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From a site called Orgtheory:
race, genetics, and the lure of forbidden knowledge (guest post by ann morning)
Ann Morning is an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her book, The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference , was published by the University of California Press.
Recently geneticist David Reich published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race.’” In it he contends that “differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real”—and what’s more, that “as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races.’”
The invocation of his status as a natural scientist, the insistence on what is “real,” and the astonishing suggestion that race has been overlooked until now—I’ve seen it all before. Reich is using a rhetorical device that sociologist Reanne Frank has called the “forbidden knowledge” thesis, where academics who identify themselves with “science” (and are usually, though not always, male, white biological scientists) contend that anyone who questions the biological foundations of racial groupings is denying reality, or “sticking their heads in the sand” as Reich puts it. …
The problem in the geneticists’ arguments (science journalist Wade’s are of a whole other magnitude of weakness) is that basically they confuse “population” with “race.” They are absolutely correct when they talk about average differences between populations in terms of the frequency of particular genetic traits. They illustrate this with examples like the Andaman Islanders (in LeRoi 2005) or Northern Europeans or West Africans (in Reich 2018). The trouble is, none of these groups are considered “races” (or have been at least since the 1920’s). “Races” are huge groups spanning entire continents and thus remarkably varied ecological environments. “Races,” as described by Linnaeus in the 1700’s or on the U.S. census of 2010, group Koreans, Mongolians, Sri Lankans and Pakistanis together (as the “Asian” race); they group Moroccans, Norwegians, and Greeks together as another (the “white” race). Groupings like these, billions of people strong and traditionally inhabiting highly variable geographic terrains, just don’t demonstrate homogenous genetic characteristics that distinguish them, even if average differences can be calculated between them.
As I point out in my review in Taki’s Magazine, Reich writes in “Who We Are …”:
Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as “Caucasoids” to differentiate them from East Asian “Mongoloids,” sub-Saharan African “Negroids,” and “Australoids” of Australia and New Guinea…. [P]opulations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia….
Morning goes on ….
That is why the statistics that Reich or others present are actually not about races; they are about much smaller-scale, local populations (including African Americans, an ethnic group that is hardly representative of the global “black” race).
Well, no, not always. As I quoted above, sometimes he gives statistics for very large scale races.
… So we are left with the question of why he is adamant that average genetic differences between races not be “ignored,” when he himself doesn’t seem to attend much to them.
It comes as no surprise though that “race” can’t do much work for him; the idea that race can help us characterize or understand human genetic variation in any serious way is laughable. Race is basically a very simple, 4-part color wheel assigning all 7.6 billion of us to a “black,” “white,” “yellow” or “red” category. Can anyone credibly claim that a taxonomy grounded in the humoral theory of Antiquity—remember the red blood, black bile, yellow bile, and white phlegm that the ancients believed determined our health and temperaments?—is a useful tool for analyzing genetic diversity at the start of the 21st century? That with the insights made possible by ever more sophisticated biological and statistical theory, growing DNA databanks, and formidable computing power, Linnaeus’ color scheme is the best we can do?
Reich implies above that the 18th Century scientists who first thought hard about these questions more or less got them right.
… As far as I can tell, the only advantage to dredging up the “race” notion is to be provocative and garner attention (especially if, like Reich, you have a new book to flog). …
Maybe it has something to do with how obsessed the federal government is with race?
Barack Obama was president of the United States for eight years. Did he order the Census Bureau to stop ask questions about the obsolete concept of race?
Is this the best the sociologists can do? This is an astonishingly weak rebuttal of Reich’s work. So if we just start saying “populations” instead of “races” we’ll be ok?
> There’s nothing new here except the well-known observation that human biological traits vary around the world in tandem with geographical location.
So they admit it? Isn’t this the thing they spent the last 60 years telling us wasn’t true? If Stephen Jay Gould were alive right now he’d be spinning in his grave.
Hey, it worked for Cavalli-Sforza.
He's spent forty years speaking of race without knowing it!
'The secret of my longevity has been in avoiding using a certain word.'
I wonder if the coming battle over HBD as a result of recent advances in genetic analysis is just another example of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures hypothesis, that progress is often not possible because of a complete disconnect between people educated in the humanities and people with a science education.
