European ethno-linguistic assimilation

Look - South African Apartheid was about race, not about ethnicity. You could speak perfect English with nice accent, be a Protestant, drink tea at 5 o'clock every day, eat British breakfasts, read Shakespeare, enjoy British humour, adher to other British customs and traditions, etc. - but it did not matter, because if you were Black, then you still had to sit at the back of the bus and could be deported to a Bantustan. So Apartheid was clearly about race - not ethnicity.



Actually biologists commonly divide many species of wild (not just domesticated) animals into races.

For example, they distinguish between several races of a chimpanzee and several races of a gorilla.

If other species of primates are being divided into races, then humans can be too, as we are also primates.



That was 30 years before scientists learned to read the complete human genome. "Prehistory"! :)

So that research must be now considered obsolete because they had no sufficient tools nor sufficient evidence to either discredit or confirm the concept - yet despite lack of evidence some of them dur that motivated by political and ideological agenda, as well as by historical events. But you should know that even in the 1970s there was never any scientific consensus on races. Even at that time many scientists supported the validity of the concept of human races.
Apartheid used the incorrect terminology of 'race' to describe a layer of (forced) ethnicity. This isn't a controversial concept.

I have never, in my entire life, heard of different animal sub-species being divided into 'races.' Certainly not other primates. Perhaps this is a language issue? Maybe sub-species and 'race' are the same word in Polish?

Upon Googling "races of chimpanzee" I find a seven-year old article that says that "chimps, like us, are assigned to races!" Since the concept of humanity being split into three distinct races was abandoned in 1979, I find this article, from something called Softpedia, dubious. The use of an exclamation point doesn't instil a great deal of enthusiasm in me either. The second article is called "Resurrecting Racism: The Attack on Black People Using Phony Science," which concludes that, as I have always heard in the past, the different varieties of chimps are known as 'sub-species,' not 'races.' Then we have something from the PBS from a teaching curriculum called "Race: The Power of an Illusion," a typical Yahoo! Answers nonsense question, Stormfront, which supports your view of sub-species as races - which doesn't say much for your argument - and then we slide down the abyss into high-school level websites and Youtube videos about chimps competing against navy seals in obstacle courses (my money is on the seal, though I'd like the chimp to win).

Also, please don't edit your posts to include copious amounts of other information after I've already replied to them. I consider it very rude, and an unfair debating tactic. It gives the impression that I have failed to respond to your points, when in fact those points weren't there when I responded. I will NOT respond to the additions to your earlier post, dealing with Afro-Centrism in more detail, because I will not be checking your posts hours after I have replied to them for sneaky edits.

EDIT: I will respond to your last two paragraphs, as you added them while I was typing this answer, and not afterwards. The concept of race was most certainly discredited in the 1970s. Mapping the human genome merely confirmed what had already been settled by the end of the 1970s. To quote that Wikipedia page:

Jonathan Marks said:
By the 1970s, it had become clear that (1) most human differences were cultural; (2) what was not cultural was principally polymorphic – that is to say, found in diverse groups of people at different frequencies; (3) what was not cultural or polymorphic was principally clinal – that is to say, gradually variable over geography; and (4) what was left – the component of human diversity that was not cultural, polymorphic, or clinal – was very small.

A consensus consequently developed among anthropologists and geneticists that race as the previous generation had known it – as largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools – did not exist.

So by the time Sewall Wright was arguing for the existence of human sub-species in 1978, the idea of human 'races' had already been debunked. Just because a few racists clung to the old prejudiced definitions - and still do, as evidenced by the supporters of your argument at Stormfront - does not mean that there was any real debate on the issue. Just because a minuscule portion of scientists disagree with the concept of anthropogenic climate change does not mean there is any debate on the issue today, after all; it's settled, anthropogenic climate change is real. The debate on 'race' was settled in the negative - it does not exist - forty years ago.
 
Since the concept of humanity being split into three distinct races was abandoned in 1979

Did the concept of 3 races ever actually exist? Obviously there are (and historically were) more races than just three. Some of these races are of course the result of more "basic" races mixing, and thus forming new races.

Examples of such races which quite obviously are the results of race-mixing in the past (mostly in very distant past) are South-East Asians, Indians and native inhabitants of the Americas (the theory about one single colonization of the Americas by one group of Siberians has long been abandoned - there were probably five colonizations of the Americas in pre-Columbian times, each by people of very different genetic group profile - of course later those peoples extensively intermarried, eventually blurring existing differences and producing a new, anthropologically unique and relatively homogenous population, yet native South Americans have most of their ancestry from first two ancient colonizations, while native North Americans have a more sugnificant admixture from last three migrations), as well as Ethiopians, etc., and North Africans.

