Will genetic anthropology establish scientific criteria for race or ethnicity?
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them. The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Human Genome Project (HGP) devoted 3% of its annual budget toward studying the ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) surrounding the availability of genetic information. In 2004, DOE sponsored a Nature Genetics supplement called Genetics for the Human Race. This supplement originated from a May 2003 workshop held by the National Human Genome Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The workshop, Human Genome Variation and 'Race,' and the special issue of Nature Genetics were proposed by scientists at Howard University and financially supported by DOE's HGP through its Office of Science; Irving Harris Foundation; National Institutes of Health through the National Human Genome Research Institute; and Howard University. The supplement contains articles based on presentations at this workshop.Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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Christopher Stringer and Robin Mckie---African Exodus pgs 181, 182, 183.
quote:Then there is the genetic evidence. It reveals the stark, simple, homogeneous nature of modern mankind. Scientists have generally recognized that the common chimpanzee of central Africa has three subspecies, though to most people they look very similar indeed. Nevertheless these chimp "races" are almost ten times as different from each other, genetically, as are the African, European, and Asian divisions of Homo Sapiens created by Linnaeus, Blumembach, and Coon.
In addition, there is the work of biologist Richard Lewontin of Harvard University, who used a series of seventeen stretches of DNA to study the differences between 168 populations, people such as the Austrians, Thais and Apaches. In this way, Lewontin found there is more genetic variation within one race than there is between that race and another. Only 6.3 percent of dissimilarity between two people from disparate ethnic backgrounds can be explained by their belonging to separate races. This means that if you pick at random any two people, say Norwegians, walking along the street and analyze their twenty three chromosomes, you could find their genes have less in common than do genes of one of them with a person from another continent. As Sharon Begley puts it an essay on race in Time magazine in February 1993 "Genetic variation from one individual to another of the same race swamps the average differences between racial groupings" Categorizing a person by their race can clearly be a deeply misleading business.
Genes do reveal some differences between populations, of course. For example, mitochondrial DNA studies have shown that human diversity within Africa is nearly three times that in Europe, and nearly double that within Asia. This same high level of African differentiation is apparent in studies of skull measurements, and in a number of recent nuclear DNA studies such as those of Kidd and Tishkoff.
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Good to recap this, for there are those who still insist in pushing racial models to account for the bio-histories of African peoples in the Nile valley and elsewhere. It is certain Europeans that introduced racist models to those studies, and carry them on to the present day, despite disguising race under new labels and distorted sampling. By contrast, men like Keita rightly eschew race was useless. When he and others say the Egyptians are tropically adapted Africans influenced by gene flow at various times over their history, who also resemble other tropically adapted African derived peoples, it is a simple statement of biological fact. But facts are what many racists want to avoid.
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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[QUOTE] In a worldwide survey of 50 populations, a team of geneticists has identified many fingerprints of natural selection in the human genome. These are sites on the genome where specific sequences of DNA show signs of having become more common in the population, presumably because they helped their owners adapt to new climates, diseases or other factors. The genetic regions where natural selection has acted turn out to differ in various populations, doubtless because each has been molded by different local forces on each continent.
This chart shows the sites along the genome (listed at the left) at which natural selection has occurred in the genome of eight regional groups (shown at top). These are 1) Biaka pygmies, 2) Bantu-speaking Africans, 3) Western Europeans, 4) Middle Easterners, 5) South Asians (people of Pakistan and India), 6) East Asians, 7) Oceanians and 8) Native Americans. The colored bars show the degree of selection at each site, with yellow denoting a signal of clear but moderate statistical significance and red denoting high statistical significance.
The three West Eurasian groups show very similar patterns of selection, which probably occurred before they separated into three geographically distinct populations but after their ancestors split from those of East Asians.
Because the human genome is still so little understood, in most cases the genes at the sites of selection (shown along the right) are of unknown function. One exception is that of genes affecting skin color that have been under strong selective pressure in non-African populations. These include the gene SLC24A5 (shown in red, at center of chart), one version of which has been favored in European, Middle Eastern and South Asian populations. SLC24A5 is not under selection in East Asians, who presumably acquired their pale skin through a different set of genes, an example of what is known as convergent evolution.
Another set of genes found to be under selection in non-African populations are three NRG or neuregulin genes (the third, NRG3, is shown in red) and a receptor gene they all interact with (ERBB4, also in red). The NRG genes make signaling proteins that are active in the developing embryo in shaping tissues like the brain, heart and breast. A variant of NRG1 has been implicated in schizophrenia. The researchers do not know which of the several roles of the neuregulin genes has caused it to come under selection.
The principal human races presumably emerged as the populations of each continent responded to different evolutionary pressures. "Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.
The authors of the new study are Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues Joseph Pickrell and Graham Coop. It was published online last month in Genome Research. It is the first to look for signals of selection in DNA samples gathered by the Human Genome Diversity Project.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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Because the human genome is still so little understood, in most cases the genes at the sites of selection (shown along the right) are of unknown function. One exception is that of genes affecting skin color that have been under strong selective pressure in non-African populations. These include the gene SLC24A5 (shown in red, at center of chart), one version of which has been favored in European, Middle Eastern and South Asian populations. SLC24A5 is not under selection in East Asians, who presumably acquired their pale skin through a different set of genes, an example of what is known as convergent evolution.
Clearly this article is talking about race as noted by the discussion above about skin color.
The authors make it clear that population=race:
[QUOTE]
The principal human races presumably emerged as the populations of each continent responded to different evolutionary pressures. "Our work supports the notion that regional populations have adapted in a variety of ways, some shared, some not, to the selective pressures they encountered as they dispersed from the ancestral African homeland some 80,000 years ago," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago.
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-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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^Clyde as noted in the parent post, the first comes from the Human Genome center....
While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.
...and of course a little example of genetic evidence from Chris Stringer who notes that although the three subspecies of central African chimpanzee whom look very much alike, but in actuality are almost ten times more different as the fallacious divisions of humankind that you follow;
Then there is the genetic evidence. It reveals the stark, simple, homogeneous nature of modern mankind. Scientists have generally recognized that the common chimpanzee of central Africa has three subspecies, though to most people they look very similar indeed. Nevertheless these chimp "races" are almost ten times as different from each other, genetically, as are the African, European, and Asian divisions of Homo Sapiens created by Linnaeus, Blumembach, and Coon.
....and out of 168 POPULATIONS (which does not equal race) Richard Lewontin noted the following;
In addition, there is the work of biologist Richard Lewontin of Harvard University, who used a series of seventeen stretches of DNA to study the differences between 168 populations, people such as the Austrians, Thais and Apaches. In this way, Lewontin found there is more genetic variation within one race than there is between that race and another.
Here is what Geneticist Spencer Wells notes about Jonathan Pritchards report...
Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to."
Of course Wells also notes that...
" Genetically speaking, race does not exist."
So Clyde that's 4 to 1, majority rules. Ball is in your court!
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I'm curious to hear what you think of this paper which defines race as an ecotype. This definition seems consistent with the population model of race that Winters is promoting while rejecting the typological model of race that many anthropologists and geneticists use when saying race doesn't exist.
On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans
Biological research on race has often been seen as motivated by or lending credence to underlying racist attitudes; in part for this reason, recently philosophers and biologists have gone through great pains to essentially deny the existence of biological human races. We argue that human races, in the biological sense of local populations adapted to particular environments, do in fact exist; such races are best understood through the common ecological concept of ecotypes. However, human ecotypic races do not in general correspond with ‘folk’ racial categories, largely because many similar ecotypes have multiple independent origins. Consequently, while human natural races exist, they have little or nothing in common with ‘folk’ races.
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^^Take note of the Human Genome centers response to "race" in the parent post, I believe it provides insight to this, yes there are genes that can be identified for hair, eye, and skin which can be explained through adaptation to a specific environment, but there are more differences within traditional "races" than between them, as noted, a group living in an area for many generations may have some alleles in common but no allele will be found in all, and not in another. Just as well there will be no uniform phenotype either, in all people of one population. Which proves that no consistent pattern of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another nor can it be distinguished cranio-facially....
