Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?
Paul Gallagher (pcg@panix.com)
2 Nov 1996 21:13:09 -0500
In <AE9E5DF4-F6B39@128.112.44.101> "Don Dale" <dale@princeton.edu> writes:
>her time. Do you want to know the gender of the runner? Does this
>information give you any predictive power at all? Of course it does.
>Granted, there might be other pieces of information you might wish to have
>in order to better predict the runner's finishing time. Some of these
>pieces of information might even be more "important" (in the sense of
>improving the accuracy of your prediction) than the gender of the runner.
>But gender still matters, even though the variables have large variances.
So, male humans and female humans are separate subspecies?
That is what you have argued. That is the sort of result phenetic and type
classifications can get you. That is why the predominant tendency in
systematics is phylogenetic systematics, or cladism: only a monophyletic
clade, that is, a group that contains *all* the descendants of a single
common ancestor, can be treated as a real entity. Generally speaking, the
species is the smallest such biological population that can be so defined.
Visit the sci.bio.evolution news group. They talk about this constantly
(they talk about it too much).
Now, to be fair, I realize that Dan Dale's intention wasn't that men and
women are different subspecies, rather that women are inferior to men
in one respect. But the analogy holds: you can continue to believe that
people with black skin are inferior to people with white skin; just don't
try to pass off Negroid and Caucasoid as real biological entities!
Paul
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