I’ve been getting lots of email and twitter remarks from the HBD mafia — they don’t seem to realize that I don’t have any respect for a gang of pseudonymous incompetents, and that they’re in a clique of self-deluded racist twits. You want to see real tribalism in action, there’s a group that demonstrates it beautifully, driven by one primitive tribal distinction, race, to constantly affirm to each other that they are right to reinforce their prejudices.
I’d rather read what real anthropologists — you know, professionals who have wrestled with and studied this specific problem deeply — have to say. Like Holly Dunsworth. She’s not very impressed with the HBD ideologues either.
That’s problem number one with HBD: It’s obviously first and foremost about tribalism and politics and pushing their beliefs, not about an honest scientific seeking of the truth.
And that’s problem number two with HBD: It can’t be about scientific truth as it claims to be because… There is no truth when it comes to whether biological race is real. It’s real. It’s not real. Choose one or both or neither. And your choice is going to depend on your own mind and as well as your social, historical, cultural, and societal context. And, that’s the reality of race.
So that’s just one of the reasons why race is considered by many to be primarily a "social construct," rather than nature’s biological construct.
Many of us are thinking about these issues all the time because we’re anthropologists and human biologists and educators. But many of us are thinking about these issues even more intensely right now because of the slight disturbance in the Force brought on by Nicholas Wade’s new book and the HBD fandom that has ensued.
Although I do have reservations about the following statement.
In fact, I can think of no positive outcome of deciding that biological race is real… except for the opportunity for folks who are seeking such an opportunity to talk openly about their personal biases and the differential value they place on one group of humans over another, or to perpetuate stereotypes, or to act on their racism without backlash.
Beyond the chance to have freedom of derogatory expression, can you think of an actual positive outcome if a consensus of scientists decided that biological races are real?
I’m not talking about anyone making a decision about whether mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, reproductive isolation, natural selection, epigenetics, microbes, viruses, environmental influences,… have influenced human evolution and variation over time and space.** We already know that. Human biology (the way we look, the diseases we get and don’t get, etc…) varies geographically and in some patterned ways, depending on the trait. That’s fact.
I’m talking about deciding that biological race is real, in other words, that race is real beyond being "just" a human construct. Could anything beneficial come of such a declaration?
I think the problem with determining whether biological race is real isn’t whether it’s beneficial or not — it should be whether it is true or not. And I’m satisfied that that has already been answered well. It’s not. A “race” is a mish-mash of categories that does not correspond at all well to any kind of clade. The concept emphasizes superficial differences as markers for significant cultural and personal differences, and fails.
But I can think of reasons knowledge about those patterned differences between people could be beneficial, because sociological race is real. These racial distinctions that people make have caused great injustices over time — in fact, some of the greatest atrocities ever. The American Indian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, centuries of black slavery…you will not make them disappear by pointing out the biological unity of the human species, and I think you would do great harm by trying to pretend that those weren’t acts targeting racial groups, and denying people recognition of their history. You need to know the truth to even begin to compensate for injustice, and to be aware so that those injustices are not repeated. If we should not ignore the sociology of race because the truth helps us do better, I couldn’t argue against the idea of a hypothetical biological pattern of variation called “race” because revealing a truth would make us worse.
I’d argue against it because it isn’t true. That’s enough for me.
I guess I haven’t really been following this but what does “HBD” mean? Hemoglobin subunit delta, half-breed degenerates, Happy Birthday, Dave, what?
kalkin:
HBD stands for Human Bio Diversity. And the main reason that I can see for pushing HDB (which really is pretty small) is so that white guys can claim that they are no relation to chimpanzees, gorillas, or brown people.
Well yes, of course you’d argue against it because it isn’t true. Saying it like that though seems to imply that the person you are quoting isn’t, even though her first quoted passage is all about the question of factual veracity.
@1
Human BioDiversity.
Worse than that, I think the majority of the HBD crowd are actually atheists who are just fine with the idea of evolution and hence our relatedness to other primates; they just draw the line at brown people.
Sociological vs biological race is probably the most crucial distinction of all, in this context.
I’d say that the most true, real and stable characteristic of a “race” is the history of the people who are designated or who self-designate as belonging to that race (or mixture of races). In other words: where you come from, what was passed down to you, socio-cultural background, and the privileges and disadvantages that go with.
Why is “genetic race” only discussed about humans? I’ve never heard or read about anyone discussing the race of toads, fish, dogs, cats or any other animal. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s all about racist assholes trying to find a pseudos-scientific justification for their own racism.
