If "there's no such thing as race," is there such a thing as gender?

Great Debates
221

The fucking SSADC as a racial marker? Are you shitting me? That proves jack about races - all it proves is that you can divide humanity up into two broad groups - those who are primarily African (but are otherwise phenotypically heterogenous) and those who aren’t. It’s great support … for the Out of Africa theory.

But unless your proposed racial schema is African and Not (i.e. you have a definition of races where Danes, Andaman Islanders and Koreans are all one race, and Ethiopians, Mbuti and !Kung are another) it isn’t anything near what people mean when they say “race”. Is that your proposed definition of race, Chen? Strictly African and Other? It would be a … unique take on things, that’s for sure.

Seriously - there’s no “scientific” racial scheme in this day and age that can still hope to lump all Sub-saharan Africans as one race and not be laughed out of the laboratory

222

As has been pointed out to your side numerous times, American “black” does not map to “Sub-Saharan African” in any way, shape or form. This starts looking like wilful ignorance.

223

So you claim that Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Pacific Islanders, Amerindians, and East Asians are morphologically distinct and geologically separte.

Good, Finally an answer.

For the third time: I didn’t ask where he refers to US Blacks.

You claimed he refers to sub-Saharan Africans as morphologically distinct. Where does Gill ever even use the tern sub-Saharan African.

No, you have not provided any at all. Gill never refers to any your nominated races.

Irish never clams that sub-Saharan Africans are morphologically distinguishable. Irish says that there is a distinct cluster in Sub-Saharan Africa. At no stage does he say that you can classify sub-Saharan Africans based on teeth. I don’t think you have actually read the paper, have you?

Now can you answer the questions?

What are the morphological features that you can use to distinguish sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians, Pacific Islanders, Amerindians, and East Asians?

Where does Gill refer to sub-Saharan Africans? I’m not asking about whether he refers to US Blacks, defined as such by the perceptions of US law enforcement. Nobody disputes that. But " Blacks as defined as such by the perceptions of US law enforcement" is not in any sense synonymous with “sub-Saharan African”.

Where does Gill say that there is a combination of morphological traits that are diagnostic of a sub-Saharan African race?

You made these claims about Gill. Now is the time to back them up.

You have a rather nasty history of misrepresenting references on these boards, and this yet another example.

Whether you do this deliberately to mislead or simply because you lack the ability to comprehend scientific literature I am unsure. But you do it with great regularity, and either way it means that your arguments based on what you claim the literature says are worthless.

224

So Melanesians and Polynesians are in one race?
Where do Australians and Tasmanians fit in?
Are Andaman Islanders “Caucasian”? They sure as hell aren’t African.
So !Kung Bushmen and Ethiopians are all part of one race?

225

Indeed, I believe Chuck made that point in the debate about a meaningful definition of race, that I linked above. Also as Coyne noted in the link I gave above:

Also, specifically on sub-saharans Razib Khan recently commented.

226

WTF?

He just spent two pages telling us that they were one morphologically distinct race.

Does anybody give this poster any credit at all?

By this stage I would hope that it is clear that he has no idea what he is talking about. But if anyone in the peanut gallery thinks that he has any credibility at all, let me know. That might make it worth my while to keep debunking this nonsense.

But for me personally, he has demonstrated very clearly that his ideas are factually wrong, inconsistent, poorly thought out and based on an complete misrepresentation of the literature.

227

On the contrary, there is a great deal of debate on the subject of youth in Asia.

228

Gill refers to six geographic races. He includes in those “black (negroid) and white (caucasoid)”. My understanding was that negroid in physical anthropology referred to sub saharan africans or those of primarily sub saharan descent.

229

Let’s re-visit what you’ve said:

I’ve given you ample evidence from the literature showing there are morphologically different groups that would satisfy the sub species criteria noted above.

230

Let’s talk about Gill for a minute - I do think he gets a little too much stick; his basic thrust is this: For his work, bone morphology maps closely to certain geographical grouping often aligning with some traditional (for the US) “races”. That’s fine, and he freely admits that this is of utility to him and not, say, seriologists:
[QUOTE=Gill in Nova interview]
"So, serologists who work largely with blood factors will tend to see human variation as clinal and races as not a valid construct, while skeletal biologists, particularly forensic anthropologists, will see races as biologically real. "
[/QUOTE]
Good for him to admit his bias.

His mistake is in then projecting his functional use of geographic population groups, which only map to “race” because of the US-centric racial filter, into the social sphere:

[QUOTE=Gill in Nova interview]
The common person on the street who sees only a person’s skin color, hair form, and face shape will also tend to see races as biologically real. They are not incorrect.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, Gill, they are, because they aren’t trained scientists working in specific sub-fields on specific sub-populations. They don’t get to ignore entire racial populations (as Gill does whole population groups like Melanesian - Gill, p296) because they are outside the scope of study or have insufficient data. Nope, they’re going to call that New Caledonian “black” (I mean, look at their neat 'fros!) which makes a mockery of any pretence to consistency or reality to morphology-based “races” as scientific.

