So, you are claiming that white people are thieves. OK.
Yep. Decades. Hardly some significant period of time in human history. (And, of course, it ignores aspects of the Constitution that may have been borrowed from the Iroquois confederacy. It ignores the ways in which black contributions were deliberately hidden from history for decades. It ignores the very serious contributions by Africans (forcibly imported from that continent), and Asians, (lured from China, then Japan, only to be penalized in law for merely being here).
If you want to brag on white contributions, you must, in fairness, admit the many unethical acts of genocide, enslavement, hypocrisy, etc. perpetrated by whites.
So do flies, mosquitoes, roaches, rats, coyotes, etc. White nationalists are not comparable to any of those, however, simply existing in many places is hardly a recommendation of quality or admiration. You’re just there. No big deal when you are not actively violating the civil rights of your fellow citizens or trying to poison our children’s minds with distortions of history or science.
I never said anything contrary to this. There are tons – millions – of white Americans with mixed ancestry. These things are consistent with each other.
There are plenty of other studies that contradict this – see here. There are many sub-Saharan African populations that happen to be more closely related, by mitochondrial (female line) DNA, to European and Asian populations, then to certain other sub-Saharan populations. This makes logical sense – it’s logical to expect that Somalians are, on average, more closely related to Yemenis than to South Africans, and for Kenyans and Ethiopians to be more closely related to Somalians than to Namibians, and similar.
Because they recognize how despicable white supremacist beliefs are, and how much death, destruction, and horror has been caused by these beliefs. Really disgusting stuff, according to most white Americans. Genocide, slavery, and other stuff of nightmares.
Millions is a lot of people. If you want to say that millions of people doesn’t qualify as “tons”, then you can do that, but that’s just quibbling about descriptive metaphor. Lots and lots of people – a whole lot of white people – millions of white people – tons of white people.
Certainly it is possible for any given African to be more closely related to a specific non-African than a specific African. For example, many people in the Sahel would have some genetic contributions from the Berbers to the north, who in turn are related to some of the peoples of Iberia. Thus, you can have Africans in Mali or Senegal who are more closely related to people in Portugal than they are to people in southern Africa.
Too much to wade through, but in the US, race is a self-identification.
See Navin Johnson.
Genetically, there is about an 80% average of genetic material that is of recent sub-saharan (and typically, west african) origin for self-identified american blacks.
For self-identified whites, there might be a few percent that is non-european. “Mixed ancestry” is a pretty vague term, and does not typically go both ways equally as a percentage of recent continental origin, for self-identified race groups.
By definition, “race” is a self-identification, and therefore not a biological definition.
As a group average, there are biological generalizations that can be made for the standard self-identified US race groups in terms of what average percent of genetic material will reflect a continent of recent origin.
Those percentages are reflected in many practical physiological average differences. For any given individual (Navin, again), they become nonsensical. But if you were looking for cystic fibrosis, your best bet is a self-identified white. Ditto fair skin or blue eyes. If you are looking for a high creatine kinase, bet on a self-identified black male. If you are looking for Neandertal introgression, bet on a white. If you are looking for MCPH1 haplogroup D, bet on a self-identified white, again.
And so on, mostly thanks to the out of africa migration at the (mtDNA L3/M-N split).
If you are talking about heart disease in african americans, sure there may be some single gene mutations that can be mapped to some people but the majority of heart health problems in african americans is mostly due to the socioeconomic reality of being a disparaged minority.
While the black population subgroup has a generalized higher CK activity in tissues there is no hard link to a genetic “race”, as a non-scientific biological grouping of individuals as being the primary cause. There is one genetic mutation that does reduce the efficacy of one family of drugs, but that does not map to the entire historical grouping of african americans.
Purely a statement that correlation != causation.
Any single gene mutation is just as likely to be associated with the smith family from Ohio as it is to be from some defined historical place of origin, especially one mapped to historical racial categories. (Given enough time for their genes to spread)
To be clear, the TOTAL human nucleotide diversity is estimated to be 0.1% to 0.4% of base pairs.
So when someone says “80% average of genetic material that is of recent sub-saharan” those differences are even a smaller subset of that genetic diversity. The differences are truly tiny.