Pseudo-scientific. Added an extra S by accident. Sorry.
In fact, though she initially gives the contrary impression just as you say, she doesn’t think factual veracity is a possibility with regard to this question, and this is why she wants to decide it in ethical, social terms. Which is, indeed, very dodgy:
— From the same blog post linked above.
She contradicts the comparison with fossils immediately below — indeed, clarity of expression is not her strong point — but apparently only in the sense that the question of biological race is different purely because of the moral dimension. In other words, her opinion is radically different from Prof. Myers view.
That’s because the word “race” means something VERY different in other animals. In domestic populations, the term is synonimous with “breed” which is based purely on a handful of phenotypic characteristics or even a single one (which means you can be a different race than your parents). In wild populations, it is occasionally used as synonimous with “subspecies”, an actual, useful, biological term, which is what the racists who push the “discrete populations” bullshit want to believe human races are, but is not what we actually observe in reality.
Human Biodiversity = Racists = Tribalists.
Got it.
We’ve seen this movie before many times in my own lifetime. Human Sociobiology, evo-psych, The Bell Shaped curve, Shockly, James Watson. the KKK, the Southern Baptists, the Civil War, etc..
It goes all the way back to the bible. The OT is just an ugly tribal myth.
God’s favorite people conquer Canaan, genocide the Canaanites, and steal their land, women, and stuff. Payback is severe as they are then overrun by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. The Romans kick them out of Israel, the xians persecute them for 2,000 years, and the Germans kill half of them.
David Chapman @9
I am unconvinced that Holly Dunsworth’s stance on “race” is “dodgy”. She asks the question, Could anything beneficial come of such a declaration? (declaration that human “race” is a valid scientific category). Before dismissing the question, try answering it. I can’t, personally, think of any positive outcomes. We don’t need “race” to explore genetic differences between populations, for instance with a view to improving medical treatments based on genetic profiles. To sit and ponder the possible outcomes of declaring “race” real is very revealing. It is akin to discussions of whether or not fetuses are human beings with human rights in the context of abortion legislation.
Couldn’t agree more. If there was an empirically defensible division of Homo sapiens into subspecies, then it would be right to acknowledge that fact; and if there was compelling evidence of significant cognitive differences between those subspecies, or between human populations not sufficiently distinct to classify as subspecies, we should acknowledge that fact: as Steven Jay Gould said: “Human equality is a contingent fact of history”*. But there isn’t.
While there are racists among their advocates, neither human sociobiology nor evo psych is racist in general. Sexist, certainly – but both have focused on behaviours that are allegedly universal in our species.
*By which Gould did not mean that every individual has equal talents, but that heritable features underlying such talents do not (I’d add: as far as we can tell), differ significantly between populations.
Does anyone know how the HBD crowd feels about the fact that one identified source of DNA separating African from non-African human populations is the presence of Neanderthal DNA in the latter but not the former? Africans are apparently more purely Homo sapiens than non-Africans are.
OK. So am I understanding this right?
Dunsworth says that biological race is analogous to species versus subspecies distinction: purely a matter of where and whether one decides to impose a change of name upon nature’s variety. Thus, it’s a decision that can be made on ethical grounds, and since the effects of imposing it are uniformly undesirable she prefers that we not do so.
PZ, however, says that biological race is analogous to the doctrine of signatures: a nonsensical folk-taxonomy that does not even correspond to any well-connected division of the n-dimensional space defined by the variation in human traits. Thus, it’s effectively not even an option as a biological classification scheme.
I haven’t read Wade, but I gather that he says more or less that biological race is analogous to…what, subspecies or variety or something else that’s usually maintained by some kind of partial isolation? And that this partial reproductive isolation is imposed by…again, what, geographic distance or cultural in-group preferences or something?
To chris61: Years before the Neanderthal contribution to most modern humans’ genomes was confirmed I already saw people trying to claim that a host of ‘advanced human attributes’ originated in Neanderthals.
But also autism. Apparently autistic people have difficulty interpreting facial expressions in a non-Neanderthal face, or something (despite the fact that their ancestors have been living among people with not-particularly-Neanderthal features for tens of thousands of years.
