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To: Question_Assumptions
Its hard to show how such a small difference between human populations is worth discussing, worth investing the time and money to research, or is going to actually help anybody. There are not medicines that will or will not help you dependent upon the shape of your skull. There is, however, medicine that will or will not help you based upon your genotype. Thus allelic differences get studied because they are useful. Skull shape differences are not useful except to archaeologists or racists.
51 posted on 10/31/2005 8:52:12 AM PST by USConstitutionBuff
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To: USConstitutionBuff
Skull shape differences are not useful except to archaeologists or racists.

And like I said, once you've come to that conclusion, you've put the burden of proof upon anyone who claims otherwise to prove it, which becomes a matter of proving that they aren't secretly engaged in the though crime of racism, which is an impossible task. Even if certain questions are normally asked for entirely racist reasons, is it really scientific to declare engire ranges of questions and knowledge off limits because it might be misused by racists?

In a society where a sports team can get sued for having no athletes of a particular race or sex or a company can be sued for having no employees of a particular race or sex in a particular job category, determining where the discrepancy comes from can lead to issues of morphology and general intelligence. Since we are a society that is so obsessed with racial and ethnic differences, they should be studied, and it could be useful to know if the prevailing dogma (which may very well be true) that there are no important differences between the races really is true if we are going to base public policies on top of those assumptions.

For the record, I do think it's important to scrutinize such research to some degree to make sure that it's not simply racist pseudo-science but I think that the assumption that any researcher who studies such issues must be racist or motivated by racism and a refusal to accept any explanation or assurances that it isn't is going way too far.

52 posted on 10/31/2005 9:37:23 AM PST by Question_Assumptions
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