Does Race exist?

[Senethro]

And what if two people disagree on the "estimated race" of each other or politeness of this word in current context?
I hope you can see why this can be problematic.

Well, so what if they do? Politeness is always negotiated.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Moderator Action: Those of you participating in this thread: Please stop triggering the auto-censor. It is sort of obvious what the word is that's being censored, and that is a no-no. Please find a more creative way to say what you are going to say. Thank you.

 

[red_elk]

Politeness is always negotiated.

Of course it is. That's what people always do when insulted - negotiate politeness.

 

[Berzerker]

It is in others', but whether it's socially acceptable is still a function of the Estimated Race (abrogated) of the participants

race does not exist

 

[Modder_Mode]

Past is prologue... How much money would Trump inherit if his father was a slave? The descendants of slaves were robbed of family wealth and everything that goes with it, like free, well educated children adding to the family fortune. As for laws now, slavery was replaced with Jim Crow and that was replaced by the drug war.

I used to think this as well especially about wealth inheritance and white people and what factor it would play in the disparity, but it doesn't explain successful black people.

I touched on it earlier, but black culture plays a huge part in the disparity, the whole gangster rap, drug culture, "F da police" type attitude and this reinforcement (usually by white people and more often than not for political gain or to virtue signal) that the whole system is out to get them simply because they are black, they have no chance at a successful life with a thought process like that, thinking that every obstacle they face in life is because there's this racist system that exists and it's purely designed to target them.

You could argue the drugs war played some factor in the disparity, but what about the black people that were/are law abiding citizens, what's the reason for their disparity? People that take drugs overwhelmingly commit other crimes.

Jim crow was Southern exclusive, that's why we see a large wave of black people migrating from the South to North and West, for the ones that stayed no doubt it had an impact but at least not in its entirety on all black people. You could well argue that the exodus itself could have been a contributing factor to a disparity especially if they were leaving with nothing and starting again with nothing and then facing hostilities and segregation in the North. Black people in the North were most certainly paid more than Southern black people, albeit it wasn't some kind of equality with whites, they were obviously paid less than whites.

According to one of Nixon's cronies the drug war was payback to hippies and black people for opposing his war, the hippies faded into history leaving black people with a bulls eye on their backs.

The problem with that though is its an unsubstantiated claim, it wouldn't surprise me if Nixon did say something like that though. I am guilty of posting unsubstantiated claims sometimes myself though, so I can't judge

Its ongoing now and the violence and mass incarceration it has caused destroys family structure even worse than a real war.

The family structure is destroyed by an individuals personal choice to commit violent crimes and take drugs.

 

[Truthy]

Ok I need a little help from you here



There are two statement here:

1. The genetic's clusters are correlated with traditional race, because specific geographic place may represent a specific dominant type of cluster.
2. This first statement is useful in biomedical setting because they can use this reality to generalized the type of dominant cluster that available there.

Here you already established a claim that there is a relation between the traditional concept of race with certain genetic group. You also argued that this categorization is beneficial for biomedical purpose because it can generalize the genetic population of certain geography group. Ok.

You are establishing your previous argument here.

I decided to clump most of what I've said in this thread into one post, so yeah, it got long pretty quickly. I start with the 1970s consensus and explained how it's changed.

In his classic "the apportionment of human diversity" (1972), Lewontin analyzed 17 polymorphic loci (locations in the genome that vary between individuals), including ones that determine blood types, and used 7 “races,” some of which sound amusingly anachronistic (Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, Australian Aborigines).

He did an analysis of variation (ANOVA) on each locus (genome location), looking at them independently. For each of them, he found that the ratio of variation within populations (sum of squares within or SSW) to total variation (sum of squares total or SST) was in the range of like 0.85-0.9. In other words, the variability between groups was like 0.1-0.15. In other other words, less than 15% of the genetic diversity of humans is between groups. When he broke that down further into groups within the “race” groups, he found a number of like 6.3% for each of the loci. Yet another way of looking at this is if you used this technique to try to genetically classify an individual (as Caucasian, etc) by these individual loci, as Lewontin attempted, your odds of misclassifying her is pretty high. Like at least 30%.

Though his analysis for each locus was fine and dandy, the way he combined them to make statements about classifications was kinda bogus. The basic reason is that individual loci don’t tell you much. But a bunch of loci do because loci vary in correlated ways within populations. As you add more loci, the odds of misclassifying decreases rapidly. He didn’t do this, so he found you couldn’t accurately map people to the 7 categories he started off with.

