You guys crack me up!
Gaspode, you are a dick.
Barbitu8, on the other hand, is one of the cool kids.
jb
Just 'cause I prefer the tried and true 'Strine version of FUCKWIT? sob!
In that case jb_Farley all I have to say is Chuck U Farley.
whateva
thrusts hand palm first into Gaspode’s face
snottily,
cu_farley
he’s copperific!
Over it!
All right, NO RACES!
Barbi, you surprised me. Wee, live and learn. PC can go a loooong way. “Everyone does not look the same, does not preclude some of the people looking the same. And…? Say what you are trying to say.
I do not think that you have to say anything.
Anyway, if you, guys, saying that there are no races, I’ll say, fine. I do not need races. I said it before, I can only repeat it.
We still have some unfinished business, but the ball is out of my park.
Peace
Um.
It’s kind of a pity this ended up in the Pit, because there’s so much antagonism that people seem to be reading straight past each other’s posts.
I think Peace has a point. His posting style leaves a LOT to be desired, but he has a point.
It’s true that the characteristics we choose to group populations by are arbitrary. It’s true that characteristics change on a continuous spectrum, and that any divisions we choose to impose on that spectrum are entirely artificial. So in this sense, it’s fair to say that races don’t exist.
On the other hand, we impose divisions on continuous spectra all the time. You could argue that “red” and “yellow” don’t exist because there’s a continuous spectrum of colours and “orange” has characteristics of both. Then there’s all those colours which have no real description “reddy-orange”, “orangy-red”, “orangy-orangy red”, you can go on as long as you want. But if someone describes something as “red”, you’re not going to mistake it for green.
It may well be true that 50% or even 80% of the world’s population will not fit neatly into any of the arbitrary groups such as “caucasian” or “negroid” or “mongoloid”. But on the other hand, if you describe a bank robber as caucasian the cops aren’t going to be showing you their mugshots of black guys for identification, at least I hope they’re not.
Back to everything that started this - if you say that it’s impossible to determine gross physical features from HLA markers I can believe it, but then I wouldn’t know an HLA marker if it bit me on the arse.
If you’re saying that gross physical characteristics are determined by a very few genes out of the hundreds of thousands or whatever which we have, I can believe that. If you’re saying that gross physical characteristics are correlated to those genes in a nontrivial manner, I wouldn’t be surprised.
If however you’re saying that it’s impossible even in theory to determine gross physical features from the genetic makeup of an individual, then you’re confusing the hell out of me. We may not be able to do it, but dammit, couldn’t you clone someone from the blood they left at a crime scene and get their skin, hair and eye colour? In theory, that is.
We already had the same discussion in great debates. See the links. That’s why it ended up here, Peace was being dense and disingenous. So he had to be taken to the woodshed.
No, he doesn’t. Not a single leg to stand on. Not a single leg.
Right. Mind you Tom, myself, and others have simply pointed out races do not exist as objective biological entities where race is understood it is common meaning. Tamerlane has nicely pointed out how the term might have other meanings, but since history is history, the word is not useful in this context.
Largely true, however as others have pointed out, perception of color is in fact culturally defined so outside of extremes you will find “mistakes”.
That’s where the subjective cultural definition of race comes in. Works fine, we’ve simply pointed out that the concept is limited and one should not conclude underlying essential relatedness on this basis. That’s all.
No, no, no!!!
Slamming head on desk.
What we have pointed out is that the gross morphologies do not reflect an underlying relatedness or greater coherency between certain populations. This says nothing about individuals, the argument is on populations Because someone has dark skin, curly hair and features we commonly call ‘African’ --which actually cover a wide range of variation mind you-- does not mean they are ipso facto more closely related to another person with the same features than to someone with ‘white’ features. Our classic example was the Asian ‘negroids’ whose range of features cover the spectrum of 100% classical “negro” to looking like an African-“classic stereotype of an Asian” mix. Genetic analysis has conclusively demonstrated this is not due to a greater degree of relatedness to Africans or recent African inputs. We might also add internal to Africa an assumption of greater relatedness because of these trivial surface features is not to be assumed.
