[ExI] Race Biology (was Larks vs Night Owls)

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:05 PM, The Avantguardian <
avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> --- Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
> > What characteristics are you referring to?  Race and therefore
> > "racial
> > characteristics" are a scientific fallacy, as surely you realize.
>
> Racial characteristics are simply those highly visible ones that
> despite being very small subset of a person's overall genetic makeup,
> are used to lump them together and judge them in less than sensible
> ways.


### No. Racial characteristics are inherited properties (i.e. alleles) that
allow the grouping of humans into large groups of persons related by common
ancestry. Whether a characteristic is phenotypic, visible, or not, does
determine whether it is a racial characteristic.

----------------------------------------------------


> I didn't say that race was a scientific fallacy, I said it was a
> biological one.


### No, race is a biological fact.

 -------------------------------

> Race is almost entirely cultural so it is more the
> purview of anthropologists, ethnographers, and other social scientists
> rather than of biologists.


### Race is not in the least determined by culture. It is a property related
to common descent.

--------------------------------------


> To a biologist, all M&Ms are chocolate on
> the inside no matter color what color they are on the outside.


### Huh?

----------------------------------

 Genetically there is far more variability within the so-called races

> than between them.


### Look up "Lewontin's Fallacy".

--------------------------------------------


> That is to say that if one were to define genetic
> relatedness as how similar someone is to you in terms of how they are
> "spelled" by a sequence of the As,Ts,Cs, and Gs instead of whether they
> are a member of your immediate family or not, then statistically, you
> should have relatives of another race that is more related to you
> genetically than any member of your race short of your identical twin.



### No. Actually impossible. Since race is defined by common descent, you
can't be more closely related to a person of another race than to members of
your own race. It's simply impossible by definition.

------------------------------------------------

> This is because unless your family has been inbreeding for several
> generations, the most genetic similarity you can have with a child,
> parent, or sibling is about 50%. But there likely is someone out there
> in Africa that is related to you on the order 75% or more at the
> genetic level.


### Really, totally ridiculous.


---------------------------------------------------

>
>
> > This is an important point. Many people today ignorantly assume
> > that there is some racial difference between two of the remaining
> > Democratic Party candidates running for president here in the U.S.
> > Time and time I hear one of them being regarded as "black", as
> > though he were of a different "race", or were partly of a different
> > "race". You would not believe how widespread this fallacy is here.


### I have a PhD in human molecular genetics from Ruprecht-Karls Universitat
in Heidelberg, Germany. I say that Ms Clinton and Mr Obama are of different
races. Who's ignorant?

-----------------------------------------------

 I don't think it is so much a case of ignorance so much as an activesocial
conditioning thrust upon them from birth with an "us versusthem" mentality
where the "us" is distinguished from the "them" on

> arbitrary and irrational criteria. In this regard, racists are victims
> as much as perpetrators.


### Assholes will always find a reason to hate an outgroup. This is
completely irrelevant to the biological question of whether you can divide
humans into large groups related by descent.

---------------------------------------------------


>
>
> > It gets worse. Much worse. The New England Journal of Medicine
> > actually reported an investigation of differences in the
> > effectiveness
> > of two types of hypertension medication in the so-called "black"
> > people and the so-called "white" people here in the U.S.  You won't
> > believe this, but they even went on---surely in the full knowledge
> > that race is a biological fallacy (they're surely not that un-read)
> > ---to allude to a so-called "fact" that the so-called "black" people
> > are more likely than the so-called "white" people to have nitric-
> > oxide insufficiency. (Can you believe it??)


### I really despise the idea that somebody would denounce and suppress
life-saving research, if that research acknowledges the biological reality
of race.


Rafal
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