Of course, for this to be true, it is necessary to view sociology, the softest of the soft sciences, as a humanities subject instead, since is so now so beholden to cultural, emotive imperatives. But Lord Snow would probably have viewed it that way anyway, since what he had in mind were hard science technocrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Right I never understood how progressives could simultaneously disavow and obsess over race. The people who are the most adamant that race is a meaningless social construct seem also to be among the most obsessed with assigning us to the very same racial categories that they themselves had disavowed only minutes earlier!
It’s truly uh doublethink at its finest…
Would anybody who truly understands human variation lump Pakistanis with Koreans?
Dunno. I always thought that races could be scaled up or down….
So everything is kosher if we use “population” instead of “race?”
Really? I’ve got some anthropology books from the ’50s that divide the world into dozens of separate races……
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, he has a psychiatrist character work out that the four humours theory she mocks was essentially correct too. P. 216 of the mass market paperback — just go there to Amazon, click “Look Inside”, and search for “humours” and it’ll come right up.
No, this is false. You can read the 2010 Census race questions. The questionnaire distinguishes between Koreans, Chinese, and Asian Indians.
Saying “suggestion that race has been overlooked until now” is also wrong. No one suggested that.
I keep trying to tell you suburban types that White preppies invented baggy pants hanging down around your ass in the eighties (and thus YT would be collecting royalties from Blacks), a-but no-o-o-o. This was when every Black kid was wearing tight pants to look like Michael Jackson.
*cough*dog breeds*cough*
I bet if we looked up various definitions of “race” we’d have a hard time finding “(must be) huge groups spanning entire continents” anywhere.
A “race” is a population somewhere along in the process of speciation; we all know how many such groups there must have been, over time, in places like the Amazon Forest…
On the other hand, when you do find a handful of races blanketing the planet, they suddenly become a very important subject of study. Hence anthropologists’ desperate attempts to prevent them being studied.
P.S., “Morning” doesn’t sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*
Nee Morgen
It’s a meaningful social construct because deplorables and invisible White Supremacy. Until YT has been smashed, leftists must reluctantly care about race!
Another way to say it is that racial disparities demand leftists champion the victims, because assumption of human equality.
> There’s nothing new here except the well-known observation that human biological traits vary around the world in tandem with geographical location.
So they admit it? Isn't this the thing they spent the last 60 years telling us wasn't true? If Stephen Jay Gould were alive right now he'd be spinning in his grave.Replies: @G Pinfold, @Nicholas Stix
Indeed. Such a weak rebuttal that Morning needs Watsoning.
This argument doesn’t make any sense.
If splitting populations into large categories and calling them ‘races’ is bad, wouldn’t dividing them up into many smaller groups (like Luigi Cavalli Sforza’s list of at least 2000 ethnic groups) be considered worse, since it would open up the possibilities for even more potential stereotyping?
Well, if she can call it a ‘rhetorical device’ then I suppose it can’t be true
aka man splaining according to these two unmarried female sociologists. But “rhetorical device” resonates better in the post modern bullshit sphere.
A pretend scientist quotes another pretend scientist to argue that a real scientist is wrong in his own speciality.
Well, I’m convinced.
But professional, academic, salaried sociologists are so busy applying their expertise in so many areas, that it may be hard for Dr. Morning to find the time to rescue Reich. Perhaps she could assign one of her undergraduate students to this task.
I bet if we looked up various definitions of "race" we'd have a hard time finding "(must be) huge groups spanning entire continents" anywhere.
A "race" is a population somewhere along in the process of speciation; we all know how many such groups there must have been, over time, in places like the Amazon Forest...
On the other hand, when you do find a handful of races blanketing the planet, they suddenly become a very important subject of study. Hence anthropologists' desperate attempts to prevent them being studied.
P.S., "Morning" doesn't sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*Replies: @backup, @Seamus Padraig, @MEH 0910, @Anon
I would say anything that does not (yet) warrant the biological term “subspecies”.
I’d love to see a Youtube channel Cinema Sins-style review of race-denial, something like “Everything Wrong With Left-wing Anti-white Race-denial.”
https://twitter.com/bo_mcjangles/status/979170043509592068
Reich implies above that the 18th Century scientists who first thought hard about these questions more or less got them right.
This was what struck me about the Reich article. Races developed within continental divides, and as we dig into this further, sub-races–ethnicities–developed within creeds and local geography, and “ancestry” is a useful term. Science is validating common sense observation, and that is not okay!
