army1987 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 14 April 2013 08:21:40PM 1 point [-]

Levels of melanin in the skin are very strongly correlated with race

This smacks of circular reasoning - for a correlation to be demonstrated, you'd have to know that "there is a meaningful way to categorize human beings into races " to start with. So, this too needs a citation.

What about this: levels of melanin in the skin are very strongly correlated with the geographic provenance of one's ancestors in the late 15th century?

Comment author: Morendil 14 April 2013 09:01:06PM *  0 points [-]

Somewhat more specific; still not enough to support a coherent notion of "race", as geographic latitude becomes a confounder. For instance, there's mounting evidence that "similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness" (from WP).

Classifiers such as "black", "white", and so on do not carve nature at its joints.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2013 05:55:07PM *  0 points [-]

"similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness"

Well... duh. I don't think anyone would have expected that the reason sub-Saharan Africans, south Indians, and Australian Aborigines are all dark-skinned, or Europeans, Ainu and Inuit are all pale-skinned, is that they're closely related.

Classifiers such as "black", "white", and so on do not carve nature at its joints.

Those labels aren't intended to be literal. Colin Powell is still generally considered “black”, despite being pale-ish.