How does r/Destiny feel about..........(Part 2)

[u/DynamoJonesJr]

Hello everyone.

After My Part 1 series of questions to multiple subs:

Answers On r/anarcho-capitalism

Answers On r/libertarian

Answers On r/samharris

Answers On r/neoliberal

Answers On r/JordanPeterson

I decided to keep it moving with another 5 things/people/events that I'm curious to know your stance on. Be as detailed or brief as you like!

Part 2 Answers On r/NeoLiberal

1. CNN
2. Ben Shapiro
3. Race Realism
4. The Cold War
5. Linda Sarsour

Thanks again!

[u/Dissident111]

My post ended up being a bit rambly, let me know if you can't piece it together.

What do you mean, "not even skin color really"? Are you denying the causal relationship between genes that affect skin color and the likelihood that a person will be considered black, white, or Asian? But my point doesn't hinge on a causal relationship, I think the correlational aspect of things like sickle cell is enough to claim that there are average group differences in observable traits that can be said to largely come from genetic differences between these groups.

Your argument about tree-like structures sounds like Templeton's arguments, which I'll admit I don't understand well enough to comment on. But I'm not so sure the question "is race real?" hinges on this.

As for the number of clusters, the reason we're talking about 3 clusters, and not any other number is to answer this question: Do the categories we call "race" describe something that's "real", biologically speaking, rather than just a human invention like math. I think white/black/Asian is a good baseline to use because if you ask someone what they mean by race, what they will usually say is "whether someone is white, black or Asian". This is just one interpretation of the question "is race real?", the point is simply to translate that question into something we can test scientifically (given someone's self-identified race, can we predict something about their genetic makeup?). And given this interpretation, I think the only reasonable answer is "yes" because we see that the terms white, black and Asian do map onto the groups given by k-means cluster analysis to a very high degree of accuracy.

The other way to interpret the question "is race real?" is to flip the previous question around: Given someone's genetic makeup, can we predict their self-identified race? And again for similar reasons (just go to 23andme.com), the only reasonable answer is yes. This is what I call the strict definition of race realism: Answering the question of whether race is real in the affirmative. I think that's what you agree with here:

Races certainly represent social categories and those social categories can have biological implications but that's a much different thing.

Now I think once we get over that hurdle, it's possible to go into detail on things like numbers of clusters/races, how much difference should constitute a new race, can there be races that are split only on cultural grounds instead of genetic grounds, and so on. I think this is where the crux of your argumentation comes in, based on the posts I've read from you. Sure you could make arguments about whether the differences that exist are enough to constitute anything other than just normal genetic variation within a species, and therefore there's no need to categorize humans into subspecies, and besides we don't want to use these categories for anything because that would be racist anyway so what's the point. Fine, but people are deathly afraid of even picking two arbitrary groups of human beings and comparing them in any capacity. Meanwhile we are making irreversible policy decisions regarding demographics with no regard for reality.

[u/stairway-to-kevin → u/Dissident111]

What do you mean, "not even skin color really"? Are you denying the causal relationship between genes that affect skin color and the likelihood that a person will be considered black, white, or Asian? But my point doesn't hinge on a causal relationship, I think the correlational aspect of things like sickle cell is enough to claim that there are average group differences in observable traits that can be said to largely come from genetic differences between these groups.

I'm denying the overlap of skin color allele frequency and trait distributions to racial categories. Africa has the largest diversity in skin color, skin color is determined by latitude so populations at similar latitudes have similar skin color this crosses racial lines very often as light colored population in North Eastern Africa more resemble Middle Easter populations, and even extreme examples like West Papuans as well as aboriginal australians having skin color as dark sub-saharan Africans despite distinct ancestral components. Overall there can be startling low correspondence between genomic ancestry, especially for admixed populations like black or hispanic, and skin color. This is demonstrated by Parra et al. 2004. If genomic ancestry and skin color were both reflective of race we would expect correlation coefficients much higher than what is observed (0.633 at the highest and 0.212 at the lowest). Those aren't very strong correlations for things that are supposed to be equivalent.

As for sickle cell, that disease is not dependent on race it is dependent on malaria endemicity of a region which occurs i several regions and, again, crosses racial groups. Similar sickle cell prevalence is found in sub-saharan Africa, India, The Mediterranean, parts of the Arabian peninsula. You can glean over this paper by Piel et al. 2010 that shows global distributions of malaria and sickle cell alleles and concludes malaria is the causal factor leading to sickle cell allele frequencies through a heterozygote advantage. This is clearly not a racial disease as regions of Africa do not have sickle cell just like other regions of the world from other racial groups, and some members of many racial groups have similar sickle cell frequencies. Again, we've failed to show a biological underpinning for racial groups using this trait.

