The Renaissance painters portrayed God as western European for the same reason that the Byzantine artists of mosaics and ikonists in portrayed God as an inhabitant of the Eastern Mediterranean. They painted God to look like themselves. The RCC (and the Orthodox), for whatever other problems it (they) has (have) demonstrated, never declared that God is “white.”
(There are some strong arguments to suggest that the whole notion of “race” only dates to the 1600’s, so painters in the 1500’s would not have been affected. People obviously knew that other people had different appearances, but the notions that those appearances made a person specifically “different” was not a strong one.)
Obviosly we can all interbreed, and are all part of the human race.(Crowd claps for the acceptance and tolerance shown in said statement. Yay).
However, to say that there isn’t a Mongoloid race, breed , whatever consisting of Asians and the Native Americans is just dumb. And that there is no Black race consisting of Subsaharan Africans(wooly haired etc.) is equally miguided.
I read the links that you posted, but found that one of the arguments against the Big 3 was that Austrailian Aboriginies didn’t fit in with the other Africans, or that maybe they were part of the Mongoloid race. Again, Johnny, crack open that old Hi Skool textbook and learn. the Aboriginies have always been Caucasian and classified as such, and the fact that they don’t really match up with the Africans and the Mongoloids seems to be good Cause from said Effect.
If there are any other small populations that seem to break the mold, I’d really appreciate hearing which ones they are, otherwise thanks but no thanks.
Brown skinned Jesus on a tricycle! For a second there, in your previous post, you were headed in the right direction. Now, after reading all the evidence to the contrary (and you did read it, right? Including the links) you come back with this.
I am sorely confused by this statement. Are you actually reading anything anyone has posted here, on this particular thread? The very dark Aboriginies are classified as Caucasian so this proves the big 3 race theory?
What mold? The one that proves or disproves the race theory? How about the fact that, genetically, we are all the same damned race! There is more genetic variations within the so-called races than between them.
So, in essence, depicting Jesus as either white or black makes no difference. The fact that each culture shows the Son of God as a reflection of themselves makes perfect sense. That the OP’s friend believes everyone should think Jesus is white is where he went wrong.
I feel like bashing my head against a wall. What is it about this topic which suddenly causes intelligence to drop off the register?
As for Axiom, read the god damned cites, your assertions are incoherent and wrong. If you have some substantive comment on the genetics literature then please feel free, otherwise, the issue is dealt with.
I Never said that we are not all one race, the Human Race, YAY!!. But like dogs, there ARE different breeds. you can look at people and see that. to say otherwise is ridiculous.
They may just be superficial differences (skin color, eye color, etc.) but they ARE there.
I do beleive that climate and locality DO play a big part in the evolution of man. I think you can see that by the growing amount of “Ethnicity”, for want of a better word, as you get closer to the Equator.
I really don’t see the problem with excepting that there are big groups that we are a part of. It seems to me that that is how we would evolve.
But it seems to me, that you are saying, that a Chinese person has nothing, or even less in common with his or her Chinese brethren, than with an Anglo living in America. And no common Mongoloid ancestry, and that just strikes me as weird, sorry.
German Shepards ARE at least a subset of dog, they are still dogs, but they ARE a subset.
Taking out the Aboriginies, I would like to know another group of people that doesn’t fit into the big 3 mold, or at least a mixture of them.
Exion, I added the emphasis which you forgot to put in the original.
What textbook are you using, something from the '50s or earlier? (For what it’s worth, I can confirm for Tom and others that some books back then actually did classify Australian aborigines as Caucasians) Modern geneticists say there is more genetic diversity among sub-Saharan Africans than in the rest of the world’s population combined; that genetically northern Asian populations are closer to Europeans than to southeast Asians; and that southeast Asian populations are closer to [drumroll] Australian Aborigines than to northern Asians or American Indians.
You’re two for two here. This is exactly what genetic studies have found. Read the research. Or, continue believing what you want, even though you are wrong. How easy all life would be if we could just make assumptions to fit our own personal view of the world and not even try to look at the facts.
The Aboriginies are not a mixture of your big 3? How in the hell are we going to find examples of people who do not share human qualities?
Exion, you are right. There is such a thing as race. Enough people believe in it and act on it to make it true in everything but fact. Race does exist culturally, you get no arguement with me there. But don’t mix up cultural beliefs with scientific facts.
