Race: Biological Reality vs. Social Construct

[EgalitarianJay]

The video above features Jared Taylor, a prominent White Nationalist who is trying to argue that racial differences are rooted in biological reality and not a social construct. I would like this thread to explore this topic and some of the issues he brought up regarding race. Do you believe race to be a biological reality or a social construct? Give your reasoning and any recommended reading on the subject.

I personally think there are real biological differences between human populations but I don't think that race is the best way to describe that variation. I think the racial categories popularly used in modern society are socially constructed. Taylor's video appears to be a set up for discussion of racial differences in intelligence which is a fixation of most racists which I certainly don't believe in. But he did mention a lot of interesting racial differences that I would like to see addressed in this thread.

Here's some recommended reading along with commentary from an evolutionary biologist who I emailed on the subject:




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

Now that I am back in the office I will take on answering your questions. I will start with one of the simplest:



EgalitarianJay: Or if someone claimed that human races were as different as breeds of dogs and cited anatomical differences such as craniofacial morphology, height or body structure.



Graves: To address this question we must first make no assumptions about the partitioning of humans. In other words, you cannot start answering this by assuming that the socially-defined racial groups are really “races.” Instead you have to look at the characters in question and ask do they differ in a way that allows us to define groups with any reliability; and if so, what are the groups. When this is attempted with physical traits (such as craniofacial morphology) or any others, the groups which result do not match genetic/genomic variation. For example, the diagram below resulted from using a variety of physical traits and attempting to draw a tree of relatedness (phylogeny.)



This figure is taken from Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Menozzi, P., and Piazza, A., The History and Geography of Human Genes, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press), 1994.



You will note that general anthropometric traits shows that Swedes and French people are more similar to each other, than either is to Eskimos or North American Indians. This fits your intuition, however, Eskimos and North American Indians are closer to Swedes and French than they are to Japanese, Chinese, or to South American Indians should not! Indeed the notion that North and South American Indians fall on different branches already shows you the weakness of physical traits to define genetically meaningful groups. The lower branches to the tree are also wrong, as Sub-Saharan African Bantu speaking people come out next to Australian and Papuan, New Guineans; these groups are much further separated from each other genetically.




The neighbor joining genetic phylogeny above shows Sub-Saharan Africans in the orange group next to Europeans as the closest group, not Micronesians or Australoids (pink group.) Thus, while groups of humans differ in physical traits they do not do so in ways that allow physical traits to mirror genetic relationships. This would be necessary to define biological races. The reason physical traits do not match in this way is due to the principle of discordance (natural selection acting on different portions of the genome in different ways; as I explained in my presentation in Portland.) Good articles that help explain this general idea can be found in the Encyclopedia of Race & Racism 2nd Ed. (such as C. Loring Brace’s Clines, and Clusters articles.)



The dog breed example is one commonly misunderstood and used inappropriately to describe human biological variation. This is often cited from a Frank Miele and Vince Sarich book on human races (a book that I reviewed for a publisher and rejected for publication) Dog (or any other domestic breeds) are produced by conscious high level artificial selection. This selection is maintained for many generations and leads to inbreeding, increasing a number of physiological and anatomical pathologies resulting from increased homozygosity (genes identical by state.) In a recent paper published in Science, Parker et al. 2004 showed that the population subdivision statistic for dogs is FST = 0.333. This exceeds Sewall Wright’s threshold for the existence of biological races (0.250), and as I said in my presentation, FST for humans is less than 0.150. In addition, human inbreeding is never as high at that seen in domestic breeds, so this example again is simply an incorrect way to understand human genetics, which generally never sees that much inbreeding.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. The dog breed analogy really is massively stupid.

The features by which 'races' differ are largely cosmetic features, not broad anatomical ones. They loom large to us because we're evolved to be keenly sensitive to tiny details of our fellow humans' facial structure and posture, but to an alien almost all of them would be nigh-undetectable except for skin color variations. And even there, we're calling people "black" for having any of a huge range of different skin tones, which is just idiotic.

Whereas dog breeds differ by huge anatomical differences. Which should make it obvious that selective breeding of dogs has changed dog breeds from the ancestral wolf a LOT. Far more than human interactions have changed 'breeds' of humans from the ancestral homo sapiens.

Show me the human 'races' whose basic anatomy varies as much as huskies and Chihuahuas, or bulldogs and daschunds, and I'll believe that those races are as different in other ways too.

[K. A. Pital]

They might be considered a different species if the differences are so visible, Simon. Like homo erectus.

[Democracy Fanboy]

I side with the view that race is a social construct, but the same could be said for most systems of categorization. No one denies that populations across the world look different, but the problem comes in when you try demarcating where one population ends and another begins. It's rather like trying to determine on a color spectrum precisely where one color begins and another ends.

I notice Taylor cited a study claiming that African-American women lose weight at a slower rate than their European counterparts, which he blames on slower metabolism. Thing is, there are certain environmental variables known to impact weight gain and loss. For example, stress can lower metabolism and slow weight loss, and in fact there is direct evidence for a correlation between obesity and racism experienced by African-American women. Taylor's conclusion that African people have naturally slower metabolism than others is premature.

