Some facts about race

Procrustes Stretched

And you say, "Oh my God, am I here all alone?"
Dec 1, 2008
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Maybe a space to put links on is needed? I always like a short cut to valuable content when discussing things like race. There is so much trash :lol: out there.

Race and genetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless. They argue that since genetic distance increases in a continuous manner any threshold or definitions would be arbitrary. Any two neighboring villages or towns will show some genetic differentiation from each other and thus could be defined as a race. Thus any attempt to classify races would be imposing an artificial discontinuity on what is otherwise a naturally occurring continuous phenomenon.

However, other scientists disagree by claiming that the assertion that race is biologically meaningless is politically motivated and that genetic differences are significant. Neil Risch states that numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races with regard to susceptibility and natural history of a chronic disease. Effectively Neil Risch is attempting to redefine "race" for human populations to represent that small proportion of variation that is known to vary between continental populations. It is well established, that the level of differentiation between the continental human groups, as measured by the statistic FST is about 0.06-0.1 (6-10%), with about 5-10% of variation at the population level (that is between different populations occupying the same continent) and about 75-85% of variation within populations.(Risch et al., 2002; Templeton, 1998; Ossorio and Duster, 2005; Lewontin, 2005). Tempeton (1998) states that in biology a level of 0.25-0.3 (20-30%) of differentiation normally accepted in biological literature for a population to be considered a race or subspecies.

"A standard criterion for a subspecies or race in the nonhuman literature under the traditional definition of a subspecies as a geographically circumbscribed, sharply differentiated population is to have FST values of at least 0.25 to 0.3 (Smith et al. 1997). Hence as judged by the criterion in the nonhuman literature, the human FST value is too small to have taxonomic significance under the traditional subspecies definition."(Templeton, 1998)

Indeed Neil Risch himself avoids defining race, when asked to respond to the comment "Genome variation research does not support the existence of human races.” he replied

What is your definition of races? If you define it a certain way, maybe that's a valid statement. There is obviously still disagreement....Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I'm not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways.(Gitschier, 2005)
 
Maybe a space to put links on is needed? I always like a short cut to valuable content when discussing things like race. There is so much trash :lol: out there.

Race and genetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless. They argue that since genetic distance increases in a continuous manner any threshold or definitions would be arbitrary. Any two neighboring villages or towns will show some genetic differentiation from each other and thus could be defined as a race. Thus any attempt to classify races would be imposing an artificial discontinuity on what is otherwise a naturally occurring continuous phenomenon.

However, other scientists disagree by claiming that the assertion that race is biologically meaningless is politically motivated and that genetic differences are significant. Neil Risch states that numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races with regard to susceptibility and natural history of a chronic disease. Effectively Neil Risch is attempting to redefine "race" for human populations to represent that small proportion of variation that is known to vary between continental populations. It is well established, that the level of differentiation between the continental human groups, as measured by the statistic FST is about 0.06-0.1 (6-10%), with about 5-10% of variation at the population level (that is between different populations occupying the same continent) and about 75-85% of variation within populations.(Risch et al., 2002; Templeton, 1998; Ossorio and Duster, 2005; Lewontin, 2005). Tempeton (1998) states that in biology a level of 0.25-0.3 (20-30%) of differentiation normally accepted in biological literature for a population to be considered a race or subspecies.

"A standard criterion for a subspecies or race in the nonhuman literature under the traditional definition of a subspecies as a geographically circumbscribed, sharply differentiated population is to have FST values of at least 0.25 to 0.3 (Smith et al. 1997). Hence as judged by the criterion in the nonhuman literature, the human FST value is too small to have taxonomic significance under the traditional subspecies definition."(Templeton, 1998)

Indeed Neil Risch himself avoids defining race, when asked to respond to the comment "Genome variation research does not support the existence of human races.” he replied

What is your definition of races? If you define it a certain way, maybe that's a valid statement. There is obviously still disagreement....Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I'm not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways.(Gitschier, 2005)

I hope you don't mind if I take the discussion of race in a slightly different direction, but I recently saw an astounding quote from Justice Ginsburg. Did you see this?

"In an astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it "populations that we don't want to have too many of."
Her remarks, set to be published in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday but viewable online now, came in an in-depth interview with Emily Bazelon titled, "The Place of Women on the Court."


