Greatest Post World War II President

Danny · 11-11-2008, 06:37 PM

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Originally Posted by JerryLove

Problem 1: This makes "green eyed" a race, and "sickle-cell anemic" a race.

I think the key difference is that eye color, etc., are single traits, whereas race is defined as a specific collection of traits.

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Problem 2: the fact that more than one race exists establishes the chance above zero.

I did say "close to zero," for the record.

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Problem 3, and most importantly: The inheretence of traits does not prove "race" exists. You would need to be able to actually define "caucasian", so that I know what one gene I could change to make "not caucasian". Remember you are talking to someone who will honestly defend that "species" is not "real".

I'm not sure what sense it is arguing with you about this if you don't acknowledge the classification of species.

What you've pointed out is that the definition is blurry (i.e., changing one gene does not change the species, just as changing one gene does not change the race), not that the definition does not exist. At some point, it is necessary to distinguish that a wallaby and a cockroach are two different species, even if the difference is less obvious than a wallaby versus a cat, and even less so than a wallaby versus a kangaroo, etc.

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Related to this conversation, under the social idea of "race", Obama is clearly "black" to an American.

In terms of social significance, as has been pointed out, he's "black," but in terms of reality I've never considered him anything other than multiethnic (or whatever the politically correct term is). For what it's worth, the "argument" to which I was referring was racism itself, not necessarily anything specifically to do with Obama.

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He didn't invent it at all. The idea is far older than that.

Duly noted. I've often heard the argument that "Darwin invented race because he was a racist," so I assumed it probably had some grain of truth to it.