Misconceptions Based on Race, 'Genetics', et. al.

I'll make note of it in the blog area.

 

The thing is people believe a lot of these things and are in positions to make life-changing judgments and create policies based on them.

If people are free to bring up what quite frankly I believe are denigrating AND false stereotypes in a forum like this one (variety of viewpoints allowed), we have a chance to see where the beliefs come from. Then when they are expressed, we have a chance to offer reasons why they are wrong/false, whatever. The participants may not necessarily change their minds, but readers can get exposed to different perspectives without hearing people talking over each other.

Yes, some of these ideas are pretty toxic; however, while I'm here, I appreciate the chance to challenge certain long-standing ideas. I started this thread because when race gets brought up, one side seemed wholly defensive while the other side dominated the conversation. It also was/is incredibly difficult to dig up countering information as much of it is buried under mainstream thoughts. People should be able to shut down dangerous ideas with common sense, facts, logic, and evidence and not have to be defensive. This way archaic ideas can finally die....................imho of course.

 

You said something of Nigeria having few prisoners which doesn't demonstrate it is a low crime society when they have a very high homicide rate.

 

My goal isn't to demonstrate Nigeria as a low crime society. My goal is to undermine the idea that Black people should be synonymous with criminality when there are far more violent races out there.

 

All you need to do is point out how many people have been killed over religion. The majority of the killers were not of dark skin.

 

How are you making your point when Nigeria has a very high homicide rate?

 

The idea I was addressing is that Black people are supposedly inherently criminal. This makes no sense when we look at the top 50 most violent cities and see people of European descent hit the worst homicide rates. A rate of ~18--as high as it may be, is a far cry from 84-90!

The top 5 countries with the highest murder rates are Central and Southern American.

The 4 American cities that hit the top 50 consists of mixed-race Blacks.

The common denominator appears to be European genes, not African. This makes sense when we look at who is constantly at war and who has created the most deadliest weapons known to man. Western nations have low crime rates because they export their violence onto other nations. Therefore, if we're going to look at who is supposedly inherently criminal, we should probably start with those with the highest murder rates and those who have killed the most people in absolute numbers.

 

Lol. Yes, the gang members in central america look so European.


Have to hand it to you for the stellar logic re: north american crime and white contribution. I think there might be a lot easier way to check that, though...haha

 

Whoa, what's this? Are you discarding the fact that the most violent people and places in the world contain peoples with significant amounts of European DNA? We are to go by what people look like instead of what they really are genetically. Why, you'd be making an argument in favor of a racial social-construct instead of true race-based biology!

...Common denominators people. The most homicidal places worldwide and modern warfare all have something in common and it isn't African/Black.

 

Last I knew, appearance has always been used to distinguish species and sub-species until very recently.

Unless you have haplogroup samplings of Hondurans (the country with the highest homicide rate), I'm going by visual appearance to tell you the gang members are not White.

Feel free showing their genetic makeup otherwise.

 

Appearances can be deceiving, especially when it comes to mixed races, hence why I mentioned 'common denominator.' The vast majority of Hondurans are made up of mestizos. Mestizos have mixed ancestry of white European and indigenous Latin American (wiki).

Here is a chart of their haplogroups:


http://atlas.xyvy.info/country-national-haplogroup-chart-dna/honduras

 

Speaking of Nisbett, why aren't you defending the work you keep copy/pasting him from his critics who have dismantled and trashed his poor scholarship on this topic?

"2.3. Black and biracial children reared by European parents

Studies of black and biracial children reared by European parents yield conflicting results and thus support for no particular conclusion (Table 2). Instead of acknowledging the ambiguity of these findings, Nisbett chooses to portray them as favoring his strict environmental hypothesis by launching an unprincipled attack on the study most clearly opposed to it.

The study at issue is the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study (MTAS) (Waldman, Weinberg, & Scarr, 1994; Weinberg, Scarr, & Waldman, 1992). I first note that the MTAS data summarized in Table 2 exhibit a striking regularity that agrees with the conclusions reached earlier in this review: the environmental advantage conferred by a white upper-middle-class household for all ancestry groups appears to be largely transient. At the second time point, both the black and white adoptees showed mean IQs extremely close to the means of their respective populations.

I also note one egregious reporting error by Nisbett. In his chapter on heritability and malleability, he cites the original MTAS publication for the following: One study looked at the IQs of white children who were born to mothers with an average educational level and who were adopted by mostly middle- and upper-middle-class families. The children adopted relatively late had an average IQ of 117 [111.5 after correction for the Flynn Effect (Table 2)]. This study suggests that even children who would be expected to have an average IQ if raised in an average environment can have their IQ boosted very considerably if they are raised under highly propitious circumstances (Nisbett, 2009, p. 37).

Given Nisbett’s extensive discussion of the later MTAS reports in his account of the black–white IQ difference, his failure to mention the longitudinal wipeout of the MTAS adoption effect is inexplicable."

 

And what off Lee's criticisms of Nisbett's conclusions, use of data, and ignoring other pieces of data on this subject?

- - - Updated - - -

Uh, no... Nisbett has been demolished, and since you can't defend his work in this subject, why do you keep saying this?

 

Mikemikev has lied and claimed PCA shows sharp continental genetic discontinuity.


(Tishkoff et al. 2009)

"...the major human geographic groups overlap rather than cluster on their principle component analysis of world-wide data set... As Weiss and Long (2009) suggest, this study shows that the results and interpretations of STRUCTURE and world-wide population structure are strongly influenced by the population samples included. If more intermediate populations, such as the Middle Eastern and Indian populations, are included, cline rather than clustering explains the world-wide human population structure and genetic differences among human racial groups." (Batai, 2010)

 

Here's typically what happens when you select only a small number of populations within continents. You end up with imaginary clusters, because populations between the geographical (continental) extremes have been excluded.


