Race absolutely correlates with genetic clusters. Look at this map, [1], and say that there's no correlation between genetic markers and continental origin. Forensic anthropologists can identify race very well using nothing but bone structure.
The idea that race is scientifically invalid is complete nonsense. You can argue that race doesn't correlate with phenotypical characteristics that we care about (okay, but it does though), but arguing that race itself is just in our heads is nonsense.
Is it any wonder that more and more people distrust science on issues like evolution, climate change, autism, and so on when scientists claim that you can't really tell whether someone is white, black, or asian?
> The idea that race is scientifically invalid is complete nonsense. You can argue that race doesn't correlate with phenotypical characteristics that we care about (okay, but it does though), but arguing that race itself is just in our heads is nonsense.
You couldn't be more wrong.
My mother is Puerto Rican, and my father is mostly Irish (with some ancestors from other European countries). My 23AndMe results show that all of father's genes are from Europe, and my mom's come from Europe (mostly Spain, but with a tiny bit of Ashkenazi), Africa, and the Caribbean (Native Americans, likely the Tainos).
My genetic makeup is roughly 7% Native American, 14% African, and most of the rest is European; some percentage is inconclusive.
You may be able to guess that I mostly look white, and you'd be correct. However, with my mother being roughly half non-white and half white, what would you guess? I'll tell you right now that I wouldn't guess that she's from Europe, but she does have relatively light skin. Her sister, however, could easily pass for a black person.
To think that your phenotype can be determined just by looking at your genes is ridiculous, and it's clear to me that you have very little experience in diverse environments. Things like skin and hair color are complex and are determined by multiple alleles, and there's no way to know which ones are going to be dominant.
Even aside from genetics, the social construct of race is even more complex, and I challenge you to do more reading on why that's the case.
Edit: To add more fuel to this, most of my girlfriend's genes come from China and surrounding areas in the Southeast. If we have a child, what will they look like?
Roughly 3.5% Native American, 7% African, 39.5% European, and 50% East Asian. Tell me, what race will they be? What about their phenotype? There's simply no way of knowing. Scientifically, race just does not exist.
Why would it be surprising that the child of someone who is white and someone who is half white might go on to appear mostly white? You yourself mention that your genetic makeup (presumably from 23andme or something) also suggests a "mostly white" appearance. In this case, there's a pretty good match between phenotype and genotype.
You absolutely can predict someone's phenotype from her genotype, roughly speaking. In cases of recent admixture, the exact gene expression can be uncertain. Just look at Mendel and his peas! Even this variable heredity has limits. There was a zero percent chance that you'd end up looking like a typical Japanese person.
I don't understand your point. I'm not claiming that the classic races are fixed for all time. I'm not suggesting that we can't arrange genes in new combinations. I am claiming that people today cluster in certain historically-contingent ways and that these clusters reflect the everyday understanding of race.
It seems like you don't understand my point because you've ignored the fact that my mother and her sister look they belong to different races, despite having roughly the same genetic makeup (about half white and half non-white). My result is not surprising; theirs are, however.
As another commenter said, what about Obama? I've met people who are half black and half white and end up looking like white people. Obama doesn't look like someone from Africa, nor does he look like someone from Europe. Because of what society determines as being white, most people would say, "he looks more black," which isn't really true, but regardless, you likely would not be able to tell just by looking at his genetic makeup. Many people in the same circumstance look wildly different from him.
If your argument is that when someone's genes all come from one area, then you can take a guess at what they might look like, then sure. But to apply that blanket statement to the entire world is just not the case. There are parts of the world where those lines get very blurred (e.g. Turkey, Nepal, Afghanistan), and plenty of people who are of "mixed descent" with different phenotypes from you would predict from their genes.
I don't see it as very surprising that your mother and her sister look like they belong to different races. That's how genetics works in case of individuals; siblings can get different sets of dominant and recessive alleles from their parents.
In terms of population, things then average out. There are indeed parts of the world where things are very blurred because of extensive human interaction across populations. If every place in word were like that, then there indeed wouldn't be what we call races. But most of the world is not quite like that, and particularly, in the course of history it hasn't been.
Race and "continental origin" are only vaguely related.
For example: what race is the current President of the United States? Most would say "black" (or "African American" if they're trying to be politically correct). And yet his ancestry is half European.
This is hardly an isolated example. The average African American has about one quarter European ancestry. About 10% of African Americans have a majority European ancestry.
Yes, you can use genetics to divide up humans into related groups. But those groups will not match with how we divide up races.
Could you list what races you think exist, and some kind of paper that establishes a scientific method for where the dividing lines in the genetic gradients are drawn and why such a line needs to be drawn at all? That is, going from DNA to races, and not vice versa. Is there still an Irish race for example?
