The stickers appeared to be part of a campaign started on the forum website 4chan, which called upon followers to put up posters with the message in their area on Halloween night. The author of the original post on the site wrote that they hoped the “credibility of far left campuses and media gets nuked” as a result of the incident, adding that they could help achieve a “massive victory for the right in the culture war.”What "incident"? I guess it's "the incident" of whatever reaction the stickers provoke (rather than the putting up of the stickers). Just don't react and there's no incident. But there's an anodyne reaction: The Law School Dean of Students asserts that the stickers will not divide us and we believe in diversity. So that's very close to no reaction. This is really a nonstory as long as we don't talk about it, but Harvard Crimson wrote it up, and I got sent here from Instapundit and TaxProf Blog, so now I'm feeling as though this is bloggable, especially since I got into the rathole of the comments at the Crimson.
There's this, from Haardvark:
Brilliant -- the very same folks who may claim the stickers to be offensive (by interpreting them to mean "it's NOT okay to be anything else") are forced to reconcile their outrage with their "Black Lives Matter" =/= "No other lives matter" position.And then there's this kind of thing, by Thrifty:
Whoop-de-doo. Obviously there's a sense in which it's "okay to be white"—every person has a right to exist and be respected, including people categorized as "white". Less obviously (at least to white people like me), there's a sense in which the familiar cultural artifact called "whiteness" can be harmful, by making it easier to limit this right to exist and be respected to some people but not others, and, although it's a stretch, "being white" could be interpreted as "deliberately perpetrating or perpetuating this harmful system," which is not "okay". 4chan knows the first sense is obvious while the second is only widely recognized in academia, and is hoping to perpetrate a transparent fallacy of equivocation by getting us to point out the second and sound like we're attacking the first. Like most of this part of the internet's efforts to push memes, this one is thankfully hamstrung by its own idiocy and will die out soon.Which made Lukas Oman say:
You use a lot of words but you say essentially nothing. First, define "whiteness" for those of us who opted to take STEM courses and are naive to the concept.Thrifty steps up, but not in a strong enough way to make me want to bulk up this post with a quote, and it makes (((kingschitz))) say "Your word salad is a target rich opportunity" and "you’ve transformed all discussion into racial shaming." And Lukas Oman comes back to say a few things, including:
The concepts of whiteness, white fragility, racial microaggression, and even "equality", as it is defined now, are complicated constructs with more twists and turns and holes than the surface of a nanoporous ingot. And dude, you don't even go here.
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236 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 236 of 236"Because inbreeding has nothing to do with it. The affected population is huge. It's simple evolution towards population fitness."
It's still "inbreeding" with a huge population when that population is genetically similar to begin with, all live within the same environment, and it is not significantly altered by the introduction of new genes from a population of people outside that relatively closed community.
There is no "simple evolution toward population fitness," just random differences that appear, some of which are advantageous and some of which are disadvantageous. The more diverse the genetic information within a given community the less chance genetic concentrations will occur that can lead to debilitating hereditary diseases. Sometimes those genetic concentrations can be advantageous if they offer better adaptation to the environment, but they can also be disadvantageous.
How does the race-is-a-social-construct argument make sense of these findings?
I prefer this study.
Several studies including ours showed that genetic diversity in humans is higher between individuals of the same race (~85%) than between races (~15%) [4,24]. A good example is the wide variation observed in two African populations. The prevalence of HLA-B*5701 variant in the Masai group in Kenya is 13.6%; the frequency of the same allele was zero among the Yoruba in Nigeria and 5.8% among European ancestry.
In other words, if you're looking for the HLA-B*5701 variant, race tells you zip, nada, zilch and nothing. Not helpful at all!
Another seminal study is the complete sequence of two US scientists of European origin, namely, James Watson and Craig Venter, and an Asian scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. The two Europeans share fewer SNPs (461,000) than they each share with Seong-Jin Kim (569,000 and 481,000, respectively)
It's almost like brotherhood isn't a racial concept!
These results reflect a well-known feature of human diversity, that is, different genetic polymorphisms are distributed over the world in a discordant manner. These observations reveal characterization of races simply as “White” or “Caucasian”, “Asian”, “African”, or “Latino” which are poor predictors of human biological diversity or similarity.
I also like…
skin color cannot reflect the actual genetic ancestry of individuals.