Not even mentioning Sub-Saharan Africa, where Bantu people, Pygmies and Bushmen can easily be counted as 3 different races. Then we have the Negritos ("pure" Negritos are very rare today - majority of them melted into ancestors of - mostly - South-East Asians and Indians) and the Australoids - the latter are widespread throughout what used to be the continent of Sahul (Australia+Tasmania+New Guinea all connected, when sea level was much lower than now). But the Ainu people in Japan, the Fuegians and the Patagonians in South America also resemble the Australoids.
 
different varieties of chimps are known as 'sub-species,' not 'races.'

Race and sub-species are usually considered to be synonyms, according to biologist John R. Baker.

But he writes that both concepts are quite vague - after all, even the concept of species is not 100% clear! The same Baker also mentions races of chimpanzees and has a map with geographical range of them. He also writes that Bonobo used to be considered one of races of chimpanzees, but later it started to be considered as a distinct species of its own.

================

Now I posted a new post instead of editing in case if you replied before. But you didn't.

Edit:

largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools – did not exist.

Humans - no matter from which continent - share 30% of their DNA with onions and other plants - no matter from which continent.

We also share over 95% with monkeys - no matter from which continent.

Only fractions of percent of our DNA correlate with geographically distinct populations.

However, even those fractions of percent amount to millions or at least thousands of indivudual genes that are largely group-specific.

Of course, most of DNA varies more within each population than between two populations.

However, there are also some "race-specific" genes or entire small segments which vastly correlate with given populations and are rare outside them.

Gene for malaria immunity can be found only among Black Africans, for example.

Bushmen of South Africa have specific only to them genes responsible for hair structure, for example.

And so on, and so on.
 
Did the concept of 3 races ever actually exist? Obviously there are (and historically were) more races than just three. Some of these races are of course the result of more "basic" races mixing, and thus forming new races.

Examples of such races which quite obviously are the results of race-mixing in the past (mostly in very distant past) are South-East Asians, Indians and native inhabitants of the Americas (the theory about one single colonization of the Americas by one group of Siberians has long been abandoned - there were probably five colonizations of the Americas in pre-Columbian times, each by people of very different genetic group profile - of course later those peoples extensively intermarried, eventually blurring existing differences and producing a new, anthropologically unique and relatively homogenous population, yet native South Americans have most of their ancestry from first two ancient colonizations, while native North Americans have a more sugnificant admixture from last three migrations), as well as Ethiopians, etc., and North Africans.

Not even mentioning Sub-Saharan Africa, where Bantu people, Pygmies and Bushmen can easily be counted as 3 different races. Then we have the Negritos ("pure" Negritos are very rare today - majority of them melted into ancestors of - mostly - South-East Asians and Indians) and the Australoids - the latter are widespread throughout what used to be the continent of Sahul (Australia+Tasmania+New Guinea all connected, when sea level was much lower than now). But the Ainu people in Japan, the Fuegians and the Patagonians in South America also resemble the Australoids.
The entire point of racist ideology was the splitting of humanity into three racial groups, the Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid, which is echoed today in the fabulous Macedonian school system, which teaches that the three basic races are Macedonian, Negroid, and Mongoloid. It's like Benny Hill was put in charge of a tin-pot dictatorship.

The sub-groups and mixtures of those three races included many of the people you mention, and several others; Polynesians, for example, were actually described in a text I read at university - which should never have been on the curriculum - as "an obvious mix of Caucasoid and Mongoloid types," and the Ainu in Japan were long considered to be "the Easternmost of the ancient Caucasian peoples."

But that science was discredited decades ago. I have no idea why you are continuing to use it here. It could be deficiencies in the Polish education system - I have already mentioned the wonderful Macedonian history curriculum - or it could simply be that you've tried to educate yourself on this issue, and come across websites using outdated data. As I stated earlier, most of the people who call themselves 'ethnographers' these days are nothing more than whackjob nationalists. Many of them still think that craniometry is a legitimate method of determining ethnicity!

Race and sub-species are usually considered to be synonyms, according to biologist John R. Baker.

But he writes that both concepts are quite vague - after all, even the concept of species is not 100% clear! The same Baker also mentions races of chimpanzees and has a map with geographical range of them. He also writes that Bonobo used to be considered one of races of chimpanzees, but later it started to be considered as a distinct species of its own.

================

Now I posted a new post instead of editing in case if you replied before. But you didn't.

