Quite. There’s an interesting anecdote from the filming of the 1968 Planet of the Apes:

“Speaking of eating arrangements, here’s an interesting bit of trivia for the sociologists: Despite the fact that some of the actors knew each other [offscreen]…they never sat together [at lunch]. For whatever reason, actors always gathered with the actors who looked like they did. So chimpanzees sat with chimps; gorillas with gorillas.”

cite: http://fieldingonfilm.com/wp/?p=1596

i don’t disagree with dienekes at all.

I could be wrong, but it’s just hard to imagine too many cases of very complete genetic replacement of agricultural peoples for hunter-gatherers: if it wasn’t complete in the Caribbean and Australia in the last 500 years, it doesn’t seem like there would have been many instances of complete replacement in the ancient world.

you’re confusing the qualitative with the quantitative. a replacement of 90-99% is replacement genetically.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished

I find a lot to agree with here, from “the main point which I think we can all agree upon is that colloquial understanding of race has only a partial correlation with any genetic understanding of race” to the idea of species: “The reality is that I’m not sure I know what a species is in an axiomatic sense, let alone race (many biologists don’t . . .)” Both of these statements seem very helpful in relation to the previous comment thread.

I would also endorse a historical understanding that “the 19th century race science which modern biologists and anthropologists revile (to a great extent, rightly) did not give rise to the race system of the West. Look at the history, and you see that its genesis predates Darwin by decades.” It is absolutely the case that people were dehumanized long before biologists and anthropologists ever arrived, and that race systems were formed out of the economic-political conditions, not handed down from science.

I also do appreciate your warning to anthropologists and some others “to be careful about hitching their wagon to isolation-by-distance and clinal variation.” It could very well be that there were clinal groups replaced by others. However, I think we will also be seeing even more fine-grained complexities as more data emerge. As I quoted from Dienekes: “Tree models are orderly and well-behaved. It would be great if people behaved that way, because the math would be easier. But, people aren’t laboratory mice that follow predefined paths in a maze: they mix with their neighbors, they split and move forward, but sometimes, they split and move backward. Hopefully, H&H’s paper will lead to an increased appreciation of admixture in the human story” (Latent admixture causes spurious serial founder effect).

For me, as a non-user of Admixture software, I’ve found the term “admixture” appropriate to describe some of the findings about Neandertals and Denisovans, and perhaps also with archaic African lineages. However, I would volunteer that many of the other processes that get called admixture are just “normal” human life and reproduction. I could be wrong, but it’s just hard to imagine too many cases of very complete genetic replacement of agricultural peoples for hunter-gatherers: if it wasn’t complete in the Caribbean and Australia in the last 500 years, it doesn’t seem like there would have been many instances of complete replacement in the ancient world. And while I might admit “admixture” terminology as appropriate for the trans-Oceanic contacts and migrations in the last 500 years, I’m not entirely convinced this initiated a qualitatively different era than some of the earlier movements across Eurasia, or as John Hawks put it “past populations had incredible dynamism across Eurasia” (http://johnhawks.net/node/28142).

As a professor, I found your analogy to grades intriguing, that “professors generally look for ‘natural breaks,’ and then distribute A’s, B’s, and C’s, accordingly.” It certainly is nice at the end of the semester to find some “natural breaks,” but I find this end-of-the-semester clumping exercise to be quite artificial. It would be much easier–and more accurate–to report out the percentages. More often than not I have to resort to the idea of “you have to draw the line somewhere.” Moreover, I would not want to start believing the C’s form any kind of “natural group”: some students get that grade by doing C-level work thoughout, others because they combined good-and-bad work, others because they did exceptional in some areas and chose to slack off in other places. So while it is indeed true that people clump clinal realities all the time, I’m not sure that’s always the smartest idea.

Thank you again, Razib, for the engagement and a post that can hopefully be a reference for people across various disciplines. I may try at some point to make some comments about racism and inter-racial marriage, but at the moment must get back to… grading.

Hawks and I let him right up to the door but we don’t let him in.

no shit, should i take into account the opinions from planet zorkon?

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding this but, are you saying that Bushmen are genetically equidistant from other humans to bonobos?

you are misunderstanding.

Out of the papers in the symposium, John Relethford’s paper “Race and Global Patterns of Phenotypic Variation” made this point quite effectively. Relethford also made the point that labels are imposed on underlying continuous variation all the time in everyday life. People can do this with the realization that they are somewhat fuzzy (eg. mountains & hills, bald, not bald etc).

Sorry if I’m misunderstanding this but, are you saying that Bushmen are genetically equidistant from other humans to bonobos?

