Race is Real?

Discussion in 'Biology & Genetics' started by Bowser, Jul 4, 2017.

  1. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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  3. Buckaroo Banzai Mentat Registered Senior Member

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    I find this question annoying by often being somewhat a "loaded question" in a way -- implicitly being "is race real and therefore there are inherent racial differences in human faculties or attributes that are socially very relevant in themselves", rather than a mere "do human populations differ biologically along their geographical distribution in a manner that we could roughly identify the original geographic origin of individuals or lineages, and perhaps assign arbitrary labels accordingly."

    The latter can without a doubt be answered "yes", which may or not be also an "yes" for "is race real" depending on the bio-taxonomic criteria in vogue, but wouldn't necessarily imply a "yes" to the former.

    But people who dislike or like an "yes" to the first question/statement often seem to not realize that these are really independent statements/things, and may spend a considerable time arguing as if they were really synonymous statements, which is very unfortunate for the side that posits that the complexities of society (and biology) make it so that the social conditions of individuals aren't exactly their "phenotype" (meaning a more strict derivation from the genotype), regardless of whatever influences that innate biological attributes may have in social outcomes, or how these are distributed throughout people.

    I find it kind of akin to the sloppy mistake of saying something like "yes, evolution is true, even the origin of life was even created in the laboratory". It just gives some lee-way for educated creationist/evolution-denier/ID-proponent counter-attacks correctly pointing that the origin of life wasn't reproduced experimentally, that we are in fact very far away of ever doing so, and so on, giving impressive details of microbiology, biochemistry, and the gaps in our knowledge.
     
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  5. EgalitarianJay Registered Senior Member

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    You are a racist. Yelena goes by the username Taxonomy26 on PoliticalForum and made me aware of this thread recently in a thread on PoliticalForum where I addressed the pseudoscientific topic known as Scientific Racism. You can follow a link to the thread below.

    http://www.politicalforum.com/index...ic-racism-shouldnt-be-taken-seriously.515633/

    Yelena claimed in this thread that the moderator Bells ducked responding to his arguments in this post and the he refuted the poster Iceaura on the thread's topic claiming he didn't post any sources to support his argument. Well I reviewed the thread and told him in my thread on PoliticalForum that from my perspective Iceaura refuted him point by point, Yelena lost his temper and started hurling childish insults then stormed off in a fit of rage. In my experience Yelena aka Taxonomy26 is an extremely dishonest debater who ignores counter arguments and indeed entire posts when the debate gets too rough for him. In our debate, as anyone who reads the thread can plainly see, Taxonomy26 ignored all of my sources and merely complained about the number of sources I actually posted including my use of Youtube videos and quoting abstracts to studies (while also providing links to full papers). I responded to all of his sources and he had no rebuttal to any of mine. In fact he has an obsession with complaining about the citation of my primary source, Joseph Graves, because he is an African-American. He has even made racist insults towards him. I posted the article below which directly addresses whether humans have biological races and whether there is a genetic component to average IQ score differences between socially-defined racial groups which is central to his claims in my thread and this thread.



    http://www.politicalforum.com/index...nt-be-taken-seriously.515633/#post-1068076787

    Taxonomy26 completely ignored this article and called Dr. Graves names such as "Uncle Joe", "House Boy Graves" and "House Scientist Graves" which are obviously suggestions that Graves is an "Uncle Tom" or "House Negro" which is extremely offensive and consistent with anti-Black, racist propaganda that is very common among White Supremacists and White Nationalists when talking about well-educated Black People. So Yelena McMullen can deny being a White Supremacist all he wants for accepting Asians being above Whites in the racial hierarchy he has adopted from academic racists but his post history indicates that he is racist to the core.

