Define race--because now I'm confused

Ok thats the KKK's position on race.

 

And you were doing so well until the question of Nation popped up Homosapien is a species not a race,the Human species homonoid,race is a political definition used from the 19th century on as a device of imperialist colonisation to rationalise the suppression of the 'primative natives'its part and parcel of Nationalism as a historically formed ideology and is used to divide the Working Class .

A human race ,is an athletic competition no more and no less.BTW what the Goggle thing about?

 

Thanks for defending my furry friends Canine is canine ,all with common acestery ,WOLF,WOLF WOLF.

 

The dictionary definition of race you cited is very vague. It gives us no criteria for identifying distinct physical and biological characteristics that distinguish races.

A more scientific definition of race can be found in the literature of scholars qualified to speak on human genetics and evolution.

I recommend the work of Joseph L Graves, an evolutionary biologist who has studied the concept of race in biology:

What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race

That is not true. Even the article you quoted states that experts on genetics and biology along with social scientists reached the conclusion that along with empirical and conceptual problems with the concept of race there were observable trends in thought on race that have a social and political rather than scientific basis.

For instance no one denies that there are biological differences between some human populations some that can be seen with the naked eye like skin color and hair texture. Western societies have for centuries used these observable differences to classify various populations into races but they often did so with the assumption that the variations were correlated with innate differences between races that were culturally significant enough to justify social hierarchies which often resulted in discrimination based on race which came to be known as racism. This is the basis for claiming race as a social construct rather than a biological phenomena.

This is a mainstream scientific position not a political one.

Indeed I would recommend that people actually look at research from a variety of sources before reaching a conclusion. Always look at the evidence a source provides for their claims. Not all sources are credible and some such as that paper you posted on mental differences between races have been widely criticized as unscientific which I addressed in this thread:

http://www.forum4politics.com/race-relations/242538-why-race-realism-pseudoscience.html

 

"Race" is just a useful way of identifying those you need to expend excess energy persecuting.

Like Hollywood, it is all about looks. If the persecutee looks like you, it is called tribalism. Which is equally useful in expending excess energy and blaming for your own condition.

 

Here is a good video by Joseph Graves explaining why human genetic variation does not structure into races:

[video=youtube;VfGlmVpUajs]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfGlmVpUajs[/video]

Also here is a video of Graves involved in a debate with one of SecretAgent94's primary sources on racial differences:


[video=youtube;lUjo31DChcE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUjo31DChcE[/video]

 

There is the occasional exception. I know several black people who have green and yellow eyes. But it doesn't change the fact that most don't. An exception doesn't mean the entire rule is invalid.

I don't care what it was used to do. I only care about what's true.

If every race of people had a majority of people with completely random phenotypes, then you would be correct. Your case is not the majority.

Wow okay, I have a question for you; do you consider wolves and house dogs to be separate species? What about dingos?

So you admit that there are differences between the difference ethnicity (I mean breeds), with regard to these things? Particularly in behavior and intelligence?

I already said that the amount of genetic difference doesn't matter if you look at my first or second post! It's how they are expressed! Do you know what the amount of genetic difference between us and Chimps are? 2% ! But that 2% makes a HUGE difference! The same is true for the different human races (well MUCH less so than the difference between us and chimps, but still there). There may be a small genetic differences, but it how those individual genes are sequenced that matter. For instance FOX2P is only ONE SINGLE GENE that enables language. That's a huge freakin difference for only a single gene don't you think? With your logic, us and Chimps would be the same species. After all, it's only 2% right? We are about 98% identical! We are 92% identical with mice! I recall reading somewhere that we are 40% identical with a carrot.

So let me say it again: Small amount of differences genetically do cause huge differences! I am NOT disputing that there are very few differences between us genetically!

Um I'm not even white and I'm a very avid anime fan. Even I can see that anime characters look like white people. Big eyes, different color hair...They usually look like white people or at least partially Caucasian depending on what anime it is...Although some do look more Asian but most look white to me. Even my other non-white friends think so including my Hispanic friend who I just asked.

What you are doing is taking a few rare cases, and trying to act as though they are the rule.

I have a question, what would qualify something as a different species to you? Or sub-species?

Ugh, please guys stop with the "I've seen"s, "I know a guy who"s. Exceptions do occur, no one is disputing that. Most Africans are black with dark eyes. Are some paler? Yes. Do some have orange eyes? Yes. But the majority are black with dark eyes. Same applies to all the other races with their own respective characteristics.

Then we should come up with classifications that do reflect the reality. Not just close your eyes and say "race is just a social construct, no such thing!". That's a cop-out. Any child can point out an Japanese person and an African person and realize that there are major differences. It's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean one is better or worse than the other. They are just different in their own way.

