I’d like to recommend this article for further reading.
Dr Gill (the second perspective) takes the view that race is a reasonably biological construct, and that forensic anthropology can and does identify “race” from skeletons.
From the article (quoting Dr Gill): “The “reality of race” therefore depends more on the definition of reality than on the definition of race. If we choose to accept the system of racial taxonomy that physical anthropologists have traditionally established—major races: black, white, etc.—then one can classify human skeletons within it just as well as one can living humans. The bony traits of the nose, mouth, femur, and cranium are just as revealing to a good osteologist as skin color, hair form, nose form, and lips to the perceptive observer of living humanity. I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains than from looking at living people standing before me. So those of us in forensic anthropology know that the skeleton reflects race, whether “real” or not, just as well if not better than superficial soft tissue does. The idea that race is “only skin deep” is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm.”
Obviously, because “race” is such a crude category, we are talking about generalizations and averages. No one wants to bother defending the notion that any of these categories are absolute for a given individual, and particularly when that individual has a relatively recent admixture of genes. On the other hand, identifying the race (not the “ethnic group”) of a sub saharan african San from, say, someone whose entire recent ancestry is European, is not a difficult thing. Those groups are separated evolutionarily by well over a hundred thousand years (in terms of their maternal mitochondrial lines).
I suggest reading the link I gave just above to answer your question about studying, or using the term “races.” In the end, it becomes an argument of definition to use the term “race,” so it’s much easier to avoid the term altogether and talk about mitochondrial lines, or biological clines (or whatever substitute you prefer using).
Many people who holler when the term “race” is used with any biological attachment are woefully undereducated about the history of human evolution and migration. But when you familiarize yourself with that topic, you begin to have a new appreciation for why the term “race” is a convenient shorthand for various biologically-based population groups.
This statement by the OP: “It is an arbitrary division people drew up for the sake of classifying perceived groups of others. In reality, it is not an adequate means to evaluate the character of another. Your perception of someone’s “race” says absolutely nothing about his or her values or temperament.” is an example of the confusion and senstivity around the use of the term. There’s nothing in the (biological) use of the term “race” that is intended to apply to any given individual.
It’s true that no human groups have been as selectively bred as are dogs, although migration patterns and geographic separations do this functionally to some extent. (Consider that the San population is separated from Europeans for over a hundred thousand years.)
Where the dog breed argument is more useful, however, is countering the argument that, because we cannot identify an exact nucleotide sequence accounting for differences among human populations, there’s no evidence such differences exist.
I may not be able to identify the exact geneset that creates the difference between a greyhound and a chihuahua, but I can analyze the average outcomes of each of those groups of dogs and identify that the difference is genetic and not nurture. Both groups are obviously dogs. Both groups have nearly identical overall genetic makeup. Both groups contain variations. But a handful of genes direct substantially different average outcomes between the two groups of dogs for various quantifiable skillsets.
Largely due? Let’s hold up on that leap of logic. A change in one pair of genes can make a huge difference in the overall phenotype. So if environmental effects can silence a gene or few, then that can make a huge difference. You can’t figure the effects of genes quantitatively, like pie charts. Genes interact with each other and the environment. So you have to take each situation on a case by case basis. In some cases, environment will be the biggest factor, in others, it will be genes.
You accuse of Honesty of teaching bad information, when it’s clearly you that aren’t up to speed on the latest science, and you who are pushing a transparently political agenda.
I didn’t see any attempt to prove a general rule. What I saw was a discussion of the obvious flaws in your claims.
What’s ridiculous is that you keep peddling the same junk science year after year, and remain impervious to the myriad debunkings here and elsewhere.
If you want to make these claims for human populations, you have to actually do the work. Find the genes, demonstrate the specific advantages accrued in specific environments. Thus far, no one’s been able to do this for intelligence or violence. They probably won’t ever be able to. (They have been able to do with sickle cell, but the whole race thing doesn’t work there. Italians and Nigerians? What race do they have in common?)
