So, it's June... WHERE THE **** IS THIS LOOMING GENETIC CRISIS!?

[orcenio]

@Chief_Pedant

I’m with Kimstu: still looming, and what “crisis”?

Piece by piece we’ll figure out how much of who we are is our genes, and who has those genes. The rest is rhetoric.

It will turn out to be mostly genes; of that I have no doubt. The simplest proof case I offer is the utter failure to eliminate differences so far.

On the one hand, the genetic “crisis” side wants to pretend a timeline is Real Soon Now. I’m in that genetic camp generally, but I think the timeline might be closer to 10 or 15 years, especially to persuade the last stubborn soul that I don’t have the genes for golf and never will, and a better environment ain’t gonna get me there.

Your utter faith in the validity (and future absolution) of your racist pseudo-science fantasy, comes as no surprise to me.

On the other hand, the genetic egalitarians keep hoping to uncover the long-hidden nurturing-difference Secret preventing whole groups from performing equally, Real Soon Now. However the clever among them will continue to develop new potential nurturing-difference Secrets that then have to be disproved, so they have an almost unlimited amount of time in which to advance nurturing arguments. (Until all 6 Billion have been genome-mapped and compared, for some of them.) Still; their arguments are getting feebler: for children of wealthy, educated blacks underperforming in the US system, they are down to stuff like crappy grandparents, low self-esteem and low teacher expectations–slim pickings indeed, and the recognition of which have not changed the scoring landscape in at least the last ten or fifteen years.* But I’d say they can milk those indefinitely for the Egalitarianly Devout.

“genetic egalitarians?” Ha. Do you think you are using genetics? You are not talking about genetics!

You are not a “genetic realist!” You are “race realist!” You are not promoting “genetism,” you are promoting “racism.” You are not a “geneticist!” You are something else! So just drop the doublespeak.Go back and re-read any of my thousands of post to you. Genetics don’t play any part in what you are promoting. It’s 18th century race theory.

There was one study this year, Orcenio, which seemed to be an initial shot across the bow against the general argument that we are all more or less equivalent branches of the same genetic trunk: this Science article is one of the first to provide at least one genetically-based distinction between Eurasians and sub-saharans.

I can’t wait for them to come. I can only wonder how wild your wild-ass racial interpretations of any of these papers will get.

It’s a long way from that, though, to showing exactly which genes (Neandertal or otherwise) are different, and what they govern, and while that difference is “looming” in my opinion, it’s a stretch to say it’s “looming in 2010.” It’s my personal opinion that, like the Creationist-type mentality from which the egalitarian argument derives (one common ancestor; we are pretty much all God’s beloved and equal children), many will quietly set aside the nurturing explanation for differences as a personal belief while being publicly non-committal about it. There is no extra love or academic hoorahs extended toward those who want to raise the specter of genes as the driver for the differences among us.

*The Black-White Test Score Gap, c 1998 e.g., which I just bought and am perusing now. 15 years on from the data in this cheerily optimistic position, standardized test scores are still wretchedly disparate by race. See, for instance, MCATs here.

Blah, blah, blah. Assert. Assert. “the future will absolve me” crap. I aint interested…

One bright and optimistic note for those of us discouraged by the belief that our differences are in fact genetic (and therefore immutable) is that inter-racial marrying is apparently on the rise. Perhaps a modern and mobile society can create such a dispersion of genes than none of us need take up one side of the argument or the other.

Your “races” are already products of “Interracial marrying.” Your assumptions (of some sort of ancient mythical race purity) doesn’t exist. Regardless, you still draw your stupid race lines on the world map and grit your teeth in favour for 18th century race models.