Also, is it worth pointing out that the people who don't believe in climate change, think vaccines cause autism, think evolution and fossils are a hoax etc. could make your exact claim about how scientists not coming clean on their pet subject and rather intentionally misrepresenting the facts to the public for whatever nefarious reason makes it their own fault that no-one believes in science.
How do you convince yourself you're not one of them and therefore actually the cause of the very problem you lambast scientists for? I'm sure they have books with nice diagrams proving them correct too.
> Could you list what races you think exist, and some kind of paper that establishes a scientific method for where the dividing lines in the genetic gradients are drawn and why such a line needs to be drawn at all?
Let's define our terms. By "race", I mean the classic continental groupings of people whose ancestors come from areas centered on Europe and the near east, east Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. When we say "race", we're talking about that category to which people readily self identify and to which we can easily assign others. When we say "race exists", it means that these categories are not arbitrary.
More generally, they're big ancestor clusters. You can see the clusters yourself if you take genome corpuses and run principal component analysis (or other grouping algorithms) on them. If you select k=3, the classic continental races come out of the data.
I'm not sure how much more real a taxonomic classification scheme can get. We use the same genomic approach for organizing the rest of life.
With more groupings, you get finer-grained population clusters nested inside the larger ones. If you look for enough clusters, you start seeing an "Irish" grouping. Can we agree that, say, the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs are distinct hereditary groups? Can we agree that they're more similar to each other than, say, the Irish are to the Pygmies?
You could, in principle, put everyone into her own cluster. Sure, at k=7e9, race doesn't exist. But that's not a very useful classification scheme, because it ignores the reality that there are high-level classifications that we can see with our own eyes.
> How do you convince yourself you're not one of them and therefore actually the cause of the very problem you lambast scientists for?
That's an excellent question. Epistemology is hard. The best we can do is try to explain observations using the best-predicting theories we can find. I reject the "race does not exist" theory because it fails to explain observable facts about the world. This theory requires, in order to explain our observations, elaborate systems of oppression. It's full of epicycles. Even so, it fails to predict the result of studies like the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study.
The "race corresponds to allele clusters" theory makes better predictions. It explains heritable and persistent differences in measurable characteristics. It agrees with genomic observations. It requires no hidden assumptions. This latter theory isn't politically correct, but this status can't affect its truth value. We delude ourselves about things all the time.
Look: the traditional continental race classification scheme is a crude folk theory. It's very embarrassing for science when even a crude folk theory makes better predictions than the best theory to come out of the academy.
So you seem to agree more with the "race is a social construct" people than it first appears since all the boundaries you talk about are fuzzy and arbitrary, you even suggest that people must be able to distinguish them with their own senses for them to be meaningful, and that if it's not a useful tool to humans then it's pointless. All of which sounds very social construct-ish to me.
Possibly you're just talking past each other, and don't fundamentally disagree at all.
When you take a big corpus of genomes and split them using impartial mathematics into similarity-clusters, you get clusters that almost perfectly match the continent-scale races that people self-report. That's not "arbitrary". Furthermore, people in these groups differ in characteristics that are measurable and important.
When I say that "race exists", I mean that there are real differences between the k={3,4,5} groupings and that almost always tell someone's group affinity by sight alone. The existence of marginal cases doesn't somehow invalidate the reality and utility of the high-level groups.
When people say "race doesn't exist", the general public reads that as "there are no differences on average between people from the various continents", and this claim is not only false, but it's so false that one doesn't need sophisticated instruments to tell.
I believe that this confusion is deliberate and is part of a misguided attempt to eliminate bigotry by delegitimizing the classification schemes upon which bigotry is built. This strategy is doomed, because you can't take away people's eyes and ears.
If neanderthals were alive today, respectable people would call them homo sapiens sapiens and it'd be racism to suggest otherwise. Any evidence that you could distinguish neanderthals on the basis of genetics or morphology would be called pseudoscience and people like Stephen Jay Gould would publish elaborate sophistries explaining why anyone who notices differences between neanderthals and humans is a wicked person.
While it's true that, a priori, there's no reason that ethnic homogeneity should be a prerequisite for a welfare state, this idea is misleading because it supposes that all ethnic groups contribute to the welfare state equally. I know that it's modern dogma that all groups are equal in all respects, but hear me out: what if they're not?
What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity, educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular --- but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.
I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.
Others have commented that it's the size of the country that makes welfare impossible --- that it just doesn't work over a certain size. As a practical theory, I think that's true, but I don't think size itself is the root cause. I think that as a country's population increases, the visibility of low-contributing groups increases, and it's this visibility that reduces the will to create a global welfare state.
