Actually, he is proposing a model of common descent with modification. The question of race is left to those who wish to establish a classification system. He is proposing that given such a classification system, one based on perfect knowledge of genealogy is going to avoid the types of mistakes one gets when one looks only at morphology. This nowhere establishes any scientific utility to the notion of human "races" which Victorians were predisposed to imagine had reality and value.
Not at all. "Descent with modification" refers to heredity with mutation, not a classification system. The system Darwin refers to in his letter is purely descent based.
The immigrant-fueled success of Silicon Valley goes a long way to refute such antique notions.
Well now your making a subjective-normative judgement, based on cherry picked situation, and hilariously using the race concept to do that. You can see silicon valley is mixed race, and there are smart people of all races there. Granted. Does that case disprove average racial differences? Of course not! How silly.
Also, your incomprehension of Darwin's argument is compounded when you don't read his September 26 letter and T.X. Huxley's reply.
Well feel free to post them and explain how it contradicts me. "A letter disagrees with you" isn't an argument.
Only an anti-scientific troll refers to common decent with modification as "Darwinism". It's not a belief system, it's a empirically vetted model that explains the diversity of life. Typological models are based on the belief system of essentialism applied to biology — the claim that a banana is essentially different than a human so all that needs to be done is to identify some finite number of types and know that those definitions apply throughout all time and space. Typology is refuted by data which shows that not only are there no boxes around "kinds" but that the population of banana trees and the population of humans had in the distant past a common ancestral population, utterly defeating the notion that hard classification schemes work.
I think I see the problem here. Wikipedia:
"In the United States, creationists often use the term "Darwinism" as a
pejorative term in reference to beliefs such as
scientific materialism, but in the United Kingdom the term has no negative connotations, being freely used as a shorthand for the body of theory dealing with evolution, and in particular, with evolution by natural selection."
Typology is the study of types. It's really that simple. Types can be essentialist or cut arbitrarily from continuous variation. Darwin refuted essentialism, and I agree with him. The confusion is where you allow non-essentialist types in non-human taxonomy, then deny essentialist types in human taxonomy. I am saying that races are non-essentialist types of exactly the same nature as non-human taxa. We agree there are no "boxes" or "hard classification schemes". I am saying that race was not conceptualised as such by Darwin and isn't now. It's a strawman race concept.
They "kind of" work at temporal snapshots at macroscales because the way populations change over time is hidden by taking a brief snapshot and the branching of the tree of life has left populations well-separated by morphology at the Family level. But the notion of a species is generally where the classification system breaks down as the goal of species is to find the finest hard-box classification that works when hard-box models are known not to work.
Races and subspecies are certainly less distinct than species due to gene flow and blurred boundaries. This doesn't mean "the classification system breaks down". One can still group by ancestry or similarity. Unless you deny the subspecies concept?
Since human "races" are finer divisions yet, they are without merit in science. In medicine, it makes more sense to treat the individual than some population grouped by ancestry or collection of morphological traits.
What? "Finer divisions" are without merit? Contrived nonsense. Of course individual assessments are better. This doesn't mean the race concept has no value. That's why it's used in medicine.
Only hard-box classifications are doomed to fail. That doesn't mean classification of populations in time and morphological space is without merit.
Nobody is talking about "hard-box classifications". Strawman. Races are cut from continua.
Modern taxonomy is well-aware that their hard-box model is doomed to fail over time as populations continue to diverge and doomed to have only a finite resolution. The purpose of classification is to put names on a map of the tree of life and just like geographic names have limited utility over geologic time as rivers and plates shift, those names serve the purpose of identifying their subject matter.
Absolutely. Same with races.
That's not my opinion, that's your misunderstanding of “humans are remarkably homogeneous genetically, so all humans are only one biological race.” That's "biological race" = variety. So if humans consisted of more than one species, (say after a small population colonized a distant star system and these branches of humanity re-met 500ka in the future), then there would necessarily be more than one biological race of humans. If genetic engineering bred humans to live under the sea, those would a population of humans who carry such extreme niche survival traits that hybrids with the ancestral population would not be well-adapted to survive in either environment. That would be an example of a variety below the species level. If Earth is enslaved by aliens and they start competitively culling and breeding us on a massive scale, they might create temporary domesticated varieties which would tend to return to ancestral trait statistics should the enforced culling end. Those are all counterfactual examples of how you get and maintain populations of "humans" which are distinct. Even famously self-selected inbred groups like European nobility and isolated Pacific islanders failed to make the cut as they were not that isolated and not inbred long enough — they are still enough like the rest of us to merit the question of can one of them as an individual do a particular human job. They all can live in the desert, in a mountain pass, on a tropical island, in Buckingham palace. So there is just on "biological race" of humans.
You're using the word "variety" in the same sense as race. It's just a semantic game. And you didn't answer my question. Apparently, according to you, races aren't differentiatied "enough". Quantify enough. Is there some standard in non-humans? Give examples.
You have misunderstood the term. Shared ancestry is an empirical fact which refutes typological assumptions.
Nope. It refutes
essentialist typology. Let's use the word division instead of type. Races and all taxa are non essentialist divisions.
It thoroughly refutes typology while explaining the pattern of classification systems in terms of shared ancestry in a tree of common descent with modification. Why do you bother to quote what you have not read and understood?
If by typology you mean essentialism, then races are not typological as conceived by Darwin. Strawman.
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