Yes, this is counter intuitive, but that’s the way the genetic cookie crumbles.
I think this is adequately explained above so I’m not going to explain the hows and whys again. If you reread the various threads in the context of populations and not individuals I think it will be clearer.
"If you reread the various threads in the context of populations and not individuals I think it will be clearer."
Okay. I didn’t realise this had been covered so thoroughly already. Hadn’t seen the Athletes and race or Differences between Humans threads before. Interesting stuff!
**"No, no, no!!!
Slamming head on desk."**
Don’t do that! I’ve read them now!
It’s going to take a while for this to become “common knowledge”, but you can chalk up one more set of misconceptions altered…
Gaspode: "he is one of the best people I have ever seen at executing the trick of going from complete disagreement to wholehearted agreement on a subject by means of a series of tiny steps."
Would those be glenties? He’s also fairly good at hoffing.
Matt are you asking if we can use genes to determine which race someone falls into, or who they are related to or just whether genes can be used to determine what someone looks like. In that case the answer would have to be yes. Barring environmental factors a person’s appearance is entirely dependent on their genes, and if we clone someone and grow them to adulthood we can tell what they look like (obviously).
The point often missed here is that no matter what someone looks like or what genes they possess there is no way of putting them emphatically into any racial group or even line of descent.
So yes you can reconstruct someone’s appearance from a gene sample, just as you can by eyewitness accounts, photographs or a plaster cast of their body. Any of these techniques can be used to assign them to a particular racial group and any technique is equally valid to do so with. I don’t think even Piece would argue that the fact that you can use a plaster cast of someone’s face to assign them to a racial group proves that races exist. It simply proves that people like to group things and that we are very good at it. The groups however can not be demonstrated to be real using any scientific standard.
Glenties and hoffing? “The Meaning of Liff” right? Unfortunately I lost my copy several years ago and have alas been unable to find a reprint. What is hoffing?
"Matt are you asking if we can use genes to determine which race someone falls into, or who they are related to or just whether genes can be used to determine what someone looks like?"
The last one, and thanks for the answer! Do you know if we are actually capable of making such a determination yet?
They are indeed from The Meaning of Liff - A dictionary of things that there aren’t any words for yet.
“Glenties” are the tiny steps involved in backtracking from disagreement to agreement.
Hoff (vb.) “To deny indignantly something which is palpably true.”
Matt, these people here made their decision: “ biological races do not exist”. They admit and even insist on the existence of “cultural” races, but biological races do not exist, according to them, for many reasons: races are not needed anymore, many people cannot be pigeonholed into them, their (nonexistent) borders are blurry, etc. Races might be a complicated concept to understand, anyway, there are different levels (appearance, genetic markers). Consider the following.
Let’s say that I said: “There are diurnal cycles. Each day (24h) night and day change. It happens because the Earth rotates and consequently, its surface gets exposed to the Sun radiation with some periodicity.”
They completely agree with me (although would not sign this statement formally).
And then they would say: you are right. But actually, there are no diurnal cycles: they are not needed anymore, they are unequal over most of the Earth, and there are periods that cannot be fit into them. Besides, there are clocks, watches, AM & PM systems, radio announcements. Anyone can tell time using the latter. The former does not exist, it survived from the old, preclock days and outlived its usefulness. We decided to cancel it.
You can argue that you can prove the existence of the diurnal cycles simply by going out and observing them, or by astronomical observations. They agree, but then they say that it’s not so, because the following famous scientists said so (refs. here), and because, how do you explain polar days and twilight? And sometimes it is impossible to tell the precise time of the day, when it’s neither day, nor night.
