My Favourite Blog

My latest favourite blog ;


http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2008/10/whites-reluctance-to-talk-about-race.html


How about that "it's a flawed concept that doesn't accurately describe human variation" instead of "it has no biological relevance"

The statement that it "doesn't accurately describe human variation" is flawed. The totality of human variation can't be described by race -- and no one has ever claimed it can be.

What race does describe is a part of human variation. Knowing a person's race tells you something about their genotype and phenotype: for a single trait and a single individual often not much; for the combination of many traits or many individuals a lot.

Today, we know a lot about human genetic variation and all evidence points to clinical [sic] variation through a series of bottle necks.

All the evidence points to mankind being distinguished to many genetically distinguishable races and subraces. "Bottlenecks" are a way in which existing human variation may have come about. Accepting that bottlenecks happened in human evolution is not in any way inconsistent with the idea that mankind is divided into races.

Nothing from the past (even educational models) is so holy we can't discard in lieu of new data and even newer models reflect that data.

The newer data is perfectly consistent with the five races of traditional physical anthropology, and is indeed beginning to reveal unsuspected depth of substructure within the major races.


" How about that "it's a flawed concept that doesn't accurately describe human variation" instead of "it has no biological relevance"

The statement that it "doesn't accurately describe human variation" is flawed. The totality of human variation can't be described by race -- and no one has ever claimed it can be.

What race does describe is a part of human variation. Knowing a person's race tells you something about their genotype and phenotype: for a single trait and a single individual often not much; for the combination of many traits or many individuals a lot.Today, we know a lot about human genetic variation and all evidence points to clinical [sic] variation through a series of bottle necks.

All the evidence points to mankind being distinguished to many genetically distinguishable races and subraces. "Bottlenecks" are a way in which existing human variation may have come about. Accepting that bottlenecks happened in human evolution is not in any way inconsistent with the idea that mankind is divided into races.

Nothing from the past (even educational models) is so holy we can't discard in lieu of new data and even newer models reflect that data.

The newer data is perfectly consistent with the five races of traditional physical anthropology, and is indeed beginning to reveal unsuspected depth of substructure within the major races. "


" Another definition: A race is a group within a species, characterized by a set of inheritable traits which other such groups do not possess, as a result of separate selection forces.

It seems there are people who overthink race and fall into the trap of the fallacy of the corrupt continuum: that the observation that the concept is fuzzy means it should be discarded entirely.

Race doesn't have to be rigidly definable in order to be scientifically valid. "