[Dragaera] Boing!

[Maximilian Wilson]

On 9/8/06, Jon_Lincicum at stream.com <Jon_Lincicum at stream.com> wrote:
>
> "race is an artifical concept"... Hmmm... I don't agree with this. Race is
> based on visible characteristics, therefore it is not "artificial". That
> it is based on "superficial" differences, I will grant you.
>

Not always superficial. Race is a concept designed to classify human beings
into broad categories so that decisions can be made more easily; as with any
classification algorithm, it produces varying results depending upon your
classification parameters. Any attempt to classify all human beings into
exactly one of two races would probably decide that "male" and "female" are
different "races", since that produces the clearest division for the
greatest number of human attributes; other schemes exist that classify
according to malaria susceptibility lump Nelson Mandella in with Italians.
The historical conceptions of which races are which (e.g. white vs. black
vs. hispanic vs. asian, to name a common division) probably have good
historical reasons for having been chosen, some of which are still valid
today (given four random people, one in each category, you can make a good
guess as to their relative IQ rankings asian > white > hispanic > black,
IIRC) and some of which are not (you can no longer conclude that someone who
is black is probably Muslim). Since it's not explicit in the historical
record why our racial boundaries were set where they were, you can certainly
argue that race is arbitrary, if not artificial.

That said, it's likely that Dragaerans cluster naturally into 17 races
corresponding to their houses, because of both the unique spliced genes and
endogamy.

-Max Wilson


-- 
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.