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#14801927
Race is a Social Concept, Not a Scientific One
Our single race is independent of geographic origin, ethnicity, culture, color of skin or shape of eyes — we all share a single phenotype, the same or similar observable anatomical features and behavior.

Science highlights these similarities in our embryonic development, physiology (our organ-based systems), biochemistry (our metabolites and reactions), and more recently, genomics (our genetic makeup). As a molecular biologist, this last one is indeed the most important to me — data show that the DNA of any two human beings is 99.9 percent identical, and we all share the same set of genes, scientifically validating the existence of a single biological human race and one origin for all human beings. In short, we are all brothers and sisters.

Genetically speaking, studies have shown that there is much greater genetic variation within a given human population (e.g., Africans, Caucasians, or Asians) than between populations (Africans vs. Caucasions), indicating that human variation cannot be subdivided into discrete races.

http://www.livescience.com/47627-race-i ... ncept.html

Race and Racial Identity Are Social Constructs
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2 ... constructs

What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct'

Andrew Sullivan and Freddie Deboer have two pieces up worth checking out. I disagree with Andrew's (though I detect some movement in his position.) Freddie's piece is entitled "Precisely How Not to Argue About Race and IQ." He writes:
The problem with people who argue for inherent racial inferiority is not that they lie about the results of IQ tests, but that they are credulous about those tests and others like them when they shouldn't be; that they misunderstand the implications of what those tests would indicate even if they were credible; and that they fail to find the moral, analytic, and political response to questions of race and intelligence.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... ct/275872/

Turkheimer's findings make perfect sense once you recognize that IQ scores reflect some varying combination of differences in native ability and differences in opportunities. Among rich kids, good opportunities for developing the relevant cognitive skills are plentiful, so IQ differences are driven primarily by genetic factors. For less advantaged kids, though, test scores say more about the environmental deficits they face than they do about native ability.

More generally, IQ tests reward the possession of abstract theoretical knowledge and a facility for formal analytical rigor. But for most people throughout history, intelligence would have taken the form of concrete practical knowledge of the resources and dangers present in the local environment. To grasp how culturally contingent our current conception of intelligence is, just imagine how well you might do on an IQ test devised by Amazonian hunter-gatherers or medieval European peasants.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... iq/275876/
#14801949


David Reich, Professor of Genetics Investigator at Harvard Medical School, is the world's foremost expert on the subject. Most European ethnic groups are related to Yamnaya steppe herders from southern Russia, who are Proto-Indo-Europeans, and a three-way mixture of European hunter-gatherers, Early Neolithic, and Yamnaya gave rise to modern Europeans.

Our results support a view of European pre-history punctuated by two major migrations: first, the arrival of the first farmers during the Early Neolithic from the Near East, and second, the arrival of Yamnaya pastoralists during the Late Neolithic from the steppe. Our data further show that both migrations were followed by resurgences of the previous inhabitants: first, during the Middle Neolithic, when hunter-gatherer ancestry rose again after its Early Neolithic decline, and then between the Late Neolithic and the present, when farmer and hunter-gatherer ancestry rose after its Late Neolithic decline. This second resurgence must have started during the Late Neolithic/Bronze Age period itself, as the Bell Beaker and Unetice groups had reduced Yamnaya ancestry compared to the earlier Corded Ware, and comparable levels to that in some present-day Europeans (Fig. 3). Today, Yamnaya related ancestry is lower in southern Europe and higher in northern Europe, and all European populations can be modelled as a three-way mixture of WHG, Early Neolithic, and Yamnaya, whereas some outlier populations show evidence for additional admixture with populations from Siberia and the Near East (Extended Data Fig. 3, Supplementary Information section 9).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5048219/
Last edited by ThirdTerm on 03 May 2017 03:17, edited 2 times in total.
#14801950
I'm going to be even more unpopular after this post but it is important to me to say a few things about IQ.

Some of you know I am a member of Mensa and Intertel. I got my membership, of course, by taking IQ tests. Three of the acceptable ones and among those one of the most studied and "verified" available. So I know what my IQ is and I associate with others with high IQs. So what?

Well there is a difference in people with high IQs and those with low ones. A pretty profound one. We discuss it at the meetings. I guarantee that most of you would be very surprised to sit in on those discussions.

The difference between the reputed 70 IQ and my fellow Intertel members with IQs of 140 or more ought to be so distinct that communication might even be difficult. Crafting systems usable by both groups 'ought' to be a real challenge. But here is the thing. It is not. In real life we really do not experience IQ in any obvious way. Sure we meet "smart" people and we meet "dumb" people but those observations are situational. We inflict those labels on others based upon how well we like them more than by any discernible difference in their (or our) functionality. I am happy to go into the stuff we do notice but not in this thread.

