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On the biological underpinnings of the idea of race — 25 Comments

  1. I read somewhere that race does not really exist and it is just a social construction. I guess breeds of dogs don’t exist either and they are also a social construction.

  2. Ray:

    Actually, race does exist and it is also to a certain extent a social construction.

    Dog breeds are quite different in that they represent deliberate and purposeful human breeding with the goal of selecting for certain traits and involve very small gene pools within each breed. So dog breeds exist only as the result of human effort.

    Human races exist in the sense that “race” is a descriptor that describes human variation in a convenient shorthand way that appears to conform to what we observe in our everyday lives. It does not “exist” however, in the sense of being a hard division in which the traits that cluster represent something fixed and linked to each other (which is what some people assume). The traits are separate in the way I stated in the post.

  3. you can reconstruct facial features and skin color from DNA information… there was a company doing this, but they were put out of business by the left because of their results… now another company is doing it… DNA Defines you, and whether we like it or not, genetic compression of information means things overlap and are used in more than one context… which is why the red hair is not just a single mutation or point, its actually more like 8 and includes pigments and other things..

    see Forensic Phenotyping

  4. oh.. and the point of racism has nothing to do with color, thats an abberation as the subject is really about culture… not color… but in the old days, culture and color were almost synonymous, so americans are confused.

    Leon Trotsky’s 1930 work, “The History of the Russian Revolution”
    http://www.1917.com/Marxism/Trotsky/HRR/1-1.html

    Славянофильство, мессианизм отсталости, строило свою философию на том, что русский народ и его церковь насквозь демократичны, а официальная Россия — это немецкая бюрократия, насажденная Петром. Маркс заметил по этому поводу: “Ведь точно так же и тевтонские ослы сваливают деспотизм Фридриха II и Ñ‚. д. на французов, как будто отсталые рабы не нуждаются всегда в цивилизованных рабах, чтобы пройти нужную выучку”. Это краткое замечание исчерпывает до дна не только старую философию славянофилов, но и новейшие откровения “расистов”.

    from google translate

    Slavophilism , the messianism of backwardness , has based its philosophy on the fact that the Russian people and their church are democratic through and through , and the official Russian – is a German bureaucracy imposed upon Peter. Marx remarked on this subject: ” For in the same way the Teutonic jackasses blamed the despotism of Frederick II , and so on . D . The French , as though backward slaves were not always in need of civilized slaves to go through the required proficiency .” This brief comment completely finishes off not only the old philosophy of the Slavophiles , but also the latest revelations of ” racists .”

    The Slavophiles which Trotsky alluded to were historically a group of traditionalist Slavs who valued greatly their native culture and way of life, and wanted to protect it. Trotsky on the other hand saw them and others like them as an impedement to his internationalist communist plans for the world. This man didn’t care one iota about the Slavic Russians whom he supposedly served. To him, Slavophiles, i.e. Slavs that committed the “crime” of loving their own people and trying to protect their traditional ways were simply “backward”, and others like them were simply “racists”.

  5. No, race is not a claster of traits, which can be liked to each others or occure separately and independently. This is a common ancestry, which determines a lot of traits and can be diagnosed by objective means. It is not just a skin color, it goes to the bone – literally. In scull alone around 30 different parameters can be measured, and comparative genomics reveals dozens of specific genetic markers, which simply can not appear randomly by chance. From a single bone – a fragment of the last digit of a small finger, around 0.5 cm by size, found in Altai cave and several dozen millenia old, a whole new species of humans (Denisov man, different from both Homo sapience and Homo neandertal) was established.

  6. It is impossible to have a meaningful discussion about race in its true, biological sense, in so polticised and ideologically divided society as nowdays USA. My dear friend and mentor, evolutionary geneticist and physical antropologist, told me a hillarious story about his visit into Columbian university where he was at some international conference. He knew that the university has a very full craniological collection and he asked for permission to make some study on it to understand how diverse different Native American tribes really were. But his collegue who has access to the collection was so embarassed by this request that he unswered: I will lose my job if anybody here will see me with a craniological compass in hands (an instrument by which parametres of sculls are (were) usually measured).

  7. The only validation for race that can hold up scientifically is in our DNA — and the fact that we ALL self-select towards familiar forms and away from those more ‘distant.’

    This is a tic that is universally true — and I’ll wager crosses all species.

    The kicker with Man is that there are far more races — based upon DNA than there are based upon appearance.

