Edit: Wow, this turned out to be long. Also, this is fairly politically and potentially "identity hot" and I didn't add in a lot of caveats and disclaimers. If I may humbly request, could you read at least halfway through the comment before voting, and please write in and let me know if it offends, or with any concerns or suggestions? Also, my email is in my profile if I seem off and you're lurking without an account or don't want to comment publicly. I imagine people could read a lot into what I'm saying that I'm not saying, so please feel very welcome to make yourself heard by me if you disagree or dislike anything I've put down. Also, I didn't mention any of the downward spiral thinking that knuckleheads could potentially get into - and yeah, I agree that stuff is ugly and we need to be careful, and no, I'm not a knucklehead. Anyway:
I can tell a lot about someone by asking them in private, when it's just me and them, "So... what do you think of genetic differences between races?" Almost everyone, in private, will agree that there's some - but some people are really, really uncomfortable saying it. Some people, especially very diplomatic people, hedge and qualify first. When I make it known that I'm not particularly judgmental, that I've had friends and lovers of all colors and from all over the place, but that I also have a healthy respect for science and reality - well, the diplomatic people tend to open up a lot more.
Basically I'll put it like this - people of difference descendencies have been observed to have different average heights, weights, body fat percentages, average musculatures, bone densities. Different kinds of blood cells even - if you look at sickle cell anemia, blood cells shaped a little differently than normal make a person more resistant to malaria, but more prone to anemia. Malaria of course, being orders of magnitude more deadly and dangerous than anemia, which is a more long term unhealthiness thing. And sure enough, sickle cells are more present as an adaptation in people descending from formerly high malaria areas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Genetics
Moving on - there's clearly slight variances and differences between people of different descendants. The idea that there's no cognitive differences just seems incredibly unlikely. Now, I think "IQ" or "intelligence" is drastically oversimplified and bunk. But things like abstract recall - how fast can you remember something? Pattern recognition. Dexterity and coordination. And so on - why wouldn't these things be adaptable and heritable? Wouldn't some parts of the world being able to remember a skill after not using it for a long period of time be more valuable than others? (places with harsh winters, for instance?) The ability to think quickly and adapt be better in different places? And if they were, wouldn't you expect natural and sexual selection to make the local population more like that?
This is almost all moot in many practical ways - the only thing that bothers me is that since people don't want to acknowledge that these differences exist, there's been very little work to learn teaching styles that would apply to different people, how different medicine and diet regimes would work better, and so on.
Different groups of people tend towards different lactose intolerance and alcohol intolerance levels - this is only recently being considered in nutrition and diet because the implications of it - different food good better for different races - is not a good political position these days. It would have been easy to test for lactose sensitivity among different groups of people and make recommendations 20-50 years ago, but no one wanted to touch it. Instead, "milk for everyone!" was the official position, which is nonsense. Dairy is terrible for the people it's bad for.
Finally - I'm very curious about what the effects of mixing blood in children would be, and there's been very little research that I know of. From my understanding of genetics, mixed blood children should be particularly strong. My background is mixed Western/Eastern European, and I'd prefer a wife of different bloodlines than my own, as I think it's a very positive thing to do for my children. Obviously you can't control who you fall in love and connect with completely, but if I choose to live in Ankara or Osaka instead of London, that greatly increases the chance my kids are half-Turkish or half-Japanese. I think that'd make them stronger, healthier, and less prone to some of the negative things in my bloodlines. But how much so? When parents have different cognitive backgrounds, which are dominant? For instance, if one parent has much higher natural testosterone levels, is that dominant? That means the children would have higher energy, be more resistant to some diseases, be more willing to act independently and defy consensus, but also have more proneness to violence, anger, and aggression. I generally have high testosterone throughout my family - we've made good soldiers but some of us have had pretty bad tempers. What happens if I marry a woman with a lower natural predisposition towards testosterone? How about different cognitive abilities? We've generally got bad eyesight and bad spatial relations in my family. You'd expect good eyesight should be a dominant characteristic, no? But how much so?
