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Geckoman
Joined: 07 Jun 2007
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 Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 8:58 am Post subject: Biologically There is No Such Thing as Race! |
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It is a scientific fact that "biologically" race does not exist.
"Race" does not exist biologically. I learned this in an anthropology class I took in college. Race is nothing more than an artificial concept that mankind created to classify and identify people. So race exists "sociologically" and "politically," but in the world of science, it does not.
Different places have different definitions and opinions about what makes one a member of a certain race. For example, in America, if you have just a little bit of African ancestry you are "black." But in Africa, if you have just a little bit of European ancestry then you are "white." So a guy who may be classified as "black" in America would be classified as "white" in Africa. So what makes one a member of a certain race is nothing more than perspective and has not scientific basis to it.
What if we took the American state of Oregon and said that the folks in Oregon, whom we call "Oregonians," are a "race." After all, there is a genetic similarity of people within a state. One reason is because people of a state usually marry people from that same state, and their kids usually marry people from that same state, and their kids usually marry people from that same state, and so on. And another reason is because immigrants would in the past, and still to this day, often settle in a state where many of their kind are at (for such reasons as having relatives there; having friends there whom came from the same country as them; because there would be a community of people of which they would have something in common with -- similar culture, language, etc -- as they came from the same country of origin; etc.) And wa-la, we have a race called "Oregonians." So we can create a new race out of any people of an location in the world.
It is so silly how humans are obsessed with race. Do we see cats obsessing and classifying themselves over their different appearances? Do cats sit around and go: "You are a black cat, and so your race is 'black', and cats with black but white dots are this race, and orange cats are that race, and white cats with some brown on the side are their own race," and so on. Hell no! (Cats are actually colorblind.) How about parakeets? Do they sit around and also obsess and categorize their own species into categories based on their different appearances? Absolutely not.
So biologically there is no such thing as race!
See this article that tells about how "biologically" race does not exist at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php or see below.
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Genetically Speaking, Race Doesn't Exist In Humans
Race doesn't matter. In fact, it doesn't even exist in humans. While that may sound like the idealistic decree of a minister or rabbi, it's actually the conclusion of an evolutionary and population biologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University, has analyzed DNA from global human populations that reveal the patterns of human evolution over the past one million years. He shows that while there is plenty of genetic variation in humans, most of the variation is individual variation. While between-population variation exists, it is either too small, which is a quantitative variation, or it is not the right qualitative type of variation -- it does not mark historical sublineages of humanity.
Using the latest molecular biology techniques, Templeton has analyzed millions of genetic sequences found in three distinct types of human DNA and concludes that, in the scientific sense, the world is colorblind. That is, it should be.
"Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans -- genetic differences," says Templeton. "Evolutionary history is the key to understanding race, and new molecular biology techniques offer so much on recent evolutionary history. I wanted to bring some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows the outcome is not even a close call: There's nothing even like a really distinct subdivision of humanity."
Templeton used the same strategy to try to identify race in human populations that evolutionary and population biologists use for non-human species, from salamanders to chimpanzees. He treated human populations as if they were non-human populations.
"I'm not saying these results don't recognize genetic differences among human populations," he cautions. "There are differences, but they don't define historical lineages that have persisted for a long time. The point is, for race to have any scientific validity and integrity it has to have generality beyond any one species. If it doesn't, the concept is meaningless."
Templeton's paper, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," is published in the fall 1998 issue of American Anthropologist, an issue almost exclusively devoted to race. The new editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist is Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Sussman and his guest editor for this issue, Faye Harrison, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina, have enlisted the talents and expertise of anthropologists across the discipline's four subdivisions -- biological, socio-cultural, linguistics and archeological anthropology -- plus Templeton and literary essayist Gerald L. Early, Ph.D., Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to provide a renewed perspective on race, a topic that historically is linked closely to anthropology.
"The folk concept of race in America is so ingrained as being biologically based and scientific that it is difficult to make people see otherwise," says Sussman, a biological anthropologist. "We live on the one-drop racial division -- if you have one drop of black or Native American blood, you are considered black or Native American, but that doesn't cover one's physical characteristics. Templeton's paper shows that if we were forced to divide people into groups using biological traits, we'd be in real trouble. Simple divisions are next to impossible to make scientifically, yet we have developed simplistic ways of dividing people socially."
Single Evolutionary Lineage
Templeton analyzed genetic data from mitochondrial DNA, a form inherited only from the maternal side; Y chromosome DNA, paternally inherited DNA; and nuclear DNA, inherited from both sexes. His results showed that 85 percent of genetic variation in the human DNA was due to individual variation. A mere 15 percent could be traced to what could be interpreted as "racial" differences.
"The 15 percent is well below the threshold that is used to recognize race in other species," Templeton says. "In many other large mammalian species, we see rates of differentiation two or three times that of humans before the lineages are even recognized as races. Humans are one of the most genetically homogenous species we know of. There's lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it's basically at the individual level. The between-population variation is very, very minor."
Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations.
"The pattern of overall genetic differences instead tells us that genetic lineages rapidly spread out to all of humanity, indicating that human populations have always had a degree of genetic contact with one another, and thus historically don't show any distinct evolutionary lineages within humanity," Templeton says. "Rather, all of humanity is a single long-term evolutionary lineage."
Templeton's analysis gives impetus to the trellis model of evolutionary lineages, as opposed to the candelabra model, still popular among many anthropologists. The candelabra model generally holds that humanity first evolved in Africa and then spread out of Africa into different populations in Europe and Asia. Picture a candelabra, then imagine three distinct populations emerging from a single stem, each of them separate genetic entities that have not mixed genes, and thus are distinct, biological races.
The trellis model pictures humanity as a latticework, each part having a connection with all other parts. It recognizes that modern humans started in Africa about 100 million years ago, but as humans spread, they also could, and did, come back into Africa, and genes were interchanged globally, not so much by individual Don Juans as through interchanges by adjacent populations.
"If you look down at any one part of a trellis, you see that all parts are interconnected," Templeton explains. "Similarly, with modern molecular evolutionary techniques, we can find over time genes in any one local area of humanity that are shared by all of humanity throughout time. There are no distinct branches, no distinct lineages. By this modern definition for race, there are no races in humanity."
Out of Africa
The candelabra model often is used to justify the "out of Africa" replacement theory, whereby modern humans descended from a single African population, expanding out of Africa and replacing the less advanced Old World humans in Europe, Asia and Africa.
Templeton's analysis suggests a less hostile scenario. "Traits can spread out of Africa to all of humanity because all of humanity is genetically interconnected," he says. "Spreading traits doesn't require spreading out and killing off all the earlier people. They're spread by reproducing with people -- it's make love, not war."
Sussman says one of his motivations in devoting his first issue of American Anthropologist to race was to show the relevance of anthropology both in the academic world and in our everyday lives.
"Historically, race has been a key issue in anthropology," says Sussman. "Since about 1910, anthropologists have been fighting this lack of understanding of what people are really like, how people have migrated and mixed together.
Anthropologists such as Franz Boas, W.E.B. Dubois, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu were in the forefront of warning people about the dangers of Nazism during the '30s and '40s, yet the anthropologists' profile on key issues in America has been so low recently that when President Clinton appointed a committee on race in 1997, there wasn't a single anthropologist on it.
"Anthropology, in some ways, has become too esoteric. One of my goals with the journal is to show what anthropologists are doing and how they relate to how we think and how we live."
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php |
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Last edited by Geckoman on Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:23 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Tony_Balony
Joined: 12 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:15 am Post subject: |
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It is so silly how humans are obsessed with race. Do we see cats obsessing and classifying themselves over their different appearances? Do cats sit around and go: "You are a black cat, and so your race is 'black', and cats with black but white dots are this race, and orange cats are that race, and white cats with some brown on the side are their own race," and so on. Hell no! (Cats are actually colorblind.) How about parakeets? Do they sit around and also obsess and categorize their own species into categories based on their different appearances? Absolutely not.
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Bosh.
When advocating diversity, people obsess over race. If there are no differences, then divesity has no value. I think you avocated diversity some how some way.
Because I am a human male, I prefer lighter skinned females. In that way, race has no matter but skin color does. |
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Treefarmer
Joined: 29 May 2007
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:28 am Post subject: |
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| Tony_Balony wrote: |
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It is so silly how humans are obsessed with race. Do we see cats obsessing and classifying themselves over their different appearances? Do cats sit around and go: "You are a black cat, and so your race is 'black', and cats with black but white dots are this race, and orange cats are that race, and white cats with some brown on the side are their own race," and so on. Hell no! (Cats are actually colorblind.) How about parakeets? Do they sit around and also obsess and categorize their own species into categories based on their different appearances? Absolutely not.
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Bosh.
When advocating diversity, people obsess over race. If there are no differences, then divesity has no value. I think you avocated diversity some how some way.
Because I am a human male, I prefer lighter skinned females. In that way, race has no matter but skin color does. |
you just attributed him advocating diversity so that you had an attack that had some grounding in logic. the OP didn't advocate diversity, he just pointed out that race is a very limited concept |
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Tony_Balony
Joined: 12 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:38 am Post subject: |
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| you just attributed him advocating diversity so that you had an attack that had some grounding in logic. the OP didn't advocate diversity, he just pointed out that race is a very limited concept |
He didn't advocate diversity, but he does now or will in the future. These kinds of articles are published in magazines and on websites that advocate diversity. Its supposed to lighten the opponents up. |
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bejarano-korea
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 9:57 am Post subject: |
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| race has no matter but skin color does. |
Yes but you are a cretin, with the IQ of tapwater. |
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SPINOZA
Joined: 10 Jun 2005
Location: $eoul
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:05 am Post subject: |
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We've been through this soooo many times, but okay......
