Is political correctness anti-scientific?

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Race is a pseudoscientific concept constructed in the Early Modern Era by high-ranking Westerners to help maintain their own personal interests: A classic example of why it is useful for the elites is the Old South Example: In the Old South, the poor, landless whites had much more in common with the slaves than they did with the rich gentry who owned the slaves yet the gentry would not benefit from an alliance between all the poor people, who vastly outnumbered them, and thus they needed a scapegoat: The African-Americans; thus, we get the stereotype of the dangerous African-American male obsessed with raping white women and other such idiocy. Another great example can be seen here. This still happens today, with poor people of "different" races fighting each other instead of their real enemies, the rich; we see this with the obsession of so many poor, hard working European-Americans with poor, hard working immigrants from Mexico and such stupid defenses of their resentment of the Mexican-Americans as "they will take our jobs"; how often does an American citizen choose to work in dusty, pesticide-ridden fields in the hot sun all day for minimum wage? Very rarely, and certainly not enough to be considered "taking jobs." In reality, there is plenty of work to be done in the USA for everyone but we simply chose as a society to send manufacturing jobs and low-level service jobs to India, China and other countries that have far less unemployment than we do.

And about "racial differences": How do you account for the vastly greater genetic diversity in Africa than in everywhere beyond the continent?

I think that cultural differences and cultural worth are far more important in determining human relations than any negligible genetic differences but, as they are much more complicated and nuanced than the artificial concept of "race", they are shied away from by most people. But they explain why China was so much more advanced than the West from the Shang Dynasty until the Warring States Period and from the Sui Dynasty until the Industrial Revolution, and why it is now rapidly getting ahead of the West again now, and why Chinese society, culture and civilization are so much more enduring than any other society on Earth.

It also explains the collapse of the Roman Empire, the development of the Inka Empire, again, in many ways, such as civil engineering and quality of life, more advanced than its Spanish conquerors.

In the first case, I see 3 main reasons why Rome fell: Christianity focused more on an imaginary death than the old Roman Religion, causing people to stop building the roads, aqueducts and the sewers for this world and try not to sin for fear of going to an imaginary pit of eternal torment; slavery, which did not exist in China for most of its history as a counterpoint, held back innovation; Greek philosophy also was so focused on the theoretical that it discouraged innovation in contrast to Confucianism, the state philosophy of Imperial China from the Han Dynasty onward and still highly influential today, which focused on reality and practicalities.

In the case of the Inka, their forced assimilation and clever Machiavellian social engineering allowed them to build a vast empire without much advanced technology, while their centrally planned economy could provide for all the subjects of the Sapa Inka efficiently and adequately by mobilizing the people for public works projects and to raise a large standing army to maintain order and authority throughout Inka territory.

Political correctness isn't anti scientific in the sense of race, but it is in the case of gender and sexual orientation. People are scared that they will offend someone if they state that there is a difference in the genders, or that homosexuality isn't natural/results in more STDs even though these statements are true.

Maybe debatable, but neither are vaccination, writing, automobiles, maize or for that matter anything else made by humans. Besides, if homosexuality is not natural, then why has it appeared in most, if not all, cultures on Earth, from modern Iran to Ancient Greece?

As humans, we are unique among life forms in that we are able to go beyond our biology and our nature and consciously modify ourselves and our environment be by society (as in the rise of complex societies in ancient times), genetics (as in agriculture), culture (as in the rise of different world religions) or technology (such as not living in caves.)

The argument that something is bad because it is not natural is silly at best but more often than not dangerous.

Point taken. Let us modify the proposition. Anything not based on fact is non-scientific.

ruveyn

Race is not 'based' on skin color. Our largely inaccurate racial categories are, but what race actually is are large populations descended from small bottlenecks. It's true that Africa has most of humanity's genetic diversity. It is also true that Africa has major cultural differences among the tribes to match up to it.

Plus quantity of diversity is not everything. Take for example, the Amazon rainforest - very diverse, but most of that diversity is stuff like bugs - in some ways it lacks things that other places have, such as large animals. African people are diverse but they do not have any groups that are say, evolved to live in the Arctic tundra, like Eskimos.

That's not true, sometimes it's a theory that one hopes will become fact.

Good point, I shouldn't have assumed that phenotypical differences would equal mental differences. I should have just said it's highly likely and seems unlikely that there wouldn't be a connection. I mean look at cats - orange cats seem to have a 'personality' as do black cats. I guess that's not really totally accurate as an analogy since cats don't have color races like we do, but it is connected to their genetics nevertheless.