[sarevok2]

Race is the last refuge of the scoundrel who has nothing to be proud of.

[Thanas]

There are some physical differences between people living in different areas. For example, some people handle exposure to the sun better than others. In short, during our evolution we made tradeoffs that resulted in some benefits and some drawbacks to better adapt to local life.

However, what we today perceive as "race" has changed a lot over the years. In antiquity, it was about political allegiance, not physical traits. For example, a black person of North Africa could be both a Roman (if he lived in the Empire) or a Goth (if he defected to them and was accepted into the tribe). The race idea we have today is based on physical traits and is largely a product of colonialism.

This is a great documentary which shows the origins of modern racial theory (which really only cropped up because Europeans needed a convenient excuse to enslave others).




We discussed it a bit here.

Though thankfully this is not used anymore and biology has reverted to classifying people by physical characteristics, leaving out the racist BS.

[Simon_Jester]

They might be considered a different species if the differences are so visible, Simon. Like homo erectus.

Which is exactly my point.

Honestly, if we didn't know that chihuahuas and bulldogs and so on had a common ancestor within historical memory, we'd have a damn good basis for assuming they were different species. For that matter, I'm not even sure they can interbreed and produce viable offsprings; the physiological issues are kind of insane.

So if we're going to say "dogs are all one species, but different dog breeds are very different and obviously so..." I respond "except dogs arguably aren't one species, especially if we use the racist moron approach of ignoring their DNA and common ancestry and paying attention to whatever physical traits happen to catch our eye. And even if they were all one species, there are no human groups that differ physically by nearly as much as a poodle differs from a rottweiler."

Because really, that's why dog breeds differ so much; we physiologically changed them by highly selective breeding to give them all sorts of weird and distorted physiques. Physiques that look nothing like the ancestral wolf of a hundred thousand years ago. If human races were as different from the ancestral proto-h. sapiens, there'd be whole subspecies of three-meter giants clomping around, and one-meter midgets, and people with midget-sized bodies but three meter limbs, and people with heads the size of oil drums that have to crawl everywhere, and all kinds of bizarre stuff like that. There'd be breeds of people who are mentally too aggressive to even live together and can barely survive in the wild because two of them locked in a room together would rather fight than mate. There'd be breeds of people with fur. There'd be breeds of people with... almost anything we can imagine.

But there isn't. Humans everywhere have, basically, the same physical size, shape, and body plan, allowing for differences in nutrition. We all have pretty much the same 'native-developed' technologies, varying only in how many of them we have due to different regions producing different levels of technical progress. We all live in broadly similar social structures, with things like families and towns existing all over the Earth.

So all this fixation on races as biologically distinct has to focus on tiny minutiae that no biologist would take seriously for a moment.

It boils down to taking a few very minor differences (nose shape, the radius of curvature of hair, whether eyelids curl this way or that way). Plus the one cosmetic difference of skin tone... which we know damn well is largely cosmetic because in sunny conditions the same person can have radical differences in skin tone just depending on how much time they spend outside.

Now, all these are things that happen to be conspicuous to the human eye because we have millions of years of practice telling each other apart using those features. But apparently, instead of being relatively trivial features we use to tell each other apart because the broader, more significant ones are present in all humans, suddenly these things are signals of drastic differences in intelligence and physical aptitude among humans.

It's literally as stupid as assuming there is an important national difference between people who open their boiled eggs at the big end or the little end.

[Alyrium Denryle]

So all this fixation on races as biologically distinct has to focus on tiny minutiae that no biologist would take seriously for a moment.

And in point of fact, we dont take them seriously. Hell, are there some minor physiological differences? Yeah. To the point that heart medications for certain conditions vary in efficacy. But those differences are controlled by a single polymorphism at one loci that is more common in people of african decent, and can be present in white people, or not present in a black person, thanks to historical contingency and interbreeding over time scales that far outstrip things like slavery. Are there differences in things like the length of the long bones? Yeah. Differences that happen to coincide with Distance From Equator irrespective of racial group.

[Darmalus]

Other than lactose tolerance, the only human adaptation of significance I've heard of is high altitude adaptation, but even that has cropped up in 3 different places (Tibet, Ethiopia and the Andes) and is the result of a different set of mutations in each case.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Other than lactose tolerance, the only human adaptation of significance I've heard of is high altitude adaptation, but even that has cropped up in 3 different places (Tibet, Ethiopia and the Andes) and is the result of a different set of mutations in each case.

White skin is an adaptation for high latitude and the lack of sunlight during winter. Less baseline melanin means more vitamin D3 synthesis, will adjust with tanning to prevent sunburn and melanoma. But there are bigger differences between two populations of the same species of frog that live in the same region, so fuck it.

[Adam Reynolds]

Other than lactose tolerance, the only human adaptation of significance I've heard of is high altitude adaptation, but even that has cropped up in 3 different places (Tibet, Ethiopia and the Andes) and is the result of a different set of mutations in each case.

Another similar example is the alcohol flush reaction, often referred to as Asian flush, which produces a visible reaction to alcohol among people of Asian descent. It was suggested that this is the case because it gives a stronger resistance to certain diseases and that generally Asian societies historically boiled water rather than drinking alcohol.

