PBS lies in an attempt to prove that race does not exist

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Japher
GP, I used the same analogy for races (the dogs that is), yet no one is willing to except that a race could be some sort of "sub-species"...

What if we all began as a dark skinned race, then all of a sudden ppl start having albino children (some sort of mutation), these ppl exile all these albinos out of fear that it is their gods punishing them. These albinos head north were they mate in make the anglos... Would it not be consituted then that there was a significant genetical difference to distinguish a race or even a breed?

breeds of dogs have been created by conscious breeding. didnt happen with humans.

could a race be a subspecies - yes. but it didnt happen for humans. just as your model of albino migration didnt happen. Its not that race is by definition impossible - its just that by any meaningful definition, (ie one that excluded defining london cabbies as a race just cause you can make some statement about the distribution of genes for them) race is not empirically a fact.

[TCO]

Originally posted by elijah
Caligastia: You talk about race, whereas you should be talking about genetic traits. It is the human mind, society and the individual that decides to call and perceive it as race, but scientifically, the traits are merely superficial, like I said, like blondes and brunettes, brown eyes and green.

Why are some traits superficial? You make a value judgement here. A trait is a trait. It takes further analysis and consideration of the specific isssue to decide wether it is superficial or not. Just as you do when you get all knickered up with the term, race, and thus try to change the word from its commonly used meaning. But use "ethinc grouping" if it makes you feel better.

And race is not just skin deep. There are implications in terms of disease resitance as well. That may not seem so superficial if a tsetse fly bites you. Are there other traits than skin color and physical appearance and disease which may vary amongst "race" groups? Who knows? But why assume that the only traits that vary are the ones that are easy to see? If I had several samples of iron bar that varied in corrosion resistance, I would not assume that they would all have the same conductivity. Heck, it would sur[prise me in the least if there were some correlation between the two prperties in the total grouping. Perhaps with a lot of noise thrown in, but maybe still in a manner which gave significant results when examined with statistics.

[Japher]

LotM you almost make me laugh...almost. In the same sense as you trying to defraud my arguments I could easily say the same thing:

So you believe that everytime a couple has a kid they swap this kid for another kid on the other side of the world to encourage cultural diversity? That's absurd. Cultures produce races, and even today a majority of people are hard pressed to remove themselves from their indigiouness surroundings, much more so in days when communication and travel were much more difficult, and racism and unforgiving social structures were rampant...

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Japher
GP, I used the same analogy for races (the dogs that is), yet no one is willing to except that a race could be some sort of "sub-species"...

What if we all began as a dark skinned race, then all of a sudden ppl start having albino children (some sort of mutation), these ppl exile all these albinos out of fear that it is their gods punishing them. These albinos head north were they mate in make the anglos... Would it not be consituted then that there was a significant genetical difference to distinguish a race or even a breed?

in which case the albinos have never interbred with the dark ones, since the emergence of the trait. so there was a beginning time, when pure races emerged, survived until some point when mixing starts again - and by determining how much each individual gets from each group at that magic point before the mixing started, we can say what percentage they are of each race.

But there was no such magic point.

and, BTW, i dont think thats quite how dog breeding works, either.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Japher
It would be funny to see a Bull Masive try to mate with a some sort of minature dog!

Hehehe, it's not even about logistics, but actual ability to breed.

About 150 years ago, a breed of canine was brought from SE Asia to North America. It has since adapted and evolved to a point where it can no longer breed with its parent back in Asia.

Speciesation and race are different things.

[Japher]

breeds of dogs have been created by conscious breeding. didnt happen with humans.

All because you say it does not make it true. I am still holding to my derived opinion that we (as humans) just do not have enough evidence either way to prove or disprove this argument. And, I am not going to dimiss my ideas only because you say they are wrong, as I don't expect you to change because I think you are wrong.

