:rolleyes:
Umm, I’m demonstrating that “race” does not exist.
Your little pearls, however, appear more suited for another forum.
Anyway, this discussion is going nowhere.
I’m outta here.
Genetic heritage and races, a closing comment on the issue here:
First, I have to agree with Tomndeb that our ‘ally’ sjgouldrocks has not been either helpful or particularly useful. In fact his/her interventions rather resemble drive-bys themselves nor has sjgoudrocks shown much comprehension in the attacks, often at the wrong targets, made. That’s quite regrettable as we have no need for such behavior. Most egregiously As Tom has noted is sjgouldrocks evident misapprehension that genetic evidence indicates that the classic race concept does not work in describing human populations biological variations (and in this sense we can say ‘proves’ that the classic races do not exist in any scientifically useful sense) means there are no population variations. That is not what the evidence indicates at all.
While it is important to recall that regional variation, that variation that could be between coherent populations, is very trivial in humans, it does exist. Of course it does not break down by the classic races and is not known to be terribly coherent across traits among the large populations which might be called races – when I talk about baskets of traits I am thinking of coherent variation, i.e. correlations between the variation of various traits and a population such that percentage of say trait X predicts that the group also varies in a similar manner with trait Y which is not otherwise linked. So making sarcastic comments which reflect what might fairly be called denying real differences is truly a form of ‘political correctness’ from a certain POV, much as the opposite, affirming unsupported differences is in my view ‘political correctness’ from another POV.
In regards to greeny, it is not a question of intellectualism, it is a question of engaging and thinking about the critique in an effective manner. I have suggested and I maintain that suggestion that you are locked into an unsupportable hypothesis based on a casual and fundamentally superficial approach which in the final analysis is racialist(*)-light for it depends on a similar approach to understanding variation as the classic race theory. That approach has failed. The data is abundant on that point. I wish to be clear that my characterization is in regards to the logic of the argument and its accord with the data, not of the political or social implications. Grienspace notes with some fervor his attachment to a multicultural Canada and I have no reason to doubt that. But there is no necessary connection. As Freedom noted some time back, indirectly, the concept of race or not as based on biology is not inherently for one political POV. Non-races wherein human variation is actually only truly important on an individual level (i.e. taking as given for the moment that no coherently structured population, mini-race will emerge) could be a fundamentally Libertarian thing. Or not.
(*: I often use the term racialist to indicate positions/people which counter-factually take the classic races as a given. I use the term in order to avoid ‘racist’ insofar as while perhaps technically correct given many dictionary definitions, it also implies one has a David Duke/Rushton/KKK agenda which may not be the case. I myself took races for a given until I stumbled into the genetic literature in the late 1990s, and I can say I’ve not been a racist in my adult life.)
Now, if I implied – I have not reviewed my own words so I’m not being disingenuous – that greeny is a racist (per my racialist-racist explanation) in the common then I do apologize for that. It would have in the heat of frustration.
And perhaps a final stab at explaining my fundamental problem with the ‘Black Americans dominate North American sports and North Americans dominate in certain athletic events because of their [supposed] West African heritage.’
My fundamental problem lies in the fact that explanation is terribly reductionist and runs into numerous logical problems when one thinks about it terms of genetic data, variation and populations.
Insofar as ‘West African’ heritage, hereafter WAH, (**) is supposed to be the determinate we run into the question of how this is supposed to occur. There is no denying the heterogeneous nature of Black American ancestry. For example, my cites and the unfortunately deformed links in my prior message were intended to provide reference to the long and intimate (in all senses although the degree to which some of the materials tend to whitewash Amerind slave holding/relations with Africans is to be regretted) relations between ‘Black’ and ‘Red’ America and the high degree of ‘mixing.’ Greeny was apparently unaware of this long and yet very recent history. And then we can add European ancestry etc.