One issue that can be brought up in these debates is the fact that forensic anthropologists are quite effective at determining the ancestry of skeletal remains. While it is a probabilistic value based upon the population within which the remains were found(there is a major difference between a black male found in the southern United States and Sub-Saharan Africa), it is still odd how accurately they are determined. However this is not to say that there is anything more to this than there is to skin color.

[Channel72]

Well, I think nobody would deny that there are subtle genetic differences between ethnic groups (like African Americans are more susceptible to sickle cell anemia, etc.)

But, the only thing that really matters with regard to racist ideology is the claim that non-whites have less intelligence on average than whites. This is pretty much the dogma of racist groups like stormfront or the KKK. They generally offer as evidence various cherry-picked historical or political comparisons, rather than scientific or biological evidence. An oft-repeated comparison is to compare Iceland and Haiti; the argument being "look Iceland is so enlightened and prosperous whereas Haiti is a shithole, therefore white people are awesome!" But of course they ignore or excuse major historical scenarios where the reverse was true (like say, Middle Ages Europe vs. Middle Ages Baghdad, or pre-classical-Greece Europe vs. the much more sophisticated Near East/North Africa.)

[mr friendly guy]

The argument can be summarised like this.

1. Races are different.
2. Are the differences (biological) sufficient to give race its own biological section.

Keep in mind that modern day humans are a subspecies of homo sapiens, ie we are homo sapiens sapiens. If you want to give races its own biological heading, (and keep in mind these racists, er I mean race realists have these weird concepts of biological race and sub-races) then biologically speaking, we would have sub sub sub species. Yeah, that's 3 subs. But going on

3. If you answer no to question 2, then how is race defined then. Is it social?

My answer to question 2 is no. There isn't enough biological difference to give race its own biological section. The racists, er I mean race realists can sprout all the retarded dog breed analogies they want, or black people do better in sports, Asians do better in intellectual pursuit, <insert racial stereotype here>, or we have drugs tailored for specific races arguments, but they cannot overcome the following inconvenient facts.

a. The features we associate with race eg skin colour are only a small part of the genes governing phenotypical appearance.

b. What this means is that we can have people in one racial group who are more genetically closer (if we count the number of genes which are the same) to a person in a different racial group than a person in his own group. Think about that for a moment. If race should get its own biological classification, shouldn't all members in this sub sub species (race) be more closer related compared to a person of another group? This doesn't happen and its well documented by Calvelli and co.

Even if we discover a gene which is only present in every member of one racial group (lets call it group A), and we find this gene is not present in any other human group, it still wouldn't be sufficient to give group A its own unique classification because we would still have members of another group (lets call that group B) more similar to members of group A than some members of group A are to each other.

There are reasons for this, but to put it simply human gene flow has occurred from one end of the world to the other. This doesn't mean that an individual in Europe would have somehow interbred with an Australian Aborigine all those years ago. It does mean that an individual in Europe would have interbred with someone from a neighbouring region, and people from that neighbouring region would interbred with an individual from the next neighbouring region and so on all the way down to Australia. Humans have been screwing each other from ages past. Suck it down racists.

We can summarise this maxim as "there is greater variation within racial groups than between them".

Now going on to question 3. The answer to that is race is more socially defined than biology (even if we accept that race is biological, and its not). Where is the evidence? Lets consider these examples.

a. Under the Apartheid regime of South Africa Chinese people would be classified as "black" because the Apartheid regime only had 4 classifications - black, white, indian and coloured. Yet in say the US and Asia, Chinese people would be classified as yellow.

What this indicates is, that racial classifications vary between society. I can give other examples of varying racial classifications, like how under the US "one drop rule" mixed heritage individuals could be classified as black, whereas some other regions, say Latin America would have their own term for mixed heritage individuals, and a separate classification for black people.

Lets go onto to exhibit two.

b. Under the "one drop" rule, an individual could be 3/4 white and 1/4 black by ancestry but is classified as Black. Clearly the biology seems to play second fiddle to arbitrary definitions of race. In this case, social conventions outweighed the actual biology.

Now you can say that these social conventions are bullshit, but you cannot refute the fact that people classified race by these social conventions and still do. Don't believe me? How many people refer to Obama as the first black president, rather than first mixed heritage president or another white president (since he is half white). Clearly some people do follow these conventions.

Based on these facts I conclude
a. Race is not very strong biologically defined
b. Race is classified by social rules

Thus while race is partially biological construct, most of it is a social construct.

[mr friendly guy]

Well, I think nobody would deny that there are subtle genetic differences between ethnic groups (like African Americans are more susceptible to sickle cell anemia, etc.)

The problem with this argument is that we know Blacks are more likely to have sickle cell because the gene is more prevalent in the population. Its not because all black people have genes which make them vulnerable to a disease and it just so happens that some develop it and others don't.

A black person without the gene is just as unlikely as a white person to not have the disease (ie zero percent).

Going on, we say a person is a member of a particular racial group based on the individual. So consider the following.

This African person has the gene for sickle cell. So he is a Black person, has sickle cell. What about the other black person who doesn't have the gene. Does that make him no longer black? People would obviously say no. So using examples of genetic disease to defined race fails under their own criteria.