(Xing et al. 2009), only 27 world-populations

Tishkoff et al. (2009) in contrast included 121 population samples from Africa alone, alongside 60 world-populations (57 from CEPH-HGDP, and 3 others). You can see there is no genetic discontinuity between continents, but a smooth gradient/cline.

 

Thanks for proving my point. For example Tishkoff et al has 121 African population samples, your source has less than 10. The gaps/discontinuities are filled when you include more populations.

"Because we do not (yet) have vast data banks of genetic data collected in every corner of the world (at least not at the disposition of scientific researchers), claims about genetic clusters of human beings—that is, about the structure found within a species of more than 7 billion people—are often based on samples that are relatively very small... Serre and Pääbo (2004) argued that sampling often concentrates on “the extremes of continental land masses” (p. 1680), maximizing the geographic and therefore genetic distance between individuals presumed to belong to distinct continental clusters.
Without “a sampling strategy that maximizes the geographic distribution of samples and keeps similar sample size for each geographical area,” they warned, researchers risked falsely creating “apparent substructures” (Serre and Pääbo 2004:1681). In contrast, when these researchers designed a study that sampled individuals “such that their geographic distribution around the world approximates the distribution of the human population as a whole and includes areas where Africa, Asia, and Europe meet,” the pattern of genetic variation they found was “one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters” (Serre and Pääbo 2004:1679-1680)." (Morning, 2014)

 

You're clinging to a falsified position. Note that the most recent scientific attempts to defend race - acknowledge human biological variation across continents is clinal, e.g. Shiao et al. 2012 who propose the concept of "clinal classes" meaning arbitrary slicing of genetic continua into large "classes" (a synonym for race) for utility. This paper is refuted by Fujimura et al. 2014. who show arbitrarily dividing populations into continental clusters is not useful, e.g. in medicine broad divisions like this tell us nothing:

"These big groups that we characterize as races are too heterogeneous to lump together in a scientific way. If you're doing a DNA study to look for markers for a particular disease, you can't use 'Caucasians' as a group. They're too diverse." (Naggert, 2000)

 

Also ask yourself why the arbitrary "Caucasoid" division is so huge (Europe, West Asia, North Africa), and the "Negroid" so small (Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding Horn Africans). These divisions are a relic of European colonialism, alongside outdated typological thinking:

"This structure places heavy emphasis on the idea that the world once harboured distinct and independently evolved populations that have now undergone admixture… this idea of population structure is unfortunately more in line with race concepts held by European explorers and traders." (Weiss & Long, 2009)

Had Africans colonized the globe like Europeans did in the modern-era, they would have made the "Caucasoid" division small, and "Negroid" massive to serve their own interests. Evidence for the latter is found in modern Afrocentric literature which is as bad as Eurocentric race typology.

 

Actually, both definitions are correct...

Full Definition of racism:

1) a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2) racial prejudice or discrimination (Merriam Webster)

Is it possible, though, that you emphasize #2 and seem to downplay the first because you might be a racist according to #1?

 

Do you not see the vertices on this plot? The vast majority of people fall into those clusters. The vertices (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid, NA) are orthogonal to each other, ie. not a continuum. And the continua between represent minor admixed populations, such as Hazara and Uyghur.

 

You think that applying a mathematical algorithm to genetic data is some kind of consipiracy by "White racist explorers"? *facepalm*

 

The spaces are filled when you include more populations. For Sub-Saharan Africa you only have 8 population samples. Tishkoff et al has at least 10 times that amount and hence you see the smooth gradient. The only discontinuity is found in isolated hunter-gatherer populations e.g. Hazda, Khoisan where there is a barrier to gene flow.

No, they're in situ part of the genetic continuum, not "mixed race". What you are displaying is discredited race typology. Any variation outside your race types, you can only explain by race mixture. This sort of obsolete thinking is pre-modern evolutionary synthesis.

"Neo-Darwinian theory requires also considering adaptive selection and genetic drift to explain variation. This is not to say that gene flow or population replacement never occurs, but that variation in a given situation must be explained based on all of the data and likely probabilities. The racial-typological approaches tend to be deductive and reductionist and only conceive populations or individuals in terms of predefined types. Hence all variation is due to admixtures in this approach." (Keita, 1995)

 

European colonials made the divisions to serve their own interests, i.e. the Scramble for Africa. This is why the concept of the "Hamite" (Caucasoid African) was introduced:

"European colonists, convinced the Tutsi had migrated to Rwanda from Ethiopia, believed the Tutsi were more Caucasian than the Hutu and were therefore racially superior and better suited to carry out colonial administrative tasks." - Wikipedia

It played a role in the Rwandan Genocide:

"Taylor describes how Tutsi extremists have used the Hamitic hypothesis to claim intellectual superiority and Hutu extremists to insist upon the foreign origins of Tutsi, and the autochthony of Hutu. Both are reproducing a colonial pattern that “essentializes ethnic
difference, justifies political domination by a single group, and nurtures a profound thirst for redress and vengeance on the part of the defavourized group” (2001, 57). The Hamitic hypothesis formed a powerful part of the genocidal ideology and it has been
difficult to leave behind." (Wielenga, 2006)

And now Afrocentrists are just doing the reverse - they invent some pan-African cluster which has no basis in genetics either.

 

Why are you posting an image of this:



as if it somehow contradicts me?

Hybrid forms in no way impugn a taxon. Do ligers invalidate lions and tigers? I'm simply lablelling a cluster of variation, your Marxist race denial tactics sadly cannot invalidate this simple and informative act.