Race, gender, sexual orientation, intelligence, what else?

[Dan Rowden]

One could argue, though, that race wasn't always an entirely unreasonable proposition. It's really only our understanding of mtDNA that has destroyed the idea.

[vicdan]

One could. one would then still have to contend with the fact that we picked a fairly arbitrary groupings of characteristics in order to delineate races. out of hundreds of possible characteristics, only a handful were picked to define what constitutes race. The rest were either used selectively or (even more) not at all.

Why not group races based on hair color, for example? Body hair patterns? etc. 'Race', as a taxon, is as silly as classifying animals based on their mode of locomotion -- swimmers, flyers, etc... lump bat and bird, dolphin and fish together -- why not? it's just an arbitrary taxonomic choice without real grounding.

[daybrown]

Race dont have a scientific definition, but does have a powerful psychological one. The Tutsi & Hutu showed us that, and they are doing it again in Darfur. In SE Asia, the Chinese have been seen the same as the Jews elsewhere for centuries.

The Chinese, Korean, & Japanese, despite their own perceived differences, all evolved in yeoman farm villages over the course of the last 10,000 years or so the same as Europeans. And while on average, the former are smarter than the latter, the bell curve for the Aryans is flatter, running out further in both directions, with more retards, but also more geniuses.

All the other races have lower IQ averages, that is test scores on the kind of mental skills transnational employers care about. Dont argue with me, argue with them. They seem to think they know what produces the most profit. But note, that these kinds of corporate entities were invented long ago on both ends of the Eurasian landmass. It evolved out of the seasonal resource management skills needed in agrarian village life, the need to allocate food and fuel to survive the winter, that tropical hunting tribes didnt need to bother with.

Warfare went on in the tropics all year around. The villagers had an enforced peace every winter, and plenty of time to think about more sophisticated weapons and means of defense. The same logistical skill developed to survive the winter was applied to organizing ever larger military forces.

But no matter what the gene pool, we have the means now to identify the talents, virtues, and vices of each *individual*, one at a time. Race is a crummy indicator individually, but is reliable in understanding how whole homogeneous communities develop, or fail to. You cant use the policy designed for agrarian villages on displaced tribal warriors that now live in cities.

Tacitus tells us that at village meetings, even the women and slaves rose to speak. That does not happen in the misogynistic tropical cultures, even to this day. Read Gibbon and Machiavelli to see how competent men could, and did, move from one tribe to another or city state, voting with their feet. Warriors in the tropics could not do that either. Read the archaeological reports that are now coming in from their farmsteads, and one of the things that was going on, was that men who would not be Roman slaves in Gaul, stole the grain and the farming tools to flee into Bavaria or Saxony.

The Germans today are in part the sons of those pioneers, who brought their own traditions of freedom to America. They didnt need no rich men to create a constitution, but *instinctively* knew how to protect their common interests, as the whiskey rebellion demonstrated. There are sets of inherited instincts that determine which men will be seen as fit enuf to father the next generation, and those cultures which let women make that judgment have had the most innovation.

[Oceaxer]

One could. one would then still have to contend with the fact that we picked a fairly arbitrary groupings of characteristics in order to delineate races. out of hundreds of possible characteristics, only a handful were picked to define what constitutes race. The rest were either used selectively or (even more) not at all.

Why not group races based on hair color, for example? Body hair patterns? etc. 'Race', as a taxon, is as silly as classifying animals based on their mode of locomotion -- swimmers, flyers, etc... lump bat and bird, dolphin and fish together -- why not? it's just an arbitrary taxonomic choice without real grounding.

This argument is not valid. You can with propriety circumscribe a taxon only on the basis of a congeries of phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters, such as those which distinguish the human races. Race is not some arbitrary grouping of isolated physical characteristics; it is based on observable genotypic frequency differences for a congeries of intercorrelated genetically determined traits.

[Oceaxer]

On a serious note, "race" doesn't appear to be a credible scientific category any longer, even if it remains a practical social one to some degree.

The view that race is a purely social concept is contradicted by the biological evidence.


http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlse ... en.0010070

"For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance--across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara--that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions."
http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlse ... en.0010070

See also:
http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html

To argue that human evolution has followed some weird global synchronicity doesn't seem especially scientific to me.

That is correct.

[Katy]

One could. one would then still have to contend with the fact that we picked a fairly arbitrary groupings of characteristics in order to delineate races.

We picked geographical and cultural differences, then started identifying physical characteristics that showed the differences between these areas. Since most European places had at least a few different hair colors etc, it's useless for trying to identify race while simultaneously trying to build loyalty to a particular ruler - or religion.