They are nice guys. In all other areas they are reasonable, but as it comes to diurnal cycles, their delusions cannot be overcome by logical arguments. So, it’s better to agree with them, because it would change anything one iota in nature: the real diurnal cycles will still exist. They will be called differently; they will be used in everyday speech, etc. These people will think that they rid of them and everything will be OK.
The phenomenon is not new; it was described by George Orwell in “1984”, more than 50 years ago.
Peace
You are twisting the argument. Go back to matt’s color spectrum analogy.
“We” will all agree that purple, blue, and turquoise are different colors. (Interestingly, there are cultures where they have not developed words to identify even this categorization, but we’ll let that slide.) All these colors (and all the various gradient hues between them) are nothing more than our categorization of our perception of different wavelengths. They are “real” in that those of us in a culture that identifies baby blue, cerulean, indigo, azure, and a host of other ranges as “blue” will agree that they are real. Identify them as wavelengths along a spectrum, and we find that there are no discrete “boxes” of blue. There are “blues” that are closer to “red” that fall into the “purplish” range and “blues” that are closer to “yellow” that fall into the “greenish” range. However, there is no gap in the spectrum that allows us to identify discrete groups of wavelengths as “blue.” The aceptance of those colors is “real” because we all grow up in a culture that names them and gives them values in picture books. A different culture that assigned different values to those ranges of wavelengths would get different “colors.” Red, blue, and yellow are sufficiently different to qualify as primary colors. (Additive? I think subtractive is red, green, blue, but it’s been a while since I paid attention to that.) If we claimed that the three primary colors were “races” of colors, how many objects in the real world would actually display those “races”? All objects reflect light/color in different ways. Which wavelength would we assign to each color? And how broad a band of waves could we include in the color before we had to talk about “mixed colors”?
The same thing happens with race. There is a continuum (or spectrum) of people with various genetic differences across the world (and many of those differences are manifested in physical characteristics). Since many people living close together will share more of the same physical characteristics, people can identify a number of groups based on some similar features. Since physical features play a big part in how people relate to each other, the fact that people do associate people by appearance makes race a valid cultural construct. When people are examined for genetic traits, however, the traits tied to appearance show wide variations within groups with many of those characteristics present throughout other populations.
The point of claiming that race has no biological basis is not to form some sort of counterintuitive, PC definition of the world, but simply to recognize that the biologists have not found any collections of characteristics that can be used to identify discrete races–or, we might be able to define discrete races if we got each race down to an absurdly low number such as fewer than a million people per “race.”
Peace,
You are a stupid asshole.
Consider you are unable to define race adequately or logically via either appearance or genetic markers (anyone doubting this can review the threads and the many, factually laden rebuttals to Peace’s broad distortions).
I think everyone has grown tired of your factless “examples”. The data is there, we’ve all had the opportunity to review it.
If you know what you’re talking about and have some analysis to present refuting the community of researchers in population which has concluded that race is not a biologically useful concept, then do so.
Spare us your fact free fantasy world.
O, Peace is telling us this. That’s rich. Very rich.
Have you at all considered the illogic of this? If we were in some PC thing against race, we’d be arguing that one can not define races culturally either. No, all along, the numerous persons contributing, fruitless evidently, to the combat against your willful ignorance, have spoken to the biological utility of race. No one person has spoken to race in society, usage in language etc.
Evidently the issue is yours not ours.
So fuck off, moron.
I just noticed that in his “diurnal cycles” analogy, peace has actually reversed the roles that we have played in the actual discussion. Science (as presented at length by Collounsbury) would not deny the diurnal cycle, while the cultural artifacts of clocks would seem to impose a “reality” that peace cannot give up.
Let us take the diurnal cycle and demonstrate a clearer example of peace’s logic:
Scientists tell us that the Earth rotates about an axis, creating the illusion that the sun and stars rotate about the heavens.
peace, with his superior observational powers, points to the sun “rising” in the east and “setting” in the west and the stars circling overhead at night and asks “How can you deny the obvious reality that the fixed earth is orbited by heavenly bodies?”