Edit:



Humans - no matter from which continent - share 30% of their DNA with onions and other plants - no matter from which continent.

We also share over 95% with monkeys - no matter from which continent.

Only fractions of percent of our DNA correlate with geographically distinct populations.

However, even those fractions of percent amount to millions or at least thousands of indivudual genes that are largely group-specific.

Of course, most of DNA varies more within each population than between two populations.

However, there are also some "race-specific" genes or entire small segments which vastly correlate with given populations and are rare outside them.

Gene for malaria immunity can be found only among Black Africans, for example.

Bushmen of South Africa have specific only to them genes responsible for hair structure, for example.

And so on, and so on.
I did read that race is sometimes used to describe sub-species amongst chimps, but most biologists prefer to avoid it, because it is a loaded term and not very technical.

I am unsure what you post-edit additions are supposed to mean. It's a well-known and indisputable fact that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world put together, and that the descendants of different human communities have different immunities and attributes; your malaria example is the best known, but there is also the resistance of European-descended communities to bubonic plague, and the Mongolian ability to survive on a diet with way too much meat. Humans do have specialised differences. Thhis does not mean that humans have different races, or indeed sub-species. There does not appear to be enough variation for that, despite what Sewall Wright claimed in 1978.
 
The entire point of racist ideology was the splitting of humanity into three racial groups, the Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid

Source ??? Which of the most "prominent" racists in history actually used this kind of simple division. Hitler ??? Not exactly, Hitler did not use the division into Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid. He believed that even neighbours from across the eastern and western borders were other races.

BTW - the point of racist ideology was not the splitting of humanity but the value hierarchization of already split humanity.

In other words - you are not racist when you assume the existence of races.

You are racist when you hierarchize these races from "master races" to "slave races", assigning some "value points" to each.

It could be deficiencies in the Polish education system

There must be something wrong with the Australian education system if they don't teach you that racism is about believing in superiority and inferiority, not about just believing in different races. Racism is not about believing in differences. It is about assigning value judgements to these differences.

the fabulous Macedonian school system, which teaches that the three basic races are Macedonian, Negroid, and Mongoloid.

Source ??? Has Macedonia already become a scapegoat for everything or is there still some evil thing that FYROM is not blamed for ???

Many of them still think that craniometry is a legitimate method of determining ethnicity!

You are confusing the word ethnicity with the word race. Ethnicity has nothing to do with biology, genes, DNA or physical appearance. Person's DNA profile can only tell us about most probable ethnicity of his or her distant ancestors (because there are correlations between high frequency of certain DNA profiles among certain ethnic groups). But there are things such as assimilation, acculturation or occurences of "very rare" - among a particular group - DNA profiles.

Craniometry is still being used for example in paleoanthropology / archaeology to compare populations and establish their possible places of origin.

I'm not sure if you already know this or not, but Stephen Jay Gould's attempt of debunking the value of craniometry in studies on race, which can be found in his 1981 book "The Mismeasure of Man", has been proven to be a hoax. It has been recently (2011) proven by a team of scientists that Gould - perhaps deliberately - falsified results of his research in order to be able to claim that skulls of all races are the same, and that there are no differences between them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=0

Scientists have often been accused of letting their ideology influence their results, and one of the most famous cases is that of Morton’s skulls - the global collection amassed by the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton (...) had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

“Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould,” they write in the current PLoS Biology.

Dr. Gould, who died in 2002, based his attack on the premise that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence. But there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it, said Jason E. Lewis, the leader of the Pennsylvania team. Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately (a lively issue before Darwin decreed that everyone belonged to the same species).

In his book, Dr. Gould contended that Morton’s results were “a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions.” This fudging was not deliberate, Dr. Gould said, but rather an instance of unconscious doctoring of data, a practice he believed was “rampant, endemic and unavoidable” in science. His finding is widely cited as an instance of scientific bias and fallibility.

But the Penn team finds Morton’s results were neither fudged nor influenced by his convictions. They identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases,” the Pennsylvania team writes.

Dr. Gould did not measure any of the skulls himself but merely did a paper reanalysis of Morton’s results. He accused Morton of various subterfuges, like leaving out subgroups to manipulate a group’s overall score. When these errors were corrected, Dr. Gould said, “there are no differences to speak of among Morton’s races.”

But Dr. Gould himself omitted subgroups in his own reanalysis, and made various errors in his calculations. When these are corrected, the differences between the racial categories recognized by Morton are as he assigned them. “Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,” the Pennsylvania team writes.

