Is there such a biological thing as a racial group?

[Chuck11]

delete

[GIGObuster]

@Chuck11

I don’t know what you mean by “imposed on science.” Race, in the taxonomic sense, was first used by taxonomists who were trying to make sense of the world (e.g Linnaeus). Taxonomy, of course, is a human ordering imposed on the world. “Racial” divisions of mankind were just part and parcel of that human imposition.

The scientists of the day followed the ideals of the society and ignored the warnings that were already there.

Retired Site | PBS

Science and the Justification for “Races”

What is so striking about the American experience in creating such an extreme conception of human differences was the role played by scientists and scholars in legitimizing the folk ideas. Scholarly writers began attempting to prove scientifically that “the Negro” was a different and lower kind of human being. The first published materials arguing from a scientific perspective that “negroes” were a separate species from white men appeared in the last decade of the eighteenth century. They argued that Negroes were either a product of degeneration from that first creation, or descendants of a separate creation altogether.

American intellectuals appropriated, and rigidified, the categories of human groups established by European scholars during the eighteenth century, but ignored Blumenbach’s caution that human groups blend insensibly into one another, so that it is impossible to place precise boundaries around them.

During discussions in the U.S. Senate on the future of “the negro” after slavery, James Henry Hammond proclaimed in 1858 “somebody has to be the mudsills of society, to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” Negroes were destined to be the mudsills. This was to be their place, one consciously created for them by a society whose cultural values now made it impossible to assimilate them. In the many decades since the Civil War, white society made giant strides to “keep the negro in his place.” Public policies and the customs and practices of millions of Americans expressed this racial worldview throughout the twentieth century.

These are some of the circumstances surrounding the origin of the racial worldview in North America. Race ideology was a mechanism justifying what had already been established as unequal social groups; it was from its inception, and is today, about who should have access to privilege, power, status, and wealth, and who should not. As a useful political ideology for conquerors, it spread into colonial situations around the world. It was promulgated in the latter half of the 19th century by some Europeans against other Europeans and reached its most extreme development in the twentieth century Nazi holocaust.

All anthropologists should understand that “race” has no intrinsic relationship to human biological diversity, that such diversity is a natural product of primarily evolutionary forces while “race” is a social invention.

[tomndebb]

@Chuck11

The author is quite clear. He argues that, given sociopolitical concerns, the race concept should not be used to characterize “human variation” even though it would be scientifically clearer (or something) to do otherwise. Perhaps doing so is socially wise.

“Or something.” It would not be scientifically more clear or else it would still be in use in science, today. Cavalli-Sforza published a fairly large number of papers discussing race througout his career until he began getting deeper into the data and finding that he could not find any evidence to justify that division. The rejection of “human race” in biology followed the data.

It might be easier for lay persons to follow more complex discussions if they could associate the data with a more familiar concept, such as race, but the discussions would be less accurate because the word has little biological support for its use.

[Chuck11]

@John_Mace

First of all, you don’t know what “non sequitur” means. But that’s another issue.

The chart from C-F are not clades. I mean, seriously, are you telling us that “Europeans” are clade? Where’s the boundary? Who is a “European” and who is a “non-European”?

You are taking some general conclusion about the ancestry of certain populations and making claims about the reproductive isolation of those populations that simply aren’t correct.

@John_Mace

First of all, you don’t know what “non sequitur” means. But that’s another issue.

I said: “Instead, you argue that since populations are phenotypically continuous, such divisions are biologically … arbitrary. Elsewhere , I pointed out that this is a non sequitur”

A non sequitur is an argument in which the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises. As I am reconstructing your argument, you have:

Premise 1. racial divisions would be biologically arbitrary if the populations were continuous
Premise 2. racial populations are phenotypically continuous
Conclusion. racial populations are biologically arbitrary.

Your conclusion, in fact, does not follow from the premises. The populations could be discontinuous in a non-phenotypic way.) Hence, it’s non sequitur. (At least as I am constructing it).

The chart from C-F are not clades. I mean, seriously, are you telling us that “Europeans” are clade? Where’s the boundary? Who is a “” and who is a “”?

You are taking some general conclusion about the ancestry of certain populations and making claims about the reproductive isolation of those populations that simply aren’t correct.

I’m not sure what you don’t understand about the idea of clades. The human population branched out from some place in African. Imagine the letter Y – as you move up the Y, you have two branches that diverge from a node. The “boundaries” are the genealogical differences (and the accompanying genetic differences) between the end points. Who’s a Caucasians? A Caucasians would be a descendant of the population that made its way to the region which we call the Caucasus that descends from the population that split off from the population that split off, etc. from the Ur-African population. The substantive point you make, here, concerns isolated breeding populations. In cladistics, you only need reasonable isolated populations, not absolute, across enough of time to make the clades differentiatable by other criteria. With humans we have that which is why Caucasians can be identified by cluster analysis.

