Vox Day has responded to the release of that video interview. Once again, he’s weasely: he’s now saying he was ambushed, that it was supposed to be all about gamergate, and Pakman surprised him with other questions. But he says some more things that irritate me.
But that’s how they play the game. I’m not the least bit upset or annoyed about it. I could have shut it down once it became clear that David Pakman had set up a bait-and-switch, but I was interested to see just how far he would take us off subject. I find it amusing that the headlines are focused on my supposedly "controversial statements" when saying that some races are smarter than others is no more debatable than saying that some races are taller than others.
And I am not stating unequivocally that homosexuality is a birth defect for the obvious reason that we don’t know with any degree of certainty that it is an immutable condition determined at birth. But if it is, then what else would you realistically call a condition that significantly reduces the odds that a creature will be able to propagate its genes?
Two stupid things from ol’ Teddy Beale:
-
It makes no sense to talk about the height of “races”. People within a racial group have a range of heights — you can’t simply judge individuals by an average of a group, especially when the metric is something so incredibly sensitive to environmental factors during development.
It’s the same story with IQ, whatever it is. So he’s actually correct: racial height makes about as much sense as racial intelligence, i.e., neither do.
-
Homosexuality is a birh defect because it
significantly reduces the odds that a creature will be able to propagate its genes
? That argument is idiotic.First, show me that it actually does reduce fertility. Significant numbers of heterosexual people have no interest in having children — for instance, Theodore Beale is 46 years old, and seems to have failed to reproduce. Shall we argue that being a racist asshat is a birth defect? Also, many gay people with a desire for children manage to reproduce. It turns out the bulk of the work of generating, producing, and raising children is not driven by sexual desire!
Second, there are other things that reduce fertility, in a statistical sense: education and wealth, for example. Should we regard intelligence as a birth defect then? How about all those wealthy Republicans? The Koch brothers, between the two of them, only have four children; my parents, lower middle class Democrats, had six. The fitness of two of the richest people in America is lower than my parents, who were probably in the bottom 15%.
Finally, if we want to get really fundamental, sexual reproduction itself must be a birth defect. Populations are limited by the fact that only half their members actually produce offspring — males only produce gametes. We could double our growth rate if we were all functional hermaphrodites!
Another fundamental ‘birth defect’ would have to be multicellularity. Look at us slow, clumsy human beings: we have to go through this elaborate process of development to even be able to reproduce in about 15 years. Years! And even then we only spawn two or three children, on average. There are bacteria that can divide every hour. In 15 years, which is about 130,000 hours, they could produce 2130000 progeny.
The bottom line is that if you’re going to use the metric of maximum rate of propagation of genes, then heterosexual human beings are total failures already.
I really am unimpressed when people with no knowledge of biology try to rationalize their prejudices with biology. The only good thing about it is that it makes them look really stupid.
I look forward to calling Teddy Beale “shorty” if I ever have the unpleassure of meeting him. I suspect that he may be sensitive to height as a status symbol.
Of course, my response will be ‘just joking, but be so sensitive’.
Lame statement about why he continued the interview.
The only thing stupider than Beale’s petty hatreds are his failed pseudoscientific justifications.
As a bonus, he’s employing that excuse so often used by vapid, loathsome bigots when their vapid, loathsome bigotry is exposed: “I was ambushed! It was a bait and switch!”
Well, to me that just says he knows on some level how offensive and stupid his views are (or at least how they are perceived) and merely regrets that he couldn’t think of an off-the-cuff way to talk around or sugar-coat them. Sorry, VD, but don’t blame the interviewer if your answers to his questions make you look like a thoughtless hate-filled idiot. Engage that massive IQ of yours and think about it.
IQ, I’d like you to meet GIGO.
I am in awe of Teddy. Surely it can only be my mere inadequacy that wonders why someone of such divine inspiration has limited themselves to writing and editing pretty piss poor sci-fi and gaming an awards ceremony. He should turn that Mensa IQ to curing something at least. How about raging idiot fascism? God must surely expect more from Teddy seeing the gifts he has bestowed upon him…
A comment:
LOL whut.
Talk about projecting.
@ 3 Hank_Says
Even more amazing is how he then proceeds to double down after the fact. But still, he was somehow tricked into making these odious statements – statements which he stands by completely because science and happily shares within the safety of his own blog – because how dare anyone actually look into the views of Gamergators instead of accepting the facade of ethics in journalism at face value. Looking at the little man behind the curtain was a total bail-and-switch; I was told they’d be focusing on my giant head!
