The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

I'm gonna call a spade a spade here and use the word retarded. The fact we have many genes means therefore they are all identical after a hundred thousand years? And the fact we are more the same than different means we are exactly the same?

This garbage is pathetic.

I find it so hard to believe anybody could be this stupid. Is it dishonesty? Self deception? Actual stupidity? I really don't know.

 

You're attacking strawmen. Graves didn't say we are exactly the same (individually) he simply said that given that we are more alike than different and given that there are many genes that impact intelligence there is no reason to believe those genes are unevenly distributed across geographic populations. This makes sense.

 

No. It makes no sense at all.

 

There are many genes involved in determining our intelligence so for there to be genetic differences related to intelligence between races many genes would have to be affected. There is no selection mechanism that could account for such a differential in this trait. How do you not understand this?

 

How did you establish "no selection mechanism" and why would genetic drift and mutation alone not probablistically require at least some differences?

 

Genetic drift cannot account for the difference because drift events are random. What we would see with genetic drift and mutation is genes for intelligence being scattered throughout the population so on an individual level yes there are genetic differences related to intelligence but not on a population level.

 

I asked you how you established "no selection mechanism" and no mutation and drift very obviously wouldn't result in an equal "scattering" or as biologists say distribution.

 

What do you think of this BTW?

https://right.orain.org/wiki/Robert_Sussman

Are there any inaccuracies? I would hate for there to be any slander or lies.

 

Bob Sussman completely agrees with the comments of Joseph Graves. Rushton's use of r and k selection is completely off. As to any arguments about the scores of IQ, you should follow the critiques in the book, starting with those of Otto Klineberg and also understanding that the original followers of the use of IQ tests to measure differences in intelligence (Goddard,Terman, and Bingham all rejected its use by the 1930s). However, for a very good review of the use of intelligence tests and their falsities, look at Jefferson M. Fish "Race and Intelligence: Separating Science and Myth" (an edited book of 15 chapters on this question), and "Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You" by Agustin Fuentes.

 

That wasnt so hard was it? You yourself just highlighted distinguishable DNA differences that most of us call race.

As Professor Harpending says, calling it anything else is simply word play.

Is race a social construct? Are golden retrievers a social construct? Can one accept heritable genetic differences within sub-species for dogs and deny them for men? Professor Henry Harpending explains.
[video=youtube;nhBYAPok6ek]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhBYAPok6ek&list=PLYcuLAArq58R7sWjyL4rflpT 8CmQuM7Ba&index=17[/video]

Henry Cosad Harpending (born January 13, 1944)[1] is an American anthropologist and population geneticist at the University of Utah, where he is a distinguished professor. Dr. Harpending earned his A.B. degree from Hamilton College (Clinton, New York). Harpending earned his PhD at Harvard in 1972 and is co-author of the book The 10,000 Year Explosion.

 

There's no evolutionary basis to assume a selection based mechanism can account for genetic differences related to intelligence between races. This is based on the nature of the trait in question. It is a complex, multifactorial, polygenic trait. Random drift events would result in "IQ genes" being scattered throughout the population. For them to be unevenly distributed there would have to be a selective pressure operating only on certain populations. Again genetic drift is random so we should expect there to be differences on an individual level but not a population level. All that genetic drift entails for human intelligence is that high IQ genes are more frequent among some families as intelligence is heritable but random mutations would not result in an uneven distribution across populations.

We have far more commonalities and differences. The only major differences in intelligence that I believe exist are between individuals on a spectrum from genius to mentally challenged ("retarded") with different strengths and weaknesses as well as different learning styles depending on the individual. There is no smart or dumb race.

 

Geographically based genetic variation does exist but it is not structured in to races. This may seem like a confusing position but it isn't once you understand the difference between biologically defined definitions of race and socially defined definitions of race. In America the demographic group known as African-American or Black is regarded as a race as socially defined by the American government. But the African-American population does not meet the criteria for biological definitions of race. Europeans are a continental population, not a race. Given the genetic diversity of continental populations there is no scientific justification for classifying them as races. The same science that has been utilized to determine that African-Americans are 20% European can be used to determine that any population has a significant quantity of genes from another. You could break up a "White" person's genome in to population percentages based on quantity of European ancestry using the same logic (e.g. 50% Swedish, 25% English, 25% Spanish). Human populations do not have the same degree of genetic differentiation as dog breeds which are the result of high level artificial selection by humans.

[video=youtube;VfGlmVpUajs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfGlmVpUajs[/video]

 

The argument that “race” can be determined at the genetic level in a blind study.

The slight physical traits that we define race is first determined by location on the planet where a majority of that particular population share those dominant traits.

It is the same with ring species for example the salamander who traits are classified in different colors associated with the particular location where this trait dominates in that location.

Can scientists in a blind study of salamanders identify each of the subject’s location by a specific trait of color in the DNA?

Physically all these salamanders look alike in their body plans except color differences.
How we define race in Humans is the same thing as we define salamanders as different species of salamanders.

 

I would like to welcome Dr. Joseph Graves to the board! Graves has agreed to post so I'd like to welcome him in advance and ask him a few questions. Feel free to ask him any questions you want.

Question #1: Dr. Graves, earlier in the thread a poster proposed the idea that modern DNA testing combined with MRI scans and a culture-fair IQ test could solve the race & IQ debate once and for all. Could you please explain what problems or challenges you find with their proposal? Here is a quote from that post:

Question #2: In an old email you told me that there were no systematic measurements of human crania that could be used to represent different continental populations and establish that there is a racial hierarchy in brain size. However several studies claim to have measured skulls and found results. For instance Beals, Smith and Dodd (1984) measured 20,000 crania from around the world and recorded regional differences in brain size. Their conclusions were different from those reported by racialists like Rushton as they attributed "racial averages" to differences in climate. Nonetheless they found differences. Could you please elaborate further on the problems with trying to use measures of brain size to establish a correlation between race and intelligence?

