vimothy
yurp
I don't think putting it in capitals makes what you say more believable. Frankly, it makes you look like nomadologist.
Have you ever read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond?
Liberal Creationism, or: Yippee, It’s Bell-Curve Time Again!
- Thread starter Guybrush
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I don't think putting it in capitals makes what you say more believable. Frankly, it makes you look like nomadologist.
Have you ever read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond?
vimothy
yurp
Very clever. I 'm not sure why you are being an arsehole. I was only asking a simple question -- have you read it?
Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
I agree race exists only as a social construct. I'll try and find a link/source to research I've seen which suggests that genetic differences between people across these so-called 'races' are less than the gentic differences between people within one given 'race'.
'Ethnicity' is also a socially constructed system; both are designed to establish common identity and to divide/classify people into distinct groups. However there are major differences in the way 'race' and 'ethnicity' are applied as constructs. The criteria for division along the lines of ‘race’ are relatively unambiguous focusing entirely on physical attributes like skin colour. By contrast the criteria for the demarcation of boundaries between ethnic groups are based on a set of highly interwoven factors, which create multi-tiered identities and are subjective to the individual.
While 'race' is a fixed construct, ‘ethnicity’ focuses on socio-cultural factors which by their very nature are not fixed and therefore adaptation in ethnic identities is possible in accordance with changes in the social and political environment.
I would argue that 'ethnicity' is generally more concerned with the identification of ‘us’ while 'race(ism)' is more orientated to the categorisation of ‘them’.
vimothy
yurp
But you could say that about anything, surely. What about strains of crops -- they exist, right? What about, e.g., Aborigines?
Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
vimothy
yurp
There's nothing big or clever about 'cropism'
But you see my point -- I can easily tell the difference between an Aborigine and, say, a Lapp, just as I can easily tell the difference between cauliflower and broccoli.
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Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
Ok but going back to my previous point; are the genetic differences between Aborigines and Lapps greater than the internal genetic differences across Aborigines (or Lapps)?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Absloute horseshit. Race - meaning a collection of hereditary characteristics found in some human populations and not others - OBVIOUSLY exists. That's light-yearas away from defending the obsolete notions of discrete caucasian/asiatic/negro 'sub-species' of mankind or early 20th century craniography bullshit. Recognising this fact is no more the same thing as racism than recognising that some people are taller than others makes you a 'height supremacist'. Then again, I wouldn't put it past you to say that height is socially constructed, and there's not really any such thing as tall and short people...
There are plenty of good, reasonable and logically and morally robust arguments agains racism: merely denying that race itself exists is not one of them.
Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
Try to find some research by the British geneticist Steve Jones. He wrote a famous article in the Independent (12th Dec 1991) entitled: 'We are all cousins under the skin'.
Here's a quick summary (from a sociology textbook):
1. Jones suggests that to be able to show that there are distinct 'races' 'then the different peoples should be quite distinct from each other in a large sample of their genes, not just those for skin colour'. However this is not the case. Geneticists have not found that the genes governing skin colour are related to other genetic patterns. Jones: 'The patterns of variation in each system are independent of each other. Our colour does not say much about what lies under the skin.
2. Genetic diversity has relatively little to do with 'race'. About 85% of the variations in human genes result from the differences between individuals from one country. A further 5-10% of genetic diversity comes from the differences between countries in the same continent and populated by the same supposed 'race' (i.e. differences between English and Spanish, or between Nigerians and Kenyans).
Jones:
3. Overall, humans are much more homogenous than other species. For example, one of Jones's areas of expertise is the genetic variations between snails. His research shows that variations between the snail populations in different pyrenean valleys are greater than the variations between Australian Aborigines and English people. Jones: 'If you were a snail it would make good biological sense to be a racist; but you have to accept that humans are tediously uniform animals.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Skin colour is certainly related to race, though it's by no means the only part of it, or even the major part.
Look, there are genetic differences between groups of people who originate, or whose ancestor originated, in different parts of the world. People of different ethnic origin - of different race - have different rates of hereditary diseases, hereditary disease resistances, the ability or otherwise to digest certan nutrients, different body shapes and builds, all sorts of things. Sickle-cell disease, which is an evolutionary side-effect of resistance to malaria, is far more common in people from Africa or India than other parts of the world; East Asians usually can't metabolise alcohol very well, the Dutch are taller than the Greeks and black guys make great runners but lousy swimmers. None of these things makes one ethnic group 'better' than any other outside of certain kinds of athletics events, and I'm certainly not convinced there are any average mental differences between people of different race that can't be accounted for by socioeconomic conditions, education, diet and other culture-specific factors.
vimothy
yurp
Well, skin colour is not necessarily the important variable.