[Japher]

, i dont think thats quite how dog breeding works, either

I don't either. I was just wondering how much of a genetic difference it would take for sceptics to even consider different races.

[Boris Godunov]

GP/Japher:

White parent + Black Parent = ?? Child.

Provide answer. Explain why it isn't arbitrary. Consider ramifications.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Zero
Rcae exists because we need it. Humans have this need to categorize things when the universe doesnt really have a neatly organized categories, so there's always gonna be arguments for what goes into which category and why such categorization exists etc....

Anyways IMO Race is primarily determined by ancestry than genetic pool. It may sound the same, but genetics would mean each race has unique genetic pool while ancestry would not consider that.

Race being defined by certain genetic pool doesnt really hold for me because socially certain white ppl are "blacker" and certain "whiter" black ppl.

If its ancestry though, black population that eventually develops "white" characteristics will still be considered black because of ancestry. Or maybe we would give them a different category.

Ancestry and "genetics" are two sides of the same coin. You are just talking about different extents of genetic influence. The important idea to differentiate is genetic influence versus environmental effect. Nature versus nurture. If I take different strains of corn and plant them in the same row, the difference I see come from genetics (ancestry). If I put seeds from the same strain in different states, the differences are from nature. Obviously in real life, we have some mixture of the two effects ocuring. And obviously there are seed to seed differences and some variability among seeds of grain even within a "strain".

[Japher]

It has since adapted and evolved to a point where it can no longer breed with its parent back in Asia.

That's odd. Yet I think that doesn;t prove this:

Speciesation and race are different things

I think they just created a mule...

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Japher
LotM you almost make me laugh...almost. In the same sense as you trying to defraud my arguments I could easily say the same thing:

So you believe that everytime a couple has a kid they swap this kid for another kid on the other side of the world to encourage cultural diversity? That's absurd. Cultures produce races, and even today a majority of people are hard pressed to remove themselves from their indigiouness surroundings, much more so in days when communication and travel were much more difficult, and racism and unforgiving social structures were rampant...

tehy dont swap the kid - the kid grows up and looks for opportunities, and moves. and breeds with whoever he finds there.

You think travel was so difficult - i suggest you learn more about how the polynesians settled the pacific. Or the speed with which the clovis hunters spread through the americas. and you dont have to move a thousand miles in a generation to create diversity - remember it takes lots of generations to create isolated distinctive populations - moving 100 miles over in one generation will result in a move of 2000 mile in only 20 generations, which isnt all that much genetically. and a lifetime shift of 100 miles doesnt seem that radical for nomads.

as for racism and social structures - anthropoligists studying real live "primitive peoples" find that their villages are usually diverse in language, and origin (see clifford geertz) the rigid social structures are a product of state societies, which are relatively recent in human history (hey this is a civ site - does 4000 BC ring a bell???)

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Japher
I think they just created a mule...

Huh? The new species is capable of breeding with itself. Mules aren't capable of breeding at all. Not the same thing.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Saint Marcus
I'm dating a "half black" chick who acts "white" and hangs out with "yellows"...

yeah...

who gives a rat's ass about "race"?

Agreed. There are many important things about people that are much more important at the individual level than the population level.

But that is no reason to say that "races" are not groups with statistically different DNA.

Just because you value the individual for what he or she is, is no reason to pervert the science. (Not saying you...but some.)

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Japher


All because you say it does not make it true. I am still holding to my derived opinion that we (as humans) just do not have enough evidence either way to prove or disprove this argument. And, I am not going to dimiss my ideas only because you say they are wrong, as I don't expect you to change because I think you are wrong.

humans were consciously bred???? never happend in recorded history, even under slavery. not damned likely in more primitive conditions

[Boris Godunov]

And I really wish GP would address the most relevant current points rather than mindlessly slogging through the thread and responding to every damn post.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by GP


Agreed. There are many important things about people that are much more important at the individual level than the population level.

But that is no reason to say that "races" are not groups with statistically different DNA.

