In today’s Cecil Classic article, at http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_099.html, the great and powerful Unca Cece says:
As it turns out, there’s even a pre-colonial ethic Caucasoid group that was spread out as far as easternmost Asia. They were the Ino, the Japanese aborigines, whom some anthropologists believe settled parts of the Americas before the current crop of Native Americans came over and displaced them.
There is a big difference between “Caucasians” (if you believe in that sort of thing), and “white people”, as colloquially used by most people.
Aren’t Arabs and Indians (from India) considered Caucasians? Thus wouldn’t that be the distinction cuate is making?
Back in the days when the “Five Races” were considered to have a basis in biological reality (note that the article dates to 1982, well before the notion was pretty much discarded in the 1989-1993 time frame), “Caucasians” were identified as the group that stretched from the Northwest of Europe all the way through the Middle East and down through the Indian subcontinent.
I take it that “Caucasoid” groups, such as the Ino of Japan, were not considered actual Caucasians, then?
Classification was confused and contradictory. Only after genetic evidence came rolling in in the 1990s were actual descent affiliations clarified, or the process begun.
Japanese aboriginal groups were various classified bec. it was unclear by their phenotype where they belonged.
I always thought it was the IndoEuropean language family that stretched from India up through Europe. Are Caucasians and IndoEuropeans supposed to be the same?
It is my memory, that the blurry, nonexistent line between races was always known not to be a strict line. I remember thinking that Turks, Semites, Mongolians, etc were examples of populations demonstrating that the races blend from one to another. This was back in the seventies, so what is the big deal about proving that “races” do not exist in the early 90’s?
By the way, why do “The 5 Races” not exist? The visible spectrum blurs together, but that doesn’t mean that colors don’t exist. Yeah, I know frequency is one linear parameter, and the human genome is a lot more complicated than that, but the analogy still holds. In fact, I recently read - in Physics Today (July?) - that the human perception of color is not well correlated to frequency. Goethe and then some guy in 50-s and 60’s demonstrated that. Yet for all that, when I say “blue” people know what I’m talking about. Just like I know what someone who calls me “whitey” means. Races exist, at least in a social and cultural contexts, even if they do not exist in a genetic context.
Not necessarily. Depends on who’s doing the theorizing, what standards etc.
however, in general it is always bad analytics to presume language and phenotype have an identity, e.g. the Arab world and the vast array of phenotypes for semetic speakers.
Genetics. The biological aspect.
The context is the genetic. Of course races exist socio-culturally.
As I understand it, you can categorize humans (or any other group) based on various characteristics. One such categorization was based on easily-observed differences of appearance, leading us to the Five Races (or Three, or Four, or 17, or however many races you claim there are). The problem is, that the characteristics used to describe the Five Races are about the most useless, irellevant, unimportant traits one could pick.
For instance, “black” people are people who have dark skin, curly hair, and whatever other traits you chose. Who cares? One might also make a category of people who have a high likelihood of carrying the sickle-cell anemia gene. Now, this would be a useful classification, for at least some medical purposes. But the sickle-cell group only corresponds very poorly to the “black” group: There are many people who are considered “black” among whom sickle cell is unknown, and there are many sickle-cell carriers who are not considered “black”.
As I understand it, to divide people into biologically interesting groups, such that variations between the groups are larger than variations within each group, you need thousands of categories, not 4 or 5, and even then, you have to account for mixing between those groups.
One point I was trying to make is that the designation of “race” is not useless. Just ask the Census Bureau, which has the absurd notion that all Americans belong to just one. “Race” is an important social and cultural concept. That “race” is a human invention and with no sound basis in biology is unimportant. (Of course, I suppose Sunscreen marketers, and hair care product marketers, might argue skin color and hair types are important.)
The reason I asked if IndoEuropean is identical to Caucasion is because that is what the conversants seemed to be assuming. IndoEuropean is a useful construct and, unlike race, clearly defined. (Not that I’ve ever understood why language families exist. Why shouldn’t a given language lie in two or more families?) That language families have no biological significance is to be expected, so if one used the language families to demonstrate that there wasn’t a statistically significant genetic correllation proves only the expected.