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This chart shows the sites along the genome (listed at the left) at which natural selection has occurred in the genome of eight regional groups (shown at top). These are 1) Biaka pygmies, 2) Bantu-speaking Africans, 3) Western Europeans, 4) Middle Easterners, 5) South Asians (people of Pakistan and India), 6) East Asians, 7) Oceanians and 8) Native Americans. The colored bars show the degree of selection at each site, with yellow denoting a signal of clear but moderate statistical significance and red denoting high statistical significance.
The weakness of this approach is that it cannot account for many populations in Africa in neat race percent models. Bantu speaking populations are only one group in Africa, but what about Saharans, Afro-Asiatic speakers, etc? Where do the Nubians fall in Pritchard's neat race scheme or the Saharans? or the Northern Sudanese? Or numerous peoples of Chad or Mali, with vast areas above the Sahara? Too often the race modelists are only too happy to classify these populations are "white" which ties nicely into certain ideological dispositions. That's the trap of the race models, and that's why in study after study they skew the sampling, such as taking samples from the far north of Egypt and using them as "representative" for all Egypt. As Keita notes, using race models to analyze the complexity of Africa makes little sense.
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race
Stephen Ousley 1 *, Richard Jantz 2, Donna Freid 2 1Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA 2Department of Anthropology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
email: Stephen Ousley (sousley@mercyhurst.edu)
*Correspondence to Stephen Ousley, Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA
Abstract American forensicanthropologists uncritically accepted the biological race concept from classic physical anthropology and applied it to methods of human identification. Why and how the biological race concept might work in forensic anthropology was contemplated by Sauer (Soc Sci Med 34 [1992] 107-111), who hypothesized that American forensic anthropologists are good at what they do because of a concordance between social race and skeletal morphology in American whites and blacks. However, Sauer also stressed that this concordance did not validate the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology that there are a relatively small number of discrete types of human beings. Results from Howells (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 67 [1973] 1-259; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 79 [1989] 1-189; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 82 [1995] 1-108) and others using craniometric and molecular data show strong geographic patterning of human variation despite overlap in their distributions. However, Williams et al. (Curr Anthropol 46 [2005] 340-346) concluded that skeletal morphology cannot be used to accurately classify individuals. Williams et al. cited additional support from Lewontin (Evol Biol 6 [1972] 381-398), who analyzed classic genetic markers. In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
a1 Department of Society, Human Development, and Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA E-mail: dfullwil@hsph.harvard.edu Article author query fullwiley d [Google Scholar]
Abstract Many researchers working in the field of human genetics in the United States have been caught between two seemingly competing messages with regard to racial categories and genetic difference. As the human genome was mapped in 2000, Francis Collins, the head of the publicly funded project, together with his privately funded rival, announced that humans were 99.9 percent the same at the level of their genome. That same year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a research program on pharmacogenetics that would exploit the .01 percent of human genetic difference, increasingly understood in racial terms, to advance the field of pharmacy. First, this article addresses Collins’ summary of what he called the ‘vigorous debate’ on the relationship between race and genetics in the open-access special issue of Nature Genetics entitled ‘Genetics for the Human Race’ in 2004. Second, it examines the most vexed (if not always openly stated) issue at stake in the debate: that many geneticists today work with the assumption that human biology differs by race as it is conceived through American census categories. It then presents interviews with researchers in two collaborating US laboratories who collect and organize DNA by American notions of ‘race/ethnicity’ and assume that US race categories of classification largely traduce human biogenetic difference. It concludes that race is a practical and conceptual tool whose utility and function is often taken for granted rather than rigorously assessed and that ‘rational medicine’ cannot precede a rational approach to addressing the nature of racial disparities, difference and inequality in health and society more broadly.
Key Words: genetics; race; rational medicine
Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist of science and medicine concerned with how personal identity, health status and molecular genetics findings increasingly intersect. She has done ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France and Senegal, West Africa on locally varied versions of sickle cell science and medical care. She is also engaged in fieldwork on emergent genetic technologies of race and ancestry testing for pharmaceutical and identity purposes. Fullwiley is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health.
-------------------- C. A. Winters Posts: 13012 | From: Chicago | Registered: Jan 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
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Thanks Clyde this actually refutes you as it notes that if biological races can be defined then there are a very large number of races which contradicts the concept of classical races....
You'll be there for days trying to identify 100 different races, many in between disconnecting the traditional classification and clustering with others....
It actually compliments the following;
People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: Understanding race and human variation: Why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race
Stephen Ousley 1 *, Richard Jantz 2, Donna Freid 2 1Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA 2Department of Anthropology, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
email: Stephen Ousley (sousley@mercyhurst.edu)
*Correspondence to Stephen Ousley, Department of Applied Forensic Sciences, Mercyhurst College, Erie, PA
Abstract American forensicanthropologists uncritically accepted the biological race concept from classic physical anthropology and applied it to methods of human identification. Why and how the biological race concept might work in forensic anthropology was contemplated by Sauer (Soc Sci Med 34 [1992] 107-111), who hypothesized that American forensic anthropologists are good at what they do because of a concordance between social race and skeletal morphology in American whites and blacks. However, Sauer also stressed that this concordance did not validate the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology that there are a relatively small number of discrete types of human beings. Results from Howells (Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 67 [1973] 1-259; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 79 [1989] 1-189; Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 82 [1995] 1-108) and others using craniometric and molecular data show strong geographic patterning of human variation despite overlap in their distributions. However, Williams et al. (Curr Anthropol 46 [2005] 340-346) concluded that skeletal morphology cannot be used to accurately classify individuals. Williams et al. cited additional support from Lewontin (Evol Biol 6 [1972] 381-398), who analyzed classic genetic markers. In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
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I don't doubt pathologists could define race in a place like America where the people being compared are readily distinguishable. The skull of a tall black linebacker from Georgia is going to be readily detectable from the skull of a tall white defensive end from Oklahoma, and that of a big Samoan tackle outta Southern cal... that's the easy part..
The problem is ulta diverse Africa and there the forensic pathologists slip up for 3 reasons.
1) The ancient tribes there defy the simplistic race models. Africa has the highest phenotypic diversity in the world. Narrow noses for example are found among the oldest populations of East Africa without needing any race mix to explain why.
2) The computer programs many pathologists use are flawed and yield flawed results. The well known exampple is the infamous FORDISC which classified the skulls of Nubia as anywhere from Japanese, Easter islander or Hungarian. See F. Williams- "The Forensic Misclassification of Nubian crania"
3) Pathologists often rely on skewed or biased sampling databases particularly in the Nile Valley. As Barry Kemp 2005 (Ancient Egypt; Anatomy of a Civ) showed, many rely on the CRANID database of skulls which uses skulls from the far north of Egypt as "representative" of the region, ignoring most of the historic south. The result is a built-in bias, with black African peoples being routinely classified as "white".
Keita recommends a balanced approach. His skull data looked at the problem from multiple angles, using a balanced set of samples. And he backs this up with limb proportion studies. From this we see not races but population variants that cut across supposed "racial" characteristics. We don't need DNA data to establish that ancient Egyptians most closely resemble brown and dark-skinned tropically adapted African peoples and that includes African derived ones like Black Americans. And this has been established using northern samples, not the supposedly "typical" southern ones. DNA data and Haplogroup E only confirms what we already know.
As for medicine, Keita himself says SELF-IDENTIFIED race may play in role in SOME diagnoses and treatments. There is a limited place for it, but analyzing medicine side effects for African-Americans in the US for example, is a whole world away from rying to understand bio-historical populations in the Nile Valley and many other parts of Africa. There are other things at play in Africa including its role in mankind's original diversity.
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
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Thanks Clyde this actually refutes you as it notes that if biological races can be defined then there are a very large number of races which contradicts the concept of classical races....
You'll be there for days trying to identify 100 different races, many in between disconnecting the traditional classification and clustering with others....
It actually compliments the following;
People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.
It doesn't refute me. It proves that races exist. As you know some anthropologists have identified more than three races.
quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
.
Thanks Clyde this actually refutes you as it notes that if biological races can be defined then there are a very large number of races which contradicts the concept of classical races....
You'll be there for days trying to identify 100 different races, many in between disconnecting the traditional classification and clustering with others....
