The works of Jean Philippe Rushton & countering them

[Alyrium Denryle]

What is the point of redefining race? What does it accomplish? Racists like the one this thread is about don't use this concept of race, and indeed it would lead to vastly different conclusions about race than the ones we associate with race. Redefining a term so charged and with such a well cemented meaning in our culture is just asking for confusion and cross-talk. Why bother? We already have the term "ethnicity" to address groups which have a significant cultural identity and national history together.

Except ethnicity is not what applies in the case I was discussing. It is not cultural, the movement of genetic populations.

Race as it is currently used is not a real category. However, there are genetic population groups transcending ethnicity that ARE real, can be used to ask valid questions, and have explanatory power.

actually, come to think, an example a little closer to home for you Aly would be trying to keep around the old taxonomic system's terminology even while under the hood you were replacing it with cladistics. If one system is better than the traditional one, why keep around its baggage?

Actually, that is exactly what I am talking about. The existence of subspecies. Subspecies status has traditionally been assigned on the basis of things like color polymorphisms that are not real. See example below:





These two turtles are different subspecies of the same species. It is assigned based on a small set of polymorphisms. Both are paraphyletic. However, there are monophyletic clades within the species that can be used to ask real questions about the spread of this species over the course of its evolution. If subspecies status is to be assigned at all, it should be based on those monophyletic clades, and not some artificially constructed category.

[Formless]

Oh, god no. Alyrium, God No. Speaking of things that play into the hands of racists, implying that races are on any level equivalent to subspecies... fuck me, do you know anything about the history behind this subject? That's about the worst way to respond to my question you could have come up with.

Here's a hint. Humans are one of the least genetically diverse animals on the planet, you probably know that. Subspecies usually appear where there is legitimate selection pressures against interbreeding; humans are just geographically spread out (a lot). You would be unintentionally conceding one of the most loathsome ideas racists have ever come up with. Not a good idea.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Oh, god no. Alyrium, God No. Speaking of things that play into the hands of racists, implying that races are on any level equivalent to subspecies... fuck me, do you know anything about the history behind this subject? That's about the worst way to respond to my question you could have come up with.

Oh for fuck's sake. You start talking to me about animal taxonomy and you did not expect me to bring up the contemporary issue of subspecies and argue by analogy. Yes. The taxonomic problem of subspecies is EXACTLY the same as that of "Race". I am also not arguing with racists here. So, I am forced to wonder if you are obtuse enough to miss my point, or being deliberately dishonest.

Subspecies usually appear where there is legitimate selection pressures against interbreeding

No. Not really. Drift and isolation will do it. Oh... wait... exactly what happened with human populations.

Subspecies are not necessarily something on their way to becoming a species. Or did you not read my post? Did you not bother to look up what paraphyly is? Monophyly? How subspecies too are artificial groups?

[Alyrium Denryle]

Further note:

I am not arguing semantics. I dont give a shit what term we use to describe groups of humans, so long as those groups are real and not arbitrarily imagined. I dont care if we call them races, subspecies, patrilines, clades. None of that matters so long as they fall out into monophyletic clades. As far as the genetics are concerned, when you do that... racists have no room to wiggle, because they belong to 1 group that descended from a group of people who are not them. White racists are descended from people from the middle east. Their evolutionary siblings live in India, and migrated to europe as Gypsies. Many of them are descendants of Ghengis Khan and have significant contributions into their gene pool from the Huns as well.

The "purity" of every race currently defined is utterly destroyed, and replaced my a rich tapestry of human evolution and genetic interchange. Instead, we find new groups exist. Groups of people who for geographic reasons were isolated from some groups, or interbred with other groups to create new ones. Groups of people who are now genetically defined by that intermingling.

[Formless]

Oh for fuck's sake. You start talking to me about animal taxonomy and you did not expect me to bring up the contemporary issue of subspecies and argue by analogy. Yes. The taxonomic problem of subspecies is EXACTLY the same as that of "Race". I am also not arguing with racists here. So, I am forced to wonder if you are obtuse enough to miss my point, or being deliberately dishonest.

The one missing the point here is you. "Race as subspecies" IS a racist idea, you ignoramus. Its a classic one, one of the textbook excuses for every racist stereotype about Africans being barely above animals ever concocted. THIS is the baggage I was talking about when I said redefining "race" as something more useful is a pointless endeavor that is only going to lead to cultural crosstalk. The word has been around for over a century, so this isn't merely me arguing for political correctness. This is about social/biological scientists being more careful in the future so as to not encourage a poisonous and false belief system.

No. Not really. Drift and isolation will do it. Oh... wait... exactly what happened with human populations.

Subspecies are not necessarily something on their way to becoming a species. Or did you not read my post? Did you not bother to look up what paraphyly is? Monophyly? How subspecies too are artificial groups?

I did. All your post proves is that biologists have been terrible about properly identifying subspecies (to take a page out of your own playbook). I know what the idea is, and I know about genetic drift. I also know that when there are no geographic barriers and the population is contiguous (like most of humanity, especially in the present day), subspecies tend to go away. Unless, of course, there is selection pressures keeping them around.





Me bringing up taxonomy was not an invitation to make a parody of yourself, Aly. It was supposed to demonstrate that terminology attached to stupid concepts need to be cycled out with the stupid concepts. If you have a better word for this, by all means, use one. Invent one. But holy fuck, don't lose track of what makes racial theory idiotic and vile just because I've mentioned your pet subject.