If and when they do prove it for intelligence or violence, by all means, get back to us.
Assuming complete separation of African and non-African populations. But this is absolutely, positively not the case for West Africans, and East Africans. Plenty of gene flow in both directions between there, the Middle East, Mediterranean Europe.
You have to further ask the question, why did this mutation provide a benefit in the Middle East or Europe, but not Africa? “Well the food just grows on trees there,” the usual pseudoscientific racialist bullshit, just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It’s actually sad that grown men continue to traffic this nonsense. It’s like believing in the Easter Bunny.
No pretense necessary. It’s simply a fact to note that genes and environment interact in complex ways, so actual outcomes can’t be simply ascribed to one or the other.
Honesty referenced a specific gene being environmentally silenced, and that this silence is relevant to brain function. By trying to conflate this with the parts of the genome that don’t appear to have any function, you’re arguing dishonestly. Or maybe the science is a bit too advanced for you.
Here’s what Honesty said: “Now, using your example, this means while Europeans and Blacks have a change in nucleotide sequence, there is no change in the final protein. I’ll repeat: there’s no change in the final protein. There are evolutionary examples in which groups carry real, phenotypic changes that are passed down (e.g. Southern Europeans & CCR5 and Sub-saharan Africans & Hemoglobin S) but these were due to infection-induced bottlenecks, and these should be considered the exceptions not the rule.”
I took this to imply that Honesty teaches that, although nucleotide sequences might change, final proteins do not, and examples such as Hemoglobin differences are “exceptions.” The problem with this sort of teaching is that an inference is easily drawn that evolutionary changes resulting in phenotypic differences among anatomically modern humans are minimal. In fact, for human populations that have been separate for long periods of time, these changes are quite common, and the phenotypic results are well-recognized. If one uses the SIRE group “race” as an example grouping in the US, one sees significant differences for all sorts of things such as the frequency of hemoglobins or disease states, to physiologic measurments such as bone density or male testosterone levels, to morphologic differences in skeletons, or age of sexual maturity.
All africans and out-of-africans are not completely separated, but the degree of separation for some groups is quite marked. The San and Mbuti mitochondrial lines have been separated from Europeans (and other out-of-africans) for at least 60,000 years, and probably closer to 150,000 years, with minimal admixture. If you have evidence to the contrary, please let me know what it is. Whether the San are an “ethnic group” or a “race” or a “sub-population” or a mitochondrial lineage is a matter of definition, and as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not interested in arguing definitions. What I do hold is that various human populations have been separated long enough to develop their own genesets, which in turn drive phenotypic outcomes. I hold that it is reasonable to suppose that those phenotypic might outcomes include all traits, including whatever it is we measure by psychometric tests or various physical abilities. I hold that it is a reasonable assumption that key genes have changed for those traits, and that when they have changed, they are available only to descendant populations from the ancestral one in which the change occurred. If, for example, a signficantly beneficial (“beneficial” meaning evolution chose it because it drives successful reproduction in some way) gene change occurred within an out-of-africa population, that gene would be substantially more available in the pool of “primary descendants” than in the african pool, since admixture into the african pool is substantially less than prevalence of that gene for descendants from the ancestral pool within which the new gene originated.
I have given you an example of this: MCPH1 in the Haplotype D group, which attained a penetration of nearly 70% in the out of africa group, but is negligibly represented in the african group. I have given you a second (slightly more controversial) example: prevalence of Neanderthal admixture within Eurasian populations, but not within sub-saharan populations.
Your implication (“plenty of gene flow”)that modern admixture has smoothed out these broad divisions is not supported by fact. I recommend additional reading about mitochondrial lines to see where admixture has occurred and where it has not.