My mom is a smart person, and she had lots of children.
I am mostly straight, but I have never reproduced, despite being married twice.
I was talking to an older gay man the other day. He had had several children by the two women he had been married to.
That was at a talk by the son of a lesbian woman. He had a sister, so his mom had managed to have and raise two children without a man in her life.
… Theodore Beale is 46 years old, and seems to have failed to reproduce.
Why pick on him for the most (only) admirable feature of his whole life?
One of the comments in the We Hunted the Mammoth thread on Vox Day’s interview gives a link to Beale’s wife’s grandfather’s obituary:
http://www.rhielfuneralhome.com/obituaries/345/Mulheron-Clair-C
It would appear that Beale has spawned four times.
I might have to renounce my atheism. Hallelujah!
I am in no way defending him (the very idea of doing so makes me a little pukey), but Beale is in fact married and has four kids.
Ambush interviews certainly happen and can happen to anyone, even Vox Day. However, unless the interviewer has dishonestly edited the conversation, he still said what he said and people are perfectly justified in criticizing it.
Everything you said is true. Even so, if someone were to talk about one race being taller than another, I think most people would understand you are talking about how average height varies from place to place; it’s an incoherent version of something real. That there are comparable differences in average intelligence from place to place, however that might be measured, is not at all uncontroversial.
So I’m not sure they do make just as much sense. Racial height makes no sense, and racial intelligence makes less than that.
@monad,
But it doesn’t make sense to talk about height as a racial characteristic.
When I was growing up, one of the stereotypes of Chinese (and Asians more generally) was that they were short. In fact, that was one of the go-to laugh lines for racist comedians.
Then many Asians adopted a more Western-style diet, and behold! Suddenly their average height became pretty much identical with ours, and we ended up with Yao Ming. So it turns out that height is mainly based on cultural, not genetic factors.
Clearly the same thing is true of intelligence — pretty much all of it, as it is measured, depends on cultural factors like the educational system.
On top of that, there’s the point that Jared Diamond made — a bushman in the Kalihari desert is a frigging genius when it comes to surviving in an environment that would kill you or me in 24 hours or less. All members of our species have pretty much the same brains, they just use them in different ways.
@15 As I understand it Yao Ming was selectively bred. Eugenics is a thing the Chinese Government does. Still Average height has gone up with better nutrition, he’s just a nonexample of this.
VD got exactly one thing right in his little screed. Racial intelligence/height is not debatable.
I know I refuse to debate my intelligence/ height or that of my cultural/ melanin group, with anyone, because it’s just not a matter for debate.
And he was not ambushed or baited. The questions may have been unexpected on his part, but what happened, Vox gave the reporter an opening and the reporter pursued the more interesting aspect of his statements.
But I think we have all seen that Vox Day is a major goalpost mover and shaker. He has mastered that.
The Koch brothers, between the two of them, only have four children; my parents, lower middle class Democrats, had six. The fitness of two of the richest people in America is lower than my parents, who were probably in the bottom 15%.
Actually there are four Koch brothers. I think William, the youngest, has two children. The oldest, Frederick R. Koch, has none.
“Still Average height has gone up with better nutrition,…”
YES!! Look at your history USAians. Visit your most sacred of boats, the USS Constitutiution, in the city up east, the Boston, the “Hub of the Universe”. [no, seriously, no sarcasm intended] The bunks built into that ship for the seamen are unbearably short. When one asks the guide if the seamen had to cram themselves into those bunks uncomfortably, he will tell one that they fit in normally as men were shorter back then than today; with a little hint of the nutrition was much worse back then than today. I even asked if the Navy only admitted short men to join the fleet. The answer was, “They accepted _all_ volunteers.”
And that was just 400 yrs ago, no Evolution involved there, Vox. Height is nutrition caused. (or more properly: lack of nutrition == lack of height)
Vox is making the simplistic conclusion of: “I know a Chinese person, and he is shorter than me, therefore Chinese = short”.
There must be a name for that kind of fallacious thinking: “stereotypization”?
re 19:
erratum:
maths failed me, should’ve noted, that: 2015 – 1797 = 218
Yeah,, Beale unfortunately(especially for them, one suspects) has kids. His son Christopher, then 6, had a book published back in 2006.