Just because you value the individual for what he or she is, is no reason to pervert the science. (Not saying you...but some.)

vermonters and alabamians have statistically different DNA. are they races???

you seem to have missed a key point - if just because you can identify a population that has a different statistical distribution of certain genes, that makes it a race, then race doesnt really mean anything. Vermonters are a race. o positive people are a race. For all i know london cabbies are a race. and nobody uses race that way. to use it the way people use it you have to assert something stronger than what you have asserted - you have to assert things more like what japher here has asserted - except that those things seem to be empirically false.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Velociryx
In that case, Bods, you have just proved the point for me. There are few, if any places left in the world where there has not been at least some mixing of ethnicities. At this point, I doubt that anybody (okay, maybe a few really remote tribes in the Amazon) could claim any sort of "racial purity" with a straight face. And if THAT does not exist, then the rest is rather pointless.

-=Vel=-

No. Just because there is variation within a group, doesn't mean that classificiation is useless.

[TCO]

Originally posted by paiktis22
there are no races.

people with different skin colour and/or facial body characteristics sure but races nope.

It's a semantic distinction. Let's call the term "zace" then.

[Boris Godunov]

lotm, you'll have to wait for GP to finish his crusade against every post he disagrees with until he can catch up to you.

[TCO]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III
Just some random thoughts about race:

Of course, different human population all over the world have different features and in certain areas certain parts of the common human genetic pool are more or less frequent. The question whether these specific (and compared to our complete genetic data neglectible) differences are considered of bigger or less importance can never be solved BUT
race definitely is a social construct as the overlapping of specific genetic particularities go well over race "boundaries". There simply is no way to scientifically draw clear lines between the races, not even fuzzy ones. Scientific races would require such thing as a "pure races", which would mean completely different sets of genes which could be only "impurified" or "mixed" but this is simply not the case. The differences within the total human population are fluent, several sub-populations seperated from each other one time more evident to the eye sometimes less, but never clear-cut and even less by criteria which could be scientifically isolated.
Thus defining a "race" is a social construct and like many social constructs, it is based on some observations and not completely voluntary, but it lacks scientific parameters to become an objective "truth".

1. This is a pretty good post.

2. Just just because a grouping doesn't have a convenient tag doesn't make it useless. You can still take the social grouping (which may or may not be arbitrary) and look at how traits vary from grouping to grouping. Obviously people use the groupings that are easily identifiable. But we could use others like the 11 major families of mito DNA or what have you. And these are not "clean" either...

[TCO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


For race to have any scientific validity, there would be specific features that would allow an individual to be genetically classed as a member of that race. i.e., you're not comparing an individual to another individual, you're comparing an individual to a distinct gene pool (a population group), to see if you can determine that the individual in question is more closely related to one group or another. If you can't make that determination, then your concept of race as a genetic reality goes down the tubes.

So is the concept of different breeds of dog useless because we lack a convenient DNA marker for each breed or because there are cross-breeds or because there is variation within breeds?

[TCO]

Originally posted by GePap
Japher:

What you observe are adaptations by the human body to best aclimatize itself to a certain region.

Tanning is adation of the body. Changes in the population are genetic adaption of the population and hence mean that the end result has significant genetic difference. (As indicated in the trait that changed).

Over time these adaptations will get better and better, which means that on the surface the populations of two distinct places will change. but the only traits that will change are those that need to change in order to aclimatize oneself, like skin color (to regulate UV intake), body shape (to regulate heat loss) and changes to make on less suseptible to local disease.

Once a human populaltion decides to change location and move to a very diffferent climate, those that survive will being the progress to change to aadpt. No traits will be kept in the end, if they make survival in the new environment difficult.

I agree with all this.

Talke a bunch of scandinavians, put them in Equatorial africa, and limit how much they mix with local populations, and in 20,000 years they will be black, ahve curly hair, and so forth.