But that’s not what I described as dodgy. I think a general scientific declaration that there is such a thing as biological race would wreak havoc. I questioned her whole approach to this issue. She doesn’t have a stance as to whether biological race exists, but what she says on race is actually potentially harmful in its own right:
— Then she immediately contradicts herself:
So ( reversing the order of argument ) race is widely considered not to be biologicial because people can’t agree whether it’s biological or not. In addition to generating that confusion, I don’t see that she does either the cause of anti-racism, or the argument that there are no such things as races any good by saying that there is not truth when deciding whether it’s real or not. What she is suggesting is that there are no social benefits to deciding it’s real, so scientists shouldn’t decide it’s real. But that is not how science is supposed to work or what it’s supposed to do. And it neutralizes and invalidates the activity of scientists who are convinced, and want to convince others, that indeed there isn’t any such thing and it’s not a valid concept — on the grounds of evidence, not on ethical and political ones.
That is, it’s not just the above confused or possibly rhetorical idea of the scientific consensus or otherwise on race that I find dodgy, but her view of science and on how it should operate. If as she appears to claim, albeit ambiguously, there is no scientific consensus on whether race is a meaningful genetic concept or not, then that should be what gets described as the scientific position. Whereas if the consensus position instead agrees with Professor Myers ( and incidentally, with me ):
then that should be regarded as the consensus. But whereas it may shock people, these scientific positions are meaningless unless the idea of biological race is not, and is never declared anathema to science on any ethical or social or political grounds. It can only be declared unsatisfactory and irrelevant on the grounds of evidence.
With regard to the last part of your post it’s my turn to be shocked:
You seem to be saying that we shouldn’t discuss whether or not fetuses are human beings with human rights. I’m very disturbed by that. Surely we should ask ourselves that if we should ask ourselves anything with regard to abortion. We can answer ‘No, they are not,’ or we can answer ‘Yes they are, but the mothers rights must come first,’ and therefore not oppose abortion. But you seem to be saying that we shouldn’t ask ourselves the question at all. That we shouldn’t let our minds go there.
Would it be preferable to say that “race” in everyday usage has always been a concept used to target populations?
The concept of race or subspecies does indeed have a genuine scientific usage as applied to humans. But it has nothing at all to do with any everyday usage of race. Pygmies (if that’s an impolite term, sorry but I don’t know any other) are clearly a phenotypically distinguishable descent group. But no one ever talks about everyday race using pygmies as exemplars precisely because that degree of difference does not and never has held in reference to targeted human populations. Everyday race means an imaginary discontinuity in human populations. Contrasting the contrasts between the popularly designated races to a genuinely dissimilar population like the pygmies makes the real continuity all too clear.
Arbitrary selection of one or two traits continuous with other populations do not identify descent groups correctly. This is the everyday usage of race, and it’s been proven wrong, over and over. Scientific race can identify descent groups by statistical analysis of multiple traits, giving results in which the number of races depend upon the criteria used. This is not the every day usage of race. I’m afraid I believe that scientists like Razib Khan and Jerry Coyne and Larry Moran (unless he’s changed his position from some years ago?) and Pinker (whatever he is) are doing a grave disservice in trying to dignify “race” with the cachet of science.
There is also another genuine scientific use of race, the identification of Neandertals as a subspecies. This is stunning. Note that no one wants to draw the conclusion that Europeans partake of Neandertal racial nature. That’s because the remarkable stasis of Neandertal culture as well as its paucity raise questions as to their intelligence, their humanity. This kind of prolonged sameness really is a prima facie argument about Neandertal cultural capacity. Then, if race was what people thought it meant then one would have to presume that Europeans were perhaps innately inferior because of the Neandertal admixture? And the unknown Denisovans would have made the Asians they intermixed with more like themselves, smarter perhaps? Or perhaps not?
I suspect when you look at it this way, the scientificity of the race concept is not so appealing any more.
[derail]Autism is a race. The species latest attempt to speciate into a new species [Homo Autista]. Autists are Human, but a significant variation. And there are a few indications that there is a genetic component to the variation of their brain structure that we “normals” call Autism. The HUGE mistake most “normals” make is to think that Autism is a disease that can be caused by beneficial pharmaceuticals [i.e. vaccines], while Autists are perfectly healthy, who just process their senses differently than most do. If two Autists breed, are their brood autist also?
Arguably, you al-so ad-ded an extra hyphen by ad-cident. :-)
…Sometimes, under some species concepts.
What the hell, raven?
No, it wasn’t , not even in some metaphorical way. Not only did the people listed in the last two sentences have completely different motivations – both stated and actual –, the stuff in the first sentence never even happened!