Ginsburg was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 1993.
Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973),
The court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7 to 2 majority vote in favor of McCorvey. Burger and Douglas' concurring opinion and White's dissenting opinion were issued separately, in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton. The opinion of the Roe Court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, and Associate Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist wrote emphatic dissenting opinions in this case. White wrote: “The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand.”
Majority
Harry Blackmun
Warren E. Burger
William O. Douglas
William J. Brennan
Potter Stewart
Thurgood Marshall
Lewis Powell
Minority
Byron White
William Rehnquist
 
One time a lawyer asked if the court would take "judicial notice" (i.e., deem credible) a Wikipedia article. The lawyer was a little bit on the older side. He thought Wikipedia was like the encyclopedia, etc. He didn't understand that the articles are written by anyone and can be changed by anyone.

All the other lawyers laughed their asses off -- even the ones on his side of the case.

Try again with your "facts", Dev.
 
Maybe a space to put links on is needed? I always like a short cut to valuable content when discussing things like race. There is so much trash :lol: out there.

Race and genetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless. They argue that since genetic distance increases in a continuous manner any threshold or definitions would be arbitrary. Any two neighboring villages or towns will show some genetic differentiation from each other and thus could be defined as a race. Thus any attempt to classify races would be imposing an artificial discontinuity on what is otherwise a naturally occurring continuous phenomenon.

However, other scientists disagree by claiming that the assertion that race is biologically meaningless is politically motivated and that genetic differences are significant. Neil Risch states that numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races with regard to susceptibility and natural history of a chronic disease. Effectively Neil Risch is attempting to redefine "race" for human populations to represent that small proportion of variation that is known to vary between continental populations. It is well established, that the level of differentiation between the continental human groups, as measured by the statistic FST is about 0.06-0.1 (6-10%), with about 5-10% of variation at the population level (that is between different populations occupying the same continent) and about 75-85% of variation within populations.(Risch et al., 2002; Templeton, 1998; Ossorio and Duster, 2005; Lewontin, 2005). Tempeton (1998) states that in biology a level of 0.25-0.3 (20-30%) of differentiation normally accepted in biological literature for a population to be considered a race or subspecies.

"A standard criterion for a subspecies or race in the nonhuman literature under the traditional definition of a subspecies as a geographically circumbscribed, sharply differentiated population is to have FST values of at least 0.25 to 0.3 (Smith et al. 1997). Hence as judged by the criterion in the nonhuman literature, the human FST value is too small to have taxonomic significance under the traditional subspecies definition."(Templeton, 1998)

Indeed Neil Risch himself avoids defining race, when asked to respond to the comment "Genome variation research does not support the existence of human races.” he replied

What is your definition of races? If you define it a certain way, maybe that's a valid statement. There is obviously still disagreement....Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I'm not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways.(Gitschier, 2005)

I hope you don't mind if I take the discussion of race in a slightly different direction, but I recently saw an astounding quote from Justice Ginsburg. Did you see this?

"In an astonishing admission, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she was under the impression that legalizing abortion with the 1973 Roe. v. Wade case would eliminate undesirable members of the populace, or as she put it "populations that we don't want to have too many of."
Her remarks, set to be published in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday but viewable online now, came in an in-depth interview with Emily Bazelon titled, "The Place of Women on the Court."


Ginsburg was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 1993.
Roe v. Wade , 410 U.S. 113 (1973),
The court issued its decision on January 22, 1973, with a 7 to 2 majority vote in favor of McCorvey. Burger and Douglas' concurring opinion and White's dissenting opinion were issued separately, in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton. The opinion of the Roe Court, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, declined to adopt the district court's Ninth Amendment rationale, and instead asserted that the "right of privacy, and Associate Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist wrote emphatic dissenting opinions in this case. White wrote: “The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the mother, on the other hand.”
Majority
Harry Blackmun
Warren E. Burger
William O. Douglas
William J. Brennan
Potter Stewart
Thurgood Marshall
Lewis Powell
Minority
Byron White
William Rehnquist

please start a thread linking to the article and could you send me a message with a link to it? I am not here all day every day so it is quite likely I would miss this one.

thanks in advance
d.

