Warp wrote:
>   I think that's the core issue in this whole thread.

Thank you. This was a *clear* explanation.

> aversion to anything that makes a distinction between races,

One item to note: One of the reasons people say "there's no such thing as 
race" is because "race" is really a mixture of a whole lot of features, and 
the variation between those features in any particular "race" (regardless of 
how you cut up the races) is larger than between separate "races".

It's not people denying genetics. It's people denying that there's any 
feature that occurs in one "race" that doesn't occur in another "race" with 
enough frequency to warrant the distinction.

It's taking 100 genes that determine different factors of your make up and 
chopping you into one of 3 or 5 or 10 buckets, then dealing with you based 
on those buckets instead of the 100 or so genes.

> promoting outright banning the entire concept of "race",

Yes. It's deep down a meaningless term. I've seen twins born of "mixed race" 
families where one twin looked like he was from finland and the other looked 
like she was from kenya. Yet they were both born of the same parents. Are 
they the same race?

Why is Obama "black" but not "japanese"?  I believe even you once pointed 
out the absurdity there.

Kenyans are tall, but not all of them, and some British are tall too. I'm 
sure you know some people born where you are that have dark curly hair.

It's like arguing over whether a programming language is "high level" or 
not. Sure, SQL is "high level", and machine code is "low level", but that 
doesn't mean you can categorize most programming languages into one or the 
other of those categories in any non-arbitrary way.

That's why people argue against using race for *any* purpose.

HTH.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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