That page is a bit long, so maybe you’ll want to start at the handy chart here. But read the whole thing at some point.
“Subspecies” certainly doesn’t with regard to modern populations: the genetic differences are simply too small. As for “race”, I don’t think that’s now used scientifically for any other species (biologists: please correct this if I’m wrong), and if not, there would seem to be no justification for using it of our own, even apart from the issues you raise.
As for Central African Pygmies, there is genetic evidence that they have a long history as a distinct descent group, but intermarriage with members of other groups (and sexual exploitation of Pygmy women by outsiders) are now common.
@twas brillig -What the ever living fuck are you on about?
I don’t even know where to start to tear apart that bullshit, except to give a very hearty FUCK YOU.
It’s not.
What is this, 1920s Lamarckism? :-)
I think her point is that while the biological concepts of “lineages” and “clades” and “genetic groupings” can be useful, any biological concept of “race” per se is going to be inescapably conflated with the colloquial, social concept of “race” which sociologists study, and given that
reifying one invites a massive avenue for prejudicing research directions and interpretations without offering any increase in either explanatory power or clarity of direction for application of discoveries.
No sense in denying human diversity exists as that would be denying the basis of evolution. There are real differences in genetic makeup (minute percentage as they may be) and their expression in different populations. There is, however, also no sense in extrapolating those differences in some trait to claim some superiority over the entirety of of another population.
I just think of two bell curves, slightly offset. You would have to draw lots of these for each measured trait and have to label each population. The mean of one is by definition less then the other, but the vast majority of the populations overlap. A 50th percentile individual of the “superior” population is still outperformed by slightly less then 50 percent of the other population. And the tails of the curves where truly exceptional individuals lie have no meaningful difference.
It seems that individuals, that I would put somewhere less then 50th percentile of intelligence, make way to much of the mean while ignoring the fact they are still out outperformed by a huge percentage of the other population.
Azkyroth @ 26:
IOW, when racists and HBDers use the term “race”, they don’t mean Rasse, they mean Volk.
dorght@27,
You seem to be under the impression (correct me if I’m wrong) that there’s good evidence of inter-population differences in innate intelligence. There isn’t. There are differences in mean IQ scores, but the Flynn effect makes it quite clear IQ tests cannot be used to find such differences.
@ David Marjanović
What would be the correct terminology?
Certainly not “breeds”, which are (the name says it already) artificial … though this is indeed what racial purists are attempting to bring into play. Pareed? (A combination of “parochialism” and “breed”).
I’m a mere student, but i’ve seen the term being used in captive populations for particular breeds or strains. Outside of that it’s an archaism that is no longer used.
But also autism. Apparently autistic people have difficulty interpreting facial expressions in a non-Neanderthal face, or something (despite the fact that their ancestors have been living among people with not-particularly-Neanderthal features for tens of thousands of years.
I have Asperger’s (an autistic spectrum disorder) and yes, I have problems reading emotion in people’s faces – but where the hell does this ‘non-Neanderthal faces’ come from? You have evidence from cave paintings that autistics had no problem reading the facial expressions of homo sapiens nearest relatives?
[derail]Autism is a race. The species latest attempt to speciate into a new species [Homo Autista]. Autists are Human, but a significant variation. And there are a few indications that there is a genetic component to the variation of their brain structure that we “normals” call Autism. The HUGE mistake most “normals” make is to think that Autism is a disease that can be caused by beneficial pharmaceuticals [i.e. vaccines], while Autists are perfectly healthy, who just process their senses differently than most do. If two Autists breed, are their brood autist also?
Autism is a neurotype, not a race: we are at one end of a spectrum that includes ‘neurotypicals’ at the other, and many of us have family members who have sub-autistic traits; autism also expresses itself in a wide range of forms, hence the saying ‘If you know one autistic you know one autistic’.
There’s no more a clear dividing line between autistics and non-autistics than there is between ‘races’ and no single characteristic that is unique to autistics or present in all autistics: its a constellation of traits that otherwise appear throughout the human population.
And even if there were,a neurotype characterised with difficulties in socialising isn’t going to ‘breed true’ any time soon, even with the growth of science fiction conventions.
Nick@29 Your wrong, but I think I can see where you might get that impression. In my last sentence (and only the last) I was attempting to illustrate how, through ignorance, a claim of differences in intelligence is made it doesn’t bode well for that individual because not only are they outperformed by majority of their own population but also the other.