It seems to me that all the racists I have met I have talked about two things: behavior (“They even steal from each other.”) and athletic performance (“White men can’t jump.”). The former clearly is not genetically linked, unless some particular mental disorder turns out to be more common in one race or another. The latter, though, definitely could be genetically linked. Would these genetic studies purportedly disproving the existence of race have picked up that say, people of west African descent are better sprinters?
Well, important to whom?
Jean Phillipe Ruston, PhD would assert that biological race is clearly true and clearly relevan to sexuality and intelligence.
That he is a racist loon does not stop him from publishing papers that try to make the point.
Certainly, perceptions of race make it easier for humans to express their xenophobia. If I can hate someone based on the color of his skin, I don’t have to ask him whether Allah is One and Mohammed is His prophet (or whether the Eucharist occurs through Transubstantiation or Consubstantiation) before I decide to kill him.
Given that we demonstrate our xenophobia based on appearance (and, in the U.S., have now passed laws to prevent the expression of that xenophobia in commerce) the government has an interest in knowing how people identify themselves and whether that has led to discrimination. That interest does not carry over to trying to impose those constructs on biological reality.
Actually, there is tantalizing (but inconclusive) evidence that Yiddish is a hybrid of two separate families with a largely Germanic vocabulary overlaying a potentially Slavic grammar. (Note, that I have not indicated that this has been proven.)
On the other hand, English, Dutch, and German are clearly “related” and the use of the “family” model helps philologists study and compare the.
You badly misunderstand the nature of the research.
First, “better sprinter” needs to be defined in terms that are testable. That means not the skewed observation of a certain select elite atheletes, but on a population basis.
Second, one has to come to an understanding of what physical characteristics are actually significant inputs, controlling for training and environment, to the activity.
Third, one has to find out what package(s) of alleles (gene variants) control such traits, and how their expression occurs, possible environmental influences for example. Anything like “running fast” is clearly something that is going to be (1) highly selected for in the environment, presuming it is advantageous (2) polyallelic, controlled by many different sites. It will, in short be a complicated question.
Those kinds of answers are some years away.
What current research focuses on is on allele distributions within the world’s populations. As primary literature has indicated, and I have cited in the past, is that in group variation overwhelms inter-group variation. There are no race-specific alleles, and few private alleles limited to specific populations. Further research designed to look at the structure of distribution of “frequencies” has found that such groupings are inconsistent, again indicating race as an organizing way to look at genetic difference is counter-productive.
This in no way excludes, however, specific populations from having advantageous “packages” as it were at higher frequencies.
There’s also, possibly, a slight evolutionary-psychology-related advantage to racism.
It has been said that sacrificing your own life to save the lives of two of your siblings or eight of your cousins is, genetically, equivalent to saving your own life. On average, each of your siblings will be carrying 1/2 of your genome (assuming their biological mother and father are the same as yours), and each of your cousins will be carrying 1/8 of your genome. So, by protecting members of your extended family, you’re acting to preserve copies of your own genes, just like you’re acting to preserve copies of your own genes whenever you protect your own biological children from harm. If any of those protected genes happens to code for the behavior pattern of “protect your family members,” said genes will also thrive and multiply when your family members thrive and multiply.
A similar argument can be made about protecting people who look like you. If someone looks similar to you, there’s a chance he may be related to you, or at least carrying genes similar to yours, and therefore preserving his/her genome means there’s a change you’ll be preserving a copy of a small portion of your own genome.
But the more different-looking someone is, the better the chances are that this person is only distantly related to you, or not related to you at all (unless you’re willing to go back thousands of years to find a common ancestor). Thus, if you fail to protect, or actively attack, someone who looks very different from you, you run much less of a risk of wiping out a copy of your own genome than if you fail to protect, or actively attack, someone who looks very similar to you.
Therefore, racist behavior may have a genetic component to it that is common to all humans.
It’s been pretty much proven through genetics that your features are just a form of where you live.
Ex. English have larger noses because of the climate. A larger nostral helpes breath in more condensed air.
Ex. A man from Zimbabwe has a smaller or flater nose, because of the hot climate. There is no need for large nostrals with expanded air.
They say that it takes 20,000 years for a black man to turn white after moving to a colder climate. So race having anything to do with biological intellagence is pretty much dismantled.