Race is for lazy people.
Tim
That's ridiculous. Lots of apolitical taxonomy used in paleontology, zoology, botany and bacteriology.
And you and some other commenters are ignorant, out-of-date or confused; by definition races can interbreed, races are murky subspecies classifications. The ability to interbreed is the very definition of a species.
One of the things the genetics revolution is doing is reclassifying species, sometimes in surprising ways. For example, all geese are the same species, even the rare endangered Nene.
As a stubborn lumper in paleontology, I'm enjoying the trend.
Mother: Navin, it's your birthday, and it's time you knew. You're not our natural-born child.
Navin R. Johnson: You mean I'm going to stay this color??
What "liberals" do not think it's okay being white?
11/5/17, 5:06 PM
The ones at Harvard, obviously.
All I know is that back in the 1960s the goal of the civil rights movement was a colorblind society where people "will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Yesterday that dream died at Harvard.
I prefer this study.
Several studies including ours showed that genetic diversity in humans is higher between individuals of the same race (~85%) than between races (~15%) [4,24]. A good example is the wide variation observed in two African populations. The prevalence of HLA-B*5701 variant in the Masai group in Kenya is 13.6%; the frequency of the same allele was zero among the Yoruba in Nigeria and 5.8% among European ancestry.
Univariate thinking in a multivariate universe.
Race is for lazy people.
Generally, yes. While race is highly correlated with "color of skin", including genetic disposition, which may be useful for medical and reproductive purposes, it is a poor indicator of "content of character".
Race is like color, convenient classifications of continuous variability. We know what green is, we know what blue is, but somewhere in the middle...
Race is for lazy people.
On the other hand, we must consider character through proximity. That may require enhanced and therefore delayed judgment.
Tim
That's ridiculous. Lots of apolitical taxonomy used in paleontology, zoology, botany and bacteriology.
And you and some other commenters are ignorant, out-of-date or confused; by definition races can interbreed, races are murky subspecies classifications. The ability to interbreed is the very definition of a species
A) Whatever you are trying to do to pretend that race doesn't exist is just that, pretend. Maybe you can find other ways to classify groups of humans using some other criteria, but that doesn't make race non-existent. Maybe you are ignorant of the intricacies of logic, I don't know. But just because something that is clear to almost any human, and if you took a thousand humans and asked them to classify a given set of humans by race, unless you looked very hard for some outlier samples, the thousand people would come to the same classifications.
B) Who is being lazy are scientists who don't bother to find the tools to identify races as. it clearly exists, and so pretend it doesn't. I have been in Boston for a month, in a very diverse neighborhood, and I can tell you that there are real differences between blacks, East Asians, and Whites. You can pretend that this is all a social construct that would disappear if our culture disappeared, but that's like the Ancient Greek conceit that if you put a bunch of babies on an island, to learn language on their own, they would end up speaking Greek. It's nonsense and there is no proof.
But at least you are consistent, lumping polar bears with brown bears as a single species, regardless of morphology and habits.
Buwaya, one drop Rule is alive and well in determining who is Native American and who is not. If it wasn’t for one drop, some tribes would be “extinct”.
I specifically requested to be born Black. WTF?. Doesn't anybody do their job right these days?
The ability to interbreed is the very definition of a species.
No it isn’t. See my comment up-thread. So lions and tigers, bison and cattle, are the same species?
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If race doesn't exist, why is the official policy of the United States to discriminate based on race?
The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the right of private and public institutions to discriminate based on race? How could they do that f race didn't exist?
How could they do that if race didn't exist?
You're forgetting the most important color of all to white Americans. Its not "White" its "green".
Its all about the greenbacks baby. The white millionaires and the "comfortable" white middle class love their cheap colored labor. The only color they dislike is the white working class.
If you don't understand that, you're a dope.
Angel-Dyne
Research is being done on the relation between race and behavior. This research is using the old categories based on looks instead of other categories which might be formed by looking at the whole of DNA and which would be different. Looks exist and obviously it would be possible to find six loci which would identify a person as Irish and two more to identify them as Southern Irish. (By the way, these studies aren't wholly accurate yet, One of my sisters - Irish in looks and ancestry - has no Irish genes according to one of these DNA companies.) But my point is that behavior, so far as it is genetic, is based across hundreds of genes, so many, that the old racial categories wouldn't hold, and yet conclusions about race and behavior are being drawn based on studies that begin by dividing races instead of ending that way.