[Formless]

Further note:

I am not arguing semantics. I dont give a shit what term we use to describe groups of humans, so long as those groups are real and not arbitrarily imagined. I dont care if we call them races, subspecies, patrilines, clades. None of that matters so long as they fall out into monophyletic clades. As far as the genetics are concerned, when you do that... racists have no room to wiggle, because they belong to 1 group that descended from a group of people who are not them. White racists are descended from people from the middle east. Their evolutionary siblings live in India, and migrated to europe as Gypsies. Many of them are descendants of Ghengis Khan and have significant contributions into their gene pool from the Huns as well.

The "purity" of every race currently defined is utterly destroyed, and replaced my a rich tapestry of human evolution and genetic interchange. Instead, we find new groups exist. Groups of people who for geographic reasons were isolated from some groups, or interbred with other groups to create new ones. Groups of people who are now genetically defined by that intermingling.

That's funny, because its one more reason to dissociate this concept of yours from race. Please, keep making my point for me.

[Alyrium Denryle]

The one missing the point here is you. "Race as subspecies" IS a racist idea, you ignoramus.

I did not say they were. I said the taxonomic problem is the same. Hell, it is the same problem of naming ANY biological group--even species for that matter. There are advantages to putting things into nested categories, the problem is figuring out which node in the tree you want to call what. Once you do that though, it makes talking about it a lot easier. Just because we have until recently had problems assigning things into the right genera does not mean we scrap the genus.

The groups are real, even if the categories we use now are not. We can change the name, and make those definitions perfect, and it wont stop racists. We can strip away all the historical baggage of the word "race" and make it very clear in the scientific literature that these are just groups of people moving through space and time. It wont stop them. They will just stop being called racists and will instead be called Patrilinists or whatever.

[Formless]

The groups are real,

But are they meaningful? You can keep dividing groups into smaller and smaller categories until you eventually arrive at the individual organism/person, but the smaller the group the more futile the endeavor. At least in cladistics you have to find an adaptation that all sub-groups share. I seriously doubt you can do that with humanity's various "races".

The groups are real, even if the categories we use now are not. We can change the name, and make those definitions perfect, and it wont stop racists. We can strip away all the historical baggage of the word "race" and make it very clear in the scientific literature that these are just groups of people moving through space and time. It wont stop them. They will just stop being called racists and will instead be called Patrilinists or whatever.

True, but one of those truths everyone knows. Racism is just one of those phenomena where you have to wait for its adherents to die out while educating their kids. Kinda like fundamentalism.

[Alyrium Denryle]

But are they meaningful? You can keep dividing groups into smaller and smaller categories until you eventually arrive at the individual organism/person, but the smaller the group the more futile the endeavor. At least in cladistics you have to find an adaptation that all sub-groups share. I seriously doubt you can do that with humanity's various "races".

Kinda. Yes for larger levels of organization, but at species level or "lower" it is on the basis of genetic characters. On the other hand, once you reduce it down to nucleotide sequences... there is nothing out there that a racist can point to and say "I am special". They will still be racists, but they wont be able to make arguments like "I have an adenine instead of guanine at basepair 65 on cytochrome oxidase III" and be able to convince anyone.

[mr friendly guy]

Bullshit. The fact that racial categorizations are imprecise, fluid, or whatever else you want to call them does not mean that ethnic distinctions are a purely social construct. It just means that we don't define them well.

Rushton seems to use the terms White, black and Mongoloid to describe the races. He occasionally uses other terms if he quoting someone elses study, for example East Asians (to describe Chinese and Japanese). Since he is using the same imprecise terms (the same terms everyone else uses when using the word race as opposed to ethnicity) then he leaves himself vulnerable to that attack.

If races are more social constructs than biological ones (once again to reiterate biology does play a part, just less so than cultural), then his whole biological basis for blacks doing worse than whites and Asians in IQ tests starts resting on shaky ground. Its even worse when things like the Flynn effect suggests environmental causes rather biological ones for the difference in IQ scores.

[Bakustra]

PS: The point is not that it's stupid, but that racial definitions are so fluid as to change massively within the course of a lifetime, and this can happen because they are socially defined.

Again, you harp on the problem of poor definition. Your problem is that you are too fucking stupid to realize that while popular notions of race like "the white race" are nonsense, that doesn't mean that there are no historically isolated-breeding ethnic groups. Such groupings are real. They are not a mere social invention. They are as real as any isolated-breeding animal population that a biologist would study in the wild. You're focusing on words ("race" vs "ethnicity") which just makes you look like your bailiwick is rhetoric rather than facts.

So if the entire colloquial definition of race is socially defined, as you implicitly admit without the dangers of admitting that you might be wrong, then why should we use "race" as a term to define these so-called "isolated-breeding" ethnic groups? That would seem to invite nothing but confusion, and certainly no credible geneticist, anthropologist, or sociologist uses race in the way you are. So what does it profit to call Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Uighur, Mongolian, Miao-Yao, Tibetan, Manchu, Yakut, Kazakh, and all the profusion of ethnic groups in just one corner of the globe "races", apart from some ill-defined attempt to declare that the entire field of sociology is full of complete idiots, which would be an extraordinary claim requiring some particularly extraordinary evidence.

[Big Triece]

Interesting meet England's smartest family.

[mr friendly guy]

Rushton will just say that exceptions does not refute the general trend. In his debate with Suzuki he admitted if you score high in IQ regardless of your race, you will do well in school.