Perhaps you’re attaching too much significance to the archaic admixture if this is the case. I always thought the difference between bonobos/chimps was 20-30x larger than the difference between the human races.

You say “us” thinking as a Westerner. I’m making it up here, but I’m guessing Sub-Saharan Africans already had that idea in their “social expectations” – already not distinguishing entirely by color.

“don’t pass off shit like this as established science”

Obviously it couldn’t be established science could it?

And I sincerely agree about the desperate and urgent need to try and open up the issue and differentiate, between societal and scientific (genetic), perspective on race, as well as the present from the history.

In some ways it maybe would be beneficial, and perhaps a much needed shake up of our own self-image, if humans an bonobos could indeed produce hybrids.

I do wonder what the public reaction around the World would be, to such a news… the case with the neanderthal interbreeding, was probably to abstract, and to far back in the mist of time I think, even if there do exist modern literary excursions into the matter

RK wrote in response:

ME: That is, looking backward, the group from which the OoA emigrants came from was (a) then relatively homogenous and (b) the only other population in Africa then with descendants in Africa now

RK: i’m having a hard time grasping your characterization. my contention is that there is structure within africa, the bushmen and pygmies being the prime examples, which predate the out of africa event. that structure is still there in these two populations.

On further thought I realize that I was trying to get at the following (and I may be trying to read to much in to your original statement, repeated here at 2).

1) Is there other structure within Africa today that predates the Out of Africa Event? It appears from your response that the answer is “Yes”. Can you mention a few examples that I can google for more info. It appears that you mentioned this one example because it is the most prominent/well known.

2) Below is a list of things that I understand to be facts, leading up to my question. Please correct any errors, and I realize that as a result, my question may be nonsensical. (iia and iib are not facts but speculation).

i) Anatomically Modern Humans (aka homo sapiens sapiens: HSS) appeared sometime between 80Kya and 200Kya, most likely in the Ethiopian highlands.

ii) Modern day humans descend almost entirely from this population, with traces in the genome from other, older, human groups (species?) — Neanderthals in Europe and western Asia, (including the Middle East), Denisovans further east in Asian, Melanesia, and descendant populations (Polynesia, the New World).

iia) I don’t know how this relates to Aboriginal Australians at all.

iib) Presumably with further study, we will find a similar pattern in African populations, almost entirely HSS with a bit from whatever was around locally when the HSS arrived on the scene, rather than purely descended from HHS.

Q: Are you suggesting that the Bushmen, Pygmies and Hadza may be largely descended from populations other than HSS? Or that they have a larger genetic contribution from other populations than appears to be typical for other humans?

no, it’s not irrelevant. you don’t understand my point.

You get races because the default preference is racial i.e. genetic, i.e. maximizing genes passed on. It’s *one* very simple and very logical factor.

don’t pass off shit like this as established science. there are some obvious reasons why this is retarded. you are now a marginal retard in my book (this comment invites no response comment)

It’s a political (and in practical terms anti-scientific) argument masquerading as a scientific one.

.
“On the subject of revealed preferences in inter[social construct] relationships, I really do believe the issue is mainly cultural, not racial.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect

“When proximity during this critical period does not occur — for example, where a brother and sister are brought up separately, never meeting one another — they may find one another highly sexually attractive when they meet as adults, according to the hypothesis of genetic sexual attraction (q.v.).”

You get races because the default preference is racial i.e. genetic, i.e. maximizing genes passed on. It’s *one* very simple and very logical factor.

3, 4, i have blogged extensively on the issue of chimp-human hybrids. i know of them.

REALLY??????????

Contemporary ones, or ones in the fossil record etc.?

So “race typologies” just means coarse reflections of genuine history of the various populations, so “races” are just…..populations.

I love this definition! And I also love the example of the South Asian populations to illustrate this definition! Thus the Coloured from South Africa are a “race”, in fact every human population is a race because every human population has a history….. I can only agree with a smile and also a slight laugh…..

But as you already know, in the reality “race” means generally something significantly different and in fact “race” is really a social construct. But I think we should be fair and admit that “the praise of diversity” practiced by those who call themselves anti-racist, is also somehow, a way to make the concept of race a social reality and thus perpetuate the idea that race is an objective reality. And all of this, even though it was probably not the goal of these so called antiracists.

But it seems to me that Kenan Malik has already explained all this with panache!

And for the “human-bonobo” thing, even in the case of a possible hybrid there is still a sufficiently large prezygotic isolation to prevent gene flow and thus define humans and bonobos as two distinct biological species. Thus your present analogy is irrelevant.

I have a lot more to say about this topic but my English is still too bad to get into a lengthy discussion.

Best regards