;/)
 
One time a lawyer asked if the court would take "judicial notice" (i.e., deem credible) a Wikipedia article. The lawyer was a little bit on the older side. He thought Wikipedia was like the encyclopedia, etc. He didn't understand that the articles are written by anyone and can be changed by anyone.

All the other lawyers laughed their asses off -- even the ones on his side of the case.

Try again with your "facts", Dev.

the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:
 
the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:

I'm fairly well equipped. I've been reading on the subject for ten years, from popular treatments to heavy academic papers. I fly to conferences where this is the topic and listen to PhDs go back and forth. I have personal correspondence with a few of the top academics in the field, at least one of whom does field research. Behind me is a mini-library of about 25 volumes on the topic, from John Baker of Oxford's "Race" to Rushton's "Race, Evolution and Behavior" and on and on.

I don't know who wrote the wikipedia article -- conveniently, nobody takes credit -- but all the sources cited add up to a whoppingly cramped view of this huge subject. Lewontin, for instance, has been exposed pretty thoroughly as someone with a heavy ideological axe to grind. It's kind of hard to imagine, as well, that Howard Freakin' University isn't giving us a pretty biased view of the subject of race.

But never mind. The "facts" don't interest you, science doesn't interest you, research and statistics don't interest you... what interests you is the notion that all human beings are equal, and that all human groups are as well. Whatever. Most Republicans believe the exact same thing. Actually, come to think of it, our entire society is geared toward rewarding those who believe that and punishing those who don't. Again, big deal. This is not indicative of truth or untruth. The Catholic Church was once the most powerful force in the West and strictly forbade belief that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. It didn't make it true.
 
Last edited:
One time a lawyer asked if the court would take "judicial notice" (i.e., deem credible) a Wikipedia article. The lawyer was a little bit on the older side. He thought Wikipedia was like the encyclopedia, etc. He didn't understand that the articles are written by anyone and can be changed by anyone.

All the other lawyers laughed their asses off -- even the ones on his side of the case.

Try again with your "facts", Dev.

the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:

You shouldn't laugh at Moroms. They're very nice people.

But honey, wiki, while a useful tool, is frequently wrong because it's like a resting place for urban legends...
 
One time a lawyer asked if the court would take "judicial notice" (i.e., deem credible) a Wikipedia article. The lawyer was a little bit on the older side. He thought Wikipedia was like the encyclopedia, etc. He didn't understand that the articles are written by anyone and can be changed by anyone.

All the other lawyers laughed their asses off -- even the ones on his side of the case.

Try again with your "facts", Dev.

the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:

You shouldn't laugh at Moroms. They're very nice people.

But honey, wiki, while a useful tool, is frequently wrong because it's like a resting place for urban legends...
Everything on the internet is true, and I know that because I read it on the internet.
 
the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:

I'm fairly well equipped. I've been reading on the subject for ten years, from popular treatments to heavy academic papers. I fly to conferences where this is the topic and listen to PhDs go back and forth. I have personal correspondence with a few of the top academics in the field, at least one of whom does field research. Behind me is a mini-library of about 25 volumes on the topic, from John Baker of Oxford's "Race" to Rushton's "Race, Evolution and Behavior" and on and on.
really?

name a few of these 'top acedmics in the field' please.

I don't know who wrote the wikipedia article -- conveniently, nobody takes credit -- but all the sources cited add up to a whoppingly cramped view of this huge subject. Lewontin, for instance, has been exposed pretty thoroughly as someone with a heavy ideological axe to grind. It's kind of hard to imagine, as well, that Howard Freakin' University isn't giving us a pretty biased view of the subject of race.

But never mind. The "facts" don't interest you, science doesn't interest you, research and statistics don't interest you... what interests you is the notion that all human beings are equal, and that all human groups are as well. Whatever. Most Republicans believe the exact same thing. Actually, come to think of it, our entire society is geared toward rewarding those who believe that and punishing those who don't. Again, big deal. This is not indicative of truth or untruth. The Catholic Church was once the most powerful force in the West and strictly forbade belief that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe. It didn't make it true.

science interests me very much---not pseudo, but real science. I do not believe all humans are equal. research needs always to be peer reviewed otherwise it is nothing but opinion in a vacuum.

talk much to the choir do you?
 
the point is---morom, you are not equipped to critique or debate anything in a wikipedia article.

have a lousy life (I wouldn't want to get your expectations up) :eusa_whistle:

You shouldn't laugh at Moroms. They're very nice people.