(**– a phrase apparently chosen by that idiot Eltine because Black Americans African ancestry largely but not exclusively traces back to Western Africa, roughly from the Niger river delta to the Senegal river as the coastal region where most North American bound slaves were acquired as I recall from reading Curtin and Thorton. Of course we are left with ignoring the large degree of variation in this region, recalling Africa is the seat of the highest degree of variation among all human populations, and that the sources of the slaves varied over time drawing on both upper savannah and lower forest populatioins as well as populations from the Congo river basin etc;)
So, given this heterogeneous heritage, this WAH is supposed to explain all. In order for this to be true we have to presume as I mentioned before that the package of traits – I am categorical that a single trait explanation is counter the evidence so we must look to multiple traits – really has to be dominate over competing alleles. It is difficult to imagine otherwise how WAH manages to shine through regardless. But if that is the case then we should see it across the board.
That is
(a) Other populations exposed to WAH, including White Americans sub-populations long resident and in contact with black populations, should stand out in the same athletics given the dominance – of course holding economic and social factors constant – whoops we have an issue here!
(b) One would expect such advantageous and dominant traits to strongly propagate through West African populations and thus present some marked echo
© This evidence should stand out clearly from socio-economic/cultural factors. I do insist on this last.
Insofar as I am unaware that
(a) Actual West Africans are stand outs in sports
(b) There is any good evidence of a WAH echo in other populations such as
a. North Africans (granting the Moroccans stand out performances in recent years in marathons but noting that there seems to be no correlation between skin color and performance and insofar as darkness of skin could be reasonably interpreted as a rough indication of recent WAH which I hope I am forgiven for presuming to be at least moderately important in this context)
b. ‘White’ Americans from a population which might reasonably be presumed to have had genetic input from Africans.
c. ‘Red’ Americans the same;
© Any good evidence of a pattern of variation which would suggest that WAH is either coherent in this manner or susceptible to matching this hypothesis while admitting that we do not have enough data to categorically rule this out. On the other hand, data to date run strongly against this.
(d) Any particularly strong evidence that the various ad hoc physical ‘factors’ cited in the WAH hypothesis are largely explainable through a simplistic and direct dependence on genetic heritage (in terms of a group, obviously individual heritage is important) as opposed issues such as training style, preparation etc.
(e) Nor any good explanation of how the various ad hoc and ultimately not terrible rigorously defined (and thus testable) ‘factors’ cited can be tied to a coherent package of traits
(f)
I have to question this hypothesis and its logic. It seems to me to run against the data and what we know about human variation. While on one hand one should be somewhat cautious about reaching conclusions, it seems to me fair to say that:
(a) data in support for socio-economic factors are clearer and stronger
(b) there is good scientific reason to favor or support this WAH hypothesis and many good ones to disfavor it.
© While mentioning at the same time that in rejecting the WAH hypothesis as a good explanatory factor for recent Black American dominance in many sports noting that this in no way implies a denial of genetic factors – in conjunction with environmental factors in the largest sense of the phrase – or the possibility of as of yet to be defined discrete populations which may harbor some discernable genetic advantage which might emerge in the context of environment.
So, the issue is boiled down to the following. The WAH hypothesis poorly matches the data (laying aside non-scientific casual observations) and runs into severe problems in terms of logic in the face of known facts of variation and population heritages. While it is reassuringly easy to grasp on an intuitive basis, it fails in the face of more rigorous examination. Insofar as there do not appear to be any scientific (stress on scientific) reasons to disfavor a socio-economic/socio-cultural explanations, I see no reason to advance this explanation unless other data comes along.
In the real world, it strikes me that anyone advancing (biological) racialist (mini or maxi) explanations in any domain, from intelligence to athletics to medical issues, now has a duty to overcome a strong doubt as to the coherence of the argument. In order to do so, the researcher advancing the argument should provide some substantive and scientific proof of the coherence of the group proposed and address if not rebut in toto competing explanations.
In re Gottfredson, insofar as dude has cited someone who depends strongly on eugenicist literature without much in the way of substantive rebuttal let alone reference of contradictory information, I think we can all see the problem. By the way the Scientific American is not peer reviewed. Regardless, one has to look at the quality of the argument as well as the place of publication.
