths to body lengths. (And I could continue even further, if I were interested in other physiological differences.) You can't imagine, how incredibly comical you are with your claims about "very tiny differences". Many of the PC clowns refuting the race concept are well-aware how large these differences are - e.g. Mr. Loring Brace - but they want to swim with the PC current and claim the exact opposite of what they find in their studies.
    The debate isn't about if human races exist - such debates are appropriate only for lunatic asylums - , but how to find the best way to classify human beings - what groups can be classified as "main/great races", what can be classified as racial subgroups, what are intermediate/mixed groups. The clustering studies don't differ much from the classification of traditional anthropology, but they are certainly more accurate and markedly improve our understanding of human genetic differences. We should only wait for a detailed study of populations in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, where the situation will be "more complex" than in Eurasia and America with their relatively simple Caucasoid/Mongoloid/Native American division. Centrum99 (talk) 21:24, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
    SLR, may I respectfully suggest that you do not feed the troll?--Ramdrake (talk) 13:56, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
    You are quite right! Slrubenstein | Talk 14:29, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
    I am a "troll"? And who are you? It is a disgrace for Wikipedia that a page about human races is filled with obsolete, discredited science of certain "scientists" with political agenda.
    http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/222389599v1?ijkey=f3uGSmr3wB0r
    http://www.goodrumj.com/Edwards.pdf
    The whole page is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, clearly reflecting the fact that it is edited by two groups of people, who can't come to an agreement. The desperate attempt of Serre and Paabo to "blur" Rosenberg's clusters was already convincingly refuted by Rosenberg et al. in 2005:
    http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070
    I wonder, why someone can't understand that populations that have been separated for 45 000 years and mixed in peripheral regions only during recent thousands of years (but mostly only during recent centuries), still must make up distinct clusters? Perphaps a lack of basic school education?
    Why does the article state that "'Race' is a legitimate taxonomic concept that works for chimpanzees but does not apply to humans", when the preceding paragraph shows that human autosomal variation (0.06-0.10) is moderate in comparison with other mammals and thus sufficient for racial classification? Correct me, if I am wrong - I am not a geneticist - but didn't Cavalli-Sforza (1994) show that autosomal Fst in humans can be as high as 0.43 between Pygmies Mbuti and Australian Aborigines? Not speaking about that the variation in cranial morphology in humans and great apes is comparable. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 02:08, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    • The desperate attempt of Serre and Paabo to "blur" Rosenberg's clusters was already convincingly refuted by Rosenberg et al. in 2005:
    That'd be the 2005 paper in which Rosenberg et al. state: Serre and Pääbo argue that human genetic diversity consists of clines of variation in allele frequencies. We agree and had commented on this issue in our original paper ([3], p. 2382): “In several populations, individuals had partial membership in multiple clusters, with similar membership coefficients for most individuals. These populations might reflect continuous gradations across regions or admixture of neighboring groups.” So it's not a refutation at all, they agree with Serre and Pääbo. Have you actually read what Rosenberg et al. actually wrote in 2005? You link to this paper above, but it does not support your claim at all.
    Well, now you showed that I should find better ways, how to spend my time than talking to a wall. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 16:55, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    • The whole page is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, clearly reflecting the fact that it is edited by two groups of people, who can't come to an agreement.
    Or possibly it simply reflects the fact that all points of view are given? This is a requirement of Wikipedia as per the neutral point of view policy. What you are actually saying is that this paper conforms to one of Wikipedia's core policies. That'd be called a compliment normally.
    The quotes in the article are grouped in such a way that it makes no sense. How can you counterbalance an argument by another argument that is based on nothing or on obsolete science that is no more valid and refuted by the previous argument? What about if you had a page about Planet Earth and you would list "opinions" of medieval scientists that Earth is the center of the Universe and Sun moves around it? Would it be maximally objective for Wikipedia? 82.100.61.114 (talk) 16:55, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    • I wonder, why someone can't understand....
    Wikipedia is not the place for personal opinion, this is not a blog, nor a chatroom, nor a forum. Keep this about the article, the article needs to reflect all points of view, the fact that you only want it to have a single point of view displays both a bias and a lack of understanding of Wikipedia policy on your part. Alun (talk) 15:11, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    As for "a single point of view", I observe it very frequently here on Wikipedia. What about the page about Franz Boas? Despite his clownish science, he is portrayed as a genius of anthropology, while Carleton Coon is almost depicted as Hitler's court racial advisor and his opinions are simply refuted by a hint at the "work of Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Leonard Lieberman and others", whose opinions are, curiously, taken as an undisputable truth here without the need of listing other scientists' points of view.
    All the fuss around Boas' "cranial plasticity" actually only concerns skeletal changes that occured in European immigrants in America (and later in Europeans theirselves) as a consequence of improved nutrition during the 20th century. The harsh conditions during the medieval "Little Ice Age" caused a decrease of body height coupled with brachycephalization (decrease of cranial index). What we observe today is nothing more or less than a return on the genetically determined level. So, for example, Czech men "plasticly" increased their body height from 167 to 180 cm and cranial index from 85 to 80% during the past century, but I would guess that even genius Boas didn't think that one day in the future all people in Europe will have the same cranial index and the same body height. Improved nutrition didn't help Southern Europeans to markedly increase their body height over 175 cm, as well as it didn't help Japanese, one of the richest nations in the world, to increase body height more than on 171 cm (and their high cranial index doesn't change - well, it has actually increased!). 82.100.61.114 (talk) 16:55, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
    I agree that this article is laughable as it is. Races are extended families. What in that statement is so difficult for the modern average Joe to understand? I wonder... In any case, now someone needs to bother to look for and find a couple of good sources that make this statement while perhaps even elaborating on the implications of it, and then that someone can proceed to make at least some improvements to this article.
    "Races are extended families"... wonderful revisionism! FilipeS (talk) 13:27, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
    Of course, the desperate comrades present here on Wikipedia dig every obsolete quotation to counterbalance the growing evidence against their silly fabrications, and fill the article with unnecessary ballast, which creates a true mess of it. They even nonsensically want to define race as species (because only species can't mix and hence they can create "non-overlapping zones"). Why don't they list the recent study of Bastos-Rodriguez (2006) showing how well the quotation of Serre and Pääbo about "the absence of strong continental clustering in the human gene pool" reflects the reality? Centrum99 (talk) 01:15, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
    Please see wikipedia is not a saop box. We are here to represent all points of view. Thanks. Alun (talk) 22:31, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
    But the views must be based on some solid facts. The article quotes obsolete science that could be cited 10-15 years ago, but now it is not valid anymore! This makes the whole article unnecessarily messy. But still, in comparison with the parodic article on CITIZENDIUM, WIKIPEDIA is the model of objectivity! Centrum99 (talk) 17:08, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
    No, articles must be based on information that is verifiable. That is a policy, it is a core policy and clearly states that wikipedia is based on verifiability not truth. When we verify things we do so from reliable sources. If we verify from reliable sources then we need to also take note of neutrality, so that we ensure that all relevant points of view are given, but we need to remember not to give undue weight to some points of view, which means that tiny minority points of view do not need to be mentioned. In addition to all of this we need to make sure that we do not include original research. Wikipedia is not here to promote your or my point of view, but published points of view, this needs to be the case or we cannot verify them properly. No matter what you personally think, these are the core values of Wikipedia, if you cannot accept them then I can only conclude that you are in the wrong place. This talk page is not here to discuss the validity of the concept of "race" as a biological reality, it is here to discuss the article and the article needs to discuss what "race" is in different contexts. The validity of human genetic variation is not some sort of coup de grâce as you seem to be implying, and I know of no reliable source that claims that this information invalidates all previous published academic thought on the subject. Even if you can provide a reliable source that makes this claim, then we certainly can cite it in the article, but it does not mean that we should ignore all other published work, that would not be encyclopaedic. These core policies and guidelines are fundamental to editing Wikipeda, you do not seem to understand them in the least, nor do you seem to be prepared to follow them. You seem to think that the article should give only a single point of view, i.e. your point of view. That's never going to happen and insulting people is just going to get you blocked, especially if you continue to make overtly racist comments like this and this. Alun (talk) 21:04, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
    Dear Wobble, you can't probably understand that I wonder, why these "published points of view" are not strictly listed on some pages like e.g. that about Carleton Coon. Here, the PC view of race seems to be proven without doubt. Interesting. You naturally have a right to list all the PC babble, but I remarked that an excessive number of such unnecessary, obsolete quotations made the article needlessly messy. Note please, that I have never made any changes in the article on my own. I only came with criticism and suggestions on this discussion forum. For example, the whole paragraph starting "It has also been noted that:" could be erased without any loss of objectivity and important information. If you think that it is necessary, so let it there; it will become outdated soon or later anyway.
    And as for Gypsies, I forgive you the blatant insult of all decent people in Central Europe because of your obvious unfamiliarity with Central European realities. Centrum99 (talk) 01:50, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