Here’s a concrete (albeit sort of simplified) example of what I’m talking about (credit). Suppose for some particular locus in population A, the probability it’s a C nucleotide is 0.3. Suppose for in population A, the probability it’s a C nucleotide is 0.7. In this situation, your odds of classifying someone correctly are 0.7, which isn’t very high. However, imagine we instead look at n loci, where for each of them there’s a probability of 0.3 in population A and 0.7 in population B. If you classify based on these n loci, you’re odds of classifying correctly will be much higher, very close to 1 in fact. Though it isn't this simple, companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA are very good at determining ancestry because they use the idea of correlated genetic variation within populations.

It would be about 30 years before his work would get properly demolished. We now know you absolutely can cluster people using many loci and the clusters across this research have some concordance with the traditional categories.

Work on population structures in the last 20 years has focused on using larger genomic datasets and algorithms to cluster people. One technique uses a statistic called Fst, which is a special case of the F statistic, for anyone knowledgeable about stats. You can roughly think of it as a statistic that reflects genetic distance between populations, but it is not really a distance metric because it doesn’t satisfy the triangle inequality. Using a maximum likelihood technique from this work, you can use Fst to create phylogenetic trees or hierarchical clustering trees like this one from this this paper.

You can use principal component analysis (PCA) to gauge the contributions of within-geographic-area and between-geographic-area variation.

Approaches based on unsupervised, fuzzy genetic clustering (UFG clustering), however, have been more popular in the past 20 years or so. To my knowledge, there are 4 main algorithms used for this job: structure, frappe, admixture, and mStruct. UFG techniques are better for at least one big reason, which is that Fst approaches introduce subjectivity, as the researcher has to visually identify the clusters. With UFG, on the other hand, assignment to the clusters is done automatically. Hence, the term “unsupervised.” Here’s a visualization of world population structures from this paper (2015), which uses the admixture algorithm for UFG:

The bottom shows haplogroup codes, which are annoyingly buried in the supplementary materials. Maybe they just expect people to have these memorized. Anyway, from left to right, you’re basically seeing West Africa, East Africa, the Americas, Southern Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Asia, China, and Japan. As I pointed out earlier, this has the issue that some world groups were not included, such as Middle Easterners.

Calculated using various forms of ANOVA, the variation within geographic areas is most of the genetic diversity, in the 80s. Variation between geographic areas is something like 10-15%. These people get 84.7% and 12.9%, respectively.

What does all of this say about the idea of race? I’m not really sure. I’m not a philosopher of race and I’m not really clear on what people mean when they use that term. Overall, it seems like abandoning the term in biology contexts is the wisest move, but you have to deal with the fact that in the US, the traditional terms are used all over discussions of healthcare, public policy, education, and so on and so forth. These cases mean that bringing biology and race into the same discussion is sometimes is necessary.

For example, it’s well known that African American men have higher rates of prostate cancer. For a long time, it was assumed this was because of unequal access to healthcare. It turns out it’s actually genetic. This becomes a thorny issue. If I hear someone say “discrimination causes African American men to have higher rates of prostate cancer,” but I know it’s genetic, how am I supposed to correct them? It seems like I need to, in some sense, combine biology and race. Note that isn’t necessarily my preference. I recognize race is a social construct and focusing on “African Americans” as a biological group is not that useful. E.g., what about Ethiopian-Americans? The’re African American, but like I showed, they probably don’t belong to the same cluster (for any value of k above like 2 or so) as most African Americans and so why should I make generalizations about all “African Americans”? But in the context of the discussion, we’re talking about socially constructed groups anyway.

Situations like this are why folks like David Reich say what they’re saying. They know we’re talking about social constructs. They know the genetics research only sort of vindicates the traditional concept of race, depending on what that term even means. But our public discussions use those terms and the shared genetics of socially constructed groups is sometimes relevant. It just depends on the discussion and who the socially constructed group even are. However, a lot of people who don't understand get extremely agitated immediately. So Reich's whole thing is "hey guys, maybe we could just go ahead and not freak the **** out every time this topic comes up?" Predictably, when he says that people freak the **** out.

Of course, culture is tied with its land, but culture is not vis a vis race. People from every back ground and color can adopted certain culture, a white William Adams can be a Japanese and get recognized as a Japanese, this is not genetically defined, this is defined culturally; the adoption of language, custom, manners, arts of certain cultural products makes one adopted the said culture.