Theophontes, as far as i understand the term “race” was once used to describe what we now call “subspecies”. Anyone attempting to claim that there are more than one extant human subspecies is fucking delirious.
Great image that people are tweeting on twitter. It reads:
“The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism
Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.
Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.”
Image at: http://oi62.tinypic.com/21ovkpj.jpg
This perfectly sums up the idiocy of the “social construct” positions — both of religious and liberal creationists.
Nick Gotts, yes intermarriage is possible between subspecies or races. My point, again, is that if there is any human group on the face of this planet that is a phenotypically distinct descent group, it’s pygmies. Yet no one supposedly interested in scientific race, much less everyday race, cares. I think that’s because race is about targeting (“identifying”) populations. Pygmies are omitted from supposed neutral usage of race because they show so very clearly a genuinely distinct human phenotype. And the contrast between that distinctness shows all the other putative major races are not.
I don’t think there is any overlap between a genotypically defined descent group and any allegedly phenotypically distinguishable “race.” None.
Nigel Evans@35,
You’re a lying racist fuckwit. First, neither PZ nor most of those arguing that “races” are social and not biological categories are not Marxists (“Cultural Marxist” is just a piece of meaningless far-right drivel). Second, the empirical grounds for that position are clear: human genetic diversity simply does not divide the speicies into discrete biological “races”, and racial categories quite clearly are socially defined, since the same person could be regarded as “black” in one country and “white” in another.
*sigh*
The second “not” in my second sentence@37 should not be there.
Perhaps you could send it to Enopoletus Harding; he seems to have lost one.
Then these people do not understand what a social construct is.
? What kind of weird JohnBirchin’ goofball are you? I don’t think you even know what a Marxist is, if you’re applying that term to me.
Also, the argument by analogy is not at all convincing. You can substitute anything for “race” in that last line and still make it work: . . . Are you going to argue that people who reject acupuncture, chiropracty, and scientology are therefore all creationists?
When the root of your argument is illogical repetition of slogans, I think we can safely say you’re too stupid to post here. Bye.
Meaningless. The concept of ‘subspecies’ in biology has always been nebulous and subjective. Traditionally, it was (sometimes still is) used to differentiate phenotypically distinguishable geographic variants. There is no Official Amount of Genetic Difference for designating a subspecies. A single fixed allele that affected pelage coloration in a mammal or striping or even scalation pattern in a squamate was/would be/would have been sufficient in many cases.
The obvious gestalt phenotypic patterns that allow anybody’s brain to accurately place the continent (or often continental region) of origin of another human’s ancestors are easily within the range of differences that have been used to designate subspecies in other animals. IMO.
But so what?
Even if “the three principal races” or whatever were biological realities (and they emphatically are not, just bear with me) race would still be socially constructed. All these idiots on Wade’s bandwagon are concentrating on the wrong end of the argument. What he has apparently tried to show is that some classification scheme (social construct) or other (since he apparently can’t even settle on a number) corresponds meaningfully or usefully with some biological reality. The social construction part is taken for granted! And yet we get the likes of Pinker, for fuck’s sake, saying that he’s destroyed the myth. That he grants up front.
“Landrace” is still a word in current use by agricultural types, I think, FWIW.
Meaningless gibberish.
“Cultural Marxist is undefined and is just a trivial insult.”
Nigel Evans is a cultural troll though.
And I will define “cultural troll”. Cultural troll = troll. Putting cultural in front of troll doesn’t add or subtract anything but it sounds educated to grade school kids and Fox NoNews viewers.
Nigel Evans @ 35
It took a banning for me to understand what the fuck he was talking about. To the extent that he knew.
Apparently, Creationists are Cultural Marxists.
I think.
In Strange Fruit Kenan Malik examined the argument that there would be medical advantages to accepting ‘race’ as biologically real. Sickle cell anaemia, for instance, is widely regarded as a ‘black disease’ in the US because it effects people with African ancestry – yet in Africa it would be associated with particular areas rather than race.
The consequences of designating it a ‘black disease’ was prejudice towards those carrying the gene in the USA – yet it would be hard not to argue that the consequences of a cut in funding into sickle cell research would be ‘racist’ in consequence, even if not in intent.
stevenjohnson2, @36
I couldn’t find anything stunningly helpful online, but in the 19th century there were numerous attempts to create racial taxonomies with dozens of races, some including pygmies as their own race. They usually came up with a dozen or two “races” and relied on everything from eye color to personality to supposedly tell them apart. The whole exercise went out of style fast with the Nazis, who used similar tests to decide who to execute. Not surprisingly, plenty of people with “Jewish features’ had some things to say about it.
