Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
How does this research “dispels a biological concept of race”?
>“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yep, that's true. Skin color is the most prominent and easily identifiable feature. But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice. Forensic anthropologists can identify a race based on skull, they can even make a pretty good prediction based solely on a jaw.
The idea that race is just a skin color is not a dated notion of race, it is a modern interpretation that is pushed by leftists. If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?
Now, if we could dispel the idea that race is just a skin color and the idea that some races are inferior, if we could stop treating it as a dichotomy, that would be good.
> But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian...
It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?
> If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists?
Yes. If we were all precisely the same skin color they'd find other ways to put people down. Your "Jewish" nose. Your "nappy" hair. Color's just the tip of the ice-berg.
Some people are perceived as being inferior because that's what some elements in society need them to be in order to advance their own social standing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877
>It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit?
First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or "Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept.
Anyway, Japanese and Inuit are easy to distinguish. Middle Eastern and European are better examples. If you take one European person and one Middle Eastern person it would be hard to differentiate them, if you take two groups of one hundred people it would be easy.
Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country. Same goes for Inuit who were geographically and culturally isolated.
> Middle Eastern and European are better examples.
If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.
The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.
If we are talking about white/black voice difference, then it is meaningful.
>Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country.
Race is just a more broad concept than an ethnic group, that's what I mean.
>If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.
That's what I meant when I said that it would be easier if you take groups 100 hundred people, it averages out. And yeah, Europeans and Arabs are white, so there is little difference between them.
>The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.
Yes, "cline" is a better description than "race" but it is not as useful in daily life as "race" is.
No, that's not dubious.
Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people.
I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in college in which they played a tape of a discussion and told us the white speaker was black and the black speaker was white. Participants in the study were not fooled by this. The black guy sounded like Rick Astley, for lack of a better explanation. We all knew we were being lied to. Switching the labels fooled no one.
It isn't a perfect indicator of race. But, yes, there are voice differences that have nothing to do with vernacular speech habits.
It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because some of the ethnolinguistic markers are subtle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_profiling
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races...
Of course, it is a bit like differences in height for the genders: while men are, on average, taller than women, there is overlap in height as well as statistical outliers (so, no, you cannot definitively say "They are x height, so I can confidently assert their gender"). But there is some evidence that a) average or typical physiological differences between ethnicities influence voice sound and b) people who have zero training can pick up on these differences.
Granted that race, itself, is a somewhat nebulous human construct or mental model that often groups people together somewhat arbitrarily for sociocultural reasons having little or nothing to do with DNA.
You'd be better able to predict someone's physical size from their voice than anything else, but even then it's a guess. I've known very big people with unusually high-pitched voices, plus small women with surprisingly deep voices. It's all over the place.
I know it isn't politically correct to talk about any differences at all between ethnicities or even genders. The PC thing at the moment seems to be that "all such differences are social construct." So, it would probably be wise for me to just walk away here as a lot of people will assume I am a racist trying to justify racism. And this isn't some kind of hill I care to die on.
But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian based on facial features or voice.
Put another way, you could describe that in your words: you can make an educated guess about ethnicity from the sound of someone else speaking.
I have already allowed that race is a nebulous social construct at best. I don't know what your point is. You stating that we can't yet prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that these differences are purely physiological in origin is not really a rebuttal.
There is no real way to readily separate something like voice from things like lifestyle and socioeconomic class. Similarly, on average, men are taller than women. We could argue about how much of that is actually genetic and whether or not there is some culturally determined stunting of women going on globally, but it doesn't change the measurable average height difference between the genders as a group.
It may be reinforced by virtue of their giving time to use it in their rebuttals, but the issue lies deeper in the reason these rebuttals come up in the first place--people in general use this marker more than most when discriminating. Since when has "broad nose" or "high cheekbones" been something that is so highly correlated to being the victim of discrimination?
We didn't win the civil rights war, though the major battle that took down institutional discrimination was won. People still discriminate today, and they do it by relatively few high-profile indicators, e.g. skin color and name.
Article even says it:
>The dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia and New Guinea, for example, did not independently evolve their color simply because evolution favored it.
>They inherited the ancestral dark variants Dr. Tishkoff’s team found in Africans. “They had to be introduced from an African population,” said Dr. Tishkoff.
They even admit there's some aspects to skin tone that are still completely a mystery, there's no genetic marker(s) they can point to as the cause.
“If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.
i suppose that Tishkoff is right, but to be a bit more rigorous about it, i would be curious to see the sociological research that demonstrates that "somebody on the street" actually thinks that "the main differences between races" are "skin color." maybe people don't think that. not really sure either way.
"dispels a biological concept of race" - as in, it dispels one concept
or
"dispels a biological concept of [human] race [because the genetics variants determining pigment predate humanity, therefore either human delineation of race predates humans, or is incoherent]"
i'm not trying to start an argument but i think i was saying pretty much the same thing you're saying.
i think we actually agree on this.