Quote Originally Posted by inumbra View Post
well, you're missing my point. i mean people in the deep south: ooh 20 generations or something. that's hardly any. is it going to make for some significant personality trait or cognitive feature shared by no other humans anywhere? can the deep southerners be their own race now? i mean it's ridiculous. it's also ridiculous to call all "white people" or all "black people" distinct races.

i'm not arguing that we are not adapting to our environment subtly, but that we are and we still don't actually have any races. i'm not saying it's impossible to find a distinct pocket of people that have a higher tendency to be adapted to a single thing--like a virus... but that is not a race. it's really hard to see how like if some of my ancestors lived in the alps for 25,000 years before climbing down to live in the valleys and spread apart in separate groups for the next 10,000 years until finally a small pocket of the original group settled in a northern forest... how that gives me a particular racially identifiable set of personality or cognitive traits that anyone should actually care about because of their amazing significance. like i can't genetically shake the laziness of those damn mountain dwellers and their 25,000 years of sitting on their asses => it's a racial distinction.

(this is also funny because kids often have unique behavioral and cognitive traits anyway, unique from their parents. sometimes you just get the alien child who seems utterly unidentifiable in the family.)
You act as though there has to be some switch that gets thrown for classification to occur. TBH there isn't even perfectly clear boundaries as to what is a human v.s. what is not. You go back to the period of time where we were undergoing a lot of changes, and our physical and mental composition is a lot different. Species, race, population.. these are social constructs by choosing certain specifics to focus on.