> I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.
That is wrong. In Belgium you have a strong welfare state, identifiable groups (Flemish people speaking dutch, Walloon people speaking French), with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good (GDP per capita in 2006 of 27,900 EUR and unemployment < 4.55% (2012) in Flanders vs 20,100 EUR and 10.12% in Wallonia [1]). Of course there is perpetual political bickering and stereotypes, but so far they manage.
I think this is quite right. But this is even true if the racism is unfounded. The mere illusion that some ethnic groups are low-contributing will weaken the cohesion of society. So in this backwards way, racism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The way out of this trap is to emphasize the shared identity of people in the country instead of encouraging them to think of themselves as members of distinct ethnic groups within that country.
It's for that reason that the identity politics of today's social justice advocates infuriates me. These activists can't see that their divisiveness is actually bringing them further from their goals.
> What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence?
If we were to divide up the country into the subsidizers and the subsidized (whatever that means), why must we pick ethnicity as the dividing feature?
Or, to put the question differently, if America were ethnically homogeneous, would it follow that there wouldn't be a taker/maker split to "damage social cohesion"?
To give an example of a different dividing criterion, how about the disparity between federal tax revenue and federal spending per state? Taxpayers in "red" states get a 4.0 percentage point better return on investment in federal taxes than "blue" states [0]. If one were to accept your claim that "identifiable groups with different socioeconomic contributions" (a condition states surely satisfy!) make welfare impossible, one would have to conclude that the American welfare state is broken because it has states!
> why must we pick ethnicity as the dividing feature?
Human behavior is largely heritable. Ethnic groups represent groupings of heredity.
(Look: I know the first sentence is one of those things you just can't say. Nobody wants to admit to believing it. But it's true. Instead of raking me over the coals for saying something that is true and unpleasant, how about we find a way of grappling in a fair, humane way with reality?)
> I know the first sentence is one of those things you just can't say
Evidently you can, as you've said it here.
You alt-righty folk seem to mistake "something you just can't say" for "something you just can't _defend_".
But yes, let us try to find a "humane" way to make America an ethnically homogeneous country. A kind of cleansing, shall we say? Once everyone has the same ethnicity, they will all behave the same. Science vult!
We can't make America a homogeneous country. What we can do is stop demonizing successful groups and blaming them for social disparities. You're not going to make any progress so long as your discussion is limited to blaming white men for everything.
>What if, for whatever reason, ethnic group A subsidizes B's existence? This difference will damage the social cohesion necessary for a welfare state to exist. In the real world, we observe huge group differences in productivity, educational attainment, conscientiousness, fecundity, and other characteristics, and in the real world, we see that mixing groups does indeed damage social cohesion. I understand that this observation is unpopular --- but this unpopularity doesn't make it wrong.
If wishes were fishes, I'd order a plate of chips. You're proposing we ask a "what if" question without tying it to reality.
> I don't think it's politically possible to create a strong welfare state in a country populated by identifiable groups with differing socioeconomic contributions to the common good.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but strong welfare states exist, and they have always had groups with different socioeconomic contributions.
Denmark has always been a nation with strong cultural differences to the point where people simply cannot understand each other's dialects, there were poor areas, rich areas and so on and so forth.
It angers me that a drug yielding cognitive improvement of X in an Alzheimer's patient is progress, but the same drug yielding the an improvement of X in a healthy patient is abuse. There should be no stigma against improving ourselves.
How is it illegal/abuse when you can pay to have similar therapy already or even buy a cheap kit on the internet to hook your brain up to?
I don't think anyone is holding back progress. The minute it becomes clear there's cognitive improvement for healthy people the demand and usage will make anabolic steroid use seem tiny in comparison.
Then why is Modafinil still a controlled subtance? What about Adderall? They both greatly improve cognitive performance in healthy people, and they are widely used by healthy people, but we all do this ridiculous dance where we pretend that we're only using these drugs to treat medical conditions.
"Fake news" is itself fake news. Look at the timing: immediately after Clinton lost, a consensus emerged among the losers that we have to do something about all the "fake news" floating around the internet. The timing is a huge DNC banner in the sky.
The whole fake news hullabaloo is obviously partisan. It provides a psychological relief valve that allows the left to blame its terrible loss on some external evil. It also provides the left a mental system for justifying literal censorship of the right. "Fake news" isn't about public responsibility. It's a strategy for winning the next election.
So we're just going to pretend that Donald Trump didn't claim the media was manufacturing negative coverage about him, making up quotes or taking quotes out of context and altering poll numbers throughout his entire campaign?
