Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 April 25

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April 25

Appearance of peoples

Is there any site which tells something about appearances (skin colour, hair colour etc.) of different peoples of the world? --40bus (talk) 13:49, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia has articles on human skin color and human hair color. Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:16, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

These articles don't present information of different peoples' skin and hair colors. I want to know hair colors of different peoples. --40bus (talk) 14:51, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Did you read those articles? The one on hair color clearly states "Some hair colors are associated with some ethnic groups due to observed higher frequency of particular hair color within their geographical region", (my emphasis) and red hair "It is most prominently found in the British Isles and in Udmurtia. Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads; 13 percent of the population has red hair and approximately 40 percent carry the recessive redhead gene. Red hair can also occur in Southern Europe, West Asia, North Africa and Central Asia." And so on. In other words, hair color varies too much to be assigned to one particlular "people". Shantavira|^{feed me} 15:25, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Similarly from Human skin color#Geographic variation, "similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness; populations with similar pigmentation may be genetically no more similar than other widely separated groups. Furthermore, in some parts of the world where people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skin color and ancestry has substantially weakened.[101] In Brazil, for example, skin color is not closely associated with the percentage of recent African ancestors a person has, as estimated from an analysis of genetic variants differing in frequency among continent groups... Migrations over the last 4000 years, and especially the last 400 years, have been the fastest in human history and have led to many people settling in places far away from their ancestral homelands. This means that skin colors today are not as confined to geographical location as they were previously." So, just as with hair color, while there may be trends among certain parts of the world, there is no clear connection between skin color and people groups. Historically, darker skin colors were associated with peoples from closer to the equator, but given mobility, this has become much less significant. --Jayron32 15:58, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Although that sort of information was commonly seen in school textbooks in the mid-20th century, our article, race (human categorization), explains why this is not now regarded as obsolete. Alansplodge (talk) 13:19, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Though many of the pseudoscientific bullshit surrounding race have been debunked, the continued use of race as a classification is still valid on cultural and social grounds. For example, in the U.S. African American culture still exists, and in U.S. society, there is still real, actual discrimination that against black people. Insofar as the society needs to understand the roots of this discrimination and needs to find ways to ameliorate that, the classification still has real use. --Jayron32 14:29, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Arguably the "race" classification you're referring to corresponds at best very loosely to peoples due to its over-reliance on non-scientific criteria like skin colour.

As a side note, as a German it amazes me that the word "race" is still used so widely. If you say "Rasse" in German you'd better be talking about dogs or cats. Using the word to refer to humans is an almost unambiguous sign of racism here. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 01:47, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Some English speaking countries give their citizens racial labels at birth, the USA being the most notable among these countries. These labels are routinely requested of people when filling in forms, and they are used frequently in daily discourse. Where I live, Australia, there is no official racial labelling of people at all. Not even ethnicity. The only related "classification" is that on the five yearly national census, residents are asked to self declare their ancestry. Over 30% declare their ancestry to be Australian. (That doesn't mean Australian Aboriginal. There's only about 3% of them.) I agree with you that the American approach of giving everyone an official racial label inevitably makes it more likely that racism will happen. HiLo48 (talk) 03:00, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think I've ever seen a form asking for race or ethnicity, only nationality. I don't know if the constant labelling actually increases racism. We have plenty of racism without it -- we haven't learned that much from our history. And people still do plenty of labelling based on ancestry. It is typically more nation, or geography, or religion based. But that's probably just because the majority of immigrants are from Turkey and South and East Europe. So skin color is not as big a factor as in the US. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 03:50, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Dark skin#Sub-Saharan Africa says:

Due to frequently differing ancestry among dark-skinned populations, the presence of dark skin in general is not a reliable genetic marker, including among groups in Africa. For example, Wilson et al. (2001) found that most of their Ethiopian samples showed closer genetic affinities with lighter-skinned Armenians than with darker-skinned Bantu populations. Mohamoud (2006) likewise observed that their Somali samples were genetically more similar to Arab populations than to other African populations.

I found that enlightening. Also, no reference, but I read somewhere that Haile Selassie did not understand why he was classified as black by Westerners.

--Error (talk) 18:54, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

See also this article: "Larger Genetic Differences Within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians".  --Lambiam 20:01, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

References

I might as well add a question here that is kind of related to this topic. I'm British, and when I go to tourist areas in other European cities it's quite easy for me to spot other Brits just by looking at them (without hearing them speak). British people seem to have a particular "look" about them which makes them distinguishable from, say, French or German people. Is there any basis for this observation? --Viennese Waltz 08:40, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Well ... [1]^[Humor] -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 08:52, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Apparently there is research into using machine learning to recognise nationality from pictures.[2] I don't know to what extent this actually works. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 09:01, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

I suspect that This Brit and This Brit and This Brit and This Brit and This Brit may confuse such algorithms and/or magic Brit detecting humans (if they weren't already known to be British). --Jayron32 11:54, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

The existence of the (presumably peer-reviewed) paper linked above should have led you not to be quite so dismissive. The paper reports 94% accuracy in identifying nationality from photographs using a small dataset. It's not about magic, it's about science. --Viennese Waltz 10:39, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

It's a conference paper, so I expect that someone looked it over, but that it is not properly peer-reviewed. To really evaluate the quality of the results we would need to see the data set. It would be important to know how the pictures were selected, e.g. were immigrants included, if so, how many, etc. I expect nationality recognition to be strongly influenced by the uniformity of ethnic background. I'd also expect some nationalities to be very similar, especially in regions where borders have not been stable over a long period of time, while others may show greater distinctiveness. So, while I am sure that it can have some value, I would want to see a lot more than one study (or even a handful of studies) with a limited range. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 18:14, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

Thinking of professional presenter Sonali Shah, I suspect she'd fall into that other 6 percent, as she looks Indian (which she is, by heritage). Yet she was born in London and speaks perfectly good British English. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:43, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

A person might go by style, behaviour, bearing. But how a computer is supposed to do it, especially when using just a picture of a face, is -- let's say -- not exactly obvious. There are a number of "ethnicity dectors" available online (I have no idea how accurate they are), but nationality is a whole other level. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 12:56, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

I presume the USians on the other hand are easily identified because they're loudly demanding everyone speak English American? (US citizen so I claim the privilege of criticizing my fellow countrypersons ) --47.155.41.201 (talk) 20:50, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Looks like you're from SoCal. Maybe the smog has warped your perspective. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:56, 29 April 2023 (UTC)