Dr. Lewis, the lead author, said that on checking the references for some of Dr. Gould’s accusations he found that Morton had not made the errors attributed to him. “Those elements of Gould’s work were surprising,” he said. “I can’t say if they were deliberate.”

Dr. Lewis, who is now at Stanford University, began the project while at Penn.

An earlier study by John S. Michael, then an undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, concluded that Morton’s results were “reasonably accurate,” with no clear sign of manipulation. But when others suggested Dr. Gould had been refuted, Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of science at Columbia University, rode to his defense.

“It is not entirely evident that one should prefer the measurements of an undergraduate to those of professional paleontologist,” he wrote in 2004. “Pending further measurement of the skulls and further analysis of the data, it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote.”

Dr. Kitcher said last week that the Penn team had done a “very careful job” and that “it’s a nice thing that undergraduate work gets vindicated.”

As for the new finding’s bearing on Dr. Gould’s reputation, Dr. Kitcher said: “Steve doesn’t come out as a rogue but as someone who makes mistakes. If Steve were around he would probably defend himself with great ingenuity.”

But Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia and a co-author of the new study, was less willing to give Dr. Gould benefit of the doubt.

“I just didn’t trust Gould,” he said. “I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of ‘The Mismeasure of Man’ came and he never even bothered to mention Michael’s study, I just felt he was a charlatan."
 
Source ??? Which of the most "prominent" racists in history actually used this kind of simple division. Hitler ??? Not exactly, Hitler did not use the division into Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid. He believed that even neighbours from across the eastern and western borders were other races.
Scientific racism used this basic divide for decades. Just because racists have a habit of not having a particularly sensible ideology doesn't mean that wasn't the basic divide used. Though that is partly my fault; I should have specified that I was discussing so-called 'Scientific Racism,' rather than the garden-variety 'they look different from us, therefore they are evil.'

BTW - the point of racist ideology was not the splitting of humanity but the value hierarchization of already split humanity.

In other words - you are not racist when you assume the existence of races.

You are racist when you hierarchize these races from "master races" to "slave races", assigning some "value points" to each.
Assuming the existence of races is very much racist. It may not be as bad as claiming that all Jews belong in ovens, but claiming that all Jews are genetically better with money is very much racist.

There must be something wrong with the Australian education system if they don't teach you that racism is about believing in superiority and inferiority, not about just believing in different races. Racism is not about believing in differences. It is about assigning value judgements to these differences.
There are many problems with the Australian education system, but understanding what racism is doesn't happen to be one of them. We leave that to our politicians.

Source.

The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races:
The first half of that definition clearly states that racism need not require any belief in inferiority or superiority, hence the use of the term "especially."

Newman (not an online source, unfortunately) describes racism as:

"racism: Belief that humans are subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as superior or inferior."
"Innate capacities" such as the old chestnut that Asian people are smarter than blacks, but they're shifty and you can't trust them, or that Jews are good with money. This need not imply that any one 'race' is inferior or superior to another, merely that they are better at certain tasks.

Racism need not imply a belief in superiority or inferiority, merely the belief that being of a different race makes one different in some way other than physical appearance and genotype. An example would be the common thought that a person's ethnicity determines their behaviour.

Source ??? Has Macedonia already become a scapegoat for everything or is there still some evil thing that FYROM is not blamed for ???
I didn't say it was evil, merely stupid. Here's a source:

For example, in 2009 the Macedonian Radio-Television, aired a video named "Macedonian prayer" in which the Christian God was presented calling the people of the Republic of Macedonia "the oldest nation on Earth" and "progenitors of the white race", who are described as "Macedonoids", in opposition to Negroids and Mongoloids.[
I'll admit, that appears to be just another crackpot Macedonian theory, and not actually taught in their school system. It seems to be considered mainstream enough to appear on their national broadcaster though.

You are confusing the word ethnicity with the word race.
No I wasn't. I knew full well what I was saying there. I used the word ethnicity intentionally.

Ethnicity has nothing to do with biology, genes, DNA or physical appearance. Person's DNA profile can only tell us about most probable ethnicity of his or her distant ancestors (because there are correlations between high frequency of certain DNA profiles among certain ethnic groups). But there are things such as assimilation, acculturation or occurences of "very rare" - among a particular group - DNA profiles.
Well, duh. Tell that to the 'ethnographers' who claim that the shape of a person's skull determines that they're definitely a Celt.