I'd love to see research on this, and I think we will, because you can only hold back science and knowledge through moral fashion for so long before it breaks through.
Drawing lines around big groups of people and making sweeping generalizations is exactly what will be made obsolete by proper sequence-the-whole-DNA genetics. You really don't have to give a damn if one parent's ancestry is this and another's is that, if you can look at the actual genes. As information, it's "screened off" - knowing it tells you nothing extra.
Would mixing two very different gene pools necessarily take the maximum of positive traits from each parent? Couldn't it possibly take the average or even minimum?
Natural selection operates only by influencing who mates- it does not impact the way in which genes are spliced. That is left to the molecular structure of the genes themselves I believe.
A lot of heritable diseases are recessive traits - dominant genes are easier to select against.
Two people from the same background/race etc. are far more likely to carry the same recessive genes for a disease than two from different backgrounds.
This is why inbreeding produces unhealthy individuals. Two individuals that share a parent/grandparent etc will be very likely to inherit identical recessive disease genes from the parent.
Two people of different backgrounds will have offspring that are somewhat more likely to be healthy and have fewer problems.
I'm very curious about what the effects of mixing blood in children would be, and there's been very little research that I know of.
Actually, there is plenty of research, and most of the research reaches a conclusion consistent with the main point of the submitted article, that people being "mixed" as to "race" doesn't really matter much at the individual level. That's to be expected from Motoo Kimura's now well established theory of neutral molecular evolution,
which fits human populations quite as well as it fits other organisms.
I write this as a western man (American by citizenship, with ancestry from various temperate and Arctic zone European countries) who married and has four children by a woman from Taiwan (whose traceable ancestry is south Chinese, tropical rather than temperate zone). My four children are healthy, smart (by IQ test), and arguably good-looking, and very ambiguous to untrained eyes as to their "racial" heritage. (My oldest son has variously been described as Asian in America, western in Taiwan, "black" in America, and "Hispanic" in America, and could pass as "Native American" in America.) Before I met my wife, I met many people in Taiwan, where I was then living, who earnestly urged me to marry a Taiwanese woman because then my children would be "smarter and better-looking," which seems to be a common cultural belief about half-Asian, half-western people over there. But I really don't have the slightest evidence that my children have been advantaged in any way by their rather divergent "racial" heritage, and actually my marriage was quite assortative,
skin color, personal recreational habits, IQ, etc., etc., etc.
Any man can gain a lot of perspective on life from his wife, and it's important to cherish the differences that will still show up even though most people marry assortatively. A cross-cultural marriage will include plenty of differences of cultural assumptions that make for thought-provoking conversation and a richer family life for both spouses and all the children. We have enjoyed our twenty-six years together.
Congratulations on your 26 years together. Cross-cultural marriages can be challenging but rewarding. I've been with my Chinese wife for only 8 years and we have only one son thus far. Whether in Shanghai or small town Georgia, he usually gets attention as being the most beautiful child in the room ;). I account for any noticed positive traits mostly to my being a proud father (I probably only notice the compliments).
For all the thought you've put into your comment you clearly have a lot of your ego -- probably too much -- invested in being the guy who's not afraid to publicly point out it might be worth making scientific inquiry into racial differences.
Let me point out exactly how you're being stupid here.
The article is about future ramifications of genetic sequencing technology finally becoming economical enough that it's possible to cheaply sequence a person's complete DNA.
You're right that this will allow research to be done of the form: grab a DB with 100k different peoples' sequences; discover strong statistical associations between such-and-such genes and such-and-such amount of alcohol intolerance, and notice that those genes are particularly prevalent amongst people of asian descent.
Where you go awry is your conceptualization of how this information will likely be used; it's a failure to take a premise you've accepted in one part of your scenario -- the premise that DNA sequencing will be cheap-and-thorough enough to allow for research like just sketched -- and failing to apply it to another part of your scenario -- the doctor-patient interaction, and so on.