Slithy Tove, there is a replica of a Greek Trireme rowing around in the Med. When it was first built, I tried to get in as a oarsperson. Turned out there was a height limit for the crew, because it was an *exact* replica.
As for Vox’s biology: I suspect that he may be making unwarranted claims about his recent ancestry – I have met a few folks that he reminds me of. It is new to me that in his older ancestry, the Neanderthals are to be proud of – they went extinct, which isn’t evidence of superiority, or were they brought low by inferior peoples?
Sugarfrosted @ 16
Yeah, I mean, has good christian Beale ever been to the ho,es of good vhristian medieval folks? Here’s a hint: they were small.
Oops, blockquote fail. Grr ah well.
This is slightly off topic but it must be shared. Watch as Adam Baldwin defends the helpless and bullied Vox Day.
Hi @Popehat: Why are you bullying @voxday today?
So: Popehat tweets WHTM article, VD tweets at Popehat, ergo Popehat bullies VD. Makes total sense in a martyr complex mindset.
Just when I thought Adam Baldwin couldn’t get any more vile, he has to go and defend a theocratic reactionary neo-fascist rape apologist. Ugh, rewatching Firefly next time will be hard.
I get the impression that Vox Day’s[1] whole life is a “bait and switch” as he is constantly subjected to evidence that he is not nearly as smart as he’d like to think himself to be.
[1] It’s quite amazing to me how anyone can claim to be a Christian and use such a blasphemous nym without imploding into a blob of quivering protoplasm under the crushing cognitive dissonance. I guess anything’s possible when you’re that much of a narcissist.
[rant]
@zenlike
VD is even worse than your garden-variety rape apologist. He is a serial rapist by his own admission:
And even if he contests or amends the above statement, there’s still this one:
This is a person who does not recognize other people’s agency or personhood, not even his own spouse’s. This is the mindset of a predator. Ironically, this puts him and his followers squarely outside the bounds of any civilization worth a damn.
And a person so unwilling/incapable of recognizing their own thoughts as barely more than a lazy re-hash of century-old justifications for bigotry and (sexual) slavery is not intelligent in any meaningful way, Mensa membership or not.
It’s fucking disheartening that so many men are so eager to gobble up this anachronistic might-makes-right horseshit…
I am sorry for his family, because they are not safe around a man like that.
Yeah, that too :(
[/rant]
I think that’s enough internet for me today.
klatu,
Indeed, sorry, I was being too soft on Vox. I was aware that he is a self-confessed rapist and not merely an apologist (although, I wouldn’t be surprised if most apologists, because they don’t seem to understand, or want to understand, consent, are either rapists or at least would-be rapists).
klatu’s quote of VD:
What is this, I don’t even…
If the definition of theft is stretched so far to include taking something from someone without permission, then I am absolutely a thief!
Saad: Openly Feminist Gamer ,
Keep in mind Vox doesn’t see women as individual moral entities. A woman is a lesser being who is the property of a man. In that vile mindset, a woman doesn’t need to give consent: as long as she belongs to the man, he can do whatever the fuck he wants with her.
I actually like that MRA’s like Baldwin link themselves to someone as disgusting as Vox, it clearly shows that they in fact hate women. No fuzzy language can save them from that.
I believe klatu left out a crucial word:
He was strawmanning a feminist position, not admitting to rape.
And I am more than a little squeeved at having to correct the record to something approaching his favor. The things he actually says are awful enough.
I’m sad to learn he has 3 daughters. Poor kids.
Lady Mondegreen,
Keep in mind he doesn’t believe in marital rape. So yes, he is a (potential) rapist.
This is, however, a substantively different claim.
Why give the rat fucks even a sliver to make rat-fuck-hay with?
Lady MOndegreen
Nope, the first version is also correct, he later backpaddled to make it “written consent”.
I love when bigots start jumping around complaining about being and . You were asked a question, you answered it, and the answer revealed in great clarity the loathsomeness of your views. What they are really saying is “They sprung it on me, so I didn’t have time to think of a publicly-acceptable response and just said what I actually think”.
You’re right, Giliell. I apologize, klatu. I didn’t go back to the original (2005) post.