[Chuck11]

@tomndebb

“Or something.” It would not be scientifically more clear or else it would still be in use in science, today. Cavalli-Sforza published a fairly large number of papers discussing race througout his career until he began getting deeper into the data and finding that he could not find any evidence to justify that division. The rejection of “human race” in biology followed the data.

It might be easier for lay persons to follow more complex discussions if they could associate the data with a more familiar concept, such as race, but the discussions would be less accurate because the word has little biological support for its use.

I was interpreting the author’s cryptic statement: “What do we lose by giving up race as a biological concept? We lost some instant recognition of what we do. It takes a bit longer to explain human variation.” It seems you have a different interpretation.

Cavalli-Sforza…I’ve already discussed Cavalli-Sforza. He rejects the idea of human subspecies; he argued that there is no major genetic discontinuity. Yet, he clearly recognizes population clusters that correspond to what others consider to be human subspecies and he clearly thinks there is some genetic discontinuity between the groupings that he, himself, has called races. He, of course, has never stated (in any of the articles that you cite or that I am aware of) what would qualify as a major genetic discontinuity or what criteria we should use to determine if there are human subspecies, so we are left to try to figure this out ourselves.

[Chuck11]

@GIGObuster

The scientists of the day followed the ideals of the society and ignored the warnings that were already there

I really am quite unworried about the dangers of racialism; the danger makes the topic all the more enticing to me. As it is, I wrote quite a bit about the plausibility of a genetic basis to the Black-White IQ gap. I’m not interested in debating the issue here. The issues are logically independent.

[John_Mace]

@Chuck11

I’m not sure what you don’t understand about the idea of clades. The human population branched out from some place in African. Imagine the letter Y – as you move up the Y, you have two branches that diverge from a node. The “boundaries” are the genealogical differences (and the accompanying genetic differences) between the end points. Who’s a Caucasians? A Caucasians would be a descendant of the population that made its way to the region which we call the Caucasus that descends from the population that split off from the population that split off, etc. from the Ur-African population. The substantive point you make, here, concerns isolated breeding populations. In cladistics, you only need reasonable isolated populations, not absolute, across enough of time to make the clades differentiatable by other criteria. With humans we have that which is why Caucasians can be identified by cluster analysis.

Oh, I understand clades just fine. I understand them well enough to know that “Europeans” aren’t one. Europeans are not “reasonably isolated”. Anyone looking at Europe, Western Asia and Middle East can see that, and the paper you linked to earlier by C-S demonstrated it.

I don’t know why you switched to “Caucasian”, when the chart you linked to had “Europeans”, but what that chart calls “Caucasoid” is not a group of people originating in the Caucus region. It was early racialists who came up with the term “Caucasian” because they took current residents of that area to be what we’d call the type specimen for the race, if there was such a thing.

[John_Mace]

@Chuck11

Cavalli-Sforza…I’ve already discussed Cavalli-Sforza. He rejects the idea of human subspecies; he argued that there is no major genetic discontinuity. Yet, he clearly recognizes population clusters that correspond to what others consider to be human subspecies and he clearly thinks there is some genetic discontinuity between the groupings that he, himself, has called races. He, of course, has never stated (in any of the articles that you cite or that I am aware of) what would qualify as a major genetic discontinuity or what criteria we should use to determine if there are human subspecies, so we are left to try to figure this out ourselves.

I think you need to go back a read that cite. In particular:

Further support for the conclusions of this study comes from the observation that, almost without exception, gene frequencies form smooth clines over all continents (22). Zones of discontinuity in human gene frequency distributions are present, but the local gradients are so small that they can be identified only by simultaneously studying many loci using complex statistical techniques (23). In addition, such regions of relatively sharp genetic change do not surround large clusters of populations, on a continental or nearly continental scale. On the contrary, they occur irregularly, within continents and even within single countries (24, 25), often overlapping with geographic and linguistic barriers (26–29). Genetic enclaves seem to be mostly limited to islands. Probably any two populations compared at a sufficient number of loci may be shown to differ, as suggested by the fact that several variances among populations, although low in relative terms, are statistically significant in this study. However, this has little to do with the subdivision of the human population into a small number of clearly distinct, racial or continental, groups. The existence of such broad groups is not supported by the present analysis of DNA.