The very fact that the race theorists needed so many races and relied on variable traits like slants of the nose just highlights the fact that there isn’t an actual genetic line corresponding to race, let alone cultural group. But as far as the pygmies, it doesn’t take much to convince yourself that they are a subset of “black” and deciding who got to be called black was at the core of the exercise.
I’m going to quibble a bit with PZ’s read of beneficial.
I think in this context, “beneficial” is similar to the way the term “planets” or “species” are beneficial.
Planets went from “Wandering star” to “objects orbiting the sun”, then further refined by additional discoveries to be “rounded by it’s own gravity” (separating out asteroids), not massive enough to create thermonuclear fusion (a star orbiting a star is not a planet, nor are brown dwarfs), and has cleared it’s neighbouring region of planetesimals (goodby Pluto, even though nothing’s changed by that arbitrary designation).
The name stuck because it was beneficial to scientists studying those objects, and illuminating how they were created. For a category like “Messier objects”, the phrase was so broad that née study was done to separate those objects into distinct categories of nebula, galaxies and the like, the phrase itself has been relegated to a historical oddity.
If “race” was actually a useful way of looking at biological diversity within our species, it would be redefined to fit the truth of that diversity. It hasn’t. Instead, it only re-shapes itself to fit social prejudices. There are genetic distinctions within populations, but race isn’t in any way useful as a means of clarifying those differences in a scientifically meaningful way.
née? DYAC, I meant “once”
In the words of a geneticist I know, race is: “A social construct based upon exceedingly minor biological differences.”He also says that “Separating humans into races solely by skin colour and minor differences in facial morphology and biochemistry leads logically to the inevitable conclusion that people with brown hair must be of a different race than those with blonde, black, or red hair. Of course, we don’t do that, but the biological justification for defining them as separate “races” is the same.”
I read “Messier objects” as “messier objects” initially. ( ?? ) I had to do the internet thing a bit to find out you were talking about Charles Messier and his 1771 cataloguing system. :)
I have some academic curiosity about what fuzzy lines could be drawn to meaningfully divide humanity into types, preferably for medical purposes. I’ve heard about some kind of “blood groups” as one classification scheme that doesn’t rely on things like subjective evaluation of skin color.
The irritating problem would be if there was a consensus or if one scheme became popular outside the scientific community, it’d be used as an excuse for discrimination. It’s bad enough parts of Asia believe personality is determined by ABO blood type. I’ve heard people sometimes get turned down for jobs and relationships because they’re the “wrong” blood type.
ABO blood type is a poor means of dividing people, but Rh type might work better.
Bronze Dog @ 53:
Just as a complete layman, it seems like it might be a time-saver if you had somebody come in with certain symptoms: If they looked like being of Sub-Saharan African ancestry you might suspect Sickle-Cell anemia, whereas if they looked Mediterranean you might think of Beta-Thalassemia…but you’re going to do a blood test anyway, so I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.
I think a ‘Cultural Marxist’ is someone who no longer accepts Marxism as a belief system (by analogy with someone who is ‘Culturally Christian’ or a ‘Culturally Jewish’) but who is still rather fond of red flags and watching Brecht.
I remember an episode of M*A*S*H that dealt a bit with that. They were giving malaria vaccines/treatments, but only for non-Africans because it risked causing anemia in them. (I assume it has something to do with the anti-malaria gene that causes sickle-cell anemia when paired.) When Klinger, an Italian-American, starts developing symptoms of anemia, they’re slow to catch on, accusing him of being lazy, until he gets them to recite the list and realize he really has been affected.
After the show, a text card mentioned the real-life discovery that people of Mediterranean descent were vulnerable, leading to a revision of medical guidelines.
Klinger was supposed to be Lebanese I think, not Italian.
@58
Yep. I always liked the fact that they chose to highlight a frequently overlooked ethnic group.
I thought Klinger was fantastic, especially after Radar left and his role expanded. Damn, M*A*S*H was good… Must get around to rewatching.
Well, you have a mustache and a quick wit… :P
Christine Rose @48
“But as far as the pygmies, it doesn’t take much to convince yourself that they are a subset of “black” and deciding who got to be called black was at the core of the exercise.”
