Can the race of the fetus be determined prenatally?

Factual Questions
121

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Then it should be easy to describe an experiment that might falsify it… At this point, the burden is on you to describe an experiment. If you cannot do so, then the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.
[/QUOTE]

Umm, dude, he just did that:

How much more clearly do you wnat the experiment explained? Do you want a full detailed methoidology.

All you need to do to falsify the claim is find a group, any group, that is physically and genetically distinguishable from all other groups and that has had little interbreeding with any other group in the world. If that is done then the hypothesis has been flasified.

122

[QUOTE=brazil84]
I did propose an experiment that you rejected.
[/quote]

I haven’t seen you propose any experiment at all, unless it’s your suggestion that 3500 people “from all over the world” be sampled. You haven’t provided any details of your sampling scheme, or why exactly you picked 3500 individuals. Care to elaborate? Do you have a cite for a such a study that supports your position?

In any case, I don’t think you deserve any more responses until you start responding to some of the questions I and others have posed to you above.

123

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Then it should be easy to describe an experiment that might falsify it.
[/quote]

Well, yes. I did describe the experiment. But designing the experiment is whole different matter.

You gave me no information as to why you chose the number 3500. There are 6,000,000,000,000 people on this earth. We know that a large percentage of those people have been in constant contact with gene flow between population for 10s of thousand of years. Africa, Europe and Asia are not separate continents in any meaningful sense wrt human contact. So, if you want to find some tiny, remote population somewhere on earth that may have been isolated long enough to form a subspecies (contrary to all the evidence we have collected thus far), just how many people do you need to sample DNA from? Frankly, anyone who told you he knew the answer to that would be bull-shitting you.

You don’t know the size of the population you’re looking for, so you can’t determine in advance what the sample needs to be. That is why I said I suspected you’d need to take an iterative approach. Try a certain sample size, and if that doesn’t work, use the data you’ve amassed to determine what the next sample size needs to be.

Also, one reason I rejected your 3500 number is that we already have sampled at least 10,000 people from indigenous populations, and that didn’t produce any populations that could be considered races (ie, subspecies).

124

[QUOTE=Blake]
Umm, dude, he just did that:
[/quote]

Ummm, dude, he invited me to design the experiment.

Yes.

125

[QUOTE=Colibri]
I haven’t seen you propose any experiment at all, unless it’s your suggestion that 3500 people “from all over the world” be sampled. You haven’t provided any details of your sampling scheme, or why exactly you picked 3500 individuals.
[/quote]

I clearly referred to doing the “same study, but instead used 3500 people from all over the world” The 3500 people would be chosen in a manner analogous to the way the 3500 people were chosen for the US study.

Which questions?

126

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Well, yes. I did describe the experiment.
[/quote]

You didn’t describe it in enough detail to risk falsification of your claim.

The 3500 comes from the study linked to in Post #66.

Perhaps, but if you can’t tell me an experiment that might falsify your claim, then your claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

127

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Perhaps, but if you can’t tell me an experiment that might falsify your claim, then your claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.
[/QUOTE]

Not knowing exactly what size the sample needs to be is not the same as being unable to design the experiment. That problem crops up all the time in science, mainly because we often don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.

In this case, what you would do is hypothesize that this unknown population is of a certain size. Let’s say we think it may be 10,000 people. Given that information, a statistician (which I am not) can tell you what the sample size needs to be for a given confidence level. If you do the experiment and the results come up negative then that means one of two things: Either no such population exists, or a population does exist but it’s smaller than 10,000 people.

At this point you have to decide whether you will conduct another experiment, in which case you’ll assume the population is smaller, and you’ll use a larger sample size. You go back to your statistician friend, and she tells you what your sample size needs to be.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Of course, you could just take DNA from every living person on earth and be done with it. While that wouldn’t be very practical, it is theoretically possible.

128

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Not knowing exactly what size the sample needs to be is not the same as being unable to design the experiment.
[/quote]

An approximate number will do.

129

[QUOTE=brazil84]
An approximate number will do.
[/QUOTE]

Approximately 6,000,000,000.

Oops-- too many zeros. That should have been “6,000,000,000 people on this earth” in that post.

130

Ok, so in order to falsify the claim that a species is monotypic, one would need to get a gene sample from every last individual in the species?

131

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Ok, so in order to falsify the claim that a species is monotypic, one would need to get a gene sample from every last individual in the species?
[/QUOTE]

No you just need to provide two groups within the species that would qualify as a subspecies. You don’t even need genetic testing, and can do it morphologically. Show me two populations of humans that do not interbreed, are morphologically dissimilar and do not form a cline in-between the populations.

