Not for an instant do I believe any but the most educated experts could do this.
If I felt sealionish at the moment I’d respectfully ask for cites but fuck it, this is just plain bullshit. Either objectively define races genetically or get off the pot.
Anglophile media in the 1800s depicted Irish and Sicilians as apes and Jews also as subhuman. Could a Boston Brahmin then look at a person’s face, bones, muscles, and feet and determine their genetic heritage? (Hint: Genes were unknown.) Could YOU non-lustfully scan my childhood friend Dan’s physiognomy to tell he’s Choctaw with Adventist parents? Do you have any idea whether your great-grandma screwed American blacks?
Quit guessing. Name the genes that determine race, or get off the pot.
If you cast a net each over Europe, Africa, Asia, and Mesoamerica, and then analyze all the people in that net for certain traits, genetic or otherwise, I guarantee you will find statistically significant differences between those groups for at least some traits. Does that mean, though, that continuing to use those same broad statistical groupings is especially useful, especially as more granular testing shows that both sub-groups and, more importantly, individuals within those groups differ much more from each other than those broader groups do on average?
Because it seems to me that answering “yes” to that, as if race is a useful construct to keep around or, worse, to apply as if it has some useful predictive power, that you would be committing something like the ecological fallacy, constructed along the lines of (to use sickle cell anemia as an example) “people with at least one recent (last few hundred years) ancestor from Africa are more likely to have sickle cell anemia, therefore those with at least one recent African ancestor will be more likely to have sickle cell anemia.”
But they won’t, necessarily. As noted, this trait you attribute to people with African ancestry during the last few hundred years in not actually a trait of people with African ancestry during the last few hundred years, but rather of people with ancestry from a certain part of Africa (corresponding to certain ethnic groups that tend to be localized to that region) that is not shared by all the ethic groups that makeup the many people’s of Africa, never mind that they all tend to have darker skin than those with European ancestry.
Sartre wrote in the 50s that you’re a Jew when people treat you like a Jew - your actual beliefs and practices, or even your actually having anything to do with Judaism at all don’t really matter. Race is the same - if people or society say you ain’t white, then you ain’t. Until such time as they do. DNA is a non-factor.
Which is why these days the social studies buzzword in my country is “racized”, which goes both ways : you’re being racized if you’re being treated differently from the norm or put in this or that “race box” on account of your looks or name, and you’re racized if you act differently from others due to a background of having been through different experiences than the norm or have different expectations based on racization. Racization is always a social process, and always going from the center to the peripheries. The dominant culture defines and identifies itself first and foremost by whom it excludes and why.
I’m going to repeat the thing I said in those old threads:
What would it even matter?
Let’s say, hypothetically, we had entirely fair IQ tests, could eliminate the different effects of environment etc etc and therefore could conclude with all certainty that group A has a lower IQ, on average, than group B.
From a scientific point of view, it’s not a very important or useful observation. It’s about as useful as knowing that Spanish men have on average bigger noses than Italians, with considerable overlap and no particular inferences we could make about individuals or outliers (we could not assume, for example, that the man with the very biggest nose would be Spanish).
This supposedly super important observation is only of interest to bigots, who will pay lip service to “on average” but really wish to believe that their tribe is superior to some other tribe.
Sorry, perhaps you could explain something I’m having a little difficulty with? What “African group” is “Black americans”[sic]?
Or vice versa. Sickle cell is not endemic in South African Black groups, for example.
But the “chance” you’re talking about doesn’t depend on racial category, but actual genetic heritage.
There are populations that are generally classified as racially “black” that do not have a higher-than-average incidence of sickle cell trait, and populations that are generally classified as racially “white” that do have a higher-than-average incidence of sickle cell trait. (Note: the underlying genetic disorder is called “sickle cell trait” and the serious illness that affects some of the carriers of sickle cell trait is called “sickle cell disease”. Anemia is just one aspect of sickle cell disease.)
Well, in the sense that scientific facts are ultimately arbitrary, I guess. I think what you’re confused about here is the fact that there are actually two different probabilistic issues involved:
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The probability that an individual in a certain genetically distinct population will have an elevated likelihood of sickle cell trait.
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The probability that an individual who is superficially classified as belonging to a different “race” will actually belong to one of the genetically distinct populations that have an elevated incidence of sickle cell trait.
You can’t just use (2) as a proxy for (1) and complain that pointing out the important distinctions between them is “arbitrary”.
From that link:
Well, other than all that cannibalism…
Just correct for the statistical incidences of Italians with Spanish, Greek, Slav, Albanian, Arab, Germanic, French, Roma, Nordic, Martian, or other genetic heritages. Then divide by tau and bark once. But wait! Every lab we sent a DNA sample to for analysis returned different results! And only a few guys sat long enough to have their noses measured.