We already had this exchange already on this matter. You think you would learn. Race is linked to biology; ethnicity is linked to culture. Race is a biological and social construct. Ethnicity is a social construct. Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices.
Certainly, race and ethnicity overlap, but they are distinct. For example, a Japanese-American could probably consider himself a member of the Asian race, but, if he does not engage in any of the practices or customs of his ancestors, he might not necessarily identify with the ethnicity, but rather consider himself to be American. Of course, American is not a “race”, it is a conglomeration of distinct ethnic groups all rolled into one, with a common cultural bond. Scandanavians, which are from the white race, are descendants from several distinct (North) Germanic tribes. Through intermarriage, they developed a unique set of customs that incorporated Old Norse traditions.
So, in a nutshell, race refers to a group of people who possess similar and distinct physical characteristics, while ethnicity refers to a a category of people who regard themselves to be different from other groups based on common ancestral, cultural, national, and social experience.
As far as sub-races are in essence "ethnicities", that is YOUR sophistry.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
Infrickincredible! What’s most troubling about this is 1) the species of ad hominem argument against Reich (“white male”) and 2) the post-modern dismissal of objective reality. Is someone still stupid enough to pay sociologists? If so, could Morning’s employers argue she is denying their “accounting foundations” when she sees a zero in her pay statement and they say it’s actually a gazillion dollars? These idiots can’t see the slippery slope of their own reasoning.
I bet if we looked up various definitions of "race" we'd have a hard time finding "(must be) huge groups spanning entire continents" anywhere.
A "race" is a population somewhere along in the process of speciation; we all know how many such groups there must have been, over time, in places like the Amazon Forest...
On the other hand, when you do find a handful of races blanketing the planet, they suddenly become a very important subject of study. Hence anthropologists' desperate attempts to prevent them being studied.
P.S., "Morning" doesn't sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*Replies: @backup, @Seamus Padraig, @MEH 0910, @Anon
Are you thinking of those really billowing baggy suits that David Byrne used to wear back then?
Sociology today is not a serious academic discipline, either in the context of social science or humanities. It is not an objective body of knowledge nor does it utilize any objective standards.
The entire field is staffed with freaks, lesbians, queers, and leftist women whose sole agenda is pushing the Cultural Marxist agenda.
Unfortunately, there is a a LOT of sociology taught in universities today. Often, sociology classes are required. Young women in particular seem to register for these classes in droves.
I bet if we looked up various definitions of "race" we'd have a hard time finding "(must be) huge groups spanning entire continents" anywhere.
A "race" is a population somewhere along in the process of speciation; we all know how many such groups there must have been, over time, in places like the Amazon Forest...
On the other hand, when you do find a handful of races blanketing the planet, they suddenly become a very important subject of study. Hence anthropologists' desperate attempts to prevent them being studied.
P.S., "Morning" doesn't sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*Replies: @backup, @Seamus Padraig, @MEH 0910, @Anon
https://www.nyu.edu/alumni.magazine/issue14/14_square_whatcolor.html
“That is why the statistics that Reich or others present are actually not about races; they are about much smaller-scale, local populations ”
This demolishes racial,solidarity but replaces it with something horribly WORSE — it sounds like a justification for a finely-differentiated CASTE system!
https://www.nyu.edu/alumni.magazine/issue14/14_square_whatcolor.html
Bill the Blizzard:
If people were serious about identifying population genetic structures, they’d take the full-genome databases being compiled at institutions like Harvard and use them as a corpus in an incremental prize for lossless compression.
If people were serious about identifying social causality structures, they’d take the wide range of time-series social measures that have been, for 100 years, compiled at institutions like Harvard and use them as a corpus in an incremental prize for lossless compression.
If people were serious about getting to the bottom of the contributions of population genetic structures to social causality structures, they’d combine the two into a single corpus in an incremental prize for lossless compression.
