Meh, your grasping. He said the average S. American was multi-racial. Do you have a citation that thats not the case?
then show me the evidence. Rereading Argentines - Wikipedia and White Brazilians - Wikipedia would be a good start.
Incidentally, so just how “genetically” white do you need to be to be white? If a Brazilian white person has a black female ancestor five generations ago, is he genetically white enough for you? Or are we supposed to go to the one drop rule here to better appreciate the diversity?
You have to have a genetic definition of “white” in the first place. Europeans have so extensively interbred with non-Europeans over the centuries that picking out a population of white-looking people who happen to live in Argentina really gives you no confidence at all that you have any kind of genetically groupable set.
Although Argentina’s population is mostly descended from Europeans, it is exceptional in the region.
This is total nonsense. While about 52% of of Brazilians are classified as “white,” the “white” classification in Brazil as elsewhere is a social construct, and many such people have have between 10-20% non-European ancestry. Many of these “whites” are descended from Portuguese colonists who arrived centuries ago. There are pockets of more recent European immigrants who may be endogamous to an extent, but they don’t make up anything close to half the population.
There is no “white region” in Bolivia.
do you realize that your attitude has the technical name of “obscurantism”? If God wanted us to fly, we would have had wings. If Lady Science wanted us to make statistically valid statements about white people in South America, she would have made them 100% endogamous going back ten thousand years. Or something 
To find new knowledge you need to set out with an attitude that “yes, I can find it”. Maybe you will first discover phlogiston and other such bunk. So you can improve on that. Or, instead, you can just sit there saying “nah, too complicated”. Freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength, so to speak.
Maybe you should try reading them.
From your second link:
We’re talking about much higher percentages than one ancestor five generations back.
how many are the “many”? And how many are descendants of Italian, Slavic and German immigrants without any mixed race people thrown in?
The outfit that did one drop rule type of genetic identification in Germany in 1930s used to look up people’s family trees going back to 18th century, based on parish records. So maybe we should learn from the experts in the field 
Well, Brazilian white people are historically pretty Catholic, right? And I think the state marriage registers were set up in the more advanced areas already in late 19th century. So perhaps if the claims about non white admixture based on 10th generation single ancestor get too much out of hand, you can just start scanning these archival documents and analyzing the last names and other ethnicity-correlated information.
Overall, if you have somebody whose ancestors were “socially white” for the last 4-5 generations, and most of those ancestors happen to have distinctly immigrant last names, then that sounds to me is strong evidence that the guy’s family tree has been mostly white.
please clarify. You can have Amerindian MtDNA even if your female ancestors kept marrying purely white men for ten generations, right? That’s not necessarily what has been happening with all these Argentinian and Brazilian whites with non-white MtDNA, but you cannot make meaningful arguments about major admixture just based on that.
You tell me. You were the one who claimed more than half the population consisted of endogenous white immigrants.
Godwinizing an argument pretty much indicates you have no factual information to contribute.
I’ll wait while you do the research.
Again, show me the data.
There’s other evidence of admixture as well. Read the cites.
another way to look at the matter would be, racial classifications are done in the manner that is useful to the guy doing them. E.g. if it was useful for Obama to self-classify as black and not mixed race on his census form, then that’s what he did.
It is my contention that classifying the “social” white people of Argentina and Brazil as “white” is a very useful thing (not to mention more accurate than the Obama case). They do look like other, presumably “purer” whites, they behave like them (temperament and stuff 
) etc. Their countries run in ways that are not inherently dissimilar from how European countries like Italy or Spain run.
Classifying the dark skinned mixed race Brazilians as “dark skinned mixed race Brazilians” is also pretty useful. You can make all sorts of useful generalizations about them and the regions they live in based on that.
Whereas the utility of categorizing all white looking people in South America as “mixed race” seems to me like an exercise in diluting the meaning of the word “mixed race”. They are mixed race, we are mixed race, everybody is mixed race, yay! Once the term is applied without discrimination, it becomes indiscriminate and meaningless.
