Posted on 05/06/2014 5:19:14 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
To a certain extent you are correct.
The topic of this article, and the article itself for that matter, amounts to pseudo-scientific claptrap.
The author can’t even get the MAO polymorphism data correct, does not understand it or he would not make such an error in describing it.
But this is the world we live in. Idiots think they are geniuses, and no one knows better or cares.
“I’m trying to figure out what relevance your post has to the subject of the article?”
Good point, me as well.
It would seem to be saying Sanger was right.
They do so, not through natural selection or any other evolutionist fantasy, but through countless complicated scams that only they fully understand. For instance the chinese business immigration scams in Canada. Chinese education is based on plagiarism, cheating, bribery and fake degrees and everyone knows and accepts this. Everyone but dumb north americans that is.
So I repeat, have you read it?
If not then please do so. I believe it is available on-line. Then you may cite parts that support what ever argument you are trying to make.
i see, survival of the smallest. So, according to evolution, people today find small brains more attractive, and hence tend to have more small-brained offspring with attractive small-brained mates. That's interesting. Or is it that having a smaller brain gives you an advantage in, say, Wall street, or the advertising industry, or maybe plumbing or accounting? Indeed a small brain would be of great advantage to the lucky ones who have it... though at the moment I can't think of why... perhaps my brain isn't small enough and I'm due for extinction. But it doesn't really have to be an advantage, does it? We can just say that it is, and that's good enough for evolution. Or we can say that it isn't even an advantage, and that's good enough for evolution.
No, I am not.
You are trying to change the subject because you know you can’t answer without incriminating yourself.
Ben is afraid to even raise his head.
I’ve pretty much smoked you both out with a simple question.
What are you talking about?
More particularly, what do you mean by “incriminating?”
And what do you mean by “Smoked me out?”
Seriously, you sound deranged.
~>>It is absolutely clear that difference between groups are solely cultural and there is no legit clues to prove otherwise.
The field of athletic success says otherwise.~
LOL. It’s a classic argument in a discussion like that and I wonder what part of white guilt makes it any acceptable, considering how racist and overall wrong this argument actually is:)
Do the math if you think it is not cultural or learnt. When was the last time you’ve seen a bunch of Hasidem kids at basketball court in midnight?
They have different priorities. That is why, genetic aside, they have Einstein, and other group Magic Johnson.
I wouldn’t think so.
It does exemplify the progressive mind set.
Sanger was a eugenicist. She took Darwin very seriously.
Margaret Sanger was a life fellow of the british Eugenics Society. Leonard Darwin (Charles's son) was the president.
“If you start learning about world genetics you find that we are far more mixed then most people could believe. Genes from around the world are found around the world. We travel, we trade and we have lots of sex.”
Heredity does not function that way, and it reflects poorly on your understanding of basic biology when you claim that it does, to say nothing of your knowledge of history. Place a drop of milk into a gallon of ink, and see what happens. That is what happens when someone from the Bell-Beaker culture washes up on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa.
Your potential misuse of the word “genes” tells me that you may also misunderstand genetics. Do you know the difference between a gene and an allele? Between nuclear DNA and the mtDNA or Y-chromosomal DNA used as useful yardsticks in population genetics?
Limited trading contacts and limited geneflow or introgression events are not sufficient on their own to significantly change the genotype of the whole population, whether we are talking fruit flies or humans - after each generation any small introduction of new genetic material would be halved, halved again the next generation, and so on. The dominant communal genotype would remain dominant, period. Over centuries beneficial alleles derived from an introgression event which happen to convey a reproductive advantage may begin to proliferate, but that in no way implies genetic replacement of the dominant genotype or significant admixture. Quite the contrary, most alleles introduced by limited introgression events are quickly lost even if they are beneficial and convey a significant reproductive advantage, simple probability governs the equation. There’s a reason we don’t look like Neanderthals and Denisovans.
It requires mass displacement of a population and, usually, total military conquest in order to significantly shift the overall percentages of measurable traits or allele frequency in a given human population, and historically those types of events have tended to replace native populations on the whole rather than create a significantly admixed population; on average merely amounting to picking up a few sex chromosomes here and there from the conquered to let future geneticists know that some tribe was subsumed. Even prolonged border-sharing isn’t usually sufficient to significantly alter the dominant features of a community, especially when administrative, cultural, economic, geographic or linguistic barriers discourage complete freeflow of genetic material. Picking up a little mtDNA from a slave or two isn’t enough to shift a group’s clustering on a haplotype map.
There are VERY few significantly admixed populations in the world today, a few notable examples being African-Americans and some (but certainly nowhere near all) Latin American populations. Fascinatingly enough some Indian ethnic groups have maintained a high degree of differentiation despite numerous conquests and centuries of cohabitation, cultural barriers can be surprisingly effective at stopping gene flow.
The vast physical differences you see when looking at people from different areas of the world is a consequence of the biological differences between populations of human beings that have been breeding in significant isolation from one another. You can even tell many of the larger clusters of human populations apart based on something as simple as visually examining a hair or a bit of ear wax.
“Well, you see that is just the problem. You can’t.” Well that’s the problem, you can. You are quite wrong. If your assumption were correct, then there are a whole lot of forensic scientists out there helping to convict people with false science. Significant physical differences exist between the main ancestral groups of human beings, and even when dealing with a mixed community of many different ancestral populations cohabiting (the American continent would be a good example) we can still identify significantly different traits existing between different communities living in the same small place.
You don’t get epicanthic folds, powdery ear wax and shovel teeth by practicing Confucianism; they are hereditary traits, not cultural ones.
Here’s the crux of the disagreement. You would like to ignore every possible cause of human difference other than culture. I on the other hand admit that human beings are a product of both nature AND nurture, and further I believe that it’s important to understand which force is responsible for what effect, rather than simply assuming that half or more of the equation doesn’t exist.