    The Caucasian race — as a term is strikingly recent — and was crafted entirely in ignorance about the true home stomping grounds of White Nordids.

    DNA – and geology — indicate that what is taken as the “White” race is actually two races that folded into each other millennia ago — some time back in the Ice Age. Other than the DNA, all evidence has been scrubbed — by ice sheets.

    But the bread crumbs seem to indicate that one race traces back to the caves of southern France and northern Spain — and is best now seen expressed in Nordic countries.

    The other White race seems to have evolved in Mongolia — in a genetic island bounded by super ice walls for many generations. This Red Nordid race has every evidence of being the source of most farmyard domestication, as its from this location that every domestic animal has a common ancestry.

    Horse
    Cow
    Camel
    Sheep

    { The dog/ wolf and the pig/ hog are hard to pin down… and show every DNA evidence of having become the first domesticated animals. }

    One might assume that once the scheme of domestication was understood, it was re-tried.

    The flat terrain and ancient legends/ writings also lead us to believe that Red Nordids discovered the wheel and axle… in a land that was so flat it needed no roads… so sparse that you really needed to get around.

    The impulse to travel, for travel’s sake, seems to now be genetic. Witness the RV industry and tourism, generally. Both are pretty much White ‘inventions’ customs/ tics/ priorities.

    The other races don’t see what the hustle is all about. Everywhere else on the planet the economic drive is to stay put and hold onto ones plot of land. This is promptly subject to change when the local terrain is not provident: sub-Sahel Africa comes immediately to mind.

    All seem to have been domesticated and brought along as the Red Nordid race left Mongolia when the ice walls melted.

    Millennia of inter-marriage have caused what had been two entirely independent White races to be melded into one.

    Even further back up the DNA branching there lies the Semitic races. Unlike the Whites, they were on the south side of the ice age super barriers. When the Red Nordids broke out of Mongolia millennia ago, they seemed to have made a ‘pit stop’ of some thousands of years — in the middle east.

    It’s a pretty good bet that this is when animal husbandry was introduced to the larger world.

    Say what you will, there’s something about Afghanistan. Those residents seem to have a sampling of every possible variation of DNA north of Africa and west of China!

    This may be a legacy of the Mongols — who are ironically identified with the turf they expelled the natives from.

    Even the Huns were expelled from western China in historical times.

    And the Red Chinese are running around destroying ancient White graves all over western China and Mongolia — whenever and wherever found.

    The Han and the Chin were strictly eastern boys — in the low country — and now figure to be among the youngest races on the planet.

    Other notable races that get no recognition — generally — must start with the San of Africa. Because of their tiny population, this race is usually not credited with even being a race.

    If you use the metric of not marrying outsiders for millennia on and on, then the San are a race — and rather unique — being the oldest race with the most DNA variation. It’s not even a contest. Interestingly enough, they’re not all that black, and they absolutely hate their nearest neighbors — and vice versa. (At least as far as permitting cross-racial marriages go.)

    The same thinking leaves one with multiple black races — who are just as alienated to each other as any races can be. This tic is usually mis-described as tribalism. The real split is way past tribal, not that tribal hatreds aren’t pretty crazy in Africa.

    In North America, it has been discovered that the DNA variation among the natives was much larger than ever imagined — with plenty of evidence for Solutrean DNA from Europe still kicking around certain tribes. Curiously, those tribes — for whatever reason — are still plopped down on top of some of the best land/ hunting grounds/ farming land for miles and miles around.

    [ The Yakima tribe (Washington state) has a huge Solutrean blood quantum — measured as high as 25% by some. Strangely, the Yakima tribe ended up — from the first days to the last — as being one of the tribes the White man had no ‘difficulties’ with. It may be a new thing — as this is exactly the death site for Kennewick man. BTW, he gives every evidence of being closest to the Ainu — the original people of Japan. The Oriental’s invasion pushed them to near extinction, too. ]

    &&&&

    All of which is a long way of saying that there are a lot more races — DNA wise — than previously counted.

    The other take-away is that both White races suffered extra-ordinarily during the ice ages — which made them white.

    And, finally, the Yellow races are the youngest, most aggressive, and populous on the planet. They not only drove all Whites out of Mongolia, they displaced (that’s the polite term) every native of Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, on over.

    Rice farming enabled all of that.

    Rice cultivation made the Oriental race what it is today: locally dominant — and largely fatalistic — at the personal level. This is a natural outcome when every confab turns into standing room only.