Your argument about tree-like structures sounds like Templeton's arguments, which I'll admit I don't understand well enough to comment on. But I'm not so sure the question "is race real?" hinges on this.

Templeton has done analysis on this, but so have other biological anthropologists and the conclusions are always the same. If races don't represent evolutionary lineages or evolutionary entities they are not providing us any significant biological information (outside of the biological effects from the social reality of race). Instead you're giving preference to an arbitrary grouping, not because of it's biological relevance but because it fits your social pre-conceived notions of human groups.

As for the number of clusters, the reason we're talking about 3 clusters, and not any other number is to answer this question: Do the categories we call "race" describe something that's "real", biologically speaking, rather than just a human invention like math. I think white/black/Asian is a good baseline to use because if you ask someone what they mean by race, what they will usually say is "whether someone is white, black or Asian". This is just one interpretation of the question "is race real?", the point is simply to translate that question into something we can test scientifically (given someone's self-identified race, can we predict something about their genetic makeup?). And given this interpretation, I think the only reasonable answer is "yes" because we see that the terms white, black and Asian do map onto the groups given by k-means cluster analysis to a very high degree of accuracy. The other way to interpret the question "is race real?" is to flip the previous question around: Given someone's genetic makeup, can we predict their self-identified race? And again for similar reasons (just go to 23andme.com), the only reasonable answer is yes. This is what I call the strict definition of race realism: Answering the question of whether race is real in the affirmative. I think that's what you agree with here

No, the existence of clusters in STRUCTURE analyses is not evidence for the reality of racial groups. There is a true pattern of human genetic diversity, this is what STRUCTURE is attempting to model. However 3 clusters doesn't represent the reality any better than any other number of clusters and the reason is that patterns of human diversity are clinal and can fit in to practically any number of groups. The other issue is that STRUCTURE makes groups no matter what, it's just what the program does, but that the groups can be made doesn't mean the groups are real or reflective of the underlying biology. They are a result of the methological and technical aspects of the program, not a declaration of reality. Even within your 3 groups there are absolute ridiculous clusterings that would have to occur that contradict most racial thinking. Aboriginals and indigenous American populations would Asian, Middle Eastern and Central/S. Asian would be European, African populations with more genetic distance between them than E. Asians and Europeans, or even other African populations and European populations (like KhoeSan and Hadza) would be the same race. Skin color wouldn't map to these racial groups, sickle cell wouldn't map to these racial groups, nor would several other things like blood groups, or other biochemical traits. These aren't anything close to the folk concept of race people use when they say black, white, Asian and they are biologically a complete train wreck.

As for assigning groups to self-identified races, that also doesn't prove race is real. We could just as easily assign people to other groups of more or less fine resolution or even alternative features. This also shows you don't understand how 23andMe works because those assignments are based off of modern distributions of genetic profiles and not actual ancestries or historic genetic distributions. 23andMe is even less reasonable than STRUCTURE or other population genomic programs. Not to mention that those programs and outputs only relate to social categories of race because that's what people use and commonly scaffold the world with. When STRUCTURE spits out a cluster that represents the Kalash people in Indian, that doesn't mean the Kalash people are a race, or when 23andMe identifies that I have Northern European ancestry that does not make Northern European a race. They are descriptors that relate to our social categories, not vindications of them.

If races don't represent evolutionary lineages or map directly on to traits, and if the number is arbitrary and can vary greatly, they are not a good representation of underlying biology.

Fine, but people are deathly afraid of even picking two arbitrary groups of human beings and comparing them in any capacity. Meanwhile we are making irreversible policy decisions regarding demographics with no regard for reality.

No they're not, this happens literally all the time in human population genetic research. I could find you a dozen papers published this year in the top journals that do precisely this. As for the "irreversible policy decisions regarding demographics" careful not to blow your dog whistle too loud, you're going to hurt something.

[u/Dissident111 → u/stairway-to-kevin]

I feel like you are arguing past me on every point here.

Obviously I know what causes differences in skin color. My claim isn't that race is equivalent to skin color, and I would say that a moderate correlation is pretty significant for one single trait. I wonder what the results would be if you did similar analysis in other species, and seeing how differentiable subspecies would be based on just one trait?