The funny (funny peculiar, not funny haha,) thing is that what he wrote in the blog post was even worse than what he said in the interview–and he obviously had plenty of time to think about what he wanted to say in writing.
But narcissism makes for sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking makes for sloppy writing. The 2005 post is just him wanking off to a fantasy of himself as a macho dude; coherence is asking too much.
Vox Day is my age. That’s more similarity to Vox Day than I would prefer to have.
Homosexuality is a birth defect because it “significantly reduces the odds that a creature will be able to propagate its genes”? That argument is idiotic.
That’s because Vox Day is an idiot, and his entire mindset and reasoning is built around the premise that he’s a brilliant polymath, and everyone and everything that disagrees with his pretend-genius is, by definition, stupid. There’s really no point in trying to argue or reason with someone like him — his mind has long ago locked itself into a bubble-verse where his dick and his DNA are the most important things ever conceived. He may claim to be a Christian, but his real god is his own dick and his own DNA.
I’m really surprised that you chose to address his argument in this way, since I’m sure your work involves comparing the average results from differing populations all the time. And it’s really obvious that’s what he’s talking about.
I think we can all agree that the average height of women in a given population is less than the average height of men in an equivalent population. This doesn’t allow you to predict the height of given individuals. I don’t know if the same is true of height compared across racial populations (barring a few exceptionally short or tall groups). As you say, there are many environmental factors to be corrected for.
There are even more environmental factors for intellectual performance which is how I know that we know not a damn thing about any kind of hypothetical intellectual differences between races (average over populations, again). We also don’t have a viable conceptualization of any kind of intellect to test. Let alone do we have any reasonable framework for labeling any of these still hypothetical differences ‘better’ than others if they turned out to exist. Philosophically, and I think this is consistent with evolution theory, we would probably have to ask ‘better under which circumstances?’
Beale’s problem is that he’s fantasized a result where none exists, around a concept that’s as ill-defined as ‘God’ (which he also believes in). It isn’t that comparing populations is intrinsically meaningless.
(My emphasis added. All quotation marks below are used to indicate quotation; none are scare quotes.)
Is it “really obvious” that whatever it is that he means by a “race” is an instance of the kind of “population” for which it actually “makes sense” to measure properties and then replace the total distribution (if known) or sample distribution (if that’s what you’ve got) with some single statistic like its average (in whatever sense)? In other words, is there any reason to think that what (I think that) he thinks is a “racial population” is actually a structured population for any statistics other than skin albedo and a few others?
@ Anne fenwick
It probably does make sense if you are talking about defined, differing populations, but therein lies the difficulty. Races are entirely socially constructed and are differentiated almost entirely by perception, not in any scientifically meaningful way.
For example, let’s say you are measuring the difference in average height between Black people and Asian people. Define Black person. Now define Asian person.
@46 I’m a bit confused by the arguments being posed that races are ill-defined, and therefore results alluding to differences in race are all complete bunk. Your examples of “black people” and “asian people” are specifically some of the vaguest possible descriptions of “race.” They are the terms often used to stereotype, but if you were to really ask people what they meant, they’d be forced to use more specific terminology, and would probably end up provided reasonable-enough boundaries to do a legitimate study. Am I incorrect here?
As an example, I don’t feel that studies comparing heights of men and women are invalidated by the Nature report from PZ’s post that “The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.” Although the line between the two may be blurred, there is undoubtedly a strong bimodal distribution, and the fact that the distribution is continuous doesn’t invalidate the claim that population can be modeled by two groups.
In the case of “race,” is there a really a debate that genetic correlations between individuals aren’t dependent on the distance? I would imagine that, on average, two individuals living in Hong Kong are much more genetically similar than one individual in Hong Kong and one in Australia. Undoubtedly we’ll have a large connected map in which changes occur slowly across a continuum, but does this preclude us from drawing small circles which are far apart from each other, and using these as separate groups in a study (that study, hypothetically, somehow controlling for all other environmental factors, which may be well night impossible, but that is not the issue of this debate).
(By the way, I’m not very well-versed in sociological studies of race–I’m just surprised to hear that “race” isn’t well-defined enough to perform valid studies comparing race. I’m happy to learn more if someone here can point me in the right direction or if I’m showing ignorance.)
You can do valid sociological studies on race.
Marshall
Just let the fact that this woman’s son is the first black POTUS sink in for a while. His “race” is clearly defined in the everyday way, but really not in any way by his ancestry.