    The brutality of the wartime Vietnamese, Japanese, and Koreans would appear to be a ‘learned’ if not ingrained result of competing with ancient Han and Chin armies of epic scope.

    Some idea of how insane those wars were is written history. The first ‘Caesar’ of China was nuttier than Hitler, Stalin and Alexander the Great all rolled into one. Adjusted for time and place — he has to hold the pole position as the single worst tyrant in human history. He even killed his own (by blood) father!

    The only other player to do that was King Alexander. His ‘hands’ being all over the assassination of his father, and so conveniently timed, too.

    Even giving the Orientals the hope that they can continue to expand at the expense of all other races is as harmful as giving Hitler his enabling act.

    In both cases, you just can’t imagine where the ‘other guy’ is going to take events.

  8. Race is a complex amalgamation of biological, cultural, and social factors.

    Artfldgr:

    The Left, despite successfully fostering perceptions of goodwill, and perhaps even adopting good/functional policies, favors environmental stability, not individual dignity or intrinsic value. This is made patently clear with [class] diversity policies and [selective child] pro-choice policy, among other equivocations. The biological foundation of racial clusters, including families, engenders an internal loyalty that is often disruptive to their “principled” interests.

  9. Neocon said: “back when I was in college and I remember studying it in depth …”

    The science of genetics and the data on human races has grown significantly since we were in college and continues to expand every day. Don’t rely on that old college instruction.

    By the way, a few years ago Cavalli-Sforza and his team did extensive research sampling human DNA from all over the world. He published first in The Journal of the National Academy of Science and then published a monumental tome, “History & Geography of Human Genes”. Even that is now dated, but his measures of genetic distance between human groups/races are arresting.

    Put simply, he said humanity can be divided into two genetically distinct groups, Sub-Saharan Africans on one side and Everyone Else on the other. The genetic distance from a black African to an Australian Aborigine is about twice the distance between an Aborigine and a mainland Asian, and that distance (aborigine to Asian) is about twice the distance of that between Asians and Europeans. The black Africans have been isolated on their continent since the migrations out to the rest of the world and have the oldest human DNA (and most variation) in the world.

    This studied says nothing about intelligence, color,or whatever. It is simply a study of genetic distance reflecting how far the populations have drifted apart. But it certainly does nothing to prove that race does not exist, rather the contrary.

    Again, if you want to escape from what you learned long ago in college, read Nicholas Wade’s book, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’. He will bring you a bit more up to date.

  10. Rachelle:

    What makes you think I’m relying on it? There are new links here. I mentioned the past only because I wanted to specifically state that this is not a new POV arrived at in academia because of the recent dominance of PC thinking.

    In fact, it’s my impression that “race” and its meaning has been controversial for a long time and remains so. And I’m aware that a lot of research today can trace divergence in time. But I have seen nothing that substantially contradicts the information I’ve put out here about traits and how they vary within groups and across groups, and how races are commonly defined by society and how that relates to the science of race.

  11. The question is more philosophical and theological than scientific.

    The fact that people think it is scientific is nothing more than testimony to the fact that most people never learn philosophy and theology and are therefore ignorant as can be except in a technical sense.

    The higher the education level without at least philosophy the more impenetrable the ignorance of the person.

    Sorry. It’s bad news. But its true. If you don’t know that it is true, then you don’t know.

    Aristotle called this “invincible ignorance”. It exists mostly among the learned, the honored, the praised and the pedigreed.

    They have no freackin clue what they don’t know.

    Unfortunately you can’t be nice on this one. Lives, fortunes and cultures and civilizations rest on getting it right.

    Homework: What the heck does the word “person” mean, and where did it come from?

  12. Art: “DNA Defines you”.

    No, it doesn’t.

    What defines you Art? You can’t even answer that question, since it would mean that your DNA defines your DNA if your definition is true. It amounts to gibberish.

    I think you should try another definition.

  13. Art: The 1930’s is not the Old Days. The 1930s are modernity.

    The old days are the ancient world. That’s a better place to look for answers.

  14. For anyone interested in this topic, I’d like to recommend Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.”

    Wade has worked as an editor at “Nature” magazine and as a science editor for “The New York Times,” and he’s good at synthesizing broad sweeps of research and re-writing it for nonprofessionals. “A Troublesome Inheritance” was published in 2014, so it covers most recent research on population genetics and evolution. The book was widely attacked by the usual suspects, but about half the book isn’t scientifically controversial. For better or worse, the other half is speculative, but still worth reading.

