My OP, was more about whether race could be a choice which people self identify. Not about discrediting King. While Breitbart’s source may have been from a known troll, I still think that King’s childhood photos show no hint of African ancestry. Considering he claims he doesn’t know who is father is, and no paternity test has ever been done, I fail to see how he can conclusively say he knows for sure that he is bi-racial. And more likely that he has self identified as bi-racial.
It’s quite possible to have recent African ancestry and not show it. His mother told him his father was black (a light-skinned black man), so he does know that. It would be odd for her to lie about something like that, and it would be odder still for us to expect him to think she did.
I looked whiter as a child than I do now, I am half black. It’s amazing in 2015, we are so ignorant of the existence of mixed people and how they work, we might as well be trying to read tea leaves.
Wow. Let’s look at the paper you cited. The very first sentence of the abstract repudiates your claim.
[QUOTE=Witherspoon et al]
The proportion of human genetic variation due to differences between populations is modest, and individuals from different populations can be genetically more similar than individuals from the same population.
[/QUOTE]
You said all African people are closer related to other Africans than other racial groups. The scientists said that genetic variation due differences between populations is modest and that furthermore (to use an example) an African can easily be more genetically related to a European than another African.
I warn my fellow posters that ** Construct** appears to be misrepresenting the science.
The authors go on to state that using more genetic markers (like, say, 100) makes it easier to distinguish between populations. But that doesn’t mean that you can say definitively that a guy from Africa will be more related to another guy from Africa than he is to a European guy, based on those 100 markers. Some fraction of the time that simply won’t be the case. Values for the dissimilarity fraction were reported to be 20% in the study for 50 markers if I understand it properly. If I’m eyeballing the chart correctly, it appears to be above 10% if you work with 150 markers. The authors conclude:
[QUOTE=Witherspoon et al ]
The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes.
[/QUOTE]
The disparity between what the scientific paper says and Construct’s claims about it are stunning.
Let me add some broader context. Even the paper offered by Construct co-written by the penis intelligence guy linked to upthread noted that variation in intelligence scores was huge compared to the small sliver of the differences in scores between races. Basically you have two closely spaced lines in a vast sea of observation points. The two race writers even showed this in their first chart (though they repressed the effect in their 2nd chart).
I think it’s reasonable to wonder what the hell they are going on about at that point and furthermore pretty dubious to think that they can tease out nature from nurture on the basis of this weak effect embedded within rather noisy data. Set that aside though.
I’m wondering whether Construct grasps this aspect of the science. He hasn’t as yet shown evidence that he does, though I referred to this graph on the previous page. Maybe the discussion is getting too technical. At any rate, I haven’t seen him address these papers in non-tendentious manner.
This point is nothing new; its exactly what iiiiandyii said above. It’s also a complete misunderstanding of the data.
Humans can be genetically categorized into as many population groups as one desires. For example, if you choose five genetic groups, they’ll correspond to White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Austronesian. If you choose six groups, they’ll correspond to White, Black, Asian, Native American, Polynesian, and Australian Aboriginal. Any number is more or less equally valid. The authors state that for a large number of populations (“the most distinct populations”) individuals may be closer related to an outgroup than their ingroup. But for the specific claim in question, for which they used the three largest genetic groups, they found than an individual will never be more closely related to someone of a different population group than their own. So there’s no contradiction between what I quoted and what you posted; you just made a misleading response intending to pretend that I was misrepresenting the source.
It’s also utterly unclear how exactly believing that individuals from different populations can be more genetically similar than individuals from the same population proves the invalidity of race. A person from India can be taller than a person from the Netherlands, but it’s still true to say that Dutch are taller than Indians. And likewise, even if a person of Indian descent was more closely related to Dutch people than to other Indians, that wouldn’t make the concept of ethnicity invalid.
It’s certainly a correct interpretation that if you use a subset of the available information, e.g. 50 or 100 genetic markers, you’ll wind up with individuals more closely related to outgroups than ingroups. But partial sequencing is a kludge used to account for the high cost and time involved in complete genetic sequencing. Complete genetic sequencing, however, is of course the only type of sequencing that matters here, since it is all of an individual’s genome, not just a subset of whatever genes are easier to work with, that determines their identity.
