|I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t.
My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson’s statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources.
It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.
|People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black?...”
Perhaps I was overly harsh in my initial reply. However, I do endorse being very rigorous when talking about the overlap of race and genetics. Whereas in the example of police, we generally assume that any influence of race on a given interaction involves the social labels.
|I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
The issue I find relevant isn’t vagueness, it’s that the standard ways to subdivide humans into 3-10 races don’t cleave reality at the joints.
If I understand correctly, ignoring recent intermixing, humans can be divided into the highly genetically diverse “Khoisan”, and the much more populous and less diverse non-Khoisan. Descendants of the out-of-Africa migration group (ie people who aren’t of sub-Saharan ancestry) are effectively one branch of non-Khoisan.
|And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to each other than white people.
Ignoring recent intermixing, I think this is actually false, and may remain false if we ignore the Khoisan peoples. On average, a randomly selected black person may be more closely related to a randomly selected white (or Asian) person than to another randomly selected black person. (Whereas white or Asian people would be more closely related to their own group). This can happen if multiple clusters are grouped together under one label.
Whereas a couple weakened versions of your claim are true:
“Socially defined labels contain nonzero information about genetics, such that you can predict someone’s racial label with very good accuracy by looking at their genome, much more so than if people had been randomly assigned to racial groups.”
And, “You can decompose racial groups into a reasonably small number of subgroups, such that a randomly chosen member of a subgroup is on average closer to another random member than to a random member of another group” is probably true as well.
|I meant to link to Gottfredson’s statement. Do you think that black people and other racial groups scored equally on IQ tests in 1996? I don’t.
My disagreement was with the characterization of Gottfredson’s statement as mainstream when this is disputed by mainstream sources.
It is true that there was a difference in IQ scores, so I suggested a less disputed source saying so.
|People don’t object as often to arguments about race in this way in other contexts. For example, “black people are abused by the police more” doesn’t get the response of “what do you mean by black?...”
Perhaps I was overly harsh in my initial reply. However, I do endorse being very rigorous when talking about the overlap of race and genetics. Whereas in the example of police, we generally assume that any influence of race on a given interaction involves the social labels.
|I do not think that these categories are perfectly defined and unambiguous, and yet I think they can have genetic differences.
The issue I find relevant isn’t vagueness, it’s that the standard ways to subdivide humans into 3-10 races don’t cleave reality at the joints.
If I understand correctly, ignoring recent intermixing, humans can be divided into the highly genetically diverse “Khoisan”, and the much more populous and less diverse non-Khoisan. Descendants of the out-of-Africa migration group (ie people who aren’t of sub-Saharan ancestry) are effectively one branch of non-Khoisan.
|And although you can find some counter examples, I think it is generally true that black people tend to be more related to each other than white people.
Ignoring recent intermixing, I think this is actually false, and may remain false if we ignore the Khoisan peoples. On average, a randomly selected black person may be more closely related to a randomly selected white (or Asian) person than to another randomly selected black person. (Whereas white or Asian people would be more closely related to their own group). This can happen if multiple clusters are grouped together under one label.
Whereas a couple weakened versions of your claim are true:
“Socially defined labels contain nonzero information about genetics, such that you can predict someone’s racial label with very good accuracy by looking at their genome, much more so than if people had been randomly assigned to racial groups.”
And, “You can decompose racial groups into a reasonably small number of subgroups, such that a randomly chosen member of a subgroup is on average closer to another random member than to a random member of another group” is probably true as well.