Well I would want to treat them humanely obviously, regardless of how human they actually are..

 

Species = Organisms with distinct characteristics that are capable of interbreeding.

Sub-Species = A population within a species identifiable by biological characters that mark a distinct evolutionary lineage.

I think a major problem with this debate is that racialists don't understand why race is called a social construct and people arguing with them don't articulate the significance of calling race a social construct very well.

This is one of the best articles I have read on the topic:

Conceptualizing human variation Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)




You recommend that people read a variety of sources on a topic and draw a conclusion based on knowledge of all sides of a debate.

So why not actually take the time to read a real academic paper on race, genetic variation and social construction and try to understand the argument before rejecting it?

It's one thing to disagree with an argument because you believe it is false and it's another to not understand it at all.

When you claim that claiming race is a social construct is politically motivated and proponents are "closing their eyes" you show that you don't actually understand the argument being made nor do you recognize the credibility of the source of the argument. This is a legitimate scientific position. You may not agree with it. You may think it's wrong but you can't demonstrate that it is if you don't understand what the argument is in the first place.

 

Your rules have so many exceptions there's not much of a rule left.

Ah, here's the real root of the argument, isn't it? You think that some races are more intelligent then others? Just what sorts of behaviors are you talking about? Perhaps you could elaborate on this and tell us just why you think these things?

We have come up with classifications that reflect reality - they're called haplogroups. And they haven't replaced the idea of race in the general culture because you can't tell someone's haplogroup by looking at them.

 

You've exposed a flaw in Collectivist thinking with this post. Race is man's attempt to discretize something which is continuous in nature.

 

Not really. The fact that you are even mentioning these accounts are proof of their rarity. Go to an China and pick out as many Chinese people with red hair as you can. (Or whatever the heck country you used as an example.) You can use as many "I know someone who..." examples as you want. Still doesn't change the fact that the VAST majority of people look like their race.

Sure. Approximately 100,000 years of geographic isolation was enough for us to evolve different characteristics. One of which is the way we think. Africans evolved in a warm, hot environment with whites evolved in colder climates. And other races in their respective environments. The results are different biologic characteristics including different cognitive ability. Each race adapted to their own environments.

Just a politically correct synonym for race.

By the way, this video addresses many of the arguments you make that I've replied to but you keep bringing them up.

[video=youtube;4ZurClqPGLc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZurClqPGLc[/video]

 

Actually, at least in Japan it's not that uncommon to see people with red hair. Or, well, sort of a sickly orange color. It's a common result of hair bleaching coming out badly.

And no, it's not "I know someone who," it's "I see people all the time who." To be honest, most people with medium skin tones do not seem to be of any particular racial group to me. Some Hispanics, light skinned Africans, southern Europeans, middle easterners, people from the Indian subcontinent, American Indians, most of them aren't really easily told apart unless you happen to have grown up in a place with a lot of some of those groups around where the cultural divisions were important. Heck, for that matter, I often see people who seem to me that they may or may not have some East Asian ancestry. I would also point out that a lot of those groups have been the target of hate violence (particularly since September 11th) because people can't tell them apart from Arabs. It is both grimly ironic and very telling when you hear about some hate crime or another where the victim isn't even a member of the group the perpetrators thought they were targeting. I'd say that the majority of humans don't look like any particular race, but as rather indeterminate.

What you're saying is just plain wrong. In the US, we have a sharp divide between "white" and "black" because people have been divided into those categories based on skin color, not ancestry. Especially during slavery, there was a lot of interbreeding, and a lot of people were assigned a race purely on how they appeared. That's how you get a big black guy in NYC with a European haplotype.

So which races are smarter then which? And what empirical evidence do you have that this is the case? To my knowledge, no one's ever found any real evidence of differences in intelligence between different races.

And characteristics that change in such a short period of time are mostly those that are strongly selected for, such as skin color, and are genetically quite malleable. In other words, superficial characteristics that would tend to vary a lot anyway.

And you haven't answered my question. Why are you hanging on to the concept of race? How's it at all useful? Why should anyone care? What's it good for? Not so very long ago, Protestants and Catholics were killing each other. Nowadays, for the most part nobody cares. In the early 19th century, there was a serious debate about whether or not Irish were white. It was important because a lot state and local laws at the time referenced whites, and a lot of people didn't want to see Irish get those sorts of legal protections. Why should race matter any more then any of those past distinctions?

No, haplogroups are based on specific mutations and genetic markers that can be used to track lineages. And like I said, there's no way to tell someone's haplogroup without actually testing their DNA.