One of the surest signs of a crank theory is that it is long on explanations, but short on verifiable, quantifiable predictions.
When someone argues to me in favor of a new gun control law, I always say “So, by what percentage will gun violence go down if your law is enacted?”
Interesting that nobody took my bet about the 100 meter dash in the 2004 olympics.
Collounsbury thank you for your extremely cogent and well-thought postings. As a scientist and a physician, I admire your abilities to expound intelligently based on both data and accepted theories, while avoiding untenable metaphors and acknowledging where the data is incomplete or contradictory. Rational and open-minded individuals cannot help but to be impressed by your presentation.
Respectfully,
Qadgop, MD
Much more interesting, of course, is that you have not provided the information as to the exact ethnic background of the winners in 2000. (Sorry, a photograph shows nothing more than an impression of skin color. Where is the genealogical/genetic demonstration of each winner, including the percent of European (by region) or American (be region) ancestors and the regions of Africa from which your purported winners came?)
Low on demonstrated facts, indeed.
Well thankyou Collounsbury for clearing that up.I hate being considered a racist. The problem for me is that the your position would require some trust on my part to accept as I am incapable of grasping the entire line of reasoning that would allow me to cast aside a physical heritage explanation for black dominance in basketball and the sprint.
Astute readers will note that in response to my recent post, another poster has ignored the idea of prediction entirely, and instead tried to divert the issue into a debate over interpretation of the past.
Sorry, I don’t have the energy to argue over whether Maurice Greene (winner of the gold medal in the 100m dash at the 2000 Sydney olympics, and depicted here: http://kckansas.com/kckmg03030100.htm) is black or not.
The beauty of PREDICTION as a tool for evaluating hypotheses is that there’s often no need to get bogged down in semantic debates.
I can make predictions, based upon my hypotheses, that don’t require any definition of race and in fact are based on observations that are only loosely related to race - by anyone’s definition.
I predict that the winners of the gold, silver, and bronze medals in the men’s 100 meter dash at the 2004 olympic games will not have blue eyes.
Yeah, and I predict that the winner of the 5000m skating competition will have straight hair.
Actually, I have not ignored anything. Since none of us (to my knowledge) has the information that I sought, performing the analysis that I asked for is identical to making a prediction of what will be found without waiting three years for the result.
Your prediction proves nothing. The majority of the countries who are going to invest the most money and effort into trying to produce a winner have already pre-selected for your choice. In the U.S., Canada, and a few other places, whites are discouraged from pursuing those events as a career (just as blacks were discouraged from trying out as quarterbacks in college football and the NFL).
(The last time we went around this track, I found an interesting article by a Canadian racer. He (along with a couple of other kids with African ancestors) had been recruited by a prestigious high school to win races since “everybody knew. . . .” However, in their district, there was a white kid who was simply walking away from all of them. The author noted that whenever the white kid won, he was never congratulated for being the best. Instead, he was constantly told that he was “lucky” that the black kids were having an off day. The author wondered, in the article, how many of those put-downs the kid (whose time was never beaten in the district) suffered through before he began to believe the silliness and began to let the black kids overtake him.)
The purpose of my response is to you is to identify exactly who has been winning to discover whether there is any truth to the idea that ethnic background makes a difference.
If the only thing you have to show for you prediction is the amount of melanin in the skin of the winners, then you have to explain why the only ones who seem to be winning are the ones whose ancestors were brought to the Americas so long ago. Why are not the Nigerians and Ghanans and Congolese (with their “purer” blood) dominating the events, leaving the runners from the Western Hemisphere in the dust?
I must respond to this paragragh as I believe it is utter bullshit. High schools in Canada do not recruit. Our culture is very much different than the US in that respect. Secondly, good athletes do not allow for slacking off in the face of negative opinion. In British Columbia, we have many track clubs independant of the high schools, competing every weekend in the spring and the coaches can pick out the potential future athletes from a very young age. I know many of these coaches, and let me tell you that the colour of a young athletes skin has nothing to do with their assessment of that athletes future potential. Body type, current times, PBs, progress and mental attitude is what these coaches look at.Any one who has the desire to improve and compete will get the full backing of these coaches.
Utter bullshit? Perhaps.
OTOH, you are assuming that BC and Ontario are identical in regards to their attitudes toward sports,
you assume that your idealized view of sports is true (which I doubt),
you have bought into the myth of the “nicer” Canadian.
I did read the article I mentioned. It is, obviously, nothing more than an opinion of the author–pure anecdote. However, you have certainly presented no information to show that it cannot have happened (and your wide-eyed naiveté regarding sports does not lend your position much credence).
Aw come on. This does not inspire credibility.
I was raised in Ontario and played football both ways and a forward in basketball for a high school with a proud record. In BC, my daughter pursued athletics and won medals in the BC summer games. I know the high school sports culture in both provinces, and no recruiting goes on. I believe the reason is that high schools don’t have the same alumni loyalty and organization that demands superior performance pressuring hired coaches to do what it takes to win. Furthermore, coaches in BC and Ontario are on the teaching staff and are not hired from outside and are not paid for their coaching.
Nothing I said placed a relative value on the two cultures. Differences do not neccessarily mean one is better than the other. Is the lack of recruiting idealistic? I don’t think so. Many Canadians go to American universities for the athletic scholarships.
I can not prove a negative
If one cannot demonstrate that another is a liar, one is best served by not calling another a liar in the first place.
Poor form, grienspace. Very poor.
So, what is the evidence that races are equal in intelligence?
Have we assumed, for the sake of this arguement, that athletic prowess and intelligence cannot co-exist?
Peace,
mangeorge
Never claimed tomndebb was a liar** Andros**. In fact that never crossed my mind. The only poster I ever called a liar was you** Andros**, in my very first experience in the pit for which I later expressed regret. Tomndebb is guilty of presenting an anecdote to back up a claim for which he/she later has expressed no confidence in its veracity. To his/her credit, tomndebb has at least admitted as such.
One can only surmise why you ** Andros** felt the need to express your opinion and categorize the “form” of my post, completely irrelevant to the discussion, but I can only assume you felt the need to demonize my character. As such, I find your post childish and my opinion of you has sunk.
First, **Qadgop ** thank you for the compliment. I could not receive a better one.
Second, comments. First, in re greeny. Of course I would not expect you to “trust” me in my explication of how and why you are committing some fundamental analytical and perceptual errors. I simply expect that you have the native ability to review my arguments, which I believe are fairly clear for all that they are long, and engage them actively for in my critiques I have demonstrated to the best of my abilities why your ‘hypothesis’ is unworkable. To ** rationally ** refute my critique I would expect that you would directly engage rather than ignore the points.
However, I have not seen you engage the critique. Rather you have simply repeated your superficial observations with the rhetorical equivalent of throwing up your hands and exclaiming “‘but how’?” with the subtext understood that since you have not grappled with the scientific data somehow the naive explanation ipso facto becomes valid. The discussion really does not advance when you fail to address the critiques and data. Well, as you are deeply invested in the racialist POV (as well as, judging by your most recent comments, a touchingly if pitifully naive assessement of the analytical rigor of professional coaching) to the point of being deaf to fundamental, data-centered critiques there is no hope for any rational resolution to this conversation. Such is life.
Now as to the more problematic of the participants here, AWC. While barely meriting a response, let’s take a quick look at this prediction thing.
AWC ‘observes’ with an attempt at cunning duplicity that the beauty of prediction is that it allows testing of the hypothesis. Very nice that she can manipulate the terms. The reality is another issue.
My first observation is that there mere prediction does not allow scientific testing of a hypothesis above all if one is not basing such a clearly defined prediction upon a clear, testable hypothesis. Nor is there a logical connection between predicting the vague phenotype of the next 1000 meter race winner and ‘proving’ race as a biologically valid category of analysis. I understand AWC’s education in these areas has been deficient, that much is clear, but I would have hoped that she grasped the lack of logical foundation in her ‘argument.’
