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Is race a social construct? 
----
Many scholars in the humanities and social sciences argue that race is primarily a social construct—an idea invented, reshaped, and given meaning by societies to classify and rank people. Others, mainly from population genetics and evolutionary biology, argue that while “race” is an imprecise folk term, it still tracks statistically meaningful clusters of human genetic variation and therefore has at least a partial biological grounding. The consensus across disciplines is therefore mixed, depending on how one defines the term “race.” [4] [6] [7] [9] [10] [11]


Arguments that race is a social construct 
== Overview  ==
• Genetic variation is overwhelmingly within rather than between continental populations (about 85 % within‐group in Lewontin 1972), so racial categories poorly capture individual ancestry [9].  
The word “race” is used in at least two main ways in contemporary discourse:  
• Historical “races” have changed repeatedly (e.g., Irish, Italians, and Jews in the U.S. shifted from non-white to white), demonstrating socio-political elasticity [4] [6].  
# as a sociopolitical label that groups people according to rules that differ across time and place, and   
• UNESCO’s post-WWII statements on race emphasized cultural and political equality and framed biological race as scientifically untenable, influencing later scholarship [4].   
# as a loose biological shorthand for clusters of human genetic ancestry.   
• Labeling divisions as “racial” often justifies unequal treatment and therefore reflects power relations more than biology [3] [6].


Arguments that race has a biological component 
Whether those two meanings can be kept separate—or whether one should be preferred over the other—lies at the heart of the modern debate.
• Modern genomic studies recover geographically structured clusters that correlate with major continental “race” labels, even when race labels are not provided to the algorithm [1] [5] [10] [11]. 
• A deep-learning survey of medical images could identify patient race with high accuracy, implying that phenotypic signals correlate with genomic ancestry beyond obvious visual cues [2]. 
• Some disease risk alleles and drug-response variants differ in frequency between continental populations, suggesting biomedical utility for ancestry-based categories [5] [11]. 
• Critics of Lewontin’s 1972 analysis argue that ignoring correlations among loci underestimates between-group differentiation; a small fraction of the genome can still powerfully predict continental ancestry [10].


Historical factors that popularized the “race as social construct” view 
----
• 19th-century anthropologists originally treated race as fixed biological essence. The catastrophic misuse of those ideas in eugenics and Nazi ideology led to strong post-1945 critiques [4]. 
• The 1950 and 1951 UNESCO statements urged scientists to abandon typological race thinking in favor of population genetics, embedding the “social” framing in policy and education [4]. 
• Civil-rights movements of the 1960s–70s further delegitimized biological race claims in U.S. social science, culminating in the popularity of Lewontin’s 1972 genetic partitioning result [9]. 
• Since the Human Genome Project (2001), low overall human diversity (≈0.1 %) was publicized as proof that race lacks biological basis, reinforcing social-construct arguments [6]. 
• Nevertheless, the rise of consumer genomics (2007‒) and population-genetic work by groups like Reich’s lab reopened debate on whether large-scale clusters are meaningful [5] [7].


Human population groups and known differences 
== Is race a social construct?  ==
Population geneticists often replace “race” with “continental ancestry clusters” or “human population groups.” Broad groups commonly cited are: sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans (including Middle Easterners), East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, and Oceanians [11]. Differences documented include: 
• Allele frequencies at disease-relevant loci (e.g., sickle-cell trait in parts of Africa; lactase persistence in Northern Europeans) [11]. 
• Polygenic height scores differing by a few centimeters in predicted adult stature across continents [11]. 
• Variation in skin pigmentation genes (e.g., SLC24A5, OCA2) explaining much—but not all—phenotypic color differences [5]. 
• AI models can infer these groups from medical images, even controlling for visible features, indicating deeper correlates in tissue morphology [2]. 


Origins of different human population groups  
Short answer  
• All modern humans descend from an African population ~50–70 kya that expanded out of Africa; successive founder effects, isolation by distance, and local adaptation produced regional clusters [11].
* Yes, in the sense that the everyday categories “Black,” “White,” “Asian,” etc., are defined by social rules that vary by country and epoch and are not required by biology alone [4][6].   
• Back-migrations into Africa, as well as admixture with archaic hominins (Neanderthals, Denisovans), further shaped present-day continental genetic structure [5] [11].   
* No, or at least “not only,” in the sense that humans do form partially distinguishable genetic clusters that broadly map onto continental ancestry, and these clusters can be predicted from DNA far better than chance [1][5][7][10][11].
• Most clusters are clinal rather than discrete; where geography forms barriers (Sahara, Himalayas, oceans) the clines steepen, creating partially separable groups that map onto folk races [5].