    WP:DNFTT Slrubenstein | Talk 19:30, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

    What about some arguments, dear Mr. Rubenstein? What if we talked a little about racial differences in humans? I suppoose you are virtually loaded with knowledge! Centrum99 (talk) 03:18, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

    [edit] Splitting article into smaller articles

    Hello all. I would like to suggest splitting this article into smaller articles. As you can see, the article size for this article is currently at 163 KB, which is quite a big size. I think many of the sections can be split into a separate article.

    Yes, although some of the sections have a 'See Also:...' and 'Main article:...', I feel more sections can also follow suit. Seeing that this article is substantially long, it would be a better idea for the sections to have its own article, so that the article size can be reduced.

    Thank you. Angcr (talk) 14:09, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

    Slakr did just that and there was a strong consensus that noble effort though it was it did not work. This is a great article on a very controvesial and complex topic and we just need to accept that complex and controverisal topics require longer articles Slrubenstein | Talk 22:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
    Ok, thank you for your comments. Angcr (talk) 00:57, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
    I agree with Angcr. This article is impossibly long--no one could read this in a single sitting--and in dire need of some WP:SS. I may do some cutting down here and there soon. Calliopejen1 (talk) 03:43, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    yes! the article weighs an insane 163k. It needs to be trimmed dramatically. Try to review it for redundancy. What is left over should be branched to sub-articles per WP:SS whenever possible. This article should not be more than a collection of concise summaries of dedicated sub-articles. It is an old fallacy that "complex and controverisal topics require longer articles". that's simply not the case. Or Universe would be an article of several gigabytes. this edit was a step in the right direction, but it isn't nearly enough. dab (𒁳) 14:50, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    Dbachmann, there was already an attempt to split this article into sub-articles, and the result was the creation of several quite undesirable POV-forks. If you have suggestions as to how to trim down this article without creating POV forks, please feel free to present them. However, given the controversial nature of this subject, it might be best to discuss any major changes to the article here before making them.--Ramdrake (talk) 17:29, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
    WP:SS says it all: pov-forks have nothing to do with it. There is really no alternative to that, because obviously the whole topic cannot be treated in a single page. There is nothing controversial about this suggestion. The difficult part is of course how exactly to do it: a clean ToC is needed, with unambiguous scopes for sub-articles. A summary-style article needs stable sub-articles it can summarize. Disputes should be settled at the talkpages of the respective sub-articles first. Come on, it cannot be that difficult to give a sane and coherent account of "race", other encyclopedias manage it as well. In any case, a monster article such as we have at present is useless. Any reduction will be an improvement. The actual danger of WP:CFORK arises when we have a full {{main}} article and a lengthy section here: viz., the same material is treated at length both here and at the sub-article. This leads to redundancy, and is a nightmare to maintain. dab (𒁳) 18:10, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
    Articles on complex and controversial topics will be longer than the average. Remember, Wikipedia is not paper, and a good TOC helps guide people to the sections they care most about. That said, I would not be opposed to edditing and creating sub-articles but I think we ought to have some discussion about how best to do it before actually cuting and moving - given how disasterous the last well-intentioned effort was. And I agree with Ramdrake, strongly: POV forks must be avoided, period. Slrubenstein | Talk 18:58, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
    POV forks must be avoided, period. Which is why we are blanking material treated here which is also covered at sub-articles: Covering the same stuff here and in the sub-article constitutes a content fork, which is only a small step away from a pov fork (it becomes a pov fork as soon as one version is edited but not the other. Avoid POV forks, remove content covered elsewhere. Glad we agree on this. dab (𒁳) 12:19, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