It actually compliments the following;
People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.
It doesn't refute me. It proves that races exist. As you know some anthropologists have identified more than three races.
Read the article.
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It does refute you Clyde, it specifically notes that it contradicts the classical race constrsuct you adhere to, and in essense if race can be used biologically then there would be a whole lot of races, races in between races in between races and so on and so on...
Compliments the following of course.....
"Genetic variation from one individual to another of the same race swamps the average differences between racial groupings" Categorizing a person by their race can clearly be a deeply misleading business.Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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^ Indeed, Clyde is so desperate to cling on to his precious notion (European invention) of 'race' he fails to realize how it is debunked.
Of course in forensics subjective notions of 'race' can be handy in countries like the U.S. that has considerable heterogeneous populations. As Zarahan says, knowing which features are 'typically' African as opposed to European can help identify whether the remains belong to a black person or a white person but that does NOT mean that genetically race exists!! And as Mind has just shown with his topic post, it does NOT exist!
Notice how I put quotes around the word typical when it comes to the study of physical remains by forensics. That is because even with the examination of physical remains there is no absolutes when it comes to craniofacial features which are the most varied in the human species that even within a single population there are going to be differences. Remember the studies below:
J. Edwards, A. Leathers, et al. ...based on Howell’s sampling Fordisc 2.0 authors state that "there are no races, only populations," yet it is clear that Howell was intent on providing known groups that would be distributed among the continental "racial" groups. We tested the accuracy and effectiveness of Fordisc 2.0 using twelve cranial measurements from a homogeneous population from the X-Group period of Sudanese Nubia (350CE-550CE). When the Fordisc program classified the adult X-Group crania, only 51 (57.3%) of 89 individuals were classified within groups from Africa. Others were placed in such diverse groups as Polynesian (11.24%), European (7.86%), Japanese (4.49%), Native American (3.37%), Peruvian (3.36%), Australian (1.12), Tasmanian (1.12%), and Melanesian (1.12%). The implications of these findings suggest that classifying populations, whether by geography or by "race", is not morphologically or biologically accurate because of the wide variation even in homogeneous populations.
And...
Forensic Misclassification of Ancient Nubian Crania: Implications for Assumptions about Human Variation -April 2005, Current Anthropology:
It is well known that human biological variation is principally clinal (i.e., structured as gradients) and not racial (i.e., structured as a small number of fairly discrete groups). We have shown that for a temporally and geographically homogeneous East African population, the most widely used “racial” program fails to identify the skeletal material accurately. The assignment of skeletal racial origin is based principally upon stereotypical features found most frequently in the most geographically distant populations. While this is useful in some contexts (for example, sorting skeletal material of largely West African ancestry from skeletal material of largely Western European ancestry), it fails to identify populations that originate elsewhere and misrepresents fundamental patterns of human biological diversity.
Thus even at the eyeball level of examination 'race' is invalid, let alone the molecular level.
You lose, Clyde. But then again you've been lost. Posts: 26260 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Sorry for all you fallacious race baiters who think that your outdated and refuted work still stands, scientific majority debunks you, read the following if you dare!! Try to refute it if you can!
African Exodus: The African origins of modern humanity (pgs 183-193) Christopher Stringer and Robin Mckie
Nevertheless, the message from the Out of Africa theory is a straightforward one. Our exodus's timescale is so brief that only slight differences, if any,in intellect and innate behavior are likely to have evolved between modern human populations. And yet there are those who would still deny this fact, workers who cling to an intellectual tradition that runs from Galton to Eysenck and Jensen, scientists who have argued that racial differences in psychological and intellectual abilities are deep and meaningful. Indeed the subject has been fueled to near ignition in the recent years thanks to the claim that researchers have uncovered new evidence that the world's populations are easily seperable into distinct categories, particularly with regard to intelligence.
Take the example of British born Phillipe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. In a paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1989, he used the Out of Africa as a starting point for arguing that humans evolved in a rich but unpredictable environment (Africa) where natural selection favored a strategy of high birthrates and low levels of parental care. However, some populations moved into more challenging environments (Europe and Asia) where lower birthrates and more intense parental care were favored. Whites, and particularly, Orientals, have evolved this adaptation, says Rushton, while black people retain our ancestal African pattern. He ranks these races for features suck as brain size, educational and occupational achievement, rate of maturity, fecundity, promiscuity, penis size, aggressiveness, parental care, respect for the law, and many others, revealing blacks to be the most primitive, Orientals the most advanced, with whites lying somewhere in between. For example Rushton reports that IQ tests consistently show a grading in favor or Orientals (average score 107) followed by whites (100) with blacks some way behind (85).
This entire thesis is based on some very old suppositions, however, For one thing, Rushton simply assumes that the Out Of Africa theory establishes the primitiveness of Africans and the superiority of Orientals. It does nothing of the sort of course. As we have seen throughout this book, indeed in this chapter, the theory provides no rationale for supporting that Orientals are evolutionary superior beings or blacks inferior. It would be expected that Europeans and Orientals are more closely related through recency of common ancestry, but there is no obvious basis for Orientals being more "evolved" than Europeans or blacks. And while we know that the supposed ancestors of Europeans-the Cro-Magnons --lived through the peak of the last ice age, we have little data to show where Orientals evolved. Equally, the relative merits and drawbacks of African and non African habitats are certainly arguable. Is surviving equatorial drought more or less challenging than enduring an Artic winter, for example?
Then there is the issue of Rushton's data and disparate sources one of the most heavily cited in his earlier workd is an 1898 book, by an anonymous French army surgeon, a repository of anecdotal information about the penis, breast, and buttock size of different native populations. His reliance on these kinds of data led to some strong criticism. More recently Rushton has used a wider variety of sources, including census data, studies of military recruits, and brain scanning techniques. He argues taht such data reinforce his original conclusion that human populations can be ordered in a scale of evolutionary advance from blacks, to whites, to Orientals.
Not surprisingly, Rushton's work has provoked a storm of protest. He has been dubbed a racist and has been threatened with removal from his teaching post. However, his univeristy has so far maintained his right to academic freedom of expression. more intriguingly Rushton has also recieved more than $700,000 from the Pioneer fund, set up in 1937 to further "race betterment with special references to people of the United States" In fact, the fund, established in 1937 by Wycliffe Draper, a Harvard graduate who inherited a textile machine fortune, has had a higly controversial history, having backed research programs on human behavior and variation at more than sixty institutions in eight countries. These projects include several that have claimed to have uncovered strong links between race and intelligence.
Rushton's views might have remained on the fringe had they not received a sudden, invigorating dose of intellectual oxygen with the appearance of "The Bell Curve", by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray-- a book whose publication in 1994 triggered widespread controversy in the United States. (The Bell Curve of the title refers to the characteristics shape of a diagram of a trait, such as IQ, in a population in which few people display exceptionally low or high scores while the majority cluster near the average value. Such a dispersion --known as a normal distribution--produces a graph that looks like a bell.) Herrnstein and Murray, who cite Rushton's work eleven times, as well as that of many Pioneer fund beneficiaries, concentrate their arguments on the over representation of American blacks in the countries lowest social levels and as scorers of its lowest IQ ratings. They conclude that no amount of state or national aid could achieve real racial equality in intellect and achievement. The book would have been incendiary at any time and in any country. However, its appearance during a period of when Americans, including many liberals, had begun to question the merits of the nations welfare system and to challenge it civil rights agenda, hit an exposed nerve. Indeed, such was the fuss that when the New Republic magazine prepared to print an eleven page extract from the book, an army of columnists and staff writers protested so strongly that a total of sixteen pages of rebuttals also had to be published.