(Earlier, he claimed that I would deny that day and night alternated if “scientists” had not explained why they do. However, that is a straw man. I have not denied any phenomenon because I had not had it scientifically explained to me. I have simply insisted that when scientific evidence has been presented, we should not cling to faulty, unscientific perceptions.)
And, of course, peace has now decided to muddy the discussion, further, by (inappropriately) bringing up the ghost of George Orwell. As noted by Collounsbury, no one in this discussion has ever denied that there are culturally defined races or that people have not used racial perceptions to make decisions in the world. Discovering that there is no biological basis for race does not change the fact that people clearly put other people in categories based on appearance.
Collounsbury, you rage is the best proof that I am right!
Tom, when you see you neighbors/coworkers, can you assign them to a particular racial group of significantly more than one million people? Simple YES or NO will suffice, there is no need to ruminate.
Peace
Peace,
A person can see day and night in nature, though. A person can’t see “races” in nature…biological differences between people, sure, broad physical traits, sure, but not races. “Race” is an anthropological system of classification. People sat down, and said, “We’ll classify people with these physical traits, race X.” However, there’s no sanctity in a system of classification. It’s used as long as it’s useful, and modified or thrown out when it’s not. It was certainly modified by anthropologists a great deal over the years. A quick look at books on race from the 1930s to the 1960s shows there being 3 races, or 5, or 7, or 20. This is because what defined a race changed over the years, and different anthropologists had their own ideas. Lately, most anthropologists are saying, along with Tom and Collounsbery, that race isn’t really a good way to classify people anymore…it’s not precise enough, and there are too many people who fit outside of the old racial classifications, and so we should get rid of it.
Oh, and Collounsbury, I still think my eugenics idea COULD work, if you gave me 10,000 years, complete control over mating pairs, and complete knowledge of the human genome.
peace, name the object that is blue.
Chicory blossom?
Cornflower blossom?
Cloudless sky at noon? (How about cloudless sky at sunset?)
Paul Newman’s eyes?
IBM logo?
Standard paint for WWII U.S. Navy fighter aircraft?
Union field of U.S. flag?
Captain, I noticed than you do not post much, but, apparently, when you do, you don’t mince words. At least, it’s the FIRST reasonable post I see in this thread.
I totally agree with you. Perhaps, I could not express my thoughts clearly and that is why fairly balanced people mistook me for a troll or whatever…(actually, I doubt this) but what I am saying is this: if I see (in my American town) a person looking like Bill Clinton, I place him (subconsciously) within Caucasoid/White race/people/group/population/etc. If I see a person looking like Ho Chi Minh, I place him within Mongoloids/Orientals/Asians. If I see a person, who looks like Martin Luther King, Jr., I place him within Negroids/Blacks. I do not do that with regard to each and every person that crosses my field of vision. When I need to describe/recall a person, I recall his race. Sometime it is not so simple. For instance, when I try to recall my son’s friends from school (unfortunately, from many years ago), I remember kids’ names sooner than I remember their races. Except one, a Korean boy. He was the only Korean boy in my son’s class, I did not (and still do not) see many Korean people then, and his image stuck in my head.
I am not an anthropologist and I do not know many races. Nor do I need to. I am sure, that if I see (or already seen) an Australian Aborigine, I may mistake him for a Black. Or may not. It does not make me a racist or even “insensitive”. Perhaps, ignorant. But I do not care much. My primitive “classification” served me the purpose: helped me to remember the person better. Besides, it’s biological. A person may impress me more, if he does not look like myself. It could be PI, but it is a universal reality. If, for whatever reason, I will have to know a person’s race, I will ask him. If I can’t ask, I may do it by biological markers and I will know it in large proportion of cases.
