Quote:
Originally Posted by noodle
A social scientists has the difinition you've been saying... We're all equal, and basically the only reason we even speak about races is to help us understand slight differences in traits.
A scientist will tell you that when there general general biological difference from region to region, this defines a race... For example, West African have different twitch muscles, or that there are certain blood diseases that only tend to affect Black people, and some that only tend to affect white people. Sometimes, for the same illness, they have different medicines. One is for Black and other is for White (in laymans terms).
Socially, human value etc, I agree we are all the same, we are equal etc, but to argue against the scientific definitions of race so blindly because you probably believe that it's racist is kind of silly. It is impossible to give clear cut and dry definitions of race because even within races, there are differences, but it's not a bad or stupid thing to define races according to traits. When you notice that the majority of West Africans have fast twitch muscles, it helps to define them as a race!
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I mentioned that earlier... there are regional differences, but my point is that they are a small part of a bigger picture when it comes to the biological makeup of humans.
Furthermore many of these regional tendencies aren't always absolute. (For example, I read many Asians have a gene which makes their earwax dry... but not all of them do). So when scientists or doctors speak of race... they speak in relation to it and sometimes use it out of convenience (medicine especially). But they don't have a definition of it... largely because racial theory was debunked last century.
Scientists tend to use terms which relate to humans on a genetic level rather than race.