Much of this sort of work is based on the idea that there is an indisputable correlation between IQ scores and brain size. Rushton, for example, makes a great deal of the fact that woman's brain size is smaller on average than a man's as is a black person's compared to a white's or an Oriental's. According to him the issue is straight forward, though it is in reality extremely complex: because brain size statistics are variously based on estimates of external head dimensions, external skull dimensions, internal skull dimensions, and volume and weight measurements on the actual brains of people have dided. In addition, the relationship of brain size to body size has to be taken into account since there is a clear correlation (as there is with all primate) between the two. Quite simply, bigger bodies need larger brains to govern them. For example, a woman's brain is on average 13 percent smaller than a man's brain. But when scaled against her smaller body size, the difference disappears. (Rushton does not accept this argument, however, and introduces a new factor--fat-- into his equations. He maintains that women have a bout 20 percent body fat in their bodies and ment only 10 percent, he uses these "fat allowances" to show women really do have smaller brains than men. Not surprisingly, this argument has not gone down well in many circles). If nothing else, this problem shows the difficulties of trying to study body and brain size relationships. In the former case we use lean body weight, total weight, height, or surface area? You take your choice.....
As to racial differences, it is well known that there is significant global variation in brain size. For example Tierra del Fuegian men have an average cranial capacity of 1,590 milliliters, while a sample of Peruvian womaen gives 1,219. Similarly, French men produce a figure of 1,585: women from the Tyrol, 1,238; men from the Xhosa (Nelson Mandela's tribe), 1,570; and Kenyan women, 1,207. So why these variations? Well, as we have seen, people living near the tropica are lighter bodied, on average, than those who dwell near the poles. This is a specific case of Bergmann's rule whihc states that animals tend to be larger (in particular, rounder) in colder climates to help to conserve body heat. Equally, people in warmer conditions have smaller (mainly thinner) bodies. And, of course because brain and body size are linked, they will also have smaller brains. Put simply, hot weather means smaller but longer brains, while a cold climate produces larger, rounder ones. And that indeed is what we see. The largest study of global cranial volumes ever carried out, by Beals, Smith and Dodd in 1984, showed that climate of origin was the most important variable influencing the size of human cranium. "Any effort to contribute racial or cognitive significance to brain size is probably meaningless unless climate is controlled," they state. "For example, the endocranial [inside the braincase] volumes of Europeans and Africans differ little from what one would expect given the difference in respective winters"
For their part, Rushton and the like accept that people living in colder climates have bigger brains, while those from the tropics have smaller ones, but for reasons that go beyond the issue of body size. They argue that brain grew to cope with the harsher, more challenging conditions involved in living in the higher latitudes. "The further north the populations migrated out of Africa, the more they encountered their cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters" states Rushton. As the original African population evolved into Caucasoids and Mongoloids, they did so in the direction of larger brains and lower levels of sex hormones, with concomitant reduction in aggression and sexual potency and increases in forward planning and family stability" In other words, our brains got bigger because we needed more intellect to deal with life in Europe, Asia, Australia, ans the Americas later on.
But there is a crucal flaw in this reasoning . It assumes that intellect and brain size are intimately related, and that is by no means clear. Just consider the case of two of the cold adapted populations we encountered in the previous chapter--the Ona, the original settlers of Tierra del Fuego; and the Tasmanians. They are useful benchmarks for our comparisons of brain size and achievement because Fuegian skulls and brain capacities are among the largest of all Homo sapiens while the average Tasmanian brain size was higher than that of their mainland Australian cousins, as we might expect.
Consider Tierra del Fuego first. Its inhabitants. the Ona, lived in land that lies just outside the antarctic circle, at the very southern tip of South America. Surrounded by the Atlantic. Pacific, and Antarctic oceans, the archipelago is swept by rain and blizzards: ripe, challenging territory growing those large skulls so admired by Rushton and the rest. And this cranial growth is indeed what took place, with most scientists maintaining that it was related to an increase in body size. For Rushton et al./ this enlargement must also reflect increased intelligence, however.
But if the latter scenario is correct, how can we reconcile the advanced cerebral status if the Ona with their impoverished existences. Readers will recall Darwin's description of their low, wrecthed lives, unadorned by fire or decent clothing. " Viewing such men, one can hardly make onself believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world," he wrote. Yet these folk, according to our recent racial demographers, should represent the very acme of human achievement, endowed with larger brains and living--as they undoubtedly did--in one of the most challenging of cold climates.
Then there were the Tasmanians. Archaeological records show that 20,000 years ago they were making pierced tools from wallaby bones, and necklaces and engravings. Then their Tasmanian homeland became isolated bu sea level rises 10,000 years ago. Slowly their tool kit became simpler and simpler, while their smaller brained mainland cousin, living in an apparently "debasing" warmer climate (according to Rushton that is), produced-- 6,000 years ago--a sudden leap in implement techonology that was one the great flowering of stone age cuture.
In short, having larger crania and bigger brains within them, did little for the Fuegians' or Tasmanians' quality of life. In fact, they were neither more or ess inteligent than the rest of humaity, as Drwin discovered when he met Fuegians who had been "civilized"--i.e., acclimated -- by spending a year in England. By this time, they spoke good English, dressed in Western clothes, and were considered to be sophisticated enough to meet the Royal family.
What impoverished their lifestyles in their homeland was cultural isolation, not lack of brainpower. Like the Tasmanians, the Fuegian people were stuck at the lonely, southern end of a large continent. And this is the critical point overlooked by the new racial evangelists. They assume large brains means big intellect, and the reverse. Yet its not that simple. We would not expect a person to be clever because they wore a large hat, after all. Moving from genra statistics to judging individuals is always dangerous. Other worker--such as Majie Henneberg of Adeaide University--suggests that human brain size is in fact a poor predictor of achievement. His work has revealed a a low correlation of IQ with brain size, and more to the point suggest that if the opposite were true--I.e., that brain size and intellect were in fact linked--our species must be getting stupider by the millienium. It sounds extraordinary. Nevertheless, Henneberg and others have discovered that human brain size has decreased almost universally over the past 10,000 years, an absorbing story whose telling forms and important part of the final chapter of this book, and for which hungry readers will have to wait (or skip a few pages).
Of course, the concept of intelligence itself is a difficult one to pin down and quantify. IQ tests reflect only one aspect of intelligence, the one which seems most influential in gaining material success in Western societies. In fact, different components of brain function--memory, association, extrapolation, intuition, and creativity--are all important, working separately and together. IQ tests only measure limited aspects of these diverse talents, and there is no doubt that cultural differences and familiarity with the contents of the test affect results. For example, Native Americans generally get very low IQ scores even though they were orginally Orientals, the alleged superiors of Europeans and Africans.
Unfortunately these issues have genrally been overlooked in the furious babble that greeted publication of The bell curve and sister works. Particularly ironic was the coverage in the times (London) which, on a day when it carried some of the very first reports of the debate, published an obituary of Davidson Nicol, a black African from Sierra Leine who got a first in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then gained a medical degree, and then finally followed this up with a distiguished academic and diplomatic carrer. His story in itsef might have seemed a rare or isolated accomplishment. Yet only three months after The Sunday Times (London) reported that:
"Black Africans have emerged as the most highly educated members of British Society and are twice as likely to hold jobs in the professions as white people. The findings, which challenge popular stereotypes about black underachievement, ate revealed in a new analysis of the offical census that for the first time, details the social class, educational achievement and aspirations of Britain's three million ethnic minorities. More than a quarter of the 130,000 adult black Africans in Britain hold qualifications higher than A-levels, compared with one in eight whites. They are now just ahead of Chinese, the most academically successful ethnic minority in previous studies"
Yet the authors of The Bell Curve and all its apologists, argue that putting resources into education to improve the intellectual performance of children from deprived backgrounds is a waste of money. It is a view denounced by Tim Beardsley, writing on Scientific American:
"Even though boosting IQ scores may be difficult and expensive, providing education can help individuals in other ways. That fact, not IQ scores, is what policy should be concerned with. The Bell Curve's fixation is a myopic one. Science does not deny the benefits of a nurturing environment and a helping hand."
In any case the story of our African exodus makes it unlikely there are significant structural differences between the brains of the world's various people. We came out of Africa as an already advanced species and those who remained on the continent retained that sophistication, just as much as the rest of Homo sapiens used it to conquer the world. Of course, that does not mean that there are absolutely no variations between populations. As we have seen already, the "race" called afer by Linnaeus, Ethiopian by Blumembach, and Congoid by Coon, and Negroid or African by Rushton appears to contain as much genetic variation as the rest of humanity put together, a fascinating prospect that will be put to the test over the next few years as the Human Genome Diversity Project gathers data around the world. This venture-- an offshoot of the Human Genome Project which is scheduled to produce a composite, but complete, map of the entire human genetic code by the early years of the next century--will study certain stretches of our DNA to see how they vary among different peoples. The results will provide a new, far more realistic perspective on racial differences. As Howard University's Georgia Dunston puts it: " After the diversity project we won't have the luxury of drawing distinctions between one another based on skin pigmentation."