Many Mensa members love games. But I once heard someone say that "we like to play them but really don't crank the grey cells up to full" when we do. I bring all of this up to talk about racism. Intelligence is a tool. None of us are called upon to "crank the grey cells up to full" on a daily basis. Indeed rarely. Intelligence is far more subtle than that. It is not, and I see this in this thread repeatedly the same thing as education. It impacts on ones educational performance but it is not the foremost deciding factor in how we do in school." People tend to perform to standard not to some theoretical level of excellence. We can know quite enough about something and the relationship between our IQ and that task then becomes irrelevant. On a day-to-day basis we simply do not experience IQ. And when we do, it is rarely obvious.

So. When it comes to Sub Saharan African IQs. Is a visit to Africa an immersion experience in dumbassery? Of course not. Given an otherwise level playing field to people with moderate IQs perform as well as those with very high ones? Yes. Sometimes better. It is very much possible to be severely gifted. High IQs are associated with a number of psychological issues. (Don't get the big head. We will kick your ass at Chess and physics.)

Mensans are a joyful group of people. We don't usually mention our membership to others. (It took many years for me to mention it on this forum though it was relevant to many discussions in the past.) We join because we know we are "different". The doctor, the teacher, the physicist and the cab driver all go to the organization to understand themselves. Not others. We know that we are the unusual ones not "them". But when we get together we are released. We are normal. Cowboy, cab driver and chemist. All "the same".

All of this preface to ask you all (especially you who think that these population based IQ scores are evidence to support your prejudices) to step back from this a bit. Science is hard. It is harder when these data sets are not being looked at by the people most qualified to understand what conclusions are being drawn. I am disturbed by the notion that we somehow believe that blacks can't function as well as whites because they are genetically inferior. This is, as a practical matter, untrue. Two thirds of the population scores between 85 and 115. I would not give you much for the real difference between the highest and lowest even in that group. There is no room for arrogance in this discussion. No room for a feeling of superiority nor one of inferiority.

Most of you can ignore what I am about to ask. I ask it only to make a point. If you are an average American or Brit the difference between your IQ and mine is greater than the difference between yours and the 'supposed' IQ of the average Sub Saharan African. Am I a genetically superior creature to you? Are you doomed to follow my lead forever? When an Intertel member steps in front of an audience of 100 random people he/she can reasonably assume that the smartest person in the room is.....ta da! Please don't ever go there. Don't think those kinds of things. People who are very smart....don't. And while you are at it. Don't condemn an entire population to third class citizens because they fall into a data set constructed to make a point. If you are a really smart person then see it as a gift. There is no merit accrued to smart people simply because they are smart. You will never even see the concept mentioned at meetings of high IQ societies. We (humans) grow where we are planted. We adapt to the soil. We are happy or sad, successful or unsuccessful based upon our own rule set. And that set is individual. It is deeply personal. It is far to complicated to be "blamed" on something as tenuous as IQ or even the broader genetic discussion. We look to those things for subtle insights not billboard revelations.

I hope I make you angry when I say that outside of Mensa and Intertel, most of my friends are not as "smart" as I am. I hope making you angry makes you realize what a unkind, no devastating thing it is when you say to a young person. You are never going to be the smartest guy in the room....Its your genes after all.

Boy did I just piss a whole lot of people off.
#14801958
Agent Steel wrote:Suntzu has just provided a detailed report on which way the evidence points. You accuse me of ignoring the science yet you are doing the same thing. Now you're fabricating reasons to try to explain away the differences in IQ, which is irresponsible and unscientific.

Race deniers operate with the presupposition that any discrepancy in performance between the races must be due to cultural and environmental factors, because they don't want to accept the evidence that's right before their eyes.

If you want to deny race, you might as well just do away with the entire field of genetics. Who needs it after all? It all comes down to environment right?


Are you talking to me?

-----------------

Vlerchan wrote:That blogpost is citing Rushton and Jenson (2009) (Ruston's Wiki; Jenson's Wiki). From their paper, source 30 and 32 refers to two books written by Richard Lynn (2006 [2015]; (2006)) a controversial, Cambridge-trained psychologist.

It's been noted before that Lynn's work is a heap of shit (Wicherts et al. 2010a; 2010b; 2010c) based on strategic misinclusion of relevant studies within his meta-analysis, with shoddy inclusion criterion, if not outright falsification at points. I'm not sure why it is being referred to as evidence for this hypothesis.

Hope that was of some help, PoD.

:)


That was very helpful. Thank you, Vlerchan.

So the evidence that supposedly shows that blacks are stupider is itself either fabricated or conjecture.