Or that Fox News doesn't exist because the American right has been convinced that "fake news" has been a thing for years?
Or that fringe sites on both ends of the political spectrum don't actually make up "news" stories as clickbait?
Or that various governments don't employ propaganda and disinformation campaigns through various forms of media, including the planting of false stories and rumors, and have been for decades?
It's all just something the DNC made up just now?
Ok.
Or maybe we can concede that the meme of "fake news" is distinct from the actual phenomenon of "fake news"?
> Donald Trump didn't claim the media was manufacturing negative coverage about him, making up quotes or taking quotes out of context and altering poll numbers throughout his entire campaign?
He did make those claims, and as it turns out, the media really was doing these things --- not only against Trump, but as it turns out, against anyone not-Clinton in the primaries.
Yes, in other words, contrary to the premise behind your earlier comment...
"Fake news" is itself fake news. Look at the timing:
immediately after Clinton lost, a consensus emerged
among the losers that we have to do something about
all the "fake news" floating around the internet.
The timing is a huge DNC banner in the sky.
..."fake news" was not concocted whole cloth by the DNC and leftists in order to discredit Trump's campaign. Because Trump himself invoked it, because it's been a reliable Republican hobbyhorse for years, and because it demonstrably exists.
The psychological projection is on the part of Trump supporters, who want people to believe that either fake news doesn't exist, or it does, but it's entirely manufactured by the left.
I mean this past week WAPO had to all but retracted a fake news story about Russia hacking a laptop when it was revealed the laptop was not connected to the electrical grid had Russian malware that anyone can buy and use on the open market. They failed to contact the power company in question to confirm the information and went with anonymous sources. We all know they ran with the story because it fit the DNC talking point that Russia hacked the election and are hacking other systems as well. Too bad it was fake.
"Hands up, don't shoot" <-- false news. When all the dust cleared after the grand trial and all the facts came out multiple witnesses said he didn't raise his hands but was in fact charging at the police officer.
"George Zimmerman used stand your ground laws to defend himself" <--false news. He actually just claimed self defense. However the media became obsessed with Stand Your Ground laws.
"2 years after the san bernardino attacks we still don't know the reason for the attack" <-- false news. The media and FBI may not know but the rest of America knows, it was Islamic Jihad.
It is funny how the media can spread fake/false news like wildfire but all of the sudden they care about 100% truth after the election. I mean the mainstream media is almost always wrong when it covers self defense trials and in general any story involving a gun. The amount of misinformation in regard to the Zimmerman trial was truly staggering and if anyone watched the trial it was obvious the state had no case but prosecuted it anyways to appease the masses. I mean the media even invented a term, "White Hispanic" any order to make the story about race.
Regardless of the election, the fact that stories like:
"Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegience In Schools Nationwide"
This got 2,177,000 shares on Facebook.
These are the issue. I'm of the mind that Hillary Clinton lost because she was a lackluster candidate who didn't address blue collar issues properly, thinking that anti-poverty and welfare programs would be equivalent.
But just because the Democrats are sounding the alarm for reasons you find partisan, doesn't mean the problem goes away.
Fake news is the social web's version of fwd: fwd: fwd:, and we've always known that was hugely problematic. Well, now it's gone viral on a global scale. We can't ignore that.
"...Hillary Clinton lost because she was a lackluster candidate who didn't address blue collar issues properly, thinking that anti-poverty and welfare programs would be equivalent."
This is mostly correct.
HRC didn't win enough. Democratic candidates have to also overcome structural flaws in our system.
HRC didn't inspire like Obama and Bernie did. IMHO, her biggest mistake was getting into the gutter with Trump with all the negative attacks. Obama didn't do that. Voters are sick of it, so those Obama voters simply stayed home.
But she's a Clinton. The War Room & triangulation strategies that worked so well before failed her in 2008 primary and 2016 general.
Too bad she didn't learn from Obama's campaign successes.
"Negative ads have been a hallmark of presidential campaigns for decades, because polls show they work.
But conservative strategist Frank Luntz, president and CEO of Luntz Global, LLC, has conducted various focus groups on the effectiveness of political ads, and says this latest batch is different in one key way.
"It's one thing to be negative," he observes. "It's another thing to demonize your opponent.""
Me quoting Frank Luntz, of all people.
Luntz is closer to the mark. The demonization of each other during 2016 was stomach turning.
McCain and Obama never did that, that I recall. (Their surrogates certainly did, of course.) McCain even batted down the birthism crap and defended Obama's patriotism.
It's really a last ditch effort for the MSM to remain relevant by appointing themselves as the only source of "real" news.