I tend to agree with this simply because if you look at climate and facial charictaristics it makes sense. Those in a warmer climate tend to have flater noses…while those in colder tend to have larger noses. Since Caucasians are spread from Sweeden (cold) to the Itallian coast (warm) it makes sense that they would not all look alike.
I would also like to add that some Africans are very tall and thin…while others are more short and heavy. And Vietnamese do look diffrent then Koreans. We all came from Africa in the beginning…we just evolved into diffrent colours as we spread through the planet.
Lizabeth
Back to this unresolved issue…
tomndebb said:
Which begs the question, why are these peoples all classified in one group? Was it because of the Indo-European language family? Or what? Why is a dark-skinned Indian in the same class as a light-skinned Nordic? That question would seem to play a key role in addressing why “white” people don’t all look alike.
And assuming we, for the sake of argument, throw out the Indians and Arabs (just because I’m a racist snob), we still get a lot of variation between, say, Swedes and Greeks.
Of course this question misses the fact that there’s much variation between Minute Bol and a pygmy, too. And Andalusian (Andulasian? sp?) Islanders.
“They say that it takes 20,000 years for a black man to turn white after moving to a colder climate …” I’d say that it takes, at most, 150 years for any man to turn bone white. 
I think you should be aware that the physical elements of the environment can only modifies physical characteristics if the group remains within a similar environment for extended periods of time. I seem to recall reading a Scientific American article a few years back comparing high altitude adaptions of Tibetians with those of natives to the Andes (Andeians??) The Tibetians having lived in Tibet for far longer have greater adaptations. I have often wondered why there are no blue eyed, pigmentless, Inuit. They seem to be surviving just fine, or were before we arrived. Did technology advance significantly between the arrival of the Swedes and the Inuit to the far north?
I doubt nose shape has anything to do with average temperature. First of all, volume would matter, not shape, and second, when you are breathing hard - and most likely to be undergoing a Darwinian “fitness test” - you breathe mostly through your mouth. I’m sure concepts of beauty and pure random variation matter more. Finally, my Italian friends all have larger noses than I, and I am largely Scottish and French.
But I have a question for Tracer, or any other expert, if there are no known racial alleles, how is skin color determined? I color, if I understand correctly, is determined by three alleles located at two locations. (An allele is an variant of a gene?) So wouldn’t that be one example?
Allele is a varient of a gene.
Skin color is determined by several alleles, none of which are private (restricted) to any “race.” Something that obvious of course would have been covered long ago. I had some citation about this, but someone better learned than I can cover activation issues.
I don’t think it is activation that confuses me, I think I am confused at a simpler level. The way I understand eye color, there are three alleles - blue, green, and brown. There are two places at which eye color genes are located. At one you can have brown or green, and at the other green or blue. Brown being dominant, and green next. Am I wrong here? Are all three alleles present in all “races”? If so, why do green and blue eyes seem to be a northern European thing?
I would have thought that skin color works somewhat similarly, but in a more complicated matter. I seem to recall that Asians have something other than melatonin (sp?) to pigment their skin. Are those alleles present everywhere? And why does it exist in the first place? Melatonin clearly sufficing for subSaharan Africa?
I’m not familiar with the particulars of allelic distribution for eye color, however green eyes are also found in North Africa, esp in the indigenous Berber people in the Atlas mountains and in Central Asia, so it is quite clear those traits are not restricted to Northern Europe.
Your understanding is defective, I am unaware of anything indicating such a seperation.
It’s useless to think of eye color in terms of two or three alleles; there are at least two genes that influence pigmentation of the eyes, and several different levels of pigmentation, but it’s all melanin. Generally, blue and gray eyes are virtually unpigmented (the color is due to the arrangement of collagen fibers). Brown eyes contain plenty of melanin, and green eyes contain just enough melanin to contribute a yellowish tinge to the iris, which leaves a greenish cast overall.
As for Asians and “melatonin,” :rolleyes: there is no other pigment; some people who eat a LOT of carotenoid-rich food get a yellowish cast to the skin, but that’s highly individual, not genetic. There are two varieties of melanin, but the second type, phaeomelanin, does not appear to contribute significantly to skin color in any population (it’s reddish, and is responsible for red hair, but only where eumelanin is sparse). Speaking of red hair, has anyone seen the new CSI? Is David Caruso a posturing block of wood, or what?