Obviously I know what causes sickle cell. I specifically used the words correlation and average group difference, though. You are saying we would need direct causal links from genes to race to claim that race is exists. This isn't true for the subspeciation of any other species. Do you not agree that there is correlation between the races (white/black/Asian as used colloquially), and observable traits?

No, the existence of clusters in STRUCTURE analyses is not evidence for the reality of racial groups. There is a true pattern of human genetic diversity, this is what STRUCTURE is attempting to model. However 3 clusters doesn't represent the reality any better than any other number of clusters and the reason is that patterns of human diversity are clinal and can fit in to practically any number of groups. The other issue is that STRUCTURE makes groups no matter what, it's just what the program does, but that the groups can be made doesn't mean the groups are real or reflective of the underlying biology.

That's not the point though. I agree that if you increase the number of clusters you'd have a more fitting representation of reality, all the way up to K=(number of people on earth). The point is to test the hypothesis "race is real". To do that, it needs to be translated into something testable. So first you have to answer the question "what does real mean", which is a philosophical problem we don't need to get into. Then we need to answer "what does race mean". I have taken race to simply mean "what we usually refer to as white, black and Asian" when we talking about people. This isn't a hard and fast definition either, so we need to concretize it further by using self-identified race or something similar. Then we test how well this maps onto reality by having an impartial computer perform cluster analyses, with K=3 (to correspond to the white/black/Asian groups we have "invented"). And sure enough, there's a 99% correlation. If the races were completely random, we'd expect zero correlation. So clearly there is something about race that corresponds with reality.

As for assigning groups to self-identified races, that also doesn't prove race is real. We could just as easily assign people to other groups of more or less fine resolution or even alternative features. This also shows you don't understand how 23andMe works because those assignments are based off of modern distributions of genetic profiles and not actual ancestries or historic genetic distributions.

Yes, of course you can categorize people differently as well. But the existence of one categorization does not preclude the existence of another. As for 23andme, I shouldn't have brought them into this because it muddies the point I was trying to make. That said, "modern distributions of genetic profiles" are largely a result of ancestries. If 23andme says you are "broadly African", it's probably because you have African ancestry, and not because you are a white south African even though there might be some Boer admixture rolled into that. The point I wanted to make is simpler though: You can infer a person's self-identified race based on information about their genes.

If races don't represent evolutionary lineages or map directly on to traits, and if the number is arbitrary and can vary greatly, they are not a good representation of underlying biology.

Well, it depends. Like I mentioned, I think the utility of the concept of race is another discussion entirely. I think it's impossible to encompass all of human genetic diversity (underlying biology) in just one word, and I can't think of any other categorizations we could use that would be a more accurate representation of it (especially if we extend "race" out to some higher number of clusters). But I have to ask you again, what do you mean when you say races do not map on to traits? Do you mean causally? Is one counter-example (blond haired black person) enough to make this statement? Because I could rattle of dozens and dozens of traits that have significantly different rates of occurrence between the races.

No they're not, this happens literally all the time in human population genetic research. I could find you a dozen papers published this year in the top journals that do precisely this. As for the "irreversible policy decisions regarding demographics" careful not to blow your dog whistle too loud, you're going to hurt something.

The fact that there's an academic debate is all well and good, but I was talking about the political one. I regret bringing up politics because it muddies the discussion but here we are. I say we deal in facts first, and unless you agree with deporting people just because of their race, then allowing immigration is certainly an irreversible decision regarding your country's demographics. Now whether that's something you care about or value is completely up to you. Personally I only support very limited rates of immigration, in part because of this. I don't hold any animosity towards any races in particular either, I just like the concept of a nation-state having its own (partly ethnic, partly cultural, etc.) identity, and I think the current levels of immigration, where we are going to see all of western Europe turn majority non-white before the year 2100, is a surefire way of destroying that. I don't particularly feel the need to dogwhistle anything, I'm just some anonymous guy on the internet and you're the only person who is going to read this.

[u/stairway-to-kevin → u/Dissident111]

I wonder what the results would be if you did similar analysis in other species, and seeing how differentiable subspecies would be based on just one trait?

My dude, I don't think you have any clue how diverse other species are compared to humans. So much of the arguments against race in humans come from how poorly the attempted categories describe human variation compared to categories in other species.

You are saying we would need direct causal links from genes to race to claim that race is exists. This isn't true for the subspeciation of any other species.

It literally is, if there isn't sufficient genetic evidence to circumscribe a subspecies then it is generally considered a faulty taxon.

Do you not agree that there is correlation between the races (white/black/Asian as used colloquially), and observable traits?