I'm not sure if you already know this or not, but Stephen Jay Gould's attempt of debunking the value of craniometry in studies on race, which can be found in his 1981 book "The Mismeasure of Man", has been proven to be a hoax. It has been recently (2011) proven by a team of scientists that Gould - perhaps deliberately - falsified results of his research in order to be able to claim that skulls of all races are the same, and that there are no differences between them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=0
I was not, as a matter of fact, aware of this. I will need to look into it, and don't have time right now. I still don't see how the shape of a person's skull, which shows great variation - my head has a completely different shape to both of my parents' skulls, and that of my daughter - can possibly determine a person's ancestry myself. But I'll look into it.
 
I mentioned racial beliefs of German Nazis and of course all I hear in response is "Jews, Jews, Jews".

Maybe another failure of Australian education is that it doesn't teach you that Nazi racial ladder was not just divided into Jews and Non-Jews.

Scientific racism used this basic divide for decades.

Not really. Even already Gobineau divided "white" people further, distinguishing among them several races or perhaps sub-races.

I did read that race is sometimes used to describe sub-species amongst chimps, but most biologists prefer to avoid it, because it is a loaded term

The term "sub-species" have become popular only after the term "race" became loaded.

Charles Darwin's 1859 work was: "On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life".

Assuming the existence of races is very much racist.

Your claims actually contradict the definition you cited to support them:

"The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races"

By this definition assuming the existence of races is not racist, as long as you don't claim for example that all members of race A are good dancers, all members of race B are good soldiers, and all members of race C are good rulers, etc.

This need not imply that any one 'race' is inferior or superior to another, merely that they are better at certain tasks.

Actually the definition you cited to suuport this claim, has conjunction and implication, so it does need to imply this:

"racism: Belief that humans are subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as superior or inferior."

You would have been right only if there was "that might be" instead of "that are" and "or" instead of "and" in highlighted places. But according to this definition, just a belief that humans are subdivided into races is not racist. It has to be accompanied by a belief that races are innately different in both their social behavior and innate capacities.

Also accepting the following implication (p ⇒ q) as true (logical value of 1) is required for a belief to be called racist:

"If humans are subdivided into races, then [all individuals from] each group must be (are / is) innately different in social behavior and innate capacities."

the shape of a person's skull determines that they're definitely a Celt.

This is actually determined by the shape of a person's pot (ask any archaeologist)! :D
 
I mentioned racial beliefs of German Nazis and of course all I hear in response is "Jews, Jews, Jews".
I mentioned the word "Jews" three times in my previous post, with two of those uses in the same sentence, and none of the usages actually in response to your mention of Hitler. So you've just used the word as many times in your complaint as I used in my post. That seems like an attempt to enflame the discussion for no discernible reason, as does your next paragraph.

Maybe another failure of Australian education is that it doesn't teach you that Nazi racial ladder was not just divided into Jews and Non-Jews.
I intend to write my thesis on the economics of Nazi Germany. I don't feel this paragraph by yourself deserves any more of a response than that.

There is no need to take my comment about the Polish education system earlier personally. There was no malice in it. I have come across people in my lifetime that have used English words in non-standard ways, due to translation issues. I specifically remember a Japanese Ph.D student at my university having issues with certain words because of this. My comment was a legitimate question about whether the Polish education system or language used the word 'race' in a different manner to English.

Not really. Even Gobineau divided "white" people further, distinguishing among them seveeral races or perhaps sub-races.
Starting from the point that "white" was one of three stem races, with the other two being Asians and Negros. Which is my point.

The term "sub-species" have become popular only after the term "race" became loaded.

Charles Darwin's 1859 work was titled "On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life".
I accept that. Still, races is not a commonly used term anymore, and I had not encountered it in any recent discussions until you mentioned it. The science of taxonomy has changed drastically in the last few decades.

Your claims actually contradict the definition you cited to support them:

"The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races"

By this definition assuming the existence of races is not racist, as long as you don't claim for example that all members of race A are good dancers and all members of race B are good rulers, etc.
That is correct, I made a mistake there. I applied the correct term in the very next sentence of my post, however, which oddly enough is the single mention of Jews in my post. The one you complained about far too much in the opening paragraph of your post.

Actually the definition you cited to suuport this claim, has conjunction, so it does need to imply this:

"racism: Belief that humans are subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as superior or inferior."

You would have been right only if there was "or" instead of "and" in the highlighted place. But according to this definition, just the belief that humans are subdivided into races is not racist. It has to be accompanied by belief that races are innately different in both social behavior and innate capacities.
Again, this is covered by the part of my post you elected NOT to quote. Cherry-picking portions of a post to argue against is no better than editing your arguments after they have been responded to. It's a grossly unfair debating tactic, though it will serve you well should you elect to enter politics.
 
my head has a completely different shape to both of my parents' skulls, and that of my daughter
Because that's simply not how it works.