It is a point backed by Jared Diamond:
"Of all those traits that are useful for classifying human races, some serve to enhance survival, some to enhance sexual selection, while some serve no function at all. The traits we traditionally use are ones subject to sexual selection, which is not really surprising. These traits are not only visible at a distance but also highly variable: that's why they became the ones used throughout recorded history to make quick judgments about people. Racial classification did not come from science but from the bodies' signals for differentiating attractive from unattractive sex partners sex partners, and for differentiating friend from foe"
In other words, we have extenuated the minute differences between ourselves, sometimes with grievous results.
Indeed, says Loring Brace, the concept of race is probaly only a very recent one. For most of our existence we lived without the notion and without a term for it in our vocabularies, he believes. Only when we came to the great age of European exploration which began in the fifteenth century did one set of people encounter another that looked starkly different. " The concepts of race did not exist until the invention of oceangoing transport in the Renaissance", he states in an article in discover magazine. Before then explorers traveled on horseback, covering only about twenty-five miles a day:
"It never occurred to them categorize people, because they had seen everything inbetween. That changed when you could get into a boat, sail for months, and wind up on a different continent entirely. When you got off, boy, did everybody look different! Our traditional racial groupings are not definitive types of people. They are simply the end points of the old mercantile trade networks."
Ideally, we need a time machine to travel back into out recent--and distant--past to prove such points. It would be an enriching exercise: most illuminating of all, would be that period--about 40 to 60,000 years ago--when small and separate human populations started to expand. marking the beginning of our planetary takeover. These surges in numbers acted like biological photocopies creating multiple version of these newly divergent people of different shapes and hues. After that, natural selection, sexual selection, and isolation helped mold our species in increasingly diverse ways. Later, over the past 15,000 years, as the fingers of ice that covered earth's higher latitudes reliquished their grip, the boundaries between different populations became blurred as benign climates and swelling human ambitions further mixed the melting pot of populations.
And that is the task of the Human Genome Diversity Project. Its anraveling of our planets web of ancient lineages will be fascinating business, though understanding what brought about our global spread is a different question. Obviously there was something very special about the mind of Homo Sapiens that led to our African exodus, an evolutionary endowment that dates from the creation of our species more than 10,000 years ago. That gift was present in that small founding population and it gave us all a shared heritage of social intelligence which was once of the keys to our success. That mental capacity was (and is) extraordinarily complex and if we want understand our own basic nature, we would be be best occupied in extending our understanding of its general nature rather than attempting to find minute variations in human ability in order to use them as the grounds for discrimination.
Ever more sophisticated methods of probing the workings of the brain are being developed, and these will allow us to move from crude generalizations to detailed studies of its operations. For instance, it has been claimed that functional differences between male and female brains have been found. But even if these exist, they probably have a much more ancient basis in behavioral between the sexes (Chapter 8) than the short timescale of differentiation which separates the human races.
This brings us directly to the final mysteries surrounding our African Exodus. What were the secrets which allowed us to grow in numbers and to spread to new lands previously beyond our reach What finally propelled us down the road to todays technology? This is an elusive topic, of course. In Chapter 4, we showed how superior organisations may have given our ancestors a crucial lead over our hominid cousins, Neanderthals, the Neanderthals, an advantage that ma have also helped us to compete with archaic people in China and Java. In addition there was our technological expertise--our mastery of boat building, working skins into clothes , constructing better houses and hearths, and other skills--that opened up previously untameable terrain.
Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Clyde Winters: In this study, multivariate analyses of craniometric data support Sauer's hypothesis that there are morphological differences between American whites and blacks. We also confirm significant geographic patterning in human variation but also find differences among groups within continents. As a result, if biological races are defined by uniqueness, then there are a very large number of biological races that can be defined, contradicting the classic biological race concept of physical anthropology.
American Journal of Physical Anthropologyn (2009) Volume 139 Issue 1, Pages 68 - 76
.
Thanks Clyde this actually refutes you as it notes that if biological races can be defined then there are a very large number of races which contradicts the concept of classical races....
You'll be there for days trying to identify 100 different races, many in between disconnecting the traditional classification and clustering with others....
It actually compliments the following;
People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.
It doesn't refute me. It proves that races exist. As you know some anthropologists have identified more than three races.
Read the article.
.
It does refute you Clyde, it specifically notes that it contradicts the classical race constrsuct you adhere to, and in essense if race can be used biologically then there would be a whole lot of races, races in between races in between races and so on and so on...
Compliments the following of course.....
"Genetic variation from one individual to another of the same race swamps the average differences between racial groupings" Categorizing a person by their race can clearly be a deeply misleading business.
posted
I did read it, that's why I know your own source refuted you Clyde, just get over it and move on.....
It proves that scientists have no consensus on the identification of races and in actuality there would be races in between races in between races, it's all fallacious and an extremely misleading business.
Try reading what I posted right above your last post from the book "African Exodus", it also clearly refutes you.
Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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quote:Originally posted by MindoverMatter718: Sorry for all you fallacious race baiters who think that your outdated and refuted work still stands, scientific majority debunks you, read the following if you dare!! Try to refute it if you can!
African Exodus: The African origins of modern humanity (pgs 183-193) Christopher Stringer and Robin Mckie
Nevertheless, the message from the Out of Africa theory is a straightforward one. Our exodus's timescale is so brief that only slight differences, if any,in intellect and innate behavior are likely to have evolved between modern human populations. And yet there are those who would still deny this fact, workers who cling to an intellectual tradition that runs from Galton to Eysenck and Jensen, scientists who have argued that racial differences in psychological and intellectual abilities are deep and meaningful. Indeed the subject has been fueled to near ignition in the recent years thanks to the claim that researchers have uncovered new evidence that the world's populations are easily seperable into distinct categories, particularly with regard to intelligence.
Take the example of British born Phillipe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario. In a paper presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1989, he used the Out of Africa as a starting point for arguing that humans evolved in a rich but unpredictable environment (Africa) where natural selection favored a strategy of high birthrates and low levels of parental care. However, some populations moved into more challenging environments (Europe and Asia) where lower birthrates and more intense parental care were favored. Whites, and particularly, Orientals, have evolved this adaptation, says Rushton, while black people retain our ancestal African pattern. He ranks these races for features suck as brain size, educational and occupational achievement, rate of maturity, fecundity, promiscuity, penis size, aggressiveness, parental care, respect for the law, and many others, revealing blacks to be the most primitive, Orientals the most advanced, with whites lying somewhere in between. For example Rushton reports that IQ tests consistently show a grading in favor or Orientals (average score 107) followed by whites (100) with blacks some way behind (85).
This entire thesis is based on some very old suppositions, however, For one thing, Rushton simply assumes that the Out Of Africa theory establishes the primitiveness of Africans and the superiority of Orientals. It does nothing of the sort of course. As we have seen throughout this book, indeed in this chapter, the theory provides no rationale for supporting that Orientals are evolutionary superior beings or blacks inferior. It would be expected that Europeans and Orientals are more closely related through recency of common ancestry, but there is no obvious basis for Orientals being more "evolved" than Europeans or blacks. And while we know that the supposed ancestors of Europeans-the Cro-Magnons --lived through the peak of the last ice age, we have little data to show where Orientals evolved. Equally, the relative merits and drawbacks of African and non African habitats are certainly arguable. Is surviving equatorial drought more or less challenging than enduring an Artic winter, for example?
Then there is the issue of Rushton's data and disparate sources one of the most heavily cited in his earlier workd is an 1898 book, by an anonymous French army surgeon, a repository of anecdotal information about the penis, breast, and buttock size of different native populations. His reliance on these kinds of data led to some strong criticism. More recently Rushton has used a wider variety of sources, including census data, studies of military recruits, and brain scanning techniques. He argues taht such data reinforce his original conclusion that human populations can be ordered in a scale of evolutionary advance from blacks, to whites, to Orientals.