@Suntzu , do you want to keep going?
#14801969
Suntzu wrote:I don't know. Shockley and Watson can't hold a candle to y'all. :roll:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

    An argument from authority (Latin: argumentum ad verecundiam or argumentum ad auctoritatem), also called an appeal to authority, is a type of argument which argues that because a person or group seen as having authority on an issue believes something about it, it is likely to be true.[1]

    Opinion on appeals to authority is divided, with some holding that it is a strong argument[2][3][4] which "has a legitimate force",[5] and others that it is weak or an outright fallacy[6][7][8][9][10] holding that, as noted in the Medical Press and Circular, on a conflict of facts, "mere appeal to authority alone had better be avoided"[11] and, as Carl Sagan wrote of arguments from authority:

    One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ... Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.[12]
#14801997
Suntzu wrote:Folks with low I.Q.s usually don't put much store with I.Q. tests.
Right, and that's why many scientists who are very intelligent don't put store in IQs. :roll: Stupid Ad Hominem Fallacy. Pathetic, really.

Drlee was pretty much right on the money.
#14802000
Dr Watson deserved his Nobel Prize for the work he did on DNA but his comment on races was his personal opinion, not based on science.
It was a stupid thing to say and his name will always be associated with it.
#14802006
Pants-of-dog wrote:So, that is five diseases. Out of approximately 30 000.

So the genes associated with a vanishingly small number of diseases happen to also be correlated with the very few genes that make phenotypic differences that we associate with race.

And because of that, racists are right?


Any SNP you care to name varies substantially as a function of geography. Oh and also:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

"We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."

An odd outcome for a variable that is purely socially constructed.

Godstud wrote:data show that the DNA of any two human beings is 99.9 percent identical


Irrelevant. Two aberrant letters of DNA make for Tay-Sachs disease. What varies among human beings genetically creates vast differences between them, with or without the variable of race coming into the picture. If the biological differences among humans were as trivial as your author says they are, humanity would have long since been a global eusocial supercolony (which it is not).

Godstud wrote:Genetically speaking, studies have shown that there is much greater genetic variation within a given human population (e.g., Africans, Caucasians, or Asians) than between populations (Africans vs. Caucasions), indicating that human variation cannot be subdivided into discrete races.


Oh no, not Lewontin's fallacy!

Godstud wrote:More generally, IQ tests reward the possession of abstract theoretical knowledge and a facility for formal analytical rigor...


Add dubious claims about cultural bias in IQ tests to the list as well.
#14802017
Height is merely a social construct. Any suggestion that some folks are taller than other is bigoted. Intelligence, like height is obvious to the observer, no tools of measurement needed. I don't need a ruler to tell Tattoo is shorter than Larry Byrd. Even our vocabulary is rich in descriptors, smart, stupid, etc.
#14802035
Dubious claims, by professionals in the field? You're talking out your ass @Perkwunos :lol:

Have you heard of the term Confirmation Bias?
#14802056
Perkwunos wrote:Any SNP you care to name varies substantially as a function of geography.


If you say so, but I am not sure about that.

Oh and also:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

"We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."

An odd outcome for a variable that is purely socially constructed.


No one said it was purely socially constructed.

Are you saying that this study supports the claim that the entire genome of each individual was derived from a single homogeneous population?
#14802101
Suntzu wrote:Intelligence, like height is obvious to the observer, no tools of measurement needed.

I disagree. Intelligence is much more difficult to judge than height, and unlike height, its judgement is unsymmetrical: a short person is just as good at judging others' height as a tall one, but an unintelligent person is a far worse judge of others' intelligence than an intelligent one. I remember one guy whose obesity (yes), poor diction and stunted social skills led some people who did not know him well to conclude he was retarded. But being more intelligent than that, I immediately noticed that his eyes were bright and lively, he had no trouble following high-level conversations, and he did not need to be told things twice. He subsequently proved convincingly that he was smarter than the people who had misjudged him, and I later found out he had a 140 IQ.
#14802120
Godstud wrote:Dubious claims, by professionals in the field? You're talking out your ass @Perkwunos :lol:

Have you heard of the term Confirmation Bias?


It looks like you're one of those people who thinks the notion of IQ is now considered outdated and pseudoscientific by mainstream researchers. But given that I can find thousands of hits for scholarly articles containing the term "intelligence quotient" in the past year, almost invariably being invoked as a standard research tool, perhaps the "confirmation bias" problem is not really with me...

Pants-of-dog wrote:If you say so, but I am not sure about that.


Well of course you aren't sure because you don't know anything about this subject matter but hey feel free to go ahead and search for all these SNPs that don't behave like I say they do—there must be many of them—and provide the Population Genetics summary as Objective™ Rational™ Logical™ Ebuhdins™ for your pseudoskeptical claims. It should look something like this, except that everyone would be Equal™:

Image

Oh and you can do that here:

http://grch37.ensembl.org/Homo_sapiens/Info/Index

Pants-of-dog wrote:No one said it was purely socially constructed.


It sure as hell looked that way.