This is the same logic used when people say, look the pharmaceutical companies have developed drugs to treat heart disease which are more effective for black people, and more effective in white people.

[mr friendly guy]

These videos explain race very well. Beware he uses foul language so might not be work safe

[Zixinus]

To give another example of how arbitrary race can be, nationalists (thinking of Hungarian nationalists in particular) define race as from being from one country. Typical arguments will involve trying to somehow involve an "abnormally high" number of Olympic athlete medals, Nobel prize winners or whatever "for the country's population" to somehow hint a common genetic superioty.

The way this is actually done and the way you can get this to work with almost any industrialized country is simply claiming some people to be members of a nationality that the person themselves do not claim to be. Typically they can be second or third generation Americans or something.

This view (again, in my experience as a Hungarian) tries to create the idea that a nation's population is an isolated thing. In reality, this is only a recent perception with the 19th and 20th century history of public education that also forced teaching one national language. Before that, nobody really cared what nationality you were if you crossed the border if anyone cared at all. Throughout history and before nationalism, rulers actually organized and encouraged various peoples to move about so they would bring their skills at various crafts with them. But most people in Hungary wouldn't necessarily know because they eventually lost their original language they came with (and later on, changed their name for Hungarian pronunciation-spelling rules).

The idea, as often hinted by nationalists and somewhat by history books modified for them, that Hungarians are a direct descendent from an off-shot of Asian steppes is weird, because when I look at mongol (what Hungarians are supposed to be relatives with), I don't see people that resemble the ones I see every day around here.

Another example:
If you saw a person who had white skin, blond hair and blue eyes but his every other feature was typical to African-Americans, you would consider him a white person. I recall from a documentary that cancer (or some other condition) can actually cause you to have your skin change color somehow, as it happened in the case of a woman who had to carry around a certificate that she was white despite having black skin. Look up Darcel de Vlugt as an example of a woman unintentionally changing her skin color by a skin disease.

The idea of separation of people into black and white category is absurd when the difference is one that a rare skin condition or a more obscure disease can cross.

[Imperial Overlord]

The idea, as often hinted by nationalists and somewhat by history books modified for them, that Hungarians are a direct descendent from an off-shot of Asian steppes is weird, because when I look at mongol (what Hungarians are supposed to be relatives with), I don't see people that resemble the ones I see every day around here.

To nitpick the Hungarians have been traced back to the Urals region and you're related to other speakers of Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finns and Estonians) with a dose of Turkish and then mixed with everyone else who ended up living in Hungary or was there earlier. So not really Mongol (although there was the Mongol invasion so probably a little of that too), but gloriously mixed.

[Ultonius]

Under the Apartheid regime of South Africa Chinese people would be classified as "black" because the Apartheid regime only had 4 classifications - black, white, indian and coloured.

According to Wikipedia, Chinese South Africans were classified as 'Coloured' or 'Other Asian', until 1984, when they were granted the same 'honorary white' status as other East Asians such as Japanese and Koreans.

[SWPIGWANG]

But, the only thing that really matters with regard to racist ideology is the claim that non-whites have less intelligence on average than whites. This is pretty much the dogma of racist groups like stormfront or the KKK. They generally offer as evidence various cherry-picked historical or political comparisons, rather than scientific or biological evidence.

In some sense this is not important. If you want to design a immigration policy, or filter people in your social environment, simply measure the important trait directly. Give them an IQ test, or use proxies for IQ (completed education, visible mental speed, etc) to estimate. Other factors like future aggression and criminality can also be better estimated then with a crude tool like 'race', perhaps with help of family tree (50% heritability of most mental traits).

The problem is that such an thing is not allowed in some political contexts because it produces unequal results for different "races." IQ tests do show worst performance for Africans on average (have not seen much contradicting info despite obvious importance in debate this would be), and they on average are of lower socioeconomic class, life outcomes what not.

One needs correct for measurable traits (like IQ) and outcome and see if there is abnormal "race" factor on top of that. This is not commonly done and it is assumed that a selection of individuals known as "race" (or females, in that other movement) is a perfectly random sample of humanity that ought to have perfectly average traits in everything.

To the racialists, which is pretty much everyone on all part of the political spectrum, different outcomes demands a explanation independent of measurable traits: must be the white man keeping them down! We need affirmative action, blah blah blah. There is fixing things that reflects on measurable traits: improving health to improve IQ, fix broken cultures that is against education and have low parental investment, instead we have a bunch of ideas based on racism.

"Race" is not a social construct that is used only by "hostile racists" but everyone, including much of the "minorities" themselves. That is why black people riot when a "white cop shoots black teen", because they have adapted the idea and identity completely.
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"Race" is also a highly useful concept, that is why it is hard to discard. What racism really is, is just collecting info on the correlation between observed characteristics (skin color, bone structure, etc) with other information (average crime rate, average level of education, etc). If I am walking down the street, a black male youth will look more dangerous then a white grandma, and this so correct and so useful that this is built into the subconsciousness.

There is nothing "morally fair" about this discriminating behavior, it simply just works. There is nothing fundamental about it either as *insert group* may have skewed averages for traits due to random historical contingent, but doesn't change correctness of prediction.