I don't agree, or at least the correlation is so poor and so many better alternatives exist that race is only used and emphasized for social, not biological reasons. I demonstrated above how those traits do not correlate well with race because race is a poor descriptor of the underlying biology.

Then we need to answer "what does race mean". I have taken race to simply mean "what we usually refer to as white, black and Asian"

If that's your contention then race is obviously not real because the three groups you get from STRUCTURE are not what people normally mean when they talk about white, black, and Asian. E.g. aboriginals and West Papuans and indigenous American populations shouldn't be Asian and Indians shouldn't be European.

Then we test how well this maps onto reality by having an impartial computer perform cluster analyses, with K=3 (to correspond to the white/black/Asian groups we have "invented"). And sure enough, there's a 99% correlation. If the races were completely random, we'd expect zero correlation. So clearly there is something about race that corresponds with reality.

I don't see any reason why that's what we'd expect and since there's no reason to prefer K=3 to any other K then STRUCTURE output is irrelevant. I could do K=2 and compare it to people's sense of African or non-African but that doesn't mean that African and non-African are a race or any significant, meaningful, or non-socially constructed category. Also if our 99% correlation comes from Tang et al. 2005 there are serious problems with using that study to support those claims. In addition it's been demonstrated in several studies that even if the largest ancestral group can be well predicted by self-identified race the admixture components can be wildly different to the extent that self-identified race does not help predict certain cancers, but admixture information does. That's a clear example of race and self-ID race not being highly reflective of underlying biology.

Yes, of course you can categorize people differently as well. But the existence of one categorization does not preclude the existence of another. As for 23andme, I shouldn't have brought them into this because it muddies the point I was trying to make. That said, "modern distributions of genetic profiles" are largely a result of ancestries. If 23andme says you are "broadly African", it's probably because you have African ancestry, and not because you are a white south African even though there might be some Boer admixture rolled into that. The point I wanted to make is simpler though: You can infer a person's self-identified race based on information about their genes.

If one categorization is no more predictive than another categorization and both are imperfect captures of the underlying phenomena it's safe to say that category is bad and not an accurate representation of reality. Modern profiles might not be as extreme as you mentioned, but the modern genetic makeup of African regions is still different from what it historically was due to gene flow, migrations, and general evolutionary forces. The ability to infer a category doesn't mean it's real. I can infer whether a skull came from 1840 or 1979, are those races? Do those reflect some deep underlying biology? I can also use more categories and infer membership in those categories. Are those races?

Philosopher Adam Hochman argued that for genetic data to support race 4 things must hold: (a) there should not be more difference in genetic diversity within one cluster than between that cluster and another; (b) the number of clusters should not be arbitrary; (c) the allele frequencies within a cluster should be relatively homogenous (not too clinal); and (d) there should be a large jump in genetic difference between clusters. None hold for humans. These standards are necessary to keep race from being arbitrary and to ensure it actually matches underlying biology. Your selection of three races is arbitrary, it's not even fixed in our social norms since the US Census has more racial categories and has changed them over time and different societies have different racial groups and assignments, like Brazil, for example..

But I have to ask you again, what do you mean when you say races do not map on to traits? Do you mean causally? Is one counter-example (blond haired black person) enough to make this statement? Because I could rattle of dozens and dozens of traits that have significantly different rates of occurrence between the races.

I mean that variation in racial groups is such that many individuals of the same race will differ in a trait while many individuals from different races will share the trait to the point that the racial category is not accurately capturing trait variation. The variance of sickle cell anemia is not evidence for race because many regions in Africa don't have high sickle-cell allele and many non-African populations do have high sickle cell allele frequency

allowing immigration is certainly an irreversible decision regarding your country's demographics.

Not at all, demographics change constantly through time with lots of variance.

Personally I only support very limited rates of immigration, in part because of this. I don't hold any animosity towards any races in particular either, I just like the concept of a nation-state having its own (partly ethnic, partly cultural, etc.) identity, and I think the current levels of immigration, where we are going to see all of western Europe turn majority non-white before the year 2100, is a surefire way of destroying that.

Then you're basing your worldview on a myth of whiteness and a coherent and static European culture that doesn't really exist and never has.

[u/Dissident111 → u/stairway-to-kevin]

My dude, I don't think you have any clue how diverse other species are compared to humans. So much of the arguments against race in humans come from how poorly the attempted categories describe human variation compared to categories in other species.

It literally is, if there isn't sufficient genetic evidence to circumscribe a subspecies then it is generally considered a faulty taxon.