I’m glad to see that your are no longer pretending that the bizarro beliefs of Rushton represent scientific consensus: I accept your retraction. By way of pre-emption, I will interpret unsubstantiated denial of such retraction as evidence that you got nothing.
Your link indicates that there’s no definitive genetic marker for African ancestry, but that genetic markers in combination can be used to predict African ancestry, with imperfect accuracy. Yawn. Also from your link, “…caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes… A final complication arises when racial classifications are used as proxies for geographic ancestry. Although many concepts of race are correlated with geographic ancestry, the two are not interchangeable, and relying on racial classifications will reduce predictive power still further.”
No kidding.
Speaking in the most general sense, we encounter a fair number of crackpots and lunatics on this message board. Their argumentative patterns are fascinating. True Believers in Bigfoot / UFOs / Smog Monsters / Whatever will provide a stack of sightings of shiny lights in the sky, none of which survive, you know, scrutiny. But when confronted with this, Bigfoot fans will… pull another example out of their stack. At bottom, they lack the capacity to evaluate evidence: they can only compile link lists. The block is at bottom emotional, though it has cognitive implications. I don’t think Construct is doing this though: he probably recognized that when he championed Rushton, he picked the wrong race hero:
I knew Jensen was a nutcase, but I didn’t know he co-wrote papers with the penis intelligence guy.
Not clear. Goldberg may lack behavioral modules associated with empathy or impulse control. A psychiatric evaluation is appropriate, but he might prefer a shorter stay in prison to a longer stay at a psych ward.
Review of the Goldberg troll variation:
He made heavy use of sock puppets. When one guy figured out that Tanya Cohen was either a satirist or a phony, another Goldberg incarnation would oppose Tanya, insist she was a) real and sincere b) crazy and c) that there were a lot of people like her. “Tanya Cohen”:
Anyone guilty of hate speech – which should carry criminal penalties of 25 years to life – should be sent to special prisons designed to re-educate them and to instill values of tolerance, freedom, democracy, and human rights in them.
Not bad, but I doubt whether that would fly here.
List of alleged Goldberg troll variations on Reddit. I didn’t recognize any:
He posted a lot of racist stuff and cross-sock denunciations.
Also, he had lousy Op-Sec and I’m not surprised he was caught.
Your numbers are off, and your conclusions are invalid. There is no scientific support for this idea that genetic variances among populations are trivial or simply reflect the occasional disease state.
I recommend additional reading if you think the differences among groups are trivial.
Start with Neandertal introgression; for most out of africa (eurasian) population descendants, that contribution to their genome alone is about 1-4%, where in sub-saharan populations it is trivial, and then only where some back-diffusion has occurred in the last few thousand years–especially in east african populations. Perhaps 20 or 30% of the total Neandertal genome may have survived in modern eurasion populations. Out of the box, the average eurasian has 1-4% genetic material from an archaic hominem line that sub-saharans do not have; the survival of those genes suggest their contribution is not trivial.
Then look at whether or not the genetic differences we find in modern populations are due to Darwinian selection or just every group kind of getting the same random mutations which occasionally produce disease states. Eric Wang’s paper would be a good start. They used the Perlegen database to study genes (from european, han chinese and african american cohorts), and an LD decay test to parse out 1,800 gene variants driven by evolutionary selection and not bottlenecks, admixture, population inversions or other such things which might account for gene penetration within groups (they used :
*"1.6% of Perlegen SNPs were found to exhibit the genetic architecture of selection…
We outline several predominant biological themes among genes detected with this strategy and suggest that selection for alleles in these categories accompanied the major “out of Africa” population expansion of humankind and/or the radical shift from hunter–gatherer to agricultural societies…
Based on overrepresentation analysis, several predominant biological themes are common in these selected alleles, including host–pathogen interactions, reproduction, DNA metabolism/cell cycle, protein metabolism, and neuronal function…
The model that best explains these data is the ongoing balanced selection for these alleles for at least the last 40,000–50,000 years after the out-of-Africa expansion…"*
Next, look for differences in penetration or distribution for gene variants among populations. Start with the work on MCPH1 haplogroup D variant, before Bruce Lahn was forced to choose between that work and a career. Penetrance of that variant group into eurasian populations is on the order of 70%, suggesting strongly selection pressure (a conclusion which is controversial only because MCPH1 relates to brain capacity). Or perhaps you would like to consider the distribution of the ACTN3 R577X (nonsense) allele homozygosity by race.