231

So you were wrong to say “Sub-Saharan African” is the same as “Black”, weren’t you?

Doesn’t that make you stop and wonder what else you might be wrong about on race?

232

Quiet, you! Don’t make me get my pun-stick…

233

So you admit that you don’t understand your own references. That’s good enough for me.

234

No, you haven’t provided even one.

As we’ve noted, you utterly misrepresented Gill. You claimed that gill said that there there were morphological traits traits that are diagnostic of sub-Saharan Africans. Gill in fact never even used the term sub-Saharan African, and he specifically sated that there are no morphological traits traits or combination of morphological traits that are diagnostic of any race. I dn;t know whether the8i blatant misrepresenation was deliberate, or because you can;t understand what Gill clearly wrionte, but either way it is enough to uttelry discredit you.

You quote snippets of Irish, but Irish likewise never clams that sub-Saharan Africans are morphologically distinguishable. Irish says that there is a distinct cluster in Sub-Saharan Africa. At no stage does he say that you can classify sub-Saharan Africans based on teeth.

So no, you have never shown evidence showing there are morphologically different groups that would satisfy the sub species criteria. What you have shown is that you are utterly incapable of accurately representing the literature, either dliberately or due to an inability to understand it.

You no longer have any credibility on this issue Chen. There is simply no reason to believe that you have any idea what the literature says.

And if you so clearly don’t understand the literature, what the hell makes you think you have any idea what you are talking about?

235

Back to Gill: it should be noted, for those following along, that Gill is still a little behind the state of the art when it comes to craniofacial studies. Both the work of González-José & Perez et al on environmental factors influencing morphology, as well as work on the interdependence of various skull morphological features, has moved the whole field far forward in the last decade. Or take the work of Strauss and Hubbe(pdf):

So: racial craniometrics is hardly settled science.

236

  1. I explained to you above - Gill refers to “black (negroid” and white (caucasoid). Negroid refers to those from sub saharan africa.

  2. You need to read Gill again. I think the quote you keep going back to reflects my point above: Your objection appears to be more with the subspecies/race concept itself. As Gill notes, races are not discrete or absolute conditions that exist in nature. This is also a point made by Sesardic above (whose paper and points regarding morphological features you have studiously ignored).

As noted above - he goes through various morphological features that can be used to assign people with high confidence to the major geographic racial groups. In term of a combination of morphological traits that are diagnostic of race, let me quote Gill again (I’ll highlight some points you overlooked):

  1. You’ve ignored Sesardic, not to mention the Howell’s data referred to by Releford. Why is that?

  2. What is your definition of race & sub-species. Above you suggested you accepted these exist in other species. Do you accept the Mayr & O’Brien approach set out above?

237

No, once again you are blatantly misrepresenting Gill, who states explicitly that he us using “Racial taxa such as ‘Black’” that have “clear meaning to.. law enforcement personnel” within the US because as long as society perceives race as discrete forensic anthropologists are forced to communicate in those terms.

At no stage does Gill suggest, state, imply or even insinuate that “Black” refers to sub-Saharan Africans. Or that there are morphological traits that are diagnostic of a Black race. Those are claims that you simply made you out of whole cloth.

Anybody who wants to read the article can see where Gioll states that his usage of “Black” is a social convention that has been forced on scientists because it has use to law enforcement. Everyone can red where he disavows the existence of a discrete Black race. Everyone can see that he never implies that Black equates to “Sub Saharan African”.

You are misrepresenting the reference in the most egregious fashion. If you were not doing so you would be able to better than simply assert that Gill equates “Black” with “sub-Saharan African” when Gill himself states quite clearly that he is using “Racial taxa such as “Black”” that have “clear meaning to.. law enforcement personnel”. do yo societal constraints.

No, he does not, as we have already explained to you multiple times.

All you do by repeatedly misquoting Gill and Irish is to destroy what tiny shred of credibility you may have. There are accusations I am forbidden to make in this forum, but I am sure you know very well what people are thinking of you when you repeatedly and knowingly misrepresent the references.

As such there is little that I need to do to utterly discredit you. You have already done that to yourself. All I need to do is keep highlighting the way that you knowingly and repeatedly misrepresent the references.

So please, keep doing so. While you do there is no chance at all that anybody is going to accept the ignorance that you spout, and that is good.

238

…and is a stupid, outdated classification that bears no relation to actual geographic populations.

239

Not such high confidence, it turns out. I’ll say it again: Gill’s work is on a highly filtered subset of human populations. That he finds groupings there is no surprise. Doesn’t make the groupings significant in general application.

240

The question is whether or not you are seriously skeptical.

So if I provide precise, objective definitions for racial categories, you will accept that race is scientifically valid?