    Bells can decide whether he bothers with Yelena's post but I request that if Yelena decides to participate in this thread he directly addresses this paper by Graves and stop lying to this community about not being racist in light of the evidence against him. He can also explain why he doesn't accept Graves as being a credible source given Graves' standing as a respected evolutionary biologist with several significant scholarships, fellowships and professional appointments who has been in several documentaries and been consulted to speak on national TV about this subject (ex. being invited to speak on CNN to address to address James Watson's controversial statements on race and intelligence). His credentials have been provided to Yelena in my debates with him and all he does is respond with racist taunts.

    http://jsnn.ncat.uncg.edu/faculty/joseph-l-graves-jr-ph-d/



    So Yelena, if you want people to respond to your sources you need to respond to theirs.

    Otherwise you will rightfully be accused of trolling.

    You are absolutely correct. So-called "race-realists" are really just advocates of Scientific Racism.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience


    https://www.amazon.com/Funding-Scientific-Racism-Wickliffe-Pioneer/dp/0252074637/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507169841&sr=8-1&keywords=pioneer fund

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    The Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by Wickliffe Preston Draper, is one of the most controversial nonprofit organizations in the United States. Long suspected of misusing social science to fuel the politics of oppression, the fund has specialized in supporting research that seeks to prove the genetic and intellectual inferiority of blacks while denying its ties to any political agenda.This powerful and provocative volume proves that the Pioneer Fund has indeed been the primary source for scientific racism. Revealing a lengthy history of concerted and clandestine activities and interests, The Funding of Scientific Racism examines for the first time archival correspondence that incriminates the fund's major players, including Draper, recently deceased president Harry F. Weyher, and others.Divulging evidence of the Pioneer Fund's political motivations, William H. Tucker links Draper to a Klansman's crusade to repatriate blacks in the 1930s. Subsequent directors and grantees are implicated in their support of campaigns organized in the 1960s to reverse the Brown decision, prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act, and implement a system of racially segregated private schools.Tucker shows that these and other projects have been officially sponsored by the Pioneer Fund or surreptitiously supervised by its directors. This evidence demonstrates that any results of genuine, scientific value produced with the fund's support have been a salutary, if incidental, consequence of its actual purpose: to provide ammunition for what has essentially been a lobbying campaign to prevent the full participation of blacks in society and the polity.


    I asked Taxonomy26 in my thread to name any scholars who support his view that there are genetically determined racial differences in intelligence (racial hereditarians) who have presented their research in an academic setting in the past 10 years and debated an opponent on the subject in an academic setting. He failed to do this for Linda Gottfredson who he claims is the foremost expert on IQ research but claims Charles Murray has spoken at Harvard University many times. Murray is one of the authors of The Bell Curve. I have never seen Murray in debate with an academic opponent and he ducked a direct challenge made by Joseph Graves to do so and made excuses not to have a formal debate with him when they were invited to speak at an event.

    The inability to name a single scholar who supports your position that is willing to defend their theory in an academic setting speaks volumes about what the scientific community thinks of your claims which is that your theory is fringe and discredited and is only supported by disreputable scholars with a racist ideological agenda.
     
    Last edited: Oct 6, 2017
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  7. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Are all races equally absent minded?
     
  8. Kylo Renskins Registered Member

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    I would think so.
     
  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Depends on their relative literacy and schooling. There's a red tribe in New York (Oneida? Mohawk? in the Iroquois Confederacy anyway) that once upon a time had a lock on the high steel construction trades - but not if they had too much schooling. Seriously - anything past junior high was viewed with suspicion. Too many of them fell off.
     
  10. Jake Arave Ethologist Registered Senior Member

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    Here's the thing that I feel a lot of you have been missing. Race is real, and we are all different. I refuse to allow academia and the pursuit of knowledge to label and disenfranchise those from different backgrounds than myself. Supposing Social-Darwinism as a construct was always correct, why would we allow ourselves to justify hatred and bigotry for no other reason but because we are racists and bigots? When we use our observational science as justification for our baseless hatred, we aren't only destroying our fellow man, we are corrupting and polluting our quest for knowledge. When people like those that have commented on this thread attempt to shine light on supposed inferiority of race(s) - typically black Americans. What have we accomplished? What have we done to improve the human condition? What is the purpose of knowledge if not to better the human condition? You're not intelligent, you're not a realist, you're a racist.
     