Given a world in which DNA sequencing is super-cheap and super-affordable, which doctor-patient interaction is likelier:
- doctor says to patient: "you clearly are asian just by looking at you. asians have been shown to have lower alcohol tolerance on average. be careful with how much alcohol you imbibe."
- doctor says to patient: "your DNA sequence contains 7 of the 10 major genes associated with higher levels of alcohol intolerance. this isn't surprising given your family history, but it's nice to know concretely what you've got. be careful with how much alcohol you imbibe."
...which is why you're being stupid: race is a proxy measure for ancestry that's "field-performable" (just look!) and cost-effective and is not an entirely useless proxy measure for ancestry; it is indeed the case that were political bugaboos different than they are that some useful research could be done to characterize racial differences that could be put to general use.
It's also a terribly inaccurate proxy and given the ability to do direct DNA sequencing would be dropped like hotcakes; why use the inaccurate proxy when you can make a direct measurement?
So even in your hypothetical example of looking for a wife: when this research is available, would you not be better served testing for specific genes in a particular individual rather than cutting it off at the level of race? You might still want to move to Ankara if you discovered that "Turks" are likelier than Brits to carry the genes you want your kids to have, but would you really not take it further and check the specific woman's DNA directly (the way that some jews test for tay-sachs at some point in the courtship process)? If you take the research seriously enough to move to Ankara to stack the deck why stop there?
You're essentially making the same kind of mental error you saw in the early dot-com days where people understood that "in the future, you'll buy stuff at home over the internet" -- so were semi-prescient -- but couldn't discard what they already knew about "shopping"; the consequence being that they'd write articles about how you'd sign into some 3d virtual world and then visit an online bookstore and browse the shelves in virtual reality (transporting outdated ideas into a world of new possibilities).
The idea that there's no cognitive differences just seems incredibly unlikely.
As long as the difference between individuals in a single population is greater than the mean difference between populations themselves, I don't see much relevance.
Sure, Negroid races as a group don't have the IQ of Caucasians. But Caucasians who attach any importance to that had better look over their shoulder at the Asians, who in turn beat them on the same tests. The Asians don't want to get too smug in a room full of Ashkenazi Jews. Meanwhile, there are plenty of individual Negroids and whitey-birds who outperform plenty of individual Asians and Ashkenazis.
If any lessons have emerged so far from the study of human genetics, it's that your genes are not your destiny. In any just society, an individual's success will always consist of 90% perspiration, 8% inspiration, and 2% DNA.
> As long as the difference between individuals in a single population is greater than the mean difference between populations themselves, I don't see much relevance.
I'd say even more difference comes from culture. Asians are a huge population, but those who have the greatest success are those with a strong culture for education (Japan, China, South Korea). The same, there are black people on several continents, and the ones who are the easiest to criticize are those who either have a lack of modern culture (countries which didn't completely recover from colonialism) of made a counter-culture which pointedly rejects everything white, including the good parts (education, work ethics etc).
Given these huge differences, a few points of IQ really don't seem to mean anything.
> countries which didn't completely recover from colonialism
I’ve heard this statement and it is completely false (I did not take issue with the rest of your post). Colonialism actually introduced a lot of technology into Africa (things such as the wheel were not widely used).
The most heavily colonialised countries in Africa are the best. A good example is Botswana. They did not return to their pre-tribal ways but basically adapted the British system. South Africa is also heavily “colonialised” and it is the only industrial country.
Countries such as Lesotho and Swaziland had minimal colonial influences and still have much of their traditional leadership (uninterrupted). Those two countries are also the biggest shitholes in Africa.
The traditional African governance was a strong-man (chief) with absolute power. It was basically an absolute monarch who is only removed by someone more powerful. That is why Africans in rural areas usually like a strong-man – anyone else is seen as a weak leader. A leader who is compassionate is seen as weak.
I personally would content that a lot of African countries returned to their pre-colonial government structure.
> countries which didn't completely recover from colonialism
You have edited your post now. The reason I take issue with your post is because of the “African Renaissance” idea. This idea/ideology (which was mostly promoted by Thabo Mbeki) states that Africa was a wondrous well developed place full of technology, culture, art, industry and peace (it goes hand in hand with strong historic revisionism). The idea was that colonialism destroyed Africa and Africa should just recover from colonialism.