Pants-of-dog wrote:Are you saying that this study supports the claim that the entire genome of each individual was derived from a single homogeneous population?


No I'm not. Please provide Ebuhdins™ for this claim about me.
#14802124
Our sequential cluster results are completely consistent with what we observed from the genetic distance measures and from figure 1—namely, that the East Asians are the most distant from the other groups, followed by the African Americans, and then the Hispanics. Allowing for more than four clusters did not yield stable results: multiple runs of structure produced varying cluster configurations; in many runs, one cluster was nearly empty. However, when we repeated the cluster analysis with only the East Asian subjects, two clusters did emerge that almost perfectly distinguished between the two ethnicities, with a total of 6 (2 Chinese and 4 Japanese) (1.1%) of 567 subjects being differentially classified. No such consistent subclusters emerged from separate analyses of the African American, white, or Hispanic groups.

Only two subjects had a probability <.95: one of these subjects self-reported as Hispanic but fell into the white genetic cluster, and the other subject self-reported as African American but fell into the white genetic cluster. We note that this analysis was not based on determination of individuals’ “racial” ancestry (e.g., estimating individual European, African, and Native American ancestry for the African American and Hispanic subjects). To do so would require inclusion of the nonadmixed ancestral groups (such as Africans and Native Americans) and the use of the “ADMIX” option of structure. What our results do show is that the (admixed) groups included have approximated within-group random mating sufficiently long enough to give rise to distinct genetic clusters.

Although our results suggest that genetic stratification may exist within racial/ethnic groups—specifically, whites and African Americans sampled from different geographic locations in the United States—we found the differences based on current geography to be quite modest. On the other hand, geographic matching of Hispanic subjects is likely to be of much greater importance, given the larger genetic differentiation between Hispanic groups on the basis of current geographic origins. In this study, we could not evaluate this question directly, since Hispanics were recruited only from a single site. Also, these geographic analyses do not rule out other potential sources of confounding within geographic regions for these groups (for example, those based on specific ethnic affiliations), which still may require attention.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/


The cluster analysis by Tang et al. (2005) is still vague about racial classification. Only the Chinese and Japanese emerged as almost perfectly distinguished clusters between the two ethnicities. No such subclusters emerged from separate analyses of the African American, white, or Hispanic groups.
#14802144
Perkwunos wrote:It sure as hell looked that way.


I find that many things can be clarified by asking the other person exactly what they are arguing.

No I'm not. Please provide Ebuhdins™ for this claim about me.


Then what are you arguing with that study?
#14802165
ThirdTerm wrote:The cluster analysis by Tang et al. (2005) is still vague about racial classification. Only the Chinese and Japanese emerged as almost perfectly distinguished clusters between the two ethnicities. No such subclusters emerged from separate analyses of the African American, white, or Hispanic groups.


Well that doesn't really have to do with whether broad racial classifications are viable and it's moot anyway because 23andme provides more or less that sort of data now. This is me:

Image

Pants-of-dog wrote:Then what are you arguing with that study?


Then why didn't you ask me earlier? I'm arguing that the idea of race as social construct is barely tenable in light of clear Ebuhdins™ that it is possible to discover / classify racial categories from genetic data. It's only "socially constructed" in the sense that any such cluster analysis is, but that doesn't mean what "race is a social construct" people want it to.
#14802170
All DNA ancestry analyses rely on the same signal to produce their results — they differ only in how they go about capturing this signal. The signal that they use is the association between a DNA marker and a geographic location. DNA markers vary widely in how strongly they are associated with a geographic location.

Here's an example to illustrate the idea. This image shows the frequency of the maternal haplogroup H around the world. You can see that H is very common in Europe, is found in Africa and Asia, and never seen in Australia or the Americas.

Image

The association between this marker and geographic location works both ways: If you know you have European ancestry, we'd know that there's a decent chance you have the H haplogroup. On the other hand, if you have the H haplogroup, we'd know that it's unlikely that you're Native American.

Just on the basis of this one DNA marker, we wouldn't be able to locate your ancestry with much precision. Fortunately, there are quite a few DNA markers available on the 23andMe platform. If we combine the evidence from many markers like this haplogroup, each of which offers a little bit of information about where in the world you're from, we can develop a clear overall picture.

https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/ancestry- ... ion-guide/


23andMe's racial classification is based on haplogroups, by which you can trace your ancestry geographically. You can broadly tell which haplogroup is commonly found in certain regions. For instance, mtDNA Haplogroup H is the most common mtDNA haplogroup in Europe found among 41% of Europeans but the lineage is also common in North Africa and the Middle East. Haplogroup H has been found among Palestinians (14%), Iraqis (9.5%), Somalis (6.7%), and Yemenis (13.9%). If you're assigned to hg H, your ancestors could have been Somalis or Yemenis, while you can rule out Native Americans.
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