    Here’s one of his first paragraphs:

    “New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure. Most of these signals of natural selection date from 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, just an eyeblink in evolution’s 3 billion year timescale.”

    When Wade refers to differences that are “recent, copious, and regional,” he’s talking about differences that have been used to designate races. Of course, the history of this idea is very messy. That’s the subject of his book.

  15. Rachelle, sorry I missed the last line of your earlier comment — the one where you also recommended Wade’s book. Apologies for the duplication. I also have a vague memory, from a year or so ago, of someone else writing a comment about “A Troublesome Inheritance.” Maybe a tiny groundswell?

    Since Rachelle and I seem to be reading some of the same things, I’ll also second her recommendation of both John Hawks’s blog and “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.”

    Finally, I want to put in a plug for a free online course, taught by Hawks, on human evolution. Hawks does an amazing job of making complex research palatable. The course videos are no longer posted to Coursera.org, but there’s still a web page for the course, so it looks as if it’ll be offered again soon.

  16. Cornflour,

    Thanks for the heads-up on Hawks’ online course on human evolution. I wasn’t aware of it even though I drop in on his great blog every now and then. I read Neo-Necon often as well and my not agreeing completely with her on this subject should not be taken by anyone as a lack of regard for her ideas. I imagine you think the same way.

  17. The orthodox position was that genes were fixed and transferred unbroken in the lineage. Later on, some unexplained things start to challenge that concept, the concept of genetic sequences leading to programmed outcomes.

    The hunter gathering time of humanity and the farming period of humanity, were environmental changes that humans did to themselves more and more. So one extra idea is that evolution wasn’t random mutation, but self directed by human technological changes to the environment, the diet, activity, etc.

    This goes back to the main point, which is do people inherit talents unchanged from their ancestors, or do they have to activate the genes for them to acquire the ability? This is related to neural plasticity, since that is one way to determine the productivity of a talent, rather than trying to reverse engineer it from a gene sequence. (If they could do that, they could DNA sequence people into being super humans too once the DNA manipulation techniques become feasible)

    The other issue is whether mutation was really random, based merely on environmental factors, or whether it is also due to the human body activating and de activating genes. If mutation is random, then we have survival of the fittest. Dice roll. If mutation is not random, but keyed to genetic inheritance and the environment, then that explains why human genes change when humans change their behavior.

    The next question then becomes, when does the change/mutation occur in the lineage?

  18. I listened to some lectures on culture not long ago. I think that is the real issue and not the color of one’s skin. In that respect, I don’t care for the African American culture as it has been portrayed and I don’t consider myself as a racist because of that view. Instead, I detest the stereo-type of willful ignorance, constant hand out or taker, racism (yes, blacks are the most racist of all I have met), violence and treatment of women. If you are black and don’t adhere to these cultural aspects, then I judge on individual merits. But, if you fall into the cultural stereotype, then I see no problem in discrimination and society desiring to alter the negative behavior.

  19. Sergey Says:

    “From a single bone — a fragment of the last digit of a small finger, around 0.5 cm by size, found in Altai cave and several dozen millenia old, a whole new species of humans (Denisov man, different from both Homo sapience and Homo neandertal) was established.”

    The Denisovans are another example which disproves the old theory that all races share all alleles for all genes only in different frequencies. There are probably hundreds or thousands of unique alleles which are shared among some races but are not present in others.

    A group of humans exiting Africa stopped long enough on their migration to mate with one or more Denisovans. According to Wikipedia “about 3% to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians deriving from Denisovans.[5][6][7] ”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan

    Other humans who left Africa mated with Neanderthals. According to some scientists as much as 40% of Neanderthal DNA survives in the genomes of modern Europeans and Asians. Those genes seem to be absent in modern Africans. By the time they mated the Neanderthal species and homo sapiens were so different that they were “at the edge of biological incompatibility.” In the animal world this is probably similar to the status of coyotes and grey wolves in which only a few offspring have survived to produce a new animal called a coywolf.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/modern-human-dna-neanderthal_n_4689506.html

    http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/anthropology/science-neanderthal-genes-modern-human-dna-01734.html

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

  20. Today the Washington Post asked if race was real or just a social construction and they decided you can be whatever race you want. I’m glad that’s settled.

  21. Cornflour and Rachelle,

    I also read “A Troublesome Inheritance” and was about to recommend it again. It may have been me who brought it up a year ago.

  22. Science and politics have intermingled like fascism did with business and imperial doctrine, to the point where the race of science and the race of politics, are too corrupt to consider giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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