Racial differences in IQ are still extremely meaningful, especially at the far upper bounds of the normal distribution. It’s a nearly universally accepted fact, for example, that White Americans have an average IQ of 100, and Black Americans have an average IQ of 85. Explanations of the causes of this gap differ, but its existence itself is accepted across the field of psychometrics. And what this gap implies that:
50% of whites have an IQ above 100, compared to 15% of blacks, a multiple of 3.33
15% of whites have an IQ above 115, compared to 2.2% of blacks, a multiple of 6.81
2.2% of whites have an IQ above 130, compared to .135% of blacks, a multiple of 16.2
And this overrepresentation of Whites only continues as you move towards the extremes of the bell curve. At the absolute limits, for examples, gentile whites drop out, and the population is composed of Asians and Ashkenazi Jews. I don’t possibly see how you can say that racial differences in IQ are meaningless, or even more suggest that this is actually the consensus in the field, given that the white overrepresentation increases with IQ and that IQ “is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality.”
The debate over the heritability of IQ between races is not typically determined from simply a population level sample, but rather from studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study, which suggested that racial differences in cognitive ability were largely heritable.
This is mostly false – there are populations that probably add up to hundreds of millions of people (if not billions) who don’t fit into any of these categories… where would you put Andaman Islanders? Malagasy? Sri Lankans? Persians? Somalians and Ethiopians? How about the San, which are further from many “black” groups than those “black” groups are from Europeans and Asians?
Further, it’s entirely trivial: “Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace, philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther, and geneticist Joseph Graves, have argued that while there it is certainly possible to find biological and genetic variation that corresponds roughly to the groupings normally defined as “continental races”, this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is therefore dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups the clusters become continental, if one had chosen other sampling patterns the clustering would be different. Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being clinally composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials.[37] Kaplan and Winther therefore argue that seen in this way both Lewontin and Edwards are right in their arguments. They conclude that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. Moreover, the genomic data underdetermines whether one wishes to see subdivisions (i.e., splitters) or a continuum (i.e., lumpers). Under Kaplan and Winther’s view, racial groupings are objective social constructions (see Mills 1998 [38]) that have conventional biological reality only insofar as the categories are chosen and constructed for pragmatic scientific reasons.”
One can divide up humans into any number categorizations, all of which are equally valid in these terms. “Black, white, asian…” is no more or less valid than “Maori, Icleandic, and Mayan” – and there are an infinite variety of other categorizations. It’s not coincidence that white supremacists insist that the categorizations must be exactly the same as the pre-scientific (and entirely non-scientific) categories of 19th century racial pseudoscience.
To get the answer of “black, white, asian…” and the like, you must intentionally start with those categorizations – use any other grouping (like the aforementioned Icelanders, Mayans, and Maori) and those will be the groupings that one concludes exist.
There were no magical barriers between Africa and Eurasia, or between Asia and Europe. There was always genetic interchange between neighboring populations. The relationships were and remain entirely clinal – the racial categorizations are based on sociological phenomena and not biology. Just as it was thousands of years ago, the people in any given village (or island, or whatever) look pretty much exactly the same as the people in the neighboring village (or island, or whatever), in general, around the world.
I know reality sucks for white supremacists – that’s why they continually live in their fantasy world in which scientists secretly agree that black people are inherently inferior. But there’s no reason to spew this nonsense in public.
From the first sentence of the abstract of the article:
I can get into the weeds of number of loci and samples sizes, but to be honest I’m not sure you are interested. After all, your posts are flatly contradicted by your sources. Full disclosure: I am not a biologist.
In the US, at least, by definition “race and ethnicity” is a self-identification.
Federally (and this filters down to the States), race and ethnicity data is collected using a couple of questions, and that’s it. There isn’t any genetic test; there aren’t any followup questions to see who is gaming their category, or mistaken.
Socially, it’s also a self-identification. I President Obama wants to be black, he can be black, even if genetically he is at least half european, and even his african side also contains any number of genes from out of africa populations.
With such crude categories to begin with, and without any practical means to require self-identifiers to figure out which proportion of their genes come from where, it would be ridiculous to have any means other than self-identification to decide what race you are. There aren’t any biological definitions of race.
Our US society is loaded with individuals who identify with a given race but whose genetic makeup comes from all over the place, so it also ends up being kind of cultural complaint to start making charges against those thought to be faking it.
From a biological perspective, for large enough groups, you can make some generalizations about average genetic makeup of a “race” group, because self-identification closely enough parallels migration patterns such that distinct group averages for the percent of genes from a given source pool arise.
For an individual, an argument around whether they should self-identify with a race is not a biological argument, unless you first establish a biological definition. We have long since decided that’s a ridiculous approach.
I was deeply amused that Rachel Dolezal got so much heat for trying to self-identify with black from many people who had long touted the idea that race cannot be defined biologically. Now this poor guy.
L. O. L.
Not “magical” barriers. Geographic barriers which open and close migratory gates.