Sorry, what I meant was identifications that are culturally based. E.g., "white," "black," etc.

What you going to use this statement for?

a. That race are genetic based classification because the genetics of people with similarly distributed ancestors are correlated (imperfectly).
b. You just simply want to say that the genetics of people with similarly distributed ancestors are correlated (imperfectly).

which one?

I don't really know how (a) could be true given that definitions of race were created long before we knew what DNA was. I agree with (b), but I'm also saying there is some concordance with the traditional concepts of race and genetic clusters. How could this be true? Well, because the traditional concepts aren't totally random. The ancestors of people Americans typically call "white" are not from random locations around the world. People kidnapped into slavery were not from random locations around the world, or even around Africa.

However, this is a nuanced issue and race and genetics shouldn't be brought into the same discussion in most cases. But in some situations, like the public policy discussion about prostate cancer above, yeah, it kinda makes sense. Hypothetically speaking, if you say some difference in a socially constructed group exists because of differential treatment, but I know it's actually genetic, I'm not sure how to correct you without mixing genetics and social constructs into the same discussion. Doing so isn't my preference. It certainly isn't the most medically relevant way. It might not really make sense because a term like "African American" will include people like Ethiopian-Americans, Caribbean Americans, etc, who have different ancestry and not necessarily the same prostate cancer rates.

if it is "a" then by your definition using our previous example Steve Jobs is an Arab while the Turk are European. Because genetically Steve Jobs has Arab ancestor, while majority of the Turk genetically more resemble to Italy and France than that of Central Asian.

This is totally negating your concept of Europe Dweller, because who walk where is not the object of the importance, but who is the one who walking is the object of importance.

Because it was last week, I'm not sure what I point I was originally making with the "Europe-dweller" thing so idk exactly how to respond to this. I mean, both things--where and who--are kinda important from a genetics standpoint. The Turk issue seems to show that things are fuzzy and poorly defined. But I don't think it really has a huge bearing on what I'm saying.

again trying to convince me about the validity and how academically based your arguments are

Yeah, it's kind of a silly trick. Trying to give David Reich credibility by innocence through association. But to be fair, I don't think Henry Louis Gates would be caught dead with Charles Murray or James Watson. Yet he pals around with David Reich, endorses his book, collaborates with him, Reich helps him make a genetics TV show, and whatever else. I think that says something about how Reich's beliefs are not actually fringe race theories.

But yes, I really don't think this is some huge controversy if everyone would settle down. I'm not totally sure about the implications of population genetics on the philosophy of race. I don't believe anything I've said supports "race realism" when you actually think about it carefully. And again, most of the variation really is within populations. The full significance of between-population variation is totally unclear. It manifests itself in some medically-relevant ways, that's for sure. But I think this between-group variation is only really relevant in policy discussions where the social constructs have already been introduced. Like in the prostate cancer example I provided.

I really hope everything this will be clear soon, and thank you for your respond

I appreciate your politeness

 

[Hygro]

I used to think this as well especially about wealth inheritance and white people and what factor it would play in the disparity, but it doesn't explain successful black people.

I touched on it earlier, but black culture plays a huge part in the disparity, the whole gangster rap, drug culture, "F da police" type attitude and this reinforcement (usually by white people and more often than not for political gain or to virtue signal) that the whole system is out to get them simply because they are black, they have no chance at a successful life with a thought process like that, thinking that every obstacle they face in life is because there's this racist system that exists and it's purely designed to target them.

You could argue the drugs war played some factor in the disparity, but what about the black people that were/are law abiding citizens, what's the reason for their disparity? People that take drugs overwhelmingly commit other crimes.

Jim crow was Southern exclusive, that's why we see a large wave of black people migrating from the South to North and West, for the ones that stayed no doubt it had an impact but at least not in its entirety on all black people. You could well argue that the exodus itself could have been a contributing factor to a disparity especially if they were leaving with nothing and starting again with nothing and then facing hostilities and segregation in the North. Black people in the North were most certainly paid more than Southern black people, albeit it wasn't some kind of equality with whites, they were obviously paid less than whites.



The problem with that though is its an unsubstantiated claim, it wouldn't surprise me if Nixon did say something like that though. I am guilty of posting unsubstantiated claims sometimes myself though, so I can't judge




The family structure is destroyed by an individuals personal choice to commit violent crimes and take drugs.