@Sally – can you explain a bit more? Doesn’t a sociological study require the segregation of your subjects into distinct groups? Why can’t that same distinction be used for non-sociological studies as well?
@Giliell – As I mentioned, there is no question that the lines between groups are blurred, and one can easily find countless examples of cases in which the race of an individual is difficult to define. This is why we use models to reduce the number of parameters in a study, with the expectation that these models are only approximations. For example, in my hypothetical study of “comparison of heights between Chinese and Australians,” we might select 10,000 people from Hong Kong and 10,000 people from Sydney, regardless of what they look like or from whence they came, under the assumption that genetic differences are somewhat geographically localized and, therefore, we may see a statistical effect.
@#19: slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) said:
Hasty Generalization fallacy.
If you don’t care in your hypothetical where they come from, then how are you going to find genetic differences that are geographically localized? You might as well choose to do a height study based using New York and San Francisco.
Second, ooo nice attempt at trying to hide the stereotype of ‘lol, asians are short’.
Anecdata, my friend Jimmy and his parents are all taller than I am. His parents were born in China, though he himself was born in Canada (and refers to himself as Canasian). My Aunt Ling, also from China, is taller than I am. Her son is 10 years old and nearly as tall as me. My half-Japanese cousins are both taller than I am, as is my half-Japanese aunt. Aunt Kumiko is indeed shorter than I am, but she’s exceptionally petite at 4’11”.
So here’s me, with pretty much nothing but european ancestry as far as the eye can see. One grandmother is 5’2. The other is 5’4. My mother is 5’8. I’m 5’6. I am surrounded by people of asian descent, family, friends, and coworkers. I am of average height, and so there are plenty of ‘whites’ in that group that are taller and shorter than me (mostly taller), and those who are ‘asians’ are also taller and shorter than me (mostly taller again).
Maybe try looking at other factors than ‘lol, short asians’, such as diet, the average height of people born at the same time, influence of health on height, influence of puberty on height, etc. I mean, I was 5’6″ when I was 12 years old. I haven’t grown since, because I hit puberty at 11.
Marshall, a couple of books reviewed here.
The main thrust of the non-controversy:
@Rowan Whoa, calm down. That is not at all what I was going for. I’m a white male at 5’6, haven’t grown since 11 either. I was using the height example because that’s what PZ mentions in his original post. I chose China and Australia pretty much randomly. I originally chose China and Iraq, but felt Iraq was too close, and I wanted to provide examples of places that were very geographically distinct. I don’t quite understand why you’re giving me your history and pointing out that tall Asians exist; I wasn’t even thinking of going down that road. I was trying to figure out whether one could viably conduct a study by selecting geographically distinct populations.
A height study between New York and SF might work. I’m not sure if they’re far apart enough. If you read my post, I mentioned that the map most likely forms a continuum, and that we’d want to draw distinct circles with sufficient distance. I’m not sure if NY and SF are far enough apart for that to be valid.
The problem is that there’s been too much migration for ‘location’ to be workable. Most of the people you’re going to find in Sydney are going to be of European or Asian lineage. For that same reason, pretty much all of America is unworkable.
Marshall @ 55:
Marshall, if you’re going to hang out here, don’t be the kind of ass who tells people to calm down. People don’t need to calm down, they generally aren’t upset in the first place. Don’t mistake passion for anger, and realize that in the case of many subjects, if you aren’t angry, something is fucking wrong with you. People do try to give newbs a break, but telling people to calm down isn’t going to help you out.
@Nerd of Redhead Thank you! That’s exactly what I was looking for.
@Caine I’m fine with passion; what Rowan was displaying was not passion when he falsely accused me of attempting to finagle stereotypical tropes about Asians into the conversation. Anyway, Nerd’s response was great contribution to my question and I don’t want to continue down whatever path we have started heading.
Marshall, thanks for the assumption about my gender. Quite appreciated.
If you’re arguing, even hypothetically, for ‘differences between the races’, and bring up an asian city, and height, what the hell were you expecting? It’s a huge stereotype and I don’t know if you’ve simply forgotten it, or blithely ignored it when you brought up your hypothetical.
@Lady Mondegreen
Hey, no apology necessary. VD backpaddelled to make it look like a “joke”/hyperbole.