The election was hugely damaging to them, as most outlets predicted a Clinton victory with certainty, and their bias was on full display (see: the Clinton campaign giving direct orders to some journalists). The surge in "fake news" hysteria is simply a way to discredit any independent news source.
At this point, it's become partisan. Some how bias and opinion/click bait head lines are now fake news. Someone has moved the argument, And it has been an amazingly effective tactic.
so, if you are wary of the left, and see them talk about fake news after an election, you assume they are wrong because it aligns with their interests.
this is exactly what the OP and the article author are denouncing.
And exactly what you're doing. You're ascribing a psychological motivation for the comment that you're replying to that aligns with your own prejudices, rather then replying to its content. There's nothing in the comment you replied to that implies that they are not on the left themselves.
The old media has been lying for years, especially about race, gender, and sexuality. People saw through these lies, because the reality asserts itself to anyone who sees and hears, but most felt trapped, unable to report the evidence of their eyes without losing friends, family, and jobs. When these people saw new media come along that told the truth about the things they saw with their on eyes, people felt a sense of relief and began believing everything these new media reported, even things about which old media has been truthful and about which new media is lying.
The lesson here is that if you have a platform and social trust, don't abuse that platform to lie, even in the name of "social justice". It's tempting, but it won't work. The truth will come out, and you'll have irreversibly damaged your reputation.
Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of the old media lying about race, gender or sexuality? I am legitimately curious about this claim.
> Are you able to point to any academic papers or even concrete examples of the old media lying about race, gender or sexuality
The fact that you would ask such a question belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how things work. You are thoroughly embedded in the system and don't realize it yet :) The academy (which is overwhelmingly left wing outside of the hard sciences, math, and engineering) establishes the "truth" regarding matters of "race, gender or sexuality" - whereby "truth" means the opinions you may express without being exiled from polite urban society, without losing your job, without being vociferously attacked by an enraged mob.
Note that the old media is staffed by people who were all educated by the very academy you are expecting to perform a truth-checking function! To be clear, there are no "marching orders", but everyone understands the game, and everyone is incentivized to say what they are supposed to say. You may as well ask for Soviet academic papers giving concrete examples of Pravda lying about industrial production!
You'll have to do some research off-HN, sorry. I'm already treading very thin ground by questioning the polite consensus on these topics. It's too dangerous to bring up the real issues at a place like HN.
Try scanning, say, the Unz Review once in a while. Hold your nose and look at the content. Yes, everyone respectable will denounce the place, but make up your own mind. Occasionally, you'll see an article that makes you say, "Hrm. That makes sense." You'll have been trained to reject this feeling, to attribute it to something evil within yourself. You'll want to go running back to your comfortable lies. Ignore this sensation, just for a moment, and give new ideas the benefit of the doubt.
I suppose one thing that's safe to talk about is the campus rape issue. The official story is that the American college is about as dangerous as a third world country when it came to sexual assault. After Rolling Stone's piece was revealed to be a complete fabrication, this claim started to lose its currency. But until this debunking, everyone went along with the idea that campus was some sort of awful, dangerous place and that men were demons. The Jackie article was far from the first one painting an unreal image of gender relations.
I'm having a hard time thinking of anything other examples I can denounce in polite company. All I can say is that the official story is that human being are blank slates upon birth, with all characteristics socially constructed, and that this idea is false. Nothing in our society makes sense if you ascribe to the blank slate idea, but the media pushes it anyway. The intellectual contortions that the mainstream media uses to preserve the blank slake hypothesis are embarrassing and credibility-destroying.
A "free stuff" is incompatible with unlimited fertility. The bargain has to be that the necessities of life are provided only if you agree to limit yourself to replacement fertility. If we allow unlimited fertility, then no matter the starting conditions, any group that breeds faster than the rest will come to dominate the whole population.
Because we won. The whole "war crime" business is just how we justify in today's oh-so-sophisticated society the ancient custom of the winners imprisoning and executing the leaders of the losing side.
I reject the premise and refuse to feel guilt for my ancestors doing what was necessary to win a total war.
* The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been three megatons of TNT
* The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 7,000 megatons or 7 gigatons (7,000 million tons) of TNT
And TFA talked about a nuclear winter from burning cities when using a hundred Hiroshima bombs, not the US/Russian arsenal. We ought to have learned about those effects, just from WW II.
The idea that race is scientifically invalid is complete nonsense. You can argue that race doesn't correlate with phenotypical characteristics that we care about (okay, but it does though), but arguing that race itself is just in our heads is nonsense.
Is it any wonder that more and more people distrust science on issues like evolution, climate change, autism, and so on when scientists claim that you can't really tell whether someone is white, black, or asian?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_history_and_geography...