    An article can be split into several subarticles without POV forks of the sort "Race (scientific)" versus "Race (social)" versus "Race (animals)" versus "Race (19th century scientific racism)" versus "Race (my aunt Ethel's opinion)". Just make the main article a very short summary of the main issues, concepts, and perspectives to take into account. As a model, I suggest taking a look at the Gender article. Initially, some users wanted to make it just about Grammatical gender. Others seemed to have a certain bias to make it purely social. See what it looks like now. FilipeS (talk) 21:14, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    Felipe, dividing an article into one subaticle on aunt Ethel's view, and another subarticle on another view, and so on, is by definition POV-forking. Slrubenstein | Talk 21:51, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    I don't think you understood my point. I'm saying you don't have to do that. FilipeS (talk) 21:59, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    My apologies ... I am tired. Perhaps it would be productive if you said a bit more about how the Gender articles could be a model for how to handle this one ? Slrubenstein | Talk 22:03, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    Let me think about this more carefully. But I just want to add that I am worried about the splits I see at Race currently. I don't think it should be a disambiguation article. Race (classification of human beings), Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Race and genetics, Historical definitions of race, Race (biology), Scientific racism and Social interpretations of race (the latter two got lost already) should not be treated as disconnected articles. They are different, but related notions — sometimes confounded notions. There should be one common "omnibus" article that linked to all of them, and had brief summaries of what each one is, how they developed historically, how they relate to each other, how they differ from each other, and what they may teach us about folk notions of race and the race concept in general. The Gender article does this. It explains where the word came from, how it was originally used, how its meaning has changed with history, which different meanings it has today in several sciences and fields... Just summaries, with a link to the main articles about each "gender" notion. Granted, "race" is going to be a lot harder to tidy up than "gender". FilipeS (talk) 22:28, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

    can everybody please review WP:SS before continuing this debate? It's not about content forking, it is precisely about avoiding content forks. This article is too long. It has sub-articles, such as Race and ethnicity in the United States Census. Seeing we have a full Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, we can only have a brief summary of the topic here. Keeping a lengthy discussion of Race and ethnicity in the United States Census here is, by definition, a content fork. We don't want that. I have no opinion on the actual content, but the detailed discussion must be kept at Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, with only a brief summary kept here, both for reasons of article length and of WP:CFORK. This is what WP:SS tells you. Avoid content forks, do not keep more than a brief summary here. This is what we have been trying to do. Disputes on actual content have nothing to do with it. People reverting these edits are obviously suffering from a bad case of Wikipedia:Main article fixation. thanks, dab (𒁳) 12:25, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

    I agree that having subarticles is not a POV-fork. In fact, that's obvious, I'm not sure why you even brought it up. Nevertheless, the current form of the article Race is not very good, and care needs to be taken not to create POV forks when moving what is currently at Race (classification of human beings) to other articles. FilipeS (talk) 13:18, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

    I brought it up because Slrubenstein right above nearly had a fit at the suggestion, implying that "main article" means "pov fork". Obviously, when we export material to the sub-articles (which already exist, and are already linked), we might find that some material is in contradiction to what is already there. Viz., we might find that we already have "pov forks" as the situation currently stands, and we will then be able to clean it up. Realizing we have contradictions is not the same as creating them. Indeed, since the article at its current length is practically unreadable, I will not be surprised if we should discover that we used to have "pov forks" all along, as we clean it up into something more accessible. dab (𒁳) 15:34, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

    I can't see any really good arguments in favour of shortening this article. Ok so it's very long, but so what? Besides it's not that long, it can probably be read from beginning to end in ten to twenty minutes. So it is much longer than the recommended article length, so what? I don't understand the obsession with conforming to the letter of any and all recomendations, guidelines etc. The only hard and fast rules are those regarding neutrality, verifiability and no original research, all else are guidelines, recomendations and essays. There is no authority here, and recomendations and guidelines should be taken as just that, not treated as hard and fast rules. This is a very contentious subject with a great deal of material and many different povs, to produce anything worthwhile is always going to lead to a very long article. So what's the motivation behind this push to gut the article of any detail? I'm struggling to believe that shortening the article will improve it, it is a very weak argument. I can't believe that anyone could ever feel strongly about something as superficial as the article being too long, whereas of course some people are going to feel strongly if they feel a great deal of the important material here is shunted off into obscure side articles never to be read again, for purely cosmetic reasons. People come here to read about "race", the more information we cut, the less good their understanding is going to be. So Wikipedia works by consensus, here we have an article that, though far from perfect, is relatively stable, to make big changes we need to have a very strong consensus in favour in my opinion. If we're in a situation where there's no real supermajority in favour of a big change, then I think we really have to keep it as it is. In a contentious article, big changes are going to be contentious and there's no real "killer" argument in favour of a change. Alun (talk) 06:35, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

    "People come here to read about "race", the more information we cut, the less good their understanding is going to be." - this sums it up, for me. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:42, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
    Not true. The more information we cut, the less they stop reading before they get to the end! This is supposed to be an overview - that is what an encyclopedia is for. I studied this topic and I can't read through the whole thing. Readers are going to slog through the article to about, uh, Subspecies as isolated differentiated populations, and not read the last 2/3. And the content here is repetitive beyond belief. I tried to summarize the race in the United States section, because it's already and Race in the United States (where it should be, because the US view is only one view of many of what race is) but was summarily reverted. I may start an RFC on this if I don't see improvement soon, because I think outsiders' opinion would be that this, like every other article, should follow WP:SIZE. Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:41, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
    I think an RfC is a bit premature, but it may be useful. Remember Wikipedia works by consensus. I don't have a problem per se with your observation that the article is very long and difficult to read. My problem lies with the fact that this is a contentious subject which is not easily summarised. The question arises "is it always possible to condense contentious articles so they conform to some artificial concept of "too long"?" What is very long for some articles may in fact be a relatively good summary for other articles. Anyone really interested in covering the vast depth and breadth of this subject will always have to plough through a great deal of information. What is covered in this article is already a very abridged synopsis of the subject at hand. My concern is to get consensus before we make drastic changes. Make specific proposals here on the talk page first and let's discuss the changes before making any. I suspect we can abridge much of the genetic material, there is a long discussion of why molecular lineages are important, we may be able to discuss what molecular lineages are in another article and just make reference to them here, for example, leaving the reader to go and find out what Y chromosome and mtDNA lineages actually are for themselves. I'm more than happy to work towards a consensus and am in no way taking an absolutist approach. Sorry if I implied I was. Cheers. Alun (talk) 21:41, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Question

    I haven't participated much in this article and don't really plan to since it seems to be in great shape. I am concerned about this statement though which User:Slrubenstein re-verted:

    "Stephan Palmie has responded to Abu el-Haj's claim that genetic lineages make possible a new, politically, economically, and socially benign notion of race and racial difference..."

    I've read all the information from Abu el-Haj in the paragraphs prior to this one and there is no statement at all about a "politically, economically, and socially benign notion of race and racial difference". This statement sounds like POV does it not ? Epf (talk) 04:02, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

    It is a POV. It is Stephan Palmie's POV. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:54, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
    I agree with Epf, the article is in pretty good shape. Just a reminder Epf that NPOV doesn't mean no point of view, it means neutral point of view. Palmie's point of view is relevant if he constitutes a reliable source, we should of course include other different points of view to make the article neutral. It seems to me that you are confusing what Abu el-Haj said with Palmie's opinion of what this implies. Cheers. Alun (talk) 14:00, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

    Isn't the concept of race in direct disagreement with the Bible? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.153.49.41 (talk) 12:34, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Merge / rearange?