  11. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    3,252
    What makes us racist, bigots. I believe the environment that groups generate. If a group is negligent in its attitude it will be labeled and a stigma will be attached . Would I want to live with my family in an area where
    s is neglected by the residents, NO , would I want to live in an high crime area , NO . So I will label where , the negligence takes with certain physical appearance, and I will not want to associate with them . So than I am a racist and a bigot.
    As people stop degrading and deteriorating the environment and live to the standards to the greater population they will not be excluded from the rest of the population.
     
  12. EgalitarianJay Registered Senior Member

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    I agree with your overall point. Even if Scientific Racism were valid I don't believe it would justify racism. Tim Wise actually wrote a good article on this where he analyzed some of my scientific arguments against racists and made the point that whether or not claims of racial superiority are true or not they have no relevance to the moral stance that racism is wrong. I agree with this. Even if some groups were mentally inferior I would still believe in social equality and oppose racist discrimination. We don't discriminate against the mentally ill and disabled just because they have mental problems and cognitive deficits which are not their fault. What we do us seek cures to these ailments and help people with these problems live fulfilling lives to the best of their ability.

    However I don't believe we should allow these racists to take the moral high ground by simply dismissing their arguments without a challenge. We should show them that they are wrong. If they want to step up on a science message board and claim they are correct let them present their argument and when they fail and start trolling ban them. As far as race being "real" and us all being different is concerned we are certainly all unique with our own unique life experiences and what ever differences may exist on a physical level should not have any social importance. I believe that is far more important than arguing about whether race is a biological or social construct.
     
  13. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    This may be of interest:
    https://www.sciencenews.org/article...7&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Editors_Picks

    I have absolutely no idea if this makes any fundamental difference. From a cursory glance, this may even present some physical problems such as propensity to sun-burn, and from the article;
     
    Last edited: Oct 15, 2017
  14. EgalitarianJay Registered Senior Member

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    I never thought Neanderthal ancestry in certain populations meant anything given the small amount of 1-4% reported although its association with genetic variants related to certain health conditions is interesting. If anything it simply indicates that modern humans were able to interbreed with archaic humans not that admixture with Neanderthal suggest some fundamental difference between human populations. Graves had this to say about it:

    I have seen racists posit the bizarre theory that Neanderthal ancestry actually made Europeans and Asians smarter given their larger brain size. This is not supported by scientific research given that Neanderthal had a much larger visual cortex than modern humans and much larger body size leaving them with less brain volume to control the body for higher thinking and social interactions.


    This theory also contradicts research on human evolution and intelligence:

    In addition, what little we know about the evolution of ‘intelligence’ in hominids seems to argue directly against his thesis. It is possible that around 300,000 years ago Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo neanderthalensis were extant in different regions of the world. It is not clear whether these were true species, or geographic races of the same species (in ways that we do not have ‘races’ in modern Homo sapiens). The evidence seems to suggest that in Europe Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis coexisted between 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. Most evidence suggests that Homo sapiens originated in Africa and when it invaded Europe it brought with it culture, art, wind instruments, record keeping, symbolic and ritualistic beliefs, and a constant pattern of organization and technical improvement.

    The contact between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis seemed to always lead to the short-term replacement of the latter by the technologically advanced former (Tattersall, 2000). Why does this observation contradict Rushton’s thesis? Simply, because it was the Neanderthals who should have been living under Rushton’s K-selection regime and the culture of the Homo sapiens resulted from the r-selected tropical environment. We know, for example, that the Neanderthals had larger cranial capacities than Homo sapiens (Neanderthal cranial capacities: 1524–1640 cc for males, and 1425–1270 cc for females, as opposed to around 1325–1166 for early Homo sapiens, in Poirer and McKee, 1999).