Your assumption that gene changes have not driven intelligence differences is based on hope and not science. The general approach is the one taken by anti-vaccination crowds. “Prove this and then this and then this and then what about this?” The evidence is much plainer than that: normalizing nurture does not normalize outcomes. If it did, we wouldn’t need this discussion, because the argument over “race” would melt away as it became obvious that groups from all ancestries had the same outcomes once we gave them the same nurturing. Instead, as I’ve supported ad nauseum on this board, this never happens, anywhere in the world and anywhere in time. Not only does it not happen, but the same general order for the same general skillsets appears over and over and over again.
Want to take a bet on what SIRE group the next hundred-yard dash Olympians will be?
Want to take a shot at explaining why the non-black SIRE groups have such larger starting pool numbers and better resources but still pull up lame?
I appreciate you defending the homogeneity of all human groups. It comes from a good heart. Unfortunately, mother nature does not care about your good intentions, nor did she start her design process 5000 years ago with Adam and Eve.
“Obviously”? If a person from some remote country where dogs were unknown were to wander into a dog show, he would not immediately realize that all these animals are of the same species.
Oh no!
The distributions of skin color for Ethiopians and Europeans are obviously different.
The distributions of hair characteristics for Ethiopians and Europeans are obviously different.
The distributions of dental structure for Ethiopians and Europeans are obviously different.
BUT, the distributions of inate running ability for Ethiopians and Europeans are exactly the same.
The distributions of inate intelligence (or any attribute for which “merit” might be associated) for Ethiopians and Europeans are exactly the same.
I have this on the authority of intelligent people who would swear on a stack of [DEL]Bibles[/DEL] Dawkin’s God Delusions that they are motivated only by pure science and empiricism, and are thus superior to deniers and racists.
I won’t bet. Doubt if any of the pure-science God Delusion-swearers will either.
When any of you can show me how modern L0 populations are reasonably admixed with genesets arising after L3 left Africa, let me know.
As soon as the Dutch and Han Chinese achieve equivalent lactase persistence, report in that human populations are homogenized.
After you discover some evidence that beneficial adaptations stopped the moment we became anatomically modern homo sapiens 200 thousand years ago, publish it.
In the meantime, egalitarians can enjoy their delusions that all modern human populations draw from about the same gene pools coding for about the same abilities. But don’t hold your breath looking for the NBA to reflect the starting pool of NBA wanna-be populations, or that the Mbuti are going to be the next stars in quantitative sciences.
Im out of town, will school you one more time when i get back home next week. again, your knowledge is that of a layman. you cant comprehend the influence on environment on genes. until i get back look up histone modification and dna methylation as well as the effect on identical twins. you also dont understand that the vast majority of polymorphisms are silent mutations. If you live in chicago, message me, we can meet up and i can draw you a picture. Also, im published on pubmed, have three degrees in science, wtf is your qualifications? please excuse my grammar as im w riting this via my cell phone
Sadly this is an area where a reasonably intelligent layman with a little common sense can think more accurately than a professional with a reputation and career to be destroyed if he dares to step out of line.
Is there a meaningful biological definition of ethnicity? If so, what is it? If not, is it your position that ethnicity does not exist?
Lol, nice strawman. Of course that’s not true.
There are enough differences in genes between people of different races to have a measurable effect in a lot of areas. Much of the measured differences between different races are due in part to differences in genes. Do these two claims contradict your knowledge in any way?
Ouch.
My qualification is that I’ve studied the subject.
Of course most mutations are silent. If they weren’t, we’d crap out pretty rapidly given the billions of base pairs that need copying. This has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Of course environment has an influence on how we turn out. That again has nothing to do with the fact that human populations have markedly different genesets in the first place which interact with that environment.
If I have a gene for lactase persistence or high testosterone or sickle cell hemoglobin, my environment might affect the expression, but I still have a gene the next guy over might not. And at a population level, if 70% of my population has the gene for lactase persistence and the comparison population has 5% penetration for that gene, it’s pretty obvious we’re going to have an average difference phenotypically for lactose tolerance.