It's a way to make the "us" vs "them" stronger - by declaring that "us" and "them" are distinct categories and visually recognizable, starting with "us" Christians and "them" Muslims. Prior to that there were descriptions of where people were from, but not "race" in the way we think of it today. "Us" had to include all Christians/Europeans to build unity.


Not exactly arbitrary - but then it does add to your theory that faith has caused most of the world's problems.

[dyctiostelium]

Why not group races based on hair color, for example? Body hair patterns? etc. 'Race', as a taxon, is as silly as classifying animals based on their mode of locomotion -- swimmers, flyers, etc... lump bat and bird, dolphin and fish together -- why not? it's just an arbitrary taxonomic choice without real grounding.

Which biological taxons are you referring to as arbitrary? Swimmers, flyers, yeah, but those are not in use anymore. Taxonomy is now pretty much built (and fine tuned) by molecular indexes, like differences in DNA sequence at ribosomal proteins. These are solid, quantitative measurements that reflect the degree of divergence from a common ancestor. Molecular clocks.
And is in exactly the same way that the degree of divergence among humans is analyzed, so that the set of variations in sequences of genomic DNA is used to recognize different clusters of humans. The interesting part is that these clusters that happen to map nicely with categories which have traditionally being described as "races".
It is of course clear that categorization is only a tool, that there are no real neat boundaries, that the whole thing is a continuum. You can choose to define 3 races or 6, and many subraces and ethnicities within each one of the main branches, and ultimately every human is slightly different from the next at the genetic level even within a very thight cluster.

On a side note, and regarding Dan's comment, it might be worth noticing that the studies of "out of Africa" based on mitochondrial DNA only reflect the genetic journey from the maternal side, while the studies cited here are based on measuring genetic differences on the 46 nuclear chromosomes, so it is not the same story. The use of genomic DNA (the 46 chromosomes) gives you a global view of the evolutionary history, you end up seeing the average of all the molecular clocks, and not only one or a few, which could be biased.

[vicdan]

Yes, genetic features cluster in close correlation with what we socially call 'races'. And vertebrate lineage closely tracks mode of locomotion -- most mammals are walkers, most birds are flyers, most fishes are swimmers... that doesn't mean that clustering vertebrates by mode of locomotion is a good idea.

if you take a random set of vertebrate species of which you know only the class, you will generally be correct if you assume that mammals are walkers, birds are fliers, and fish are swimmers. There will be a strong correlation between the two sets of taxa. Does that validate locomotion-based taxonomy?

Same with races. Race, as the concept extant in society, may closely correspond with genetic trait clustering and/or geographic origin, but that's by far not the same as saying that the concept of race is biologically validated. Australian aborigenese, asian indians, Kalahari bushmen, ainu, etc. play the same role of a wrench here as dolphins, ostriches, bats, etc. do in wrecking the locomotion-mode-based taxonomy.

[Pye]

.

Race: another fine obsession brought to you by patrichian breeding/identity concerns. How well - true or false - such an obsession has served us . . . . how bloody useful have been these "distinctions" for humanity overall . . . . you tell me. Man, the explorer, conquerer, must know these identity distinctions of 'other peoples' and hold-fast to them, and at the same time has not been able to help himself from inseminating them anyway.

Fucked-up, in every way.

Why hold-fast to race conceptually, when biologically, sexually, one is driven to ignore the distinctions anyway.

When you start wanting to fuck monkeys - oh, wait, no - sheep - wait, no - how about zebras? Well, when you start wanting to cross-breed with other species, then we might have reason to be concerned. Or not.

You hold onto that race thing, fellas. You need all the reasons to value yourselves [above others] that you can.


.

[daybrown]

Where the rubber hits the road is personal and public policy. Whether we like it or not, people will react to perceived racial diffs. I dont see that politically correct education on the issue is getting anywhere.

[Dan Rowden]

You hold onto that race thing, fellas. You need all the reasons to value yourselves [above others] that you can.

Your implication seems to be that race have never meant anything to females. Is that meant as a joke?

[Pye]

daybrown writes:

Whether we like it or not, people will react to perceived racial diffs. I dont see that politically correct education on the issue is getting anywhere. [emphasis mine]

You don't need to fang the issue even further with an accusation of p.c.
It is exactly about the nature of those perceptions.

[Pye]

Dan writes:

Your implication seems to be that race have never meant anything to females. Is that meant as a joke?

My implication is that race doesn't mean anything to procreative [human] life.

But we might want to review your work: Civilizations are men's accomplishment, remember? And women are unconscious anyhow, hence unable to hold meaning to anything anyway, right?