From the GNXP article:
I. Genetic variation in humans forms clusters that correspond to geography
The fact that one can cluster humans together by geography based solely on their genetic information was most convincingly demonstrated in two papers (the second one is open access) by a group out of Stanford. These studies looked at several hundred variable places in the genome in 52 populations scattered across the globe. The hypothesis was as follows-- on applying a clustering algorithm to these data, individuals from similar geographic regions would end up together. I've put a representation on the right [actually reproduced below], where colors represent poplations-- on top is a pattern of variation that would lead to no clustering (the colors all blend one into the next) while on the bottom is a pattern of variation that would lead to clustering (there are subtle but noticable jumps from yellow to green, for example, though there is much variation within each color). Note that the lack of clustering would not mean that all populations are genetically the same (in the top figure, yellow and orange are not "the same" even though you couldn't find a fixed boundry between them). But indeed, the researchers found the situation corresponding to the bottom figure-- the individuals formed five clusters which represented, in the authors' words, "Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas". Some populations were exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions in biology)-- they seemed to be a mix between two clusters, or could even form their own cluster in certain models.
But in general, the second model in the figure is a good fit for human variation based on the spots in the genome used by these researchers-- continents correspond to clusters, and geographic barriers like the Himalayas or an ocean correspond to those areas where a "jump" from one cluster to the next occurrs.
The fact that one can cluster humans together by geography based solely on their genetic information was most convincingly demonstrated in two papers (the second one is open access) by a group out of Stanford. These studies looked at several hundred variable places in the genome in 52 populations scattered across the globe. The hypothesis was as follows-- on applying a clustering algorithm to these data, individuals from similar geographic regions would end up together. I've put a representation on the right [actually reproduced below], where colors represent poplations-- on top is a pattern of variation that would lead to no clustering (the colors all blend one into the next) while on the bottom is a pattern of variation that would lead to clustering (there are subtle but noticable jumps from yellow to green, for example, though there is much variation within each color). Note that the lack of clustering would not mean that all populations are genetically the same (in the top figure, yellow and orange are not "the same" even though you couldn't find a fixed boundry between them). But indeed, the researchers found the situation corresponding to the bottom figure-- the individuals formed five clusters which represented, in the authors' words, "Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas". Some populations were exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions in biology)-- they seemed to be a mix between two clusters, or could even form their own cluster in certain models.
But in general, the second model in the figure is a good fit for human variation based on the spots in the genome used by these researchers-- continents correspond to clusters, and geographic barriers like the Himalayas or an ocean correspond to those areas where a "jump" from one cluster to the next occurrs.
vimothy
yurp
The Lessons of the Ashkenazim -- Steven Pinker, TNR
Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
Well I can't really argue with that, it (the GNXP article) seems pretty convincing:
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vimothy
yurp
It's only saying that "race" exists as a biological category. I'm not sure that I buy into the idea that (biological) race explains IQ test scores, if that's even been suggested.
The footnote is totally OTM, as is Mr Tea upthread.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
That genetic variation in humans forms clusters that correspond to geography is to be expected - after all, that's how the development of animal populations has been being explained for the past hundred years.
That there are genetic differences within populations might reflect an intrinsic genetic variability that comes with being human. Just because this variability is greater than that between different populations doesn't mean that the lesser variability in the latter is necessarily unimportant. After all, an ostensibly minor variation in genetic code can have significant implications.
That there are genetic differences within populations might reflect an intrinsic genetic variability that comes with being human. Just because this variability is greater than that between different populations doesn't mean that the lesser variability in the latter is necessarily unimportant. After all, an ostensibly minor variation in genetic code can have significant implications.
vimothy
yurp
You would think so, yes, but then you read the hysterical responses to the original post ...
From the Pinker article:
The CH&H [Gregory Cochran, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending - researchers at the University of Utah] theory - can be divided into seven hypotheses. The first is that the Ashkenazi advantage in intelligence is genetic in the first place. Many intellectuals dismiss this possibility out of hand, having been convinced by Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man that general intelligence does not exist and that there is no evidence for its heritability. But a decade ago, the American Psychological Association commissioned an ideologically and racially diverse panel of scientists to review the evidence. They reported that IQ tests measure a stable property of the person; that general intelligence reflects a real phenomenon (namely, that measures of different aspects of intelligence intercorrelate); that it predicts a variety of positive life outcomes; and that it is highly heritable among individuals within a group. This does not imply that differences between groups are also genetic, since one group may experience a difference across the board, such as in wealth, discrimination, or social and cultural capital.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I'd say 'category' is putting it too strongly though, as categories tend to be discrete, well-defined and mutually exclusive. Racial variation in humans doesn't usually have sharp cut-offs* - millennia of interbreeding and migration have put paid to that. For example, many people in North Africa and parts of the Arabian peninsula are of mixed Arab and African descent, to the extent that they can be considered to form an ethnic group in its own right, and even within the 'indigenous' white Northern-European population of Britain, there is a mixture of Germanic, Celtic and pre-Celtic gene markers. This is of course without taking account individual mixed-race people whose parents come from different ethnic groups.
On the subject of genetic variation, it has been shown pretty conclusively that humans have far less variation than do other species of primates: you could analyse the DNA of any two people in the world selected at random and they will show much greater similarity than would two chimps taken from breeding populations just a few hundred miles apart.
*except (possibly, I'm conjecturing here) in a very few cases of isolated populations such as in the Ainu in Japan
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mixed_biscuits
_________________________
The thing is, those populations that have been separate from others for the longest periods of time, creating genetic difference, are probably the most instructive to study - in crude terms, they are the 'primary colours' that have been used in the mongrelisation of subsequent interbreeding.
Apologies for the terrible mixed metaphor.