Chen019, you are a liar.

[Chen019]

Just curious given his strange belief that humans are special and evolution doesn’t apply to them. No, unlike other animals we don’t have any races. Everyone was magically created together and there are absolutely no groups geographically separated at any point Certainly not long enough for any morphological differences that might allow individuals to be assigned to their geographic group, let alone genetic clusters!

I mean, the winner of the 2004 Curt Stern award for major scientific achievements in human genetics during the past 10 years, would never say there were human races? Would he?

A tree relating 144 individuals from 12 human groups of Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania, inferred from an average of 75 DNA polymorphisms/individual, is remarkable in that most individuals cluster with other members of their regional group" [13]. Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry - namely African, Caucasian (Europe and Middle East), Asian, Pacific Islander (for example, Australian, New Guinean and Melanesian), and Native American.

Maybe, I’m wrong. You’re not a creationist. You’re just like the type of person described here in the the New York Times that

[Dr. Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, said that the conclusion that race was not a valid concept ‘‘comes from honest and brilliant people who are not population geneticists.’’

‘‘That doesn’t mean they are insincere,’’ Dr. O’Brien said. ‘‘It’s just that they haven’t really looked at it. What is happening here is that Neil and his colleagues have decided the pendulum of political correctness has taken the field in a direction that will hurt epidemiological assessment of disease in the very minorities the defenders of political correctness wish to protect.’’

Seriously, Blake, you may be ignorant but I do admire your faith or at least good intentions

[Miller]

[Moderating]
I don’t think the Pit really needs two threads full of Chen’s dishonest racism, so I’ve merged his pitting of Blake with Blake’s pitting of him. The preceding post was the OP of Chen’s thread.
[/Moderating]

[Robot_Arm]

@kaylasdad99

34 minutes and two posts intervening; why did you feel the need to bump the thread?

He was just speaking off the top of his head.

[Chen019]

@Miller

[Moderating]
I don’t think the Pit really needs two threads full of Chen’s dishonest racism, so I’ve merged his pitting of Blake with Blake’s pitting of him. The preceding post was the OP of Chen’s thread.
[/Moderating]

Or Blake’s dishonest creationism for that matter. Go back to the original great debates thread. I asked you about 3x what your definition of race or sub species was. Still waiting for a response.

[Chen019]

Blake,

Also, as I tried to explain to you I understood that Gill was referring to sub-saharan africans in the paper.

I’m not sure why you are so outraged about that. The point is that groups can be distinguished via morphological features into groups that reflect geographic ancestry. I provided you with the Sesardic paper discussing more recent evidence of how that can be done with high confidence.

[magellan01]

@Miller

[Moderating]
I don’t think the Pit really needs two threads full of Chen’s dishonest racism, so I’ve merged his pitting of Blake with Blake’s pitting of him. The preceding post was the OP of Chen’s thread.
[/Moderating]

Interesting. A mod—with Mod hat on—calling a poster both dishonest and a racist. :rolleyes:

[Belowjob2.0]

@magellan01

And this is an example of what I mean. Forget the term race if you must. Use “groupings”. And example of one such genetic grouping being those people that have dark skin and kinky hair.

Prediction: some post from someone showing people that are not squarely in one “grouping”. This evasive maneuver interests me not at all.

Groupings? Pretty everybody in the bio sciences agrees that there are human population groups which differ in various inherited characteristics. Not a controversial position at all. If proponents of classical race theory were okay with the term population group, there wouldn’t be any dispute here at all. (But it does make it more difficult to make glib generalizations for political purposes.)

But that’s not what the people who are trying to revive classical race theory are claiming. They’re claiming that continent wide groupings of humans, based primarily on phenotype, have scientific validity. They don’t.

As I pointed out in the other thread, Torres Strait Islanders and other Melanesians can look exactly like black Africans. This isn’t a case of people not fitting neatly into one group. This is a case where phenotype tells you that people are members of the same group, when they are in fact members of groups that couldn’t be farther apart.

[GIGObuster]

As usual, Chen019 ignores what the bulk of the works of the experts are dealing with.