[GIGObuster]

@Chuck11

I really am quite unworried about the dangers of racialism; the danger makes the topic all the more enticing to me. As it is, I wrote quite a bit about the plausibility of a genetic basis to the Black-White IQ gap. I’m not interested in debating the issue here. The issues are logically independent.

Of course they are. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, this discussion is not happening in a vacuum, check the pit thread for illumination.

Of curse, if it does not worry you, it could mean that seeding doubt is the point for later looking for underhanded “solutions” to the issue.

[Belowjob2.0]

@Chuck11

I really am quite unworried about the dangers of racialism; the danger makes the topic all the more enticing to me. As it is, I wrote quite a bit about the plausibility of a genetic basis to the Black-White IQ gap. I’m not interested in debating the issue here. The issues are logically independent.

Your blog merely regurgitates the same racialist pseudoscience that’s been refuted on this board over and over again.

http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/index-of-articles-and-references-for-hbd-and-race-realism/

Index of Articles and References for HBD and Race Realism

As soon as you refer to yourself as a “race realist”, I know all I need to know about you.

[GIGObuster]

@Belowjob2.0

Your blog merely regurgitates the same racialist pseudoscience that’s been refuted on this board over and over again.

http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/index-of-articles-and-references-for-hbd-and-race-realism/

As soon as you refer to yourself as a “race realist”, I know all I need to know about you.

Yep, my observation that you can recognize the level of your opponent in a discussion by the cites he/she produces is a valid one, it is more so when we are pointed to their blogs.

Really, if one thinks that it has the material to overcome what others recommend about the use of the race term, then publish that in a journal and face the criticism of your peers, otherwise what we have here is just the musings of a blogessor.

What it is clear is that most, if not all of the scientists cited that continue to use old race definitions report that their use of the race term is as a proxy, not to be used to conclude or justify bad political or societal solutions.

[Chen019]

@Belowjob2.0

Your blog merely regurgitates the same racialist pseudoscience that’s been refuted on this board over and over again.

http://abc102.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/index-of-articles-and-references-for-hbd-and-race-realism/

This isn’t correct.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

This isn’t correct.

Well, when the cat is out of the bag…

As the interpretations and posts are coming from blogs, it is then ok to point at the blogs that oppose this.

Incidentally, I can see that many have also reached the same conclusions that I have regarding the lack of support and reliance on conspiracy theories that proponents of using race are coming with.

Most of the cites are twisted by Scientific racists and then mindlessly followed by some posters here.

The bloggers that are hung up on old race definitions and solutions make four big mistakes:

Scientific racism: Con

1. Correlation does not equal causation

Just because blacks in America have a higher crime rate or a lower average IQ does not necessarily mean the cause is mainly genetic. To come to such a conclusion you would have to assume that racism is pretty much dead, that American society is just so gosh-darn fair to everyone that genetics is pretty much all that remains to account for the differences.

2. Confirmation bias

Scientific racists notice the cases that prove their ideas while overlooking those that disprove them. But in science it is the exceptions that disprove the rule. That is why the law of gravity is still a part of science: no known exceptions!

3. Lack of expertise

Look at the race realists and HBDers you hear about most:

Steve Sailer, journalist/computer salesman.
J. Philippe Rushton, psychologist.
Francis Fukuyama, political economist.
Steve Hsu, astrophysicist.
Richard Herrnstein, psychologist.
Charles Murray, political scientist.
Arthur Jensen, psychology professor.

You notice anything strange? No biologists or anthropologists, much less geneticists.

Why in the world should we trust these people over biologists and anthropologists, the very people who study these things for a living? To leave no stone unturned, some biologists and anthropologists have even written books about race for the general public:

“Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Jared Diamond, biologist
“The Mismeasure of Man”, Stephen Jay Gould, biologist
“Genes, Peoples, and Languages”, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, geneticist
“Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Human Race”, Ashley Montagu, anthropologist

These books are good to help you overcome the racist brainwashing of American society.

4. Conspiracy theories

The reason scientific racists give for trusting, say, Steve Sailer, a computer salesman, over Cavalli-Sforza, a professor of human genetics who has, like, studied race, is, wait for it, that people like Cavalli-Sforza secretly agree with them but are too afraid to say so in public! Have they gone mad?

One item that that source is missing IMHO is that most of the people cited by the race realists do not agree with the solutions that posters that are hung up on the race issue are coming with. As the forensic guy from the NOVA show mentioned, he is just asking for the freedom to use a tool like race even if they do not believe in the solutions that some people think the research is leading to.