See, the thing that you are missing is the simple argument:
Populations differ in terms of how prevalent certain genes are. We do not all have access to the same pool of genes from which we draw. It’s abundantly clear that different populations have different prevalences for all sorts of genes, proving that we are not anything close to homogenized among groups. Even among SIRE groups–a very crude biological category–there are all sorts of prevalence differences for genes with non-silent phenotypic differences.
Those differences are driven by evolution, which makes a lot of silent changes but also creates some significant changes.
For some human populations, the age of separation with minimal–if any–admixture of non-silent mutations can be measured in tens of thousands of years. For example, Mbuti and Europeans have at least 60 and possibly over 100 thousand years of separation.
It is patently absurd to assume that all genes except those which code for superficial appearance are non-beneficial. In fact, the rapid prevalence of genes such as MCPH1 in the L3 mtDNA line descendants (70% in out-of-africans versus 0% in africans) is prima facie evidence that it is associated somehow with a significant benefit (as it would not have otherwise attained such a marked prevalence so rapidly).
PS: If you think the environment explains how genes express themselves so completely that the underlying genes themselves have a trivial influence, you should stop teaching anything and go “school” yourself a bit more. While environment does explain the expression of some genes in some settings, no amount of environmental benefit is gonna get a chimp through Harvard. The idea that we all have some sort of completely equal genetic tabula rasa on which is written our phenotype by the environment is beyond silly. Were that the case we could take any baby and turn them into an academic or athletic superman. The world around us is overwhelming evidence that does not happen, and I’ve given any number of cites showing how opportunity and environment do not overcome genes at a population level.
PPS: Schooling wise, I’ve had 4 years of college, 4 years of med school, 5 years of residency training, and as far as basic ability to grasp things, my last really standardized scores were my MCATS which were 99, 99, 99 and 97 for percentiles (Science, Verbal, General, Math). It’s not clear to me how that’s relevant, since arguments should stand on their own merit.
I have enough education to know that pasting degrees on people does not confer understanding. It appears to me that Honesty wants to present schooling qualifications as some sort of prima facie evidence his positions are correct. Without access to a specific academic record–including admission scores and published papers–an assignment of a degree means little, particularly when academia is trying to be as broadly inclusive as possible for matriculants. Unfortunately, our schools have plenty of incompetent teachers with marginally rigorous degrees being paid to teach incorrect things.
Beyond that, this is an anonymous internet site. I can have a few PhDs and be a peer-reviewed published authority on any topic I choose, right?
I’m trying to get Honesty to move away from a plea to his schooling (and while he’s at it, move away from his assumption that I need more) and instead focus on the actual argument he is advancing.
So far I’m completely underwhelmed with his grasp of the topic at hand. He seems to have concluded that, since any given–and perhaps even the majority of–SNPs are phenotypically silent, evolution of anatomically modern human beings past 200,000 years ago is trivial aside from a handful of exceptions for things like malarial resistance secondary to local vector prevalences for disease.
If that’s Honesty’s position, I will be disputing it, whether he managed to get a paper indexed on pubmed (now there’s a silly plea to authority) or not. Of course, if he wants to link to a paper he thinks supports his particular position, I’ll be delighted to review it.
Human diversity among populations as evidenced by gene prevalences within those populations is well-established.
Separation of some population groups by tens of thousands of years without achieving homogeneous admixture due to modern migrations is well established.
The prevalence of phenotypic expression of disparate genes with disparate functions from one population to the next is well established.
We can argue about whether or not “race” is a sharp biological grouping (it’s not). We can argue about whether or not there’s evidence intelligence or physical potential is strongly determined by our genes (it is). But Honesty’s position (if I’m reading it correctly) that the mechanics of how genes change and how the DNA code is influenced by environment, somehow means all humans are more or less equal genetically, is completely incorrect.
I look forward to a clarification upon Honesty’s return, without any further sidebars about how my perspective is a “layman’s” one that necessitates him to craw me a picture, and his multiple degrees somehow add credence to an otherwise untenable position.
