# At what level is racialism accepted in the scientific community? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 10, 2014, 6:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257 "2014-08-10T18:55:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 17
**Author:** ![Chuck11](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/96bed5/32.png) [@Chuck11](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chuck11)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2014, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/321 "2014-09-05T03:07:37Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > This surprises me. I thought you were firmly in the genetics camp. I’m in the _partial_ genetic camp and also the _partial_ shared environmental one. I’m also in the we-will-find-out-soon-camp. Just a few more of the many found hits – see this [Beijing based site](http://iqdb.cbi.pku.edu.cn/index.jsp) — need to be well replicated. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/322 "2014-09-14T08:58:10Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > The definitions are wholly abitrary, biologically speaking – the definitions are based on culture, history, and society, and not genetic ancestry. Of course they include [genetic ancestry too](http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/whats-new-since-montagu.html). The following posts by Steve Hsu elucidate this point: > [@](#): > > Genetic variation is patterned – two individuals who trace their ancestry to the same geographical region (e.g., two Japanese) will have about 15 percent fewer total differences between them than if we were to compare individuals from widely separated ancestries (e.g., a Nigerian and a Japanese). This means hundreds of thousands of fewer differences between individuals from the same group than for two randomly selected people from different groups. Hsu on European [genetic sub-structure](http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2008/11/european-genetic-substructure.html): > [@](#): > > Genetic distances between population clusters are roughly as follows: the distance between two neighboring western European populations is of order one in units of standard deviations and the distance to the Russian cluster is several times larger than that – say, 3 or 4. From HapMap data, the distance from Russian to Chinese and Japanese clusters is about 18, and the distance of southern Europeans to the Nigerian cluster is about 19. The chance of mis-identifying a European as an African or E. Asian is exponentially small In relation to Wade’s book, Hsu [considers](http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/whats-new-since-montagu.html)the second half is too speculative (as Wade sets out himself), but is nonetheless testable. The example of differences in the frequencies of alleles associated with height between North & South Europeans gives an example of how complex traits could be compared across groups: > [@](#): > > I think Orr/Coyne/Wade all miss the most interesting piece of science regarding strength of recent selection: evidence that the N-S height gradient (about 1 SD of difference between the two regions) in Europeans is due to selection pressure. > > That would constitute an example of fairly strong (in the context of the debate over group differences in humans) selection pressure acting over relatively short periods of time (~ 10 kya or less). > > I would think this result, if it holds up, might require significant updating of priors for certain people. It also provides a good example of how science in this area should be done: observed phenotype group difference, large data sets (GIANT) teasing out the genetic architecture, tests for selection on associated genetic variants… > > Another point, for the cognoscenti: Wade does a good job explaining the difference between soft and hard sweeps. Orr notes that small adjustments of allele frequencies is one of the primary mechanisms for evolutionary change (so nothing new in Wade’s discussion; goes all the way back to Fisher), but many many readers, even biologists who aren’t in population genetics, don’t understand this point very well. So reading that section in the book would increase understanding for a large number of people. ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2017, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/323 "2017-04-28T19:05:47Z")
Pardon. [Wrong thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=824576). ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2017, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/324 "2017-04-28T20:26:57Z")
Although bumped by mistake, I have to comment that the tactic now for racialists to try to get their sorry ideas into the mainstream is by getting involved in the latest fad of controversial authors or writers getting kicked out of educational institutions because of “leftists being fascists” and “preventing freedom of speech”. Problem is that no, there is no logical mechanism that makes racialism OK, or accepted in the scientific community, the reality is that after more years have passed their acceptance is not better. Also it should not be a left or right issue. An issue about freedom of speech is serious and I think the ones using violence to prevent it should be arrested, but it does not make anything of what they are peddling **good**. The most important issue for me is that we all should wonder why is that from the right there is very little to no effort nowadays for other important guys on the right to use their freedom of speech to also point out the reality that racialists, bigots and misogynists deserve criticism too. > **[“Scientific racism” is on the rise on the right. But it’s been lurking there...](https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/3/28/15078400/scientific-racism-murray-alt-right-black-muslim-culture-trump)** > > When a Republican Congress member tweeted, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he was tapping into old themes. > [@](#): > > What the Trump administration has provided is new, fertile soil for these ideas to spread. Trump’s casual rhetoric of genetic superiority, his stable of advisers touting the supremacy of white Western culture, his hesitance to denounce supporters like David Duke and the alt-right — all this has reenergized advocates of scientific racism. Which is why, when someone like Steve King tweets about “other people’s babies,” he no longer feels like an outcast. He knows he has sympathizers throughout the White House, including the Oval Office. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2017, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/325 "2017-04-29T15:50:22Z")
What I’m hearing here is that there’s 2 sides : a. The primary difference between groups of humans who have different genes, on average, is their genes. This applies both to physical characteristics you can easily measure (how tall, how strong) and mental ones, since the brain is a physical computer. b. Side B says that since racism is evil, it can never be justified. Therefore, people _must be_ equal. Therefore there are no genetic differences. And I’m hearing a few ways people are wiggling out of it : one is that there’s “no such thing as race” (even though it is possible to build a blind laboratory test looking for certain markers to determine race) or “it must all be nurture” (even though nurture doesn’t let a midget play basketball) or “the _author_ is racist”. Whether side a or side b is correct has profound real world implications. See, if side b is correct, the disparity of differences in success in some endeavors (like academics or modern, high mental requirement jobs like software development) _must_ be due to remaining racism. If it’s not genetics, and the black students got to go to the same school, that means if they all do worse on a test, the test is racist. Therefore we need to bend the curve and give them “racism adjustment” points and treat a black student with lower scores the same as a white student with higher scores. Now, why do we give asians a negative score, then? If asians _aren’t_ smarter than white people, and they _aren’t_ being given “white privilege”, why exactly do we treat an asian applicant worse than a white applicant to the same elite school? The relative success of asians and the way schools performing “affirmative action” discriminate against them is only really supported by a genetic hypothesis that I can see… ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2017, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/326 "2017-04-29T16:11:25Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > What I’m hearing here is that there’s 2 sides : > > a. The primary difference between groups of humans who have different genes, on average, is their genes. This applies both to physical characteristics you can easily measure (how tall, how strong) and mental ones, since the brain is a physical computer. > > b. Side B says that since racism is evil, it can never be justified. Therefore, people _must be_ equal. Therefore there are no genetic differences. And I’m hearing a few ways people are wiggling out of it : one is that there’s “no such thing as race” (even though it is possible to build a blind laboratory test looking for certain markers to determine race) or “it must all be nurture” (even though nurture doesn’t let a midget play basketball) or “the _author_ is racist”. Well, going for cartoon versions of what the experts are telling us is only setting up straw men. There are differences, but they are not as big as the racialists claim, nor it is a good justification to continue to make things unfair. [http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/sciam2.htm](http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/sciam2.htm) > [@](#): > > Scarr, who accepts a substantial role for heredity in individual IQ differences, insists that efforts to boost intellectual functioning in disadvantaged youth can deliver results. “There’s no question that rescuing children from desperately awful circumstances will improve their performance,” she notes. > > Scarr also points out that ameliorating a child’s environment may reduce social problems, regardless of its effect on IQ. “The low-IQ group deserves a lot more support than it is getting,” she argues. “Other societies manage not to have the same levels of social ills as we do.” Edward F. Zigler, a prominent educational psychologist at Yale University, asserts that “in terms of everyday social competence, we have overwhelming evidence that high-quality early education is beneficial.” > > Therein lies the fatal flaw in Herrnstein and Murray’s harsh reasoning. Even though boosting IQ scores may be difficult and expensive, providing education can help individuals in other ways. That fact, not IQ scores, is what policy should be concerned with. “The Bell Curve’s” fixation on IQ as the best statistical predictor of a life’s fortunes is a myopic one. Science does not deny the benefits of a nurturing environment and a helping hand.