I spent much of the Obama administration pissing people off by calling Obama White.
Imagine what his life would be like if he identified as white.
His name would be different. He's still be Barry.
It's likely his wife would have been different, too. None of his early girlfriends are African-American. Barry might have married Alex McNear or Genevieve Cook or Sheila Jager. At some point in his life he made a conscious decision to identify as a black man and to marry a black woman.
Entirely possible that Harvard Law would have rejected the application of Barry Obama if he had checked the "white" box on the application.
Quaestor said...
“Many people that go to college lack the smarts and/or the tenacity to benefit in any real sense,” he wrote.
The longtime acquaintance was obviously drawing on personal experience. Does it take an Ivy League degree to not understand the usage of English pronouns, or can anybody play?
Anyone can play. The number of those playing grows larger every minute. The correct pronoun is obviously whom.
Saint Croix said...
I prefer this study.
"Several studies including ours showed that genetic diversity in humans is higher between individuals of the same race (~85%) than between races (~15%) [4,24]. "
That's "Lewotin's Fallacy":
In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example.
+++
So ha ha, Saint Croix, you should stick to subjects that you know something about, if there are any.
wildswan: But my point is...
You don't have a pertinent point, as is always the case when this topic comes up. You merely dredge up, and dredge up yet again, with increasing incoherence as a thread goes on, the decrepit straw-men and bogeymen that litter the imaginations and the "discourse" of the pc-addled on the subject of human genetics, followed by the reiteration of the standard obfuscating maneuvers that interested readers recognize immediately. ("Thousands of genes!", "Epigenetics!", and, inevitably, some variant of Lewontin's Fallacy, which is always a sure sign that the writer either doesn't know what he's talking about is being deliberately dishonest. I don't think you're dishonest.)
It takes some doing to sound nuttier and less-informed on this subject than Saint Croix, but I must say that you're giving him a run for the money here.
@Saint Croix:
Here is Richard Dawkins' in The Ancestor's Tale:
"It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. What is not correct is the inferene that race is therefore a meaningless concept. This point has been clearly made by the distinguished Cambridge geneticist A.W.F. Edwards in a recent paper “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy.” R.C. Lewontin is an equally distinguished Cambridge (Mass.) geneticist, known for the strength of his political convictions and his weakness for dragging them into science at every possibile opportunity. Lewontin’s view of race has become near-universal orthodoxy in scientific circles. He wrote, in a famous paper of 1972:
It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.
This is, of course, exactly the point I accepted above, not surprisingly since what I wrote was largely based on Lewontin. But see how Lewontin goes on:
Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxnomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.
We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes on forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn’t mean that race is of “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is Edwards’s point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance."
And here is Jerry Coyne:
"What are races?
In my own field of evolutionary biology, races of animals (also called “subspecies” or “ecotypes”) are morphologically distinguishable populations that live in allopatry (i.e. are geographically separated). There is no firm criterion on how much morphological difference it takes to delimit a race. Races of mice, for example, are described solely on the basis of difference in coat color, which could involve only one or two genes.
Under that criterion, are there human races?
Yes. As we all know, there are morphologically different groups of people who live in different areas, though those differences are blurring due to recent innovations in transportation that have led to more admixture between human groups.
How many human races are there?
That’s pretty much unanswerable, because human variation is nested in groups, for their ancestry, which is based on evolutionary differences, is nested in groups. So, for example, one could delimit “Caucasians” as a race, but within that group there are genetically different and morphologically different subgroups, including Finns, southern Europeans, Bedouins, and the like. The number of human races delimited by biologists has ranged from three to over thirty."
You can read Coyne's full discussion here.
@Saint Croix:
I would also recommend the first 16 pages of Michael H. Hart's book Understanding Human History, where he gives a very concise introduction to evolution and human races. You can read it here.
So ha ha, Saint Croix, you should stick to subjects that you know something about, if there are any.
Yeah yeah, because Craig Venter doesn't know anything about science!
Did you sequence the human genome? Then shut up already.
"Race is a social concept, it's not a scientific one."
-- Craig Venter
This is reminiscent of the NFL kneeling protests:
NFL Players: "We are going to disrespect the flag in a blatant anti-American act to protest something or other. We'll get back to you once we figure it out."
