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> Personally I don't believe in average anything when it comes to race, it's a totally meaningless metric that will get you absolutely nowhere when you deal wit

by defen 18y ago

> Personally I don't believe in average anything when it comes to race, it's a totally meaningless metric that will get you absolutely nowhere when you deal with actual people and in some cases will handicap you with preconceived notions. I agree that you can't use race to judge individual people, but it's ridiculous to not "believe in average anything when it comes to race". Again, individuals must be judged on their own merits. But if only 20% of Hispanic students graduate college, versus 40% of white ones, you can't just automatically assume institutional racism. All human sub-populations are not equal. Check out this new book - http://the10000yearexplosion.com/ http://the10000yearexplosion.com/

chiffonade 18y ago
> All human sub-populations are not equal You look down on hispanics, do you think Asian Americans look down on you because your racial "subpopulation" is behind theirs in college degrees, graduate degrees, and median income?
- defen 18y ago
  I don't "look down on" Hispanics - intelligence is not a moral value. And I've been around enough Chinese Americans to know that yes, a lot of them do look down on white Americans, for the aforementioned reasons as well as others.
  - chiffonade 18y ago
    > And I've been around enough Chinese Americans to know that yes, a lot of them do look down on white Americans, for the aforementioned reasons as well as others. Yeah, so you know it's bullshit logic.
    - defen 18y ago
      I feel like we're talking at cross purposes here. Here are my thoughts on the matter, as neatly as they can be summarized in a 1-minute forum posting: 1) We should allow & encourage more immigration of high-IQ, educated people. Said IQ would be determined by using IQ tests on individuals, not by racial/country of origin quotas. Exceptions would be made for people with outstanding achievement in some field - we shouldn't exclude a world-class dancer because he has an average IQ, for example, or a great programmer because he doesn't have a college degree. 2) We should discourage immigration by low-IQ people, regardless of how hard they are willing to work. Everyone would be assumed to be in the "low-IQ, uneducated" group until he has proven otherwise. Do you disagree with either of these points?
biohacker42 18y ago
All human sub-populations are not equal. That depends on how big your sub-population is. If your population is 1, then the difference between two populations, unless they happen to be maternal twins, will be HUGE. Statistically speaking. But as your population size grows the difference between populations begin to shrink. Statistics again. The reason for that is simple, humans are among a few species that happen to have very little genetic diversity. Approximately 80 thousands years ago, something (bad) happened and the totality of humans on earth was reduced to a terrifyingly small number. We don't know exactly how small but it could have been as little as a few hundred individuals. And of those only 4 or 5 (I forget) matrilineal lines survive today. Besides humans, cheetahs are one of the other species that is similarity genetically pure. Not that genetic purity is a good thing, quite the opposite, it makes us susceptible to extinction by disease. We could be wiped out by something like a more easily transmissible HIV. Even a single tribe of chimps has more genetic diversity then all of humanity. And that's why looking at the genetic difference of human populations is not very insightful. Take one of the most famous reproductively isolated human sub-populations - the Ashkenazi. DNA suggested that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women. As is common in cases of the founder effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect A few genes that are very rare in a population, can be common in the population resulting from the few founders, if even just one of the founders had the rare genes. And the Ashkenazi appear to have a much higher incidence of genes responsible for neural diseases but perhaps also increased intelligence. So what happens if you pull a "Trading Places" trick, but with two babies instead of Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd? Nothing, remember humans sadly have a very shallow gene pool, so even an Inuit and an Ashkenazi could have more in common genetically with each other then the Ashkenazi with most other Ashkenazi. And that's why talking about DNA in human populations, is like talking about the gold plating in Monster audio cables. The people who do, aren't very smart about the subject they're ranting about.
- defen 18y ago
  Mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA are not good ways of determining population bottlenecks, since they are inherited exclusively from the mother and father, respectively. The "Two individuals from one race are more different than two random people" myth is a pernicious one that needs to die. The short answer is that you need to look at correlations in DNA, especially of regions under selection. Imagine a single human's DNA as a point in 4-billion dimensional space (where each dimension can take on the value A,C,G, or T). If you do a principal component analysis on the DNA of large numbers of people, you will see clusters, and these clusters correspond to geographic ancestry. http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/abs/ejhg2008210a.html http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/abs/ejhg2008210a.... "A major East–West gradient from Russian (Moscow) samples to Spanish samples was identified as the first principal component (PC) of the genetic diversity. The second PC identified a North–South gradient from Norway and Sweden to Romania and Spain." In picture form, from that paper in case you don't have access to Nature: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/11/another-genetic-map-of-europe.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/11/another-genetic-map-of-euro... Now, please tell me again with a straight face that I don't know what I'm "ranting" about, and that DNA in humans is irrelevant.