The problem with this is that it does not address the current core issues of African problems. It also lays the blame for all problems on colonialisation – instead of corrupt African governments and systematic problems. It basically absolves current African governments from all responsibility.
Most African societies do not have a single strong king - I think you are confusing Africa with Europe. Europe and Asia are the societies that have always had a system of very powerful leadership at the top, and a large peasant class. African society is usually not constructed that way.
But I guess knowing what you are talking about is not fundamental to your argument.
> Most African societies do not have a single strong king - I think you are confusing Africa with Europe. Europe and Asia are the societies that have always had a system of very powerful leadership at the top, and a large peasant class.
Africans usually had a strong leader. The size of these societies does however differ. A good example is smaller “family type” groups. These are sometimes called a “kraal” in South Africa (that is why many place names are name of leader + kraal).
At least in the 18th and 19th century there was a lot of consolidation among these groups into larger groups. Probably the best example of this is the Zulu kingdom. Large strongman leaders included Dingaan and Shaka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zulu_kings). Even smaller groups have exactly the same pattern.
The governance is also top down. Even today in many rural areas of countries (which are trust or tribal areas with community property) it is usually the chief that controls them. He tells his followers who to vote for as an example. Since all ground is communal and basically controlled by the chief/king, he has significant power.
The power of tribal leaders has significantly decreased with urbanisation though.
> But I guess knowing what you are talking about is not fundamental to your argument.
And what qualifies you as an expert? Either make a good argument or refrain from posting.
When you say "Africa", I assume you are not speaking of "South Africa". Most of Africa has always been organised into communities, where the communities select a non-heriditary leader, who represents the community in a meeting of all local leaders. This is why the chief "controls" the land - it is his job to make impartial decisions on land. He cannot assign all the land to himself, that never happens in Africa (in constrast to Europe). Rather, he is a caretaker.
In Europe, the king is a man who tells people what to do, and his decisions are completely separated from the people. In Africa, the chief is a person who is best thought to represent the decisions of the people, and so what he says is representative of the people who he leads. His very role depends on him being the voice of the people - it is impossible for a chief to not do this, because he does not have an army to force the people to follow what he wants. His army are the very people he leads.
Ground is not communal, ground is owned by individuals in small portions across the villages or towns. Africa is mostly compared of Niger-Congo speaking people, and most of them use exactly the same system I describe here. The far South Africans, which you are basing your argument on, are not representative, just as Ethiopians or Somalis would not be representative.
I believe there has hardly ever been a situation in Africa where a chief attacked his own people with an army, and caused some kind of internal massacre. The structure of society does not allow this.
> When you say "Africa", I assume you are not speaking of "South Africa".
My experience is admittedly limited to Southern African countries (SADEC countries including Zambia and Angola). I chose the South African examples since they are the best documented.
But I see no reason to believe that there would be a significant difference in other African countries.
> Most of Africa has always been organised into communities, where the communities select a non-heriditary leader, who represents the community in a meeting of all local leaders.
Not really – I have not seen any evidence of this. Most of the leaders are hereditary or semi-hereditary (when the line is broken by the brother or family member of the chief).
As another example, take the Bamagwato. Ian Khama is the chief of the Bamagwato (in Botswana). He is the great-great grandson of Khama III (who is again had his chieftanship descend from his father). Ian Khama is the president of Botswana (this is not to detract from Botswana’s good governance and its incorporation of Western values).
> He cannot assign all the land to himself, that never happens in Africa (in constrast to Europe).
Unfortunately many similar things happen. A good example is the Reed Dance in Swaziland. King Mswati selects brides for himself from people (he recently selected one that was under the age of consent). The whole purpose of the Chief is self-serving.
> In Africa, the chief is a person who is best thought to represent the decisions of the people, and so what he says is representative of the people who he leads.