As for the Native American thing - how closely related are Native Americans to the Chinese anyways? Sure, they came from Asia, but 15,000 years is going to change a lot, plus we're not even 100% sure they are of Asian origin. I agree that most of the differences in the test are probably due to cultural practices (in Asia for example, studying hard is religiously promoted, exaggerating the intelligence of the people there), however I do not think culture accounts for all of it. I reject the Bell Curve because I do think it has a racist agenda - IQ is a product of the European concept of intelligence so of course people who share the intellectual high points of white people are going to score higher than people who excel in different forms of intelligence.

If homosexuality isn't 'natural' why has homosexual behaviour been observed by scientists in over 1500 species?

If nature does it all on it's own - it is a natural behaviour. To condemn homosexuality as evil/unnatural is a fabrication of the abrahamic religions.

Of all the PC crap that we have to put with from our overlords, so far the only examples chosen to prove PC is anti-science are two things that science has already proven beyond all reasonable doubt to be utterly and totally wrong.

Skin colour determines nothing other than skin colour, the concept of race is as debunked as phlogiston is.
Homosexuality is a natural behaviour observed in hundreds of other species.

<insert favourite facepalm picture here>

For the record, I'm completely in favor of gay rights and I agree it is completely natural behaviour. I am also completely in favor of racial equality; I'm just skeptical of this idea that all races are equal in every single way and that race doesn't even exist.

I never said skin color determines anything. What I did say, is that people from different continents, who developed different physical and cultural traits, likely developed different psychological traits as well. I am not 100% sure of this because it is extremely difficult to isolate such traits, but it would make no sense if people changed physically and culturally as they migrated around the world, but somehow their psychological traits remained identical among every population.

Science isn't a democracy. It is a dictatorship of the facts.

How can you be completely in favour of racial equality and also skeptical of racial equality?



Evolution is not random, there was a massive genetic selection pressure to produce the variation in skintone that we see today that pressure existed because the of issues of UV radiation, cancer and vitamin D production. these were things that we couldn't solve any other way at the time other than to go through the painfully slow process of evolution to fix it.

For humans we solve virtually all of our problems with our intelligence and opposable thumbs, if we want to eat fish we don't have to evolve into dolphin like creatures, we just invent a spear or a net or a hook on piece of string, so there is no selection pressure on us to change.

Race and culture are very, very different things and have nothing to do with each other.

Race does exist in the sense that all abstract concepts do. If you're studying sociology, yes, I would say race is a very real and pertinent concept. That said, I mean race as social construct rather than biological fact. It just so happens that in Western countries like the United States, our society has decided that the pigmentation of one's skin and the continent one's ancestors predominantly came from constitute an immutable, socially significant identity. Much of this is intertwined with a history of expanding European powers coming to dominate Africa, the Americas, and Australia and New Zealand. The conquered peoples came to be seen as lesser and in need of Christianity and civilization from the Europeans.

From a scientific standpoint, there are organisms with genomes reproducing and passing on genes/traits in a population/gene pool. For our convenience, populations that cannot mate and produce viable offspring are delineated as separate species, but this classification scheme breaks down in corner cases (e.g., ring species). Modern-day biologists usually do not divide modern humans into distinct subspecies or biological races because the boundaries are simply too blurred to make the categorization very useful. The course of human history has been filled with migrations, wars and conquests, intermarriage, and the like; there may be local variations in the propensity of some genes/traits in the human gene pool, but that's it.

No, theories are built on facts and attempt to explain observations. No scientific theory will ever become fact.

The idea of race is modern, and of European imperial origin.

As for political correctness, it depends what you mean. Most of what people would call "political correctness" could also be called "politeness." Or it could be called "moral relativism," like your example of religions and universalism. Usually, political correctness is simply defined by what it isn't. For example, it may be politically incorrect in Massachusetts to call for the legal dissolution of all gay unions that have ever taken place there, while where I live it is politically incorrect for me to oppose wars. In other words, it is politically unpopular, or against social norms to state such an opinion.

Is it scientific? No, it lies in the realm of political philosophy. I would caution anyone against deciding which political philosophy can be made into applied science...we've been down that road before with eugenics and ultimately the Holocaust.

I should also point out that everything is based on facts. Philosophy, religion, political ideologies, social science ad. finitum are all based on certain facts, but they not scientific. History is not scientific, but it's not anti-scientific, either.

Scientists themselves don't agree on the utility of the term race. Some run from it, others embrace it as useful. Forensic anthropologists strongly defend it. I doubt it will get decided here.

Whatever term we invent, genetic diversity between populations is real. Evolution wouldnt work without it. And we don't yet know the full extent of it. Maybe in 50 years.