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"Race" is not a very useful idea, if more discrimination information about individuals are available. The question is whether we can use it.

If big data with an array of tests can predict a criminal with good accuracy, what should be done with such info? If we are not allowed to collect/use it, people are going to have to sub in whatever mental tools they have to fill the gap, some of which is very imprecise like race.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that such an thing is not allowed in some political contexts because it produces unequal results for different "races." IQ tests do show worst performance for Africans on average (have not seen much contradicting info despite obvious importance in debate this would be), and they on average are of lower socioeconomic class, life outcomes what not.

One needs correct for measurable traits (like IQ) and outcome and see if there is abnormal "race" factor on top of that. This is not commonly done and it is assumed that a selection of individuals known as "race" (or females, in that other movement) is a perfectly random sample of humanity that ought to have perfectly average traits in everything.

Every study I know of that's been done indicates that the IQ gap is the product of the socioeconomic gap and the cultural status gap*, with a strong enough correlation that the socioeconomic gap swamps all other effects.

*I can explain this later.

To the racialists, which is pretty much everyone on all part of the political spectrum, different outcomes demands a explanation independent of measurable traits: must be the white man keeping them down! We need affirmative action, blah blah blah. There is fixing things that reflects on measurable traits: improving health to improve IQ, fix broken cultures that is against education and have low parental investment, instead we have a bunch of ideas based on racism.

Since it's an empirical, observable fact that whites keeping blacks down makes it much harder for those blacks to improve their socioeconomic status, and places them in a generally harassed and high-stress environment that is bad for the mental development of children...

Frankly, concentrating on racism IS fixing things that reflect on measurable traits. It is a cold hard reality that if you grow up in a society that methodically abuses you, everyone who looks like you, and your parents and everyone they grew up with... You just plain will not live up to the potential you'd have otherwise. Unless you are one of a very small number of people with truly inexhaustible drive.

"Race" is not a social construct that is used only by "hostile racists" but everyone, including much of the "minorities" themselves. That is why black people riot when a "white cop shoots black teen", because they have adapted the idea and identity completely.

Since other people who hold this idea are shooting them with real bullets, they are stuck with this idea and identity whether they like it or not. Blacks thinking "post-racially" doesn't do them a damn bit of good if whites don't do the same... and so far, whites in the US have not done so.

If being black can get you shot in situations where a white would just get yelled at, don't you think that is grounds for black protestors to take to the streets?

"Race" is also a highly useful concept, that is why it is hard to discard. What racism really is, is just collecting info on the correlation between observed characteristics (skin color, bone structure, etc) with other information (average crime rate, average level of education, etc). If I am walking down the street, a black male youth will look more dangerous then a white grandma, and this so correct and so useful that this is built into the subconsciousness.

On the contrary, that information contains a lot of crap and prejudicial things that have nothing to do with actual facts. It's pseudoscience.

In many cases, making NO judgment and NO decision in advance is better than making a judgment based on pseudoscience. This is one of them.

[SWPIGWANG]

In many cases, making NO judgment and NO decision in advance is better than making a judgment based on pseudoscience. This is one of them.

In real life, judgments and decisions have to be made, sometimes with insufficient information.

In any case, valid empirical observation is truth. All science is about taking observations seriously. Even in the absence of greater theory (biological or socioculture), correlates of visible characteristics with other traits stands alone and is useful. It is also natural and operates under the conscious.

If there is something wrong with race based discrimination is that it is not discriminating enough: we can do better now.
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The cause and effect of culture/status and IQ is not well separated. They are correlated, however it may very well be that IQ causes Socioeconomic status as opposed to SES generating IQ as there is no (validated) mechanism for this. Do remember that intelligence is also partially heritable.

Modern society is wealthy enough that everyone beyond the absolute SES floor of a developed country, can supply everything we know that produces healthy child development and fulfillment of biological potential. I don't think the human organism would become more stupid with a worst car and a smaller house.

Since it's an empirical, observable fact that whites keeping blacks down makes it much harder for those blacks to improve their socioeconomic status, and places them in a generally harassed and high-stress environment that is bad for the mental development of children.

This does not really work. The massive discrimination against the Jewish, the Japanese, and Chinese in early parts of the 20th century did not keep them down.

There is a easy escape from hostile outside pressure as well, it is forming a independent enclave and not assimilate into the mainstream culture. Everywhere where the blacks that did this, they have not succeeded and instead created pockets of poverty.

Take another group, atheists: there is few groups in America that is less trusted then this group, however this does not make them (or their children) of lower IQ or educational attainment. I don't think the culture mainstream have perfected mind control rays that can make out group people stupid just by waving their hands.

For a measurement construct like IQ, which is suppose to measure biological capabilities, it should not be effected by the environment in that anyways. Why would people be more stupid when not accepted by an out group? What is the mechanism and why would it have escaped observation up to this point? There have been a huge history of discrimination of different groups, however it doesn't show in IQ tests as you'd expect.

Blacks thinking "post-racially" doesn't do them a damn bit of good if whites don't do the same.

When you say "whites", as if it where a homogeneous group that can be treated as a whole, you are thinking in racialist terms.

Is it okay if some individual of a nonwhite race is prejudiced against another? If the protesters thinks that whites are the enemy, as opposed to the idea in individuals, then racialism just grows.