[Chen019]

@John_Mace

I think you need to go back a read that cite. In particular:

There is an interesting discussion of the cline/cluster issue by Rosenberg & co here. They look at far more loci than the Cavalli-Sforza paper and find clusters as well as clines. Genetic distance increases in a clinal manner within the clusters. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. And, not surprisingly, the clusters correspond to geographic regions separated by oceans, mountains & deserts.

[Chen019]

@GIGObuster

Well, when the cat is out of the bag…

1. The comment that these things have been refuted here is incorrect. There was a thread a few months ago on the topic. If someone was able to dismiss the argument that group differences are due to environmental & genetic variation, then I missed it. (note that the environmental & genetic variation explanation was supported by three times as many of the 600+ researchers surveyed by Mark Snyderman & Rotherman, as the pure environmental explanation).

2. If you’re going to link to arguments against this position you can do a lot better than abagond or Zek J Evets. In fact, another blogger just did a rather embarrassing demolition of that post a day or so ago. If you want polemics, which misrepresent the oppositions arguments, then Zek is your guy.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

1. The comment that these things have been refuted here is incorrect. There was a thread a few months ago on the topic. If someone was able to dismiss the argument that group differences are due to environmental & genetic variation, then I missed it. (note that the environmental & genetic variation explanation was supported by three times as many of the 600+ researchers surveyed by Mark Snyderman & Rotherman, as the pure environmental explanation).

2. If you’re going to link to arguments against this position you can do a lot better than abagond or Zek J Evets. In fact, another blogger just did a rather embarrassing demolition of that post a day or so ago.

I doubt that, and I do hope that other blogger had some expertise in the matter. Because as mentioned before, relying on what philosophers or astrophysicists say on this matter is extremely foolish.

Real life scientists are not experts on everything, you may as well think that “Brains”, the scientist know-it-all from the Thunderbirds, was real.

potholer54

That video deals with global warming denial, but the methods used by the deniers are copied by the race realists.

[Chen019]

@GIGObuster

I doubt that, and I do hope that other blogger had some expertise in the matter. Because as mentioned before, relying on what philosophers or astrophysicists say on this matter is extremely foolish.

Real life scientists are not experts on everything, you may as well think that “Brains”, the scientist know-it-all from the Thunderbirds, was real.

That video deals with global warming denial, but the methods used by the deniers are copied by the race realists.

As I’ve suggested earlier, people need to think for themselves. Consider the evidence and logic underpinning the arguments. I find the arguments of Zek and co quite misleading. In fact, I doubt they’ve actually read or understood much of the work by the people they’re criticising.

Also, I take it the comment about “astrophysicists” is directed at Steve Hsu. It’s important to note that he’s involved with research at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) on the genetic basis of cognitve ability. He is familiar with the subject.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

As I’ve suggested earlier, people need to think for themselves. Consider the evidence and logic underpinning the arguments. I find the arguments of Zek and co quite misleading. In fact, I doubt they’ve actually read or understood much of the work by the people they’re criticising.

Now, now, point of order: you are supposedly defending group differences over here, my beef was with the all encompassing trash that is included in the site that Chuck11 pointed at, do you really want to be on the record of defending all that?

As for thinking for yourself, there is the reality that trusting people that are not experts is folly, and on top of that, getting weird solutions that even those cited do not approve may be indeed thinking for yourself, but at the expense of missing that you are being had.

[GIGObuster]

@Chen019

Also, I take it the comment about “astrophysicists” is directed at Steve Hsu. It’s important to note that he’s involved with research at the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) on the genetic basis of cognitve ability. He is familiar with the subject.

he [BGI’s vice-president] took pains to say the study was essentially focused on studying students’ aptitudes and suggesting occupations that would make the best use of their capabilities.

He may be familiar, but that still does not make an expert, and I already saw that he did not support your conclusions in a different thread. BTW I don’t think that finding that genes influence intelligence was the subject here. In our cognition, we are more than our genes anyhow.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html

[Chen019]

@GIGObuster

Now, now, point of order: you are supposedly defending group differences over here, my beef was with the all encompassing trash that is included in the site that Chuck11 pointed at, do you really want to be on the record of defending all that?

As for thinking for yourself, there is the reality that trusting people that are not experts is folly, and on top of that, getting weird solutions that even those cited do not approve may be indeed thinking for yourself, but at the expense of missing that you are being had.

I can’t say I’ve read the whole blog, but it seems to be a painstaking collection & analysis of various peer reviewed academic papers. My comment was at Belowjob2.0, who suggested that arguments in those papers had been refuted here. I couldn’t recall that happening. In fact I think there was a thread on the topic a few months previously & it basically ended in a stalemate.