Not surprisingly, Rushton's work has provoked a storm of protest. He has been dubbed a racist and has been threatened with removal from his teaching post. However, his univeristy has so far maintained his right to academic freedom of expression. more intriguingly Rushton has also recieved more than $700,000 from the Pioneer fund, set up in 1937 to further "race betterment with special references to people of the United States" In fact, the fund, established in 1937 by Wycliffe Draper, a Harvard graduate who inherited a textile machine fortune, has had a higly controversial history, having backed research programs on human behavior and variation at more than sixty institutions in eight countries. These projects include several that have claimed to have uncovered strong links between race and intelligence.
Rushton's views might have remained on the fringe had they not received a sudden, invigorating dose of intellectual oxygen with the appearance of "The Bell Curve", by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray-- a book whose publication in 1994 triggered widespread controversy in the United States. (The Bell Curve of the title refers to the characteristics shape of a diagram of a trait, such as IQ, in a population in which few people display exceptionally low or high scores while the majority cluster near the average value. Such a dispersion --known as a normal distribution--produces a graph that looks like a bell.) Herrnstein and Murray, who cite Rushton's work eleven times, as well as that of many Pioneer fund beneficiaries, concentrate their arguments on the over representation of American blacks in the countries lowest social levels and as scorers of its lowest IQ ratings. They conclude that no amount of state or national aid could achieve real racial equality in intellect and achievement. The book would have been incendiary at any time and in any country. However, its appearance during a period of when Americans, including many liberals, had begun to question the merits of the nations welfare system and to challenge it civil rights agenda, hit an exposed nerve. Indeed, such was the fuss that when the New Republic magazine prepared to print an eleven page extract from the book, an army of columnists and staff writers protested so strongly that a total of sixteen pages of rebuttals also had to be published.
Much of this sort of work is based on the idea that there is an indisputable correlation between IQ scores and brain size. Rushton, for example, makes a great deal of the fact that woman's brain size is smaller on average than a man's as is a black person's compared to a white's or an Oriental's. According to him the issue is straight forward, though it is in reality extremely complex: because brain size statistics are variously based on estimates of external head dimensions, external skull dimensions, internal skull dimensions, and volume and weight measurements on the actual brains of people have dided. In addition, the relationship of brain size to body size has to be taken into account since there is a clear correlation (as there is with all primate) between the two. Quite simply, bigger bodies need larger brains to govern them. For example, a woman's brain is on average 13 percent smaller than a man's brain. But when scaled against her smaller body size, the difference disappears. (Rushton does not accept this argument, however, and introduces a new factor--fat-- into his equations. He maintains that women have a bout 20 percent body fat in their bodies and ment only 10 percent, he uses these "fat allowances" to show women really do have smaller brains than men. Not surprisingly, this argument has not gone down well in many circles). If nothing else, this problem shows the difficulties of trying to study body and brain size relationships. In the former case we use lean body weight, total weight, height, or surface area? You take your choice.....
As to racial differences, it is well known that there is significant global variation in brain size. For example Tierra del Fuegian men have an average cranial capacity of 1,590 milliliters, while a sample of Peruvian womaen gives 1,219. Similarly, French men produce a figure of 1,585: women from the Tyrol, 1,238; men from the Xhosa (Nelson Mandela's tribe), 1,570; and Kenyan women, 1,207. So why these variations? Well, as we have seen, people living near the tropica are lighter bodied, on average, than those who dwell near the poles. This is a specific case of Bergmann's rule whihc states that animals tend to be larger (in particular, rounder) in colder climates to help to conserve body heat. Equally, people in warmer conditions have smaller (mainly thinner) bodies. And, of course because brain and body size are linked, they will also have smaller brains. Put simply, hot weather means smaller but longer brains, while a cold climate produces larger, rounder ones. And that indeed is what we see. The largest study of global cranial volumes ever carried out, by Beals, Smith and Dodd in 1984, showed that climate of origin was the most important variable influencing the size of human cranium. "Any effort to contribute racial or cognitive significance to brain size is probably meaningless unless climate is controlled," they state. "For example, the endocranial [inside the braincase] volumes of Europeans and Africans differ little from what one would expect given the difference in respective winters"
For their part, Rushton and the like accept that people living in colder climates have bigger brains, while those from the tropics have smaller ones, but for reasons that go beyond the issue of body size. They argue that brain grew to cope with the harsher, more challenging conditions involved in living in the higher latitudes. "The further north the populations migrated out of Africa, the more they encountered their cognitively demanding problems of gathering and storing food, gaining shelter, making clothes, and raising children successfully during prolonged winters" states Rushton. As the original African population evolved into Caucasoids and Mongoloids, they did so in the direction of larger brains and lower levels of sex hormones, with concomitant reduction in aggression and sexual potency and increases in forward planning and family stability" In other words, our brains got bigger because we needed more intellect to deal with life in Europe, Asia, Australia, ans the Americas later on.
But there is a crucal flaw in this reasoning . It assumes that intellect and brain size are intimately related, and that is by no means clear. Just consider the case of two of the cold adapted populations we encountered in the previous chapter--the Ona, the original settlers of Tierra del Fuego; and the Tasmanians. They are useful benchmarks for our comparisons of brain size and achievement because Fuegian skulls and brain capacities are among the largest of all Homo sapiens while the average Tasmanian brain size was higher than that of their mainland Australian cousins, as we might expect.
Consider Tierra del Fuego first. Its inhabitants. the Ona, lived in land that lies just outside the antarctic circle, at the very southern tip of South America. Surrounded by the Atlantic. Pacific, and Antarctic oceans, the archipelago is swept by rain and blizzards: ripe, challenging territory growing those large skulls so admired by Rushton and the rest. And this cranial growth is indeed what took place, with most scientists maintaining that it was related to an increase in body size. For Rushton et al./ this enlargement must also reflect increased intelligence, however.
But if the latter scenario is correct, how can we reconcile the advanced cerebral status if the Ona with their impoverished existences. Readers will recall Darwin's description of their low, wrecthed lives, unadorned by fire or decent clothing. " Viewing such men, one can hardly make onself believe that they are fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world," he wrote. Yet these folk, according to our recent racial demographers, should represent the very acme of human achievement, endowed with larger brains and living--as they undoubtedly did--in one of the most challenging of cold climates.
Then there were the Tasmanians. Archaeological records show that 20,000 years ago they were making pierced tools from wallaby bones, and necklaces and engravings. Then their Tasmanian homeland became isolated bu sea level rises 10,000 years ago. Slowly their tool kit became simpler and simpler, while their smaller brained mainland cousin, living in an apparently "debasing" warmer climate (according to Rushton that is), produced-- 6,000 years ago--a sudden leap in implement techonology that was one the great flowering of stone age cuture.
In short, having larger crania and bigger brains within them, did little for the Fuegians' or Tasmanians' quality of life. In fact, they were neither more or ess inteligent than the rest of humaity, as Drwin discovered when he met Fuegians who had been "civilized"--i.e., acclimated -- by spending a year in England. By this time, they spoke good English, dressed in Western clothes, and were considered to be sophisticated enough to meet the Royal family.
What impoverished their lifestyles in their homeland was cultural isolation, not lack of brainpower. Like the Tasmanians, the Fuegian people were stuck at the lonely, southern end of a large continent. And this is the critical point overlooked by the new racial evangelists. They assume large brains means big intellect, and the reverse. Yet its not that simple. We would not expect a person to be clever because they wore a large hat, after all. Moving from genra statistics to judging individuals is always dangerous. Other worker--such as Majie Henneberg of Adeaide University--suggests that human brain size is in fact a poor predictor of achievement. His work has revealed a a low correlation of IQ with brain size, and more to the point suggest that if the opposite were true--I.e., that brain size and intellect were in fact linked--our species must be getting stupider by the millienium. It sounds extraordinary. Nevertheless, Henneberg and others have discovered that human brain size has decreased almost universally over the past 10,000 years, an absorbing story whose telling forms and important part of the final chapter of this book, and for which hungry readers will have to wait (or skip a few pages).