[Simon_Jester]

In many cases, making NO judgment and NO decision in advance is better than making a judgment based on pseudoscience. This is one of them.

In real life, judgments and decisions have to be made, sometimes with insufficient information.

Which is better, going to a doctor who bases his decisions on the theory of the four humours, or going to no doctor?

Quite often, the answer turns out to be "no doctor."

This is similar. If your theories are pseudoscientific and you base strong judgments on them, you can end up far, far more wrong than simply not making any judgments at all would.

It turns out that avoiding a random guy because he's black, when you would not avoid a random white guy of similar dress, mannerisms, and physique in the same situation... really isn't any kind of a necessary strategy for avoiding danger. Police busting black and only black people for petty offenses like "obstructing traffic" is not a necessary strategy for avoiding crime. Refusing to hire someone whose resume indicates a typically 'black' name (e.g. Tyrone Freeman) while hiring a person whose name suggests they are probably white and has the same content on their resume is not a necessary strategy for making sure you have competent, reliable employees.

So all I can say is that belief in race as a fundamental biological thing, as practiced by real humans, is a horrible, meaningless, farcical injustice.

In any case, valid empirical observation is truth. All science is about taking observations seriously. Even in the absence of greater theory (biological or socioculture), correlates of visible characteristics with other traits stands alone and is useful. It is also natural and operates under the conscious.

If there is something wrong with race based discrimination is that it is not discriminating enough: we can do better now.

Except that your observations are junk, and most of the people who show any interest whatsoever in your dream of efficient discrimination are the very ones most likely to cherrypick and discard data that doesn't support their racial prejudices.

The cause and effect of culture/status and IQ is not well separated. They are correlated, however it may very well be that IQ causes Socioeconomic status as opposed to SES generating IQ as there is no (validated) mechanism for this. Do remember that intelligence is also partially heritable.

There are numerous mechanisms by which socioeconomic status causes higher IQs. Children growing up in stable homes with financial security get better early-childhood educations, even before school begins.

This helps them in many ways- they can start out learning more advanced things, and they will learn them more rapidly and efficiently. They will be more able to concentrate on purely mental puzzles and vocabulary-building exercises, which gives them more practice in those areas, which in turn enhances IQ.

Take the child of two bona fide geniuses, and foster them out to an overworked single mother who is herself poorly educated because she is the daughter of an overworked single mother who was herself poorly educated because she grew up in a district where schools were segregated and the schools for her race got the short end of the stick.

I think you will find that this child knows a hell of a lot less at eighteen, and is far more likely to have neuroses, behavioral problems, and poor learning habits than they would have if they'd grown up in a stable upper middle class lifestyle.

Modern society is wealthy enough that everyone beyond the absolute SES floor of a developed country, can supply everything we know that produces healthy child development and fulfillment of biological potential. I don't think the human organism would become more stupid with a worst car and a smaller house.

What matters isn't the physical possessions. It's the ability to properly educate children and create an environment where that education is stable and consistent. But the modern poor are routinely expected or required to move unpredictably, work extremely long or odd hours, and otherwise behave in ways incompatible with good childrearing practice.

Physically, the children of the poor in America are basically healthy and fit. Mentally, they are often unfit, by the standards of the college-oriented, white-collar world of the American middle class. And yet there are masses of reasons for this to happen which have nothing to do with genetics.

Since it's an empirical, observable fact that whites keeping blacks down makes it much harder for those blacks to improve their socioeconomic status, and places them in a generally harassed and high-stress environment that is bad for the mental development of children.

This does not really work. The massive discrimination against the Jewish, the Japanese, and Chinese in early parts of the 20th century did not keep them down.

All those groups got their start as immigrant laborers in cities, not rural farmhands (or before that, as slaves). Moreover, they were not segregated by law into designated ghettoes in the US, not to anything like the same degree. This gave them more access to education and the opportunity to form more connections with mainstream (white) society.

All three groups started with far more legal opportunities to create businesses, accumulate wealth, and acquire educations for their children than any but a handful of African-American families. Nor did they ever experience the same intensity of legalized discrimination that blacks did- note that the KKK spent a lot more time lynching blacks for being 'too uppity' than they ever did to Japanese or Jews.

Thus, these ethnic groups are not a counterexample.

There is a easy escape from hostile outside pressure as well, it is forming a independent enclave and not assimilate into the mainstream culture. Everywhere where the blacks that did this, they have not succeeded and instead created pockets of poverty.

Blacks didn't "form" those enclaves; they were left in them. At first, whites literally wouldn't let blacks move into the same neighborhoods as themselves. Even after that ended, once a significant number of blacks moved into an area, nearly all the whites abruptly moved out, real estate values plummeted attracting poorer occupants, and more often than not the place turned into something akin to a slum.

This had nothing to do with blacks being genetically incompetent, and everything to do with whites believing that they were icky and scary.

Take another group, atheists: there is few groups in America that is less trusted then this group, however this does not make them (or their children) of lower IQ or educational attainment. I don't think the culture mainstream have perfected mind control rays that can make out group people stupid just by waving their hands.

