Comments on: Human Races May Have Biological Meaning, But Races Mean Nothing About Humanity

By: Tanya McPositron

Tanya McPositron — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:28:51 +0000

@Jorient, et al:

I hold my Dunning-Kruger Effect dear! Sometimes, being science-y is better than being a scientist–no? I always say that I am just dumb enough to see things clearly.

For example, I have this theory (hypothesis?) that Dunning-Kruger resides on (in?) the same gene that codes for optimism, OXTR…

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-life-scientists-discover-215259.aspx

Just wait and see. Betcha I’m right.

(I usually am)

By: Jorient

Jorient — Sat, 19 May 2012 16:55:49 +0000

Comment to AndrewV

@17 AndrewV says that Nathan and I suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect. That may be true, but isn’t that the classic liberal argument…attacking the individuals rather than what they say? Doesn’t that shut down the dialogue and therefore allow the attacker to win by default? The problem is that to discuss major issues such as evolution and races can’t be done in an article or one liners, or by redefining words. It takes years of careful study and at least a long discussion. Sorry I didn’t take the time to do that. I have only studied evolution for forty years. Guess I will just have to start over.

By: Geack

Geack — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:28:37 +0000

@ 11. Paardestaart:
“If only scientists had been more responsible and courageous…” What are you talking about? Scientists have had depressingly little impact on social behavior. They are certainly not the source for racism and all the other group hatreds people have cherished over the millenia. We have generally treated biological theories the same way we treat religious texts – ranting about whichever parts support our collective prejudices at a given point in time and ignoring the rest. I supposed one might mourn the fact that science hasn’t magically cured all humanity’s inherent flaws, but to blame science for those flaws is simply nonsense.

By: Jason Antrosio

Jason Antrosio — Mon, 07 May 2012 18:22:26 +0000

Hi Nora,
I would agree that this is an important consideration. A close look at the genetic-cluster plot above reveals these are sampled from populations that would be considered native to Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Americas are obviously not included. But as you point out, in the last 500 years, these populations have almost all been reshuffled and moved around. Interestingly, the place where the idea of race emerges and is held most firmly in place are the colonial places: the Americas and South Africa. Those are also the places where–I suspect–one would most likely get a smear across the canvass if contemporary populations were plotted. We can talk about admixture fractions from ancestral populations, but that also involves interpretive and sampling exercises as Razib’s post on Finding Fake Roots clarifies.

By: Hypothetical questions are always scary « S.J. Esposito's Weblog

Hypothetical questions are always scary « S.J. Esposito's Weblog — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:29:42 +0000

[...] lately. The issue has been talked about enough that certain blogs were written with even a more general audience in mind–or it certainly seems that way–and I’ll admit: a decent portion of my own [...]

By: Nora

Nora — Sat, 05 May 2012 09:07:45 +0000

As a Political Scientist (I apoligize in advance for not doing ‘real’ science), studying in South Africa, I naturally have some serious personal reservations about using the word ‘race’ to define anybody. A ‘neutral’ scientifically-rooted definition is, and has been, easily misused. We cannot discard this as another person’s problem in any discussion on race.

That being said, I have a question about the scientific definition of race, or ‘substructure’. If we take the concept of different races in science as a given, where do totally mixed population fall?

The Masai (who dont just live in Kenya but all over East Africa) are relatively homogenous so they make a favourite example of ‘African populations’. In contrast, in South Africa, we have a large population of ‘Coloureds’ (NOT in the American sense) who are descendents of important Malaysian slaves, the local populations, White settlers and whoever else was around. Now, under apartheid they were defined as a race based on a common language, culture etc.

My question is, in this globalised word, using the Coloureds as an example, how can any population which has so many different ancestors and genetic variations be defined as a race, even scientifically? Who do they share common undertones with? Where can science begin to classify races when humans have aleays reproduced across all races?

By: AndrewV

AndrewV — Sat, 05 May 2012 08:56:14 +0000

@13 Jorient Here is a clue for you. The author of the paper is a secular conservative.

@14 Nathan you and Jorient also appear to be a great examples of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:30:04 +0000

“In the year 1900, one out of three human beings alive was of European extraction”
That’s surprising, I thought China + India (which encompassed a lot more territory then) would match them. Through Unz.org I was led to Lothrop Stoddard’s famous book and he starts by noting that whites had political control over most of the earth’s territory, but were still a minority of the total population.

NMObserver, just because 100 random people will have a lot of variation within-group does not mean there will be “no correlation” between group-membership and other traits. For example, we know that a great many people of african descent speak english (a language associated with whites/europeans). But if Swahili is almost a 100% predictor of African descent, then we can say that African ancestry is correlated with speaking Swahili (even if it’s a minority language among our random 100).

By: Richard Dawkins accepts the usefulness of race | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine

Fri, 04 May 2012 23:14:25 +0000

[...] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/05/02/human-races-may-have-biological-meaning-but-races-… [...]

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:14:12 +0000

1st Assertion rebuttal rebuttal: The assertion is using the the colloquial version of the word race, and in that sense it is correct. Nobody refers to ‘Western Eurasian” as a race. And while we’re on the topic, the phylogeny described is not equivalent to the biological definition of race. Eye color in particular doesn’t even fit that division…Fail.

2nd Assertion rebuttal rebuttal: Humans are all mammals. Well mostly, our species also bred with apes in it’s extant past…Do you see the failure in logic there? We are all still African, but we’re also partially neanderthal, and denisovan, and any other ‘extinct’ archaic human you want to add in pending evidence of interbreeding. Fail.

3rd Assertion rebuttal rebuttal: None of the differences listed are major. It’s almost as if you thought the assertion was; ‘there hasn’t been enough time for any new mutations to spread throughout the population’ because that’s the only assertion you managed to refute. Nice strawman. Since we came ‘out of africa’, which is the actual timeframe for us to gain races not enough time has passed. Our species population only got large enough, and geographical divided enough for it to be a possibility since then, because, in case you forgot, you need divergent populations. Populations, plural. Got it? Fail.

4th Assertion rebuttal rebuttal: Again, you’ve misunderstood the use of the word race. Not only do humans not fit the definition of biological race, making any statement to the contrary a reference to myth, but the colloquial sense itself is based upon myths and is itself one. Yes humans evolved, and are still evolving, and yet we have no races still. Fail.