Prove it.
I gave a link to the NIH site earlier. If you don’t accept that, then it’s pretty clear that you won’t accept proof. Or, you can look at the Vox study MfM linked to and that I re-linked to earlier.
If you cannot define what you are testing for you cannot test for it. If you cannot construct a hypothesis, and test that hypothesis you are not doing science.
It is actually worse than a random guess.
Heck, at least you could have grabbed a basic framework off of stormfront or some other supremacist site. It may not be valid but at least they are still actively trying to argue that race is a valid concept.
Because I doubt you will find any legitimate sources which are still holding onto the concept.
Do you yourself not have any defined thresholds for testing the level of ones nigritude? If you assume that I should intuitively accept the concept of human races it would seem that at least you could set some criteria, after all you argue it is just “common sense”.
My personal stance is that we are just human, who all look slightly different and while I am not bias free, remembering the fact that we are all the same helps me fight the biases I do have when I notice them.
So if you are going to convince me that there are broad homogeneous groups that are discernible based on simple criteria, you are going to have to tell me what to look for.
As I noted earlier, there are any number of definitions. It hardly matters which one you use. In the Vox graph, the definition is “self-identification”. Anything wrong with that?
You are trying to turn a social science into physics. Think about how were test for whether people find someone “attractive” or not. Or whether we find a facial expression to be “fear” or “laughter”. We ask a bunch of random people to look at pictures and rate them. Are those sociologist and psychologist not doing science?
In science yes, at least conceded you don’t care about science.
As an example, do you consider Finnish people white? Arthur de Gobineau defined them as part of the Mongolian race. As I am mostly Finnish should I start self-identifying as asian?
No, all of those things are semi-testable, although the attractive part would be relegated to the “soft sciences”, and they will actually define the terms they are testing.
But in turn why are you trying to turn ancestral genetics, a mostly hard science into a quasi non-science like Sociology.
I am not saying the subject matter of sociology not meaningful but wow…you are really shooting for a low bar as far as a standard of evidence.
FYI, even Sociology has definitions and standards for subjects like attraction.
You can google the following to find a word doc.
‘Interpersonal Attraction Judgment Scale’
Yet still you haven’t even provided even a basic definition or test on what makes someone white or black.
This is the intersection of hard science (genetics) with the softer science of sociology (race). Nothing unusual here. The researchers chose one definition of “race”, self-identification, which is as good as any. In fact, it seems to be the preferred definition of a good number of posters in this very thread.
You can self-identify as anything you like. If you choose to self-identify as Asian, I suspect you will simply be an outlier, adding a tiny bit to the error. If you look at the Vox curve, it’s not perfect. Again, not at all unusual. Do you know what it would look like if there was no correlation? It would look like a random scatter plot, which is much, much different than what it actually looks like.
You could select a much better example of an ethnic group that is less well defined, and less well studied. It’s quite possible that with such a group, the correlation would be much lower. So what? If you are expecting science to predict with 100% accuracy, you have an unusual idea what science actually is. You seem to want to dispense with the whole idea of error bars.
Are you still contending that it’s “100% BS”? Because that would be factually incorrect, contradiction the actual evidence.
Also factually incorrect since I submitted “self-identification”. I also submitted the definition used by the US government.
Now a question for you: How does an organization like BLM determine if a victim is actually black or not? If no definition works for you, then the whole business is a sham. All we can say is that Michael Brown was a member of the species H. sapiens.
Rat Avatar: I can go on like this for as long as you like, but going forward I will NOT answer questions that I’ve already answered. For example, you ask me for a definition, I give you one, and you ask me again. I will be ignoring any future question like that. If you want to continue the discussion, you’ll have to come up with a question that I have not yet answered.
I’m all ears.
The NIH study does not offer a genetic definition of race. It does not claim that there is a genetic test for race. It doesn’t even use the word “race”, or “black” or “white.” It does not support your assertion. Citing to something that does not support, nor even address your assertion is not proof of your assertion.
The Vox article says this:
And what do you think that that graph shows you? It doesn’t offer a scientific definition of race. All it shows is that people who self-identify as black are likely to have African ancestry. But we already knew that.
But that doesn’t show us anything more than a non-scientific test.
Of course it matters what definition you choose. What is the purpose of a scientific test? It is to offer a better answer to a question than a non-scientific test. If the socially important definition of race is “self-identification,” then by definition there is no scientific test that is better than your non-scientific test.
If all the test does is confirm those cases that no one disputes (like the Vox graph), then the test is pointless. To be a useful test for race, it must offer a definitive answer at the margins. But if race is defined by self-identification, then by definition, self-identification will always trump the test.
Uh, no. You are doing that.
John Mace, it seems like you genuinely do not get it.
In the 1800s, the scientific revolution was changing the way we view the world. One of the many avenues people tried to explore was categorizing people. The only instrument people had to do this at the time was basically looking at them, so people settled on skin color, more or less, as a sorting mechanism. They tried (and tried and tried) to tie this to something more grounded, like measurements, but they couldn’t really get anything to stick.
None of the other criteria stuck because skin color isn’t a good sorting mechanism. “Black”, for example, lumps in more genetic diversity than the rest of the planet combined. Pick three black people and you can easily end up with more generic difference than a Sri Lankan, a Cherokee and an Estonian. There is no common genetic thread tying together all the people we call “black.”
