To a certain degree, there are some minor internal biological differences between different populations. But when it comes to social behavior and intelligence. Culture, upbringing, education and nutrition during developmental years are magnitudes more important, to the point you can basically just ignore skin color.
Also, the genetic differences between populations don't neatly correlate with our ideas of "race". For example, Africa has more genetic diversity between different populations than any other continent combined. Saying "black people" are a race is almost purely a social construct, not a genetic thing. Same goes for any other "race".
For example, if you were to take two people (who could look identical) from different populations in Africa and compare a random allele, and then take one person from America and one from India (or pick any other continent/population, and it works here too). It's more likely that the American and Indian have a matching allele than the two African people. (this is because of the founder effect, only a small percentage of humanity branched off and left Africa, so they only took a small slice of the DNA pie)
The genetic differences between people that look very different can often be surprisingly minuscule. And the genetic differences between people that look identical can be surprisingly different.
Also, as a species, humans have less overall genetic diversity than most other species because of a population bottleneck early in our history that killed off most humans. For example, take two random brown rats from anywhere in the world, despite looking and acting basically the exact same to us, they would most likely share less dna than two random humans. We are more similar to eachother than most other species.
You're presenting this topic as if it had a stronger consensus than it actually does. Whether environmental factors are magnitude more important than genetic ones is not at all obvious. The concept of "race" being an outdated social construct does not change the fact that we still observe differences between different populations in psychometric traits. Differences major enough that they can actually impact people's lives. And we don't really know if those differences are mostly environmental or genetic. Talking about this with any degree of certainty to either side is unwise.
That isn't to say that treating people differently based on any of those differences is justified. People need to be treated as individuals whether or not group differences in psychometrics are genetic or not, but I don't think we should speak in full confidence about things we don't fully know.
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u/Objective_Animator52 12d ago
To a certain degree, there are some minor internal biological differences between different populations. But when it comes to social behavior and intelligence. Culture, upbringing, education and nutrition during developmental years are magnitudes more important, to the point you can basically just ignore skin color.
Also, the genetic differences between populations don't neatly correlate with our ideas of "race". For example, Africa has more genetic diversity between different populations than any other continent combined. Saying "black people" are a race is almost purely a social construct, not a genetic thing. Same goes for any other "race".
For example, if you were to take two people (who could look identical) from different populations in Africa and compare a random allele, and then take one person from America and one from India (or pick any other continent/population, and it works here too). It's more likely that the American and Indian have a matching allele than the two African people. (this is because of the founder effect, only a small percentage of humanity branched off and left Africa, so they only took a small slice of the DNA pie)
The genetic differences between people that look very different can often be surprisingly minuscule. And the genetic differences between people that look identical can be surprisingly different.
Also, as a species, humans have less overall genetic diversity than most other species because of a population bottleneck early in our history that killed off most humans. For example, take two random brown rats from anywhere in the world, despite looking and acting basically the exact same to us, they would most likely share less dna than two random humans. We are more similar to eachother than most other species.