Atheists in America have never actually been on the receiving end of anything like the level of discrimination blacks experience today, let alone in the past. The reason is simple. You can hide being an atheist when you walk down a street, you can fake being religious when your boss starts preaching to you. But just TRY walking into a job interview while black and pretending to be white. Go right ahead, I'll wait.

For a measurement construct like IQ, which is suppose to measure biological capabilities, it should not be effected by the environment in that anyways. Why would people be more stupid when not accepted by an out group? What is the mechanism and why would it have escaped observation up to this point? There have been a huge history of discrimination of different groups, however it doesn't show in IQ tests as you'd expect.

I already explained and addressed this. Create an environment where children grow up not only poor but unstable, where their parents and grandparents had limited access to education as a matter of state policy, and where stable middle-class jobs are a pipe dream and... yeah. They turn out a lot less educated. And believe it or not, IQ does not in any real sense measure innate capabilities, it measures acquired ones. It takes practice and exercise to hone one's problem-solving skills, formal instruction in logic to apply the rules of logic most effectively, and a stimulating environment with lots of learning opportunities to acquire knowledge. It takes people who speak fluently, frequently, and on a variety of subjects to build vocabulary and the ability to master complex sentences. And so it goes.

The net effect of all this is like subjecting people to footbinding, and then claiming they're genetically inferior because they never seem to win footraces. Sure, MAYBE there's a genetic component, but damned if you stand any chance of isolating it as long as you keep up the footbinding.

Blacks thinking "post-racially" doesn't do them a damn bit of good if whites don't do the same.

When you say "whites", as if it where a homogeneous group that can be treated as a whole, you are thinking in racialist terms.

Since whites are, empirically, the majority of Americans, I can just as well rephrase to say "blacks thinking 'post-racially' doesn't do them a damn bit of good if the majority of Americans don't do the same." Which presents the exact same problem. The only difference is that now I'm only naming the racial group you choose to blame for their own problems, not naming the one you prefer to hold blameless.

Is it okay if some individual of a nonwhite race is prejudiced against another? If the protesters thinks that whites are the enemy, as opposed to the idea in individuals, then racialism just grows.

Since all or nearly all the people shooting at them are white, and all the people condemning them for "overreacting" to what, as far as they know, is the shooting of an innocent young man, very possibly at the hands of a police department with a long history of abusing them...

Exactly how inhuman do you expect them to be, to ignore the fact that YES, this violence and oppression directed against them because of their black skins is in fact coming at them from people who don't have black skins?

[Channel72]

"Race" is also a highly useful concept, that is why it is hard to discard. What racism really is, is just collecting info on the correlation between observed characteristics (skin color, bone structure, etc) with other information (average crime rate, average level of education, etc). If I am walking down the street, a black male youth will look more dangerous then a white grandma, and this so correct and so useful that this is built into the subconsciousness.

Um... are you fucking serious? Race is really not useful at all for detecting potential danger. What about a young white skin-head with swastika tatoos versus an old black grandma?

I live in a pretty multi-racial area anyway - half the people I see on a daily basis are not white. Race tells me nothing about whether a person is potentially dangerous. Crime is correlated with socio-economic status, not race.

In general, race is a pretty fucking useless measure of "danger". Who would you rather meet in a dark alley at night? Tupac Shakur or Jeffrey Dahmer? (Hint: the answer is Tupac.)

[SWPIGWANG]

I live in a pretty multi-racial area anyway - half the people I see on a daily basis are not white. Race tells me nothing about whether a person is potentially dangerous. Crime is correlated with socio-economic status, not race.

It turns out that avoiding a random guy because he's black, when you would not avoid a random white guy of similar dress, mannerisms, and physique in the same situation... really isn't any kind of a necessary strategy for avoiding danger.

Socio-economic status is not as visible, or as hard to hide, as race. While using race alone, we get:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_c ... s#Homicide
A 8 fold increase over base whites.

In any case, there is few studies on correlations on dress/mannerism/physique and crime/whatever, while we have pretty good data on race/age/gender which is used as the first line in identification. Dress/mannerisms are also subject to fashion winds and not very stable, while other factors are.

Simply, Racism is the easy discriminating method that everyone knows already, and its usefulness means it lingers on.

-----
Of course, it is possible to make a comprehensive "how to spot a criminal" study (and how to spot good employee,etc), and the result may or may not find race as a useful predictive factor. Perhaps blacks are more likely to act ghetto culture that predicts crime, which entirely explains the correlation between blacks and crime and race can be factored out after spotting for ghetto culture. However it is also possible that "race" information helps generate a more accurate prediction in conjunction with all other factors.

Without this study having been done to show better tools for identification that matches the ease and power of race, race will live on.

So all I can say is that belief in race as a fundamental biological thing, as practiced by real humans, is a horrible, meaningless, farcical injustice.

As I said before, one does not need to believe in biology to make use of the race idea.

The desire to believe in race as a fundamental biological thing partially stems from people wanting to justify their discrimination because of correlations. Instead of thinking it as a result of convenience, they want to elevate it to righteousness.


----- Why biological theory of different "race" mean IQ --------

This helps them in many ways- they can start out learning more advanced things, and they will learn them more rapidly and efficiently. They will be more able to concentrate on purely mental puzzles and vocabulary-building exercises, which gives them more practice in those areas, which in turn enhances IQ.

