It has become way too easy to bully people into submission with tools such as Twitter, but not only, too easy to create harassment brigades against anybody over manufactured outrage.
Race can, and has, been defined in a way that is useful to scientists. "Biological races" are different populations of the same species that meet some threshold of genetic variability with respect to each other. When populations are isolated for a long time, this is inevitable.
As you must know, the ordinary understanding of race is based upon external appearance, primarily melanin: black, white, yellow, brown, Indian, and so on. If you redefine race as a genetic population, then you will end up with new population categories that have absolutely nothing to do with race as it is ordinarily understood, i.e. as I just pointed out on this thread, it is possible (though I don't know how likely) that certain tribes living at high altitude in Kenya and Ethiopia have adapted to increase the efficiency of their oxygen uptake. But that would be a localised adaptation to environment, not a general feature of 'black' people, or even of Kenyans and Ethiopians.
This is exactly my point. Race means different things in different contexts. Colloquially, the word is used as you used it here. But it has other definitions, like the one I posted. All words are like this.
> If you redefine race as a genetic population, then you will end up with new population categories that have absolutely nothing to do with race as it is ordinarily understood
I'm not redefining it. It has been defined this way by other people. There are real scientists who use the word race like this.
But I agree: different definitions of the word "race" will result in different race categories. When a scientist uses the term "race" they mean something different than someone using the word race colloquially.
You are being obtuse. There are not 'different' definitions of race. There is an overwhelming homogeneity in the dominant definitions of race, i.e. according to melanin. Race, on these terms, has been a major structuring force in modern social relations. If you invent a new definition of race and use it to justify what, with the normal definition of race, is racism, then you are either seriously confused and/or politically malicious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)
I don't think this conversation has much hope of continuing in a productive direction so I'm going to call it a day
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
Do you then admit that tribes can adapt cognitively depending on their environment? Or does adaptation only occur below the neck?
You'll get much less push back from something like "genetic marker found to influence spatial thinking in young children.
But, to grant your Argumentum ad dictionarium, it seems like even here (considering the downvotes) the point parent was making still stands. People don't like discussing the connection between "genetic heritage" and "commonly used markers of general intelligence".
When race is correlated with some condition, it's important to first correct for socio-economic status, then environmental factors, then look at potential genetic factors. Since race is a much stronger proxy for the former than the latter.
That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease.
> Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America
> ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects from particular continents, and to correct for population stratification in admixed population sample sets.
As population genetics becomes more advanced we will become able to distinguish ever smaller ancestry ancestry groups. For example if you don’t try to identify Continental population ancestry, just use k means clustering to divide humans into clusters based on similarity the continental groups arise naturally.
> Genetic Structure of Human Populations
> Genetic Structure of Human Populations Noah A. Rosenberg,1* Jonathan K. Pritchard,2 James L. Weber,3 Howard M. Cann,4 Kenneth K. Kidd,5 Lev A. Zhivotovsky,6 Marcus W. Feldman7 We studied human population structure using genotypes at 377 autosomal microsatellite loci in 1056 individuals from 52 populations. Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations. General agreement of genetic and predefined populations suggests that self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies.
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Sci...
Get someone to show you pictures and have you identify them. I bet you'll make a lot of mistakes.
Historically, not only can people not tell the difference objectively, they decide what the difference is subjectively. In the United States, the child of a white slave owner and a black slave, if their parentage was known, was ... black. People of "mixed race" might be deemed a different race than their own full siblings, based on which visible characteristics they got from which ancestor.
Even today, people migrating from one country to another are often surprised that their racial classification is different in the new country than at home.
> Get someone to show you pictures and have you identify them. I bet you'll make a lot of mistakes.
I’m going to sleep now but if you find ten pictures of each I’ll be happy to do your survey. I’m sure many others would be too if you put it on surveymonkey.
The overlap in skin tone alone between Caucasians and the other two groups is ~0 so I doubt there would be any mistakes there. I’m sure there would be many more mistakes between Melanesians and Sub Saharan Africans but even just going on whether they have a broad nose or not you’d get pretty far distinguishing SSA from Melanesians. I’m not claiming perfect distinction. I’m claiming that doing better than chance is unremarkable. These groups are visibly different on average. Some groups the population values don’t even overlap. The shortest adult Maasai is taller than the tallest adult Pygmy.
> In the United States, the child of a white slave owner and a black slave was... black.