The race and IQ debate 
Most scholars therefore speak of race as ''socially constructed'' yet ''constrained by population genetics''. The relative emphasis differs among authors, yielding ongoing controversy.
• Beginning with Arthur Jensen’s 1969 Harvard Educational Review article, scholars argued that mean IQ gaps between U.S. Black and White populations are partly genetic; others attributed the gap entirely to environment. 
• Herrnstein & Murray’s 1994 bestseller “The Bell Curve” mainstreamed the debate, provoking strong pushback from social scientists. 
• Jason Richwine’s 2013 PhD and subsequent firing from the Heritage Foundation kept the controversy alive [12]. 
• Online venues such as Quillette and blogs by Steve Sailer continue to argue for partial heredity, whereas mainstream outlets emphasize environmental explanations and warn about misuses [8] [13].
• Current genomics finds thousands of loci associated with cognitive traits, but their portability across ancestries is limited, leaving the causal balance unsettled [11]. 
Conflicting views: hereditarians (e.g., Sailer, Richwine) cite polygenic score gaps, while critics (NYT op-ed by Reich, UCSC Science & Justice) warn that socioeconomic confounders and stratification artifacts remain large [6] [7].


Timeline of public discourse 
----
1940s–1950s: Post-war UNESCO statements promote social-construct framing [4]. 


1972: Lewontin publishes variance-partitioning paper; widely cited as refutation of biological race [9]. 
== Arguments that race is '''primarily a social construct'''  ==


1980s–1990s: Population-genetic clustering methods (RFLPs, microsatellites) quantify ancestry; The Bell Curve (1994) sparks race-IQ debate.   
* Classification rules are historically contingent: a person classified as “Black” in the U.S. might have been “coloured” in South Africa or “white” in Brazil at the same time period [4].   


2003: Edwards’ “Lewontin’s Fallacy” essay argues population structure is still real [10].   
* Genetic variation is mostly ''within'' continental groups (~85 %, Lewontin 1972); hence between-group boundaries are blurry [6].   


2013: Jason Richwine controversy renews political focus on IQ and immigration [12].   
* Genomic clustering methods require researchers to pre-specify the number of clusters; the output can shift with sampling decisions and statistical settings [6].   


2018: David Reich NYT op-ed urges honest engagement with genetic differences, igniting wide commentary [5] [7].   
* The label “race” has been entangled with colonial and political projects; UNESCO’s 1950 and 1951 statements called the biological race concept scientifically obsolete and socially harmful [4].   


2022: Medical-image AI paper shows race prediction, challenging “biology-free” view [2].
* In medicine, social conditions (e.g., access to care) often explain outcome disparities as well as, or better than, genetic ancestry [6].


Present: Blogs, magazines, and preprints keep the debate active; academic consensus remains that human variation is both clinal and patterned, with social meaning layered on top [1] [6] [11].
----
 
== Arguments that race is '''not purely a social construct'''  ==
 
* When thousands of genetic markers are used, individuals cluster reliably into groups that align with self-identified continental ancestry—even when no population labels are supplied to the algorithm [10][11]. 
 
* A convolutional neural network can infer a patient’s self-reported race from radiological images with high accuracy, even when human experts cannot, suggesting a biological signal not reducible to social labelling [2]. 
 
* Certain allele frequency differences (e.g., lactose persistence, sickle-cell trait, EDAR variants affecting hair morphology) follow continental patterns and have medical relevance, implying that ignoring population structure can harm precision medicine [5][7]. 
 
* Critics of the Lewontin 85 % figure note that multiple loci considered jointly can separate populations with near-perfect accuracy (Edwards 2003) [10]. 
 
* Empirical geneticists such as David Reich argue that while race is a poor proxy, ancestry differences ''do'' exist and matter for some traits; denying this risks eroding public trust in science [5][7].
 
Authors disagree over how much weight to give these points. Aporia’s “Race Realism” essay emphasises them; the UNESCO historiography and some genomics sociologists emphasise social construction.
 