We are not clones of each other. We inherit traits "through" our parents more than "from" them. That's because you get your genes from all of your ancestors. As a matter of fact children sometimes happen to be more similar in physical appearance to one of their grandparents or even great-grandparents than to any of their parents. My grandma once told me that I'm very similar to one of my great-grandpas. One of my cousins has red hair but neither of her parents has it - which indicates that both of them had just one allele of red hair gene, and thus the gene was inactive. She perhaps inherited two alleles (one from each parent). Her sister has black hair.

Various measurements are only useful (in the sense that you can obtain statistical data from them) when you compare average figures for large groups, not for individuals.

It seems to me that once again you are making the mistake of an excessively individualistic approach (just like with ethnicity) to something which is collective.

Race is by definition mostly a collective thing, not individual. Individuals within a given race can vary quite significantly but race is a collective defined by certain statistical correlations. It doesn't mean that every individual within a race is the same and matches all average parameters of entire group.

I will reply to the rest of it later.
 
I have records of my family dating back to a certain King I'm named after (I didn't choose to name myself after his royal headlessness for no reason). If there's any similarity in head-shapes, it's very well-hidden. And I am well-aware of how genes work; there are certain genetic defects in both mine and my wife's families - which we have both somehow avoided, no doubt due to our superior genetic footwork - which required me to learn, even though it is not my specialty.
 
I intend to write my thesis on the economics of Nazi Germany.

OK, but the economics of Nazi Germany =/= the racial policies of Nazi Germany.

Though, obviously, you will need to do some research about racial policies because they also influenced the economics.

For starters, you might want to check Gunnar Henson's essay "What makes the Holocaust a uniquely unique genocide?".

Later you might want to read something which concerns the Generalplan Ost.

And of course the balance of costs / profits from the Holocaust. I think scholars still argue about that.

I mentioned the word "Jews" three times in my previous post

I mistakenly thought that you have your idea about racial policies of Nazi Germany - like many Westerners - mostly from Hollywood movies. In these movies there is usually no mention that Germans persecuted, economically exploited, exterminated and considered as subhumans other groups apart from Jews.

For example I recall the 2001 movie "Uprising" where there was "Ghetto" and the "Aryan part" of Warsaw. No mention that those "Aryans" weren't Poles.

There is no need to take my comment about the Polish education system earlier personally. There was no malice in it.

Sorry but you suggested that Polish education may be like FYROM-ian brainwashing and now you tell me that there was no malice in it?

I have come across people in my lifetime that have used English words in non-standard ways

Some of the words you think are English, are not really English in origin. When we use "ethnicity" we use a word of Greek origin.

And of course it would be naive to think that a loanword from Greek has the same meaning in all languages which borrowed it.

Again, this is covered by the part of my post you elected NOT to quote.

I quoted it later. When I was adding stuff to my post without refreshing the site, and thus I didn't notice that you had already replied. Check it.

And I am well-aware of how genes work

Your comment from the "Frankish" thread shows that you don't understand the difference between haplogroups and autosomal DNA.
 
This is, unfortunately, also common amongst actual researchers in this field.
Remove "un-" and then I will agree. Fortunately.

Fortunately there are people who still think that there are things which can be empirically examined.

People like you believe that absolutely everything is vague and "grey" rather than black or white. That's why you don't like threads like this and you are nitpicking. You must have realized that when I called Central Asian Iranians "Caucasoid", my point was that they looked like Europeans rather than like the Chinese, and were more closely related genetically and more recently in terms of last common ancestors to Europeans than to the Chinese, etc. Yet you decided to nit-pick and to rant only because I used such a term to denote what I wanted to say. What other term do you propose? Or maybe I should use a lengthy describtion like "their eyes were not slanted, their noses were... etc., etc." ???

Just stop your ridiculous nitpicking habits, please.

It is far easier to group one group of people as 'German' and another as 'Slavic' based on their material culture then assume that they must also have spoken similar languages

Please... specify to whom you are responding (if that was a response to someone).

I'm not assuming the language based on kinds of pots people were using. You must be referring to someone else. There are more efficient methods of establishing language of historical populations than looking at pots. Toponymy, personal names, what written sources say about those people and so on, and so on.