This is the email I'm referring to and an excerpt from Beals et al.

 

Just to play devil's advocate, while I agree that the whole cranial dimension/shape thing may reflect adaptations to different climates, I wouldn't preclude that they might be correlated with certain lines of ancestry as well.

EgalitarianJay, we both know, per Allen's Rule, that human populations that evolved in different climates have different limb proportions, but also that these differences can take some time to develop even as people migrate over the world. The reason Neanderthals are stockier than even European Homo sapiens is because the ancestors of Neanderthals had left Africa and migrated to Europe earlier than ours did, so they had much more time to adapt to the Ice Age European climate. The disparity in limb proportions is even greater between Neanderthals and the very first H. sapiens (Cro-Magnons) who moved into Europe, as opposed to modern white people.

Couldn't one find a comparable trend in cranial shape or dimensions? For example, perhaps modern Southeast Asians and Polynesians have somewhat more heat-adapted crania than more northerly Koreans or Japanese, but since their ancestors originated somewhere in China before migrating southward, their cranial characteristics are less tropical than the aboriginal Negrito and Papuan peoples (which reflects their lighter skin and Northeast Asian facial features). Ergo, while differences in these cranial variables would have ultimately developed in response to climate, later migrations may confound the correlation.

(On a semi-related note that might nonetheless interest you in particular, last year I read a couple of studies analyzing Egyptian skeletal remains dating to the Roman era. One recorded that they showed greater brachycephaly, or shorter and broader skulls, than Egyptians from predynastic through Pharaonic times. The other was on limb proportions and described less tropical African-like proportions in Roman-era Egyptians than studies using older Egyptian samples. I think we can both guess what historical processes would explain these differences.)

 

This may be of some interest to you:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191000159X

 

It looks like a hit piece on Dr. Sussman. I notice that you did a lot of the editing to that page. Anyway Dr. Sussman says that he should be back to comment this weekend.

 

What? Dog breeds is inappropriate because some guy drew an imaginary line saying anything above can be race/ breed ect anything below cant? How convenient. Yet even he acknowledges the very real and measurable differences we call race.

Seems such a stupid argument to me, DNA testing as you acknowledge can define African Americans as being 20% European - the differences are there and measurable. Then we can damn well see them with our eyes.

Do you look at an Asian and assume they're African? Normal people dont they see an Asian. I couldnt care how many scientists come on here and tell me im racist for noticing a difference, then play word games saying - if we calculated the differences at .333 then you would be right, but because the difference is only .24 then there is NO difference - if you notice that .24 difference and give it name then you're RACIST! what a joke!

Just because you dont like how people use the word race to describe differences doesnt mean you can throw in some imaginary rule to discount it. You this Dr have both indicated anyone who thinks race exists is racist - pretty much sums up the bias with Marxist silencing tactics to boot.

Look a tree - no you cant call that a tree i just made a rule saying trees can only be over 20ft tall and ALL tree over 20ft are the same. Good luck ordering some.

 

I never said and do not believe that anyone who thinks races exist is racist. This is what Graves had to say about the accusation that the threshold for racial classification is arbitrary.

 

You seem to be basing all your ridicule on your own "common sense" interpretations of visual difference. Of course East Asians don't look like Black Africans, as nobody here will deny. On the other hand, your average North Sudanese Beja doesn't look quite like your average Nigerian Igbo or South African San, but most laymen would classify those three peoples as part of the same Black African race. Without "Marxist" genetic analysis, since none of them look quite the same, you don't really have any more reason for lumping them together into a single race than you would all of them with East Asians. You see the problem?

And "tree" isn't technically a scientific construct either. Coconut palms are more closely related to rose bushes than to redwoods since the former two share common ancestry as angiosperms (flowering plants) that redwoods don't, yet it's usually redwoods and coconut palms that get sorted into the "tree" category. And while we're at it, since you obviously believe that layman eyeballing suffices for taxonomy, let me remind you that all the elephants in Africa were considered one species. It took geneticists, those Marxist nemeses of European civilization, to discover that those elephants could really be divided into two separate species, the savanna or bush elephant and the forest elephant (the latter is the species Tarzan hung around with in the Congo jungles).

Fun Fact: The Chinese sailor character from the old "King Kong" movie from 1933 was played by an African-American dude. Apparently RKO's casting agency didn't perceive the same distinction between African-American and East Asian people that you or I would.

 

No.

You're avoiding his point with some strawman diversion that he doesn't know the taxonomic status of "tree". In fact his point was against using arbitrary numbers in taxonomy. In what he wrote does he suggest he "believe that layman eyeballing suffices for taxonomy"? This is just cheap slander. We know dolphins aren't fish, so quit the condescending irrelevant lectures. And it's great you tacitly admit that taxonomy is based on ancestry and that the race concept is therefore trivially valid.

 

This is nonsense.

 

What is your reasoning for calling it nonsense?

 

An Fst of 0.25 doesn't imply any fixed differences. The man is a mathematical illiterate. He's just using a made up figure over the level of human races, and supporting it with bogus reasoning. Can you demonstrate why Fst 0.25 indicates any fixation? Can you then explain why fixation is required? Is it some arbitrary hoop set up for humans and no other animal?

Also why not email Graves and ask him to explain why his "0.25" figure applies to no other species where Fsts among species are below it, let alone subspecies.

Further Wright stated 0.25 represented the point of great differentiation, not subspecies.

So Graves is reporting falsely.

 

I have invited Dr. Graves to the thread so assuming he is watching I will let him respond to your arguments here.