But holy shit, even if the “written” had been included originally as well, can you imagine any context at all in which said quote would not be creepy as fuck?
“Me being a rapist is technically only a question of
yourmy defintion of rape.” This is not something a decent person is likely to ever say out loud.Marshall @ 58:
So, you’ve decided to go full court asshole. Can’t say I’m surprised. You obviously aren’t fine with passion – I’ve known Rowan for some years now, and she was absolutely justified in smacking you about a bit.
Also, this isn’t twitter, learn to quote properly: <blockquote>Paste Text Here</blockquote>
@Rowan I’m sorry for my assumption. Rowan is generally a male-given name (e.g. Rowan Atkinson). Regarding the choice of China–yes, I regret it, and I should have been more sensitive in choosing an example. I’m sorry.
@Caine how was she justified in smacking me? Also, in what world am I being an asshole? I brought up a legitimate question concerning performing studies of race using geography to distinguish populations. I gave an example of how one might do so, and immediately was bashed by Rowan, claiming I was attempting to abuse a racial stereotype. I now regret using China as an example, but seriously–you’re interpreting everything I say in an incredibly negative light and I cannot see why.
We have a phrase here: Intent isn’t magic. Your hypothetical perpetuated a racist stereotype and indeed seemed predicated on it. It was done unthinkingly, but those things still cause harm. I have been rightfully ‘bashed’ for ignorantly doing the same basic thing: referred to my cat as having a ‘nip problem because she goes crazy with catnip. My 1/4 japanese cousin rightfully pointed out that that word is racist. I had to stop and think a moment as to *how* it was racist, and then went “Oh, Nippon. Right! sorry!’
The correct response to being shown that one has said or done something racist, especially if done via ignorance or done unthinkingly, is to NOT entrench. If one hunkers down and digs, then the excuse of ignorance or accident begins to disintegrate.
I completely agree with you. I have apologized and have told you that I regret using it as an example (which I do)–I’m not really sure what else I can do at this point.
My default assumption is always tree-name (as in the lovely song with the line “the oak, and the ash, and the bonnie rowan tree / are all growing green in the north country”).
Marshall, that’s it. If you’d done that in the first place, none of the rest of this conversation would have happened.
leerudolph, you’ve hit on it exactly. My mammals are ALL named after plants, and Rowan is my oldest girl-kitty. It’s a beautiful name and it seemed to fit her. I’ve also Mallorn, Bramble, Burdock and Hawthorn and the two current (almost wrote currant, oh dear) fosters are Plum and Prune.
Ok. I do feel that if it’s pointed out to someone that they said something racist, it’s ok to say they didn’t mean to, along with the apology. Although intent is not magic, it does mean something. I do my best to be open-minded and combat stereotype whenever possible, so being called racist caught me a little off guard and I threw up my defenses. In retrospect, I should have come around sooner, and I apologize.
Also–regarding your cats, calling them currants wouldn’t be too far off!
There are abundant examples of species that have evolved to lower their reproduction rate. Homosexuality might well be an adaptation that helps keep the reproduction rate in balance with resource availability. Or it might be a consequence of the way sexual preference is encoded. Or it might not be hereditary at all. Or some combination of the above.
Evolution is a consequence of random mutation and natural selection. Expecting every aspect of the resulting organisms to have practical advantage is to miss the point entirely. Which of course Dawkins does which is why he is not a substitute for the vastly superior intellect of the sadly missed Stephen Jay Gould.
The problem with the whole “race” = “height” thing is taht it of course starts with the conclusion and then looks for correlations as evidence.
You want to know if ethnicity has something to do with height, find out the fucking genes that code for height. Once you got them, go looking if you can find statistically relevant data that shows that their distribution is different in different groups of people.
Everything else is just racist bullshit.
Thank you, PZ for consistently speaking out against racism and racists like “Vox Day”. The fact that he so blithely claims that some races (of course, his own) are superior to other races and acts surprised that such a claim is roundly condemned says it all about his character. I cannot believe that he has so many supporters. I’d rather see the end of the Hugo awards than for his Rabid Puppy slate to succeed.
As to Beale’s comments about homosexuality, having children is not the way human beings measure our humanity. He should just come out and say that he’s against gays because of his religious beliefs since there are no non-religious “justifications” for homophobia.
@ Marshalll
Apologies for not replying; I don’t comment on weekends.