You live in a dream world. In the 1800’s, Shaka killed thousands of his own people because his mother died (and wanted people to share his pain). He also subjected them to famine.
> Ground is not communal, ground is owned by individuals in small portions across the villages or towns.
Not completely. Cattle are grazed communally and most work is performed communally. Ubuntu (most Bantu languages have a similar word) literally means “shared grazing land”. This actually also makes sense (specialisation of labour and all that).
> I believe there has hardly ever been a situation in Africa where a chief attacked his own people with an army, and caused some kind of internal massacre.
The Shaka example I showed you is a good example where he killed off and starved his own people.
I personally believe that you may have a little too romantic view of Africa (while I concede that I may suffer from the opposite).
I think it is pointless to argue with you, as you are speaking of an entirely different culture with an entirely different language group and an entirely different people.
It's like arguing with someone about European Politics, and all his examples are about Ukraine.
All African languages stem from the same group (the Bantu language group).
> an entirely different people.
Again, this is doubtful. I have given you examples of the whole Southern Africa – you have given none to support your argument. Your argument looks more like a deeply held and unjustified personal believe.
The statements you make are clearly devoid of any semblance of truth.
> It's like arguing with someone about European Politics, and all his examples are about Ukraine.
We were talking about Africa and my examples are from, uhm… Africa.
The entire west african coast is made up of people who farm plots of land. The entire village system across the congo, through kenya, to sierra leone is made up of a chief representative system. There is very few instances of a hereditary "president" system in most of Africa. You pick a single example and then say "that is how Africa is". To be frank, it's just stupid.
Africans are completely different. An ethiopian looks very different from a South African, who looks different from a Hausa. What type of absurd extrapolation are you making when you claim your limited experience is representative of the entirerity of the continent?
What you are doing here is picking examples that can support your view of Africa as a continent of savage chiefs that kill people (and then boil them in large metal pots likely).
I don't want to continue this. It's making me angry, and people like you are not worth my being angry about.
> The entire village system across the congo, through kenya, to sierra leone
You went from the west coast to the east while skipping Angola, Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique.
> There is very few instances of a hereditary "president" system in most of Africa.
There is actually quite a lot. The word Ghana even means “king”. I have given you two examples of kingships with a history of over 200 years from two different countries. Traditional leadership however do not resemble a president (since most traditional organisations were small).
> You pick a single example and then say "that is how Africa is".
You pick a few unsupported examples based on your belief. You seem to reject (without motivation) the countries I mentioned (South Africa, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, etc…). In all of these countries several systems of traditional leadership that is hereditary, dictorial and fairly small is found (in South Africa’s case, more than 9).
> Africans are completely different.
This is a retarded statement. I bet I have met more Africans and had more interaction with Africans from many countries a month than you had in your entire life. Have you gone to Kenya for a holiday and turned into an expert?
> What type of absurd extrapolation are you making when you claim your limited experience is representative of the entirerity of the continent?
You claim your view covers the entire continent. I gave you several examples which clearly falsify your theory. There is a reason why African countries tend to have the same government structure and level of development. The simple reason is that they were at the same stage of development and there is cross-pollination of ideas and people moving.
Do you think that it was a coincidence that the whole of Europe had the same type of government structure for several centuries?
> that can support your view of Africa as a continent of savage chiefs that kill people (and then boil them in large metal pots likely).
I do not think this at all. What you doing is the strawman argument – you make a easy strawman and then knock it down.
The reason (as previously stated) why the governmental structures is early similar is because of the same level of development (and similar structures existed in Europe at some stage). I personally think that your view is more based on your political view than mine.
> It's making me angry, and people like you are not worth my being angry about.
Here you descent into personal insults. This is just nasty. Just because your theory about African traditional leadership does not fit with the facts, doesn’t give you a reason to get angry. Don’t shoot the messenger.
Europe and Asia are diverse places. (As is Africa.) E.g. the German Kaisers used to be weak leaders most of the time. And Kaisertum was never hereditary.
>>Now, I think "IQ" or "intelligence" is drastically oversimplified and bunk.
