Thank you Tyrrell McAllister that is the site I remembered! Thanks to everyone who has replied.
Depends what athletics you are talking about. Not very many blacks are champion javelin throwers, discus throwers, or shot putters. Those are mostly white.
Your friend is oversimplifying things. To be sure, racial differences are more than skin deep. But it’s wrong to simply state that Blacks are, in general, better athletes.
Yes, there are measurable genetic differences between various populations, but that’s a different statement than the same one about “race”. For on thing, there is no common definition of race-- are there 4, 5, 6, or 10 races? Or maybe more? The OP’s friend talks about “East Asians” as if that were some sort of race when that term actually encompasses quite a number of ethnic groups, especially when we include Chinese. I’m guessing he probably thinks Chinese = Han Chinese, but he said “East Asians”. Does that include Vietnamese? How about Malay groups?
We can divide people up in to many different groups, but we might just talk about Africans and non-Africans. Or, we might break it down into 100 (or more) ethnic groups that have some common genetic markers. But there is little or no reason to focus on groups associated with the various continents (which is often how race was traditionally defined).
While Anthrologists are not very comfortable discussing it, very, very broad races do exist. They are largely irrelevant. There are only a few of them, and it lumps most all Sub-Saharan Africans together, everyone from Ireland to India together, and everyone from Tibet to American Indians together.
The concept is really nly important to understanding population movements at a very early stage in human history, and some of the populations mixed later. Hence, some ethnicities today don’t neccessarily fall under either one, and some we aren’t really certain about.
In fact, there may be whole races which merged eons ago, so that we no longer have any real knowledge of them. Some scientists speculate that peoples preceded the American Indian into the Americas, and I’m not at all sure into which, if any category Australian Aborigines fall into, nor Pacific Islanders, if they belong to any single race at all!
Race != ethnicity.
To be sure, there is no biological basis for the concept of race.
Just wondering, what differences do you see that you believe aren’t explained by culture (including economic status)?
[QUOTE=Xema]
In The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins notes:
It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation of the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. QUOTE]
Dawkins is quite correct about this, but that does not mean that racial difference might not explain most of the differences one finds in the tails of a distribution. E.g., where you see the top athletes performing. I’ll use IQ to illustrate simply because I know the distribution for that. Please let’s not get into any arguments about anything including the meaningfulness of an IQ test.
IQ is approximately normally distributed with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Genius is defined to be above 140. This is 1/2 of 1% of the population.
Now suppose we have two populations whose average IQ scores were 99 and 101 so they differed by 2 points. Within group variation would account for 224/225 > 99.5% of the variation. Nevertheless, the group with the higher IQ average would account for 55% of the geniuses.
If you’re looking for the truly 1 in a million person (IQ > 171), then the higher IQ group would account for 58%.
The 1 in a million person is probably about the order of magnitude we’re looking at for professional athletes. So if whatever determines athletic prowess has a distribution like IQ, then this small a difference in genes would not seem to explain the disproportionate racial mixture we see in basketball for example. Either there is more of a genetic difference or other things explain the difference.
West Europeans have a better grasp on rules and laws than East Asians? I guess that explains why I got caned that time for chewing gum in Paris.
What would be a satisfactory biological basis for you?
There is no satisfactory basis. Provide one, and you can find holes, exceptions, and special cases that make this biological basis seem contrived and meaningless.
But what would be satisfactory?
Culture and economic status can be the result of, and not the cause of, differences among populations. I do not find it a satisfactory explanation of differences in, for example standardized IQ tests among populations.
As another example, the overrepresentation of black athletes in professional basketball does not seem to me to be either cultural or economic in origin. I do not think other populations are lazy, prefer to do something else, or simply have a broader menu of choices, for example.
I have noticed that a very broad menu of explanations is forwarded for observed differences among populations. These explanations have one thing in common: none of them embrace the possibility of genetic differences as being a major explanation for observed average differences among populations. While I do not think genetics is the only factor, it is a reasonable factor to consider, and I believe it is not considered because it is discarded out of hand as being ‘racist’ or discriminatory, or out of political favor, or some other reason not related to pure science.