You appear to have some emotional and political motivations for your viewpoint, and that is understandable most people do. For example, your introduction of the concept of “breeding” better human beings, when I mentioned no such thing and when I took pains to point out that understanding human biology does NOT by definition lead to eugenics. You simply assume that anyone who claims nature has a role must, by definition, be a eugenicist advocating nature above all other causes.
Compare and contrast my comments, I took pains to point out an example in modern medicine where we identified a behavioral problem that was highly heritable, schizophrenia, and I took great pains to point out that the response was NOT “Breed better humans!”, the response was to use cultural and scientific achievements to ameliorate the effects of biological shortcomings. Enhanced medical screening, therapy and medication targeted specifically at highly risk-prone individuals and families - not eugenics.
This is key, we must not ignore biology. Nature and nurture together can build a better society, and if we understand where nature falls a little short we can use a bit of nurture (or a handful of nutritional supplements or anti-psychotics) to smooth out the difference. You CANNOT DO THAT if you refuse to admit that nature has a significant influence. You end up creating more human suffering and compounding humanity’s failures if you refuse to accurately identify the source of a problem.
To reiterate my final point from the last post - ignoring biological differences, refusing to discuss them, does not serve any useful purpose; it compounds human suffering and retards real progress. Further, ignoring biological differences DELAYS or PREVENTS the formation and adoption of rational, reasonable, moral principles to guide medical intervention. We CAN address biological differences between individuals and populations in a moral and rational manner without resorting to eugenics and extermination camps, as I pointed out with the example of schizophrenia, and it is very important that we adopt guiding frameworks that encourage this rational and moral approach before medical technology advances beyond the point where we can shape its widespread use and acceptance.
By delaying a moral discussion about the biological forces underlying human behavior, and how those forces may differ between populations, you are paradoxically encouraging a resurgence of eugenicist thought. Better to address uncomfortable truths now before they get too loud for the majority to ignore, and better yet to establish a moral framework for medical intervention BEFORE genetic screening and manipulation become common enough and cheap enough for individual customers and medicos to develop their own beliefs about how such performance enhancing technology should be used.
Our cultural features are an outgrowth of our genetic heritage. We evolved to be social beings, to have one mate (although this trait is not as strong as in other species), to invest a lot of effort into our offspring, etc. Our cultures reflect these genetic imperatives. However, there are a variety of cultural behaviors that can manifest which are different from each other yet still function to fulfill our biological imperatives.
FYI, the majority of life scientists have never read Darwin's book and have maybe heard the title of it. When I was in college, our discussion of Darwin was limited to discussing the voyage he made to the Galapagos Islands and the crucial observations he made there which led to his formulating the first working theory of evolution, the one that developed into the working theory we use today. It has been considerably refined since Darwin's time, but is still completely crucial to the study of biology.
The title of Darwin's book really has very little relevance to our use of the theory.
Well said. Too many of those who wish scientists would just forget about the theory of evolution (ToE) do not understand this. Survival of the fittest means that the organism whose genome functions the best within its specific environment is the most likely to pass half of its genome to its offspring. There is no morality or ethics involved, no subjective measure of what constitutes fitness.
The likelihood that scientists will ditch the ToE is vanishingly small: science cannot advance without a theoretical framework, and the framework provided by the ToE works very well.
What I said was that a smaller brain is not a disadvantage for survival in a society where most survival functions are performed at a level above the individual. This has nothing to do with selection of mates or anything else. For example, consider a group of nomadic tribesmen who need to devote 80% of their cognitive resources to survival (hunting, avoiding predators, finding shelter, making warm clothing, etc.), and their group is small enough that everyone must contribute to survival. In that group, children with smaller brains--for whom the 80% of the brain dedicated to survival is only equivalent to someone else's 40%--would not survive.
As humans have become more socialized, those survival functions became specialized to certain members of the group. For example, I don't raise and kill my own meat; I go to a butcher who kills the animals which, in turn, are raised by ranchers. Same thing with clothes: even if someone learns how to make clothes, she doesn't start the process by growing the cotton in her backyard--she buys the fabric already made. And so on. Since survival functions are now performed by specialized members of society, and each of those specialized members is responsible for only a tiny part of a survival function, it is no longer necessary for each person to maintain the brain power to survive individually or in small groups. Hence, average individual brain size has become smaller with no effect on species survival.
The other side of this coin is that larger brains have somewhat of a survival disadvantage. An infant with a large brain might have trouble exiting the birth canal--not a problem with today's medicine, but as little as a century or so ago was a death sentence for both mother and child. It takes more energy to maintain a larger brain, which can be a problem when food is scarce. With selective pressures to maintain a large brain eased because of relegation of survival functions to a large group rather than a handful of individuals, those with slightly smaller brains have a survival advantage.
AshkeNAZI roughly means "German", which implies a German / Jewish hybrid. Jews are taking the credit for this brand of brain architecture however the German "rocket scientists" of yore had something to do with it.
Germany has been a hotspot of envy and tribal warfare for a long time, the product being higher IQ. The German language has several words to describe subtle variations of envy. The Germans mounted "envy heads", monster faces over their doors, to scare away the envious with evil intent. The Jews are also a product of tribal warfare envy for thousands of years.
About half the Jews in Europe were killed during WWII. In general, with many exceptions, the ghetto dwellers died disproportionally while the Einsteins tended to get away. That's why Jews in America today have the reputation of being pretty smart and not welfare takers. Possibly WWII resulted in the largest amount of human evolution to occur the last 100 years, yet that evolutionary jump and its mechanism cannot be investigated by any academic that wishes to remain employed.
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