    What is the difference between this page and Historical definitions of race or what is the point of having a seperate article for that if this article has a history section bigger than the other article?--89.212.75.6 (talk) 00:05, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

    I think that page should just be a basic resource, a compendium of definitions, whereas this article whould explain the history. Slrubenstein | Talk 15:44, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Questionable sources

    Hi everybody, a proposal has been made to ease our current restrictions on the use of questionable sources. I think editors here might have a useful viewpoint on this proposal. See Wikipedia_talk:Verifiability. Tim Vickers (talk) 18:27, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] A clean-up

    As I already suggested, this article needs a massive clean-up from obsolete, often tendentiously distorted information (very probably coming from Mr. Alun/Mr. Slrubenstein's workshop) that makes the whole content unnecessarily messy. Some important remarks:

    1. Microsatellite Fst value of 0.358 reported for leopards is incorrect; the authors report the so-called Rst values that are different from Fst. Microsatellite Fst values in big cats are usually around or below the human average (0.15)[[28]][[29]]

    Firstly the article does not claim that 0.358 represents FST, it says what the paper says, that this is a measure of within to between group variation. I agree that these statistics can be misleading, it is fallacious to compare the level of within species differentiation between two species with very different ecologies. We probably should note, however, that human genetic variation is often claimed to be much less differentiated than many other species. If you want to remove discussion of measures of within to between group variation I would agree with you. Second the papers you link to are tremendously inappropriate. These papers discuss only a cat species within a single continent (South America), so it is analogous to comparing the level of differntiation within this group to that of the human population of a single continent. Humans are dispersed throughout the world, so a comparison should only be made to other species with a very large geographic range. To claim that Fst values of "big cats" is small, when the only papers ou produce are for as geographically resticted group is extremely dishonest. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    Well, and how many mammalian species inhabiting the whole world do you know? Mouse? It doesn't matter, what a large area the species inhabits; the geographical fractionalization will lead to the process of speciation anyway - as it happened in many animals in the past. Unfortunately, the case of humans is exceptional, because animals can't use boats or store food for a long journey. But the distribution of big cats is/was still very large (leopard, tiger, lion). Furthermore, despite a very restricted geographical distribution, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees show such a high interpopulation variation that it almost approaches the level of speciation. [30] But this is understandable, because in contrast with humans, who quickly spreaded from Africa 50-60 000 years ago, they diverged ca. 1 million years ago.
    It's kind of the point though isn't it? It is impossible to compare species with very different ecologies and natural histories and apply a reigid set of criteria universally. We could compare certain species of big cats to humans, as you have tried to do, but if we do there are huge problems. Cats tend to be solitary, humans live in communities, even when we look at the most geographically distributed cats they do not roam as far as humans. Humans have probably only had a global distribution for a few tens of millenia, the big cat species may have differentiated over a much longer time. Humans probably have a great deal more gene flow between geographic regions than most other terrestrial species. The only real similarity between humans and big cats it that (a) they are both large terrestrial mammals and (b) some species of big cat are quite widely geographically distributed. So in reality all this comparing FST of humans with other species is rather pointless. Indeed the only paper I can think of off hand to have done this is Templeton's 1998 paper. Measures of FST have never been used as proof of subspecific classification as far as I know. There is no evidence that mere geographic distance can produce speciation. As you point out humans are capable of migrating over huge distances, merely being globally distributed is not enough for speciation events, especially if there is a large amount of gene flow between populations, as there most certainly is and has been in the human species. Speciation events would occur only by reproductive isolation, and not by geographic isolation. Given the general rule that hunter gatherer societies tend to reproduce exogamously it seems likely that gene flow has been constant and high in the human population. Two things have lead to the relative lack of genetic diversity in humans, our relatively recent origin and the large amounts of gene flow between peoples. Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    "Human genetic variation is often claimed to be much less differentiated than many other species" - Yes, it is "claimed", but the support for it doesn't exist. Except the case of great apes (without bonobos), I am not aware of any Fst value considerably higher than that of humans. Human Fst values are comparable or higher than in big cats, whose subspecies classification is well known and established. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    Actually the support for it does exist, you just refuse to accept it. There are at least four peer reviewed papers in the article that suppport the claim. Wikipedia does not publish original research, if experts publish peer reviewed papers they are reliable sources and so we can cite them. The fact that you persoanlly believe that there is no support for this claim is of no consequence. Care to provide a peer reviewed journal citation that states categorically that there is no support for this claim? Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    2. Shortly after this case, AVERAGE Fst value for humans is compared to the MAXIMAL RANGE of Fst in chimpanzees. A silly trick, really. As we know, the maximal range of diversity in humans can be even higher. (Although I admit that the chimpanzee study was based on microsatellite data.)

    Not true. The usual statistic given for human between group variation is 15%, the statistics given for chimps give the whole range of differentiation, there is clearly an overlap, with humans given as 0.15 and chimps given as 0.09-0.32. It is well known that the level of differentiation between chimp populations is higher than that between human populations, this has been cited again and again by numerous papers. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    Those 15% don't tell the whole truth. The difference Africa - East Asia/America routinely exceeds 0.20 in SNP studies. The distance of 0.15 between Africa - East Asia in this study comparing primates
    [31]
    is very suspicious, but not so much because it is so "small", but because the distance between Africa - East Asia is virtually always 30-50% higher than in the case Africa - Europe. Curiously, here it is the same (0.14 vs. 0.15). Since the list of authors includes the very famous name Svante Pääbo, I don't take this comparison too seriously. Not speaking about that the largest human extreme (Pygmies vs. Australian Aborigines) that was only once explicitly documented by Cavalli-Sforza (0.43, 190 autosomal genes) is not listed in any later genetic study (although I know at least one that lists Aborigines in the studied populations [32], but later only lists the average, as usually). The level of differentation between chimpanzees that is so frequently cited probably concerns mainly older studies of sex chromozomes. As we now know, the real differentation of great apes isn't by far so high as these studies indicated. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    Of course the 15% does't tell the whole truth, the 15% is an inaccurate and misleading measurement, but that's not the point, the point is that this figure is given routinely by scientists and anthropologists. In truth we see greater differentiation the further we go from Africa, people living nearer to Africa are more like Africans, those living further away from Africa are less like Africans. This is the whole point of the Long and Kittles paper. Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    3. The value of "FST of 0.06-0.1 for human "races" is hardly based on any solid data. In fact, interracial comparisons routinely show values 0.10-0.15 or even higher, especially for SNPs. As far as I know, only Rosenberg et al. 2006 reported ludicrously low Fst values of 3.8% (0.04) for 377 microsatellites. The problem is that authors often don't show comparisons of single populations, but rather misleading averages based on both interracial and intraracial values. Thus, values between 0.10-0.15 would be much closer to the truth (with microsatellites on the lower end of the range). After all, see [[33]] or [[34]], where mostly values higher than 0.10 are reported. The real magnitude of Fst differences (by SNPs) is nicely illustrated in a recent superb clustering study of Jakobsson et al. [[35]]