That said, there usually tended to be correlations between material cultures and languages, and therefore between cultures and long-lasting communities of people. Sometimes one similar material culture could be shared by speakers of more than one language, or speakers of one language could be diverse in cultures. But anyway - you cannot underestimate the importance of material cultures, which were often persistent through many generations and acquired by children from parents:

http://carta.anthropogeny.org/mediaplayer/play/16063/8178



Which is why ethnic groups often correlate with material cultures. Of course one ethnic group can also adopt "foreign" things from another group.

and had similar DNA

Your idea that I am conflating language and culture with DNA and genes comes from your groundless misconception that I am using the word "ethnicity" in exactly the same way as you do. I explained that I am using ethnicity in it's proper - to my knowledge - sense, that is first and foremost in a linguistic-cultural sense.

Any aspects of ethnicity related to ancestry or DNA are of secondary importance, they are merely the shell, not the kernel (which is linguistic-cultural).

But you seem to be using "ethnicity" in the context of biology & genetic ancestry, and person's DNA, which is something crazy for me. This is complete and nonsensical confusion of meaning, but I think I know its origin - during last few decades Anglophones replaced the word "race" by the word "ethnicity" in public discourse, as the result of which ethnicity changed its original meaning and now - in your culture - it means something intermediary between the old meaning of ethnicity and the old meaning of race.

For me it is crazy what is going on with meaning of words in Anglophone countries. Continue like this and in few years we won't be able to communicate, or I will have to adjust my English to your rapidly changing standards of "PC speech", or whatever. Just crazy. Look up a dictionary of Ancient Greek to check what it originally meant.

And by the way - congratulations for derailing a thread about ethnicity, due to your "distorted" understanding of what it means.

I have records of my family dating back to a certain King I'm named after (I didn't choose to name myself after his royal headlessness for no reason).

Charles I Stuart?

You do realize that he was just one of several thousands (more or less) of your ancestors who lived in the 17th century, don't you?
 
Gucumatz, check this:

Maps of Pomeranians / Kashubians - green colour:

Year ca. 900:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1000:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1138:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1180:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1220:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1370:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1640:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1660:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1850:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 1900:

Spoiler :

Kashubian dialects - year 1900:

Spoiler :

Year ca. 2000:

Spoiler :



West-Central Pomerania Germanization from the 1500s to 1945:

Spoiler :



Germanized North-West Slavic and Baltic lands during ca. 1000 years between ca. 900 and ca. 1900:

Spoiler :
 
Carolus I said:
I think it might refer to Silesia in the 13th/14th century. But this is certainly only a rough estimate.

Well - we have rather detailed data for proportions of immigrants among knights (nobility).

By year 1300 proportions of Polish / German / Czech nobility in Silesia were as follows:

Total number of knights mentioned by name - 1192

Number of German knights - 99 (just over 8%)
Number of Czech knights - 9 (less than 1%)

Number of Polish knights - 1084 (almost 91%)

Those German knights included some knights who were themselves of Non-German origin.

For example father of Albrecht Bart was a knight who was German-speaking (Germanized) but he was of Slavic - Lusatian Sorbian - origin.

He described himself as "de genere Czurbanorum a Thethonia" ("by origin Sorb from Teutonia").

And among officials in Lower Silesia only 5% (13 out of 260) were foreigners by year 1300.

Data on proportions of ethnicities among Silesian knights until year 1300 is from this book:

Marek Cetwiński, "Knights in Silesia until the end of the 13th century. Ancestry (origins), economy, politics" (in Polish):

http://otworzksiazke.pl/images/ksia...ca_xiii_w_pochodzenie_gospodarka_polityka.pdf

German summary of this book is on pages 239 - 243, and I paste it below:



Most of knights in Silesia at that time were Polish. Until year 1300 only 55 families of knights from Germany settled in Silesia - most of them from Lusatia and Meissen. These 55 families included also Germanized Slavic noble families, such as father of mentioned Albrecht Bart. Albrecht Bart himself was a burgher - his father was a knight, but he settled in Wroclaw and married an ethnic Waloon, Romance-speaking woman (daughter of a local weaver).

Most of these 55 families of knights who settled in Silesia until 1300 came during the last 30 years of this period (1270 - 1300).

Apart from those 55 families from Germany there were also several Czech families from Czech Kingdom.
 