Good, you evidently need it. Now, one item to note, its usually helpful when arguing in Great Debates to address the materials which folks make available to you. I’ve decided to reproduce my good old standard message including cites and links to the relevant literature. Try addressing it.
No, not like dogs insofar as dog breeds are artificailly maintained and human variation, as will be noted below, is far below that of dogs. Although outside of the artificially created dog breeds there might be some good analogy given non-artificial variation. But this is a red herring.
The issue is what is the real meaning of the superficial surface morphology people call race? Population genetics has already revealed, not much and not much for describing interrelatedness per se. See below.
No one has argued otherwise, you’re clearly not understanding the argument at all. The issue is that these superficial differences do not meaningfully describe interrelatedness, although they do describe similar climate regimes.
Color or melanin. Ethnicity is your self-percieved and socially defined identity. No more ethnicity closer to the equator than elsewhere, per se. Of course, there’s more color closer to the equator, but that does not mean folks are more closely related or what not.
There is no problem per se, other than the great racial groupings have proven, through research in population genetics, to be inaccurate. That’s all.
That’s how the genetic cookie crumbled. However, you’ve mistated the genetics: rather any single chinese individual is as likely to have as much in common genetically (in gross terms) with an Anglo as with a “fellow” Asian.
Trivially simple to address:
(1) “Negritos” of south east asia: “negro” surface morphology but their closest relatives are in fact fellow SE Asians. Note these are not Aborigines who are an entirely seperate population.
(2) Khio-San, who appear to relatively significantly diverge from other sub-Saharan groups and may be one of the oldest distinct human populations
(3) Saharan and North East Africans whose skeletal morphologies range from stereotypically caucasian to somewhere in between, however they retain dark skin and ‘kinky’ hair. Nor is this a result of new “mixture” – as far back as the 1960s (See Chamla) research in the Sahara showed mixed morphologies in populations in the Sahara, North Africa and the Sahel going back 20k years and more. Genetics suggests rather Eurasiatic populations (the other refutation of the idea of the big three) are a bud off of these populations.
(4) internal diversity to sub-Saharan populations giving lie to the idea that they are homo-genenous.
Now, since you have yet to deal with the cites I provided in the other threads I will repeat here some of the highlights of what I said in the other race threads. I sincerely apologize for the repetition but certain participants seem not to like to deal with the literature:
First, to begin with the relevant literature, try checking out, for a general discussion the following texts:
Goodman, Allan. “The Problematics of “Race” in Contemporary Biological Anthropology.” in Biological Anthropology: The State of the Science 1995.
Cavalli-Sforza, L Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; & Piazza, Alberto. “Scientific Failure of the Concept of Human Races,” in _The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press (Princeton, 1994)
In regards to the later, the authors explain how genetic information abundantly proves that there are no distinct “races” in the human species. The number of “races” identified by recent authors who cling to the “race” concept ranges from 3 to 60. “Race” classifications are arrived at without consistent criteria. C-S et al note that there is without question only one human species. All attempts to find smaller groupings within the human species are entirely arbitrary. Gene frequencies vary so greatly within particular populations that they prove useless for distinguishing among geographically defined populations. Even the most isolated human groups carried with their founders diverse sets of genes; large regions of the world are all well known to have experienced many migrations and consequent exchanges of genes.
C-S et al conclude “From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to gain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence. It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals. However, the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis. . . .” What has been said all along, in other words…
There are two levels of variability to consider. Intra and inter-group (within and between group) variations in the genome. C-S’ considers an analysis of that part of our genome which can be measured by various markers (of allele
variation) of the 6% to 15% of our variability –not our entire genome note, of our *variability, which is a vanishingly small 1% or so-- which varies by region or group. The difference in the estimates depends on the markers used. Templeton, using the “classical” blood markers gets around 15%, others get around 6% using more refined methods.
I.E. our variation by things which one might call racial is tiny! Say, at maximum 15% of approximately 1%. (Some refs:
re much lower degree of mtDNA variability among modern humans see M. Ruvolo et al. [1993] Molecular Biology and Evolution 10: 1115-1135; re much less Heterozygosity of modern humans than in other primates see D. N. Janczewski et al., [1990] Journal of Heredity 81: 375-387
re Human races not having unique set of shared derived characters characterizing any human ‘race’ see P. A. Morin et al. [1994] Science 265: 1193-1201;
re max mtDNA maximum for humans (1.1%) for other primates, around 3% see R. L. Cann et al. [1987] Nature 325: 31-36. Also Research by Maryellen Ruvolo, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 13/9/66. which examined mtDNA estimated mutation rate of 0.8% per million years. It estimated gorillas separated from chimps and humans cica 8-10 MYA; humans and chimps circa 6 MYA. Found a very large difference between mtDNA of Gorilla gorilla gorilla (W Africa lowland) and E. Africa species G. g. graueri and G. g. beringei indicating a split about 3 MYA and almost making them separate species. Most interesting was how little variation there was in human mtDNA. “Her findings support previous research showing that modern humans are remarkably less diverse genetically than are the great apes. 'The most different humans on the face of the earth are less different than two lowland gorillas from the same forest in West Africa.”)