    We should compare these differences with the within-species values reported by Rushton. In his Chart 1 of the abridged version (1999: 19) he shows 1267, 1347, and 1364 cc for Blacks, Whites, and Asians respectively. This amounts to a 7.2 per cent difference between Blacks and Asians, while if we utilize the midpoint for Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens we would calculate a 15 per cent advantage for Neanderthals! These observations fly in the face of two of Rushton’s predictions: first that harsh winter climates should select for greater intelligence, and secondly that cranial volume should be correlated with intelligence. All available evidence suggests that the Neanderthals were less ‘intelligent’ than modern Homo sapiens that had smaller crania and evolved in the tropics.

    Source: What a tangled web he weaves: Race, reproductive strategies, and Rushton’s life history theory. Anthropological Theory vol. 2(2): 131-154 (2002)
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2017
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It's maybe a bit unethical to reply to a banned poster, but this quote from above
    I've mentioned before as not only poorly supported via badly conducted research in the past, but conflicting with much research and knowledge since (such as linked in post 180).

    So when yet another relevance appears in my mailbox in some report of actual research done by careful and competent scientists, it seems ok to pass it along here:
    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6357/1226
    Quote from the abstract:
    Quote from the article:
    Now the median IQ in the modernized urban areas of mainland China is normally reported as around 103. So we have a median IQ difference of 13 or more points - a full standard deviation - between populations famously indistinguishable by Western race, populations whose differences are apparently entirely cultural and based in class distinctions between child-rearing norms.

    The circumstance that the measured median IQ of American "black" youths has recently been coming in over 90, and therefore higher than the median of these hundreds of millions of Asian youths (the Chinese population is still generally rural) , is of course largely meaningless without mechanism, but maybe worth mentioning anyway.
     
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  16. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    No, you are a racist because all of the issues you pointed out are not about race but you imply they are.
    Get it?
     
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  17. EgalitarianJay Registered Senior Member

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    Thanks for posting that link. Yelena aka Taxonomy26 and other racists are currently debating me on PoliticalForum where they are getting routinely shut down but getting away with a lot of trolling which is clearly not tolerated on Sciforum. One of the arguments made by one of the racists was that Black Americans have more wealth than China yet Chinese have higher IQs on average. I pointed out the absurdity of comparing a demographic group within a nation to an entire nation and asked her what statistical measure she was using to compare wealth as well as her source for China's average IQ and evidence that this was representative of the general population. From what I've read a lot of these tests are being done on Chinese youth in urban areas and don't represent the average Chinese citizen. Your link confirms that. A lot of this research that Rushton and Jensen based their conclusions on was conducted by Richard Lynn who wrote the book IQ and The Wealth of Nations. One of my primary sources Richard Nisbett, who is the author of the book Intelligence and How to Get it: Why Schools and Cultures Count had this to say about Lynn via email:

    "No one I ever deal with in the intelligence business takes Lynn seriously. He is certainly a very foolish man and many consider him to be dishonest." - Richard Nisbett

    This criticism was confirmed by researchers who challenged Lynn's claim that the average IQ of Africans was at or below 70 (Wicherts, 2010). As you say the IQ of Black Americans is now estimated to be above 90 (Flynn and Dickens, 2006). In the past many ethnic groups were reported to have low IQs including Jews and several European ethnic groups whose populations were largely composed of recent immigrants in America.

    Genes, Race, and Intelligence

    Concerned because of Army Alpha IQ data demonstrating the allegedly moronic character of the Jewish race, the eugenicist R. A. Ross wrote in 1914 about the menacing specter of "overliterate" Jews polluting the ranks of professional positions in New York City (Chase, 1977). Along with other eugenicists, Ross then began to dictate conditions to the country's leading universities. As active members of numerous college admissions and testing boards, they demanded the strict imposition of quotas designed to keep all Jews, Italians, Poles, Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, and other non-Aryan students out of the nation's undergraduate and graduate institutions (Baltzell, 1964; Gossett, 1963). Their rationale for imposing these quotas was the belief that "American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive" (Chase, 1977, p. 272). They subsequently fought the integration of the nation's public schools, armed forces, and other societal institutions with all the statistics and figures the budding "science" of mental testing could provide. As Brigham (1923) explained in A Study of American Intelligence,

