Genetic Science vs. Belief: Racial differences are real, but no cause for discrimination.

National Review ^ | 07/08/2014 | Michael Barone

[SeekAndFind]

‘New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional,” writes Nicholas Wade in his recently published book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.

That sounds reasonable, and Wade, a science reporter and editor for many years at Nature and the New York Times, seems an unimpeachable source. But many well-meaning people will regard his words as provocative and even dangerous.

For they fatally undermine the idea, widely shared by so-called progressives, that any apparent differences between groups of people are the product of nurture rather than nature, of social conditioning rather than Darwinian natural selection.

This has become dogma among certain social scientists. The American Anthropological Association states that race “is a recent human invention” and “is about culture, not biology.” The American Sociological Association calls race “a social construct” and decries “the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological.”

Unfortunately for these folks, the decoding of the human genome in 2003 has led to research showing significant genetic differences among people descended from Africans, East Asians, and Caucasians.

Those differences must have arisen from natural selection in the different environments they occupied from the time the first humans left east Africa some 50,000 years ago.

They include not only skin pigment and facial physiognomy but many other physical characteristics, including genes that resist endemic diseases and (in Tibetans, developed only 3,000 years ago) the ability to live at very high altitudes.

Many of the progressives who reject the notion that races differ in significant respects are the same people who accuse those skeptical of global warming of ignoring science, even though the alarmists’ warming models don’t match the recent past or the present.

[House Atreides]

Just finished reading this book last night and highly recommend it.

As I gather more experience in life, I’ve coming more and more to the conclusion that there is a genetic basis for the difference in misbehavior between blacks and non-blacks in the US. Within the black population exists some genetic dysfunction (among a percentage of the population) that makes it difficult to function/behave in civilized society. Of course non-black groups have similar dysfunctional individuals but in far lower percentages.

[MrB]

Are these behavioral tendencies that you refer to suppressed or not genetically prevalent in individuals from the Caribbean or actual Africa?

Those people who immigrate here want nothing to do with America blacks.

I blame the left and their political use/enslavement of American blacks for their behavioral tendencies more than anything else.

[SeekAndFind]

How does this account for blacks who are mostly well educated in the UK and mostly NOT misbehaving?

[House Atreides]

Have you been to Jamaica or South Africa lately? And I'm not talking about the well policed and safe zones to which tourists typically are steered.

As with many things in life, folks see what they wish to see and blind themselves to that which they prefer not to see. In any case, I was referring to some traits/behaviours that are seen in a subset of the population and not in the entire population.

And, by the way, whites and Asians also have a percentage of their populations who are lacking something (whether genetic or learned, who knows as of today) - just with a lower percentage of those populations.

In any case, believe as you wish.

[MrB]

Maybe it’s just those that choose to immigrate here to ESCAPE the dysfunction of their societies, and don’t want anything to do with it here.