But they aren’t serious. They want to yammer.
https://www.hectorzenil.net/index.html
One year before passing away, Marvin, Minsky, a founding father of the field of Artificial Intelligence, made an astonishing claim describing what turns out to be exactly my research aim and purpose in a closing statement at a prime venue (see video on the right):
It seems to me that the most important discovery since Gödel was the discovery by Chaitin, Solomonoff and Kolmogorov of the concept called Algorithmic Probability which is a fundamental new theory of how to make predictions given a collection of experiences and this is a beautiful theory, everybody should learn it, but it’s got one problem, that is, that you cannot actually calculate what this theory predicts because it is too hard, it requires an infinite amount of work. However, it should be possible to make practical approximations to the Chaitin, Kolmogorov, Solomonoff theory that would make better predictions than anything we have today. Everybody should learn all about that and spend the rest of their lives working on it.
Marvin Minsky
Panel discussion on The Limits of Understanding
World Science Festival
NYC, Dec 14, 2014
“O’Brien held up a picture of Lawrence Fishburne. “Is he black or is he White, Winston?” “I, I don’t know.” Replied Winston. “Good, you are learning.” Said O’Brien.”
“Turquoise and navy blue are very different colors that have different wavelengths but are both classified as blue. Therefore, there is no difference between blue and yellow. And blue and yellow are both social constructs anyways, what are you a colorist?”
“Mount Olympus and Mount Everest are two vastly different mountains in terms of size, width, and height. But both are classified as mountains despite millions of cubic meters of difference. Therefore, there is no difference between Hamburger Hill in Vietnam and Mount Everest. Hills and mountains are social constructs. One culture’s hill is another culture’s mountain…”
Well, I'm convinced.Replies: @ic1000
I look forward to Prof. Morning explaining Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to Reich. That would do more than anything else to teach him the errors of his fallacious speculations.
But professional, academic, salaried sociologists are so busy applying their expertise in so many areas, that it may be hard for Dr. Morning to find the time to rescue Reich. Perhaps she could assign one of her undergraduate students to this task.
The significance of races — not just the Caucasoid race, but all races — has only been reinforced with Reich’s studies.
It wasn’t a priori obvious, or even expected, I think, that (mostly) continental races would be so homogeneous genetically. If separate peoples came about because a settler group entered an area otherwise uninhabited, and stayed there until modern day, or if displacements were relatively rare events, then we would expect significant genetic differences to arise.
But Reich’s data shows that that almost never happened. The story of the human expansion across the globe is one of relentless displacement (that is, elimination of previous peoples), and “merger” (that is, conquered women being taken as concubines). This appears to be true in the case of all races. Reich’s account of the Caucasoid race would seem to apply to all five standard races. In a sense, this should not be surprising: it is, on Reich’s evidence, obviously a human trait to conquer adjacent peoples.
It appears that the only impediment to such impulses to conquer are insuperable natural barriers, such as the oceans, the Sahara Desert, and the Himalayas. That’s why races are delimited as they are.
Reich tries to spin this story into one in which we are all descended from recent mergers, etc., but the real story is how much more homogeneous race is than we might have previously thought. Continental races explain a lot more than we might have otherwise thought.
It has always struck me as a puzzle that different peoples within races didn’t exhibit greater differences than they do, such as on IQ, given what I thought might be their deep history of genetic separation.
But Reich’s account underpins a good explanation of those similarities within races.
The Left loves low-syllable count arrows in its quiver, like “racist” or “sexist”, but they hate, hate, hate even lower-syllable count arrows in the Rights’s quiver, like “race” and “sex.”
Chartreuse exists; therefore, green does not. Navy exists; therefore, blue does not. Some bureaucrat misclassified an orange as an apple; therefore, fruit varieties don’t exist. How do you even parody this?
Entry #367 in the “Watch me engage in abstruse metaphysical hair-splitting, despite never having heard of the Problem of Universals” archive. You could easily substitute “dog breed” for “race” in most of these articles, and the incompetence would be obvious.
Have you ever noticed that people like Morning are the ones usually espousing the most simplistic notions of race? I don’t think they actually believe things like that (e.g. the four color idea), but it does make it hard to stomach their strawmen.
Check out biological anthropologist Jonathan M. Marks and his latest blog post (and don’t miss the archives):
http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com
Foul-mouthed ad hominems are his specialty.
This video gives more insight into his style:
I bet if we looked up various definitions of "race" we'd have a hard time finding "(must be) huge groups spanning entire continents" anywhere.
A "race" is a population somewhere along in the process of speciation; we all know how many such groups there must have been, over time, in places like the Amazon Forest...