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| Biologically There is No Such Thing as Race! |
I don't know, but linguistically and conceptually, there is such a thing and it serves a purpose.
Compare with 'country'. We all know that countries are not objective entities, yet who would in their right mind deny that the countries exist? Is there no such thing as the country Germany? Well, in a sense, no. Creatures from another planet who have no appreciation for the difference between the French and German languages will observe little if any difference. Germany's existence is kind of our imagination, certainly our construction (even though Germans and French will point to a physical barrier, the Rhine, as a dividing line and also island peoples like the British and the Japanese have regarded themselves as distinct races, which is certainly bunk in the Brits' case).
So, denying the existence of races, to me, is uninteresting and fruitless given, firstly, there are a million and one things we know don't exist yet presuppose in ordinary language (countries, the Western and Eastern hemispheres) and, next, the term can be used defensibly in a variety of contexts, such as, from the dictionary, (3c) a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans, (4) a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock: the Slavic race, (5) any people united by common history, language, cultural traits, etc.: the Dutch race
Replacing the unpleasant-sounding 'race' here with something more PC-sounding, like 'people', is entirely fruitless, given the important items in these utterances are the adjectives 'Slavic' and 'Dutch'.
Imagine the following conversation between A and B:
A: The Dutch are generally the tallest race in Europe.
B: Ah, but there's no such thing as 'race'.
A: Okay, the Dutch are generally the tallest in Europe.
B: erm......
Person A made 2 statements of exactly the same meaning, yet Person B found himself unable to deny the existence of the Dutch yet was able to deny the existence of race. So, whilst biologically I'm fine with the conclusion there's no such thing as race - I'll take their word for it - I am not happy with the inevitable language fascism that results from things like this. Also interestingly, this conclusion is hijacked by the knuckledraggers who wish to make assertions like "Koreans are stupid" or "Africans are inferior" without the charge of racism (where racism is another perfectly defensible presupposition of the existence of races).
I say think on. |
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dogshed
Joined: 28 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:09 am Post subject: |
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You are right. We need to understand that race is a cultural construct.
However, just because it's a cultural construct does not mean it isn't real. |
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Tony_Balony
Joined: 12 Apr 2007
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:28 am Post subject: |
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bejarano-korea,
You are inferior to me, in every regard and manner. |
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bejarano-korea
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:44 am Post subject: |
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| Tony_Balony wrote: |
bejarano-korea,
You are inferior to me, in every regard and manner. |
Thats right, thats why you have a piece of spam as your sig pic you
halfwit!  |
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JMO
Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Location: Daegu
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 11:18 am Post subject: |
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| dogshed wrote: |
You are right. We need to understand that race is a cultural construct.
However, just because it's a cultural construct does not mean it isn't real. |
bingo. |
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Grimalkin
Joined: 22 May 2005
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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| I agree that 'race' can be a useful concept in certain situations for instance discussing cultural differences but it is also important to emphasise that 'race' has no biological basis in order to stress the point that no inherent/genetic superiority can be claimed for one group over another. |
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reactionary
Joined: 22 Oct 2006
Location: korreia
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 3:18 pm Post subject: |
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i think more interesting is the construction of the idea of a "white race" to unite peoples who historically hated each other...think nativists in the US of english heritage who despised all the low drunks coming in from german and ireland - there wasn't much white pride then. go back even further and you had near white-slavery with indentured servants.
fair skin wasn't always a ticket for full equality in the us. |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Grimalkin wrote: |
| I agree that 'race' can be a useful concept in certain situations for instance discussing cultural differences but it is also important to emphasise that 'race' has no biological basis in order to stress the point that no inherent/genetic superiority can be claimed for one group over another. |
WE need to wipe out all the Eskimos, and wipe them out now! |
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Alyallen
Joined: 29 Mar 2004
Location: The 4th Greatest Place on Earth = Jeonju!!!
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 4:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Grimalkin wrote: |
| I agree that 'race' can be a useful concept in certain situations for instance discussing cultural differences but it is also important to emphasise that 'race' has no biological basis in order to stress the point that no inherent/genetic superiority can be claimed for one group over another. |
But culture and race are not necessarily intertwined. For example, I'm Black but I wouldn't necessarily say I share the exact same culture as Blacks in America because my parents are not from America. So in a superficial way, I will be lumped in with one group where culturally I may be a member of a "subset" (?) that may be radically different. Or if I went to South Africa, I would be Black but culturally different....
Or how about this example. I have a friend who has parents from Europe but he was born and raised in South America. He is ethnically white but culturally he's not...
I guess race is useful in a superficial sense but if people stop and only think about people or things on that basic level, much is missed out... |
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Gamecock
Joined: 26 Nov 2003
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| Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 4:33 pm Post subject: |
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WHATEVER, OP!!!
I have been told on more than one occasion that Koreans have unique DNA which makes them susceptable to fan death. That is why fan death only occurs in Korea. I think this was on the news too once, therefore debunking your entire thesis!!! |
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