As Templeton says in connection with his paper, “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective,” (American Anthropologist, Fall 1998) “The 15 percent is well below the threshold that is used to recognize race in other species. In many other large mammalian species, we see rates of differentiation two or three times that of humans before the lineages are even recognized as races. Humans are one of the most genetically homogenous species we know of. There’s lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it’s basically at the individual level. The between-population variation is very, very minor.”
Added bonus: Mark Seielstad, Endashaw Bekele, Muntaser Ibrahim, Amadou Touré, and Mamadou Traoré "A View of Modern Human Origins from Y Chromosome Microsatellite Variation " Vol. 9, Issue 6, 558-567, June 1999
Online at: http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/abstract/9/6/558
Summarizes many of the issues in population genetics in its introduction, although it really deals with paleoanthropological issues, but contains some nicely stated critiques of how to approach markers and their meaning.
Similar issues are discussed in:
Francis S. Collins,1 Lisa D. Brooks,1,3 and Aravinda Chakravarti2 “A DNA Polymorphism Discovery Resource for Research on Human Genetic Variation”
Online at: http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/8/12/1229
(mostly the intro, although the paleo stuff is fun and interesting.)
And while I’m at it, why not read this paper?
Mark Stoneking, Jennifer J. Fontius, Stephanie L. Clifford, Himla Soodyall, Santosh S. Arcot, Nilmani Saha, Trefor Jenkins Mohammad A. Tahir, Prescott L. Deininger, and Mark A. Batzer: “LETTERS: Alu Insertion Polymorphisms and Human Evolution: Evidence for a Larger Population Size in Africa”
Vol. 7, Issue 11, 1061-1071, November 1997
Online at: http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/7/11/1061
Since it shows how population issues are addressed in context, not 100% relevant but what the heck I thought it was an interesting article and since I’m in a sharing mood.
Also Li Jin, Peter A. Underhill, Vishal Doctor, Ronald W. Davis, Peidong Shen, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Peter J. Oefner
“Distribution of haplotypes from a chromosome 21 region distinguishes multiple prehistoric human migrations” Vol. 96, Issue 7, 3796-3800, March 30, 1999
is kinda fun.
Thank you for taking the time to repost your information. I HAVE read through it, but it isn’t asnswering my question.
I DO NOT disaggree with the statement that the differences between the “Races” are truly irrelevant on a genetic level. I AGREE that skin-eye color are pretty minor compared to things like body structure and things of that sort, and that even THEY are not all that relevant.
What I still don’t understand is are you saying that Native Americans did NOT emigrate from Asia. And that the Asian did NOT come about as a spliter group evolved from some other “race” after being separated for a long time in a harsh, cold, mountainous climate like Discover told me?
From what I understood evolution worked this way-
Some previos human ansestor evolved into modern homo sapiens. These new modern homo Sapiens interbred with each other as they spread out across the lands. After time, they began to develope different characteristics more suitable to their new environments than to their previous homogeneous proto Homo Sapien Shape. As different groups became separate from each other their particular differences solidified into the recognizable differences that we see today. Afros darker skin for Blacks. Epicanthic folds, Black/Brown strait hair(Mostly) for Asians, and a propensity for shiftiness amongst the Caucasians.
As with Blacks in America, you can trace them back to Africa. I was under the impression that if we had a TimeScope.Tm that we could trace the varied sub-groups(West Africans for Example) back to larger subgroups (the original Black people in general) back to the origin first people. Same for the others (Native Americans back to Mainland Asians, back to the original separated group. Etc?
Two Black people are going to have Black children(until evolution takes hold) so I really don’t understand how there cannot be a relation between the different groups.