Exactly the point! Race is supposed to be something biological, scientific, but most ended up ignoring blatant hereditary differences because using so-called racial differences doesn’t work. You get inconsistent results using only a handful of phenotype characteristics. But if you try to use statistical analysis of genes, you not only don’t get the standard races but you don’t get a discrete distribution either. Race is about discriminating, almost always for social purposes but occasionally for biological/medical research. And I say again that the latter groups never match up to the former, being defined by the research question. That’s why I’m so irked by the Pinkers, and Khans, and Coynes, and Sailers upholding scientific race.
ChasCPeterson@42
It might be wrong, but it’s certainly not meaningless, or you wouldn’t be arguing against it.
So what? The taxonomic level of subspecies is still quite widely used. Are there any currently and widely recognised subspecies that differ as little genetically, as any two human populations?
@ Raven
-David Marjanović is right here. The Babylonians came much closer to kicking the Israelites out of Israel than the Romans. The vast majority of the Israelite population in Palestine was left intact after the Roman re-conquest. See http://vridar.org/2014/04/30/the-myth-of-judean-exile-70-ce/
@ A.R. #51
-Race was always primarily about ancestry. So far as I know, there is no evidence that blondes in the U.S. have substantially different ancestry from brown or black-haired people in the U.S.
Enopoletus Harding
Ah! Finally you have the decency to show your true racist colours.
It’s refreshing to see you drop the pretext of science, and finally admit that your notions of race is a tool to marginalize people based on their ancestry.
Or is there another reason why you see genetic variations in skin colour moe significant than hair colour? Why is the Buntu and the Khoisan the same race, and the nordic people, the Slavs and Iberians the same? What useful information does “race” give on it’s own (except the rather telling information that the user of the word has at least some internalized racist notions)?
Azkyroth
He doesn’t look too much like Antonio Gramsci though…
After reading all this, here’s my new definition of HBD:
Head Beats Desk
-That which is stated without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
WTF? It can be used as such (and it frequently was throughout world history), but where the hell do you get the idea I was using it for this purpose? I wasn’t, and you should understand this.
-Are you imagining that Khoisan were somehow more closely related to, say, Slavs, than Nordics and Iberians? What?
-Define “useful”.
As far as I can see, yours is a troll comment that deliberately misinterprets my statements here. I only reply to you in order to counter false perceptions of myself among others here.
How twee!
E.H.
I’ll give you the benefit of doubt – and I’ll assume you’re as just as stupid you come off, and not both terminally stupid and a very bad liar.
First some basic tips:
Quote mining doesn’t really work. It does especially not work when the quote in question is present at the page three comments up from yours.
Possibly related: You seem either by fault or by design to have really poor skills at reading. Especially your contextual skills, and your ability to read whole paragraphs and sentences in context seem to be abysmal. If you insist on talking to thinking adults you really should put in som practice and/or good-faith effort.
Now secondly, taunting the resident blockhead for his racist tendencies is not really a subject of evidence and peer review, especially not when used as a rhetorical device.
Ah. A highly technical and difficult term. Given your apparent display of communication skills here I can see why this one gives you some trouble (especially when you omit the context, but that is another matter.).
Usually, the term “useful” is used for something that serves a purpose, has an application or to put it short: Actually works.
I know you have difficulties (especially with context) so I’ll try to help you along here. You see, the important thing here is that terms like “species”, “clade”, “race” and “individual” are not actually things in nature. Plato was wrong (on a number of things). Words don’t correspond to essences in nature. These terms are our compartmentalizations of the continuum of life. They are used to describe biology, but they are not biology as such. In that sense and context, they should only be used if they can be shown to have some actual, legitimate use.
The “race” one is tricky (well, not really, but let’s pretend it is so you don’t feel quite as stupid as you deserve). It has traditionally been used to divide people (in a very haphazard and shoddy manner) by skin colour and which continent they trace their recent ancestry to. The only good use for the first part is vitamin D uptake and relative risk for skin cancer from sun exposure. This might have been useful in a medical setting (had the definitions been a bit more coherent and rigorous), but it hasn’t really got a huge impact on daily lives (unless you’re vitamin D deficient – that sucks). The second part is not really useful at all. Unless you want to discriminate people based on their origin of course. It’s somewhat useful for that (but really, not very. People of middle eastern descent has been in and out of the “white race” so often in US context that they really should get their own revolving door).
