What if race is more than a social construct?

Globe & Mail ^ | 5/10/2014

[Altura Ct.]

Nicholas Wade, a leading science writer whose specialty is human evolution, likes to ask interesting questions. Here are some examples:

Why has the West been the most exploratory and innovative civilization in the world for the past 500 years?

Why are Jews of European descent so massively overrepresented among the top achievers in the arts and sciences?

Why is the Chinese diaspora successful all around the world?

Why is it so difficult to modernize tribal societies?

Why has economic development been so slow in Africa?

Contemporary thinkers have offered lots of provocative answers for such questions. It’s all about geography. Or institutions. Or rice culture. Or the devastating legacy of colonialism. Or Jewish mothers. Now comes another explanation, one that bravely explores the highly dangerous elephant in the room. Mr. Wade argues that human history has also been profoundly influenced by genetics.

Part of his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, is a summary of new findings in genetic science, and part of it is highly speculative. All of it is bound to be deeply unpopular among social scientists, because it challenges their entrenched belief that race is nothing more than a social construct. The wide diversity in human societies around the world can be explained entirely by culture, they insist. We’re all the same under the skin.

Except we’re not quite. Since the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, evidence of subtle genetic differences has been piling up. As our ancestors branched out of Africa, different groups of people evolved in slightly different ways to adapt to local conditions...

[ansel12]

I never get slam drunks, I am the eternal idiot, struggling to find out what you people are arguing about.

I have thoughts and opinions, I just don’t know how to interject them like you people do.

[ansel12]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM

[wardaddy]

OK

So this thread has a slew of Freepers known to me as race baiters, minority apologists and general south bashers

And a fair number of racial realists...and not all are known southern

So my question is who determined this thread about racial construct decided it was about whites or blacks?

Why not about other races or sub races?

What kills me is the group that considers itself in race denial then spends the entire thread defending the black race as just that....a race.

And again....no other minority group gets mentioned except Jews and Chinese in passing.

Since I know all my good pals here are dying to know.

I believe there are distinct races ....can’t verify timelines or how distinct or original but I think this Neanderthal DNA stuff is a tell

I think Geography is a big factor....especially isolation

I think physical differences can be demonstrated somewhat racially and overlap in places....Ethiopia....Tarim Basin...Cherokees...well not proven yet

I think personality is inherited largely and that obviously translates into group behavior and resultant culture

I think there are high and low exceptions in each group that exceed the mean of outside groups

But that doesn’t negate the mean being what it is....think Chinese basketball players or Fernando Valenzuela

I think the world was largely civilized....imperfectly but nonetheless by the white race.....preferably by the English speaking......Romans too .... and we are now resented for it and apologize for it as though everything was bucolic and better before we arrived which is hogwash

It was called western civilization for good reason and I make no apologies

[Balding_Eagle]

But note well, the questions that lead off the article are a good example of how to start off a discussion by warping the discussion before it gets going.

And this is how you think it should be kicked off? I present your picture in post #2.

[Balding_Eagle]

Thanks, I knew that and should have included the information you did when I (mis)described the contents.

[PapaBear3625]

Successful societies, before the industrial age, were the result of ample food supplies; by hunting, fishing or agriculture with beneficial water and good weather. Geography - not genes.

Or, another way of looking at it, a particular environment favors the survival of particular genes, and disfavors others, such that over a hundred generations, particular traits are significantly selected for.

[PapaBear3625]

Urban black Americans used to score higher than rural white Americans in tests administered for the first world war. And their “moral” score (percentage of out-of-wedlock births, crime figures, etc.) were also higher than some newly immigrant American ethnics. All that changed after the second world war. That’s culture.

Right. Pre WW2, the intelligent, skilled segment of the black population left the rural areas and went to seek jobs in the cities. There was no welfare in the early days, so if you didn't have what it took to make a go of it, you stayed where you were.

What changed after WW2?

A few years ago every black MBA student at Harvard was an African immigrant; despite having a much, much smaller pool to draw from, they outscored all “African-Americans”. That’s culture.

Right. What segment of Africa would migrate here (before we started mass immigration of "refugees" from places like Somalia?) The worst, or the best? The Harvard MBAs didn't come from a small pool, they were from a big pool (Africa) from which the best were enabled by their extended families to come here to get educated.

[Zionist Conspirator]

You know, I hate political correctness and am one of the harshest critics of the political behavior of American Blacks . . . but is this what conservatism is about? Biology and taxonomy?