Who cares about the historical American caste system, with its one drop rule? The social construction of race is a real thing and so is the fact that different ancestry groups are different, and can be distinguished, on average and subject to error. Pretending ancestry is entirely socially constructed is crazy. If you get thirty pictures, 10 East Asian, 10 West Eurasian, and ten people who are first generation crosses from both populations, there is very unlikely to be any mislabelling of the base population individuals.
If you go back far enough all humans come from Africa, and most (at least 90%) comes from the latest Out of Africa expansion, ~200K years ago. But all non SSA humans are 2% Neanderthal, on average, and there’s other archaic hominid introversion that varies by geography. The Tibetan high altitude adaptations are probably 2 million years old.
Which ancestors one refers to will depend on the question you’re asking.
There was a movement in the 90s to get rid of the word "race" because scientists said all humans are basically the same. However, that movement has dwindled because we are discovering some important differences between ethnic groups. Such as:
* Blacks are more sensitive to salt
* Blacks are at a greater risk of glaucoma
* etc
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
> Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.
> ...
> "What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."
> In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
> ...
> "If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.
That said, skin colour does have some physiological impact: darker skin blocks the impact of the sun on our skin, which is great for preventing sunburn (and skin cancer, I think?), but reduces the amount of vitamin D our skin creates, and vitamin D deficiency can have an impact on all sorts of things (no idea if glaucoma is one of them). That makes it a trait, though, not a race.
But the scientist insists that I can’t. Instead they tell me that race doesn’t exist and “what is intelligence anyways?”
These are distractions.
Some comic creator https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-d...
Some Proud Boys leader https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-bo...
In his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Alex Jones reported that he had an excellent credit rating and had several of his accounts closed. This is a statement of fact that, if untrue, the banks could sue for defamation. So it's likely true.
Paypal (bankish) has gone after "hate groups" https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b...
Mastercard banned Robert Spencer (white supremacist) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...
Also, even beyond behavior genetics, as neuroscience and genetics research progresses even further, we're going to have to face a bigger question, which is what to do about the fact we can actually intervene to influence behavior even in the face of congenital attributes. Let's say trait X is 80% heritable (they're often not, more like 50%), but you can use CRISPR-esque techniques with viruses, etc., whatever, to change the genome at any age. Think about the ethical and political issues surrounding that. When you can play God, you have the responsibilities of God too; there will be no excuses for altruistic intervention by society.
I'm happy about this article because I've also done research on psychosomatic issues, for lack of a better way of putting it, and this field is really mischaracterized and there is a lot of mob behavior against scientists.
There has been no public stir over say ADHD or psychiatric prevalence, hell theories in either direction for "gay genes" failed to move the needle. The Warrior gene" research (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_A) didn't despite a crime link and the double Y males link to violence wasn't controversial even though it was later shown to not be endocrinal but IQ related from the condition leading to their overrepresentation.
I cannot but laugh every time someone mentions this.
It's very simple: can you measure it? (Yes.) Is the measurement persistent? (Yes.) Then it doesn't really matter whether it's "scientific" or "unscientific" or "mezo-scientific" or whatever, it's a valid concept.
Then people say that it's "socially defined" (yeah, all words/concepts are) or that categories are not clearly separated (e.g. mixed race people), but then again, same goes for the concepts of "day" and "night". Now, are you going to claim that "day" and "night" are unscientific?
Before blood-typing trying to go with an ethnic system is fair enough as a guess and could potentially be a slightly better match rate (more likely to have similar blood types - especially in more homogeneous populations). There are better tools and groupings now so it raises the question 'why bother with a rough proxy when there are more precise alternatives'?
If looking at just light level one doesn't just go with 'night' or 'day' for light levels when specific times for measurements are possible, controlled temperature and calibrated light controlled rooms would specifically testing for a /different/ aspect and even then the point is to try to figure out what is the missing aspect from the more controlled simulation.
Sickle cell anemia may be found more in those of more immediate African descent but taking prevalence of oxygen carried by whole population and concluding African blood carries less oxygen because some have sickle cell anemia is unscientific. One should be grouping by what is actually germane - characteristics of the blood itself and how it is capable of holding more or less oxygen. Not the pigmentation of the sources.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...
What “partisans of the tabula rasa”? Activists of both the left and right seem more likely to be partisans of genetic determinism, though of which aspects of intellect, identity, and behavior varies between them.
For example, if stereotypical male/female attitudes and behaviors were found to have a substantial genetic component to them, I think a lot of socially progressive people would hate that. There's a lot of emotional investment for many in the idea that stereotypically gendered behaviors are entirely or almost entirely caused by culture/social pressure.