I have enough education to know that pasting degrees on people does not confer understanding. It appears to me that Honesty wants to present schooling qualifications as some sort of prima facie evidence his positions are correct. Without access to a specific academic record, including admission scores and published papers, an assignment of a degree means little, particularly when academia is trying to be as broadly inclusive as possible for matriculants.
Beyond that, this is an anonymous internet site. I can have a few PhDs and be a peer-reviewed published authority on any topic I choose, right?
I’m trying to get Honesty to move away from a plea to his schooling (and while he’s at it, move away from his assumption that I need more) and instead focus on the actual argument he is advancing.
So far I’m completely underwhelmed with his grasp of the topic at hand. He seems to have concluded that, since any given–and perhaps even the majority of–SNPs are phenotypically silent, evolution of anatomically modern human beings past 200,000 years ago is trivial aside from a handful of exceptions for things like malarial resistance secondary to local vector prevalences for disease.
If that’s Honesty’s position, I will be disputing it, whether he managed to get a paper indexed on pubmed (now there’s a silly plea to authority) or not. Of course, if he wants to link to a paper he thinks supports his particular position, I’ll be delighted to review it.
Human diversity among populations as evidenced by gene prevalences within those populations is well-established.
Separation of some population groups by tens of thousands of years without achieving homogeneous admixture due to modern migrations is well established.
The prevalence of phenotypic expression of disparate genes with disparate functions from one population to the next is well established.
We can argue about whether or not “race” is a sharp biological grouping (it’s not). We can argue about whether or not there’s evidence intelligence or physical potential is strongly determined by our genes (it is). But Honesty’s position (if I’m reading it correctly) that the mechanics of how genes change and how the DNA code is influenced by environment, somehow means all humans are more or less equal genetically, is completely incorrect.
I look forward to a clarification upon Honesty’s return, without any further sidebars about how my perspective is a “layman’s” one that necessitates him to craw me a picture, and his multiple degrees somehow add credence to an otherwise untenable position.
I agree 100%. It’s apparently very difficult for some people to wrap their minds around the fact that genes and environment both play an important role in how people turn out.
More claptrap from our resident “race realists”, intent on convincing others that the “black race” (or some other equivalent and biologically meaningless group) is inherently intellectually inferior to the rest of humanity.
Don’t be fooled- there is zero evidence for this. There is evidence of different outcomes educationally, criminally, and economically, but there is no evidence that these different outcomes are driven by different genetic tendencies to intelligence (or genetic tendencies to violent behavior or whatever).
Until all or most of the genes responsible for intelligence (or violent behavior or whatever) are identified, and until analyses are performed that show some ethnic/racial/SIRE/whatever groups have a higher or lower average proportion of these genes, there’s zero evidence that any group is genetically dumber than any other. Zero evidence, full stop. Everything else is just a hypothesis- a hypothesis that the best explanation for the differing educational, criminal, and economic outcomes between various populations is differing genetic tendencies to intelligence. That’s step one in the scientific method- and they haven’t gotten past it yet.
On the “claptrap” front, are you able to tell me which of the items I mention in the above few posts are incorrect? I’m particularly interested in the following:
Do genesets coding for certain phenotypic differences such as disease susceptibility or lactase persistence vary among populations? If so, is it your contention that mother nature only changes genes that do not involve intelligence?
Is it the case that the L0 mtDNA population lines (the San and the Mbuti, as two examples) remaining in africa have had their gene pools homogenized with European L3 mtDNA descendant lines to any significant extent, or do those populations represent separation by something between 60 and 100,000 years?
On the “zero evidence” front for intelligence differences being genetically driven, are you able to cite some examples where equalized nurturing has been shown to equalize psychometric testing, or is it simply your contention that nurturing cannot ever be normalized for any two groups being studied? Do you hold that even at an individual level, intelligence is purely environmental? If it is at least partially genetically driven, why at the individual but not the group level?
But, but, Bones does it every episode!