I see Nerd has pretty much answered your question, but allow me to elaborate on what I meant. Black is traditionally accepted as a “race”, so let’s stick with that. How do you define a Black person? You can look at a person and judge whether they are Black or not, but what does that actually mean?
As Nerd already said, it can’t be defined genetically. So we need another criteria. Does it mean they were born in Africa? But then what about Black British people, or African Americans? What about Obama? So that doesn’t work. So is it someone with ancestors who were born in Africa, within a certain number of generations? Both parental branches, or one? How many generations? Where’s the cut off point? There are people in the Caribbean who are undoubtedly Black as we understand it, but their ancestors were taken from Africa in the mid 1600s.
Perhaps melanin content in the skin? But which melanin? Eumelanin, pheomelanin, or neuromelanin? Relative concentrations, perhaps? How would you go about measuring the content? And again, where’s the cut off point?
See what I mean? Replace “Black” with any racial group you like, and “Africa” with the relevant geographical area (which you would also need to define, which becomes especially tricky when dealing with Eurasian races). It’s impossible to come up with any objective way of defining race; it would have to be arbitrary. In sociology perception is important, so you can define the group based on self-perception or the perception of others, but for any other purpose this is useless.
Thumper @71
Thanks–I definitely see where things are pointing. I won’t deny that it’s difficult to mentally separate concept that race is ill-defined genetically from the culture in which we have been so thoroughly steeped, and I still struggle to do so despite the evidence that I’ve been shown here. Does the evidence disagree with the claim that there are a small subset of genes which roughly correspond with those superficial physical attributes which we use visually/culturally to separate races which correlate with our cultural definitions, but these are by and large swamped by the other 25,000 genes that make up the individual? The reason for my struggle is the following: if you were to select 100 people from South America, 100 from Europe, 100 from Africa, and 100 from Asia, I think that I would do better than chance at guessing the continent of origin. This may be due partially to cultural influences on appearance, but I don’t think that influence is the dominant one. So my question here is–if I do indeed have the ability to guess the continent of origin at a rate better than chance (you can argue against this), what is informing this ability?
lets make up a test, say guess where random people come from and then lets pretend I can do this with an 80% success rate.
How do I do it?
are you being serious or just having a laugh?
most people here have way more patience with this kind of thinking than I do.
uncle frogy
@73 Are you always in the habit of smugly misrepresenting someone else’s position to make yourself feel superior? That’s not what I said at all. I gave specific examples using very broad geographic distinctions to point out that there are superficial physical trait differences. I never said 80%, I said better than chance, which in this case would be 25%. My reasoning ties back into the original post by PZ in which he said that it makes no sense to talk about the height of “races.” I am claiming that, if it is true that there are correlations between geography and some superficial traits, then I don’t see why height might not be one of the superficial traits between populations. The argument here might come down to what “race” even is, and I think the general claim is not that people from specific localities have high correlations of specific physical traits (for example, according to Wikipedia, “Blue eyes are common in northern and eastern Europe, particularly around the Baltic Sea. Blue eyes are also found in Southern Europe and Western Asia, especially among the Jewish population of Israel.” This is a case in which a superficial physical trait is tied to geography), it’s a combination of the fact that our concept or “race” is ill-defined, and that the overall genetic variation within groups dwarfs the small amounts of variation found between groups.
Anyway, Wikipedia has good articles here and here that I’m just going to read instead of discussing this in this thread. Thanks for your input everyone.
You idea regarding height fails because height isn’t purely genetic. It’s a result of environment as well; significantly so. Proper diet and health will allow someone to grow much taller. My brother had so many severe ear infections that his growth was stunted for a while. He probably would be several inches taller were it not for that. Hormone levels also affect height. Men are generally taller not purely for genetic reasons, but because they typically go through puberty later and testosterone closes the growth plates. You neuter a dog young and it’s going to end up a lot taller than one that was left intact.
That you keep harping on height as a thing between different ‘races’ without taking into account diet, health, onset of puberty, etc is why you are getting snarky answers. You haven’t *learned* yet. STOP. DIGGING.