Genetic differences driving phenotypic outcomes has very little to do with some sort of general diversity contest, or total percent nucleotide variation.
It has to do with the fact that human populations have real average differences in subsets of genes because of evolutionary drivers and historic migration patterns. We do not “define” a race biologically (a classic but ignorance-based strawman), but if we look at self-identified groups, it turns out those self-identifications reflect historic migrations, and in turn drive average gene pool frequency differences.
The differences are not “tiny” and the average outcome differences are not trivial. Regardless of the pap you might be being served in school, the Olympic 100 meter dash will not be getting Inuit representation anytime soon even if we totally change their cultural tastes toward power sprinting.
Genes. They work in humans like they work in animals, Creationist nonsense that we all come from about the same immutable gene pool notwithstanding.
These are non-factual descriptors. From what I can tell, we know that genes drive some non-trivial, non-tiny differences among human populations in certain characteristics – some part of skin and eye color, hair color and texture, likelihood of sickle-cell and some other genetic diseases, perhaps some other random superficial traits, and that’s about it (for what we absolutely 100% know because we’ve found the genes and the differences in populations). There are hypotheses that genes drive some other differences between populations – athletic success in certain sports, and for those who believe that black people are inherently intellectual inferior, intelligence (and sometimes things like aggression and criminality). But we haven’t found the genes for those traits.
To me, for what we know, the genetic differences between human populations in general are indeed trivial and tiny, and dwarfed by differences caused by culture.
You wanna make up straw-men and lump us “black-people-are-not-inherently-genetically-intellectually-inferior” folks in with Creationists, as you have for years on this board? Then I’ll lump you in with the white supremacists. Good luck defending affirmative action with them.
It’s funny that anti-racists require a 100% standard of proof for any racial differences in any characteristic, while they’re willing to accept highly speculative science elsewhere, like in climate change.
“Show me the genes” is the functional equivalent of the “show me the monkey man” argument used by creationists. It’s a good guess at what an effective argument would be, but it’s wrong. We now know that all behavior traits are heritable and that “heritability is caused by many genes of small effect”, which are difficult to detect even in extremely large data sets. That doesn’t mean that humans are blank slates as egalitarians would like us to believe.
No such “egalitarians” here, and I know of no one who thinks that humans are blank slates or that genes don’t influence human behavior and characteristics. I have no doubt that genes are involved in intelligence and most or all other human characteristics.
I know building up straw men and knocking them down is pretty much what passes for arguing among white supremacists, but it’s probably not going to work here. We’ve heard it all before.
Now, there’s a much stronger claim that hasn’t been shown, which is that the difference in IQ or various other measures of scholastic ability of differing races is due to genetic variation rather than cultural variation. And given the crazy-wide variances of average behavior of all kinds we see across historical populations with functionally identical genomes, culture obviously is a huge influence on behavior. But genes are, too.
I’m pretty sure no one disagrees with this, except these fantasy non-existent “egalitarians” that float around in the imaginations of white supremacists (and perhaps others).
That may not have been the argument you were making, but the belief that environment alone is responsible for all human differences is not a strawman. It’s a reputable argument made by otherwise intelligent people such as Stephen Gould and is common in the dispute over the black-white IQ gap.
All human differences (including between individuals), or differences in non-superficial characteristics like intelligence between populations (not individuals)? Gould doesn’t that all human differences between individuals are from environment alone. I’m unaware of anyone who believes that, and it’s certainly not a reputable argument.
Gould may have made that argument somewhere (though I doubt it), but he certainly didn’t make it in The Mismeasure of Man. He didn’t say anything even remotely approaching that, in fact.
I ask this not to be puerile, but since you cited J. Phillipe Rushton as one of your sources, do you actually subscribe to his belief that because “white people” have “big brains” they also have “really small penises”?
To me he’s an obvious quack with pretty ear inadequacy issues?
Why do you disagree and treat him like a serious scientist?
