I had a few head-scratching moments of realization of this when I was into learning Romance languages in my college years, which led me to read about history of various Romance-speaking countries. Look at the Latins. They were a small group in Lazio (Latium). Their culture expanded and absorbed the whole of Italy and then Europe and much of North Africa. (Well known story.) In each of these places there were distinct ethnic divisions, languages, cultures ... which shortly vanished and assimilated. We know very little of those distinctions today. The empire fell and outside sources came in, Germanic peoples, maybe Arabs and North Africans especially in the south. Eventually separate nation-states came about. Today many people assume those nations that emerged are homogeneous identities or ethnicities. They're not really.
Additionally, race in the United States of course has a bunch of bullshit in its history about "white people", where "white people" is a loosely defined and moving definition. I was recently reading about very odd phrases that used to exist, like "octoroon" to describe people with 7 european great-grandparents and 1 African-descended one. They bothered having a word for this. They looked pretty much like "white people". They were discriminated against. To a lesser extent, immigrants from non British or non Germanic parts of Europe were also discriminated against as if "nonwhite". In this 1899 drawing, Anglo-Saxon and German-descended Americans are said to be racially superior to Irish and Iberians, because those are said to share traits and ancestry with black people: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scientific_racism_ir...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/celts-des...
It got politicized this summer and the dude trolled outrage conservatives a bit after they made it political, but the fact is, he clearly knew more math then them.
Really?
This is hardly dog vivisection by the Royal Society.
If it’s bad science and can be shown to be inconsistent, why ‘lose faith’? That’s what science is about.
You can lose faith in a particular part of the scientific community without losing faith in the scientific method.
The issue is that these elites did not come to their conclusion through science. They came to their conclusion because they are trying to push a certain narrative. Thus, no matter what data you show them, they will always find a way to cling to their narrative. Even worse, you might get cancelled for promulgating data and interpretations that does not fit the narrative.
This is not science!
This is not a response to your comment. Hahaha
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24508308.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502064
They remain up despite flagging and reporting. What value, in your mind, do these bring?
(I'm mentioning this here since it's a detached thread anyway)
If you want to argue with the science or point out deficiencies you're encouraged to. That's the beauty of science.
Edit: apparently the theory is about paleolithic people (who did a lot of fishing) in Britain being dark-skinned, which is certainly believable.
Edit: I guess that's what the whole argument upthread is about - apparently researchers said that paleolithic british settlers were dark skinned, and became light skinned with the switch to agriculture. Which is very plausible.
Geneticists simply said that they had the genes for blue eyes while the European genes associated with fair skin were not present. What wasn't said was that they were black – that was something the media simply made up because it fit with their agenda. It seems fair to assume they were darker than modern Northern Europeans, but similarly it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
“African peoples” have a pretty broad range of pigmentation, and “black” isn’t used exclusively for African people, anyhow; e.g., indigenous Australians.
It's funny how White people use “black” with almost unlimited breadth right up until that challenges the original whiteness of territory they view as an ancestral homeland, and then immediately start demanding that the blackness be viewed maximally narrowly.
Couldn't find a better illustration of how race is a fluid social construct.
I wasn't commenting about the original poster but about the broad community that have been making this exact argument about this exact issue since it entered the public debate, and a wide number of other issues for, well, almost the entire time that population studies that would support this kind of discussion of the past have existed.
(And, yes, you can see identical behavior referencing different identity divides besides white and non-white in the same period over the same broad class of past-population issues, but this specific issue of darker-skinned past inhabitants of the British Isles is one of the focuses of whites and the flexible nature of the label “black”.)
Nobody is questioning the ancestral homeland of anyone. Just because some Scandanavians were dark skinned or had ancestors from outside Scandanavia - maybe even somewhere where people were mostly dark skinned - doesn't mean they weren't Scandanavian, unless you choose to believe that "Scandanavia" is a racial and not a geographic term.
At some point in relatively recent history some European ethno-nationalists developed this concept of a "racial homeland" and unfortunately to this day that way of thinking holds appeal among some groups.
All humans ultimately descend from hominids from more equatorial regions, and on the scale of hominid history we've only very recently left those regions.
> If race is a social construct then there isn't a Black nation, Black peoples, or anything ancestral to anyone who identifies as Black.
It's exactly the opposite, black identity exists precisely because race is a social construct, and furthermore is a powerful construct that has dictated the fates of untold millions throughout history.
That’s a pretty impressive generalization. It’s also not very charitable to imply that people are being defensive about some sort of racial homeland instead of taking them at their word that they are skeptical of the wild conclusions that aren’t supported by the science.
I am from very Northern European stock and I get very dark with consistent exposure to the sun despite my extensive freckled skin. My brother by the same parents was often mistaken for someone from Southern Italy or Mexico especially if it was Summer.
> it seems quite a stretch to assume that they were as dark as African peoples.
Africans also aren't the color black. Nobody said the first Britons were SubSaharan African at all. They just said they had dark skin.
This is bolstered by the discovery that a widespread gene - SLC24A5 - associated with fairer skin is a recent (8k years ago) phenomenon in Europe associated with the arrival of middle eastern farmers, in whom it developed due to their Vitamin-D poor cereal-based diet [1].
The same gene is present across Eurasia through to South Asia, and is partially responsible for pigmentation variation there also, even moreso than in Europe, where the gene is almost ubiquitous today. [2]
Of course it's not the only gene that controls depigmentation. Depigmentation in East Asia is not related to that gene at all - though it could be similarly influenced by cereal-based diets.
1. https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-g...
Focusing on skin and eye color seems imprecise and really, why even bring it up? DNA mutations or markers spread in a population. Then some members of that population travel to distant lands and intermarry (or not, maybe just die,) and spread their DNA mutations around and then die. Hundreds of year later someone sequences the DNA and says, hmm, here's a marker for X population but I found it in territory Y indicating that people moved around or were taken as slaves so there was a lot more mixing than history expects.
Does your theory about the original Britons imply some direct-from-<some continent> migration? If so you'd expect markers for populations on that continent to be present in historical samples without the associated markers associated with a migration via a more lengthy route. So let's test for that which will either prove or not-prove the theory and leave the silly adjectives for twitter.T
When have they been worth putting any faith in? Back when they were all theology schools? Back when the elite academic establishment drove Ignaz Semmelweis to an early grave for daring to suggest doctors wash their hands? The days of the "Invisible College" (why couldn't the enlightenment happen in a real college?)? The days of Freud?
Yes, there are some soft degrees out there, and universities have many problems, like all institutions. And I met my fair share of lazy tenured professors amongst the good ones. But come on, if you've got to dismiss people like this to make a point, there's something wrong with the way you're going about it.
Sorry you feel that way.
> "a few technical skills for teenagers"
Oh OK, yes STEM (for the most part) is pretty good. Now there are valid criticisms of the way it is done (much of the best criticism coming from within STEM schools) but nothing is perfect.
> Yes, there are some soft degrees out there
More than a few (https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates/), and if you break it down by course I think you'll find that a lot of the most common courses are also pretty soft.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about the technical courses (some of which can be very good), almost every sane person trusts scientists on questions about science. It's that once you step outside the stuff that makes clear, empirical predictions a lot of it is pretty soft and always has been (since fields which don't make predictions are never wrong so they never really learn anything).