----
 
== Historical factors shaping the “social construct” view  ==
 
* 18th–19th c. naturalists (Linnaeus, Blumenbach) first formalised continental races, often ranking them hierarchically. 
 
* Early 20th c. eugenics misused race categories; Nazi race science culminated in genocide, discrediting biological race in post-war scholarship. 
 
* UNESCO 1950, 1951, 1964 statements promoted “the race concept must be abandoned” and substituted “ethnic group” [4]. 
 
* 1972: Richard Lewontin’s famous paper quantified within- vs. between-group genetic variance and was widely interpreted as proving race is meaningless. 
 
* 1990s–2000s: The Human Genome Project popularised the slogan “there is more genetic variation within races than between them.” 
 
* 2003: Edwards’ rejoinder “Lewontin’s Fallacy” rekindled debate by showing that multivariate methods can classify populations [10]. 
 
* 2010s–2020s: Cheap whole-genome sequencing and admixture studies complicated the picture; public discussion polarised along political lines [3][5][6][11][13].
 
----
 
== Human population groups and known differences  ==
 
Meaningful ''population'' (or ''ancestry'') groups are usually defined by common descent across geographic space. A minimal list often used in medical genetics is: 
* West Eurasian (roughly Europe & Near East), 
* East Asian, 
* Sub-Saharan African, 
* Native American, 
* Oceanian, 
* South Asian.
 
Selected documented differences: 
* Disease alleles: Sickle-cell trait (African malarial regions), Tay-Sachs (Ashkenazi), alcohol-flushing ALDH2''2 variant (East Asia) [5][7]. 
 
* Morphology: Average skin melanin, hair‐shaft shape (EDAR V370A), tooth-shovel trait, high-altitude haemoglobin adaptations in Tibetans [5][11]. 
 
* Height: Northern Europeans are among the tallest populations; Pygmy groups are among the shortest. Polygenic height scores track this partially but incompletely [11]. 
 
* Drug metabolism: CYP2C19 poor-metaboliser alleles are more common in East Asians than Europeans, influencing clopidogrel dosing guidelines [7].
 
All differences are statistical averages with large overlap among individuals.
 
----
 
== Origins of the major population groups  ==
 
* Modern Homo sapiens left Africa ~60–70 kya. 
 
* A series of founder effects and isolation by distance produced continental genetic structure; for example, East vs. West Eurasians diverged roughly 40 kya, with later back-migrations [5][7]. 
 
* Admixture with archaic humans (Neanderthals and Denisovans) varies by region (higher in Oceanians) [5]. 
 
* Subsequent Holocene migrations (e.g., Bantu expansion, Steppe pastoralists, Austronesian dispersal) reshaped regional genomes, so present-day populations are mosaics rather than discrete branches [11].
 
----
 
== The race and IQ debate  ==
 
Definition 
The “race and IQ” debate asks whether average IQ score gaps among population groups are wholly environmental or partly genetic.
 
Key moments 
* 1969: Arthur Jensen argued a partly genetic explanation for the Black–White gap in the U.S. 
 
* 1994: “The Bell Curve” (Herrnstein & Murray) reignited controversy. 
 
* 2003–2010: Increasing twin and adoption data suggested high heritability ''within'' populations but did not settle ''between-group'' causes. 
 
* 2013: Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine resigned after criticism of his dissertation claiming Hispanic–White IQ differences were partly genetic [12]. 
 
* 2017: Quillette article criticised mainstream media for dismissing any genetic component without argument [8]. 
 
* Polygenic scores: GWAS now predict a share of IQ variance in Europeans, but portability across ancestries is limited, making inferences about group gaps uncertain [11].
 
Positions 
* Genetic contribution likely non-zero (race-realist writers)[1][8][13]. 
* Evidence insufficient; environment dominates (critics, many psychologists). 
* Most genomicists caution that present methods cannot definitively answer between-group causation [5][6].
 
----
 
== Timeline of public discourse  ==
 
1700s Linnaeus classifies ''Homo sapiens* into four continental “varieties.” 
 
1850s Scientific racism peaks; craniometry used to rank groups. 
 
1945 End of WWII discredits overt racial typologies. 
 
1950–51 UNESCO statements: race mostly social, replace by “ethnicity” [4]. 
 
1972 Lewontin variance analysis [6]. 
 
1994 “The Bell Curve.” 
 
2003 “Lewontin’s Fallacy” paper [10]. 
 
