Why do the media insist that 'there is no race' is a fact?

Question

Because when they asked qualified biologists if human races were a valid concept 67% of them said yes.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112759433/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

It's an study from '92. There's a more recent one that said the same, but I can't locate it on line!

Answer 1

That was an interesting study. The media must refer to scientific media because the mainstream media propogate the idea of race at almost every juncture.

The climate argument is kind of off.  I can go to a tanning booth everyday and my children are not affected. In other words, after ten years of tanning and a personal dark tan, my children would have the same genes given to them as if I had not tanned at all for ten years.  The environment, climate, does not change the genes. Sometimes, I wonder if our overspecialization has hurt the intelligence of science the same way as when the FBI and CIA are unable to communicate with each other.

Answer 2

This was before recent advances in genetic studies. Race doesn't' exist because there's no qualitative way it can be measured.

  It can't be measured through skin colour, head shape, height, geography etc especially considering are the most homogeneous mammalian species on Earth. Also considering modern humans began have variety around 40,000 years ago

Answer 3

Until the results of further studies come out, I think it's fair to accept the current results, no matter how outdated you feel they might be.

Until we discover otherwise, we'll continue to accept Newton's laws of gravity and Darwin's theory of evolution.

Answer 4

All these concepts are man made mostlty by man a long time ago.

Answer 5

Because the majority of the media is out to sell papers by telling the public what they WANT to hear!

Proven fact: the Human Race is a catch-all term for a bunch of different races...on this planet.

Answer 6

What was the basis for their saying race was a valid concept? Some people use to mean something similar to a people group - eg Native North Americans.

There is no scientific basis for different races.

There is really only one race—the human race. The Bible teaches us that God has ‘made of one blood all nations of men’ (Acts 17:26).

Scripture distinguishes people by tribal or national groupings, not by skin colour or physical features. Clearly, though, there are groups of people who have certain features (e.g., skin colour) in common, which distinguish them from other groups. We prefer to call these ‘people groups’

rather than ‘races’, to avoid the evolutionary connotations associated with the word ‘race’.

All peoples can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. This shows that the biological differences between the ‘races’ are not very great. In fact, the DNA differences are trivial. The DNA of any two people in the world would typically differ by just 0.2%. Of this, only 6% can be linked to racial categories; the rest is ‘within race’ variation.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/p...

Answer 7

Actually the media reinforces the concept of race when & if they can.  Race causes contraversy & the media feeds on contraversy. If you note the Democratic primary here in the US, it becomes obvious the media is driving the racial issues.  The media has obscured the issues of the candidates to focus on s*x & race because those issues are attention grabbers.  

One can only wonder if this is driven by Multi National Corporations seeking to avoid an open discussion of their role in controlling the US government?  Race of course exists biologically & both race & s*x are important in diagnosing illnesses & methods of treatment, imperfect though it is.

Answer 8

Race is merely the older term ( used by Darwin, among others ) for populations and species. I think no truly educated person can argue against the variance among human populations.

" The concept of race represents a clear delineation...."

You have erected a " straw man " argument, Ry-Guy. In other words you attack a position that no scientist I know holds!

Answer 9

Not only is it from 1992, but the link is not working....

The fact is the vast majority of anthropoligists and biologists know for a fact that human race means nothing...It doesnt change general abilities across populations in any ways...the only differences humans might have in ability are generally sociological (for example blacks in America are poorer because after 300 years of subjugation, they havent had a culture of valuing education and therefore do less well than their white counterparts who have more resources and support on hand on average)

Our skin color and hair are nothing but climate afaptations that Allah created us with, but take it off and we look the same , and we all hve the same amount of genes and the same amount of chromosoes (means you are in the same species)...

So I dont know why it would matter to you, because race has no siginificance except for when we study sociology and problems on earth

Answer 10

You haven't proven your first assertion -- that media insist there's no race. Prove it.

And there's a distinction to draw here. There is no *biological* basis for race -- in other words, no evidence to suggest that people with different skin colors think differently or that their lives turn out differently if they have the same opportunities. This is a basic tenet in science -- no basis for a concept of race that actually changes the nature of a person.