I realize that the biological concept of race is not important (I myself said why many times), is not needed. But, if and when it is used (loosely, like in the street, by police, or by an organ bank), I see nothing wrong with it. It is biological, hence, it cannot be offensive. I think that government/cultural use makes it offensive, but I leave that field to the experts.
Yes, Tom, ALL these things are blue. I realize that they have different hues and “characters”, reflect different wavelength of “blue” light, etc., but for the purposes of our discussion, they all are blue. And, for the long time, they will be, even when each person will carry a miniature color analyzer to identify their precise color. Precise ID is not needed or useful. That’s why we do not do it, in both cases. But, in both cases, it is a biological reality and is used by stupid uneducated folks like me.
Now, I asked my question first and I already answered yours. But you can’t bring yourself to answer mine. As you wish. I am the one who knows the truth.
Peace
I could have answered yours first, but since you are choosing to be obtuse, I wanted to see what you would do with the fact that that there is no single “blue”. However, as I suspected, you avoided the issue. Blue is a category of color on which humans have imposed meaning. There are societies in which all blues and greens and many purples would be given only a single word. Turquoise is not even a concept in those societies. A person from those cultures could certainly tell that a baby-blue object and a turquoise object were not the “same,” but that person would have no color word to describe the difference. “Turquoise” only exists in a culture that can give a name to it. There are societies (such as 20th/21st century North America) where we have “color lists” that the chemists and designers as Sherwin-Williams and a dozen other companies pore over for weeks to carefully and correctly identify. The wavelength of light reflecting back from any specific surface under any given lighting will never change, but the way that humans react to that light (with names, with attempts to match that color on fabrics or walls or computer monitors) changes from society to society (and from decade to decade within that society).
Your inability to recognize (or to admit) just how powerful cultural conventions are in defining reality is rather sad.
Since you ran away from the issue of color, I will now go ahead and answer your question: the people who surround me in my neighborhood and at work tend to appear as either “white” or “black” as they are generally recognized in our culture. (Since I live in the U.S. rust belt, those are the two largest and most easily identified culturally defined groups.) Of course, there are several people on the next street who have a hispanic surname and I have never discovered whether they are Filipino or Central American–I can’t tell by looking at them. There are also some people at the end of our street who have East Indian names, but there appearance is not clear: are they from (dark Caucasians) from Calcutta or immigrants from Fiji (Mongoloids) who have adopted the Hindu religion? In addition, there are the four different guys I have worked with over the years who came from New Delhi. One looked “English” one looked “Negro” and two looked “East Indian.” What race were they? Are the pale-skinned, blonde Swedes and Finns that I know the same “race” as the swarthy, black-haired Spaniards at the other end of the street?
It is “easy” to identify “race” in the U.S. because in most places we do know the most likely birthplaces of peoples’ ancestors. The number of Pacific Islanders in Cleveland is infinitesimally small, while in Seattle they are an identifiable group. Being able to recognize a cultural identification simply menas that one has been educated in the culture.
**No one arguing against you has claimed that people from distant parts of the world do not have similar appearances.
No one arguing against you has claimed that there is no genetic component to those similar appearances.
We have simply pointed out that creating the categories into which we divide people as races is culturally determined, not biologically real.**
Given any group of people who wish to identify “race,” they will all come up with different definitions of each group. The “Negro” and the “Kho San” of Africa would be lumped together by some people and kept separate by others. The “Negro” of Africa and the “Negrito” of Southeast Asia would be identified as identical by some and as unrelated by others.
The only basis for any of those categories is the human need for lumping and boxing. There are (despite your insistence that your preconceptions are more accurate than genetic testing) no biological tests (of any “constellation” of traits) that can be used to identify and separate races.
I do not recall anyone posting that you were racist or insensitive. Your insistence that your cultural perceptions outweigh science in some way hardly leaves you as the one who “knows the truth.” You are simply making manifest your ignorance. Willful ignorance, however, is a rather bad trait to brag about.