2013 Richwine controversy [12]. 
 
2018 David Reich NYT op-ed argues for a middle position [7]. 
 
2021 Substack, Aporia, Persuasion hosting freer debates amid claims of “conformity pressure” in academia [1][3][11].
 
2022 AI imaging paper suggests non-visible racial signal in tissue scans [2].
 
----
 
== Updated Sources  ==
 
# The Case for Race Realism – Aporia Magazine (Opinion/Essay) – https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-case-for-race-realism 
 
# “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging” (2022 pre-print, empirical research PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/AI''recognition''of''patient''race''in''medical''imaging''%282022%29.pdf 
 
# Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem – Persuasion (Opinion) – https://www.persuasion.community/p/discourse-on-race-has-a-conformity 
 
# Changing the Concept of Race: On UNESCO and Cultural Internationalism (2020, historical scholarship PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/Changing''the''concept''of''race''-''On''UNESCO''and''cultural''internationalism_%282020%29.pdf 
 
# David Reich: How to Talk about Race and Genetics – Unz Review (Interview/Blog) – https://www.unz.com/isteve/david-reich-how-to-talk-about-race-and-genetics/ 
 
# Developing Debate on Race and Genomics – UC Santa Cruz SciJust (Blog overview) – https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/05/30/developing-debate-on-race-and-genomics/ 
 
# How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race – New York Times (Op-ed) – https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/genes-race.html 
 
# No Voice, Vox: Sense & Nonsense in Discussing IQ & Race – Quillette (Opinion/Analysis) – https://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/ 
 
# “On the Concept of Race” (Philosophy of Biology, peer-reviewed 2009) – Springer – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-009-9193-7 
 
# Lewontin’s Fallacy – A. W. F. Edwards, 2003 (Peer-reviewed PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/Edwards2003-LewontinFallacy.pdf 
 
# The Current Status: It’s Complicated – Razib Khan Substack (Blog) – https://www.razibkhan.com/p/current-status-its-complicated 
 
# Jason Richwine IQ Controversy – Politico (News/Opinion) – https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/opinion-jason-richwine-095353 
 
# Latest Rationalization: “Race Doesn’t Exist” – Steve Sailer Blog (Opinion) – https://www.stevesailer.net/p/latest-rationalization-race-doesnt 
 
# Trump Annoyed the Smithsonian Isn’t Promoting Discredited Racial Ideas – Ars Technica (Satire/Commentary) – https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/trump-annoyed-the-smithsonian-isnt-promoting-discredited-racial-ideas/


== Sources ==
== Sources ==

Revision as of 01:37, 1 May 2025

Written by AI. Help improve this answer by adding to the sources section. When the sources section is updated this article will regenerate.

Overview

The word “race” is used in at least two main ways in contemporary discourse:

  1. as a sociopolitical label that groups people according to rules that differ across time and place, and
  2. as a loose biological shorthand for clusters of human genetic ancestry.

Whether those two meanings can be kept separate—or whether one should be preferred over the other—lies at the heart of the modern debate.

Is race a social construct?

Short answer

  • Yes, in the sense that the everyday categories “Black,” “White,” “Asian,” etc., are defined by social rules that vary by country and epoch and are not required by biology alone [4][6].
  • No, or at least “not only,” in the sense that humans do form partially distinguishable genetic clusters that broadly map onto continental ancestry, and these clusters can be predicted from DNA far better than chance [1][5][7][10][11].

Most scholars therefore speak of race as socially constructed yet constrained by population genetics. The relative emphasis differs among authors, yielding ongoing controversy.

Arguments that race is primarily a social construct

  • Classification rules are historically contingent: a person classified as “Black” in the U.S. might have been “coloured” in South Africa or “white” in Brazil at the same time period [4].
  • Genetic variation is mostly within continental groups (~85 %, Lewontin 1972); hence between-group boundaries are blurry [6].
  • Genomic clustering methods require researchers to pre-specify the number of clusters; the output can shift with sampling decisions and statistical settings [6].
  • The label “race” has been entangled with colonial and political projects; UNESCO’s 1950 and 1951 statements called the biological race concept scientifically obsolete and socially harmful [4].
  • In medicine, social conditions (e.g., access to care) often explain outcome disparities as well as, or better than, genetic ancestry [6].

