Aside from appearance and culture, are any two races different from eachother at all? Are Chinese not good at math? Are Irish not quick-tempered? Ofcourse, this thread spawns from the “are black people better at athletics” thread, and many seem content that they are not. Are you saying that every single racial stereotype is not true and has no basis whatsoever? I’d say that races are very different from eachother, even though that might make me a stereotypical, prejudice SOB.
One planet, one mind, one goal, one race and one spirit.
Any questions?
I think you are missing something important… the variation in personality types and skill sets within any particular “race” is far greater than the variation between each “race.” Stereotypes (that’s what we are talking about anyway) have much more to do with cultural differences than actual biological imperitives.
It would be very difficult to screen out all the variables related to culture. I doubt such an experiment could be devised to control for them, ethically at least. And I have the sneaking suspicion that what differences you did find would be fairly insignificant and possibly different from what you expected.
I would never conclude that you were sterotypical (?) or prejudiced based on your opinions on “race.” I might, however, conclude that you were rather ignorant of the subject on which you wished to pontificate.
What, pray tell, is the “Irish” or the “Chinese” race? Is the “Irish” race particularly different from the Scots “race” (when we can identify the dates that the Irish (then known as Scots) colonized what is now known as Scotland? Is the Celtic “Irish race” notably different than the ethnic Celts who are known to survive in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Britanny, the Northern coast of Spain, and the Galatian region of Turkey?
To which “Chinese” race do you allude, given that there are not only multiple ethnic and linguistic divisions within China, but that we have historical records of multiple ethnic migrations through, into, and out of what is currently identified as China?
Can you identify any given “race” and provide criteria by which we may objectively identify them?
I have noticed that a lot of Chinese have Chinese-sounding last names. I don’t know if this is cultural or genetic, though.
NO!
Anthroplogical evidence has proven that white people descended from albinos. This is the result of the absence of both ocular albinism genes on chromosome 6. Albinos are very susceptible to hot temper, quick flashes, and mood swings. In addition, there is widespread myopia and gastrointestinal tract infections within the white race. And no, I am not kidding.
The differences we (well, some of us) see between one supposed race and another are just trivial surface details. Really. It’s minor stuff like skin color, eye shape, hair texture. If you look below / beyond the trivial surface details, it all just melts away. There’s nothing you can point to and say, that is thing that determines what race that person is.
And if you look back over the last century or two, you will find a wide range of opinions as to how many races there are, and what they are. In recent times, people have percieved a fairly small number of races: Black, White, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, and, uh, who else is there? Oh, yeah, Native Australians! Go back a little farther, and you find people seriously (well they seem not to be joking) believing that there were any number of races within the White designation. Several nationalities seem to have been considered separate races. And let’s not forget the widespread perception that Jewish people constitute a race, but no other religion does.
This is all nonsence!
Just horribly misinformed.
LOL! Good answer, Zenster!
‘Race’ in humans at least, is only fairly arbitrary groupings based external physical charateristics, and doesn’t really hold at the genetic level. For example, the “black” race in fact contains more genetic diversity than every other traditional racial grouping. There can more genetic differnce between two “black” individuals, living a couple hundred miles apart, than there is between your typical German and Chinese persons. Of course, the human race itself is actually very undiverse genetically, to the point where you wouldn’t see races like you do in the animal kingdom. IIRC, there is more genetic diversity in a single tripe of Chimpanzees than there is in the entire human races.
As for your remarks about Chinese being good at math, or Irish being quick-tempered, well, how do we know these are not cultural traits- it seems just as likely as genetic traits.
Maybe Albino’s are pissed off because everyone keeps on yelling “Hey freak!” or “Demon child!” every time the walk down the street. Of course they are going to be moody. Also last time I checked a lot of Chinese wear glasses too.
I may be mistaken, but as far as I know, there is currently only 1 human race: homo sapiens.
There were others, ofcourse, the predecessors, like cro-magnon, neanderthal, and so on. Human evolution did not happen in a straight line, and at some point in history, more than one human race did exist alongside eachother, timewise, that is.