[Dan Rowden]

Dan writes:

Your implication seems to be that race have never meant anything to females. Is that meant as a joke?

My implication is that race doesn't mean anything to procreative [human] life.

Well, that's true enough. Though, if we're talking about a Sudanese chick and a Pygmy guy, someone would surely have to put him up to it.

But we might want to review your work: Civilizations are men's accomplishment, remember?

Depends on what is meant by "civilisation".

And women are unconscious anyhow, hence unable to hold meaning to anything anyway, right?

Recognition of "race" needn't be a conscious activity.

[daybrown]

<<But we might want to review your work: Civilizations are men's accomplishment, remember?>
<Depends on what is meant by "civilisation".>
Agreed. *Pre*history is obscure, but the work or archeologist M. Gimbutas, is remarkably instructive. Take her "The Goddesses & Gods of Old Europe" to start with, based on the Chalcolithic tels of SE Europe, ie 8000-4000 BCE. Civilization is innovation, right? Look at the list hardly anyone knows about which she shows us in photos and drawings of the artifacts found in the Danubian drainage basin:
1- New weaving technolgies like twill, in wool, hemp, & flax.
a- which led to *tailored* pants, jackets, blouses, & skirts.
2- Plolychrome pottery with different slips
3- Writing & something like 250 different stamps to mark the contents of baskets & pots.
4- Arsenic bronze, the toughest of all the bronzes which were used for:
a- grain sickles
b- belt buckles, clasps, hair pieces.
c wood working tools.
5 woodworking tools to create timber frame houses, planks, and the first plank hulled sailboats.
6 dolls, doll furniture, doll houses.
a- doll houses- with chimneys.

All of the above in use by 5000 BCE. All of it in a culture that was run by women. They left us lotsa very naturalistally posed human figures. None of the males are in postures of authority. Only women are.

[Leyla Shen]

[laughs] Oh, Dan. Now this is just plain corny!

Well, that's true enough. Though, if we're talking about a Sudanese chick and a Pygmy guy, someone would surely have to put him up to it.

Not if she's lying down...so, the question is, how does he get in that position--with a tranquiliser shot from a pea-shooter?

[Shahrazad]

daybrown,

All of the above in use by 5000 BCE. All of it in a culture that was run by women. They left us lotsa very naturalistally posed human figures. None of the males are in postures of authority. Only women are.

I would kill to go back in time and see that.

You've made my day.

[Dan Rowden]

Well, you sort of would have to kill to do that, because at our age we'd be a corpse in 5000 BCE.

[daybrown]

daybrown,

All of the above in use by 5000 BCE. All of it in a culture that was run by women. They left us lotsa very naturalistally posed human figures. None of the males are in postures of authority. Only women are.

I would kill to go back in time and see that.

You've made my day.

That isnt all... The whole region was abandoned about 4000 BCE, in the very same era when domestic horses were introduced. Which I think brought in Anthrax. Nobody lived there for hundreds of years. The culture split, part going up into West and Northern Europe [something to do with the liberated status of Nordic women]. part got on boats and moved to the Cycladic Isles to become the Minoans [still ruled by women]. and part got on the horses and became the Amazons.

EW Barber, "The Mummies of Urumchi" says that some of them kept on moving directly East, and ended up in what is now NW China @2000BC. And they founded what became known as the Silk Road independent City states like Urumchi, Loulan, Niya, Khotan, Churchen, and most famously, Kucha.

But *there* they were literate, and the Taklamakhan desert preserved their documents. The cold dry alkaline soil freeze dried the bodies, some of which Barber shows. "White" people. http://www.dc-pc.org/artifax/artifax.html shows some of them. Give it a minute, they are down at the bottom of the page full of .jpgs. The bodhisattvahs are stud muffins. The merchants at the bottom of the page look a lot like the Slavs, which still have some of the same DNA.

I have a copy of the "Maitreyasamiti Texts in Tocharian A", which is a 5th century copy of a much earlier document. Its a conversation between the living Buddha and the Gautamid Queen of Kucha. One of the issues they discuss is the growing trend of misogyny. Kucha is the place to go.

In the 7th century, when the Chinese emperor, Tang Tiazong, sent Xuan Zang to retrieve original Buddhist texts, he sent him first to Kucha, where the monk spent 6 months. The Kuchans had the shrines for 22 different relgions, and translated texts among 20 different languages. The place was like a college town, with Confucian, Taoist, Manichean, Zoroastrian, Nestorian, Buddhist, and other scholars. But if you are familiar with ancient script, you see most were done by a female hand.