Interesting, that goes against what I've seen intelligence researchers claim (g, etc). Do you have good references?
I'm not arguing, I'm asking because I'm curious. I'm aware that some idealists breath fire over this question, but I don't have a horse in that race (as I think the expression is?).
It's easy to have this opinion when you are from the group perceived as superior. When you are from the group that is going to receive the "scientifically validated" stamp of inferiority, I think you would be very much against such statements as advocated in the article.
It's never okay to have this view. I find that people who favour eugenics are never those who would have been culled in the first place. Same argument always when it comes to proving the superiority of a particular group - it's usually members from that group who want to do this the most.
I can tell a lot about someone by asking them in private, when it's just me and them, "So... what do you think of genetic differences between races?" Almost everyone, in private, will agree that there's some - but some people are really, really uncomfortable saying it. Some people, especially very diplomatic people, hedge and qualify first. When I make it known that I'm not particularly judgmental, that I've had friends and lovers of all colors and from all over the place, but that I also have a healthy respect for science and reality - well, the diplomatic people tend to open up a lot more.
Basically I'll put it like this - people of difference descendencies have been observed to have different average heights, weights, body fat percentages, average musculatures, bone densities. Different kinds of blood cells even - if you look at sickle cell anemia, blood cells shaped a little differently than normal make a person more resistant to malaria, but more prone to anemia. Malaria of course, being orders of magnitude more deadly and dangerous than anemia, which is a more long term unhealthiness thing. And sure enough, sickle cells are more present as an adaptation in people descending from formerly high malaria areas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Genetics
Moving on - there's clearly slight variances and differences between people of different descendants. The idea that there's no cognitive differences just seems incredibly unlikely. Now, I think "IQ" or "intelligence" is drastically oversimplified and bunk. But things like abstract recall - how fast can you remember something? Pattern recognition. Dexterity and coordination. And so on - why wouldn't these things be adaptable and heritable? Wouldn't some parts of the world being able to remember a skill after not using it for a long period of time be more valuable than others? (places with harsh winters, for instance?) The ability to think quickly and adapt be better in different places? And if they were, wouldn't you expect natural and sexual selection to make the local population more like that?
This is almost all moot in many practical ways - the only thing that bothers me is that since people don't want to acknowledge that these differences exist, there's been very little work to learn teaching styles that would apply to different people, how different medicine and diet regimes would work better, and so on.
Different groups of people tend towards different lactose intolerance and alcohol intolerance levels - this is only recently being considered in nutrition and diet because the implications of it - different food good better for different races - is not a good political position these days. It would have been easy to test for lactose sensitivity among different groups of people and make recommendations 20-50 years ago, but no one wanted to touch it. Instead, "milk for everyone!" was the official position, which is nonsense. Dairy is terrible for the people it's bad for.
Finally - I'm very curious about what the effects of mixing blood in children would be, and there's been very little research that I know of. From my understanding of genetics, mixed blood children should be particularly strong. My background is mixed Western/Eastern European, and I'd prefer a wife of different bloodlines than my own, as I think it's a very positive thing to do for my children. Obviously you can't control who you fall in love and connect with completely, but if I choose to live in Ankara or Osaka instead of London, that greatly increases the chance my kids are half-Turkish or half-Japanese. I think that'd make them stronger, healthier, and less prone to some of the negative things in my bloodlines. But how much so? When parents have different cognitive backgrounds, which are dominant? For instance, if one parent has much higher natural testosterone levels, is that dominant? That means the children would have higher energy, be more resistant to some diseases, be more willing to act independently and defy consensus, but also have more proneness to violence, anger, and aggression. I generally have high testosterone throughout my family - we've made good soldiers but some of us have had pretty bad tempers. What happens if I marry a woman with a lower natural predisposition towards testosterone? How about different cognitive abilities? We've generally got bad eyesight and bad spatial relations in my family. You'd expect good eyesight should be a dominant characteristic, no? But how much so?
I'd love to see research on this, and I think we will, because you can only hold back science and knowledge through moral fashion for so long before it breaks through.