Is race biological, or important to you?

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JakobVirgil
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04 Apr 2011, 3:52 pm

John_Browning wrote:

JakobVirgil wrote:

TheKing wrote:

JakobVirgil wrote:

TheKing wrote:

what I learned at school(from the Bill Nye the Science Guy videos) is that all humans are the same exact color(excluding albinos as they lack pigmentation) we are ALL brown but it varies between light and dark brown

thats what my nine year old says. it bothered her that the african american kids at school said they were black.
(when they are obviously brown) she was eight at the time. (maybe aspie or just raised wrong).

are you insinuating Bill Nye is an aspie? or ur daughter? lol

my daughter for choosing literalism.
she also says that she is mexican cuz she was born in Arizona and does not accept the mexican-american war as valid.
a little bit of a radical view for a nine year old. :lol:

Then she needs to read up on the 1847 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853 Gadsen purchase.

exactly- she backed down when I told her we both stole it from the Dene, Pima and Hopi.
but I can still see i her eyes she still belives it.

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RedHanrahan
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04 Apr 2011, 4:26 pm

JakobVirgil wrote:

TheKing wrote:

JakobVirgil wrote:

TheKing wrote:

are you insinuating Bill Nye is an aspie? or ur daughter? lol

I like your daughters thinking, I have long asserted that I am a 'Celtic Polynesian' not a European or Caucasian etc...

peace j

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RedHanrahan
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04 Apr 2011, 4:36 pm

zer0netgain wrote:

Frankly, I'm surprised people need to research this to know it's true.

When it comes to "race" it's not just a gene controlling skin color. Breeding habits also factor in.

There are some very intelligent and successful African-Americans. What percent of the total population of African-Americans do they represent?

If two stupid people breed, what are the odds of producing a smart kid?

Of course, this applies more to a question of the culture. A community that strives for excellence and where the women have standards of who they will take as a mate leads to children more disposed to be successful and intelligent. A community that tolerates indiscriminate breeding for the sake of pleasure likely produces more children of questionable potential.

Over time, cultural standards wind up determining the overall potential of any given member of a racial group.

Dumb white people = high chance of dumb white children.

Smart white people = high chance of smart white children.

refer Italics -

This would depend on how many genetic differences there are between the two people, if they are two dumb people from very different genetic pools the principle of 'hybrid vigor' says that there is a high probability of some exceptional talents being present, or exceptional diamorphism. There is no reason why this shouldn't be present as higher intelligences.
Conversely if you have two fairly smart, successful people from very close genetic pools the chances of merely 'typical' or reduced talents manefesting are increased.

peace j

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RedHanrahan
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04 Apr 2011, 4:39 pm

marshall wrote:

TheKing wrote:

If you exclude parts of my neck, face, and forearms that receive sunlight, my skin color is closer to light-pink than light-brown. I see the point that calling different types of skin pigmentation "white", "black", "brown", "olive", "red", or "yellow" is bit ridiculous though. That kind of naming scheme definitely implies a certain degree of exaggeration of the differences. All healthy people have skin that is basically some combination of pink, tan, and brown, coming from the color of cutaneous blood capillaries and two main types of pigmentation.

I find this preoccupation with physical difference odd, surely most pro's and con's of difference result from cultural difference between racial groups, this is certainly the case in this country.

peace j

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codarac
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04 Apr 2011, 4:50 pm

Telekon wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

There are no pure "races". The human race is a species and males and females of any so-called race can mate and produce viable and fertile offspring, which is pretty well what happened. The human race consists of lots of "mutts". Race has no biological definition. Two specimens are of the same species if they can interbreed and produce viable and fertile offspring. So there is really only one race -- the human race.

ruveyn

Your first and last statements are contradictory. If there are impure races, then there is obviously more than one race. So which is it -- are there impure races (implying more than one race) or is there only one race? And why would races have to be separate species in order to be a valid biological taxonomy? No one in the physical anthropology literature who embraces the notion of biological races regards them as separate species.

Ruveyn just copies and pastes the same crap whenever the topic of race crops up in this forum.

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04 Apr 2011, 6:58 pm

codarac wrote:

Telekon wrote:

ruveyn wrote:

Ruveyn just copies and pastes the same crap whenever the topic of race crops up in this forum.

Due to the evolutionary process, there have been mutations which have led to superficial, yet obviously apparent, differences over the tens of thousands of years. When people from one group interbred with another, they produced beautiful mutts from which we are all derived from, over the centuries. That intermixing is what has kept the various superficial mutations from evolving into new human species.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

ruveyn
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04 Apr 2011, 8:44 pm

codarac wrote:

Ruveyn just copies and pastes the same crap whenever the topic of race crops up in this forum.