The women also ran the shipping offices; men did the leg work. There are letters to other offices arranging for their men to get laid, cause they didnt want the boys coming back with STDs from fucking cheap whores. Kucha didnt have slums- cause they didnt have welfare queens. They drafted the airheads into brothels rather than letting them breed.

Ever notice that the Silk Road ends at the "jade Gate"? Why jade? cause that's where jade came into China, the only thing besides gold the Chinese wanted from the outside world. Where did the jade come from? Kuchan mines. Just imagine how rich that made them. The women wore nothing but silk.

Since the Gautama didnt need a harem, she didnt need a palace to keep them in, so she didnt need a castle to protect the palace, nor tax the shit out of everyone to pay for it. So, when we look in the Kuchan graves, we dont find any lavish graves of kings or warriors. no poor either. Everyone is well dressed, middle class.

If you look into Chinese documents, you find that the wise people, the "Ma-ag", came from the west. And you if you look in the Bible, you see where the "Magi came from the East". Well, this is *that* "East".

[Iolaus]

"There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically.

I've said this years ago, and it is no doubt the reason that the kids are now taught that race doesn't exist. I participated in a discussion on TPG, don't know if it's the same one that Shardrol remembers, but I came away sadly shaking my head at the deliberate obtuseness of those who pretend that there are no races.

And Shardrol, just because races have mixed it up in some locations, does not mean race isn't real. If all human steadily intermarry racially from today onwards, eventually the races will no longer be distinguishable. If I had a kennel containing several breeds of dogs, and a storm blew the doors open and the dogs got out, and I didn't get them all rounded up for a week, and some females got pregnant by the wrong breeds and their pups were no longer a particular breed, does not mean the others aren't.

for that reason, I question the 99% accuracy.

Unidian, I'm surprised you react so negatively to his other suggestions. It does seem a shame that some people are pretty ugly. It's not a bad sentiment to want to even things up. And I can't help but think it would be nice if the human race were smarter, not that I'd want to use killing to achieve it.

[Shahrazad]

iolaus,

I participated in a discussion on TPG, don't know if it's the same one that Shardrol remembers, but I came away sadly shaking my head at the deliberate obtuseness of those who pretend that there are no races.

Yes, you did participate in one of those TPG race discussions, so you're remembering correctly.

And Shardrol, just because races have mixed it up in some locations, does not mean race isn't real.

If it's so mixed up that most people can't be pigeon-holed into categories, what is the usefulness of the concept? Besides an excuse to lynch people, of course.

Iolaus, be advised that there is a difference between Shardrol and Shahrazad, as in, we're not the same person.

-

[hsandman]

Shit! That makes sense...

"For population pairs from the same cluster, as geographic distance increases, genetic distance increases in a linear manner, consistent with a clinal population structure. However, for pairs from different clusters, genetic distance is generally larger than that between intracluster pairs that have the same geographic distance. For example, genetic distances for population pairs with one population in Eurasia and the other in East Asia are greater than those for pairs at equivalent geographic distance within Eurasia or within East Asia. Loosely speaking, it is these small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance--across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara--that provide the basis for the ability of STRUCTURE to identify clusters that correspond to geographic regions."

So, now what? Time to build racial pyramids?

Edit:

daybrown: The fact that kucha women were in power, doesn’t make them the creators of civilization.
They were just matriarchs, for all we know (and can judge from history after the kucha) the men are the inventors and creators of tools that separate humans from animals. Women have a much,much smaller % of inventors/inventions = creative thinkers buit civilisation (men)...,but I guess we realy took a wrong turn somewhere. :-S

Personally, I think kucha civilization was great <- world where I think I would have liked to live in

:-)

[Shahrazad]

Personally, I think kucha civilization was great <- world where I think I would have liked to live in

I woulda loved it too.

[Pye]

daybrown, since mine (Civilization=Men) was a poke at general board rhetoric, you might want to take it up with those here who believe females constitutionally incapable of significant accomplishment, past or present.

You write:

None of the males are in postures of authority. Only women are.

You might want to consider some other things, too: depictions of figures on artifacts does not say anything about who made them. And depictions of subservient males could translate into the self-same obsession with all-things femme that is contained in the Female Mystique. We have a marvelous amount of pornography today to witness this obsession with her "figure" as well. Man is bent before his computer as we speak, in 'worship' of her, but the condition of her autonomy/personhood is no better off. Beauvoir's Second Sex takes after this very issue of using the presence of goddesses in the archeological past to assume any power for women in actuality. Put the past and the present together as I've done here, so you can see how meaningless (or rather, what the meaning might really be) for figures of women on artifacts. Man has been grappling with her perceived "power" over him for a long, long time, deifying, mystifying, vilifying - just generally everything except humanizing.