But honey, wiki, while a useful tool, is frequently wrong because it's like a resting place for urban legends...
Everything on the internet is true, and I know that because I read it on the internet.

So you've decided to join the peanut gallery? sigh

the saddest part of IT all is there are people who do not know how top use wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very useful tool.

most---most people who knock it are ignorant and ill-equipped to attack or argue with what is linked to so they engage in attacks upon the abuses of wikipedia. that is not only silly but ignorant
 
You shouldn't laugh at Moroms. They're very nice people.

But honey, wiki, while a useful tool, is frequently wrong because it's like a resting place for urban legends...
Everything on the internet is true, and I know that because I read it on the internet.

So you've decided to join the peanut gallery? sigh

the saddest part of IT all is there are people who do not know how top use wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very useful tool.

most---most people who knock it are ignorant and ill-equipped to attack or argue with what is linked to so they engage in attacks upon the abuses of wikipedia. that is not only silly but ignorant

Regardless of the validity of Wiki articles, these people are missing the point. The quotation you provided makes excellent points. If those points are what they disagree with, they should debated the ideas presented, not whether Wiki is reliable.
 
Everything on the internet is true, and I know that because I read it on the internet.

So you've decided to join the peanut gallery? sigh

the saddest part of IT all is there are people who do not know how top use wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very useful tool.

most---most people who knock it are ignorant and ill-equipped to attack or argue with what is linked to so they engage in attacks upon the abuses of wikipedia. that is not only silly but ignorant

Regardless of the validity of Wiki articles, these people are missing the point. The quotation you provided makes excellent points. If those points are what they disagree with, they should debated the ideas presented, not whether Wiki is reliable.

STOP making sense. They've made a huge investment in appearing superior to their realities
 
Nobody can deny the existence of race for any other than political reasons. Genetics and anthropology can establish the race of a person quite easily.

Tracking SNPs can even narrow down lineages farther, beyond the major races, to many of the ethnicities. To deny race, you must deny evolution (many of the idiots on this board do), and you must deny DNA evidence in a court room as well as paternity tests. They are all the same DNA technology and they all measure the same thing: single nucleotide polymorphisms. By charting the changes in mDNA, the female line can be traced. By comparing Y-chromosome DNA, the male lineage can be traced. By comparing two compete genomes, a determination can be made as to whether the blood at the crime scene belongs to the defended or whether the child's DNA indicates the father is one of the six men the whore has brought to Maury.


Forensic anthropologists can, by examining the bone structure of a body, determine the individual's sex, approximate age, and race. This is possible because there are differences-- both geno- and phenotypical differences-- between the major races, and lesser differences between minor races. This is why some medicines work better for some races (a recent example is Bidil), and Sicilians couldn't take the anti-malarial of choice* in Korea.

*I do not recall the name of the drug
 
Nobody can deny the existence of race for any other than political reasons. Genetics and anthropology can establish the race of a person quite easily.

Tracking SNPs can even narrow down lineages farther, beyond the major races, to many of the ethnicities. To deny race, you must deny evolution (many of the idiots on this board do), and you must deny DNA evidence in a court room as well as paternity tests. They are all the same DNA technology and they all measure the same thing: single nucleotide polymorphisms. By charting the changes in mDNA, the female line can be traced. By comparing Y-chromosome DNA, the male lineage can be traced. By comparing two compete genomes, a determination can be made as to whether the blood at the crime scene belongs to the defended or whether the child's DNA indicates the father is one of the six men the whore has brought to Maury.


Forensic anthropologists can, by examining the bone structure of a body, determine the individual's sex, approximate age, and race. This is possible because there are differences-- both geno- and phenotypical differences-- between the major races, and lesser differences between minor races. This is why some medicines work better for some races (a recent example is Bidil), and Sicilians couldn't take the anti-malarial of choice* in Korea.

*I do not recall the name of the drug

Do you believe we hve a common ancetsor and that the whiteness of skin of Europeans is from environmental factors?
 

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