The three big “groups” that we nowadays distinguish, are Africans, Caucasians, and Asians. This is mainly a regional distinction, but due to environmental circumstances, these different groups of homo sapiens developed different distinguishing characteristics. For instance, Africans have dark skin to help them protect themselves from the sun. inuit and other groups living in cold climates tend to have bigger noses, to allow them to breathe more easily through their nostrils, and thus warm up the air beofre it hits their longs, preventing loss of warmth.
Travel did not happen as fast as it does today, so large groups developed seperately from eachother, and so had different customs, believes, tradtitions, foods, and most important of all: language.
Linguistic studies have shown that the way you think depends on the language you are reared in.
http://www.unc.edu/~jdumas/projects/languagethought.htm
interesting article there…
It says that yes, language does determine the way you think, but all languages have something universal in common.
So to answer your question: yes, groups of people are different, cultures are very different, so is language and the way we think, our mindset. But inherently, all humans are the same race. We’re all Homo Sapiens, Wise Man.
If you take culture out of the equation the differences seem to be caused by climate. The differences therefore are pretty insignificant. On a larger scale race is how the human species is effected by weather.
Perhaps there will be a taxonomic reshuffle soon, based on genetic evidence-
this is happening in every branch of biology now, showing how we are more closely related genetically to trees than we are to mushrooms, for example.
Homo sapiens sapiens is a subspecies, not a race…
the question isn’t whether there are different races oF H.sap.sap, but whether there are any behavioural differences innate to the individual races. It is probably too late in the day to tell now.
The races that may soon be determined by genetic assay may be different to the ones we know from 1950’s schoolbooks- for instance there might be six or seven in Africa alone, and the rest of the world might be limited to one or two .
But the world has now become too homogenous for any innate differences, if any ever existed, to be properly isolated from enculturation.
Kelsonk:
Have you read any of the scientific liturature on race? I’m guessing that you are telling us your opinion based on anecdotal evidence you have garnered over the years. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but I’d first ask that you supply some facts as a starting point. If you don’t have any, you might actually be intersted in reading some books about the genetic diverstiy of Homo sapiens. This is a booming field right now and there is a LOT of good stuff out there.
If you just want to throw around some personal opinions, I doubt you’ll get much satisfaction out of this thread.
There is one modern human species Homo sapiens, cro-magnon (our ancestors) were H. sapiens. Neanderthal were a seperate species H. neanderthalis.
This occurred within the human species, and is still occuring to a lesser extent as globalisation spreads.
If humans were any other animal we would be seperated into race biologically. AFAICS, ‘race’ has become social construct albeit not too politically correct. Nowdays classification still happens but in ways that, hopefully, cant be seen as discriminatory e.g. blood grouping, prevalence of sickle-cell anaemia .
PS I dont mean to inflame
Pardon me if I seem politically incorrect or antiquated, but I am under the belief that there are indeed three broad races that make up most of the human population, as well as several smaller ones - based on mostly physical differences or slight biochemical differences. All people belong to the same subspecies, but in the last 100,000 groups several divisions have occurred due to mountains, deserts, oceans, and other great barriers.
One used to be called “Caucasian”, the other “Mongoloid”, and the other “Negroid” (those names are highly problematic, so I will just say "West Eurasian, East Eurasian, and Subsaharan).
Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines, and Dravidian Indians or either separate local races or archiac variants of the other groups. Native Americans are closely related to the East Eurasians.
Is there anything wrong with such a system when we use it to describe purely physical differences? I would imagine that adults of these different groups would have a different reaction to whole milk dairy products based on “race” right?
Y’know, we started with five races under Blumenbach in the eighteenth century. How did we lose two races so easily? And if it is so easy to lose two of the originals, what is the measure of a race (since later ethnologists got the number up to around 60)?
If it is that difficult to actually identify them, perhaps they are not very useful, after all.
If we use physical differences, to identify them, what do we do with groups who have very similar appearances who are in the “wrong” groups (such as some peoples in the Congo River basin, the Negritos of the Philipines, and the Andaman Islanders)?
Well, we certainly cannot use adult lactose tolerance or intolerance, since both conditions occur in every one of the “races” (although far more people of each race are intolerant than tolerant with a somewhat larger group–but still not a majority–of “Caucasians” being tolerant). Similarly, we can’t use the various conditions commonly referred to as “sickle-cell,” since many peoples in each of your “three” races are susceptible to that condition, often by way of the identical genetic disorder.