As for mutant genes, that is simply a normal function of genetic drift and having an insular population.

I agree with all this too. Would you agree that at this point, the new population of scandanavians was genetically different from the old one? If you take dachsuhnds and breed them back into German Shepards, they are no longer dachsunds right? And dachsunds and Shepards are still different breeds and are genetically different even if you can take millenia and convert them back and forth.

[TCO]

Originally posted by GePap



And if they had a white grandmother so long ago, how could they be black! arent they mixed? And if race mattered, why would one singe mating all of a sudden ruin your whole schema? That is the point!

DO YOU GET THAT?

Stop and think. The DNA that control skin color and almost all the rest of your body (every organ including the brain) are in the nuclear DNA. Mitochondria are little bugs trapped inside us...

[TCO]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
lotm, you'll have to wait for GP to finish his crusade against every post he disagrees with until he can catch up to you.

You are a smart man.

[Boris Godunov]

And he's only on page 4 so far!

[TCO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


Which is the appropriate method, and in fact the ONLY method. It's nuclear DNA that's useless, not mtDNA. Sorry, but there's no "honky gene" or "colored gene" in nuclear DNA.

You don't understand the issue, because your 1/32 or 1/1024 crap makes one huge fallacious assumption. That if you ancestor ten generations back make a little midnight visit to one of the cotton shacks out back, that that one, plus the other 1,023 in the rest of your nuclear DNA providers, in fact have "pure" DNA which reflects some "pure" racial gene sequence.

If you go back to tenth generation relatives, unless you have a highly unusual mutation (which screws the whole race genome concept right there, because a mutation is a random change in DNA pattern) that was passed down), you can't even give a high probability that two individuals are in any degree related. It can be hard enough even among siblings. Just because my half brother (now dead) got half his DNA from the same source I did, doesn't mean we got the same half, or even close. I couldn't give him blood transfusions, let alone a marrow transplant. But hey, our mitochondrial DNA proves that we're related, and that part of our ancestry traces back to northern Europe, as opposed to eastern Asia, or some of the hundreds of other known mtDNA "origins." (origins wrt where the first samples were identified and where they're commonly associated) That's all you can prove, in the absense of a specific nuclear genome for something you conveniently like to call "race."

Mito DNA is convenient for tracking groups of population because it changes so slowly. But it is nuclear DNA that affects skin color and the like directly. Just because there is a lot of variation in nuclear DNA because of sex, doesn't mean that there are no significant patterns in nuclear DNA assocated with different mito groups. Surely the heritabilty of skin color or genetic diseases shows that they are determined from nuclear DNA and that they have "significance".

[TCO]

Originally posted by Boris Godunov
And he's only on page 4 so far!

Tsorry tsir!

[TCO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


BINGO! There's your fallacy. You're dead wrong.

First, what is the characteristic set you assume constitutes a particular "race?"

Second, how is that characteristic set expressed in the human genome for a member of that "race?"

(Hints: the first one can't be defined, because nobody yet has a concise definition. How many races are there? Aryans and muds is the simplest premise, but are there 2? 10? 1,000? The second one can't be defined either, because there is no single characteristic gene, or no distinct group of genes that determines, for example, skin color.

How many breeds of dog are there? Just because the exact tag is not known or because there is variation and cross-breeding, does that mean there is NEVER any use in using the concept?

[Japher]

And he's only on page 4 so far!

if just because you can identify a population that has a different statistical distribution of certain genes

Is that true? It's the same genes just arranged differently? I didn't know that! Can you please find me a link to somewhere that indicates this? I may be just an ignorant fool, but I didn't think that human differences were cause the rearranging of genes, I thought it was different genes all together (i.e. a gene for blue eyes, a gene for green). Or do we have all those genes? {I am not being sarcastic.}

[TCO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


It doesn't matter. There's no fixed combination of genes that gives racial features.

What are the genetic markers for breeds of dog?