You really think that problems of poverty tied to race come from gangster rap etc.? You really think an individual's non-participation in the drug trade leaves them unaffected by the state's drug war? You really think a systemic destruction of stable families originates from the occurrence of individuals taking drugs?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

The descendants of slaves were robbed of family wealth and everything that goes with it, like free, well educated children adding to the family fortune.

Well... the slaves were robbed of wealth/freedom etc. Their descendants only even exist because of it. If anything they should be grateful

 

[Hygro]

Well... the slaves were robbed of wealth/freedom etc. Their descendants only even exist because of it. If anything they should be grateful

Are you joking because the joke is obviously horrid and you agree it's obviously horrid, or are you kidding on the square.

 

[Berzerker]

In his classic "the apportionment of human diversity" (1972), Lewontin analyzed 17 polymorphic loci (locations in the genome that vary between individuals), including ones that determine blood types, and used 7 “races,” some of which sound amusingly anachronistic (Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, Australian Aborigines).

http://www.sitchin.com/genetics.htm

According to the Sumerians humanity was created via 14 birth goddesses in 7 pairs of male and female.

 

[H4run]

@Truthy I really appreciate your effort on explaining this to me, it must take a lot of time and commitment, I thank you. I already read the explanation of basically how the loci pattern on genomes, and how the additional quantity of loci increase the analysis accuracy. But I would like to ask you something:

Suppose for some particular locus in population A, the probability it’s a C nucleotide is 0.3. Suppose for in population A, the probability it’s a C nucleotide is 0.7.

This is an A-B population comparison isn't it? Not particular A and general A comparison?

I appreciate your politeness

Sure man I'm here to learn, and you seem sincere and quite generous, there is no reason for me for not being nice

edit: I will reply later after I read and understand your whole article. I will read it tomorrow.

 

[Farm Boy]

Are you joking because the joke is obviously horrid and you agree it's obviously horrid, or are you kidding on the square.

Isn't it always a bit of that when laughing at the Leviathan?

 

[H4run]

Are you joking because the joke is obviously horrid and you agree it's obviously horrid, or are you kidding on the square.

that wink just added the cringyness

 

[Senethro]

Like, if you want to sell it as a joke then link that republican politician saying that descendants of slaves should be grateful and make it an eyeroll emoji.

 

[Truthy]

@Truthy I really appreciate your effort on explaining this to me, it must take a lot of time and commitment, I thank you. I already read the explanation of basically how the loci pattern on genomes, and how the additional quantity of loci increase the analysis accuracy.

I hope you appreciate the irony of me declaring "there's nothing left to be said" and then my very next post has more than a thousand words.

But I would like to ask you something:
This is an A-B population comparison isn't it? Not particular A and general A comparison?

So, I need to get off CFC for the day cause I have work to get done. But I'll respond to this tomorrow or the day after.

 

[H4run]

So, I need to get off CFC for the day cause I have work to get done. But I'll respond to this tomorrow or the day after.

Sure takes your time, I'm also here taking my time, a serious post need a serious reply

I hope you appreciate the irony of me declaring "there's nothing left to be said" and then my very next post has more than a thousand words.

Seriously I wont bother explaining for someone that I think not worth explaining, hence your wall of text flattered me.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

@Truthy Thanks for putting all that effort into the big post. Much appreciated. Not all of it was news to me, but a lot was I personally would not make the leap to call a characterization of peoples based on DNA loci "race", because it has less to do with the original concept of race than it has with the concepts of nationality or ethnicity or ancestry, for example. My gut feeling says, from your chart (2): Yoruba, Bantu, San, Uyghur, Basque, Sardinian, for example, I would call ethnicities, based on some coherence in culture and ancestry within those groups, while Russians and French on the other hand I wouldn't call ethnicities, because there isn't that much coherence in terms of language, culture and ancestry. Parts of Russia have asiatic peoples, others slavic, then others central European. Ancestry is kind of all over the place. It (grouping peoples by DNA loci) lacks a proper name for now, I think.

 

[Berzerker]

I used to think this as well especially about wealth inheritance and white people and what factor it would play in the disparity, but it doesn't explain successful black people.

I touched on it earlier, but black culture plays a huge part in the disparity, the whole gangster rap, drug culture, "F da police" type attitude and this reinforcement (usually by white people and more often than not for political gain or to virtue signal) that the whole system is out to get them simply because they are black, they have no chance at a successful life with a thought process like that, thinking that every obstacle they face in life is because there's this racist system that exists and it's purely designed to target them.