Marshall,
Are you trying to define race biologically and genetically? Race is a social invention based on superficial characteristics, and it seems like you really want for there to be more to it. I’d suggest reading through the population section of wikipedia’s page on human genetic variation. It’s a good overview of some of the topics you seem confused about. But here’s this little tidbit:
So, you feel that the fact that you have a better than chance ability to guess if black people come from Africa means something significant about their genetics, but it’s sooooo much more complicated than that. There is just as much, maybe more, genetic diversity within populations of a certain skin color than between populations of various skin colors. It’s your social condition that makes this difficult for you to accept.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#History_and_geographic_distribution
@Rowan I didn’t even mention height in my #72 response, and still got a snarky answer. I don’t care about height; I picked it as an example because it’s what PZ mentioned. I don’t have some racial agenda here, I wanted an academic discussion about physical trait distinction and race. I initially chose a very poor example to use when I mentioned China, and since then every one of my comments has been viewed through a negative lens. This is not what I wanted. What I wanted was clarification as to why it appears to me that obvious, superficial traits can be geographically linked (maybe they are not, but I provided a concrete example of eye color and so I don’t think that I’m wrong about that), and yet at the same time other superficial traits, such as height, cannot be compared because different geographic regions. Your answer as to why height inappropriate makes a lot of sense: if there is a geographic link between height, it is in large part heavily influenced by many lifestyle factors, and therefore height is too difficult to measure between geographic groups due to an abundance of confounding factors that cannot be controlled for. Am I somehow doing something wrong when I say this?
Regarding your “digging” comment, I don’t want to stop “digging,” because I wanted to discuss this topic. I was “harping” on height because that is the example that I chose due to it being in the original post, and I wasn’t aware that it was so heavily influenced by cultural factors–myself, my brother, my sister, my mother, my grandmother, and others in my family are all very short, and I have often chalked that up primarily to genetics. I don’t care about height specifically, it was an obviously poor example that I chose. I don’t know how I can ask the question to you all about superficial traits and geographic correlations without being berated; it appears that I cannot, and so I will instead go “dig” at Wikipedia, because frankly I’m tired of the snarky responses that I’m receiving here.
Toska @76 thank you, I will look into that.
Marshall,
This might also be a useful post for you to read: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/10/23/a-scientific-visualization-of-the-importance-of-race/
The post has a chart that gives a good picture of genetic diversity between humans and other apes. Here’s some of what PZ had to say about it:
I recall on an old log I used to visit, a racist (old school style) would show up during every single post to keep up his insane tirade about how irrational non-racists are. In the end, that person left and the only thing we had left to console ourselves with is that death will ultimately cleanse that person and their ideas from the planet. On reflection, that notion now disgusts me (it seems like a justification for murder by cowards too afraid to actually do it themselves, simply gleefully awaiting time to do it for them).
This Vox Day fellow seems very similar. Terrible views… Not much else I can add that hasn’t already been said.
That’s going to be fun with about 500 years of intermingling between European, indigenous and African populations…
So much for race and genetics
@ Marshall #72
Oh wow, I fucked that up. Re-post for clarity.
@ Marshall #72
I get that. I grew up assuming race was a real, measurable thing because everyone around me did. Race was real, and it seemed ludicrous to say it wasn’t. If it’s not real, how do I know that guy’s black and that one’s not? It absolutely blew my mind when I finally realised it’s all perception.
I am not a biologist, and therefore probably not the best person to ask, but as I understand it there are no genes which define physical attributes which are not possessed by all humans. It’s to do with gene expression rather than gene possession, and expression is dictated by a whole host of reasons, from the genetic to the environmental. I’m hoping a geneticist, or someone with a decent understanding of it, will weigh in here and fill in the gaps.
But as already mentioned, that actually doesn’t have anything to do with race. Unless your contention is that a black British person isn’t black. But if we’re talking specifically “native” populations (another definition problem there) then yes, generally speaking I think we can guess what continent someone is from. What informs this is the expression of certain genes which you are capable of picking up on, and cultural clues, which in my view are probably more important and aren’t at all governed by genetics. I would challenge you to differentiate between Polynesian, Native North American, Native South American, Native South East Asian, and Native Central Asian if members of each race were put in a line-up with all cultural trappings removed.
Secondly, it’s a massive oversimplification. Toska already mentioned the genetic diversity in native African populations (hardly surprising when you consider we evolved there), does it not seem ludicrous to lump them all into one race? Or the population of China? That represents a third of the worlds population, but they’re all one “race”? When you start thinking about it, it really is ludicrous.