On the other hand, when you do find a handful of races blanketing the planet, they suddenly become a very important subject of study. Hence anthropologists' desperate attempts to prevent them being studied.
P.S., "Morning" doesn't sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*Replies: @backup, @Seamus Padraig, @MEH 0910, @Anon
“Morning” doesn’t sound like a particularly Jewish surname. *Fingers crossed*
Nee Morgen
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this rebuttal is that it does not even attempt to address this geneticist’s claims of fact: that the distribution of gene frequency in populations do indeed result in divisions broad enough and large enough to be reasonably equated with the usual idea of “race”, that race is as real as continents.
Sociologist (soft “science”) vs. geneticist (a subset of biology which is “hard” science). Bet on the geneticist. My prob with “The Bell Curve”, which was otherwise very interesting and thought-provoking, was that it was strong on so-called “experimental psychology” (another soft science) and weak on genetics.
Only in sociology would you see the term “social construct.”
A line I myself have used in discussion, or variants thereof when confronted with the assertion that he was The First Post Racial President or whatever.
Race is not obsolete so long as it can be used to document (invent) discrimination against melanists as the over-arching religio-social explanation for their failure to achieve good outcomes in First World societies.
Race is absolutely obsolete so long as it can be used to assign the causes of that failure to melanists and their deficits.
For melanists and their farmers, race is a way of monetarizing their deficits and making the non-deficit pay for them. It’s thus a genomic/dysgenic tax on high achievers.
It asserts that melanists are incapable of self direction and must remain dependents of the state, which farms their deficits for taxes (profit) and careers. This is in effect a system of indulgences, where high achievers are constantly reminded of the original sin of their g, and offered the chance to buy their way out of whatever they’re accused of at the moment.
I also like to remind SJW types that we never heard Barack Obama utter a peep about his homeys in his not actual home of Chiraq clinging to THEIR guns or their thuggish religion.
The Bell Curve really represents a compendium of different studies, beyond the study the authors themselves conducted. It describes adoption studies, twin studies, family studies, and other types of studies to inform an underlying picture of the genetic component of IQ. These studies taken together certainly make a very compelling case that genes play a big role in IQ within groups, and an effective case that they do so between groups (i.e., races).
If the same sort of case were made for virtually any neutral trait — say, height — it would stand as a powerful case for the substantial genetic basis of that trait.
We can’t, of course, conduct certain kinds of studies on human beings for ethical reasons. Yet the studies we can conduct generally differ in no basic way from the sort of genetic studies that have been conducted of other species — say, cattle — and have been used to great effect in artificial selection for better breeds. If these sorts of studies weren’t correct about the genetic components, that selection simply wouldn’t work.
The idea that we can’t declare an important genetic component in the case of IQ in human beings unless we can identify the genes — and now, it seems, unless we know the exact pathways they invoke — is just a way of moving the goalposts so that the hereditarian side will never achieve victory.
But it’s a rear guard attack that is doomed to fail in the long run — maybe even in the short run. The number of, and amount of variance, identified genes for IQ can explain is ever increasing. The pathways are getting better understood, and already appear to be involved in brain development. Predictions from these genes can be cross checked with environmental factors to determine independence.
The noose is tightening on environmentalists. You can see the flop sweat on their faces. One wonders why they don’t spend their lives and careers doing something useful, such as figuring out how to soften the blow of the truth when it does at long last transpire.
If you silence, ruin, and/or murder enough scientists, you "win" the debate.
“Maybe it has something to do with how obsessed the federal government is with race?”
Indeed. The federal pentagonal racial classification scheme has been around a long time. If Prof. Morning says race does not exist, then I guess she will not need any “diversity” quotas at NYU, which rely upon that “social construction” to hand out benefits to “underprivileged minorities” at NYU.
The absurdity of this drivel is incomprehensible. I can see with my own eyes things like melanin content and epicanthic eyefolds. Denying such things exist is not very helpful, and denigrates sociology as a science, which was far more legitimate 100 years ago–even though it has always been somewhat a squishy “science” since its inception. Why doesn’t peer review cast these intellectually bankrupt, dishonest cretins into darkness and label them as the leftist whack jobs they are? Has groupthink consumed this psuedoscientific academic discipline?
