[Taxacom] Race and taxonomy

[Jim Croft]

I used to do the same in Papua New Guinea and it was remarkable how
often you could get it right in picking the regions people came from.
Even if you got it wrong, you were usually were not too far out
geographically, or there was an interesting ancestral dalliance that
explained it.  You just had to walk into a NG highland village to see
genetics and isolation in play.  But with the new mobility things are
getting complicated...

But you can come a cropper playing this game.  On the N coast of PNG I
saw a bloke in a restaurant who did not look in the right place and I
guessed mid Pacific, somewhere between Melanesia and Polynesia.  He
was challenging his colleagues to guess where he was from.  Ever the
tactful diplomat I butted in with 'Rotuma!'.  (http://www.rotuma.net/)
 He said 'How the heck did you know that?'  I told him I went to
primary school in Suva with a guy from Rotuma who had a similar sort
of not very Fijian face and so took a wild guess.  It turned out he
was that guy, we were classmates and we had not seen each other for
two decades...

jim

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 5:44 PM,  <Don.Colless at csiro.au> wrote:
> "Race", as a taxonomic category, seems to have disappeared - no doubt because of its relative uselessness vis-a-vis 'subspecies".  Nonetheless it persists, and no doubt will continue to persist, in popular speech. We are these days (especially) surrounded by many folk from many lands. And for purposes of reference, we find it useful to be able to differentiate them as, say, Chinese, or African, or European, or others according to our skills in recognition. And we may call them "races" without (in most cases) any implied attributes other than geographic origin. As a boy in Australia - in the 1920-30's - the latter was not so; but it seems to me that such "racism" has become quite uncommon these days. Having once lived in Asia for many years, it now my hobby to try to guess the ethnic origins of people around me -  and I feel no embarrassment in asking them. Indeed, I celebrate our modern, remarkable multinationality.
>
> Donald H. Colless
> CSIRO Div of Entomology
> GPO Box 1700
> Canberra 2601
> don.colless at csiro.au
> tuz li munz est miens envirun
>
> ________________________________________
>
>
> Frank.Krell at dmns.org wrote:
>> As a Commissioner, I agree that us zoo-nomenclators are brilliant since
>> race is not in our Code. However, if we look in Torre-Bueno's Glossary
>> of Entomology (I have the 1989 edition at hand), race is synonym to
>> subspecies.
>
> * and a corollary of Wilson & Brown's 1954 debunking of the classical
> subspecies concept was that there were no human subspecies or "races,"
> and therefore racism was a non-concept, since it referenced a
> non-category. As an undergraduate I once saw Bill Brown's wonderful
> slide show of human diversity, answering in the negative the question:
> "Can you classify these into a small number of uniform kinds?"
>
> fred schueler.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>             Bishops Mills Natural History Centre
>           Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
>        RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
>     on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
>       (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca
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-- 
_________________
Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499

"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality."
- Joseph Conrad, author (1857-1924)