132

[QUOTE=brazil84]
I clearly referred to doing the “same study, but instead used 3500 people from all over the world” The 3500 people would be chosen in a manner analogous to the way the 3500 people were chosen for the US study.
[/quote]

That very obviously would not be appropriate. As has been repeatedly explained to you, the subjects of that study were selected from a very restricted subset of the US population, which itself has a limited representation of human variation on a global scale. It would be completely ridiculous to use such a methodology for a global study of human variation.

I doubt whether you have read the article completely, or if you have, whether you have understood one-tenth of it.

Please present a reason why you selected the figure of 3500, and a sensible protocol for selecting them. Otherwise you are just bullshitting (which has been obvious for some time).

Try reading the complete thread. You can start with the questions **John Mace ** and I posed to you in posts #105 and #112 respectively.

[QUOTE=John Mace]
Rather than play 20 questions here, do you have some proposal that you want to make about some populations of humans being a subspecies? (And, btw, if any one population is a subspecies, then all the populations have to be a subspecies as well.) Because if you don’t, then this whole discussion is rather pointless.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Colibri]
In connection with this, can you point to some part of the globe in which a clear geographic dividing line between races existed before the Age of Discovery (that is, before about 1500)? (Note that I am talking about areas connected by land or areas adjacent to each other by sea, not oceanic gaps like the Atlantic).
[/QUOTE]

Here’s another one: do you think that Japanese and Chinese belong to the same or different races?

I would suggest (as a poster, not a moderator - this is not an official instruction) that if we are to ever see the end of this thread no one respond to any new questions from brazil84 until he has first answered these questions. At this point it seems to me he is just playing games rather than seriously attempting to understand the subject.

133

[QUOTE=brazil84]
Ok, so in order to falsify the claim that a species is monotypic, one would need to get a gene sample from every last individual in the species?
[/QUOTE]

No. You wouldn’t need to do it that way, but it could be done that way.

134

[QUOTE=Colibri]
That very obviously would not be appropriate. As has been repeatedly explained to you, the subjects of that study were selected from a very restricted subset of the US population, which itself has a limited representation of human variation on a global scale. It would be completely ridiculous to use such a methodology for a global study of human variation.
[/quote]

It’s not obvious to me.

Because that was the number in the original linked study. You seem a little confused about who has the burden here. You are making a claim, and I am asking you if there is any experiment that would falsify the claim. The burden is on you to come up with such an experiment.

If you cannot do so, then the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

Not at this time.

No, there is a point. The original poster asked a legitimate question and some people responded with claims that appear to be unfalsifiable pseudoscience and/or irrelevant to the original question.

No.

Same.

135

[QUOTE=brazil84]
No, there is a point. The original poster asked a legitimate question and some people responded with claims that appear to be unfalsifiable pseudoscience and/or irrelevant to the original question.
[/quote]

No. You have been incorrectly characterizing certain statements that I (and some others) have made thusly.

And yet the study you quoted said they could be told apart genetically with only a 1% error.

136

[QUOTE=brazil84]
It’s not obvious to me.
[/quote]

If you don’t understand why that methodology is inappropriate after it has been explained to you in detail several times, then I don’t think you understand the scientific method or hypothesis testing. And tossing around words like “falsifiable” isn’t going to convince anyone you do. In any case John Mace has described such a study.

My guess is never.

Then you have no evidence for the existence of races.

Many people responded with scientific information directly relevant to the question, unlike yourself.

This is contradicted by your favorite article, linked to in post #66. The study found genetic differences between the Chinese and Japanese populations they included. Therefore, by your reasoning, they must represent different races. (Further evidence, if any were needed, that you have not read the article.)

137

[QUOTE=brazil84]

Same.
[/QUOTE]
Thread over.

138

[QUOTE=John Mace]
No. You have been incorrectly characterizing certain statements that I (and some others) have made thusly.
[/quote]

No I have not.

So what? I can be told apart genetically from my sibling. We are both of the same race, ethnic group, and family.

139

[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Thread over.
[/QUOTE]

No, not until someone mentions Hitler. Oh, I just did! :slight_smile:

140

[QUOTE=brazil84]
So what? I can be told apart genetically from my sibling. We are both of the same race, ethnic group, and family.
[/QUOTE]

And until you two willingly interbreed separate subspecies from each other :wink: