Race is a Social Construct. (Scientific Fact from Meta data)
This post comes from discussions I've had with another member recently, where first they used the term race as a distinct identifier and secondly they believed racism was natural and something everyone has. I agreed phenotypical preference exists in like for like and they had stated we like to be nearest to people similar to ourselves...
Well, what does that mean from a Scientific point of view?
The consensus amongst Scientist these days is Race is a Social Construct and Science backs this up.
Let me explain this for people who are getting there head around this with a number of simple Scientific examples.
So why isn't skin colour a good indicator of similarities and differences between people?
"It's a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it's a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from," said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.
"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who worked on the Neanderthal genome but was not involved with the new paper.
"What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."
In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races have had obvious social and historical repercussions, and they still threaten to fuel racist beliefs. That was apparent two years ago, when several scientists bristled at the inclusion of their research in Nicholas Wade's controversial book, "A Troublesome Inheritance" (Penguin Press, 2014), which proposed that genetic selection has given rise to distinct behaviors among different populations. In a letter to The New York Times, five researchers wrote that "Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development."
The authors of the new Science article noted that racial assumptions could also be particularly dangerous in a medical setting.
"If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease. [The Best Genealogy Software for Tracing Your Family Tree]
Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, thinks the changes proposed in the Science article are "badly needed." Fullilove noted that by some laws in the United States, people with one black ancestor of 32 might be called "black," but their 31 other ancestors are also important in influencing their health.
One of the problems, with youtubers and other people who promote race and by association racism across the internet, is they simply have no understanding of modern genetics.
So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Pääbo said geography might be a better substitute in regions such as Europe to define "populations" from a genetic perspective. However, he added that, in North America, where the majority of the population has come from different parts of the world during the past 300 years, distinctions like "African Americans" or "European Americans" might still work as a proxy to suggest where a person's major ancestry originated.
Yudell also said scientists need to get more specific with their language, perhaps using terms like "ancestry" or "population" that might more precisely reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the individual and population level. The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social, but not biological, variable.
"While we argue phasing out racial terminology in the biological sciences, we also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities between groups," Yudell said.
Scientific Racism comes from a variety of Sources, but it's roots go back to craniology and Samuel Morton long ago in the 19th Century. Craniology was debunked before modern genetics.
Pioneer DNA researchers like James Watson, one of the four of Watson, Wilkins, Crick and Franklin fame, struggled with the findings of the Human Genome project.
Morton thought he’d identified immutable and inherited differences among people, but at the time he was working—shortly before Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution and long before the discovery of DNA—scientists had no idea how traits were passed on. Researchers who have since looked at people at the genetic level now say that the whole category of race is misconceived. Indeed, when scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
Over the past few decades, genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations.
As for Skin
“What the genetics shows is that mixture and displacement have happened again and again and that our pictures of past ‘racial structures’ are almost always wrong,” says David Reich, a Harvard University paleogeneticist whose new book on the subject is called Who We Are and How We Got Here. There are no fixed traits associated with specific geographic locations, Reich says, because as often as isolation has created differences among populations, migration and mixing have blurred or erased them.
Across the world today, skin color is highly variable. Much of the difference correlates with latitude. Near the Equator lots of sunlight makes dark skin a useful shield against ultraviolet radiation; toward the poles, where the problem is too little sun, paler skin promotes the production of vitamin D. Several genes work together to determine skin tone, and different groups may possess any number of combinations of different tweaks. Among Africans, some people, such as the Mursi of Ethiopia, have skin that’s almost ebony, while others, such as the Khoe-San, have skin the color of copper. Many dark-skinned East Africans, researchers were surprised to learn, possess the light-skinned variant of SLC24A5. (It seems to have been introduced to Africa, just as it was to Europe, from the Middle East.) East Asians, for their part, generally have light skin but possess the dark-skinned version of the gene.
Interestingly
THERE’S MORE DIVERSITY IN AFRICA THAN ON ALL THE OTHER CONTINENTS COMBINED.
That’s because modern humans originated in Africa and have lived there the longest. They’ve had time to evolve enormous genetic diversity—which extends to skin color. Researchers who study it sometimes use Africa’s linguistic diversity—it has more than 2,000 languages (see map below)—as a guide. Photographer Robin Hammond followed their lead, visiting five representative language communities. His portraits span the color spectrum from Neilton Vaalbooi (top left in photo grid above), a Khoe-San boy from South Africa, to Akatorot Yelle (bottom right), a Turkana girl from Kenya. “There is no homogeneous African race,” says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania. “It doesn’t exist.” The prehistoric humans who left Africa some 60,000 years ago—giving rise over time to the other peoples of the world—reflected only a fraction of Africa’s diversity.
So, if you're a racist, despite what some youtubers will tell you, there is no Science behind it.
This is wrong. The consensus among scientists is that the perception of others being "different" from you (AKA, different race) is genetic.
In fact, these findings are so ubiquitous among humans of all ages that the scientist concluded that, "Everybody is a little bit racist."
It's a central part of human evolution where tribal warfare abounded and specific behaviors influenced by our genes were selected for to increase the survivability of our proto-human ancestors.
I covered this already with citations, as well.
Why are you still posting your SJW pseudo-science?
Anyway, carry on with your copy-paste troll thread which was probably aimed at me because you're upset that I pointed out your long held SJW belief is based on pseudo-science and feel-good ideas.
No mate you are clearly struggling with this Race is not Genetic, you are struggling with the difference between Phenotype and Genotype.
I get why, unless you did it to degree level or beyond it's hard. You are as likely to share the same number of genes with a Korean as someone who has your phenotype.
In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that the vast majority of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies (Figure 1B).
If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races (Figure 1B).
Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other.
I'll go ahead and ignore the recent science of it and human evolutionary biology because your feelings got hurt over the fact that race is human perception at a genetic level, not just a social construct.
What will I do with this enlightenment your pseudo-science has given me? Oh, right, nothing changes.
So what does it get you to deny science like you're doing? Infants still have racist behaviors and these behaviors continue on into adulthood. Even people who claim to be enlightened like you are still racist. So what do I gain by denying actual science and believing in your pseudoscience?
In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that the vast majority of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies (Figure 1B).
If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races (Figure 1B).
Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other.
In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that the vast majority of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies (Figure 1B).
If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races (Figure 1B).
Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other.
Your confusing Phenotypical preferences to the Genotype.
Fact is never a strawman, you confused phenotype with germline, I understand this. The studies you looked at were cognition based and as with many things require education to solve. You actually have the answer in your post, you educate children about colour literally being skin deep and they are as likely to have as many similarities with someone who looks very different as with someone who looks similar.
But about skin colour...
Across the world today, skin color is highly variable. Much of the difference correlates with latitude. Near the Equator lots of sunlight makes dark skin a useful shield against ultraviolet radiation; toward the poles, where the problem is too little sun, paler skin promotes the production of vitamin D. Several genes work together to determine skin tone, and different groups may possess any number of combinations of different tweaks. Among Africans, some people, such as the Mursi of Ethiopia, have skin that’s almost ebony, while others, such as the Khoe-San, have skin the color of copper. Many dark-skinned East Africans, researchers were surprised to learn, possess the light-skinned variant of SLC24A5. (It seems to have been introduced to Africa, just as it was to Europe, from the Middle East.) East Asians, for their part, generally have light skin but possess the dark-skinned version of the gene.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
Yep, DDM owned himself by embarrassing Putinbot so thoroughly, poor DDM.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
Can somebody dumb this down for a non-native speaker?
How can race be a social construct when there are visible physiological traits to each individual race? Or are we talking about persived differences in behaivour of different races?
__________________
Azula: My mommy didn't love me so I'm going to burn down your village.
I admire the way he slaps down Putinbot on a consistent basis.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
If race is a social construct...then I say YES to reparations for black people!
I now identify as a time traveling former black slave.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
KMC Community Forums
Mar 28th, 2019 10:21 AM