    • So, the alleged "small" differences between humans can be viewed in a different light! The Fst value approaching 0.30 between Africans and Americans Indians certainly isn't the whole story; the difference between certain Africans and Australian Aborigines may be as high as 0.40.
    You are quite right, there is no such thing as a "true" FST, it varies tremendously depending upon the type of locus measured, SNPs, STRs, indels and Alu insertions all display different evolutionary characteristics, therefore they produce different measures for divergence between groups. The point is that the so called 15% of variation found between sampled human populations is usually given for all global populations, but this measure includes some of the variation found between populations within continents, usually the amount of variation between populations within the same continent is given as between 6% and 10%, but again it does depend upon the type of locus under investigation. In truth FST is a poor measure of genetic differentiation, both Edwards ("Lewontin's Fallacy") and Long and Kittles (2003) have criticised FST as a statistical fallacy.[36] [37] Edwards correctly states that FST cannot be used to produce an "average" statistic for all human groups, but should only be measured on a population by population basis. Nevertheless many reliable sources do use a single average figure however statistically invalid. Long and Kittles go further and show that even measuring FST on a population by population basis is statistically invalid. They show that FST is based on two invalid assumptions. Firstly that it assumes that all populations are independent and equally diverged (ie that no population is a subset of any other population, or if you like that the populations being measured all derived from the same ancestral population and diverged equally). Secondly it assumes that all populations have the same expected gene identity. Long and Kittles show conclusively that neither of these assumptions is valid. They show that the level of diversity is greatest in Africa (containing 100% of human diversity) and lowest in the Pacific (containing 70% of diversity). So what they show is that human groups do not each hold about 85% of the human genetic variation, they show that Africa holds about 100% of the variation and that Oceania holds about 70% of the variation, with in between groups holding less variation as populations get farther from Africa. They further show that gene identity is about 0.213 in their African population, while it is 0.541 in their Pacific population, or to put it another way, individual Africans are much more different from each other genetically than individual Pacific Islanders are. They claim that it is therefore the case that FST masks a great deal of diversity. Of course it is also true that if FST masks diversity within the human species, then it also must masks diversity in non-human species. But the point is this, Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, we can cite sources that criticise things like the computation of FST but we must also say what experts say, even if we disagree with them, and experts often do quote the "85%" statistic, I personally think it is a nonsense and abused statistic, but it is widely (over) used by credible academic sources. You may not like it when anthropologists say "race" is a social construct, but you don't have the right to prevent editors from including this point of view in the article, because it is constantly stated by reliable academic sources. Likewise you may not like it when geneticists and molecular anthropologists say that human genetic diversity is much lower than that of many other species, but they do say this routinely, indeed this is a something that all geneticists and anthropologists adhere to, you cannot suppress this because it does not fit your personal world view. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    So what a genetic statistics should we use? What do you suggest? And what studies can all those PC geneticists and molecular anthropologists list to support their claims? Perhaps Alan Templeton? [38]
    Or Mr. Barbujani, who successfully continued in spreading Templeton's mystifications, further misinterpreting the work of leading anthropologists of the past? [39]82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    There is no single "genetic statistic" that can be used to infer the level of differentiation between human groups. Human population structure is very complex, the whole point of Long and Kittles and numerous other papers that attempt to show how human genes are geographically patterned is to show just how complex it is. Any attempt to give a single "simple" figure that shows how human genetic variation is geographically distributed is always going to be very far from the mark, indeed it is inevitable that it will be as flawed as the Lewontin statistic of 85% Whichever way one looks at it thhough it is clear that the bulk of variation is within group, even Long and Kittles found that their most divergent group still had ~70% of variation within group, and that Africans had ~100% of variation within group. We do not produce original research here, we say what experts say, whether we like it or not. I understand the problems with the concept of FST and I understand why the ~85% claims are not accurate, but these stateistics are frequently used, and therefore we need to cite them. You do not seem to appreciate that this is not a blog, nor is it a place for you to express your opinion, you can only say what experts have said. Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    4. First, compared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically less diverse... - This is a mystification, of course. When compared with other mammals, humans are rather on the upper end of the range [[40]] As I see, virtually all claims about little genetic differentation in humans are based on the comparison with great apes. (If somebody has different data, please, don't hesitate to put them here!) Even the claim that great apes are more diverse than humans is problematic. In any case, humans are, on the average, slightly more diverse than bonobos, but chimpanzees seem to be approximately 1.5-times more diverse than humans and gorillas 1.8-times more diverse [[41]]. These numbers are especially striking considering the far higher TMRCA times for great apes. In any case, great apes must belong to the most diverse mammals in the world and saying that when humans are less diverse, they are at the same time little diverse, is clearly incorrect.

    The claim is made by reliable academics publishing in peer reviewed journals, it therefore meets Wikiepdia's criteria for inclusion. Whereas you link to the personal website of a non-expert who appears to be obsessed with promoting the concept of biological race. We use reliable sources here. Actually the nucleotide diversity of chimps compared to humans is given in the article and is comparable to the numbers you give above. Pan paniscus represents only a tiny population (~10000) that is geographically restricted,[42] whereas humans range over the entire globe. Furthermore the numbers of humans living is far in excess of the numbers of any chimp or gorilla species (~7000000000.[43]). Considering that many new mutations occur in every individual human born, the huge population size of humans relative to other apes should mean that we have a very large nucleotide diversity. After all, diversity increases with population size as well as population age. Considering our huge geographic dispersal (the only great ape to be globally distributed) and our massive population size (chimps and gorillas are species undergoing a bottleneck[44] [45] which will massively reduce diversity) the relative amount of diversity in humans appears to be exceedingly small. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    Not at all "small", considering that it needed about 20-times less time to accumulate! "Reliable academics" may claim, what they want, and certainly, they can be listed in Wikipedia, but Wikipedia should also list data showing that they claims consist of pure fabrications. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    Actually Wikipedia cannot "list data", Wikipedia only publishes the views expressed in reliable sources. If you want to interpret data that would constitute original research. The point is that you frequently come here and criticise experts who you personally disagree with, but you appear to have zero qualifications to do this, you appear to be a non-expert with no academic credibility. If you can find reliable sources that dispute the experts you are so scathing about, then please produce them. But they need to be explicit in their conclusions, they need to say that they have evidence that a specific claim is incorrect, you cannot produce a paper and say that it contradicts a specific claim if it is only your opinion that it does such a thing, the paper itself must say that it contradicts the claim. Claiming that reliable academics are fabricating results is a very serious thing to do, you should be careful because it is called libel. Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    5. The further notes in the paragraph were certainly carefully selected by Mr. Wobble - including the sentence from Long, Kittles (2003), a study that actually supports the race concept. Not too surprisingly, he even doesn't forget to quote Mr. Templeton, a man, who likes comparing apples with potatoes.