At which point we go back to the drawing board and use another term. Then we ask "is there scientific evidence of temperament differences between the “socially white” Brazilians and other Brazilians. Which brings us back to what I told to John Mace - that if he wants to disagree with other people on the intuitive meaning of “teperament”, he should start by providing a decent definition of his own. Which he never bothered to do in this thread, surprisingly enough.
you seem to have pre-conceived notions about your fellow Dopers.
An example of acting West African would be having an earlier age of menarche in teenage girls compared to white or Chinese norms.
And what do you call it when you insist on creating a group based on superficial characteristics and drawing conclusions about its genetic characteristics when there is no evidence that this group constitutes any kind of population that is distinguishable from any other group of humans on the basis of genetics?
Or, maybe, that “white people in South America” is not a valid group for comparing with other groups on a genetic basis.
What would you say about a study that sought to compare the genetic characteristics of two groups, one whose names begin with the letters A and B, and another whose names begin with the letters C to Z?
code_grey, you seem to have missed the entire point of the discussion so far. No one is denying that “race” as a social construct is not of great significance in human societies. Neither is anyone disputing that there might be differences in “temperament” between ethnic or social groups due to cultural factors. So your next to last post is completely irrelevant to the questions posed in the OP.
when did I ever say that groups should be distinguishable purely through genetics? Why, we can distinguish them as clusters of many parameters, only some of which being genetic.
E.g. if we figure out that the miracle cancer drug X works wonders just for left handed people who said the first word at precisely 9 months of age, then that would be a useful group to separate out for analysis. No matter how incompatible existence of such a group may be with our preconceived notions of what are the groups we should care about.
Similarly, if we figure out that melanin levels are a major factor in making an American citizen a bigger or smaller credit risk, even when controlled for income, then that becomes an interesting way of grouping people and analyzing some very relevant aspect of their “temperament” :). At least, if the government lets you do that.
might there be temperament differences due to different age of menarche? Or maybe due to different thickness of various brain regions that the progress in fMRI has uncovered or will eventually uncover?
I mean, I know that “the blood is red in everybody” is a profound scientific insight, but it may be just a tad dated a breakthrough.
code_grey, now you’re just bullshitting (as you’ve mostly been doing all along). I don’t think there’s any further need to engage you.
actually, brain fMRI differences between racial groups is AFAIK the gold standard of “scientific racism” nowadays. Menarche is a lower quality argument, I agree.
So you picked just the right time to disengage 
ETA: here is one of such attack by dastardly scientific racists Variability in Frontotemporal Brain Structure: The Importance of Recruitment of African Americans in Neuroscience Research - PMC . I don’t think it will be the only one either. So if you thought that explaining away the hormones is easy, eventually you will find yourself explaning away brain structure, especially in regions controlling the aspect of temperament we call “conscientiousness” and “future time orientation”.
with a question like that it’s so easy to step out of the logical lane. regarding the first part, i was obviously playing along with the premise that there really is such a thing as biological race. everyone else here is.
for the second, i thought historical mention already constituted data. but yes, i still have to show whether or not it supports my hypo.
Your cite uses only a single cite of a work that claims there is biological meaningful definition for race, then does not demonstrate that. It conflates concepts of race neutral research, self identification of race, ethnicity, and genetics.
It highlights the fact that genetic makeup is not an easy characteristic to determine in people, and self-identified races are a way to make a first guess at a genetic trait. Self-identified race is specified because the traditional superficial characteristic definitions of race were unreliable. But it’s justification for the accuracy of self-identified race was also based on non-genetic components, mixed with self-identification of specific ethnicities that correspond to specific populations.
It basically says that if you don’t know the genetic makeup of a person, you can take a good guess that if they self-identify as African-American they will have some genetic traits in common with some African populations. I wonder how many of my tax dollars were wasted on that.