Critics: "Stop disrespecting the flag, you unpatriotic millionaire jerks!"
NFL: "Stop being divisive, critics!"
What we have here is projection. The party that is going out of its way to be divisive in an extreme way (disrespecting the flag, blatant anti-white racism) has decided they can do no wrong, so everyone else is being divisive. It is quite Orwellian.
@Saint Croix:
Do you have any response to the information I quoted and linked to above?
Dang! The next thing you know, these bigots will post stickers claiming it's even OK to be male, even if you're masculine!
Do you have any response to the information I quoted and linked to above?
I thought Craig Venter was a pretty good response!
You want to read the science, you might try
If you want to read more about it, you might try this analysis of Lewontin
plus this analysis of Lewontin's "fallacy"
and Witherspoon's study
and part IV
I like this…
You may have noticed in previous parts of this series that I use the term "population" more often than "race." This is deliberate: if you want to determine if race is genetic, you can't assume that the genetic populations into which you divide individuals are synonymous with race. You have to first see if it's possible to divide individuals based on genetic characteristics and then determine if those populations correspond to what we call races.
sorry about the typo but at least the links work!
@Saint Croix:
As for the series you linked to, I'll quote a commenter, who I think gets to the heart of a matter:
"The problem, of course, is that the question "Is race genetic?" isn't actually about finding out of people can genetically be split into populations defined by allele frequencies. It's about whether or not we can find a biological basis for concretely separating people into different groups which fit with the ways we've already decided to use to separate people."
As per zoological standards we separated people into geographic races (Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, etc.). To ask: "Are races genetic?" is to ask: "Do the classically delineated human geographic races have a genetic basis? Presumable this means: "Do they have a genetic basis comparable to that of non-human races?" You seem to have answered the question in the affirmative but then you say:
"Race may correlate with genetic population, but a genetic population is not a race. Race transcends the biological, involving culture, language, upbringing, place of origin, and a host of other factors."
But this is not the race that's being discussed. The race that's being discussed is geographic race.
And from the link to the Jerry Coyne article:
In your interesting blog article “Are there human races?”, you write: "As has been known for a while, DNA and other genetic analyses have shown that most of the variation in the human species occurs within a given human ethnic group, and only a small fraction between different races. That means that on average, there is more genetic difference between individuals within a race than there is between races themselves.”– But this is patently false. I Tal (2012b) I show that pariwise genetic distances, from within- and between-populations, are substantially divergent (in fact, for Fst=0.15, reflecting average intercontinental differentiation from SNPs, the averages differ by almost 50%).
Also, you ask: "I’m not aware that anybody has tested the accuracy of diagnosing a single indvidual’s geographic origin from her multilocus genotype; if such studies exist, please let me know.”– Yes. In Tal (2012a) I develop models that show that classification accuracy approaches 100% even for very close populations, given enough loci. I then analyze recent empirical studies of human populations under this framework."
Tal O, 2012a. The Cumulative Effect of Genetic Markers on Classification Performance: Insights from Simple Models. Journal of Theoretical Biology. Volume 293, 21 January, Pages 206-218.
Tal O, 2012b. Two Complementary Perspectives on Inter-Individual Genetic Distance. In Press, BioSystems.
Race is a social concept, it's not a scientific one.
Amazing how these scientists have managed to prove a negative in as vast a domain as human DNA.
Saint Croix said...
Did you sequence the human genome?
Did you fall for Lewontin's fallacy? You know, because you were unaware of it?
Then shut up already.
Why yes, yes you did fall for it.
J. Farmer said...
And here is Jerry Coyne:
I read his blog every day (IIRC he was Lewontin's grad student) - he's VERY PC, considers Watson "odious" - but he knows his genes. So does Steve Hsu:
"No scientific basis for race"
"It's just a social construction" -- a picture is worth a million words...
(Quoted parts are sarcasm).
I thought I'd share this beautiful graphic of human genetic variation from the blog Gene Expression. The original paper from Science.
First comment from your link to the graph. No wonder nobody studies this and reasoning like Saint Croix references rules the day.
I am a fan of your blog. Can you provide a quick recap of the reasons you focus on the intersection of genetics and racial/ethnic background. I believe in freedom of inquiry and research; but how do you know that extremist political movements won't use this kind of analysis to justify some degree of racism or prejudice?
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