You could argue the drugs war played some factor in the disparity, but what about the black people that were/are law abiding citizens, what's the reason for their disparity? People that take drugs overwhelmingly commit other crimes.

Jim crow was Southern exclusive, that's why we see a large wave of black people migrating from the South to North and West, for the ones that stayed no doubt it had an impact but at least not in its entirety on all black people. You could well argue that the exodus itself could have been a contributing factor to a disparity especially if they were leaving with nothing and starting again with nothing and then facing hostilities and segregation in the North. Black people in the North were most certainly paid more than Southern black people, albeit it wasn't some kind of equality with whites, they were obviously paid less than whites.

You wanted me to identify current laws and I did, the drug war. Drug use among black and white people is comparable, enforcement is not. That was by design. If the drug war was waged in both communities 'equally' the majority white population would come to resist it faster. Much of the culture you cited resulted from that war.

The problem with that though is its an unsubstantiated claim, it wouldn't surprise me if Nixon did say something like that though. I am guilty of posting unsubstantiated claims sometimes myself though, so I can't judge

True, we have one guy claiming Nixon's aide told him about the strategy:

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Actions speak louder than words... Did all that happen? Yes. As you said, it wouldn't surprise you if that was Nixon's thinking. Why? Because thats the kind of person he was, petty, vindictive, out to get his enemies, etc.

The family structure is destroyed by an individuals personal choice to commit violent crimes and take drugs.

And we chose to wage a drug war in somebody's neighborhood and then wonder why the situation worsened.

 

[red_elk]

while Russians and French on the other hand I wouldn't call ethnicities, because there isn't that much coherence in terms of language, culture and ancestry. Parts of Russia have asiatic peoples, others slavic, then others central European. Ancestry is kind of all over the place. It (grouping peoples by DNA loci) lacks a proper name for now, I think.

The "Russians" in the article most likely mentioned as East Slavic ethnic group, not as citizens of Russia.
It's confusing that in English the same word is used for both.

 

[Modder_Mode]

You really think that problems of poverty tied to race come from gangster rap etc.?

You wanted me to identify current laws and I did, the drug war. Drug use among black and white people is comparable, enforcement is not. That was by design. If the drug war was waged in both communities 'equally' the majority white population would come to resist it faster. Much of the culture you cited resulted from that war.

And we chose to wage a drug war in somebody's neighborhood and then wonder why the situation worsened.

Professor James Flynn who is an IQ scientist made the observation that after WW2 when US troops occupied Germany and both white and black American soldiers had children, that those children that grew up in Germany showed no IQ differences at all, the black and white kids had the same IQ, he concluded that the reason was that the offspring of black soldiers in Germany grew up with no black subculture.
The same principle stands for the white rednecks subculture in southern states.
I mean there were hundreds of thousands of Asians that migrated to America with literally nothing, they started their new life with nothing but the clothes on their back, no inheritance, no privilege; but their culture of hard work and high standards of education excelled them, anyone who grew up with Asian friends knows what I am talking about when it comes to homework, study and how Asian parents react to their children's test scores, its no surprise then how successful Asians are in America, in fact next time anyone wants to talk about white male privilege and the pay gap they might want to target the Asians more if they want to be more consistent with their claims.

You really think an individual's non-participation in the drug trade leaves them unaffected by the state's drug war?

How would you explain successful black people? How did they overcome these obstacles? What did they do differently to the other black people that are supposedly being incarcerated in huge numbers for petty crimes or the systemic destruction of stable families?

The theory of black people being incarcerated en masse for harmless and minor drug crimes is a myth, black people aren't being locked up for misdemeanors, they are largely violent offenses, Vox of all publishers even did an article dismissing this narrative.
On a quick side note which just reminded me of it, I really did enjoy Vice doing the video on Black Conservatives Debate Black Liberals on American Politics, it was great to hear the opinions of all of them and not hear some biased presenter with some agenda interject, and as a lot of others commentated Vice should do more of this, it was top journalism.

You really think a systemic destruction of stable families originates from the occurrence of individuals taking drugs?

We know that drug stimulants are responsible for people committing crimes, so I would say yes, but I would not say its systemic. Lets say that as of tomorrow American law stipulates that drug use is no longer a crime, you can use drugs as you please. Even if people are not locked up the social consequences of taking drugs is apparent, drug users would most likely not turn up to work, or work unproductively resulting in dismissals, personal relationships are destroyed, drug financing is required to fund the habit, the list goes on.