–Tim Beardsley > > SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN January 1995 Volume 272 Number 1 Page 14 ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2017, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/327 "2017-04-29T16:37:49Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > Well, going for cartoon versions of what the experts are telling us is only setting up straw men. > > There are differences, but they are not as big as the racialists claim, nor it is a good justification to continue to make things unfair. > > [For Whom the Bell Curve Really Tolls](http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/rm/sciam2.htm) Define unfair. There are finite education dollars. How should you weight spending them? A rational person would weight spending each marginal dollar by marginal gain. So if you need to spend $10 to make a less gifted person learn 1 unit of calculus and $1 to make a gifted person learn a unit of calculus, correct choice is obvious. Now, at some level of education, it’s going to be increasingly more difficult to train someone to the next level up - there might be an equating point - but as long as you don’t have infinite money, offering more educational opportunity to those who demonstrate the capacity to absorb more education makes rational sense. And if a measurement happens to show that asians tend to do better than white people who happen to do better than black people, so what? If the measurement is shown to have validity, use it. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2017, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/328 "2017-04-29T16:53:58Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > Define unfair. “Other societies manage not to have the same levels of social ills as we do.” Incidentally, what I get from a lot of the ones that want to follow the unfair misleading path, they do it with conclusions that do not follow the research. One more item to point out is that you reach for a straw man to make your point, eventually yes, one should not spend much like with secondary education with people that have issues, but the point was that a lot should be invested in the early years of learning. ---
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2017, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/329 "2017-04-30T20:26:32Z")
I am a bit confused (aside from the absolute nonsense) 5 races? I know of only 3 Caucasian (Of which not all are Lilly white, and some are quite brown) Asian African Might also be listed as Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, feel free to correct what the best name/term would be. And i do not remember any appreciable contributions from the African contingency towards to art of perfecting war conquest and domination? Not to say that they lacked those skilled in the art, but they appear to not have seen much use in perfecting the tools of war to cause the largest amount of deaths per tool, let alone seeing if they could pull off subjugating most of the known world for a time. Not that doing so is racial per say, i don’t think the other 2 groups were terribly into that when they were more tribal either. The genetic difference between the 3 groups is… … how about not worth measuring? Unless you feel like nitpicking the genetic differences between blondes brunettes and redheads and other silly pointless stuff like why my toe is bigger etc. Does the Blonde Hair Blue Eyed Aryan speech come soon? Because it makes about as much sense considering that ideology is about as 100% wrong too, but makes great propaganda. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2017, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/330 "2017-04-30T22:02:04Z")
> [@Weisshund](#): > > I am a bit confused (aside from the absolute nonsense) > > 5 races? > > I know of only 3 > > Caucasian (Of which not all are Lilly white, and some are quite brown) > Asian > African it depends when and where you went to school. Linnaeus had four: _europaeus, asiaticus, americanus, afer_ Blumenbach had five: the Caucasian or white race. the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians and some Central Asians. the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders. the Ethiopian or black race, including sub-Saharan Africans. the American or red race, including American Indians. U.S. secondary education books promoted three for a long time. (I have found books from the 1890s and the 1970s each proclaiming three races.) I have seen lists that reached 64 races. Humans are lumpers or splitters and the number of races proclaimed tend to be based on whether one is a lumper or splitter. The (current) five with which I am most familiar (although they can change depending on who is setting the boundaries) are based on variations of Blumenbach’s hypothesis. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2017, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/331 "2017-04-30T22:53:14Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > it depends when and where you went to school. > > Linnaeus had four: > _europaeus, > asiaticus, > americanus, > afer_ > Blumenbach had five: > the Caucasian or white race. > the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians and some Central Asians. > the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders. > the Ethiopian or black race, including sub-Saharan Africans. > the American or red race, including American Indians. > U.S. secondary education books promoted three for a long time. (I have found books from the 1890s and the 1970s each proclaiming three races.) > I have seen lists that reached 64 races. > > Humans are lumpers or splitters and the number of races proclaimed tend to be based on whether one is a lumper or splitter. > > The (current) five with which I am most familiar (although they can change depending on who is setting the boundaries) are based on variations of Blumenbach’s hypothesis. I hear there are 6 races. Black Asian White Indian American Indian (somehow Aborigines and Pacific Islanders fall into this race because… science) and Zombies. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2017, 11:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/332 "2017-04-30T23:01:17Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > What I’m hearing here is that there’s 2 sides : > > a. The primary difference between groups of humans who have different genes, on average, is their genes. This applies both to physical characteristics you can easily measure (how tall, how strong) and mental ones, since the brain is a physical computer. > > b. Side B says that since racism is evil, it can never be justified. Therefore, people _must be_ equal. Therefore there are no genetic differences. And I’m hearing a few ways people are wiggling out of it : one is that there’s “no such thing as race” (even though it is possible to build a blind laboratory test looking for certain markers to determine race) or “it must all be nurture” (even though nurture doesn’t let a midget play basketball) or “the _author_ is racist”. > > Whether side a or side b is correct has profound real world implications. See, if side b is correct, the disparity of differences in success in some endeavors (like academics or modern, high mental requirement jobs like software development) _must_ be due to remaining racism. If it’s not genetics, and the black students got to go to the same school, that means if they all do worse on a test, the test is racist. Therefore we need to bend the curve and give them “racism adjustment” points and treat a black student with lower scores the same as a white student with higher scores. > > Now, why do we give asians a negative score, then? If asians _aren’t_ smarter than white people, and they _aren’t_ being given “white privilege”, why exactly do we treat an asian applicant worse than a white applicant to the same elite school? > > The relative success of asians and the way schools performing “affirmative action” discriminate against them is only really supported by a genetic hypothesis that I can see… Why can’t it be a bit of column A and bit of column B? We recently had a thread about the stark academic and economic success of Nigerian immigrants (much better than Asians never mind whites). IIRC much of Americas slave stock comes from that part of Africa. Did only the stupid Africans lose wars that landed them in slavery? Did the interbreeding with their white slave masters make them dumber? Or is it possible that much (if not all) of the difference we see is the result of a broken toxic culture and the legacy of racism? ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/333 "2017-05-01T01:02:29Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Why can’t it be a bit of column A and bit of column B? > > We recently had a thread about the stark academic and economic success of Nigerian immigrants (much better than Asians never mind whites). IIRC much of Americas slave stock comes from that part of Africa. Did only the stupid Africans lose wars that landed them in slavery? Did the interbreeding with their white slave masters make them dumber? Or is it possible that much (if not all) of the difference we see is the result of a broken toxic culture and the legacy of racism? Well, I mean the very first most likely explanation is misguided attempts at affirmative action. Nigerians who are economic elites getting the benefit of being rich _and_ being treated by key institutions (like Harvard and other Ivy League schools) as if they are severely disadvantaged. The Ivy League advantage to your future career is apparently pretty large. ---
**Author:** ![Weisshund](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ba8739/32.png) [@Weisshund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weisshund)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/334 "2017-05-01T03:00:11Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > it depends when and where you went to school. > > Linnaeus had four: > _europaeus, > asiaticus, > americanus, > afer_ > Blumenbach had five: > the Caucasian or white race. > the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians and some Central Asians. > the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders. > the Ethiopian or black race, including sub-Saharan Africans. > the American or red race, including American Indians. > U.S. secondary education books promoted three for a long time. (I have found books from the 1890s and the 1970s each proclaiming three races.) > I have seen lists that reached 64 races. > > Humans are lumpers or splitters and the number of races proclaimed tend to be based on whether one is a lumper or splitter. > > The (current) five with which I am most familiar (although they can change depending on who is setting the boundaries) are based on variations of Blumenbach’s hypothesis. Feel free to say hey idiot you are wrong shut up, but… asian, polynesian, native americans etc Those are all of the asian or mongoloid race, family, group, what ever is a good name for it. Germans Nordics Arabs Jews Indians etc running from pale white to very nicely browned. All Caucasian All the people from the majority of the african continent, the aborigine from australia and i am sure places along the way that are long forgotten. All African or Negroid That is pretty much it, all of us. 3 little tribes of not very much appreciable difference, and only some very mild environmental adaptations, and those can vary even within a tribe. As far as i know, those 3 are the only distinctions I guess you might call that lumping, but there is so damned little differentiating those 3, that anything else seems like splitting hairs and i only ever see it presented as a means to promote one over the others if you know what i mean. Mother Nature did a good job of nearly offing us twice in 200,000 years, pretty much assuring we would not have any appreciable diversity. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/335 "2017-05-01T12:50:53Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > What I’m hearing here is that there’s 2 sides : > > a. The primary difference between groups of humans who have different genes, on average, is their genes. This applies both to physical characteristics you can easily measure (how tall, how strong) and mental ones, since the brain is a physical computer. > > b. Side B says that since racism is evil, it can never be justified. Therefore, people _must be_ equal. Therefore there are no genetic differences. And I’m hearing a few ways people are wiggling out of it : one is that there’s “no such thing as race” (even though it is possible to build a blind laboratory test looking for certain markers to determine race) or “it must all be nurture” (even though nurture doesn’t let a midget play basketball) or “the _author_ is racist”. I have to say that your “b” is the worst summation of a position that I have ever read. Not a single sentence of it is right. Are you sure that you were reading this thread? ---
**Author:** ![gytalf2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ac91a4/32.png) [@gytalf2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gytalf2000)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/336 "2017-05-01T14:05:33Z")
Hmmm… I thought that there was supposed to be more genetic variation within the various populations in Africa than there were between africans and the rest of the world’s ethnic groups. Am i wrong about this? I might not be remembering correctly… ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/337 "2017-05-01T21:28:58Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > I have to say that your “b” is the worst summation of a position that I have ever read. Not a single sentence of it is right. Are you sure that you were reading this thread? Actually, re-reading it, the first sentence is OK (the one that reads, essentially, “racism is bad.”). OK. But everything that follows after is just comically wrong. ---
**Author:** ![SamuelA](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c77e96/32.png) [@SamuelA](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SamuelA)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/338 "2017-05-01T22:22:03Z")
> [@Evil\_Economist](#): > > Actually, re-reading it, the first sentence is OK (the one that reads, essentially, “racism is bad.”). OK. But everything that follows after is just comically wrong. I stand by my statements. I have seen this pattern many, many times. 1. A lot of the arguments made this thread were that it must be nurture 2. Another big chunk was that the \*author \*must be racist, therefore we need not even consider anything he wrote. 3. “There’s no such thing as race” - just a few posts north of you there are several arguing that very thing, such as how Africans (blacks) have more genetic diversity than the differences between races or that the number of races is arbitrary. (therefore it doesn’t exist) ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/339 "2017-05-01T22:51:50Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > I stand by my statements. I have seen this pattern many, many times. > > 1. A lot of the arguments made this thread were that it must be nurture > > 2. Another big chunk was that the \*author \*must be racist, therefore we need not even consider anything he wrote. > > 3. “There’s no such thing as race” - just a few posts north of you there are several arguing that very thing, such as how Africans (blacks) have more genetic diversity than the differences between races or that the number of races is arbitrary. (therefore it doesn’t exist) Have you read any of the citations I made at the start of the thread? It seems like you quite don’t understand why the scientific community has changed perspective towards grouping humans into races. It’s simply because such groupings don’t reflect genetic diversity **as it exists** in humanity. Its simply not an accurate design of human genetic variation. Surely you can understand these major points? 1. rejection of the validity of the **racial paradigm**. 2. proposing a new model. One based on clines, early/late migration, and geographic distance (with variability decreasing from Africa). You understand these are the points being made, no? ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Economist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/c89c15/32.png) [@Evil\_Economist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Economist)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2017, 11:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257/340 "2017-05-01T23:27:00Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > I stand by my statements. I have seen this pattern many, many times. Cool. Link to the top, say, 10 posts within this thread that say the things you claim they say, which, I may remind you, is: Side B says that since racism is evil, it can never be justified. Therefore, people must be equal. Therefore there are no genetic differences. And I’m hearing a few ways people are wiggling out of it : one is that there’s “no such thing as race” (even though it is possible to build a blind laboratory test looking for certain markers to determine race) or “it must all be nurture” (even though nurture doesn’t let a midget play basketball) or “the author is racist”. There are 339 posts in this thread (340 now) that, according to you, are in either group a or group b, so finding 10 that say the things you claim for group b should be easy. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257.md?page=16) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/at-what-level-is-racialism-accepted-in-the-scientific-community/695257.md?page=18)