Once again, a pitting of our local pseudo-scientific racialists

It isn’t my intention to hold debates here in the Pit, which seems to me to be more appropriate for name-calling or venting frustration when one’s arguments are failing.

However I don’t think the gist of your comment here leaves an entirely accurate impression for the degree of genetic admixture for most sub-saharan lines which would self-classify as “black.”

From a Y-chromosomal standpoint, haplogroup R1b made it back into the central Sahel; haplogroups G, J and T into parts of northern and eastern africa. But the vast majority of sub-saharan africa is not very admixed for post-africa Y-chromosomal lineages, as far as I am aware. Even today, many of those populations remain reasonably segregated, for historic religious and linguistic reasons. To the best of my knowledge, mtDNA groups are even more distinct (I guess daddy gets around more than mommy when it comes to traveling, or something :wink: ) Many of the mtDNA lines in sub-saharan africa split off from a common mtDNA matrilineage as long as 60-100 thousand years ago; perhaps more.

At the most basic level for arguing a group-based genetic advantage reflected within todays “socially-constructed” SIRE groups, one would have to postulate a post-african advantageous mutation (at least an L3 mtDNA line or later) or other event (say, for instance, acquisition of advantageous genes from a Neanderthal admixture). Based on population migrations of which I am aware, it does not seem reasonable to imply that such genes would be smoothly admixed back into a sub-saharan population. The fundamental debate, of course, is whether there is any evidence such advantageous mutations occurred at all. But if they did, it is disingenuous to represent that migratory patterns would have caused them to be homogenously re-mixed with ancestral sub-saharan populations as a whole.

Were such putative gene shifts conferring a neurobiological advantage to have occurred, one would expect to find differences that are most profound between the least admixed populations, and the least profound between relatively admixed populations. Modern SIRE groupings that are socially constructed in admixed populations would have outcomes somewhere between ancestral populations and populations containing a higher prevalence of advantageous genes. Outcome differences would be most profound between the ancestral populations and descendant lines post-advantageous mutation (assuming the advantageous mutation had reached a penetrance high enough to affect an average performance).

We can look at “africa” and “non-africa” populations and see an example–even at such a crude grouping level–with the haplogroup D variant for MCPH1. This has not been shown to be an advantageous gene (although its prevalence in non-african groups does suggest positive selection pressure and not genetic drift) but it is definitely a good illustration that human migratory patterns have not driven post L-3 mutations back into sub-saharan african populations for anything approaching homogeneity.

Much of this thread seems to be a rehash of debate and not so much a pitting.
I’d prefer to debate in GD, and reserve the Pit as a place to have my name unilaterally sullied by those unable to carry on a debate where it belongs.
As iiandiiii requested in the OP: mock me here.

But may I request moving the actual debate to GD?