Added to that, it turns out people like sex, and have liked it for a long time. So lots of people are literally all over the map genetically. It’s not even a neat little gradient as one blends into another. We’ve been blending and mixing since the beginning of time, and outside of very isolated places, there never has been “racial purity”.
Unfortunately, before we figured this all out, racism has been hijacked for social purposes. It was an age of exploration, colonialism and slavery, and racial categories were turned into an hierarchy in order to support that. By the time we had the technology to figure out that racism was bunk, these categories had already become entrenched in society in very real ways, with very real consequences on people’s lives.
So we ended up with our admittedly bizarre situation today, where race as a scientific concept has been debunked, but race as a social category continues. Because there is no “real” foundation to race, it definitely is inconsistent and nonsensical at times. But, again, it has too much social history to just throw it out all together.
Think of it like castes in India. At one time, there was an accepted explanation for sorting people into castes. But we’ve now realized that people probably didn’t spring from different parts of Brahma’s body. But caste is still a part of social reality. And so while there may be some genetic correlations to some caste categories, that’s not really what caste is about and generics doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.
TLDR: While there are apparent correlations between race and genetic origin, that doesn’t mean there is a correlation between racial categorization and actual science. Kind of like how leeches are medically useful, but the four humors theory of medicine is still completely wrong.
No, I get it. You guys are reading stuff into my posts that simply isn’t there. Virtually every reply for Ascenray and Rat has attributed a position to me that I have not made.
I never said genetics defines race. Never once. I simply stated the PROVEN FACT that in the US you can correlate a person’s race (as defined socially) with his genetic profile to some degree of accuracy. Period. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s not a 100% correlation, and there are known problems associated with it.
I’m sorry if you don’t like that or if it somehow upsets your political opinions, but it’s a fact. And I don’t bend facts to fit politics. I originally won’t “we” in that last sentence, but apparently that isn’t true. Some of us do.
I’m done. This is actually a stupid hijack from the original topic of the thread anyway.
I’m so confused.
Absolutely, many many people would think that. But that person might well be Melanesian, or Negrito, or Indigenous Australian or others. Or mixed, and self-identify as something other than black.
No you did not. The US Census specifically sez they did not do a “definition”. “The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.” (bolding mine)
When they do that, since the dead body can’t self-identify, they are saying "our guess is that his person likely self-identified as xxx’. In the case of mixed parentage, they often cant even do that. And of course if the bones are more than 500 years old, the chance they will be Amerind is pretty close to 100%. Of course, most Amerinds wouldn’t say they were any given ‘race’ they’d self identify as to tribe.
I don’t think you are. You hit on it earlier, when you linked to the article about the man who found out about his ancestry. Here is a similar story:
Being black in America is meaningful.
Race is a completely meaningless concept, denied by everyone from anthropologists to geneticists. The fact that there is far more genetic diversity between two African populations than between an African population and a European population proves in itself that race is pretty much meaningless. Race doesn’t exist. Race is a myth.
But black? Black is very, very real.
When my father, when my grandmother, when any of my ancestors, walked out of their door, that reality was proven. How many of my ancestors died for that reality? They were not seen as who they were, they were a black person.
I think John Mace and the others are talking past each other, because they are talking about 2 different things. I get what John is saying, and I get what the others are saying. The problem could be that both sides are using the term “Black”.
Sure, but the graph does a little more. It shows the tipping point in terms of % ancestry where half will self-identify as black and half will self-identify as white. It’s about 28%.
In other words it plots a bivariate relationship. Most relationships in the social sciences turn out to be multi-variate: in other words there is more than one determinant of racial self-identification. Plus an error term.
It’s sort of like studying perceptions of attractiveness in the US. It’s a question that can studied methodically (and has been, a little). Again, the measure of attractiveness will have a number of covariates, some reflecting the target, others the observer. And then you will get an error term.
Actually it isn’t that hard. Go over to the Vox article and skip down to the graph. Read the graph, read the surrounding minority-friendly text. The graph presents the facts. The rest is just spin.
Or definitional choices. John Mace thinks it’s meaningful to say his brother isn’t black whatever his brother says and I’m guessing he’s correct. But I think it’s fair to say that the Cajuns of New Orleans who have had racial epithets thrown at them and self-identify as black are black sociologically, even after they are surprised to find out they have no African ancestry for the past 15 generations (say). Now someone could argue that actually they are not black: people merely think they are black – apparently most people around them think they are black, including themselves. Such a definition wouldn’t exactly be unusual. I would merely argue that it’s silly. And possibly racist, though not necessarily in a KKK way. (Full disclosure of bias: I find accusations of racism to be alarming which is why I generally avoid them. Ibn has schooled me on this subject.)
Craig Cobb Continues Fighting To Prove He’s Actually White…
Craig Cobb really, really wants the world to know he’s white.
…Cobb had a second test completed that showed he was pure white, except for a “3% Iberian thing.”
“I’d appreciate it if honorable men will stop calling me 14% black,” Cobb pleaded today on Stormfront. “I wish my Wiki could get edited. … They currently have me listed as part African American. More Jew lies. I hope you can now see that at this late date in the matter.”
I think I can get behind mocking Craig Cobb. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s not unusual for those obsessed with race or anti-Semitism to have a fair number of awkward secrets.