You keep talking about how small genetic differences make a big difference, such as the difference between humans and chimpanzees. Firstly, I strongly suspect you have a grossly exaggerated notion of the differences between chimpanzees and humans. We're really not all that different. However, I believe the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees is an order of magnitude or two larger then the genetic differences between any two humans.

And just because some small mutations can produce really big differences between individuals doesn't mean that all small mutations do. Most mutations make no noticeable difference. And the vast majority of mutations that do make a difference in expression are harmful - this is why it's not a good idea to sit next to an unshielded nuclear reactor. Those mutations that make a noticeable difference in the organism that are either beneficial or at least neutral are a tiny, tiny fraction of all mutations. So if you're going to claim that there are significant differences between different races based on small genetic variations, you're going to have to demonstrate that these significant differences actually exist in the first place, which, frankly, they just plain don't. The very premise of your argument is simply divorced from reality.

As for that video, if all they had was some text to put up on the screen, why did they even bother making a video of it? And whoever made it obviously doesn't know the first thing about genetics. Or how color perception works, for that matter. Honestly, I couldn't get through the whole thing it was so bad. My impression is that the arguments it presents are either incoherent, patently ridiculous, full of factual errors, or prove the opposite point of what the author intended. For example, let's take this little gem, shall we?

The first part of the response about intermediate forms seems like a really excellent demonstration of why race does not correspond to biological reality. The second part, well, strictly speaking, yes, red and yellow are in fact illusions. Colors are aspects of how humans perceive light, not an aspect of external reality. Humans are trichromates, which means that we have three different photosensitive compounds in our retinas that are sensitive to different wavelengths. This is why we perceive three primary colors - the peak sensitivity of those compounds roughly correspond to red, green, and blue. Our perception of a color is determined by a particular ratio of stimulation of the three color receptors. Because of this, two colors that we perceive as the same may in fact have very different spectra. So mixing colors is not an example of the behavior of a true continuum. A mix of light with wavelengths of 550 nm and 700 nm may look the same as a single source of 620 nm, but they're not the same. In a true continuum, there are no sharp boundaries, no discontinuities. By definition. You can pick a region of a continuum to look at, but where you set the boundaries of that region are always arbitrary and do not reflect the inherent nature of the continuum.

 

Your line of reasoning overlooks the fact that humans as a species have many more years of common evolutionary history before the divergence out of Africa around 100,000 years ago which resulted in the development of our major biological systems that make us unique as humans, including our intellectual and social
abilities which are of equal survival value in any human populations and gave our ancestors the ability to travel and adapt to different climates of the world in the first place.

The traits that do vary from climate to climate arose through selection because they were adaptively significant to their respective environments.

 

Here's a good video for this thread:


[video=youtube;GA0XLxG2o2E]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA0XLxG2o2E[/video]

 

Yes, you would likely see that during anime conventions or something. If that kind of variation that you see in anime were the case in real life, then you would be correct.

1. You are strawmanning with skin color. There are most differences that I've mentioned already a few times..
2."Many races have similar skin colors. Therefore race is not a reality".

So what? You are saying that because someone can have ancestor of a different race in his ancestry, that biological traits unique to his race that he possesses are irrelevant? If I'm Arab, and I have Arab features, but I one day find out I have a Chinese ancestor, it still wouldn't change the fact that I identify as Arab.

Well first of all, those were also Texsdrifter's words:

He just admitted that difference in intelligence do exist.

Secondly, there are people of all races in every IQ bracket. However, there does seem to be some correlation between race and IQ level on average.
According to a study by Philippe Rushton, Ashkenazi Jews on average tend to be the most intelligent, followed by East Asians. Although others I've come across put Asians at the very top.

[video=youtube;aeUU9U9uY1I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeUU9U9uY1I[/video]

More empty jargon..

Well admittedly, I am just plain interested in the topic. I've always found the idea that race doesn't exist very unlikely. A few things I think should be fixed are mostly concerning blacks. Many parts of Africa are like hell on earth. Poverty, tribal warfare, disease. Africans are killing each other and living miserable lives over there especially places like the Central African Republic and Somalia. I see similar situations here, in America. The black crime rate is crazy high. Just look up the Department of Justice statistics if you don't believe me. This is shameful. The sooner we can admit that there are differences between the races in behavior, and intelligence among others, the sooner we can address these problems.

I never said the difference beteen two races are as much as the difference between us and Chimps. I was using our extreme genetic similarity with Chimps to make a point that a little difference can go a heck of a long way. Something I've said probably about 10 times already.

The fact that you can find someone's race (I mean haplogroup) via DNA test doesn't help your argument any.