    ... the army mental tests had proven beyond any scientific doubt that, like the American Negroes, the Italians and the Jews were genetically ineducable. It would be a waste of good money even to attempt to try to give these born morons and imbeciles a good Anglo-Saxon education, let alone admit them into our fine medical, law, and engineering graduate schools. (p. 210)

    That was 70 years ago. Since then, the sciences involved in the Great IQ Debate- genetics, physiology, neurobiology, and psychology-have made great strides, and the illogic of the psychometric argument has been played out in human events. Even the seemingly innocuous aspects of psychometric thought have had devastating consequences for humanity. The European holocaust remains the most obvious example of the kind of policy implementation that follows from psychometric research programs (Muller-Hill, 1988 ). The principles of this discipline have also been used to support the active neglect of true equal opportunity for 29 million people of African ancestry in the United States. This neglect is best illustrated by mortality rates that are presently two to five times greater for African Americans than for Euro-Americans across all age classes and for nearly all causes of death (Graves & Place, 1995; Polednak, 1989).

    Source: The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 64, No. 3, Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities (Summer, 1995), pp. 277-294

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    If you research the history of psychometric research on group differences in IQ you will see that a lot of it is based on the research of a few racist psychologists (racial hereditarians) who are obsessed with claiming certain groups have lower IQs because of genetic differences between groups to justify their racist ideological agenda.
     
  18. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Question; are IQ test not relative to our exposure to the environment.

    From the following article in wiki;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_and_intelligence#Neurological_theory

    IMO, this is intimately connected with our mirror neural system, which conditions our cognitive mirror neurons.

    In the movie "the gods must be crazy" the plot is as follows:
    To me this confirmed that environment and experience is largely responsible for associative cognition.

    This Ted Talks clip from Anil Seth explains how the brain actually is in a constant state of hallucination and when our illusion of the observed environment agrees with others we call it reality. The clip shows some interesting examples of associative cognition and how the brain can be fooled into a seemingly impossible cognitive association.. https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality/up-next
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2017
  19. Xmo1 Registered Senior Member

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    Race is genetic. Couldn't be simpler. Reason: Conservation of Energy. Type: Biological
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    None of the races defined in American sociological reality, Western society, have any basis in genetics.
     
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  21. birch Valued Senior Member

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    someone had mentioned this elsewhere but it is an interesting and true insight. we are all technically each individual races/breeds/types but it's not just about race as in what we currently define it as or even species. not only is there differences in physical attributes, intelligence, temperament, and even politics could be genetic.

    for one, liberals tend to be attracted to eachother to mate and raise offspring just as conservatives tend to find their own kind and mate to produce offspring.

    liberals and conservatives clash and will not and do not mate (especially) by choice. so, that would produce two different breeds or eventual species that can split.
     
  22. EgalitarianJay Registered Senior Member

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    The term race which is synonymous with breed, kind or sub-species gets confused too often with any sort of genetic difference. An individual can not be a member of their own race if you go by the taxonomic definition. Liberal and conservative are political labels that have cultural meaning but obviously no genetic meaning. There may be genetic factors that influence how one thinks that can make you more inclined to be a liberal or conservative but your brain isn't hard-wired to think about politics any more than it is religion. Small groups of people who marry their own kind such as the Amish could be considered a breeding population but it is unusual for such a group to be called a race.

    The general public takes for granted that idea that there are biological human races because there are obvious differences. No one can deny that skin color or facial features or hair texture are biological characteristics that are heritable. The issue for scientists is whether those differences are associated with significant genetic differentiation between populations enough to classify people with different physical traits as separate races or sub-species. Many geneticists, biologists and anthropologists do not believe that human genetic variation structures in to biological races. More importantly I don't believe that whatever genetic difference between populations that does exist has any social importance. The traits that distinguish people physically are superficial and not indicators of any mental differences that impact intelligence and personality. There's no scientific reason to believe that human populations differ in behavior and create different cultures as culture is complex and can change drastically within a population over short time scales.
     
  23. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    lactose intolerance by race?
     
    Last edited: Nov 5, 2017

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