Cloud_Strife
Deity
Because sexual harrassment at the work place and other areas happens?
I mean, why else do you think we need them?
Does Race exist?
- Thread starter H4run
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Because sexual harrassment at the work place and other areas happens?
I mean, why else do you think we need them?
brennan
Argumentative Brit
People might want to get back on topic btw.
Yes?
Cloud_Strife
Deity
I think with the advent of the MeToo movement that sexual harrassment laws are needed more now than ever.
edit: yeah fair enough brennan
edit: yeah fair enough brennan
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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Ok, so if we need them because harassment actually happens. And somewhere around 1/3 of people have a history of quite happily dating coworkers, can we at least draw the conclusion that A) not all sexual/romantic communication/action is undesired and B) some actions/communication that will happen should also be prevented/punished/discouraged in ways that historically, perhaps, were not?
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Gori the Grey
The Poster
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How 'bout you two go get a thread?
Gori the Grey
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Well, we've just barely got race opened up and now we're off on workplace sexual harassment.
If we can't keep our angsts du jour properly compartmentalized, I'm losing it.
If we can't keep our angsts du jour properly compartmentalized, I'm losing it.
Farm Boy
I hope you dance
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Opened up? I think we're sitting right at the usual confluence of disagreement over latin naming of things, colloquial usage of tangential and overlapping terms, and whether or not people tend to shallowly resemble their parents. Then, because this is actually more a disagreement between Sharks and Jets than anything else, everything else that stands in this fetid crossroads is fair game too.
Lexicus
Deity
Did anyone else notice the irony that this thread was started on V-E day?
Gori the Grey
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Well, fair enough, I can just as easily opt for Manfred's jaded sarcasm as the hope that we might get this laid out clearly this time.
I was just hoping to be able to ask Tristan how much time it has taken in their separate environments for White Americans and Black Americans to take on such strikingly different phenotypes.
In Italy April 25
In Denmark May 4
In the Netherlands May 5
In East-Europe (AFAIK) May 9
Belgium no Victory day
The rest of Europe AFAIK May 8
Lexicus
Deity
I don't get this. We lay it out clearly every time: a bunch of posters simultaneously insist that racism isn't really a thing in modern society yet also declare themselves racist by insisting race is biologically valid.
What else is there to "lay out"? We may have beaten the Germans, but Nazism obviously survived and prospers.
There are genetic features, that express as biological traits, that are related to where your ancestors lived. The obvious example is skin tone, where melanin content is strongly negatively correlated with average latitude of your ancestors.
You can sequence large numbers of people, and cluster them according to their genetic similarity, and get groups. These groups will not line up very well with what most people talk about as race, but may have some correlation. The one group that will be a long way from everyone else will be the san/bushmen, from such areas as the Kaihari. If you split it into 5 groups, 4 will be basically african origin, the 5th will have some african and the rest of the world.
Whether or not any of this exists does not really matter. In group discrimination has been an important tool in our evolutionary development, however poorly it suits today's world. We are very good at finding features to distinguish between in and out groups, as has been noted upthread race is only a relative latecomer to the game. Place of origin is perhaps even later, and is still quite trendy to use unlike race. I have little hope of us reaching a point where we do not need such a feature, it seems that affluence is making a go at top slot, perhaps genetic perfection will come after.
[EDIT] I find it quite funny, that if there is any particular feature that you can guess will come out of the current research about human origins relating to the contribution of the neanderthal and devonian (sub?)species it will be that western europeans have a higher contribution from neanderthals than africans or asians. Neanderthals have always been presented as the archetypic stupid, strong brute.
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Senethro
Overlord
That many gene loci when resolved for 5ish groups will show 4ish African groups and 1 African+everyone else is ignored by the usual suspects. Wishful thinking on their part. They don't want to explain it, so they don't have to explain it.
I've posted this before, as have others, but I really think this NYT article by Harvard geneticist David Reich is required reading. It's cfc, we're all smart people capable of deploying our Reason to arrive at Certainty without doubt and Truth without error. But it'd be nice to see more nuance beyond the classic 1970s consensus on social constructionism. I sometimes see that whole "video game NPC effect," where it seems like everyone has learned something and added a little nuance to their views, but the next time the topic comes up nothing's changed.
In roughly 1500, many pairs of populations had been geographically, and therefore genetically, isolated for tens of thousands of years. E.g., Western Europeans and Bantu peoples. Tens of thousands of years is enough time for SNPs to build up and create population-level differences in many distributions of phenotypes. Melanin levels and eye color were not the only things affected. Americans who have most of their ancestors in Europe 500 years ago are more likely to have multiple sclerosis. Americans who have most of their ancestors in Africa 500 years ago are more likely to have sickle cell anemia. These are real differences in the distributions of diseases between these two populations.
