Race is definitely a thing here in Canada. Its determined by historic and culturally engrained rules that are nebulous, arbitrary and contradictory; however its still used (and no different then any other social concept, really).
The big problem is when people try to use their personal racial ideas to project beyond these socio-cultural realities and into harmful racialist pseudoscience. Out comes claims perverting cutting edge news in niche fields of human genetics and behavioural psychology mangled to fit in with 18th century race-based essentialism through personal racist speculations on innate biology.
The end result? The harming of racial minorities by excusing unequal treatment, limiting their freedoms (to immigrate, gain employment, educate, or generate wealth), stigmatizing their free participation in society, devaluating their existence, or by removing shared human accomplishments through historical revision or denial of events.
But yes. Race is still a thing. I wouldn’t say it is more apparent today, but the privilege to ignore its social relevance is slipping (I’d also say the same thing with other socially important norms).
The Mismeasure of Man is highly outdated. A lot of science has been done in the past 40 years.
Guns, Germs, and Steel has been thoroughly and forensically discredited by Graeber & Wengrow in their recent book The Dawn of Everything. Diamond is a dilettante who knows nothing of serious archaeology and anthropology, or of the major new breakthroughs in those fields over the past few decades.
I suspected Diamond was a blowhard when he suggested in his book that because his Pacific Islander friends had no compunctions about asking intense personal questions during their conversations, they were superior in intellect compared to the average Westerner. I thought it more likely that his particular friends were raised in a culture where intense personal questions weren’t considered impolite.
This. I believe I mentioned this in a prior post, but my guess is that back in Roman times, say the 2nd and 3rd centuries, a light skinned Roman from what is now northern England would likely have felt he was of the same race as a dark skinned Roman on the other side of a whole continent and sea in what is now Libya but of a different race than the light skinned Pict just on the other side of the wall in what is now Scotland.
I can’t remember where I read this, so don’t quote me, but I read somewhare that due to our ancestral genetic bottleneck already mentioned, where humans dwindled down to a few thousand breeding pairs before making a serious comeback a couple hundred thousand years ago, that you can take any two random humans from different parts of he globe and they would would be more genetically similar to each other than two chimpanzees from neighboring chimp communities are to each other.
So I always make it a point, if for some reason I need to refer to different genetic types of people, to refer to different ethnicities rather than different races. Because despite differing superficial appearances, we’re all part of the one Human Race. And not in a feel-good, ‘up with people’ sense, in a very real, literal scientific sense.
I should have quoted you in my original post anyway, because when i referred to the ‘ancestral genetic bottleneck already mentioned’ I was referring specifically to your post.
Based on these previous studies and our new paleoenvironmental data, we find no support for the Toba catastrophe hypothesis and conclude that the Toba supereruption did not
produce a 6-year-long volcanic winter in eastern Africa,
cause a genetic bottleneck among African AMH populations, or
Interesting. I think there may have been another population bottleneck for humans who left Africa. Searching for a cite, it looks like there were two bottlenecks that affected those who left Africa:
Well, that may be so, but I believe it is a ‘fact’ that as a species, we are more genetically similar to each other than our closest primate relatives are to each other. I don’t feel like looking up cites for that right now though; I really should get some work done today…
Mismeasure questions biological determinism, which argues that human beings are controlled by their genes and not by their environment. In what way is the counter to that outdated?
Dawn questions the mainstream story from the prehistoric world to the current one. Guns doesn’t do that.
A lot more science has been done in the past 40 years. The arguments in the nature vs. nurture debate have all changed and moved on considerably.
Science isn’t static. We should never assume that we can rely on any scientific book that was written 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago in some cases.
That also applies to understanding of history, which many people don’t seem to realize.
History is not frozen knowledge, it’s always changing, sometimes rapidly. Archaeology and anthropology are moving by leaps and bounds with modern scientific methods. Old theories and understandings get overturned and discredited all the time. New information comes to light, new discoveries are made, new analyses are done, new insights are accepted, old assumptions prove to be false.
We can’t rely on old history any more than we can rely on old science.
Yes, that’s the whole problem with Guns.
It repeats tired old myths uncritically. Diamond is not a professional in the fields he is writing about. He is unaware of modern breakthroughs and advances in understanding.
Mainstream stories about early human history among the general public – and they are stories – have remained much the same for the last couple of centuries, but mainstream scientific and academic understanding has changed rapidly, especially during the last few decades.