Of course, the concept of intelligence itself is a difficult one to pin down and quantify. IQ tests reflect only one aspect of intelligence, the one which seems most influential in gaining material success in Western societies. In fact, different components of brain function--memory, association, extrapolation, intuition, and creativity--are all important, working separately and together. IQ tests only measure limited aspects of these diverse talents, and there is no doubt that cultural differences and familiarity with the contents of the test affect results. For example, Native Americans generally get very low IQ scores even though they were orginally Orientals, the alleged superiors of Europeans and Africans.
Unfortunately these issues have genrally been overlooked in the furious babble that greeted publication of The bell curve and sister works. Particularly ironic was the coverage in the times (London) which, on a day when it carried some of the very first reports of the debate, published an obituary of Davidson Nicol, a black African from Sierra Leine who got a first in Natural Sciences at Cambridge, then gained a medical degree, and then finally followed this up with a distiguished academic and diplomatic carrer. His story in itsef might have seemed a rare or isolated accomplishment. Yet only three months after The Sunday Times (London) reported that:
"Black Africans have emerged as the most highly educated members of British Society and are twice as likely to hold jobs in the professions as white people. The findings, which challenge popular stereotypes about black underachievement, ate revealed in a new analysis of the offical census that for the first time, details the social class, educational achievement and aspirations of Britain's three million ethnic minorities. More than a quarter of the 130,000 adult black Africans in Britain hold qualifications higher than A-levels, compared with one in eight whites. They are now just ahead of Chinese, the most academically successful ethnic minority in previous studies"
Yet the authors of The Bell Curve and all its apologists, argue that putting resources into education to improve the intellectual performance of children from deprived backgrounds is a waste of money. It is a view denounced by Tim Beardsley, writing on Scientific American:
"Even though boosting IQ scores may be difficult and expensive, providing education can help individuals in other ways. That fact, not IQ scores, is what policy should be concerned with. The Bell Curve's fixation is a myopic one. Science does not deny the benefits of a nurturing environment and a helping hand."
In any case the story of our African exodus makes it unlikely there are significant structural differences between the brains of the world's various people. We came out of Africa as an already advanced species and those who remained on the continent retained that sophistication, just as much as the rest of Homo sapiens used it to conquer the world. Of course, that does not mean that there are absolutely no variations between populations. As we have seen already, the "race" called afer by Linnaeus, Ethiopian by Blumembach, and Congoid by Coon, and Negroid or African by Rushton appears to contain as much genetic variation as the rest of humanity put together, a fascinating prospect that will be put to the test over the next few years as the Human Genome Diversity Project gathers data around the world. This venture-- an offshoot of the Human Genome Project which is scheduled to produce a composite, but complete, map of the entire human genetic code by the early years of the next century--will study certain stretches of our DNA to see how they vary among different peoples. The results will provide a new, far more realistic perspective on racial differences. As Howard University's Georgia Dunston puts it: " After the diversity project we won't have the luxury of drawing distinctions between one another based on skin pigmentation."
It is a point backed by Jared Diamond:
"Of all those traits that are useful for classifying human races, some serve to enhance survival, some to enhance sexual selection, while some serve no function at all. The traits we traditionally use are ones subject to sexual selection, which is not really surprising. These traits are not only visible at a distance but also highly variable: that's why they became the ones used throughout recorded history to make quick judgments about people. Racial classification did not come from science but from the bodies' signals for differentiating attractive from unattractive sex partners sex partners, and for differentiating friend from foe"
In other words, we have extenuated the minute differences between ourselves, sometimes with grievous results.
Indeed, says Loring Brace, the concept of race is probaly only a very recent one. For most of our existence we lived without the notion and without a term for it in our vocabularies, he believes. Only when we came to the great age of European exploration which began in the fifteenth century did one set of people encounter another that looked starkly different. " The concepts of race did not exist until the invention of oceangoing transport in the Renaissance", he states in an article in discover magazine. Before then explorers traveled on horseback, covering only about twenty-five miles a day:
"It never occurred to them categorize people, because they had seen everything inbetween. That changed when you could get into a boat, sail for months, and wind up on a different continent entirely. When you got off, boy, did everybody look different! Our traditional racial groupings are not definitive types of people. They are simply the end points of the old mercantile trade networks."
Ideally, we need a time machine to travel back into out recent--and distant--past to prove such points. It would be an enriching exercise: most illuminating of all, would be that period--about 40 to 60,000 years ago--when small and separate human populations started to expand. marking the beginning of our planetary takeover. These surges in numbers acted like biological photocopies creating multiple version of these newly divergent people of different shapes and hues. After that, natural selection, sexual selection, and isolation helped mold our species in increasingly diverse ways. Later, over the past 15,000 years, as the fingers of ice that covered earth's higher latitudes reliquished their grip, the boundaries between different populations became blurred as benign climates and swelling human ambitions further mixed the melting pot of populations.
And that is the task of the Human Genome Diversity Project. Its anraveling of our planets web of ancient lineages will be fascinating business, though understanding what brought about our global spread is a different question. Obviously there was something very special about the mind of Homo Sapiens that led to our African exodus, an evolutionary endowment that dates from the creation of our species more than 10,000 years ago. That gift was present in that small founding population and it gave us all a shared heritage of social intelligence which was once of the keys to our success. That mental capacity was (and is) extraordinarily complex and if we want understand our own basic nature, we would be be best occupied in extending our understanding of its general nature rather than attempting to find minute variations in human ability in order to use them as the grounds for discrimination.
Ever more sophisticated methods of probing the workings of the brain are being developed, and these will allow us to move from crude generalizations to detailed studies of its operations. For instance, it has been claimed that functional differences between male and female brains have been found. But even if these exist, they probably have a much more ancient basis in behavioral between the sexes (Chapter 8) than the short timescale of differentiation which separates the human races.
This brings us directly to the final mysteries surrounding our African Exodus. What were the secrets which allowed us to grow in numbers and to spread to new lands previously beyond our reach What finally propelled us down the road to todays technology? This is an elusive topic, of course. In Chapter 4, we showed how superior organisations may have given our ancestors a crucial lead over our hominid cousins, Neanderthals, the Neanderthals, an advantage that ma have also helped us to compete with archaic people in China and Java. In addition there was our technological expertise--our mastery of boat building, working skins into clothes , constructing better houses and hearths, and other skills--that opened up previously untameable terrain.
Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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quote:Originally posted by MindoverMatter718: I did read it, that's why I know your own source refuted you Clyde, just get over it and move on.....
It proves that scientists have no consensus on the identification of races and in actuality there would be races in between races in between races, it's all fallacious and an extremely misleading business.
Try reading what I posted right above your last post from the book "African Exodus", it also clearly refutes you.
This study proves you wrong.
Developing a set of ancestry-sensitive DNA markers reflecting continental origins of humans Paula Kersbergen1,2 , Kate van Duijn3 , Ate D Kloosterman1 , Johan T den Dunnen2 , Manfred Kayser3 and Peter de Knijff2 1Department of Human Biological Traces (R&D), Netherlands Forensic Institute, PO Box 24044, 2490 AA The Hague, The Netherlands 2Department of Human and Clinical Genetics, Leiden University Medical Center, PO Box 9600, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands 3Department of Forensic Molecular Biology, Erasmus University Medical Center, PO Box 2040, 3000 CA Rotterdam, The Netherlands author email corresponding author email BMC Genetics 2009, 10:69doi:10.1186/1471-2156-10-69 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/69
Kersbergen et al
quote: Since the ASMs ascertained in this study were developed for distinguishing between the four major continental groups, individuals from other populations (e.g. Oceania (n = 2)) that were not (or under) represented in the YCC panel for marker ascertainment, were initially clustered within their most likely source population such as (East-)Asia in the case of Oceania. However, in the independent HGDP samples Oceania could be separated from East Asians at least with 47 ASMs and at K = 6. This illustrates that although the 47 ASMs were not explicitly selected to separate sub-groups within major continental regions, they do prove to be useful for this purpose at least in some cases. Our pairwise FST method for ascertaining ASMs ensures the absence of bias towards the African population, which usually shows the largest genetic differentiation compared to all non-African groups. This can easily be seen in the many studies analysing the HGDP-CEPH panel. In most analyses involving STRUCTURE or similar analytical tools the first split of the total group of individuals always could be related to a split between African versus non-African samples (e.g. [33]). At K = 2 our 34 ASMs, but not our set of 47 ASMs, showed a split between African and all non-African samples. A similar less prominent first split between African and non-African samples was also reported in other studies [17,34-36]. Despite these differences in clustering patterns for lower values of K, most studies report an identical major clustering pattern at K = 4 (Africa, Eurasia, East Asia (including Oceania) and Native America). The ASMs ascertained in our study did not allow the differentiation among Eurasian individuals, i.e. individuals from Europe, Middle East as well as West and South Asia, which is similar to earlier findings based on a large number of STRs [17]. Finding ASMs with higher levels of specificity among Eurasian populations would improve the analyses considerably but obviously needs a different sampling design. Recently, two other largely overlapping studies were published [37,38] and demonstrated that the identification of the geographic sub-region of origin of an individual within Europe is possible within certain limits.
