[QUOTE=magellan01]
Now this is where we’ll get into our usual dance. But I hope not. I know that you know that in order to make the claim that Group A is more X than another Group B, it does NOT have to be the case that every member of Group A demonstrates characteristic X more than every member in Group B. Just that, on average, members in Group A will tend to exhibit more X. Why you attempt to turn this very simple logic on its head is baffling. Just because Kenyans are better marathon runners does not mean that every Kenyan is a better marathoner than every non-Kenyan, nor that a Kenyan will always win a particular marathon.
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But in regard to the “race” issue, we are not looking at “Negroid” peoples or blacks in the context of marathon running. Not only is it improper to say that “blacks” have a propensity for running marathons, because the marathon winners are specifically Kenyan and do not include South Africans or Ghanans or Nigerians, it is improper to say that Kenyans are the best marathon runners, because all the winners have been of the Kalenjin group within Kenya, only 12% of the country’s 37 million people, or fewer than 4,500,000 people. It is ludicrous to talk about a “black” trait that is present in only 0**.**56% of the 800,000,000 black people in Africa, alone.
Talking about mararthon running as a “racial” trait–as though it applied to the nearly 800 million black Africans along with many tens of millions more of slave descendants in the Americas when it is expressed in a closed population of 4.5 million people is silly.
[QUOTE=magellan01]
It just seems that any discussion after you make the point that you don’t think that “race” exists in a any meaningful way, is a waste of time. It’s akin to discussing the claims about the true nature of God with an atheist.
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Regardless, I do not see what this has to do with your OP. It looked to me as though you were concerned about scientists attacking Watson on social ideological grounds, not whether Rushton’s silly ideas have merit. The whole discussion of race appears to be a hijack of your own thread.
Now as to whether, in a discussion of racial characteristics, it is appropriate to point out that the whole concept is so flawed as to be meaningless, I would say that pointing out that the whole discussion has no foundation would be pretty significant. If someone wants to discuss whether Saruman’s Uruk-Hai were fiercer orcs than the ones originating in Mordor, it is rude to interupt the discussion to exclaim, “Orcs are fictional!” However, that is because the people in the disacussion have agreed to accept the imagined (but published) creations of Professor Tolkien. When one wishes to discuss the differences between imagined races, it is quite relevant to poiint out that the scientific community overwhelmingly rejects the broad category of “race” into which humanity has been arbitrarily divided because there is no consistent agreed upon base such as in the tales of Tolkien. The last several posters have, I hope, provided you enough information to demonstrate that the word race (as applied to the entire world separated into three or four or five (internally heterogeneous) groups has no basis in reality in the way that population is grounded in reality. We can talk about the primacy of marathon running among the Kalenjin compared to the rest of the world, but a discussion of the primacy of blacks in marathons expands the group under discussion to meaningless absurdity.
For example: recently a hypothesis was put forth that the McCoys of the Hatfield/McCoy feud tend to suffer from a specific genetic predisposition to violence. If we looked at the hair-trigger temper and violence associated with that group in Kentucky and Tennessee, we could note that whites have a quicker hair trigger temper than blacks or Indians. We have a group to which we can point and even measure their violence. Doers the condition of one isolated population actually tell us anything significant about the much larger population from which they sprang?