In scientific term no. Scientists study wavelength of light.
Just because you can answer, doesn't mean that you should. This answer adds nothing to the conversation because you've moved the goalposts in order to wriggle free from addressing the point I challenged you on. That's a cowardly tactic.
nonpareil: Just a very illuminating question that shows how arbitrary the whole definition of "race" is.
RiverDad:The boundaries between colors are also arbitrarily defined. Does that mean that the color yellow doesn't convey information when referenced?
You made a specific assertion that the definition of race suffers from arbitrariness. I took the time to directly address your question and asked you a question built on an identical logical structure and you respond by telling me about what scientists do. I know what scientists do, thank you very much, but your answer has nothing to do with your original point and my question to you based on the logic of your original point.
Again, is there any information conveyed to you when I tell you that a banana is yellow? Does the fact that you cannot precisely define what the color yellow is mean that the concept of yellow color conveys no information?
Depending on the correlation between the "black" and "white" group to the "liberal" and "conservative" group.
Well if the correlation is strong then we're moving away from definitions being solely socially constructed and moving into territory where the definition have both social meaning and probabilistic meaning.
If BiDil, a heart medication for black patients suffering from heart disease, is just targeting a group of people who are socially clumped together in an arbitrary fashion and with no genetic commonality, then we should expect the efficacy of the medicine to be no more effective than if it was randomly distributed to all people with heart disease. That's not the case though and this tells us that there is a genetic basis to race. The fact that there is a social layer over top of the genetic layer doesn't invalidate the genetic layer when the meanings of the social layer are modified.
The only true relationship that won't change is the causal relationship between the genetic mutation and the cancer growth as a result. If I could transfer this genetic mutation from the black population without changing other other genes in that population, into the white population, the relationship between the mutation and the cancer will remain the same even though the relationship between the cancer and the "race" proxy has changed.
Yeah, so what? The issue here is information. The best information to be had is that which is developed on each individual. The problem is that it takes time and money and resources to develop individual information and so group level information, which is less precise, is used because it provides value that outweighs the costs.
I Am a Racially Profiling Doctor
In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works.
But to a growing number of critics, this statement is viewed as a shocking admission of prejudice. After all, shouldn't all patients be treated equally, regardless of the color of their skin? The controversy came to a boil last May in The New England Journal of Medicine. The journal published a study revealing that enalapril, a standard treatment for chronic heart failure, was less helpful to blacks than to whites. Researchers found that significantly more black patients treated with enalapril ended up hospitalized. A companion study examined carvedilol, a beta blocker; the results indicated that the drug was equally beneficial to both races.
So right here is an example of "cheap information." The physician doesn't have to get the patient's genome sequenced in order to understand the patient as an individual (the best kind of information.) All he has to do is ask the patient his race. Knowing the patient's self-identified race the physician can prescribe Carvedilol instead of Enalapril and minimize the risk to the patient.
If race was solely a social construction, then this exercise would be useless. Here's another example:
Almost every day at the Washington drug clinic where I work as a psychiatrist, race plays a useful diagnostic role. When I prescribe Prozac to a patient who is African-American, I start at a lower dose, 5 or 10 milligrams instead of the usual 10-to-20 milligram dose. I do this in part because clinical experience and pharmacological research show that blacks metabolize antidepressants more slowly than Caucasians and Asians. As a result, levels of the medication can build up and make side effects more likely. To be sure, not every African-American is a slow metabolizer of antidepressants; only 40 percent are. But the risk of provoking side effects like nausea, insomnia or fuzzy-headedness in a depressed person -- someone already terribly demoralized who may have been reluctant to take medication in the first place -- is to worsen the patient's distress and increase the chances that he will flush the pills down the toilet. So I start all black patients with a lower dose, then take it from there.