On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 10:01 AM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: > On Saturday 25 Feb 2012 2:15:10 pm Chew Lin Kay wrote:
>> Throwing a comment out there until I find more brain space to deal with >> it--there is diversity of race, there is diversity of religion, there is >> diversity of class. > Disclaimer: I ask for forgiveness in advance. I mean no harm, but as I get > older I find myself writing things that probe innocent "innermost feelings" > that people may have and end up causing anger. Please assume goodwill. > Chew Lin Kay used the expression "diversity of race" and that sparked off a > series of thoughts in my mind. > There was a time maybe from the 1800s to the early 1900s where "science" > actually believed that humans occured in "races". Races were not defined on > any > objective metric but usually on physical characteritics like skin color and > shape of nose or some feature visible to humans. Shape and size of nose became > an impotant way of recognizing superior and inferior races - with Aborigines > and people of African origing occupying the lowermost rung. Race is (as you say) a phenotypic classification system that was believed to have predictive power with respect to intelligence, behaviour, and morality. Like the system of dividing organisms into species based on morphology, it was found to be inaccurate and has been largely discredited and discarded except by those ignorant of the science, or who have a particular agenda. Definition of species has largely been replaced by a system based on genetics. Similar efforts to define race by consistent genetic clusters has had limited success. While there are some genetic markers that correspond to the traditional racial divisions, the resulting clusters don't tend to meet the needs of those with a specific agenda around race (for example "white" is not a race), and they have limited predictive power for those interested in science. I think in the case of Singapore "race" here might be more usefully replaced with "culture." There is a diversity of culture in Singapore with Teochew/Hokkien/Nyonya chinese, Malay, Malaysian Indian, and "westerners" and while there are correlations with class and religion but they are not exact. -- Charles