So, the relevant question is why do you want to divide the human population into “races”. What use is the concept in your daily life? And not at least; does it any harm? Do the use of the term and the division between people it creates displace other perspectives that are more useful and more relevant?
No, blockhead. I’m saying that in-group diversity is greater than intra-group diversity as long as you treat (“south-Saharan”)Africans as a group.
It’s always amused me that “race realists” or HBD proponents always rally around skin colour and facial features as their markers for race designations. Those seem like pretty trivial differences while other things, like adult lactose tolerance for instance, that may actually have had a measurable effect on the cultures where these traits became dominant. Of course, those kinds of traits are invisible to the naked eye and can’t reinforce racial prejudices quite as easily, so…
Obligatory fact sphere ‘fact’: The first person to prove that cow’s milk is drinkable was very, very thirsty.
Regarding the M*A*S*H episode, it was the antimalarial drug primaquine, which cannot be given to people with a deficiency/lack of the enzyme G6PD, as it causes hemolytic anemia in these groups, which include Africans, Mediterranean peoples, and people descended from these groups (amusingly, the genetic deficiency that causes the problem appears to have a protective effect against malaria, which gave it a substantial selective advantage in the aforementioned regions due to the prevalence of malaria there.). For years, it was not realized that people of Mediterranean descent were also intolerant of primaquine, and as such, only peoples of African descent were not given the drug.
“Blondes in the US” is a particularly silly example on which to hang one’s hat, given that hair dye is cheap and easily available. Simply observing that someone has blonde hair isn’t going to guarantee anything about their ancestry unless they did a particularly bad job of coloration.
Gnumann+, I thought your point was that the variations between different groups of people whose ancestors went to different parts of Africa were much larger than the variations between them and the few groups who meandered northeast (with possible adjustments for Neandertals, or Denisovans, or putative hobbits.) So yeah, deciding that two very different groups of Africans are the same race but northeast Africans and Swedes are different races is very much a social construct.
neverjaunty, also “black in the US” is a pretty silly example, given how white slaveholders treated the people they purchased, and given the relative homogeneity of the slaveholders vs. the relative diversity of the parts of Africa where slaves were captured.
Shatterface
There’s a problem with that and that is stereotyping: When you closely link A with B you’re going to ignore C. Sickle cell anaemia is more common in “black” (the social definition!) people than in “white” people, but it’s not exclusive to them and it also means that it’s not the only thing that might be affecting them.
The racial classification is done by phenotype, that’s why Obama is a “black” president. Yet in many old white American families the fact that there were black people in the family is no longer visible, but they might still suffer from sickle cell anaemia, but no doctor might look for it because they don’t look like the people commonly affected.
Another example is what happened to my sister: She suffers, same as me, from Hashimotos’ disease. It’s an auto-immune dissease where your immune system slowly eats up your thyroid. Only that my sister is not overweight like people with Hashimoto’s usually are but very skinny bordering on anorectic. As a result NOBODY tested her for thyroid problems even though she showed all the symptoms. Because it’s a fat people’s dissease. In the end they sent her to a psychiatrist because she was obviously making shit up.
+++
Enopoletus Harding
Here’s a little experiment for you:
Go to Sweden. Look at the dominating haircolour. Go to Spain. Look at the dominating haircolour. Come back again and report.
“I studied a zebrafish in my pajamas … “
I don’t think it’s accurate to call race a “primitive tribal distinction.” When I took an anthropology course in college, I was taught that racism is a relatively modern idea that arose during the transition from feudalism to democracy, when the feudal elitist ideas about the upper class were transferred onto the entire nation as a “race.”
How can anyone look at the Koreas and continue believing that race is useful as an indicator of any trait (other than the superficial ones it is defined by)?
I wonder if orange tabby cats are racist against gray tabby cats.
-So institutions are really the only factors ever worth considering for explaining differences in outcomes among humans? Or do you mean something else?
You do need to work on reading comprehension, don’t you? Varun’s meaning is plain: the example of North and South Korea shows that, contra the racists, heredity does not dictate culture.
Instead of trying to ridicule a strawman position, let’s see you make a positive contribution to the discussion. How do you explain the different political cultures that exist in North and South Korea?
Enopoletus Harding
Do you do language?
But I guess the problem is that you have an unfalsifiable position so whatever arguments and evidence anybody is presenting (like the fact that blonde hair and dark here actually ARE more prevalent in certain populations than in others), you’ll simply dismiss it with some handwaiving or ignoring.