    Long and Kittle's paper is called "Human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological race" and states "Four different race concepts are considered: typological, population, taxonomic, and lineage. Surprisingly, a great deal of genetic variation within groups is consistent with each of these concepts. However, none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses. and go on to say "The biological concepts of race identified in the preceding paragraph are distinct from common lay conceptualizations of race. One such lay concept postulates the existence of near-uniform groups of individuals that can be identified by a few externally visible traits such as skin color (Keita and Kittles 1997). The AAPA statement on race (American Association of Physical Anthropologists 1996) articulates a counter argument to this popular view. In fact,our findings are consistent with the key features of the AAPA view:that all human populations derive from a common ancestral group,that there is great genetic diversity within all human populations, and that the geographic pattern of variation is complex and presents no major discontinuity." To claim that either of these statements provides support for "race" concepts is absurd. The acknowledgment that there is geographically structured genetic variation within the human species is not ipso fact support for "race" concepts, it is just a statement of the bleeding obvious. The fact that Long and Kittles state clearly that the variation presents "no major discontinuity" is clearly contrary to "racial" concepts. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    What about another quotation from Long and Kittles? "Surprisingly, a great deal of variation within groups is compatible with biological race concepts and therefore partitions of genetic variation such as those achieved by simple statistics such as F^sub ST^ do not provide critical tests for the existence of races as defined by biologists. Four decades ago, Frank Livingstone declared the nonexistence of human races (Livingstone 1963). It is now time for geneticists and anthropologists to stop worrying about what does not exist and to discover what does exist." I know that Steve Sailer interviewed Kittles some time ago and hence I know that his real opinion of race isn't as "fuzzy" as all the politically correct babbles in his articles may indicate. [46] 82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    It is a good quote, in fact in the quote they specifically state that "race does not exist". Look at the quote again, they state that Frank Livingstone declared the non-existence of race, then go on to claim that we should stop worrying about what does not exist (ie race) and look at what does exist (ie a gradual dilution human variation as one moves further from Africa). I don't know what Rick Kittles opinion of "biological race" is, and I suspect you don't either, I am sceptical that you can infer anything from this article, is it the one you are referring to? There is a difference in accepting that "race" is a socially real thing, in that one can accept that there is such a thing as racial discrimination, but we are talking about "biological race". Long and Kittles draw this distinction themselves in the quote I give above. "Biological race" is the classification of people into identifiable subspecific groups, this has never been easy either for humans or for other animal species, many zoologists reject classifications below the species level all together. In 2003 Rick Kittles and Kenneth Weiss wrote the paper "RACE, ANCESTRY, AND GENES: Implications for Defining Disease Risk", it's a long and thoughtful paper and is not easily summarised, neither can any direct quote give a good indication of it's content, but it does contain all of the usual arguments used by anthropologists, taxonomists and geneticists against subspecific and racial classifications. Indeed it specifically mentions both nucleotide diversity and FST.

    "Along the human genome, π is generally between 0.001 and 0.002 (1 heterozygous site per 1000 to 2000 sites (15, 55, 99, 105, 164, 166, 192–195). While π is slightly higher for populations of African descent (81, 94, 122, 188, 192), nucleotide diversity even between diverse human populations is about four times lower than the level observed within chimpanzees (38, 73, 83)... The traditional, though subjective, criterion for biological subspecies is FST > 0.25 (168, 190). The percentage of genetic diversity between spot-samples from the extremes of the Old World range of human populations (sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and Europe) is about 5–15%, with the remaining 85–95% within populations as noted earlier (Table 1) (2, 5, 60, 75, 76). From available sequence data, FST would likely be three times higher among different chimpanzee populations compared to levels for different human populations on separate continents."

    Furthermore Rick Kittles co-authored a paper in 2004 "Conceptualizing human variation" which covers a lot of ground regarding the extent of human genetic variation. This again discusses FST and even the famous 85% statistic "The within- to between-group variation is very high for genetic polymorphisms (approx 85%). This means that individuals from one 'race' may be overall more similar to individuals in one of the other 'races' than to other individuals in the same 'race'. This observation is perhaps insufficient, although it still is convincing because it illustrates the lack of a boundary." More usefully it discusses phylogenetic concepts of subspecies, the most sound way to classify below the species level because it relies on systematics. They conclude

    Modern human genetic variation does not structure into phylogenetic subspecies (geographical 'races'), nor do the taxa from the most common racial classifications of classical anthropology qualify as 'races' (Box 1). The social or ethnoancestral groups of the US and Latin America are not 'races', and it has not been demonstrated that any human breeding population is sufficiently divergent to be taxonomically recognized by the standards of modern molecular systematics. These observations are not to be taken as statements against doing research on demographic groups or populations. They only support a brief for linguistic precision and careful descriptions of groups under study. Terms and labels have qualitative implications....'Racial' thinking can still be found in scientific literature. Evolutionary and other biohistorical studies should be model-based and should acknowledge the ongoing legacy of 'racial' thinking.

    In their 1997 paper "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence" Rick Kittles and S.O.Y Keita state

    Racial thinking persists in spite of multiple lines of evidence that deconstruct racial schema and their underlying philosophy. These lines of evidence derive from analyses of serogenetic data, nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome polymorphisms, ans skeletal data. All show that the received racial categories should not be treated as bounded entities.
    Theory also helps in the examination of the racial construct. None of the putative races as generally understoodare breeding populations. Hence these entities are collections of various biological phenomena. They are not evolutionary units.

