>>14068668I think the difficulty comes out of all races (like dog breeds) basically being some sort of hybrids that also had some amount of unique selection and inbreeding relative to the rest of the species ("species" either singular or plural), and this amount of hybridisation vs selective inbreeding varying, and the amount of time different groups split off varying. Basically though, I think it's intuitive that White means people with visible, genetically determined traits deriving from almost exclusively European ancestry prior to the age of exploration.
Then it becomes a politically charged issue as well. So race is a confusing category that has politics all through it. Which means that people would struggle to talk about it coherently at the best of times, and yet can understand it intuitively, while they're also being highly motivated to be deceitful about the topic.
>>14068724Was the basic idea of phrenology even wrong though? Presumably there would be correlations between skull shape and other traits that would have some amount of predictive value. Just at a guess, I would imagine that skull shape correlates to races in the same way that many other traits do. But I suspect many other correlations would emerge, perhaps more powerful ones. So it would be possible to do phrenology well.
As a side note, I heard from a quite senior scientist that facial physiognomy is used in a computerised way on livestock because it has predictive value on meat quality.
Not that someone needs to use a computer to guess that a cow with a severely fucked up face has a higher likelihood of tasting unusual.
>>14068711Haplogroups actually map fairly well to the contemporary governmental and colloquial categories of race.