The researchers add that:
quote: Other groups have also identified sets of ASMs that could differentiate the major geographical regions [39,40]. One example of such a different set of 34 SNPs is identified by Phillips et al. [36]. These SNPs do not overlap with our set of 34 and 47 ASMs, and were specifically sought in close proximity of genes that have been subjected to strong regional positive selection in the recent past [36]. Their set is able to distinguish between African vs. European, Middle Eastern - Central/South Asian vs. Oceanian, vs. East Asian vs. (Native) American groups also using the HGDP samples, similar to our findings, although at K = 4 it was not possible to distinguish Native American individuals from East Asian and Oceania. As such this is yet another indication that many other different sets of ASMs could be identified, depending on the a priori selection criteria.
This research is important because it also shows that while four races exist , these populations can be separated into additional subgroups:
quote:
]. Their set is able to distinguish between African vs. European, Middle Eastern - Central/South Asian vs. Oceanian, vs. East Asian vs. (Native) American groups also using the HGDP samples, similar to our findings, although at K = 4 it was not possible to distinguish Native American individuals from East Asian and Oceania.
This research makes it clear that you can use genetics to discover four populations or races.
quote:
By means of STRUCTURE analyses we screened the 74 worldwide YCC samples from six human populations that were defined by their distinct geographical locations (referred to as 6geo) for the presence of genetically defined subgroups on the basis of the total set of 8,474 SNPs per individual after quality control (Figure 1). The six geographical locations with defined human populations (6geo) are (i) (Central) Africa, (ii) South Africa, (iii) Asia (including Pakistan), (iv) Europe, (v) Northern Asia (Russia and Siberia), and (vi) Native America. All STRUCTURE models indicated a best fit of the data at four clusters (K = 4). These four clusters combined the six geographically (6geo) defined populations into the following four genetic subgroups (referred to as 4gen): (i) African, composed of individuals from South Africa and Central Africa, (ii) Native American, composed of individuals of Native American origins from North, Central and South America, (iii) Asian, including individuals from East Asia and Siberia, eand (iv) Eurasian, including individuals from Russia, Europe, and Pakistan. These results also suggested that the identification of suitable ASMs could be best achieved by comparing the posteriori defined four genetic subgroups (4gen) and not - as is often done - by comparing the a priori geographically defined populations (in our case six, hence 6geo). For the purpose of comparison we describe below the use of ASMs identified by means of both strategies (4gen and 6geo).
Your ideas that races do not exist is not supported by genetic research
Will genetic anthropology establish scientific criteria for race or ethnicity?
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. Indeed, it has been proven that there is more genetic variation within races than exists between them.
quote:Then there is the genetic evidence. It reveals the stark, simple, homogeneous nature of modern mankind. Scientists have generally recognized that the common chimpanzee of central Africa has three subspecies, though to most people they look very similar indeed. Nevertheless these chimp "races" are almost ten times as different from each other, genetically, as are the African, European, and Asian divisions of Homo Sapiens created by Linnaeus, Blumembach, and Coon.
In addition, there is the work of biologist Richard Lewontin of Harvard University, who used a series of seventeen stretches of DNA to study the differences between 168 populations, people such as the Austrians, Thais and Apaches. In this way, Lewontin found there is more genetic variation within one race than there is between that race and another. Only 6.3 percent of dissimilarity between two people from disparate ethnic backgrounds can be explained by their belonging to separate races. This means that if you pick at random any two people, say Norwegians, walking along the street and analyze their twenty three chromosomes, you could find their genes have less in common than do genes of one of them with a person from another continent. As Sharon Begley puts it an essay on race in Time magazine in February 1993 "Genetic variation from one individual to another of the same race swamps the average differences between racial groupings" Categorizing a person by their race can clearly be a deeply misleading business.
Genes do reveal some differences between populations, of course. For example, mitochondrial DNA studies have shown that human diversity within Africa is nearly three times that in Europe, and nearly double that within Asia. This same high level of African differentiation is apparent in studies of skull measurements, and in a number of recent nuclear DNA studies such as those of Kidd and Tishkoff.
Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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posted
^^Can you please adjust the size of the pic to fit the regular format?
And then note in details what it is that's supposed to prove Or if not, just delete it thanks...
Posts: 6572 | From: N.Y.C....Capital of the World | Registered: Jun 2008
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posted
While I agree overall with the Stringer aticle, there are 2 points that may be questionable.
HUman Geonome Project to ‘move beyond’ race? How, when it is itself using categories like “sub-Saharan” in an artifical way that denies the variability, or biological relationships of Africans above and below the Sahara, which itself has been a widely fluctuating "barrier" over the centuries? Keita and Kittle note this inconsistent approach in many academy writings. While many identify a narrow "sub-Saharan" type, they never do likewise for "Eurasians", who are defined as broadly and expansively. The Geonome Project is riddled with the same inconsistencies.
From article: ”a fascinating prospect that will be put to the test over the next few years as the Human Genome Diversity Project gathers data around the world. This venture-- an offshoot of the Human Genome Project which is scheduled to produce a composite, but complete, map of the entire human genetic code by the early years of the next century--will study certain stretches of our DNA to see how they vary among different peoples. The results will provide a new, far more realistic perspective on racial differences. As Howard University's Georgia Dunston puts it: " After the diversity project we won't have the luxury of drawing distinctions between one another based on skin pigmentation."
Notion of “race” grows from “selection? Also dubious. “Race” is a rather recent construct. An African farmer, circa 10,000 years ago, did not think of “Mongoloids” if he ran into Asiatic nomads in the Sinai Penisula. THings such as “Caucasoid”, “Mongoloid” “Negroid” are modern European race constructs, not something people subscribed to in the past. People recognized members of their own tribes or families, or kingdoms, not “races”.
Jared Diamond is reading “race” into ordinary human variation or cultural perefences, based on things that have nothing to do with race, either as a biological sub-species, or even a social construct. Aiming to marry a female in a particular tribe, may have absolutely nothing to do with analysis for “racial” traits, but simply means following tribal norms like religion or kinship links, etc. Likewise people have married outside their tribes based on economic or political advantages- like 2 rulers cementing diplomatic relations for example, without any “race” caterogizations at all relevant.
From article: ”It is a point backed by Jared Diamond:
"Of all those traits that are useful for classifying human races, some serve to enhance survival, some to enhance sexual selection, while some serve no function at all. The traits we traditionally use are ones subject to sexual selection, which is not really surprising. These traits are not only visible at a distance but also highly variable: that's why they became the ones used throughout recorded history to make quick judgments about people. Racial classification did not come from science but from the bodies' signals for differentiating attractive from unattractive sex partners sex partners, and for differentiating friend from foe"
^^Based on Diamond projecting his racial categories way back into pre-history, a dubious practice as Keita and Kittles note in The persistence of racial thinking, 1997. SOme claim that "geographic clusters" represent race, but then hypocritically split Africans separated a few hundred miles from one another into a "non-African" cluster, or split people located below the Sahara, into a non- sub Saharan, non-African cluster, all the while piously proclaiming how well geography maps with "race." Why the inconsistency and hypocrisy?
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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