7 ms·

Whats the point?

oh_sigh 5y ago
The point is showing that the heritability of skin tone and height are about the same is meaningless when talking about skin tone differences among races. Literally, news articles are written and go viral about "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who is only 5'5"" If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more common to see two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more common to see two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race? If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen at about the same rate", then you should question what exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted about the heritability of height vs skin tone. The feeling I get is that many people really, really don't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real, then you can't say there are differences among the races. So, they will argue against common sense and try to say things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black parents don't give birth to white babies. I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that way.
- mcguire 5y ago
  I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I found it interesting that the two numbers were so close. To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response. I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race". To put the two into the same category, you could compare "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative frequencies of such events.) The other way to resolve the category error, if you prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially prior to modern travel and migration patterns. But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty large, too. Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a social construct and the difference between the Irish, southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European isn't a big deal today. Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly, to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are simply made up to enforce your superiority to the individual. As a result, race is either not real, or real but completely uninteresting. Any other option is intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it leads to poor outcomes. Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    > And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest here. And that goes to my point about people wanting race to not be a social construct. I believe you're lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case. > But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Exactly. You don't want race to be real, you think it might be misused if it was real, and so you argue that it isn't real. That is not a compelling basis for an argument. A good argument for the earth being round is not that you're scared of people punching you in the nose if you say it is flat. > Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other. Yes, I can see how they would prefer that. But it has no bearing on the reality of whether being gay is genetic, or a choice, or possibly both, and really has no place in scientific analysis of sexuality.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      Ok, so race is real. What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else? And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way? If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon
      - oh_sigh 5y ago
        You're right. Thinking is too hard and scary, let's go shopping! Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people. Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way? This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!

Whats the point?

The point is showing that the heritability of skin tone and height are about the same is meaningless when talking about skin tone differences among races. Literally, news articles are written and go viral about "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who is only 5'5"" If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more common to see two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more common to see two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race? If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen at about the same rate", then you should question what exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted about the heritability of height vs skin tone. The feeling I get is that many people really, really don't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real, then you can't say there are differences among the races. So, they will argue against common sense and try to say things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black parents don't give birth to white babies. I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that way.

mcguire 5y ago
I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I found it interesting that the two numbers were so close. To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response. I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race". To put the two into the same category, you could compare "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative frequencies of such events.) The other way to resolve the category error, if you prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially prior to modern travel and migration patterns. But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty large, too. Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a social construct and the difference between the Irish, southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European isn't a big deal today. Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly, to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are simply made up to enforce your superiority to the individual. As a result, race is either not real, or real but completely uninteresting. Any other option is intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it leads to poor outcomes. Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  > And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, With all due respect, I don't believe you're being honest here. And that goes to my point about people wanting race to not be a social construct. I believe you're lying to yourself(or just lying to me) that you wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case. > But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Exactly. You don't want race to be real, you think it might be misused if it was real, and so you argue that it isn't real. That is not a compelling basis for an argument. A good argument for the earth being round is not that you're scared of people punching you in the nose if you say it is flat. > Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other. Yes, I can see how they would prefer that. But it has no bearing on the reality of whether being gay is genetic, or a choice, or possibly both, and really has no place in scientific analysis of sexuality.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    Ok, so race is real. What races are there? Is Irish a race? How, in fact, do you meaningfully define a race such that there aren't 20 races in sub-Saharan Africa for every one everywhere else? And then, what do you do with that information? I'm Irish, she is Southeast Asian, Ted over there is Mayan-German. Does it improve life in any significant way? If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon. — Bokonon
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      You're right. Thinking is too hard and scary, let's go shopping! Maybe if diseases are distributed differently across different races, it can make testing and treating them more cost effective, leading to an overall improvement in health outcomes. I'm not going to waste my sickle cell anemia test kits on testing Icelandic people. Do you apply this same logic to people who study esoteric branches of mathematics with no real possibility of improving life in any significant way? This all goes to my point that you don't want race to be real, so you argue that race is not real. Maybe it is convincing for you, but it is absolutely meaningless to me. It would be great if the universe worked that way though, all we would need to do is close our eyes and pretend cancer doesn't exist, and it would just go away!