And by I do think that humans artificialy maintain their separateness similarly to the way dog breeds are maintained by the simple fact of crushing Peer pressure. It may be alot less strong lately, but mixing “races” could get you kilt almost anytime up to the last few decades. And if that is true, is their a proto human shape that we would revert to if we allowed ourselves to Intermingle, the same way that wild dogs tend to revert back to a proto dog form if allowed to do likewise?
Exion:It may be alot less strong lately, but mixing “races” could get you kilt almost anytime up to the last few decades.
Way wrong! You’re just generalizing from a couple hundred years of strictish racial segregationism in US culture, and comparing it to more liberal attitudes in the last couple decades. What about the thousands and tens of thousands of years before that? Ancient Near Eastern peoples, Africans, Central Asians, Greeks, Macedonians, Afghans, Arabs, Spaniards, Indians, Welsh, Danes, Romans, you name it—people have been intermarrying with different-colored people as freely as little bunny rabbits throughout much of human history. “Color bar” is actually relatively recent as a widespread cultural taboo.
Getting killed for “mixing races” was pretty much an American invention that only lasted a couple of hundred years (and even then, it was limited to specific types ofoccurrences). There have probably been a few occasions in other times and other places where marrying outside ones group could be lethal, but none of those instances cause even a blip in the overall evolutionary development of humanity. There are a whole slew of famous Europeans that have ancestors from Africa. We don’t hear about them, much, because it was not a sentence of death (or even much cause for comment). Only in the U.S. have we had a prolonged period of guys in white sheets murdering people to maintain “racial purity.”
I must have been thinking of some other group of “halfs” that suffered negative peer pressure in Japan. And all of those Mullatos in Europe, how could I have forgotten.DIdn’t Spain have that one Negro King? It must have slipped my mind, or was it the Russians?
WHile I agree that there has been interbreeding betwwen the larger Groups ( that you all seen to hate so much) I haven’t seen to many places where there was PREVELANT intermixing, there still isn’t (except maybe in a few anomalous areas.
Races have no coherence at the genetic level for the reasons given.
Where did I say Native Americans did not enter the Americas from Asia? Your problem is your inability to let go of your preconcieved categories:
What is clear from the evidence:
(1) prehistoric Asiatic populations had diverse morphologies (a) some of which look rather ‘white’ although they are ‘close’ in terms of descent to more ‘classic’ or stereotypical Asian populations
(2) the Americas were populated by some unknown mixture of the two.
(3) at no point in prehistory or history did any of these groups form coherent mega races, but rather it is clear, as suggested by point one and by the previously mentioned fact that SE Asian “Negritos” --with African surface morphology-- all coexisted and are codescendant.
Correct, somewhere in North East to East Africa, or possibly South East Africa.
More or less correct. If you follow my link above to Mark Seielstad, Endashaw Bekele, Muntaser Ibrahim, Amadou Touré, and Mamadou Traoré "A View of Modern Human Origins from Y Chromosome Microsatellite Variation " Vol. 9, Issue 6, 558-567, June 1999 you will find a more precise, genetic description of the events.
No, false. See the links above. Read carefully. No solidification ever occured. Moreover, at no point did pure types ever exist. EVER. Rather a shifting constellation of features was always present, and in fact have shifted in frequency over time.
What part of my prior statements indicating how stupid this is did you not understand: Once more
(1) Negritos of SE Asia, direct descendants of other nearby Asiatic populations have fully Negroid morphologies (and of course, as in all cases, there is blending, but we’ll take the classic core)
(2) South Indians have dark skin and some incidence of curly hair
(3) Saharan and North East Africans have morphologies which might be characterized as ‘caucasian’ – none of this is new and is fact ancient.
Epithantic folds occur in some African populations and can be found among some “European” populations. Not all Asian populations have the stereotypical Asian hair. Not all have the fold. You’re making gross over-generalizations and ignoring the vast evidence undermining these generalizations.
Whatever.
Your impressionn is 100% wrong. Why do I get the impression you either did not read or did not understand the ciations provided? There was no “original black people” – other than of course the original human population(s) which emerged out the constriction event which produced Homo sap.
No original groups for any. Oh god this is like talking to a brick. Please do read the citations.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding the argument. Since you can’t be bothered to read the citations, I think I shall leave you to wallow in your ignorance.
Like in the White Man Cometh discussion, you mistake recent history for all time… That is not how things worked. We have our overwhelming species level homogeneity as proof of that (as I have already noted, and you supposedly read.)