More on genes and geography: diagnosing your ancestry from your DNA

As I said, this doesn’t show that there are discrete “races” in Europe, and I don’t think there are obviously discrete “races” anywhere these days, though there is large-scale genetic differentiation among worldwide population suggesting that such races once existed as relatively discrete and geographically isolated populations. The discreteness that once existed, or so I think, is now blurring out as transportation and migration are beginning to mix the discrete groups into not a melting pot, but sort of a lumpy pudding of humanity.

What is clear is that, with considerable accuracy, you can diagnose an individual’s geographic origin from his genes. Nearly everyone’s DNA contains reliable information about their recent and ancient past. We are not all genetically alike. If we were, you couldn’t do studies like the one of Novembre et al. But neither are we radically different genetically, for if we were, you wouldn’t need hundreds of thousands of genes for such accurate predictions.

What is clear to me is that once again the writers are referring to the societal constrict, and any differences are important only on a medical setting (and even there, there are problems on making medicines that assume those differences alone can be used to develop new medicines, one should read the review of books on the matter on the last link in this post), what it is also clear, there is in any case an acceptance that we are not radically different and the bottom line is that there is no reason to prejudge people or recommend “solutions” to societal issues based on a non biological definition of race.

And of course, it does remain that attempts at making the differences more important that what they are are not without sinister implications or misuse by people who want to use medical tools and apply it to societal issues.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished

Science has exposed the myth of race, but as the diverse array of essays in Race and the Genetic Revolution shows, folk conceptions of racial typology are kept alive in various sociopolitical forms, and proponents of various DNA-based technologies continue to use erroneous biological conceptions of race as the rationale for using these technologies. Race is not just a sociocultural construct; it is a technological and commercial artifact that persists today.

[GIGObuster]

@magellan01

Interesting. A mod—with Mod hat on—calling a poster both dishonest and a racist. :rolleyes:

Because Chen019 is, of course I warned you about that a long time ago but you go ahead and continue to show others how useless you are on identifying good sources from the bad ones.

[brazil84]

@Belowjob2.0

They’re claiming that continent wide groupings of humans, based primarily on phenotype, have scientific validity. They don’t.

What is the standard for deciding whether a “grouping” has scientific validity?

For example, if I divide the human population into “non-smokers,” “light smokers,” and “heavy smokers,” does this grouping have scientific validity? Why or why not?

Also, what are the consequences is a grouping lacks scientific validity? Does it mean that any scientific study which attempts to generalize about such groups is somehow per se invalid? Or does it mean something else?

[VinylTurnip]

@magellan01

Interesting. A mod—with Mod hat on—calling a poster both dishonest and a racist. :rolleyes:

Yes, interesting that Miller’s mod hat doesn’t obscure his vision.

[Chen019]

@DocCathode

It’s my opinion that those are meaningless and arbitrary categories to begin with. How in the name of Cecil do you define and apply them?

Do you simply disagree with the concept of races & sub species generally? This was something I asked on the other thread. Because you can make the same objections for various other species.

[brazil84]

@Chen019

Do you simply disagree with the concept of races & sub species generally? This was something I asked on the other thread. Because you can make the same objections for various other species.

You can make the same objection for many other categories. But it’s only when race is at issue that these objections start coming out from Leftists.

[Kimstu]

@magellan01

Forget the term race if you must. Use “groupings”. And example of one such genetic grouping being those people that have dark skin and kinky hair.

No no no: that’s exactly the kind of misunderstanding that so persistently plagues these discussions.

“Those people that have dark skin and kinky hair” do NOT constitute a SINGLE genetic population or “grouping”.

This isn’t even about the fact that some individuals are mixed-race: this is about the fact that, and I’ll say this slowly not because I think you need help understanding it, but so that anyone hastily skimming the posts won’t misinterpret it:

***Some genetic population groups with dark skin and kinky hair …

are AT LEAST AS CLOSELY genetically related to populations with light skin and straight hair …

as they are to OTHER populations with dark skin and kinky hair.***

Therefore, it makes no sense, genetically, to lump all the dark-skinned populations together as a single “race” that excludes light-skinned populations.