Kind of reminds me of when Lysenko tried growing citrus in Moscow. He had the entire communist regime fooled:
“Lysenko wanted, above all else, to be an original. An otherwise enthusiastic official report warned that he was an ‘extremely egotistical person, deeming himself to be a new Messiah of biological science.’ Unable to understand the new-fangled genetics, he did everything he could to banish it from biology.”
https://www.faber.co.uk/blog/stalin-and-his-mad-scientists/
“[Trofim] Lysenko’s simple solutions and eager promises appealed to Stalin, who loved gardening and was obsessed with growing lemons in his greenhouses at his dacha near Moscow. When challenged by the esteemed geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, Lysenko responded viciously, denying the existence of genes. Vavilov rushed to appeal to Stalin, who received him but sneered, “You are the Vavilov who fiddles with flowers, leaves, grafts and other botanical nonsense instead of helping agriculture, as is done by Academician Lysenko.” Vavilov was arrested in 1940. The world-famous scientist died in prison in 1943.”
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2017/03/12/a-political-parable/
http://anthropomics2.blogspot.comFoul-mouthed ad hominems are his specialty.
This video gives more insight into his style:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ySHO2d4H8gReplies: @Unladen Swallow, @MEH 0910
Wow, he spends 90 percent of interview asserting that biology can’t explain human beings, than at the end tells creationists they are full of shit for believing biology can’t explain human beings. Contradict much? Are people like Marks even aware of how stupid they sound?
http://anthropomics2.blogspot.comFoul-mouthed ad hominems are his specialty.
This video gives more insight into his style:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ySHO2d4H8gReplies: @Unladen Swallow, @MEH 0910
Marks hardly ever posts on his blog. Four posts down and you’re already back to 2016.
He has an earlier blog to whose posts he links at the end of this blog. He's apparently such an idiot that he lost his password and log-in email for Blogspot and had to make a new blog.
Although he doesn't post much, the posts that are on the two blogs pretty much cover it all, his (and anthropology's?) theory that science has no meaning unless anthropologists have filtered it through their understanding of culture.
He really hates Steven Pinker.Replies: @Unladen Swallow
This was what struck me about the Reich article. Races developed within continental divides, and as we dig into this further, sub-races--ethnicities--developed within creeds and local geography, and "ancestry" is a useful term. Science is validating common sense observation, and that is not okay!Replies: @Corvinus
“Sub-races–ethnicities–developed within creeds and local geography, and “ancestry” is a useful term.
We already had this exchange already on this matter. You think you would learn. Race is linked to biology; ethnicity is linked to culture. Race is a biological and social construct. Ethnicity is a social construct. Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices.
Certainly, race and ethnicity overlap, but they are distinct. For example, a Japanese-American could probably consider himself a member of the Asian race, but, if he does not engage in any of the practices or customs of his ancestors, he might not necessarily identify with the ethnicity, but rather consider himself to be American. Of course, American is not a “race”, it is a conglomeration of distinct ethnic groups all rolled into one, with a common cultural bond. Scandanavians, which are from the white race, are descendants from several distinct (North) Germanic tribes. Through intermarriage, they developed a unique set of customs that incorporated Old Norse traditions.
So, in a nutshell, race refers to a group of people who possess similar and distinct physical characteristics, while ethnicity refers to a a category of people who regard themselves to be different from other groups based on common ancestral, cultural, national, and social experience.
As far as sub-races are in essence “ethnicities”, that is YOUR sophistry.
If a Japanese becomes a Southern Baptist barbecue chef it doesn't make him an ethnic English, no more than an Anglo becoming a Shinto Buddhist and karate black belt doesn't become an ethnic Japanese.
So abandon any attempt to correct the error because of historical errors/misunderstandings?
Boy the sciences have a lot of culling to do.
Yeah, I noticed that immediately, because I went looking for any posts just after Trump won. But he was inactive during that period.
He has an earlier blog to whose posts he links at the end of this blog. He’s apparently such an idiot that he lost his password and log-in email for Blogspot and had to make a new blog.
Although he doesn’t post much, the posts that are on the two blogs pretty much cover it all, his (and anthropology’s?) theory that science has no meaning unless anthropologists have filtered it through their understanding of culture.
He really hates Steven Pinker.
So much of left-wing political tactics consists of trying to seize control of language. Declaring that words are suddenly offensive, and so on. In this case they are taking a word that preexisted their discipline, redefining it, and then telling the world population of native speakers of English that they are using it wrong because 1,000 academics don’t like the meaning they ascribe to it. The meaning of a word is precisely the average sense you would get if you could poll all native speakers.
And words do not have to be perfect logical structures. There can be gray borders and corner cases. You’re allowed to use the words cup and mug despite the fact that there can be things that are weirdly halfway between the two that people might call by different names.
He has an earlier blog to whose posts he links at the end of this blog. He's apparently such an idiot that he lost his password and log-in email for Blogspot and had to make a new blog.
Although he doesn't post much, the posts that are on the two blogs pretty much cover it all, his (and anthropology's?) theory that science has no meaning unless anthropologists have filtered it through their understanding of culture.
He really hates Steven Pinker.Replies: @Unladen Swallow
I think Steve pointed out several years ago that Marks was probably the only leftist who realized the contradictory nature of Cavali-Sforza claiming he wasn’t talking about racial differences in a book devoted to talking about racial differences. All the other reviewers bought the obscurantism hook, line, and sinker. Interesting that the people promoting the book are known as the Boasnetwork.
We already had this exchange already on this matter. You think you would learn. Race is linked to biology; ethnicity is linked to culture. Race is a biological and social construct. Ethnicity is a social construct. Ethnicity is the term for the culture of people in a given geographic region, including their language, heritage, religion and customs. To be a member of an ethnic group is to conform to some or all of those practices.
Certainly, race and ethnicity overlap, but they are distinct. For example, a Japanese-American could probably consider himself a member of the Asian race, but, if he does not engage in any of the practices or customs of his ancestors, he might not necessarily identify with the ethnicity, but rather consider himself to be American. Of course, American is not a “race”, it is a conglomeration of distinct ethnic groups all rolled into one, with a common cultural bond. Scandanavians, which are from the white race, are descendants from several distinct (North) Germanic tribes. Through intermarriage, they developed a unique set of customs that incorporated Old Norse traditions.
So, in a nutshell, race refers to a group of people who possess similar and distinct physical characteristics, while ethnicity refers to a a category of people who regard themselves to be different from other groups based on common ancestral, cultural, national, and social experience.
As far as sub-races are in essence "ethnicities", that is YOUR sophistry.Replies: @The Anti-Gnostic
What is your hang-up over the term “ethnic?” It refers to a population sub-group, as in, ethnic Japanese are a sub-group of the Asiatic race. If the Japanese marry other Japanese more than they marry anybody else, then their genetics are going to cluster, like the Amish and Ashkenazim. This is not a novel idea.
If a Japanese becomes a Southern Baptist barbecue chef it doesn’t make him an ethnic English, no more than an Anglo becoming a Shinto Buddhist and karate black belt doesn’t become an ethnic Japanese.
“What is your hang-up over the term “ethnic?”
Strawman on your part.
“It refers to a population sub-group, as in, ethnic Japanese are a sub-group of the Asiatic race.”
Is there any scientific literature you are able to refer to that discuses in depth that each of the five race consists of several distinct sub-races? Because methinks you are simply making it up as you go along. Perhaps you enjoy playing armchair anthropologist.
“If the Japanese marry other Japanese more than they marry anybody else, then their genetics are going to cluster, like the Amish and Ashkenazim. This is not a novel idea.”
I never directly or indirectly stated otherwise.
“If a Japanese becomes a Southern Baptist barbecue chef it doesn’t make him an ethnic English, no more than an Anglo becoming a Shinto Buddhist and karate black belt doesn’t become an ethnic Japanese.”
OK. Your point?
> There’s nothing new here except the well-known observation that human biological traits vary around the world in tandem with geographical location.
So they admit it? Isn't this the thing they spent the last 60 years telling us wasn't true? If Stephen Jay Gould were alive right now he'd be spinning in his grave.Replies: @G Pinfold, @Nicholas Stix
“So if we just start saying ‘populations’ instead of ‘races’ we’ll be ok?”
Hey, it worked for Cavalli-Sforza.
He’s spent forty years speaking of race without knowing it!
‘The secret of my longevity has been in avoiding using a certain word.’
“But it’s a rear guard attack that is doomed to fail in the long run — maybe even in the short run. ”
If you silence, ruin, and/or murder enough scientists, you “win” the debate.