Arguments that race is not purely a social construct

  • When thousands of genetic markers are used, individuals cluster reliably into groups that align with self-identified continental ancestry—even when no population labels are supplied to the algorithm [10][11].
  • A convolutional neural network can infer a patient’s self-reported race from radiological images with high accuracy, even when human experts cannot, suggesting a biological signal not reducible to social labelling [2].
  • Certain allele frequency differences (e.g., lactose persistence, sickle-cell trait, EDAR variants affecting hair morphology) follow continental patterns and have medical relevance, implying that ignoring population structure can harm precision medicine [5][7].
  • Critics of the Lewontin 85 % figure note that multiple loci considered jointly can separate populations with near-perfect accuracy (Edwards 2003) [10].
  • Empirical geneticists such as David Reich argue that while race is a poor proxy, ancestry differences do exist and matter for some traits; denying this risks eroding public trust in science [5][7].

Authors disagree over how much weight to give these points. Aporia’s “Race Realism” essay emphasises them; the UNESCO historiography and some genomics sociologists emphasise social construction.

Historical factors shaping the “social construct” view

  • 18th–19th c. naturalists (Linnaeus, Blumenbach) first formalised continental races, often ranking them hierarchically.
  • Early 20th c. eugenics misused race categories; Nazi race science culminated in genocide, discrediting biological race in post-war scholarship.
  • UNESCO 1950, 1951, 1964 statements promoted “the race concept must be abandoned” and substituted “ethnic group” [4].
  • 1972: Richard Lewontin’s famous paper quantified within- vs. between-group genetic variance and was widely interpreted as proving race is meaningless.
  • 1990s–2000s: The Human Genome Project popularised the slogan “there is more genetic variation within races than between them.”
  • 2003: Edwards’ rejoinder “Lewontin’s Fallacy” rekindled debate by showing that multivariate methods can classify populations [10].
  • 2010s–2020s: Cheap whole-genome sequencing and admixture studies complicated the picture; public discussion polarised along political lines [3][5][6][11][13].

Human population groups and known differences

Meaningful population (or ancestry) groups are usually defined by common descent across geographic space. A minimal list often used in medical genetics is:

  • West Eurasian (roughly Europe & Near East),
  • East Asian,
  • Sub-Saharan African,
  • Native American,
  • Oceanian,
  • South Asian.

Selected documented differences:

  • Disease alleles: Sickle-cell trait (African malarial regions), Tay-Sachs (Ashkenazi), alcohol-flushing ALDH22 variant (East Asia) [5][7].
  • Morphology: Average skin melanin, hair‐shaft shape (EDAR V370A), tooth-shovel trait, high-altitude haemoglobin adaptations in Tibetans [5][11].
  • Height: Northern Europeans are among the tallest populations; Pygmy groups are among the shortest. Polygenic height scores track this partially but incompletely [11].
  • Drug metabolism: CYP2C19 poor-metaboliser alleles are more common in East Asians than Europeans, influencing clopidogrel dosing guidelines [7].

All differences are statistical averages with large overlap among individuals.

Origins of the major population groups

  • Modern Homo sapiens left Africa ~60–70 kya.
  • A series of founder effects and isolation by distance produced continental genetic structure; for example, East vs. West Eurasians diverged roughly 40 kya, with later back-migrations [5][7].
  • Admixture with archaic humans (Neanderthals and Denisovans) varies by region (higher in Oceanians) [5].
  • Subsequent Holocene migrations (e.g., Bantu expansion, Steppe pastoralists, Austronesian dispersal) reshaped regional genomes, so present-day populations are mosaics rather than discrete branches [11].

The race and IQ debate

Definition The “race and IQ” debate asks whether average IQ score gaps among population groups are wholly environmental or partly genetic.

Key moments

  • 1969: Arthur Jensen argued a partly genetic explanation for the Black–White gap in the U.S.
  • 1994: “The Bell Curve” (Herrnstein & Murray) reignited controversy.
  • 2003–2010: Increasing twin and adoption data suggested high heritability within populations but did not settle between-group causes.
  • 2013: Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine resigned after criticism of his dissertation claiming Hispanic–White IQ differences were partly genetic [12].
  • 2017: Quillette article criticised mainstream media for dismissing any genetic component without argument [8].
  • Polygenic scores: GWAS now predict a share of IQ variance in Europeans, but portability across ancestries is limited, making inferences about group gaps uncertain [11].