As an illustrative example, let’s say that you happen have two full-sibling brothers, both of whom happen to have red hair while you have dark hair. Somebody who didn’t know your family, on seeing the three of you, certainly might assume that your brothers were more closely related to each other than they were to you. But that wouldn’t be accurate.

As a more realistic example, consider the population of Australian Aborigines. They have typical “black race” characteristics such as dark skin, broad noses, and curly hair. And as a socioeconomic group, they have many of the disadvantages that so-called “race realists” claim are genetically linked to membership in “the black race”.

But as a matter of genetic fact, Australian Aborigines are no more closely related to African blacks than white Europeans or Asians are.

Similarly, the Ainu people of Japan, being lighter-skinned and hairier than other Japanese, were sometimes thought to be partly descended from white European peoples. But genetic studies show that the Ainu are not more closely related to whites than other Japanese people are.

In a number of examples like these, we see the problem with the whole idea of “race” in the sense of “a group of people who more or less look alike” being used interchangeably with “population” in the sense of “a group of people who are more closely genetically related to other people within that group than to other people outside it”.

To sum up: “looking more alike” != “being more closely related genetically”. And that is why we cannot validly speak of appearance-based “groupings” or “races” as equivalent to genetic populations.

[Chen019]

@brazil84

You can make the same objection for many other categories. But it’s only when race is at issue that these objections start coming out from Leftists.

Well, that is what I suspect. As this comment suggests it comes down to political concerns and that is why you get the inconsistency in approach:

Dr. Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute, said that the conclusion that race was not a valid concept ‘‘comes from honest and brilliant people who are not population geneticists.’’

‘‘That doesn’t mean they are insincere,’’ Dr. O’Brien said. ‘‘It’s just that they haven’t really looked at it. What is happening here is that Neil and his colleagues have decided the pendulum of political correctness has taken the field in a direction that will hurt epidemiological assessment of disease in the very minorities the defenders of political correctness wish to protect.’’

[Chen019]

@ Vinyl Turnip, does your name refer to your intellect?

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

Well, that is what I suspect. As this comment suggests it comes down to political concerns and that is why you get the inconsistency in approach:

Already replied to and ignored as usual, suffice to say, the support you claim to have is not exactly what you want.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/race-finished

A different aspect of racial profiling is evident in the growing industry of racialized medicine, whose proponents might argue that even if race has no evolutionary or biological meaning, it can still be useful for medical treatments. After all, more and more diseases are reportedly correlated with ethnicity and race. But as evolutionary biologists Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Jonathan Kahn argue in their respective chapters on the subject, racialized medicine is a bad investment and is bound to fail for two reasons. First, although individual ancestries are useful on medical questionnaires, ancestry should not be conflated with race. “The issue is not primarily one of whether to use racial categories in medical practice but how,” Kahn writes.

Carefully taking account of race to help understand broader social or environmental factors that may be influencing health disparities can be warranted. . . . But it is always important to understand that race itself is not an inherent causal factor in such conditions. 

As an example, he considers the drug called BiDil, FDA approved as an anti–heart-attack agent specifically marketed to African Americans on the grounds that they have a biological propensity for heart disease brought on by high blood pressure. Not only is the drug not effective for all African Americans, it is quite effective for many individuals who self-identify as Caucasian.

[brazil84]

@Chen019

Well, that is what I suspect. As this comment suggests it comes down to political concerns and that is why you get the inconsistency in approach:

Probably that’s also why you are being dismissed as a “racist.”

[GIGObuster]

Not sure where Dr. Stephen O’Brien gets that opinion, and it is still one anyhow.

Race (human categorization)

Following the Nazi eugenics program, racial essentialism lost scientific credibility. Race anthropologists were pressured to acknowledge findings coming from studies of culture and population genetics, and to revise their conclusions about the sources of phenotypic variation.[49] A significant number of modern anthropologists and biologists in the West came to view race as an invalid genetic or biological designation.[50]

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6563.2010.00263.x/abstract

[Rand_Rover]

@CannyDan

But the only traits that dark skinned kinky haired people share at greater than 95% confidence level is dark skin and kinky hair.

How do you know that?