Exion, what you say in the quote above seems reasonable to me. Where we differ is that you seem to think that the process was a relatively straightforward, threeway division leading to self-contained Caucasian, Negroid and Mongoloid races.
As I understand the findings of modern geneticists the process was much more complicated- peoples, not particularly closely related, but in similar environments might develop similar appearances, while other peoples more closely related to one of the original peoples, developed different appearances. Complicating this is the fact that there would be more-or-less continual geneflow between neighboring populations, preventing the buildup of sharp boundaries in many cases. As a result, there is no one genetic “type” for any ethnic group, merely different gene frequencies which can only be determined by examining large samples from each group.
As a consequence, we cannot infer degree of relationship or genetic closeness by merely external appearances. As an example, all the non-African populations split off from some African group within the last 90,000 years (prob. closer to 60,000). Some of the other African groups may have split off much earlier- so the mere similarity of appearances between such African populations would be a result of similar environmental causes, not of a particular genetic closeness. [And this is only my layman’s understanding of the issues- I’d welcome any critique from someone more knowledgeble]
Sarcasm works better when you are the one holding the facts.
There have certainly been times and places where one culturally identifiable group has oppressed and persecuted another culturally identifiable group. This persecution could, obviously, include prohibitions against intermarriage (or inter-breeding).
Your statement, however, was
Your statement seems to imply that this is a universal condition that has applied throughout human history until the latter portion of the 20th century. That is a gross overstatement.
There is ample evidence that the peoples of the Lower Nile intermarried with peoples on the Upper Nile on several occasions when one or the other empire expanded to come in contact with (or conquer) the other. When the Arabs swept across northern Africa in the Islamic expansion, they did not segregate the blacks on the western Coast of what is now Morocco, but intermarried with them. The European invaders certainly interbred with the peoples they found in the Americas. The Tartars interbred with both the “Caucasian” Rus and the “Caucasian” Mogols of India. The slaves imported to the West Indies (as opposed to those imported to the U.S.), intermarried freely with both white colonialists and the surviving Indians.
Of course, there were not “all of those Mullatos in Europe.” There was, until the last hundred years or so, very little in the way of mass transportation to allow intermarriage. It did not occur simply because it’s rather harder to date someone from a village 2,000 miles away when your best transportation is a 6 mph horse or a 7 knot ship. However, outside the U.S., when blacks came to Europe, they often found and married whites (Europe seems to be full of white folks) without any threat of death or banishment. Pushkin had a black ancestor who served as an officer in the court of Peter the Great. (You were saying about Russians?) There are persistent (though, to my mind, unsubstantiated) reports that Beethoven had a black ancestor.)
In fact, the Japanese segregation of the Ainu, Koreans, and some other groups tends to stand with American Jim Crow practices as the exceptions rather than the rule regarding the mingling of races.
Those of us who have posted on the subject of the three racial groups do not “hate them,” we recognize that they do not exist except in culturally created boxes that have no biological reality. (Among anthropologists, for whom the concept of race has a useful (if limited) purpose, the number of races identified tends to run between six and eight with some “ethnic” divisions running up near 60. The old “three races” has had no legitimate academic support for many years.)
nebuli, the bigger problem that I see with Exion’s race theory is one of definition. How do you define these racial groups? According to Ex, all you have to do is look at them and see: dark skin, wooly hair --Negroid from the African motherland. Skin folds, straight black hair --Mongoloid from the Asian continent. White --Caucasian (I don’t think he has mentioned any other distinguishing features for the Caucasians)
There is no scientific validity in catagorizing people in this manner. It is analogous with saying something like: These families lived in this working-class neighborhood for generations. They worked hard and developed callous hands. Look! a new race of callous-handed peoples.
Biggirl, that’s more or less what I was trying to say with:
I just wanted to clarify for him that we weren’t disputing the environmental causes for differing human appearances which he cited, but the conclusions he was drawing from them.
I was clarifying the clarification. Not that what you wrote wasn’t clear, but our friend Exion seems to have a problem with timelines and posts more than 2 or 3 paragraphs long that are not his own.
And even here it is likely very restricted to recent times. The history and Geography of Human Genes, Cavalli-Sforza et al, Princeton Univ. Press, 1993, suggests there may have been a good deal of geneflow between Ainu and Japanese populations, with over 40% of the Ainu genepool coming from Japanese sources. I recall about 15-20 years ago there was an uproar in Japan because some scholar had suggested it was likely the Imperial family had significant Ainu ancestry.