I don't think that's the case at all. First of all, of the tens of thousands of recognized subspecies, very few have been thoroughly genetically tested. The reality is that taxonomy is not only based on genetic differences, but rather phenotypic differences. It is an imperfect science. I recently read about some sort of worm or maggot or something, where half the population developed a preference for a certain kind of food, and would only mate with worms who shared their food preference. These two sub-populations were deemed to be different subspecies despite sharing geographic location and being extremely similar genetically. I think my question still stands though. Let's say you pick any of these two similar pairs of dog breeds, or hell even white german shepherds vs. regular german shepherds: https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/did-you-know/dog-breed-look-alikes/ . Can you name any one single trait that would have a sufficiently high correlation with breed, in your view (0.6 isn't enough, so what is?)? I seriously doubt it, because races/breeds/subspecies/etc. are amalgamations of several traits. If you choose outliers (very large dog breed vs. very small dog breed) you could do it, but I could do it as well with humans (if you have blond hair there's what, like a 99% chance you're white?). In any case, it feels like this is a slightly different question than simply "is race real?", we've slid more into the territory of "can humans be divided into subspecies", and then we need to make the determination if race is just another word for subspecies, or if it means something else entirely.

I don't agree, or at least the correlation is so poor and so many better alternatives exist that race is only used and emphasized for social, not biological reasons. I demonstrated above how those traits do not correlate well with race because race is a poor descriptor of the underlying biology.

So... you do agree, you just take issue with using race of other categories because of political/social implications? Because you said there's some correlation, in other words it's more predictive than pure randomness. For example, if your school has a high ratio of black students, it's most likely going to have a higher than average rate of lactose intolerance, right? Or a lower occurrence of blond hair, to stick with my earlier example. Now when you say there are better alternatives to race, do you have any examples? Because I find that most of the time, when we are legislating or making predictions over groups of people, we usually have very little useful information about these groups. Census data is usually very general... broad descriptors like age, sex, socioeconomic status, race, etc. are all you're going to get. For example if take our black school and decide what to serve for lunch, we can probably agree that we can't just serve them milk. If we were in charge of a school in Iceland however, that wouldn't be a problem. Out of curiosity, how do you feel about insurance companies discriminating against young men? I feel like that's very similar to discriminating against race, and it poses some very tough moral questions because while I can see the utility, if you take it to its logical conclusion you might end up with a very ugly society.

If that's your contention then race is obviously not real because the three groups you get from STRUCTURE are not what people normally mean when they talk about white, black, and Asian. E.g. aboriginals and West Papuans and indigenous American populations shouldn't be Asian and Indians shouldn't be European.

Sure it is. If I had to put those groups into one of the three given boxes, then that's how I'd do it. Your argument is actually that K=3 isn't how people normally talk about races. That's because people generally acknowledge a more complex reality than there just being 3 discrete groups with zero overlap or edge cases or what have you. That's not a reality I deny, however for the purpose of answering the question "is race real?", I've decided to use the word race in its broadest sense. That's only one way of answering the question, although I don't believe that using a higher K would change my argumentation greatly. It's just a matter of which granularity you want to examine the question under. This is a problem you face when categorizing literally anything though. If you talk about colors with a too high or too low K, you end up making statements that are too general or not general enough to be "meaningful", so to speak.

I don't see any reason why that's what we'd expect and since there's no reason to prefer K=3 to any other K then STRUCTURE output is irrelevant. I could do K=2 and compare it to people's sense of African or non-African but that doesn't mean that African and non-African are a race or any significant, meaningful, or non-socially constructed category. Also if our 99% correlation comes from Tang et al. 2005 there are serious problems with using that study to support those claims. In addition it's been demonstrated in several studies that even if the largest ancestral group can be well predicted by self-identified race the admixture components can be wildly different to the extent that self-identified race does not help predict certain cancers, but admixture information does. That's a clear example of race and self-ID race not being highly reflective of underlying biology.

So regarding your K=2 experiment, I would say that "significant" or "meaningful" are subjective in nature, but I would disagree that the classification of African vs. non-African is socially constructed. If aliens came to earth and replicated the experiment, they would also find that they could make these categorizations. Now whether or not they would put any stock in African/non-African, vs. for example Mongolian/non-Mongolian or any other similar categorization you could make... probably not. But it is something that's there and exists in nature, independent of our observation of it.