Positions

  • Genetic contribution likely non-zero (race-realist writers)[1][8][13].
  • Evidence insufficient; environment dominates (critics, many psychologists).
  • Most genomicists caution that present methods cannot definitively answer between-group causation [5][6].

Timeline of public discourse

1700s Linnaeus classifies Homo sapiens* into four continental “varieties.”

1850s Scientific racism peaks; craniometry used to rank groups.

1945 End of WWII discredits overt racial typologies.

1950–51 UNESCO statements: race mostly social, replace by “ethnicity” [4].

1972 Lewontin variance analysis [6].

1994 “The Bell Curve.”

2003 “Lewontin’s Fallacy” paper [10].

2013 Richwine controversy [12].

2018 David Reich NYT op-ed argues for a middle position [7].

2021 Substack, Aporia, Persuasion hosting freer debates amid claims of “conformity pressure” in academia [1][3][11].

2022 AI imaging paper suggests non-visible racial signal in tissue scans [2].

Updated Sources

  1. The Case for Race Realism – Aporia Magazine (Opinion/Essay) – https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-case-for-race-realism
  1. “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging” (2022 pre-print, empirical research PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/AIrecognitionofpatientraceinmedicalimaging%282022%29.pdf
  1. Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem – Persuasion (Opinion) – https://www.persuasion.community/p/discourse-on-race-has-a-conformity
  1. Changing the Concept of Race: On UNESCO and Cultural Internationalism (2020, historical scholarship PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/Changingtheconceptofrace-OnUNESCOandculturalinternationalism_%282020%29.pdf
  1. David Reich: How to Talk about Race and Genetics – Unz Review (Interview/Blog) – https://www.unz.com/isteve/david-reich-how-to-talk-about-race-and-genetics/
  1. Developing Debate on Race and Genomics – UC Santa Cruz SciJust (Blog overview) – https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/05/30/developing-debate-on-race-and-genomics/
  1. How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of Race – New York Times (Op-ed) – https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/genes-race.html
  1. No Voice, Vox: Sense & Nonsense in Discussing IQ & Race – Quillette (Opinion/Analysis) – https://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/
  1. “On the Concept of Race” (Philosophy of Biology, peer-reviewed 2009) – Springer – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-009-9193-7
  1. Lewontin’s Fallacy – A. W. F. Edwards, 2003 (Peer-reviewed PDF) – https://www.thewikle.com/resources/Edwards2003-LewontinFallacy.pdf
  1. The Current Status: It’s Complicated – Razib Khan Substack (Blog) – https://www.razibkhan.com/p/current-status-its-complicated
  1. Jason Richwine IQ Controversy – Politico (News/Opinion) – https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/opinion-jason-richwine-095353
  1. Latest Rationalization: “Race Doesn’t Exist” – Steve Sailer Blog (Opinion) – https://www.stevesailer.net/p/latest-rationalization-race-doesnt
  1. Trump Annoyed the Smithsonian Isn’t Promoting Discredited Racial Ideas – Ars Technica (Satire/Commentary) – https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/trump-annoyed-the-smithsonian-isnt-promoting-discredited-racial-ideas/

Sources

  1. The Case for Race Realism - Aporia Magazine (Opinion/Essay)
  2. “AI Recognition of Patient Race in Medical Imaging” (2022, pre-print PDF). Empirical research
  3. Discourse on Race Has a Conformity Problem
  4. Changing the concept of race: On UNESCO and cultural internationalism (Historical scholarship)
  1. https://www.unz.com/isteve/david-reich-how-to-talk-about-race-and-genetics/
  2. https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/05/30/developing-debate-on-race-and-genomics/
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/genes-race.html
  4. https://quillette.com/2017/06/11/no-voice-vox-sense-nonsense-discussing-iq-race/
  5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-009-9193-7
  6. https://www.thewikle.com/resources/Edwards2003-LewontinFallacy.pdf
  7. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/current-status-its-complicated
  8. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/opinion-jason-richwine-095353
  9. https://www.stevesailer.net/p/latest-rationalization-race-doesnt
  10. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/trump-annoyed-the-smithsonian-isnt-promoting-discredited-racial-ideas/

Question

Is race a social construct? What are the arguments for and against race being a social construct? What historical factors influenced the idea of race as a social construct? What are human population groups and what are some known differences between them? What are the origins of different human population groups? What is the race and IQ debate?

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