Thank you for the clarification.
I have never heard of someone who calls themselves a Musilm and yet fails to uphold virtually everything related to the religion that society by and large demands of you anyways, which is actually the status of most “christians” around here.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say merely the latter, but some of these guys you really have to watch out for–they will fuck your shit up if you don’t watch out.
It’s not about pork and alcohol. That’s just one facet of it that I personally find baffling. Really, it’s a pretty typical facet of an abrahamic religion–a silly little law that really shouldn’t matter any more but somehow does. But it’s the principle behind it that I am opposed to. Most of my opposition to Islam is tied to my opposition of organized religion in general.
They’re famous youtube atheists, each with tens of thousands of subscribers. I probably should’ve brought up the Richard Dawkin’s foundation as well…
You can’t base ignorance on ignorance. That’s a tautology.
Sorry Bubble-boy. Says right here on the card. So sorry. It’s the Moops. Says right here - the Moops.
Mac, do you happen to know how most of the people of African descent arrived here on this continent?
Like I said, the topic was discussed in the Great Debates section. If you want to discuss it seriously then bring it up there. I am not sure what your particular objection is, unless you want to rule out various other animal subspecies on the basis that some are mixed? Also, it doesn’t avoid the reality of human genetic diversity. As Robert A. Weinberg points out in the final lecture in Biology 7.012 at MIT (2004):
Anyway, perhaps you could clarify in the Great Debates thread?
I don’t think it’s worth reviving that thread, and it’s not really relevant to this one. I think you have what amounts to a false dilemma by ignoring the large chunk of humanity that’s mixed; you think the mixtures are insignificant. We agree on the facts, we’ll never agree on the interpretation. And I think your racism colours your views, and you probably think I’m a traitor to my race or something.
What the hell is an Afro-Asian? Does that just mean non-white?
the mayflower? or some other sail ship?
Well, yes.
I don’t know what race you are and I don’t really see how that is relevant to this discussion.
I haven’t ignored the large chunk that are mixed at all. Read my comment above - invariably with subspecies or varieties you get mixed groups. It hardly means there are no meaningful categories. As I said above, Risch addresses that very point in the paper I cited:
The statement you quoted, “[t]he existence of such intermediate groups should not, however, overshadow the fact that the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level,” is what I disagree with. We shall have to agree to disagree about how the scientific data, which is factual, should be interpreted and applied to current humans, which is something reasonable people can disagree about.
Fair enough, although why do you disagree? Those major clusters consistently get identified. The genetic distance within a cluster increases in a linear manner. However, for pairs from different clusters that have the same geographic distance the genetic distance is greater. For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia.
how did the notion of race turn to rocket science? it’s as stark as day and night to me.
How starkis this person, or thisone?
There are always debates about categorization of subspecies, varieties and races across animal species. The reason is that you get fuzzy boundaries and mixed groups. So there is certainly scope for debate. There is also motivation to do so because some people think that might reduce prejudice. Unfortunately, it often results in people making misleading claims, like the commonly trotted out “Lewontin Fallacy”.
Of course, in everyday life most people have little difficulty with recognising someone is caucasion/white, african american, or East Asian. And these groups are easily identified by forensic anthropologists and geneticists.
Yup, that’s one of the things that worries the rest of us about you.
I have no idea what the bolded part means. If it isn’t relevant, just continue -* in a yellow raincoat, if possible, while dancing to a didgeridoo.*
I hate to get mixed up in another discussion of race, because I swear on my mother’s grave (well, she’s still alive) that I’m neither a racist nor a racialist. But I really don’t see how the existence of people of mixed racial ancestry, which is a self-evidently true fact of the world that no one could possibly deny, proves anything one way or the other. I mean, imagine for a second a world in which race really truly existed and meant something… so an alien world in which the dominant intelligent species had been divided between continents that were out of contact for tens of thousands of years, and evolved sufficiently differently on those two continents that they were what would be called distinct subspecies in animals… so they were physically distinguishable, and also had various other distinct traits in things like pain resistance, muscle flexibility, and so forth. So in this world, I’m not saying that one race was better than the other, but the concept of race, and the idea of dividing these beings into two races, clearly actually had unambiguous biological meaning.
So, the people on this world develop sea travel, the two continents get back into contact, and a baby of mixed race is born.
Does the existence of that one baby suddenly mean that race no longer has meaning on that world? What if 10 babies are born? 100? 100000? Sure, such a baby means that the position of “every single person in the world can be unambiguously divided into one of two groups with total certainty and no exceptions” is no longer true, but should such a baby mean that the biologist who wants to study “the effects of high altitudes on the muscle tissue of star belled sneeches” should be laughed out of town because now not every single sneech can be divided into star bellied or not?
Again, I’m not saying that our world is in any way comparable to my hypothetical world, I’m just saying that “look, Tiger woods is neither black nor white, so race doesn’t exist” is not a logically compelling argument.
MaxTheVool, let me try once more. African Americans are one of the major racial groups in America according to the current system.
Africans are one of the major racial groups according to the system linked above.
Yet most African-Americans are mixed race, with genes coming from Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans (3 of the 5 biological races). So it’s a bit silly to claim that African-Americans belong to any race at all, when they’re clearly an exception. If you’re going to apply biological race to the USA, you’d have 95% of the population as either Europeans, Asians, or Mixed. But when Americans use race, they go by appearance, not biology.
Meanwhile, African-Americans ARE a distinct ethnic group, with a long and important cultural and social history. It’s bad science to ascribe their differences to biology.
If you want to claim that there are five major human races, fine. The trouble is, the exceptions aren’t rare oddities like Tiger Woods, but rather large and historically significant groups, like Latinos, African-Americans, and the peoples of the Mediterranean basin.
African American isn’t a racial group. African descent might be, but the fact that someone is in America has nothing to do with race.