    You appear to be confused with the difference between genetic variation and classification, there can be a great deal of variation between populations from the same species without it necessarily defining these populations as different subspecies. Indeed the only reliable way to identify subspecies is to us a phylogeographic approach, and many zoologists are even starting to use the phylogenetic species concept, which would dispense with any classifications below the species level altogether (and therefore abolish all subspecies), though it would increase the number of recognised species. What Long and Kittles are really saying, which you appear not to understand, is that whether "biological race" exists or not is absolutely dependent on how we define race and nothing else. All scientific concepts are based on good definitions (and this applies to classification as much as anything else), to get a good definition the concept needs to represent a good model for what we see in the real world. Long and Kittles specifically state that the four models for "biological race" concepts that they tested do not form good models for what we observe in the real world, and so they reject these as anything like "biological race concepts". Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    6. The clustering studies are obsolete. See http://dienekes.blogspot.com/

    We don't cite blogs here, this is an encyclopaedia, we cite reliable sources. Clustering analyses may have their problems, but they are reliable sources and have been used by some biologists to support "race" concepts, so they are relevant to the article. Such scientists include Neil Risch, Armand Leroi.[47] [48] Mostly these scientists are using "race" as a synonym for "human genetic variation" though. Some journalists have also made similar claims, such as Nicholas Wade in the NY Times. Alun (talk) 08:19, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
    I don't cite blogs. I cite two recent mega-studies working with more than 500 000 SNPs that can now identify single nations genetically. 82.100.61.114 (talk) 00:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
    What a strange thing to do, you cited dienekes blog to support your claim, then you later claimed that you did not cite a blog? It's clear to anyone with eyes that you have linked to a blog. Alun (talk) 07:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

    Centrum99 (talk) 01:34, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

    According to Sauer, "The assessment of these categories is based upon copious amounts of research on the relationship between biological characteristics of the living and their skeletons." Nevertheless, he agrees with other anthropologists that race is not a valid biological taxonomic category, and that races are socially constructed. He argued there is nevertheless a strong relationship between the phenotypic features forensic anthropologists base their identifications on, and popular racial categories. Thus, he argued, forensic anthropologists apply a racial label to human remains because their analysis of physical morphology enables them to predict that when the person was alive, that particular racial label would have been applied to them.

    If this isn't clinical insanity, what else is? Don't be afraid, Alun, I am slowly progressing with my work and I will post all important facts here within several weeks. Centrum99 82.100.61.114 (talk) 16:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

    Why do you think Sauer's claim is "clinical insanity"? Why should I be afraid? What have I got to be afraid of exactly? I'm not entirely sure what your point is. The quote you give is taken from the article, so what point are you trying to make? This talk page is for discussing changes to the article, but you don't seem to be making any suggestions about the article. I'm not sure that you actually understand this subject at all. Sauer is pointing to the fact that it is often possible to distinguish between different groups in the USA based on skeletal remains. So what? There is nothing in what he says that is incompatible with anything I have stated. It is obvious that we can distinguish between people who derive from geographically distant parts of the world, we can easily distinguish between a west African (the region where the majority of African America ancestry derives), an European (the region where the majority of European American ancestry derives) and a native American. That's not the point of classification. The point of classification is to be able to partition organisms into well defined groups unambiguously. Sauer himself acknowledges this when he agrees that "race" is a social construct. The utility of being able to differentiate between populations derived from extreme geographical locations does not negate the fact that it is not possible to differentiate the global human population into a few discrete groups in any biologically meaningful way. In many modern societies there are populations derived from very distant parts of the world, we can distinguish these easily, but this is not possible when we look at human variation in less artificial environments. Of course as these populations become more mixed it will increasingly be difficult to distinguish any "racial" groups. Furthermore I would be extremely sceptical that Sauer could look at skeletal remains derived from a multiplicity of much closer geographic regions and correctly identify all of them. Could he perfectly distinguish between Greek, Palestinian, Egyptian and Somali skeletons for example? I doubt it. As Kittles and Weiss state

    The Big Few races can seem real in samples of size N (Norway, Nigeria, Nippon, Navajo). That is, if one examines only the geographic extremes, differences appear large ... In that sense it is sometimes said that there are only four or five major patterns of variation. But if we look at geographically closer or intermediate populations, differences diminish roughly proportionately. Even our view of the Big Few might change were it not for our curious convenience of overlooking places such as India. Who are those pesky billion? One race? A mix of the other already-sampled races? A multiplicity of races, as has often been suggested?[49]

    I've made this point to you several times before, but you really don't seem to understand this at all. I get the impression that you are so blinded by your fundamentalist belief in "race" that you really are not interested in real science, you only seem interested in things that you think support your personal crusade, even tot he extent that you have cited material here that clearly contradicts what you are claiming (see above about Rick Kittles). I suggest you take your crusade elsewhere, this is an encyclopaedia, it is not interested in publishing your opinions and personal observations. Alun (talk) 18:27, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
    I will address all issues that you put up here. Including your "roughly proportionaly" diminishing differences. I think you will be especially interested in the Fst values that I have collected. The days of your PC propaganda are finished anyway. Centrum99 (talk) 01:58, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
    You need to find reliable sources that address these issues. If you can find reliable sources that contradict what the article says then of course we can include them. Please remember we do not publish original research and any synthesis is equally considered original research. You should observe that it is not my "roughly proportional" diminishing differences, if it were my personal claim then it would of course be original research and therefore irrelevant to the article. It is our old friend Rick Kittles along with Kenneth M. Weiss who have stated this. I'm not particularly interested in the FST values you have collected, you cannot include original research in the article, neither can you collate data from disparate sources to try to prove a point, this would be a synthesis. You can only cite reliable sources, and explicitly state what the conclusions of those sources are. you should understand this by now, I've explained it over and over to you. Alun (talk) 16:53, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
    In the meantime, can you please find the book, where Sewall Wright listed Fst values of various mammalian species? It would be fair to use it below his quotation, to avoid "original research". Thank you. Centrum99 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.100.61.114 (talk) 12:20, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Separate references from footnotes

    Section "Footnotes" has many references that should be split off in a separate section, "References". References and footnotes offer different kinds of information, and seeing one while looking for the other is confusing. Also, it is one way to segment the long section into two. -Pgan002 (talk) 06:31, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

    You would have to explain more the difference between the two. The section titled "Footnotes" is basically what other articles title "References." I don't see the need for a split myself. The documentation of arguments in the article is fairly clear. Two sections would overly complicate things. In any event there is a Bibliography Section to round out the page. This is a lot more than you see on the typical Wikipedia article.Whazstak (talk) 07:12, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

    I just noticed that footnote no. 3 and footnote no. 45 reference the same article. It seems like it would be a lot of work to delete 45 and renumber all the notes afterward; is there some sort of automated system for doing this? Nick Theodorakis (talk) 15:50, 4 April 2008 (UTC)Nick Theodorakis

    [edit] Hispanicity as a race? Please don't invent Races :-(

    Please help out with folks trying to edit Hispanicity and suggest it is a RACE. I know many people confuse the term "hispanic" with a race. They seem to become confused because for example, people from Mexico tend to be homogeneous (being predominantly AMERINDIAN). But the fact that folks from Mexico are homogeneous in their being Amerindian (Mongoloid Race, Indianid subtype) does not mean that there is a Hispanic Race!!