The maps were quite informative - thanks! The gap/change between 1370 and 1660 is a huge one. Are there not good enough demographic estimates of that era
 
In the previous posts there was a certain disagreement on the definiton of ethnical vs. racial and linguistical identity. The ethnical identiy comprehends several aspects. The definition of ethnos according to Herodot is the following:

Herodotus (8.144.2) gave a famous account of what defined Greek (Hellenic) ethnic identity in his day, enumerating

  • shared descent (ὅμαιμον - homaimon, "of the same blood"[8])
  • shared language (ὁμόγλωσσον - homoglōsson, "speaking the same language"[9])
  • shared sanctuaries and sacrifices (Greek: θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι - theōn hidrumata te koina kai thusiai)[10]
  • shared customs (Greek: ἤθεα ὁμότροπα - ēthea homotropa, "customs of like fashion").
[11][12][13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_group#Definitions_and_conceptual_history

I agree with all of that with one caveat - ethnicity is about how people characterise themselves, while genetics are about the composition of people's DNA. Usually there's some correlation there, but they're not the same thing. To use your Cambodian example, the adopted child may well adopt an American ethnicity to fit into their new country without changing their genetics. It's a matter of terminology more than anything, I think.


Following the defintion of "shared descent" the adopted baby from Combodia would not be American. OTOH that is a really bad example - what is the "shared descent" of Americans? Only the Native Americans? or those descendants of the Mayflower immigrants? or what? Is an US-born child of immigrants from Korea or Ukrainia or Syria or Norway less American than the baby of parents whose ancestors live in the USA since the days of George Washington?


The former German vice chancellor, Philipp Rösler, would be a better example:



on the left, next to him on the right is David McAllister (son of a Scotish father and a German mother)



Rösler was born in Khanh Hung, Ba Xuyen Province, in South Vietnam (now Soc Trang Province, Vietnam) on 24 February 1973.[4][5] He was adopted from a Roman Catholic orphanage near Saigon[6] by a German couple who already had two biological children, and brought to West Germany at the age of nine months.[5] He was raised by his adoptive father, who is a career military officer, after the couple separated when he was four years old.[7] He grew up in Hamburg, Bückeburg and Hanover, where he graduated from high school in 1992.[8] After training to become a combat medic in the German Bundeswehr (the Federal Defence Force), Rösler was accepted to study medicine at the Hanover Medical School. Following this, he continued his education at the Bundeswehr hospital in Hamburg. He earned his Doctorate in cardio-thoracic-vascular surgery in 2002.[8] Then he left the service as a Stabsarzt (a rank for German medical officers equivalent to an army captain)[9] in 2003.[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Rösler

Except for his descent Philipp Rösler would be an ethnical German.


David McAllister is at least of 50 % German descent:).
 
Herodotus (8.144.2) gave a famous account of what defined Greek (Hellenic) ethnic identity in his day, enumerating
shared descent (ὅμαιμον - homaimon, "of the same blood"[8])
shared language (ὁμόγλωσσον - homoglōsson, "speaking the same language"[9])
shared sanctuaries and sacrifices (Greek: θεῶν ἱδρύματά τε κοινὰ καὶ θυσίαι - theōn hidrumata te koina kai thusiai)[10]
shared customs (Greek: ἤθεα ὁμότροπα - ēthea homotropa, "customs of like fashion").

In the US census there is a question on "race" which means "descent":

In the 2000 Census and subsequent United States Census Bureau surveys, Americans self-described as belonging to these racial groups:[3]

White American, European American, or Middle Eastern American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.
Black American or African American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Native American or Alaska Native, also called Native Americans: those having origins in any of the original peoples of North, Central and South America, irrespective of whether they maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment.
Asian American: those having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.
Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islander: those having origins in any of the original peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia, or Micronesia.
Some other race: respondents may write how they identify themselves, if different from the preceding categories (e.g. Roma or Aborigine). However, 95% of the people who report in this category are Hispanic Mestizos.[3][8][9] This is not a standard OMB race category.[3] Responses have included mixed-race terms such as Métis, Creole, and Mulatto, which are generally considered to be categories of multi-racial ancestry (see below),[10] but, write-in entries reported in the 2000 census also included nationalities (as opposed to ethnicities), such as South African, Belizean, or Puerto Rican, as well as other terms for mixed-race groups like Wesort, Melungeon, mixed, interracial, and others.
Two or more races, widely known as Multiracial: those who check off and/or write in more than one race. There is no option labelled "Two or more races" or "Multiracial" on census and other forms; people who report more than one of the foregoing six options are classified as people of "Two or more races" in subsequent processing. Any respondent may identify with any number, up to all six, of the racial categories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States




http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tan...-ethnic-identity-from-one-census-to-the-next/
 
Often I find myself wishing everyone just take France's cue and not bother with classifying people by ethnicity or religion.

I agree with you - let's say: we are all of African descent...;)



But even in France there are a lot of people with prejudices against French citizens who are not of French descent or are not white or are Muslims or are not Catholic or whatever...
 
Top Bottom