Of course there are physical characteristics that we associate with race.

This is an “0f course” moment to you and me, but I could tell you horror stories about how very well educated people have bought the race is a social construction framing, hook, liine and sinker. There’s no denying that layered on top of the biology are all sorts of kooky cultural perceptions. Look, when I argue against a doctoral student in chemistry (who is extremely well read in the works of Gould, Lewontin, Rose) who is trying to tell me that a Pygmy and a Jew are more closely related than two Jews and starts invoking Lewontin’s Fallacy as a basis for his argument, then that tells me that there are a whole lot of Leftist Creationists out there who are working under some funky impressions of what race means. What is usually happening is these people are adopting this position because they think it is more sophisticated than the one that the yokels hold, but they seem to block out the biology completely. It has more to do with liberal self-image than it does with sophisticated understanding of the pertinent issues.

But when we can’t agree even on how many races there are

Most population geneticists agree on the definition of continental races. Then, when you start looking at the correlation structure of the genome you can start parsing even more finely. Think of it this way, the fact that you can’t define how many families exist in the world, nor what the boundaries of a family are, doesn’t mean that families don’t exist. As the Risch study demonstrates people’s self-selection agrees almost totally to their genetic history.

I acknowledge that my position is very disrespectful, toward (some) religions mostly. I don’t know which ones. I suppose I’m just not very religiously sensitive or something like that. (Must suck for them if they die of body-destroying accident.)

I also provided a possible cop-out that I would be willing to consider (the person who wants to buried whole does the damn paperwork explaining his/her reasons, instead of people who would prudently, and unselfishly let their organs used to save actual living people being the ones forced to do paperwork.)

what about people whose faith dictates that their bodies must be whole for proper burial?

This is true of all economic transactions. The alternative is state control of the economy, so that no bad decisions get made. It doesn’t work very well.

And, your point? Informed consent in human subjects research is qualitatively different from routine economic transactions. If you’ve got access to JAMA, I’ll point you to some outstanding pieces on this.

Yeah, people can keep saying that, but . . .

…but “race” doesn’t follow any of the rules of genetics. If a black person and a white person mate, the child is considered black. If a white person and an asian person mate, the child is considered asian. (Well, maybe race is co-dominant.) But if a black person and an asian person mate, the child is still black. (So much for co-dominance.) We can describe race in terms of “1/8th American Indian” but that kind of fractioning doesn’t make sense; as a diplod organism you’re either half something, or none of it. You only have two copies of each chromosome.

C’mon, TangoMan. Of course there are physical characteristics that we associate with race. We don’t call them “black” people because that’s their favorite color. But when we can’t agree even on how many races there are, or how race is supposed to sort through offspring, that’s a pretty good indication that this “race” business has its basis more in cultural convention than in any genetic reality.

Some thoughts on organ donations:

1) I’m actually all for harvesting any and all necessary organs from dead people. I mean, I would prefer if my body was covered in gold and placed upon a 1000′ tall pedestal after death, but what a big fucking waste of resources that would be. If not compulsory, at the very least the default state should be: “You can take everything after death” instead of: “You cannot take anything if I haven’t done the paperwork”. Rights of the living should thus trump big time over the rights of the dead.

This is somewhat disrespectful and radical viewpoint, but I can live with that.

2 While I am not, even though I have huge reservations toward it, opposed to free selling of organs, some donations, such as relatively easy and harmless (for the donor, with experienced staff) blood donation works better without economic free market system, because a voluntary system gets better blood (as opposed to blood from down-to-luck people like drug addicts. I know there is testing, but sometimes mistakes happen. As Isaac Asimov found out. :( ), thus the giving blood is good -meme should be spread. I have personally already bled a total half bucket of blood (4,5 litres) for free at this point at the local Red Cross clinic, and I’m still young.

1) Women who sell eggs can be jailed and given a six-figure fine. Men who sell sperm, who cares?

2) The purported reason for the ban is the health of the seller. The exact same risks exist for donors.

I wonder if the good Representative has figure out that Arizona women will simply cross state lines to sell eggs.

Yeah, people can keep saying that, but . . .

What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That’s an error rate of 0.14 percent.

[ . . . . . . ]

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.

“This shows that people’s self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background,” Risch said.

This is true of all economic transactions. The alternative is state control of the economy, so that no bad decisions get made. It doesn’t work very well.

Second, it strongly reinforces prejudicial cultural preferences. If you’ve seen the ads asking for a white, blue-eyed supermodel with 1500+ on the SAT, you’ll know what I mean.

So? People have preferences. Who are we to question their choices when it comes to such personal matters?