Of course, a population is an artifact of a statistical procedure. There's a popular view that it makes no sense to construct populations based on whatever "race" means. I pretty much agree with that. However, it's unreasonable to think it's meaningless or harmful to construct populations using broad geographic area of ancestors several hundred years ago. It makes sense because without modern transportation, genetic divergence is geographically-determined and 40,000 years of separation is enough time for some differences, including medically relevant ones, to build up (to preempt an objection: using Africa as a region means you're trying to clump the Bantu with the San, which are highly divergent groups. But this objection has less force in practice because the larger, more similar groups, are hundreds of millions of people--dwarfing, say, Pygmies and San. In large part, this is because of the Bantu southward expansion several thousand years ago and Bantu lifestyles more conducive to population growth). In any case, we don't even need to construct populations geographically a priori. If you run an unsupervised cluster analysis by genetic similarity with k = 5 or so, you'll obtain clusters roughly corresponding to Europeans, Sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Native Americans, or something like that. E.g., figure 2 here. Obviously this changes as you increase the granularity. But as you do so, you'll still find more similarity between clusters that had been grouped at lower resolutions. But this whole point seems weird to me. I think a lot of people would essentially be like "if you run k means with k = 1, that's ok. If you run it with k = 5, that's bad. If you run it with k = 100, that's ok."
There's been mention of how genetically divergent populations have historically tended to mix. This is totally correct and is a major blow to classic racial theories. Most modern Europe-dwellers are the descendants of Europe-dwellers and ancient steppe people who migrated into Europe in several waves. There is no primordial European race that's been isolated and static for tens of thousands of years. But that doesn't mean there aren't important genetic differences between ethnic English and Bantu peoples because you still need to go back tens of thousands of years to find common ancestors. Admixture is a fundamental part of the human story. But that even being possible implies the existence divergent groups that can admix in the first place.
Overall, the idea of a "black race" seems particularly bizarre. The San and Bantu are both parts of the "black race," but are as divergent as Europeans and Han Chinese. How does it make sense to call the Bantu and San members of the same race?
Parroting a post I wrote a few months ago, "race" has a lot of baggage and doesn't lend itself to good discussions. "Ancestry" and "populations", however, are better defined and lead to discussions that move past the racism-vs-1970s-constructionism debates that have dominated this topic for decades.
In roughly 1500, many pairs of populations had been geographically, and therefore genetically, isolated for tens of thousands of years. E.g., Western Europeans and Bantu peoples. Tens of thousands of years is enough time for SNPs to build up and create population-level differences in many distributions of phenotypes. Melanin levels and eye color were not the only things affected. Americans who have most of their ancestors in Europe 500 years ago are more likely to have multiple sclerosis. Americans who have most of their ancestors in Africa 500 years ago are more likely to have sickle cell anemia. These are real differences in the distributions of diseases between these two populations.
Of course, a population is an artifact of a statistical procedure. There's a popular view that it makes no sense to construct populations based on whatever "race" means. I pretty much agree with that. However, it's unreasonable to think it's meaningless or harmful to construct populations using broad geographic area of ancestors several hundred years ago. It makes sense because without modern transportation, genetic divergence is geographically-determined and 40,000 years of separation is enough time for some differences, including medically relevant ones, to build up (to preempt an objection: using Africa as a region means you're trying to clump the Bantu with the San, which are highly divergent groups. But this objection has less force in practice because the larger, more similar groups, are hundreds of millions of people--dwarfing, say, Pygmies and San. In large part, this is because of the Bantu southward expansion several thousand years ago and Bantu lifestyles more conducive to population growth). In any case, we don't even need to construct populations geographically a priori. If you run an unsupervised cluster analysis by genetic similarity with k = 5 or so, you'll obtain clusters roughly corresponding to Europeans, Sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Native Americans, or something like that. E.g., figure 2 here. Obviously this changes as you increase the granularity. But as you do so, you'll still find more similarity between clusters that had been grouped at lower resolutions. But this whole point seems weird to me. I think a lot of people would essentially be like "if you run k means with k = 1, that's ok. If you run it with k = 5, that's bad. If you run it with k = 100, that's ok."
There's been mention of how genetically divergent populations have historically tended to mix. This is totally correct and is a major blow to classic racial theories. Most modern Europe-dwellers are the descendants of Europe-dwellers and ancient steppe people who migrated into Europe in several waves. There is no primordial European race that's been isolated and static for tens of thousands of years. But that doesn't mean there aren't important genetic differences between ethnic English and Bantu peoples because you still need to go back tens of thousands of years to find common ancestors. Admixture is a fundamental part of the human story. But that even being possible implies the existence divergent groups that can admix in the first place.
Overall, the idea of a "black race" seems particularly bizarre. The San and Bantu are both parts of the "black race," but are as divergent as Europeans and Han Chinese. How does it make sense to call the Bantu and San members of the same race?
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Senethro
Overlord
Can you post the text of the article please?
That does not have links to the data, has no explanation of their methods, and is not a peer reviewed publication. It directly contradicts what I read in peer reviewed journals today (links to follow). I think this is false. Please show some verification.
[EDIT] My links, not showing the genetic clustering yet:
Spoiler :
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