Whatever happened to A-mighty G-d? Genesis? Adam and Eve?

[null and void]

Anyone who has kids knows personality is inherited largely

Anybody who has a whole buncha kids knows that the same set of genes from the same two parents can produce kids with wildly different personalities.

Any parents with "identical" twins knows they can have different personalities.

There are a few herds of genetically identical cloned cows, the cows in these herds exhibit the same ranges of temperament that would be found in a herd of cows made the old fashioned way.

[null and void]

Perhaps I over abstracted the story of the Killing Fields in Cambodia to the former Rhodesia, communists being communists...

[PapaBear3625]

I could simplify this argument. Culture and social conditions, over time, influence natural selection. Jews are an excellent example of this in several ways. For example, culturally Jews admire education, and they have a rare cultural acceptance of “good ideas”, no matter *who* thinks them up. Even if their hated enemy has a good idea, they may just adopt it for their own use. Over many generations this has led to intellectualism being an admired trait, resulting in reproductive preference.

In Europe, during the Middle Ages, Jews were, to a large extent, excluded from owning land or being farmers. They made their livings mostly from trading, moneylending, and skilled crafts -- trades where stupid people are at a big disadvantage. The smart ones were able to keep their families fed, the stupid ones died out. Evolution in action.

[litehaus]

“discussion about differences between races translates into calls for elimination of the races which are deemed ‘lessor’.”

Stealing the ideas of Planned Parenthood’s founder are ya ????/sarc

[null and void]

*sigh* Sad but true. It seems to me there can't help but be a lingering thought in the back of the minds of many a descendant of the slaves. "We didn't earn our freedom, a bunch of white guys came in and gave it to us. What they gave they can take."

I suspect that had the slaves themselves staged a successful uprising and thrown off their own shackles the meme and the current culture would be different.

Maybe.

Compare Haiti and the Dominican Republic:

[fabian]

Oh boy...it is morality, not race..and some of those human tribes lost their morality when they left the home of civilization, which was the garden of Eden, not a cave! Evolution is a joke...marco.

[PapaBear3625]

Got cornered by one guy who was rather like Sheldon Cooper on Big Bang Theory. Spent an hour trying to convince me that the world should turn itself over to be run by Mensa members. Out of curiousity, I queried him about what he would do if in charge. Turns out he was pretty much a Marxist. (Which didn’t speak well of his intelligence, of course.)

It has been my experience that Mensa members are disproportionately high-IQ-but-somewhat-disfunctional people.

Smart and capable people have lots of opportunities to interact with other smart people. They have their work peers and colleagues, they hang out with other smart people. They don't need Mensa to have opportunities to meet smart people.

[null and void]

Yep. That’s why Caucasians vary from snow white blond and blue in areas will little sunlight in northern Europe to as dark as any African in sunny southern India.

Drop a colony of Swedes in south India and they’d be so badly adapted that they couldn’t survive generationally, so many would die young of skin cancers that there wouldn’t be enough elders to pass on wealth and wisdom.

Swap a family of southern Indians with the swedes in Sweden and (unless the figured out the secret of eating seal liver) they’d suffer from vitamin-D deficiency and rickets.

Caucasians all, just adapted to local conditions.

[Balding_Eagle]

Stealing the ideas of Planned Parenthood’s founder are ya ????/sarc

I know you are being sarcastic, but BL isn't, and it's disgusting.

[GOPJ]

I need time to think about what you’ve written... maybe tomorrow.

[null and void]

Yeah. That’s why Americans are different. For the most part, our ancestors self-selected from their source populations. We got the malcontents, the dreamers and the ones with enough wanderlust/spirit of adventure to pack up and leave everything they knew to try to make a go of it in a strange and potentially lethal new land.

The one group that didn’t come here voluntarily just wasn’t self-selected for gumption.

[PapaBear3625]

I'm optimistic that developing technologies could lead to an explosion in production in the next decade or two. In that case, the surplus production may make it possible, although it would be financial suicide (and conservative heresy) today, to spend some of that surplus towards some sort of basic welfare and housing program for those who can't find a job. For altruistic purposes, and to minimize social unrest.

In Victorian England, and earlier times, those who had difficulty living independently often found occupations as house servants. They looked after the children of the middle and upper class, thus enabling the middle and upper classes to have larger families. Meanwhile, the servants were discouraged from having children themselves.