For one to have a clear, testable hypothesis, one has to have
(a) clearly defined terms which are objectively definable
(b) clearly and objectively definable results. This includes controlling for other explicative factors.
© it follows from this that the prediction itself must be clear and objectively definable with regards to the hypothesis.
The ‘prediction’ that someone fitting the very vague phenotype of ‘black’ by North American standards quite clearly tells us nothing at all and predicts nothing in particular in a scientific manner. I might predict that the sun rises in the east because of Apollo, the fact the next day the sun raises per my prediction has not, quite evidently, proven Apollo is the cause. Such is the case with AWC’s ‘prediction.’
Why? Well, firstly unless we specify testable causes, its rather like predicting a red car will win the Grand Prix. If it did, that is if a red car did win the Grand Prix, what does prediction prove? Not very much at all.
Let us presume that in fact red cars do disproportionately win the Grand Prix. And when we say a red car we are being fairly loose and admitting a wide range of red hues and even cars that are not all red, perhaps as low as 30% red by absolute surface area but whose color placement leads the glance to register the car as ‘red.’ What does our prediction give us? Nothing still.
We have proposed no testable (even by logic) connection between redness of some degree and winning. We have not quantified what we mean by red, and given a large variation in hue and indeed percentage contribution of that hue to the overall color of the object. Nor have we even specified the nature of the relationship. We have not even addressed how to tell if the ‘red’ winning streak is nothing but chance (for we must recall that long streaks of chance may be of low probability but that does not imply they do not happen, further recall the chance for each round always remains the same ). And this utterly ignores controlling for alternate explanations. Such as drivers, training, etc.
To begin to have a proposition and a prediction of some scientific merit, we need to directly address how we propose ‘redness’ relates to winning and the nature of the same. Does any level and type of redness suffice, if so why? These are the sorts of specifications we need to begin to truly examine the question. Now mind you, one doesn’t have to get it all right in the start, no not at all. Rather you need to have ** a clear, rigorous analytical structure ** where you do not assume your conclusion, even though of course you probably have an expected result. The structure is to help keep your analysis transparent and with as little bias as possible.
So, AWC, your bet is not taken up because it is (a) so childish as to be laughable in terms of its conception of causation (b) ultimately so childishly formulated as to be meaningless in terms of what you are obliquely trying to prove. (Which is clearly, given the body of your interventions that certain races of intellectually inferior and physically outstanding, the vulgar old Rushton et al game)
Now, if just for the pure novelty value of it, you would care to lay the racialist cards on the table and specify precisely how your prediction operates, who qualifies as black and what criteria you use, then we can rationally examine the proposition at a depth somewhat more complicated than elementary logic.
Further, your ‘objection’ in regards to prediction fails also, again as it is based on a childish conception of hypothesis testing. All in all, a rather pitiful attempt at a rejoinder attempting to cover up the fact you have no data and that you have brought no analysis nor a hint of rebuttal to any of these conversations. Rather, again we have argument by assertion with a hint of ad hominem thrown in. You might desire to try some more well-founded attempts in the future.
In the meantime, I rest my argument upon the previously cited science and on the countervailing socio-economic/cultural explanation (itself perfectly in accord with your “‘black’ by North American popular standards” winner hypothesis). We have there the least amount of logical contortions in regards to the entire body of evidence, be it genetic or sociological or historical and to which I have only seen the unimaginative critique ‘well it just can’t be that’ without any analytical rigor to back it up.
bold italics are mine.
Yep - take Joe Blow Caveman with an IQ completely off the scale - and it would take him 20 years just to be able to know how to ask the right questions.
So I take it that everyone here concedes that we can predict with a good degree of confidence that the winners of the gold, silver, and bronze medals in the men’s one hundred meter dash at the 2004 Olympics will be “‘black’ by North American popular standards”?