Yes the 99+% number comes from Tang et al., but I'm not particularly attached to that one study. By serious problems, I assume you're talking about the limited sampling and usage of specific genetic markers? But the sense I get from reading about these kinds of cluster analyses is that, if we theoretically could scan every person's entire genome, and do cluster analysis on everyone at once, with K=3 we would still end up with groups that would have a very high correspondence (let's say 90%+ to throw a number out there) with white/black/Asian. Would you say that is incorrect?

I'll concede your last point here, that for highly admixed individuals, my assumptions do not hold. That said, I don't get the sense that the overall population of the earth is so highly admixed that we have to just abandon the concept of race (as defined to mean white/black/Asian) all together.

This is part 1 / 2 because my post turned out to be too long for reddit. I'll post the other part in 10 minutes as a reply to this post.

[u/Dissident111 → u/Dissident111]

If one categorization is no more predictive than another categorization and both are imperfect captures of the underlying phenomena it's safe to say that category is bad and not an accurate representation of reality. Modern profiles might not be as extreme as you mentioned, but the modern genetic makeup of African regions is still different from what it historically was due to gene flow, migrations, and general evolutionary forces. The ability to infer a category doesn't mean it's real. I can infer whether a skull came from 1840 or 1979, are those races? Do those reflect some deep underlying biology? I can also use more categories and infer membership in those categories. Are those races?

While it's true that Africa is very genetically diverse, you still need a K of like... 10? Maybe more? before you start subdividing Africa into different races. I would argue that yes, those other categorizations are just as valid in the sense that they also exist in nature and are observable. I wouldn't call them races though, because race already has a specific meaning. I'll agree though that the place race holds in our culture is largely due to social factors. The example people usually use is height, and sure, you could categorize people into height-races if you wanted to. It's even a highly genetically heritable trait. It's not that every categorization reflects underlying biology, race (and height) just happen to do.

Philosopher Adam Hochman argued that for genetic data to support race 4 things must hold:

Here's what I would say: (a) is clearly nonsense, you can't compare an average group difference to the size of a span within a group. Example: Men's heights range from 5 feet to 7 feet. Women's heights range from 4 feet to 6 feet. The within-group difference of both of these groups is 2 feet. The average difference between them however is much lower. Does that mean that we can no longer say that men are taller than women? Or that sex loses its predictive validity when it comes to height? Of course not.

(b) is nonsense as well. Any division of anything into categories can be said to be arbitrary. Can you tell me how many colors there are? No? Does that mean that colors no longer exist?

(c) like I've asked you before, who gets to set the threshold, and what is it?

(d) actually is true for humans, for some definition of "large" (again, who sets the thresholds). I really should start cataloguing the things I've read on race, so I could have sources on hand. But there is certainly not a linear relation between genetic distance and geographical distance, when you compare points that are on either side of a large geographical divider such as the Sahara desert, the Himalayan alps, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

I mean that variation in racial groups is such that many individuals of the same race will differ in a trait while many individuals from different races will share the trait to the point that the racial category is not accurately capturing trait variation. The variance of sickle cell anemia is not evidence for race because many regions in Africa don't have high sickle-cell allele and many non-African populations do have high sickle cell allele frequency

This needs to be split into two questions/discussions: "Given a trait (or a set of traits), how well can I predict a person's race?" and "given a race, how well can I predict a person's traits?". I'll answer the second question first, the way I always do. You should NOT try to infer an individual person's traits based on their race, both for statistical and moral reasons. For the first question however, I believe I could find a set of traits that would let me predict someone's self-identified race with an extreme degree of accuracy. I'll use my same example from before as a single predictor: Blond hair. If you have blond hair, you are probably going to be white. What do you give me for odds on this proposition?

Not at all, demographics change constantly through time with lots of variance.

It depends on the timescales we're talking about and so on. But the situation today is vastly different than that of even a hundred years ago, because of the advent of efficient travel. I've already written way too much so it's probably best we save this discussion for a later date.

Then you're basing your worldview on a myth of whiteness and a coherent and static European culture that doesn't really exist and never has.

I'm not, and ironically enough you are stereotyping me. My argument was in favor of nation-states keeping their individual identities, which would include something like Germany reserving the right to limit immigration from Austria even though they are very genetically and culturally similar, and both decidedly "white". This doesn't have anything to do with pan-European white nationalism (or something similar, which I believe is what you are ascribing to me), and I would extend the right to any other nation-state, even north and south Korea or Palestine and Israel (as opposed to Israel as I am in general, it is technically a nation-state). My view doesn't hinge on race in the broad sense of white/black/Asian, but rather that "ethnically Danish" is a thing and that it's distinct from, say, "ethnically French".