I...disagree. I think you would find that most of the left takes as an article of faith (or, at least, a very strongly held belief) that gender identity and presentation (which necessarily includes stereotype-conforming as well as nonconforming identities and presentations) are very strongly genetically determined and that extreme distress results when people attempt (or are compelled) to mask what is genetically-determined in this area, and that that is fundamental to the belief that nonconforming identities and presentations should be accepted.
> There's a lot of emotional investment for many in the idea that stereotypically gendered behaviors are entirely or almost entirely caused by culture/social pressure.
There's a lot of emotional investment in the idea that the concept that there is a single acceptable relationship between external genitalia, gender identity, and gender presentation is a social construct, as well as in the necessary corollary that the particular relationship chosen in any particular culture that imposes such a single acceptable relationship is also a social construct. But that's intimately tied to the idea that each of those three things, while they may have some non-genetic contribution, is fairly strongly genetically directed, and while there may be some correlation between the genetic determinants of each, there is considerable individual variation, as well.
Agree that genetics v activism is going to get very ugly here.
We're already seeing it in health insurance: that's the essence of the pre-existing condition debate.
Should people bear the cost or accrue the benefit of their uniqueness, or should we share them as a community?
I don't think very many policies actually are.
> Gender or racial imbalances between professions for instance are attributed to cultural bias and discrimination.
That's not based on tabula rasa theory, that's based on actual experience of (often, until quite recently, overt and direct) gender and racial discrimination. It certainly tends to involve a belief that certain traits (whether or not genetically determined) are not intrinsically associated with gender or race (or, sometimes, when there is evidence that such an association does exist, that the association is not strong enough to explain the outcome difference.) But that's very different from, and entirely neutral toward, the question of tabula rasa vs. genetic determinism.
> partisans of the tabula rasa are pretty powerful, particularly in academics.
The closest thing I can see to "partisans of the tabula rasa" in the real world, with any kind of power, are religious conservatives, who have a very strong incentive to believe that things for which there is already very strong evidence are genetically determined are choices, so as to ascribe moral virtue to certain traits and moral vice to others. But plenty of them have over time adopted a model of accepting genetic predisposition in (at least some of) those areas while still finding a moral command to act in a certain way regardless of predisposition, so even with them I don't see things quite so irreconcilable as the upthread characterization.
Climate-change denialism is a more bipartisan problem than this. :)
Also suppose trait X is highly visible so that I can easily identify who has it (just for concreteness, let's say it's black eyebrows, and 20 IQ points). This would drive the internet batty.
The same is true if any such correlations are found for a number of other traits.
I hate it when your ilk make race vs IQ seem like an edgy new opinion that is being suppressed. It used to be mainstream globally, but we moved past that through dialectics. When the "bell curve" book was published, we resurrected the debate, then we moved passed it.
It seems to me that you have to go out of your way to bring up race and IQ. That's why, whenever the debate is brought up, one of the parties is accused of having an agenda.
No, parent is rightfully pointing out that it's IQ in general, not any specific trait X. X could stand for race/skin color, but it could also stand for ancestry (e.g. Askenazi Jew, which IMO have same skin color as the rest of Europeans), or sex, or maybe other things as well.
For example, any of these studies would drive the internet angry (if they found a strong result):
- Midgets vs IQ
- Attractiveness vs IQ
- Attractiveness vs Likelihood of birth defect
- Wealth vs Emotional Stability
- HN vs Autism Spectrum
- Eye Color vs Empathy
The formula is (visible trait) x (valued trait) x (has this trait already been historically used to justify atrocities).
And, actually, I would argue that in the real world, the correlation isn't even the thing that's problematic, its when the correlation is used as a basis for accepting discrimination on the basis of X. No one is upset about the widely known height/IQ correlation, but that's because no one is using it to justify discriminating based on height, because it is an easily-visible proxy for IQ.
I agree, but that's enough. In any one area, scientific fact will run into serious opposition. In a different area, the opposition may come from other people, but be just as strong.
If anything, this will make it harder to defeat, than it would be if "partisans of the tabula rasa" were a neatly circumscribed group.
In the long run the truth wins out because generally it has an advantage -- it knows what works and what doesnt.
It’s a far safer proposition for someone with a known genetic illness to just be put on medication for their entire life than something so permanent and not guarenteed as attempting to edit their parents germ cells. If your medication is bad for the patient you can just get them off of it. You can’t do too much if your CRISPR system goes off target (which is known to happen).