Mother nature has no sense of fairness. Certainly the overlay of modern society, culture and mobility blurs population isolation. But in general, I have been unpersuaded by the assortment of theories required to explain observed differences among populations. The current academic paradigm is that there is no fundamental genetic difference among populations which can explain broad average differences in performance and behavioural characteristics. The academic community has gone to great lengths providing explanations in support of that paradigm. I am unpersuaded.
Like most people I have met, I think it would be wonderful if every population group were dealt an equal hand. But Mother Nature did not ask me how to create the world.
In any case, as I have said in other posts, we are not far from understanding genetics well enough to prove the point one way or the other. In the interim my intention is to interact with individuals and not populations, and I consider the current obsession over it counterproductive.
There are people that say race is a concept? Do these same people also feel evolution is just a concept? I would hope so…
I am not sure what you intended to point out, here. To describe race as a concept indicates that race has no fixed and invariable objective definition that can be applied consistently to all populations of humans, resulting in a bright line demarcation of which individual should be categorized as which race. For large groups of people, a casual list of shared characteristics can be drawn up that will identify those persons who are in the middle of the range of features, but taking any list of characteristics out into the world and matching them against individuals from distant lands, one will find that there are people who are genetically closer together whom one has divided into separate “races” while some people who are genetically distant may be lumped into any given race.
As a cultural construct, it makes an easy shorthand to permit the splitters among us to create groups. As a biological construct, it is pretty much worthless.
OK, I’ll be non-PC and point out the obvious here. Your friend makes a logical argument which you find racist yet you admit you can’t find any evidence or logic to refute his reasoning. So what makes you so certain you’re right? Is it at least concievable that maybe he actually has a point and the prevailing politically correct notions might actually be wrong?
Case in point – certain races consistently score better than other races on standardized tests such as the SAT. You might explain that by saying some races are smarter than others, or you might explain it by saying the tests are somehow biased in favor of certain races. Either explanation is a valid hypothesis. “Guns Germs & Steel” points out evidence for one theory and “The Bell Curve” points out evidence for the other. Both books make very rational logical arguments, and any objective reader who dismisses either theory out of hand isn’t really being honest.
But it seems like we’re not even allowed to consider the hypothesis that certain races are smarter than others–it creates a knee-jerk reaction of “But that has been disproven!” without really elaborating on what the proof is.
So prejudice aside, what makes you so certain that you are right and your friend is wrong?
(Note: I am not actually saying I think certain races are smarter than others; I’m merely questioning why we’re not allowed the intellectual freedom to even ask such questions)
Are you aware that Biology is, in fact, a science? What would be satisfactory for me would be scientific evidence. As there is no such evidence–and plenty to disprove the assertion that there is a biological basis for race–I’ll continue to stick with “There is no scientific basis for race.”
Sure, and what scientific evidence would make you think that there is a biologicial basis for race?
[ol][li] A falsifiable definition of race.[/li][li] A repeatable experiment in which the evidence would support the hypothesis that the various races, as defined in 1 above, do exist and are differentiated biologically.[/ol][/li]
So, what is it that makes you think already that there is a biological basis for race?
[QUOTE=Monty]
[list=1][li] A falsifiable definition of race.[/li][/quote]
A definition is not evidence. And how can a definition be falsified?
An experiment is not evidence either. An experiment might yield evidence, but the experiment itself is not evidence.
I don’t understand what you mean by “biologicial basis.”
Wow. You really don’t understand the Scientific Method at all, do you? First step in the process is to define what you are doing, thus my use of the term definition. A very important step in the process, of course, is that the experiment be repeatable. A non-repeatable/non-falsifiable experiment does not produce results which contribute to a scientific theory.
So you’re saying you don’t know what Biology is? Why, then, did you use the expression “more than skin deep” above?