But race *does* exist as a basic superficial concept. Different skin colors and physical features are present, and they can be classified.

The question is whether or not that matters. And that's more of a sociological question -- have people been treated differently because humans react differently to people of different skin colors? Well, that's an easy one. They have. Historically, they always have.

So, even though there's not objective biological significance to race, we've constructed our own significance socially and culturally -- and for that reason, race isn't any less real than if it were biological. It might be "all in our heads," but let's face it -- our decisions and beliefs have real impact.

Answer 11

I wasn't aware that the media did insist this.

I'm not a qualified biologist, but I am a qualified anthropologist. Race exists in a cultural sense, in that people believe in it, are influenced by it, and usually assign more importance to it that is justified. In a scientific sense, race is lacking.

If race is real, and it arose from prolonged geographical isolation, then where's the list of covarying traits within each race (or ever better, geographical area). What about those traits that are discreet, but don't covary with geographic origin/ancestry? There are a h**l of a lot of them. If race doesn't stem from geographic isolation, where does it come from? Phantom haplogroups? These questions are about as basic as it gets if we're going to take race seriously as a science, and I have yet to see anything resembling good answers to them.

The problem with race is this: the concept of race represents a clear delineation between different, specific groups of people. It represents, conceptually, huge gaps between different groups, and those gaps aren't there. In a nutshell, race says that human variety is strictly categorized, when it's not. If anthropology has shown us anything in the 20th Century, it's like humans are more alike than they are different.

100% of biologists can think that race is valid. I'd be more interested if 1% of them could actually apply the concept scientifically.

This isn't to say that human variability doesn't exist, or is not significant, just that "race" as it is defined does not serve to quantify that variability adequately (or fairly, really).

EDIT: Whoa there, I'm not putting words in any scientists' mouths. I'm saying that if you look at race-based studies, or just look at the concept of race, this is what's it's saying. In fact, there is a lot of historical evidence that says this is what the concept of race was designed to do. Studying race is all about studying human variability in discrete (and demonstrably false) categories. In the future, jonmcn49, I'll try and contact all the scientists you know before posing an argument.

Answer 12

Most biologists have very little understanding of human genetics, simply because most study topics other than genetics and species other than humans.  Biological anthropologists are a much better source to ask about the question.

The idea of race in Biology was pretty much blown out of the water by Ernst Mayer in the late sixties.  As an evolutionary concept, it's arbitrary and meaningless.  A population is a measureable entity, and a subspecies has meaning (although it's a fuzzy enough concept that there are stillplenty of disagreements about what constitutes a species and a subspecies) but race, which would lie somewhere in between the population and the subspecies, has no discernable boundaries and no significance in evolutionary processes.

Answer 13

I think it has to do with the world getting more detailed oriented.  The government in the US and the state governments are the worst, every form you fill out asks the question about race. Terms are now changing at the speed of light.  You're afraid of speaking about the subject because you might use the wrong term.  I mean, Hispanic ought to be people from Spain but it is used for many people without a drop of Spanish blood. The way it is used describes the language they use.  So, I should be English.  Yeah, we should describe everyone by their native tongue.  Darn, there are some countries that speak multiple languages.  Anyway, there are people with mixed parents having serious mental issues because they can't identify themselves including someone running for president. So, the world is getting smaller and the race thing is getting to be more trouble than it is worth. Time for an overhaul.

Answer 14

I've never heard it mentioned in the mainstream media - quite the opposite.  Therein lies the problem.  

I think it's a problem of terminology.  The term 'race' is antiquated.  Taxonomically speaking, the human species is too intermixed (with a few isolated exceptions), to accurately determine the 'race' of any individual.  Racial determinations are imprecise, arbitrary, have too many exceptions and gradations to have any scientific validity whatsoever.  

Edit: Since when is science a matter of surveys or opinion polls?  If surveys showed that 67% of all scientists believe in God, could that be taken as scientific evidence in support of God's existence?