How did it come to be there are different races of people

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KevinK said:
What is Catholic teaching on how it came to be there are so many different races of people coming from the population bottleneck of Noah and his family?
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First of all, as far as I’m aware, we aren’t required to believe that the Noah story is literal.

Second, the cause of different skin colors is a scientific matter, not the religious or philosophical matter the Church teaches on. With that said, it’s got a pretty simple answer: evolution.
HOMM said:
“Race” is a human construct. There is only the human race.
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Whenever I hear someone try to “enlighten” us with this every time “race” is used:
 
KevinK said:
I agree “race” is not a clear scientific boundary, but surely you agree an Australian aboriginal and a Scandinavian are vastly different; and there must be some account as to how these vast differences arose from a Catholic perspective.
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I do not agree with this. In fact Scandinavians and indigenous Australians are closer to each other than to southern Africans. I assume you are talking about four or five physical characteristics that are more common in each group. There are millions (literally) of physical characteristics. Most you can’t see. Almost all are the same between different human groups. There are no ‘races’ except the usual geographical variations you seen in all species.
 
I stand corrected. It should read the atheistic claim that all races evolved independently from one another.
 
Gab123 said:
I stand corrected. It should read the atheistic claim that all races evolved independently from one another.
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A most unlikely view for an atheist to hold, since all science shows it is not so. Do you know of any atheists who hold this view. From memory Carlton Coon, it’s former advocate, was a Christian.
 
HOMM said:
The gif is cute, but it doesn’t help me understand what in the world you are trying to say.
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“Race” is pretty common parlance to refer to skin color and ethnicity. When used as such, it does not indicate a denial of one group’s humanity, and unless someone indicates that they’re using the term otherwise, the “race is a human construct” lecture frankly comes across as condescending, accusative, and/or pretentious.

Another example would be people who feel the need to lecture others on how the word “gay” really means “happy”. Sure, that’s a way of using it, but using it to refer to a person who is homosexual has become common parlance.
 
ZMystiCat said:
“Race” is pretty common parlance to refer to skin color and ethnicity. When used as such, it does not indicate a denial of one group’s humanity, and unless someone indicates that they’re using the term otherwise, the “race is a human construct” lecture frankly comes across as condescending, accusative, and/or pretentious.
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‘Skin colour’ or ‘color’ as they spell it in the US is far more determinant of ‘race’ in the thinking of Americans than among many other peoples. It is indeed a human construct, as can be see in these differences in attitude. There is in fact no reason regard people of one skin colour as a ‘race’. I have no doubt that in the US a Melanesian would be seen as ‘black’ but they are far more closely related to ‘white’ US citizens originating in Germany than to any African. You may feel I am condescending, accusing or pretending, but facts, I’m afraid, are facts however you feel.
 
FiveLinden said:
‘Skin colour’ or ‘color’ as they spell it in the US is far more determinant of ‘race’ in the thinking of Americans than among many other peoples.
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Well, there are Americans on this forum. Shocking, I know.
FiveLinden said:
It is indeed a human construct,
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I’m not denying that the general way of discussing such things as race aren’t, in at least some way, a human construct. That, however, is at best tangential to the original question raised, which frankly has a one word answer:

FiveLinden said:
I have no doubt that in the US a Melanesian would be seen as ‘black’ but they are far more closely related to ‘white’ US citizens originating in Germany than to any African.
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When the question is asked anymore, it actually often comes down more to ancestry than skin color. There are still some holes in most questionnaires I’ve seen, but it is less “are you black?” and more African, Polynesian, Caucasian, etc. (And if I get a lecture on where humans originated from, I’m pulling the gif out again.)
FiveLinden said:
facts, I’m afraid, are facts however you feel
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And it is a simple fact that parlances exist. If you don’t want to accept that, then maybe you can explain to me how in the world this is called a biscuit by some people:


That’s a cookie! This is a biscuit:


And also, who uses “coke” or “pop” or “fizzy drink” to refer to refer to “soda”? Weirdos!
 
Most entertaining. But these are not differences in dialect. They are differences in the understanding of scientific observations.
 
When we speak of race as a social construct it is interesting to test our assumptions about the relationship between outward appearance and underlying genetics.

For example, is this man:

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More closely related to this man:
e2578d888f781b26724876d3ddf7184ff9500a1e.jpeg


Or to this man:

eb589da29170d65b7922f662bef908eda00cd030.jpeg


The genetic evidence is actually quite clear; the first man is most closely related to the Japanese, or specifically the Japanese with a large portion of Jomon/Ainu descent. Human appearance, the thing we typically use to determine “race”, is quite maleable and changes relatively quickly (in terms of epochs, not decades). In this we are much like dogs, where the various breeds have arisen mostly in the last 200 years.

It is actually not all that unreasonable to take the stance that the races arose after the time of Noah, if one were to take the story very literalistically. The pace of “racial characteristic” change and development might not be that far off from the timeline of Genesis if we fudge the numbers just a bit. 😀
 
FiveLinden said:
Most entertaining. But these are not differences in dialect. They are differences in the understanding of scientific observations.
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Science doesn’t have a monopoly on language. There’s more to life than just science, and people have words they use to describe those other things in life.
 
Neither Darwin nor atheists claim that human races evolved separately.
 
ZMystiCat said:
Science doesn’t have a monopoly on language. There’s more to life than just science, and people have words they use to describe those other things in life.
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People can use whatever words they like. It is their meaning I am saying is false.
 
FiveLinden said:
People can use whatever words they like.
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If using “race” in such a way is using whatever word one like, then every word in this sentence is just being used the way I like. That doesn’t make any of it wrong.
FiveLinden said:
It is their meaning I am saying is false.
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And what would be the proper use of the term?

And just to cite one dictionary:
race

noun

noun race plural noun races
  1. each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics.
  • the fact or condition of belonging to a racial division or group; the qualities or characteristics associated with this.
  • a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group.
  • a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features.
  • a population within a species that is distinct in some way, especially a subspecies.
  • (in nontechnical use) each of the major divisions of living creatures.
  • a group of people descended from a common ancestor.
  • ancestry.
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Merriam-Webster is a bit more cumbersome but essentially the same. And yeah, yeah, I know, dictionary citations are normally bad argumentation, but we’re literally discussing definitions here.

Also, back to the point on science: Were you speaking of the taxonomy label or something else? Sorry, I forgot to ask. If not, that’s what I based my last comment on, since it seemed bizarre to limit oneself to the taxonomical usage when there are literally other usages of it that have nothing to do with biology (e.g. “run a race”).
 
Atheists do not claim it anymore, but in the 19th century polygenesis was used as an argument against the Book of Genesis. Atheism is a psychological condition, thus the mentality has always been inclined to use “science” to claim that the Bible has been debunked. For example atheists in the 1920s claimed that the Bible had been debunked because most scientists believed the universe was eternal, thus contradicting the Book of Genesis which states that the universe had a beginning. in fact when Fr. Georges Lemaitre proposed the concept of the Primordial Atom, it was dismissed by the scientific community and mocked as as a “big bang” theory. It wasn’t until Edwin Hubble found evidence that confirmed that the universe was indeed expanding that the “Big Bang” theory revolutionized scientific thought and became the foundation of modern astronomy today. Even atheistic Darwinism has been debunked by DNA research, thus scientists today have moved away from many of its claims…
 
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