For follow-up and comparison, a recent study showed traceable genetic elements of the Phoenicians in 1 in 17 people from countries surrounding the Mediterranean. Knowing how much the Phoenicians shared culture and genetics throughout trade routes of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, and yet only 1 in 17 retain a trace. And that’s considered a lot.

… and then:

Remember, this is all about heredity and ancestry. How many of people in the Mediterranean are descended from Phoenicians? 1 in 17 apparently. How many of them are descended from Celts or Mongols? Any?? Maybe 1 in 10,000, prior to the rise of trade coming from Great Britain in the Middle Ages, but I’m just guessing.

But the article he links to says:

Scientists reported Thursday that as many as 1 in 17 men living today on the coasts of North Africa and southern Europe may have a Phoenician direct male-line ancestor.

In any random generation of my ancestors, I will have exactly 1 direct male-line ancestor, and 2^n other ancestors. One in 17 means the Phoenicians have contributed about 1/17 of all the genetic material in that population, and by now everyone will have multiple Phoenician ancestors. The only exceptions will be recent immigrants.

That study doesn’t help your point in any way at all.

Do races exist? Are races purely a social construct? Geographically correlated variation in phenotypic traits that are visible with clothes on does exist–that’s not a social construct. It’s the categorization and labelling of such variation as “races” that is the social construct. To me, far more insidious than the abstract concept of “races” is the semantic labelling of socially perceived races. What could be more polarizing than the ubiquitous terminology of “black” vs. “white”? That taxonomy is empirically incorrect*, connotation-laden, and absurdly insufficient, but is used by nearly everybody nevertheless. Even our blog-host, perhaps the most vociferous and persuasive opponent of the race concept on the blogosphere, has no compunctions about calling somebody a “white guy.”

Not sure I’ve added anything substantive to the discussion but there you have it anyway.

p.s. windy is anything but “humorless;” nobody on the internet has made me laugh harder, Brownian and a few others possibly excepted.

*An anecdote remembered from a long-ago discussion on the Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin show:
1: Why do you call yourself “black”? Your skin is brown.
2: What about you? Is your skin “white”?
1: No, you’re right–my skin is flesh-colored.
2: So’s mine.

wtf?

for what it’s worth, not having seen the term “treeosity” before myself, I believe what Greg was trying to do was point out that it belongs to the realm of statistics used to analyze phylogenetic trees, hence the link.

A bit more explanation of how it is used would be nice, but my impression seeing the term used here is that “treeosity” is a kind of “best fit” analysis?

could be totally wrong, but that was the impression I got.

Windy, it is a shame that you have chosen to judge my credentials.

No, silly, I found it amusing that you chose to lecture me about what statistics “we” evolutionary biologists use, when I actually work with phylogenetics and have never heard anyone use ‘treeosity’. But it’s entirely possible that it has been used before my time so it would be fun to see a link to those papers.

Treeosty is obscure. I was used only briefly and in a few papers, but it has such a cool name it is not forgettable. In the field of phylogenetics there is a huge literature on methods and statistics.

Then please give me a link to a paper that uses ‘treeosity’ not to ‘phylogenetic statistics’! Sheesh!

Treeosty is obscure. I was used only briefly and in a few papers, but it has such a cool name it is not forgettable. In the field of phylogenetics there is a huge literature on methods and statistics.

Start here: http://tinyurl.com/b5nnpt

Then it’s a shame that you choose to post such obscure comments about it. And I’d still be sincerely interested in those references to papers that use the ‘treeosity’ statistic?

What Dan, Godless, Mark (probably because he was too busy transcribing the names of SNPs), and others here fail to understand is that of course one can pick any trait and find different frequencies of that trait among different populations. Unfortunately for the ‘race realists’, you’ll find different distributions depending on what traits you look at. Take blood groups for instance, and map them. (Oh, whaddaya know, it’s already been done.) See anything there that conforms to your idea of ‘race’? Given that, what makes the traits you think you’ve based your category of ‘Caucasian’, ‘Asian’, and ‘Negroid’ more real, besides the fact that blood type isn’t immediately visible?

It’s been said more than a few times up thread (and more succinctly, too), but at the risk of being repetitious, but given how poor ‘race’ is an indicator of, well, almost anything biological, and the grievous harm the concept has had and continues to have, what the hell are you all defending it so staunchly for?

(And Godless Materialist: seriously, look up the difference between sex and gender sometime, as Stephanie Z suggested. Then pull that anti-liberal stick out of your ass. You must be virtually buried in chiropractic bills.)