In addition, the late 70s and early 80s saw a plethora of books such as the one you mentioned above - books roaring on the heels of second-wave feminism that sought to argue matriarchy as the original condition of humanity, thus, "better, more peaceful, functional," etc. These books since then have also undergone some serious criticism in return for wild conjecturing and extrapolation of the lives lived around these bits and pieces in an effort to regain some female authority - Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe has taken some particularly pointed hits. Again, these remnants say nothing about the actual living conditions for women or men, and all the foci upon depictions of females could mean no more than the remnants of them on our hard-drives will to the future.

You seem to read and read and read a lot. You also seem intelligent enough to mount some critical thinking of it, too. Getting whipped up in visions of horse-riding authoritative women is what some of my female acquaintances did whilst reading these "factions" (fact+fiction) when they first came out. - a paltry poultice on deeper issues. A couple things come to mind here: a past civilization is just that, no matter how we prefer to imagine it. It says nothing to the conditions/situations of the present - at least, recalling and authorizing it for our use now belongs to the same category of thinking that is nostalgic for all things kinder and simpler, like natives, rousseau-ian noble beasts, and other dreamy visions of how much "better" things surely were (similar to how we treat our childhoods). You're not doing this, of course; I just wanted to point this out.

My point for inserting comments into this thread about race is the same point I outlined in greater detail in the Reasoning Show/World of Women thread. There is a thing afoot in all these identity/breeding obsessions - a deep and simple thing.

Patriarchy is - in my estimation - the original ressentiment against a kind of natural autonomy (hence, power) for the female human that the male will never have. Just look at how deeply that ressentiment displays itself in the wishes of some of the men here: that females might be taken out of the procreative loop altogether at some point in the future.

Obsession . . . .

[daybrown]

Polite discourse appreciated, even when challenging.
but from the 10th millennia BC Anatolian cities like Hacilar & Chatal Hoyuk, where we first find women in postures of authority, to the Danube basin where they still are, to the Minoans where they still are, or in that same era, when the Amazons spread across the Steppes- where the Russians have found some of the *lavish* graves of Amazons, all the way to Kucha and Urumchi....

Is a continuous chain of culture. Only in the case of the latter, the Tocharians, they were literate, and leave us the *documents* demonstrating women in positions of authority. Along with the documents, you can look at the western clothing on the mummies, see that the DNA of both the wool (from European sheep) and the bodies (is still seen among the Slavs) comes from Europe.

Douglas Adams has some books out on the language, which as Barber suspected, broke off the original Aryan as early as Sakskrit, Sogdian, and the European forms. Simply put, matriarchy was not something the Tocharians invented in China. They brought it with them. It is entirely consistent with the traditions Gimbutas outlines in SE Asia.

Hodder, digging at Chatal Hoyuk, reports in "The Leopard's Tale" an artistic and technological revolution that came in with the first ceramic pots. The frescos of the male hunters where painted over, The enthroned queen shown at http://dc-pc.org/artifax/artifax.html shows up. But in the late 7th mil, a period of chronic drought drove most people out. We see the same pottery now in SE Europe. And see it still with the Tocharians.

There were a dozen Anatolian cities that looked a lot like SW Hopi or Navajo pueblos, and likewise had a very peaceful culture. The communities were too big for small wandering hunting tribes to dare to attack. There's no evidence of warfare among them. The world was still full of empty land to be farmed.

I'm well aware of the controversy over Gimbutas. What she, her critics, and the feminists all miss, is that these matriarchs were not fluff bunnies. Gimbutas shows us lotsa "phallic wands". But Pye, I've seen porn flix, and I know dildos when I see them. Just like in Kucha, these ladies were running brothels. And drafting girls into them. That got them all the cooperation they wanted from the warriors. Nobody talks about it.

Between the time & place of the Tocharians and the Danubians, were the Sarmatians, an Amazonian tribe, one of whom is depicted as the mounted archer at the above website. Gibbon reports that they made an offer to Roman General Proculus that he could not refuse, if he'd take his 5 legions all the way across what is now turkey to attack the Persians. who were trying to invade the Caucuses.

They gave him 100 virgins. It took him about a week to screw them all. then, being an honorable man, he kept up his side of the deal, kicked ass on the Persians, and bought the Sarmatians 50 years of peace. Think about it; where in all history would we find a king with the moral authority to make such an offer? Naaa. The scribes pandering to the warrior class have always turned a blind eye to the power of pussy.