by defen 18y ago

chiffonade 18y ago

> All human sub-populations are not equal You look down on hispanics, do you think Asian Americans look down on you because your racial "subpopulation" is behind theirs in college degrees, graduate degrees, and median income?

defen 18y ago
I don't "look down on" Hispanics - intelligence is not a moral value. And I've been around enough Chinese Americans to know that yes, a lot of them do look down on white Americans, for the aforementioned reasons as well as others.
- chiffonade 18y ago
  > And I've been around enough Chinese Americans to know that yes, a lot of them do look down on white Americans, for the aforementioned reasons as well as others. Yeah, so you know it's bullshit logic.
  - defen 18y ago
    I feel like we're talking at cross purposes here. Here are my thoughts on the matter, as neatly as they can be summarized in a 1-minute forum posting: 1) We should allow & encourage more immigration of high-IQ, educated people. Said IQ would be determined by using IQ tests on individuals, not by racial/country of origin quotas. Exceptions would be made for people with outstanding achievement in some field - we shouldn't exclude a world-class dancer because he has an average IQ, for example, or a great programmer because he doesn't have a college degree. 2) We should discourage immigration by low-IQ people, regardless of how hard they are willing to work. Everyone would be assumed to be in the "low-IQ, uneducated" group until he has proven otherwise. Do you disagree with either of these points?

biohacker42 18y ago

All human sub-populations are not equal. That depends on how big your sub-population is. If your population is 1, then the difference between two populations, unless they happen to be maternal twins, will be HUGE. Statistically speaking. But as your population size grows the difference between populations begin to shrink. Statistics again. The reason for that is simple, humans are among a few species that happen to have very little genetic diversity. Approximately 80 thousands years ago, something (bad) happened and the totality of humans on earth was reduced to a terrifyingly small number. We don't know exactly how small but it could have been as little as a few hundred individuals. And of those only 4 or 5 (I forget) matrilineal lines survive today. Besides humans, cheetahs are one of the other species that is similarity genetically pure. Not that genetic purity is a good thing, quite the opposite, it makes us susceptible to extinction by disease. We could be wiped out by something like a more easily transmissible HIV. Even a single tribe of chimps has more genetic diversity then all of humanity. And that's why looking at the genetic difference of human populations is not very insightful. Take one of the most famous reproductively isolated human sub-populations - the Ashkenazi. DNA suggested that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women. As is common in cases of the founder effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect A few genes that are very rare in a population, can be common in the population resulting from the few founders, if even just one of the founders had the rare genes. And the Ashkenazi appear to have a much higher incidence of genes responsible for neural diseases but perhaps also increased intelligence. So what happens if you pull a "Trading Places" trick, but with two babies instead of Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd? Nothing, remember humans sadly have a very shallow gene pool, so even an Inuit and an Ashkenazi could have more in common genetically with each other then the Ashkenazi with most other Ashkenazi. And that's why talking about DNA in human populations, is like talking about the gold plating in Monster audio cables. The people who do, aren't very smart about the subject they're ranting about.

defen 18y ago
Mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA are not good ways of determining population bottlenecks, since they are inherited exclusively from the mother and father, respectively. The "Two individuals from one race are more different than two random people" myth is a pernicious one that needs to die. The short answer is that you need to look at correlations in DNA, especially of regions under selection. Imagine a single human's DNA as a point in 4-billion dimensional space (where each dimension can take on the value A,C,G, or T). If you do a principal component analysis on the DNA of large numbers of people, you will see clusters, and these clusters correspond to geographic ancestry. http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/abs/ejhg2008210a.html http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/abs/ejhg2008210a.... "A major East–West gradient from Russian (Moscow) samples to Spanish samples was identified as the first principal component (PC) of the genetic diversity. The second PC identified a North–South gradient from Norway and Sweden to Romania and Spain." In picture form, from that paper in case you don't have access to Nature: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/11/another-genetic-map-of-europe.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/11/another-genetic-map-of-euro... Now, please tell me again with a straight face that I don't know what I'm "ranting" about, and that DNA in humans is irrelevant.