I use only original material. In short I copy and paste my own stuff. And for good reason. I am right.

ruveyn

phil777
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04 Apr 2011, 10:54 pm

At least you can't say he isn't being inconsistent. <.<

I would also like to remind you people that the environnement also plays a role in someone's phenotype (their observable characteristics) (and possibly their genotype, although that happens over generations). If you don't believe me, look at cases of adoption. <.<

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05 Apr 2011, 3:43 am

phil777 wrote:

Environment and choice shapes the material the genes provide. In human affairs, culture is nearly everything and race (in the genetic sense) is nearly nothing.

ruveyn

simon_says
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05 Apr 2011, 3:46 pm

But there are also straight up advantages and differences.

90% of tibetans have a gene package that is believed to help them maintain normal levels of blood oxygen at higher altitude. Normal people have a hard time functioning at those elevations until they acclimate and even then they are at constant risk for altitude sickness. One in particular is called EPAS1 or the "athlete gene" and they believe it only took 3,000 years to reach this distribution in the Tibetan population.

http://www.biotechniques.com/news/Faste ... 99799.html

I think it's reasonable that we'll find many adaptions in populations that give them small advantages in this or that.

ryan93
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05 Apr 2011, 4:08 pm

simon_says wrote:

I recently read a paper on "rapid" evolution in humans. There are very few genes (~20) that evolved in less than 10,000 years. Your one is a particularly interesting example, others are the Europeans lactose-tolerance genes, and another case of high altitude genes in South America IIRC. I imagine plague resistance genes (come to think of it, I think that CCR5 was responsible for that immunity) also increased in frequency rapidly.

Overall, there aren't many cases of rapid evolution in people, and I imagine that implies there are relatively few major biological differences.

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ruveyn
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05 Apr 2011, 4:11 pm

ryan93 wrote:

Overall, there aren't many cases of rapid evolution in people, and I imagine that implies there are relatively few major biological differences.

Rapid human evolution is memetic (cultural) and not genetic. Cultural evolution has a Lamarckian aspect not found in Darwinian genetic evolution. Cultural evolution is rapid and has become the primary way the human race changes its ways of living.

ruveyn

ryan93
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05 Apr 2011, 4:20 pm

ruveyn wrote:

ryan93 wrote:

Overall, there aren't many cases of rapid evolution in people, and I imagine that implies there are relatively few major biological differences.

I agree. That was one of the reasons I included the world "biological" in my post; because there are major differences between cultures. I doubt that cognitive ability varies between races, given the slow rate of evolution. It would be nice to know the starting size of each group that migrated out of Africa, so that we could work out the precise probability of IQ differences (the larger the group, the smaller the chance).

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simon_says
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05 Apr 2011, 4:22 pm

Quote:

Overall, there aren't many cases of rapid evolution in people, and I imagine that implies there are relatively few major biological differences

There are also not many examples of Earth-like rocky planets around other solar systems. That says more about the nature of our detection equipment and the fact that the search has just begun that the actual presence of small rocky planets. Similarly our genetic exploration has only recently begun. The 1,000 genome project has only recently begun and that's a pretty small sample out of 6 billion + people. There is a ridiculous amount of work to do to actually understand each genes function and contrast and compare it's distribution between population groups. They might understand a fraction of it in my lifetime.

There is also an example of a region of Italy where a mutated gene in the past few hundred years has left a % of the population with increased resistance to heart disease.
http://medicine.org/apo-a1-milano-gene- ... t-disease/

ryan93
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05 Apr 2011, 4:43 pm

simon_says wrote:

Quote:

Overall, there aren't many cases of rapid evolution in people, and I imagine that implies there are relatively few major biological differences

Thanks for posting the link, it was pretty interesting.

We do, however, know the mutation rate per generation, the ratio of deleterious to neutral to positively selected (the last was determined by the 1,000 genome project, IIRC), so we can estimate how often a strongly beneficial mutation pops up. I've never computed the number myself, but I imagine it is very low. For every "resistant to heart disease" gene, there are ten de novo NF1 (neurofibrin gene) mutations (one of which is actually in my family).

I know there are other mechanisms that can lead to more rapid evolution (usually involving the re-gigging on pre-evolved material), but I reckon the rate of creation for positive mutation is minuscule.

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simon_says
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05 Apr 2011, 5:12 pm

Sure. Yet they still occur else we wouldnt be here. And the differences don't have to come directly from recent mutation, they can come from a founder effect following the african diaspora as populations fanned out. Some very old genes might be more represented heading east than north. They didnt count them on the way out and make sure everyone had the exact same set.

And if there can be genetic differences between people, there can of course be differences in distribution in populations. They may not add up to much in the larger scheme of things but they are there.

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