Now, the home environment does have an important effect on IQ in childhood, however such effects fades over time from twin studies. The non-shared environment do remain a significant factor, however it is possible that this factor is just picking up noise and completely random factors that is not systematic (random bump on the head, random developmental differences, measurement error, etc).

Now, the environmental explanation for adult IQ is not impossible, however it seems implausible (given some set of background info). If we have strong studies showing racial attitudes of the area correlating strongly with minority IQ test results while factoring out parent IQ, then there is something to go on.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, however it is evidence for it. There are many studies that could have been ran to support the large array of environmental explanation supplied by theorists, however there appears to be none that is sufficiently strong to be a "default go to" as a counter argument.

Of course, I am not highly informed on the topic, however if such studies exist please do point me to them.


------ why white racism is overrated in effect --------

I think you will find that this child knows a hell of a lot less at eighteen, and is far more likely to have neuroses, behavioral problems, and poor learning habits than they would have if they'd grown up in a stable upper middle class lifestyle.

Physically, the children of the poor in America are basically healthy and fit. Mentally, they are often unfit, by the standards of the college-oriented, white-collar world of the American middle class. And yet there are masses of reasons for this to happen which have nothing to do with genetics.

I don't think this issue can be blamed on white racism. The black communities' internal dynamic is broken as intellectual pursuits is considered "acting white", criminals are considered high class and family formation ceases being the norm.

On these basis alone, one can discriminate. Anyone inside of "black" culture ought to be view not dissimilar to fundamentalist muslims, both have adapted a culture not matching with main stream values.

Thus, these ethnic groups are not a counterexample.

A mass group level comparison may be too crude. Perhaps a smaller demographics may help, for example tracking the progression of new African immigrants. Unless modern anti-african racism is worst then anti-asian/jewish racism a century ago, we ought to see similar progressions up the SES ladder if other assumptions of equality is correct.

Alternatively, discrimination in other countries that parallels different groups better can be studied.

If there is results from this line then we can talk about it.

Blacks didn't "form" those enclaves; they were left in them. At first, whites literally wouldn't let blacks move into the same neighborhoods as themselves. Even after that ended, once a significant number of blacks moved into an area, nearly all the whites abruptly moved out, real estate values plummeted attracting poorer occupants, and more often than not the place turned into something akin to a slum.

This had nothing to do with blacks being genetically incompetent, and everything to do with whites believing that they were icky and scary.

However what whites think should not matter when they are not present in any meaningful way. I mean if you ask ISIS, they'd call everywhere here evil infidels suitable for beheadings but it does not make us dumb or raise our crime rate.

If blacks are poor because of white oppression, then attracting poor blacks to an area would not lower its quality of residents: it merely means more blacks escape the oppression and can quickly progress productively with freedom.

Since all or nearly all the people shooting at them are white, and all the people condemning them for "overreacting" to what, as far as they know, is the shooting of an innocent young man, very possibly at the hands of a police department with a long history of abusing them... Exactly how inhuman do you expect them to be, to ignore the fact that YES, this violence and oppression directed against them because of their black skins is in fact coming at them from people who don't have black skins?

First of all, a black person is 8 times more likely to be a shooter per capita then whites, and the vast majority of blacks shot are by other blacks. The recent Ferguson shooting have all threat factors ticked: gender, age, race, size, possibly behavior, and the profiling successfully identified a criminal. I do not think the event was without cause even if it is not right or optimal.

I'm lazy, have a wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_c ... ion_theory

One theory is that racial overrepresentation is due to police discrimination. However, various studies have shown that, in recent decades, there has not been any noticeable disparity in black vs white crime statistics in black-controlled vs white-controlled cities (say Atlanta vs San Diego). In the largest counties, the rates of conviction for accused blacks was slightly less than the conviction rates for whites, for example.[80]

.....The varying results can be explained to a large degree by the methods being uncertain with many possible confounding factors. As such they propose a method that they argue will remove all such observable and unobservable problems. They looked at the arrest rates for assault, robbery, and rape cases where the victims reported a black and white co-offending pair. They argue that differences in arrest rates should only reflect police bias. They found that the black offenders were 3% more likely to be arrested. Although this suggests some bias, it is insufficient to explain the large racial crime disparities.[81]

[mr friendly guy]

Now, the home environment does have an important effect on IQ in childhood, however such effects fades over time from twin studies. The non-shared environment do remain a significant factor, however it is possible that this factor is just picking up noise and completely random factors that is not systematic (random bump on the head, random developmental differences, measurement error, etc).

Now, the environmental explanation for adult IQ is not impossible, however it seems implausible (given some set of background info). If we have strong studies showing racial attitudes of the area correlating strongly with minority IQ test results while factoring out parent IQ, then there is something to go on.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, however it is evidence for it. There are many studies that could have been ran to support the large array of environmental explanation supplied by theorists, however there appears to be none that is sufficiently strong to be a "default go to" as a counter argument.

Of course, I am not highly informed on the topic, however if such studies exist please do point me to them.

Examples of these twin studies. Please don't tell me its one of those by John Philippe Rushton.