I wonder why you posted this version with hardly any views and only 2 comments and a biased title name? Here is another version with a couple of thousand views and more back and forth comments from both sides of the debate:
[video=youtube;i9FGHtfnYWY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i9FGHtfnYWY[/video]

 

The version I put up was uploaded a few days ago. That's why it barely has any views.

The version you embedded (which won't play embedded due to copyright violation) advertises a blog which is supportive of Rushton's side of the argument so it's not neutral either.

The full debate is still there but I wanted to make the point that Rushton had been refuted and provided links at the end of the video to back up my statement.

 

I know this comment wasn't actually directed at me but I'm going to respond to it anyway.

Do you know what a haplogroup is? I don't think you do because in post #61 you said it was a "politically correct synonym for race."

A haplogroup is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor. Haplotypes are combinations of alleles (DNA sequences) on a chromosome that are transmitted in descent. The most commonly studied haplogroup is the Y-Chromosome haplogroup because it can be used as a marker of paternal ancestry. Only males carry the Y-Chromosome and when a Y-Chromosome has a distinct genetic structure you can identify relatedness between two individual people. For example Blair Underwood, an African-American actor, was involved in a TV special where they traced his family history through historical documents to learn about his heritage. They were able to trace his family all the way back to slavery. For most African-Americans that is where the story ends. But thanks to DNA tests they were able to go a step further analyzed his DNA and ran the results through a DNA database on African DNA eventually finding a match for his Y-Chromosome with a man in Africa which Underwood visited.
Despite their families being separated for hundreds of years DNA proved for a scientific fact that they shared a recent common ancestor through their paternal line.





So you're basically calling the DNA sequences on a Chromosome a race.....

This discussion isn't going to go anywhere unless you define terms. You can start by citing a source that defines race as you understand the term.

As for me to simplify debate I will say that I believe human genetic variation to be absolutely and obviously real. But I don't think there are mental differences between population groups that we commonly call races.


This video provides some insight into the matter:


[video=dailymotion;xb9iip]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xb9iip_race-and-intelligence-5-7_school?search_algo=1[/video]

 

Yes, those were my words. Dogs have a much greater variations than humans. Yet the different breeds of dogs only exist because the are prevented from breeding with other breeds. That has not been the case with humans for a very long time. Henry Louis Gates Jr. Has estimated that 58% of African Americans have at least 12.5% European DNA, 19.6% have 25%. The racial system you defend is flawed and only used in humans in this context. The only reason for its use is to try and put a barrier up to replace the geographic barrier that no longer exist.

 

Wow, another great snap shot of the twisted mind at work! Spin spin spin! Spin it any way you can just so we can justify our wrongs, right?
The flat Earth is a myth, so people who believe in a flat Earth are a myth also? No. We call them Flat Earthers, and people who believe in race are racist.

 

Race is a way for progressives to deflect criticism for the cultural rot in the American inner city. It is a cultural problem and not a race issue at all.



_

 

I always found this question by racists, "How can I be racist if there are no races?" to be rather silly.

God doesn't need to exist in order for someone to have a religious belief in a God.

Racialists tend to associate "race" with any biological difference so they think if you are denying race you're saying that things like skin color or hair texture that are widely regarded as racial markers are being denied as biological distinctions which is ridiculous.

Race doesn't simply mean difference. If you look at it's etymology race basically means "kind" in reference to people who share common descent. Synonyms for race include breeds and lineages. Over time it became a word in reference to types of people sharing physical peculiarities which became culturally significant during the Age of Exploration when Europeans began sailing to distance lands and encountering people with different phenotypes and cultures from themselves.

I don't think belief in race makes one a racist. It depends on what you associate with race. Traditional models of race took into consideration not only variations in physical characteristics by hierarchy in certain traits including intellectual and personality traits. Racism is basically hatred or intolerance based on race. If your belief in race necessitates you to believe in racial superiority and inferiority and you use that belief to justify racial discrimination then yes you are a racist.

If your belief in race is merely limited to seeing it has hereditary biological differences between geographic populations which have no social importance, even if you don't understand the history of how race was socially constructed (which most people don't) I would not consider you to be a racist. Most people who believe in racial equality are expressing a moral belief in treating people equally and take it for granted that there are human races which is what I believed for most of my life until I started research race as a concept.

 

Are you stalking the guy?

 

Race: Something liberals use to gain political power.

Not to mention they lie about it and only use it when it's anti-white.

 

Black, brown, white and yellow.

 

This is why race is such a bs concept. In the US hispanics and whites are 2 different races. Go anywhere else and they're called caucasians and are the same race.