Science is hard. :smack: Pseudoscience is so much easier.
Please don’t kinkshame.
Unless that’s your kink.
Ah, the genotype/phenotype/socio-geographical shuffle. Always a favorite in these thread. “They look alike, therefore they must be genetically similar” is an understandable misconception, but a misconception nonetheless. As is often pointed out, not only is there more genetic diversity in Africa than elsewhere but many African genetic sub-groups have more in common genetically with European sub-groups than with other African sub-groups.
“Ethnic group” is the usual term I hear these days.
Also, saying “mate” makes it sound like animals breeding. What happened to “marry and have children”? Or just “marry”?
Depends on what part of the skeleton you have. An intact skull can be checked at certain points (eye orbits and base of the nose for just two points) after which one can frequently make a better-than-chance guess at which continent the person’s ancestors came from. This is something that even the average layperson can pick up on with a little study.
It is 100%? No, because humans as a whole are one species and happily mix genes when in close proximity. But quite a few skulls will either show one predominant “race” or will show they are mixed in background (quite common in the Americas, where a lot of gene mixing has happened over the past few centuries).
I studied this a little bit back when I was studying anatomy from the standpoint of an artist, in which case understanding the underlying anatomy helps in portraying faces accurately. As a general rule (because there are no purebred humans and some people are quite a mix) people of European descent have eye sockets with sort of squared off corners and a narrow nasal aperture. People with predominately Asian ancestry have eye sockets that tend more towards the circular, with a nasal aperture that, while it may be European-narrow at the top, tends to flare out more towards the base which I’ve heard described as an inverted heart-shape or leaf-shaped. Some, but by no means all, Asians also have “shovel-shaped” incisors, as do Native Americans although this trait is occasionally seen in other parts of the world. People with mostly African ancestry have eye sockets that tend towards a somewhat rectangular shape, and a wide nasal aperture. Those of African ancestry also tend to have somewhat larger and more widely spaced teeth than those with ancestry mostly from other continents, and their jaws tend to project more forward.
In other words, it’s not rocket science and it doesn’t require years and years of study. There are other “racial” traits as well used by forensic scientists, but they’re more fiddly and indeed require more study. If you’re talking about, say, finger bones no, you can’t assign general ancestry, but when it comes to skulls many can be assigned an ancestral continent. Or you can say “this person’s ancestors came from more than one of the Old World continents”, in other words, mixed race.
Skulls are also fun because they also show gender and age… up to a point. There is some overlap between male and female skulls (hence, the existence of androgynous faces). The person who first educated me on all this for a finale showed me two small skulls and asked me to pick out which was the 8 month old child and which was the 80 year old dwarf. At that point distinguishing between the two was easy. (And I also added that the little person was probably male - could not tell the tender of the baby because at that age gender markers haven’t formed in the skull bones yet.)
If these things are not general knowledge it’s because most of us don’t get to study actual human skulls - the ones you see in, say, a high school biology class or get as an assembly kit at a store are idealized plastic models. Real skulls are diverse and quirky, like their owners. If you had the chance to study/handle actual skulls you’d soon start noting these traits.
People who know what to look for can do it. The accuracy of telling ancestry from skeletons is a little over 90%.
Useful in some contexts, not useful in others. For example, if you are a scientist wanting to test a sickle cell cure, where should you go to find patients? Vermont, or Alabama? On the other hand it would be stupid to go up to a random black person on the street and ask if they have sickle cell because it is still rare in black people.
Are people chose at random to be thought of as jewish, or black, or Asian, or Indian, or white?
- I suspect that a scientific thing is true.
- I don’t hear any scientists talking about it.
- I guess that means some politically motivated assassin is murdering all the scientists who agree with me.
- Of course I don’t mean it happened in reality! It definitely happened in my mind though, and that’s what’s important.
It could be useful to craft policy, if one group is over represented in areas that require high intelligence it would be useful to know if they are there because of a genetic disposition toward intelligence or because nefarious groups are hoarding the opportunities in that area.
For instance it is well known that Jewish people are much more likely to be successful in areas such as finance, and science then gentiles are. Some people claim that it is because Jewish people are helping each other out and discriminating against gentiles. Other people think it is because Jewish people are smarter than gentiles and finance and science take alot of intelligence. Since we know that there are genetic reasons for Jewish people to be intelligence there is no need to waste time trying to unravel anti gentile discrimination.
We do not know this. In order to know this, or have anything beyond a wild suspicion/hypothesis, we’d have to know the following:
A) all (or most) the genes responsible for high and low intelligence in humans.
B) the relative distribution of these genes in different populations of humans (including Jews).
We don’t have anything close to this.