That’s why we see such marked average differences in genetic material if we create groupings which reflect those geographic barriers.
For example, after humans migrated out of africa, Neandertal (and Denisovan) genes from much more ancient lineages were introgressed into the out of africa descendant lines. The out of africa barrier (perhaps at Bab-el-Mandeb Strait) closed due to climate change, and the out of africa group became separated from most of sub-saharan africa for the following 70,000 years. Neandertal genes penetrated so widely in eurasian populations, and were so well preserved, that an average of something like 1-4% of modern eurasian genetic material is from that very archaic lineage. If you were to look at the average sub-saharan genetic material, it would reflect very little Neandertal genetic material because of that geographic barrier. The barrier is not absolute (because it’s not magical, maybe?); you could find exceptions such as the horn of africa or perhaps the Sahel (Sahara geographic gate) where the geographic barrier was not absolute, and back migration of out-of-africa genes occurred.
A second type of barrier is cultural, which also slows distribution of gene variants. (Also not magical. 
)
You seem to feel that throwing in comments about white supremacists and black inferiority lends weight to whatever position you hold. I recommend additional reading and trying to present facts, but I guess one grasps at straws and rhetoric when facts are thin?
As I mentioned, Nature ignores “supremacy” and “inferiority” except for reproductive success. And as for whites in particular, she doesn’t seem to have doled out to them either the gifted athletic genes or the gifted intellect genes, since whites as a group average do not float to the top of either category.
I think the white supremacists probably should have given up (and maybe most of them did) when the Nazis crapped out against the black Olympians. 
But in any case, that kind of rhetoric is utterly non-contributory.
the amusement would show that you have never understood their arguments - but this has been obvious for a long time in the strawmanning.
a cultural definition that excludes someone with no touch of descent relationship with an ethnic group is quite common in the world, so the social-cultural logic is perfectly consistent with their observations.
Agreed. Also, as a friend of mine said, “You can’t be a black woman unless you’ve known what it’s like to grow up as a black girl”.
Rachel Dolezal grew up as a white girl but Shaun White by contrast grew up as a black boy.
Right – and it’s not absolute anywhere else, because there were exchanges between the Sahel and Horn and their neighbors, and those neighbors further south, and the like. Sure, there are differences, but they’re entirely clinal.
I call 'em like I see 'em. The white supremacist stuff is not specifically directed at you – it’s directed at Construct, who has made pretty openly white supremacist assertions in multiple other threads. Such bigotry is entirely relevant in a discussion about whether or not black people are inherently intellectually inferior, on average.
While it’s entirely possible that different groups have differing average genes for various characteristics (including intelligence and athletic ability), it’s impossible to utilize outcome differences (including test scores and athletic statistics) to determine this when society is still profoundly unequal at every level. Differing test scores, when there still exists significant discrimination, significantly different media depictions, and significant differences in so many other aspects of society, tell us absolutely nothing about genes when it comes to group differences.
I’ll also point out, once again, the ridiculousness in believing that 19th century views about black people’s intelligence would lead people to support affirmative action, when today the people who still hold such archaic views are the least likely to advocate for any policies that might help minorities. The best reason to support affirmative action is because society is still profoundly unequal, even at higher levels of income, and such policies are necessary to make an attempt to balance a seriously unbalanced playing field. Some day, hopefully, such policies will no longer be needed.
It’s disgusting, isn’t it? A good honest man like Shaun King, trying to shine a light on police brutality with a passion that unsettles certain interest groups, being ripped to shreds by a very creepy accusation against him and yet people jump in with glee without actually considering the sources.
Oh, they considered the sources. They considered them to be worth believing. Which is, frankly, really depressing.
I think you are really stretching to describe as clinal the genetic distribution differences across the out of africa geographic boundary. Perhaps looking up the penetration of MCPH1 haplogroup D into eurasian populations versus sub-saharan african populations would be a good exercise for you.
Scattered migration pocket exceptions do not create clinal differences that erase broad averages.
So now instead of a genetic test for blackness we are going to substitute a black culture test?
Who passes, and how?
Self-identification is…self identification.
Biology is biology.
And there isn’t a Society of Black-ness that owns the definition of either.
If it’s not clinal, then where is the break (or breaks)? Where, specifically, can you travel from one village to the next and find huge differences? If there’s not a specific place (i.e. these two villages in Sudan, or similar), then it’s entirely clinal.
Thats a gross misreading of what I said.
Your concern for minorities is, as always quite touching.
Anyway I have no desire to get into another discussion of why black people are stupid.