    I don't mean to criticise anyone who wants to contribute, but please don't post phrases like "[This may have been a Racial Category but it is now regarded as ethno-linguistic] something that can also been seen as a strategy by some of the categorized in order to be included in the white dominant group (as the emergence of White Hispanics points to)"


    The problem with that edit is that it suggests that:

    1- Hispanic "may have been" a RACIAL GROUP.

    2- He's also suggesting that White Hispanics are a construct. That there are no spanish-speaking white people. In other words, that Caucasoid individuals aren't found south of the border.

    3- And given #2, that if anyone born south of the border were to claim to being CAUCASOID it would just be a strategy to be accepted in the "white majority" (where they apparently do not belong)


    Now this is my take. I believe that each of the FOUR MAJOR RACES: MONGOLOID, NEGROID, CAUCASOID and AUSTRALOID are equal and loved by God. BUT I love science and I get aggravated by unscientific claims (for example: THE INVENTION OF A 5TH RACE... the "hispanic" race)

    No, white hispanics aren't an invention, or a strategy created by Amerindians or mixed individuals to fit into the US White category!!. White hispanics are simply CAUCASOID individuals who speak spanish or live in countries where spanish is spoken. You know how many Germans went to Argentina after WW2? Similarly, how many Jewish People took refuge in South America due to Hitler? And how many Eastern Europeans emigrated after the fall of the Soviet Union? Oh they did.

    So, as I said, this is not about one race being better than another. This is about SCIENCE and not inventing races!

    I actually agree with the Mexica Movement. They are a group of Amerindians (Mongoloid Race, Indianid Subtype) who are tired of being called "Hispanic", because they are Amerindian. They had their land stolen by Spaniards and calling them "Hispanics" only adds insult to injury.

    Anyway, I am not advocating favoring any race over the other. Just don't invent races and keep an eye open for folks who may feel like suggesting there is a 5th race; or a linguistic group where the 4 races don't apply!

    Take care, Olga --Prophetess mar (talk) 23:10, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

    • I believe that each of the FOUR MAJOR RACES: MONGOLOID, NEGROID, CAUCASOID and AUSTRALOID are equal and loved by God.
    This is an encyclopaedia, it is not about what you "believe". Furthermore you start with the assumption that there are "four major races", but this is only a single point of view. Because "races" are social constructs the number and type of "races" vary significantly depending on the point of view of the observer. You "assume" that there are "four races" and then from this assumption try to classify all groups into one of these four "races". This article should not make such assumptions about what are or are not "real races", it should discuss the perceptions of what a "race" is from the point of view of society, citing reliable sources as it goes. Alun (talk) 07:02, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
    This article needs a section on the ontology of race to resolve this disagreement/misunderstanding. Those who argue that the problem is the invention of 'new' races clearly have not understood the main POV represented in this article about race as an invention. A little section on non-constructivist views about race need to deal with the POV that races are natural kinds, and the systems of classification used by purveyors of such views. Thus, the comments about 'hispanic' and 'latino' races can be dealt with according to the relevant ontology as necessary. Otherwise, this will become an irreconcilable edit war. Eyedubya (talk) 09:46, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
    The notion of 4 major races is a slippery concept with Hispanics in many ways although of course as a social and cultural construct, folks are entitled to self-report what they desire to report. Hispanic is often a cultural and linguistic term. The ancient Aztecs and the tribes before them like the Toltecs etc definitely do not fall under the label "Hispanic," although they may make up the majority of Mexico's descendants. Some may say they are "Mongoloid" but does this then mean that people from Mexico, including all those ancient tribes going back millenia can be neatly checked off into the same box as Chinese? I have no problem with an ontology of race but such heavy lifting I think would be better in another article where all the classification - linguistic, cultural, etc can be fully developed. Whazstak (talk) 07:29, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] mixed races

    The article does not say much useful on the topic of mixed races. The article Caucasian race see image-[[50]] lays out these arguments in detail and the picture map shows a racial distributions example, so no one can say that the topic "should not be" on Wikipedia. The work of Cavalli-Sforza [sic] shows that in places like Africa, discrete races met and intermingled. His category of Extra-European Caucasoid, incorporates the Mediterranean Caucasoid races outside of Europe proper that make up the past and present population of North Africa.

    At the same time, he shows negroids from further south may have moved up into zones of mingling, to produce various mixed races in Nubia, Ethiopia and East Africa, etc. Populations from these areas do not match negro features, proving admixture of races took place. This information should be worked into the article, or are the folks here avoiding it?

    Cavalli-Sforza is a respected scholar. I notice he is not referenced much if at all in the article. Anyone care to comment on why this is being left out? There was an article called Extra-European Caucasoid on Wikipedia but it is no longer found. Caucasian race has taken its place put the information is not there, and perhaps should be added back in now. Could it be that some are bury the concept? Critiques of this category anyone?Keebler2 (talk) 05:25, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] Archives

    Where are the archives? And the to do list? And this page severely needs to be archived. Doesn't anyone maintain it? Richard001 (talk) 08:10, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


    [edit] Headline text

    [edit] Article name

    I'm guessing this has been discussed (where are the archives? see above), but can't we get a less lengthy name for the article, e.g. race (humans) or at most race (classification of humans) (see human being). If it was race (human) it might be taken as meaning human race, but race (humans) is hardly going to be taken as humans race is it? Think about the people that have to link to this article... Richard001 (talk) 08:10, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

    [edit] American Indian and African ancestry

    The article failed to mention the main reason that American Indian blood in Caucasian people was based on blood-quantum (one -quarter or more and you were considered Indian; less, and you were legally and socially white) and known African blood (no matter how small the amount)in a white person would render that individual legally black. It was proposed by Thomas Jefferson, whose agenda was obviously not to offend the numerous leading families of Virginia who proudly boasted of their descent from Pocahontas. Also, Indian blood was considered more assimilable than African. To this day American Indians jealously restrict membership to their respective tribes based on blood admixture. As to Hispanics being a race, that is clearly a riduculous social invention designed to deprive Spanish-descended people of their right to a Caucasian, European heritage. Are Portuguese-Americans called Lusitanic? I am from California and I had many Mexican friends. While they all proudly claimed their Indian heritage, none of them ever denied their white, Spanish ancestors. In fact, most of them knew which region of Spain their families came from. The older generation of Mexican-Americans were always classified as "white" on all documents.I must also add that children can easily identify people by their race, therefore it is absurd to claim that there is little diversity between the three major races as some people on yhis talk page are claiming.jeanne (talk) 07:52, 4 June 2008 (UTC)