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There aren't big population-level differences, aside from basic cosmetic differences due to genetic drift [0]. Humans act as one single species, with one single

• toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I think you missed the forest for the trees in my comment. > I would end with a question: What observations and data, exactly, are you looking at? What conclusions have you drawn? Can we use contraposition to flip around any of those conclusions and find deeper or simpler truths? None. I'm arguing that if Professor Hsu wants to model an experiment and a thesis, collect data, arrive at a conclusion, and publish a paper, that should be absolutely fine and provoke no outrage, even if some feel "that's a direct introduction to ethnofascism via eugenics". Let the reader of the paper be the judge if it's "ethnofascism". I'm prioritizing the scientific method over hurt feelings.
  • ylem 6y ago
    You mean submit a paper?
• DuskStar 6y ago
  > There aren't big population-level differences, aside from basic cosmetic differences due to genetic drift What lets you assert that? There are most certainly genetic clusters that correspond to "races" - that's how sites like 23andMe work, after all. And these variations aren't just "melanin content" or "nose structure" - the obvious one is sickle-cell anemia, but a lot of other genetic disorders are racially correlated too.
  • Kednicma 6y ago
    My assertion in more detail. First, there aren't big population-level differences amongst random partitions of the single human race. There are population-level differences amongst geographic partitions, and humans are known to not travel especially far from where they are born, so that we might suspect genetic drift is happening; humans tend to not spread genes very far geographically. Indeed, there are countless examples of genetic drift in humans. Second, those drift differences are largely cosmetic, and cosmetic on average. Both properties follow from differences being Gaussian distributed with respect to fitness; the typical drifted gene is neither especially fit nor especially unfit. Third, as gene pools grow, the ability to control for fitness on a per-gene basis shrinks exponentially, so that the behavior of the pool is like a random permutation. To see this, imagine a picky procreator choosing from a list of suitors by genetic partition; at each stage, they will reject some suitors who have the wrong allele. The pool randomly combines each pair of alleles (because it is deep enough to hold every viable combination), so each rejection removes roughly the same proportion of suitors every time. Thus, a linear list of picked alleles requires an exponentially-large list of suitors to choose from! Aside: This third fact is why breeding dogs gives us pugs with their poor breathing and also why breeding tends to give us lots of hip dysplasia across different breeds. We can only positively select for a relatively small handful of traits and alleles, and each selection allows thousands of selfish genes to join the entourage, giving us patterns of unwanted gene expression. None of these facts preclude services like 23andMe; we can certainly write down lists of clustered alleles which correspond to drifted genes, and use that information to correlate people with the geographic history of their ancestors, on a probabilistic basis. (Remember, large gene pools are randomly permuted, so these services must be probabilistic.) None of these facts preclude some genes from being selected for fitness, either. Let's examine sickle-cell anemia more closely. Sometimes a mutation can improve an allele's fitness when one copy of the gene is present, but two copies results in a poor allele. Sickle cell is a very good example of this. Having one copy gives the "sickle cell trait", which resists malaria. It has a bunch of other minor health effects, positive and negative, but resisting malaria is sufficient to allow the gene variant to stay in the gene pool. What I'm saying is that, just because some people have sickle-cell anemia, that doesn't therefore change the fact that people are all of the same species. If folks want to talk about which individual genes they have, then they should do that, and not talk about race, because genes only stick together in geographic clusters probabilistically, due to drift.
• pnako 6y ago
  So you want to reject someone's will to collect more empirical observations and data on a certain issue... based on empirical observations and data you already have? This makes absolutely no sense. Either we can investigate some issues, or we can't. @markdown is a bit more honest when they say we should not research the issue at all, because the answer is very unpleasant. But note that race is only the ultimate taboo in the west; researchers elsewhere, in particular in China, will continue this research. And I think it's worth having people in the west researching this area, so they understand this research and can, indeed, challenge it when necessary.
  • Kednicma 6y ago
    Okay, please, go ahead and investigate these issues. What have you found? I am summarizing a well-understood consensus position, not exploring some novel theory. You can research the issue as much as you like, and find as many spurious "unpleasant" correlations as you like; this does not dislodge the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality. I do not want to shut down research, but I do want to point out that the research which contradicts Hsu is already done and the theories which explain why he is wrong are already understood.
    • pnako 6y ago
      Your position on this issue is not based on reason or science, but on dogma. Nothing is ever really settled. And certainly not that topic in particular. How could it be, considering how controversial it is? (This very topic is another proof.) >the fact that race is a social and cultural construction rather than some genetic reality That is an absurd claim. I'm well aware of the sensitivity around this topic. I wish we could research it freely, but I can see why people get very agitated about certain findings. I can see why it's unpleasant. Still, just like you can't research dermatology, immunology and other fields of medicine without taking race into account (the idea that racial differences are only skin deep completely breaks down when it comes to finding bone marrow donors), if it turns out that there are also racial difference in cognitive or behavioral traits, it's important to know for research on diseases like Alzheimer, or indeed for research on psychology, sociology, etc.