8 ms·

If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evol

by d0 13y ago

If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution. There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots. This attitude is no better than witch hunts and mandatory religious laws. The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes.

kome 13y ago
> The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes. Because also the nazi program started by saying "If it's a fact, it's not racism".
- Crito 13y ago
  The problem is that the Nazis were not operating with facts. Surely you understand that...
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  Aryan superiority was very much non-scientific and is a long way from any sort of fact. Either way, it's completely tangential. If certain nationalities are more prone to some diseases than others, then it's important to recognize this as it can be used for developing drugs that can help those nationalities directly. Sticking your head in the sand and chanting "race means nothing" doesn't help anybody dieing from a disease. As soon as someone starts actively persecuting people because of the research, then it does become racist however. That doesn't mean that the research is not important and shouldn't be done. It means education needs to improved (still).
  - d0 13y ago
    This. It was more akin to religious thinking.
- saykou 13y ago
  Science is science, and findings in science, can be refuted in a science impartial way. But no new discoveries will ever justify the holocaust, slavery or segregation. Because one thing is the difference in race, another thing is plain murder and racism. But we can blame this, on the inability of humans, to discern things, and make extremes of trivial stuff. I know in a way this new findings will bring new (neo) forms of racism, because that's the way we operate. We tend to elevate our self's, that some how we are better then everyone else, and that in a group, that group has to be better then everyone else.
mbq 13y ago
In fact, it can actually help killing nationalism as it shows that most cultural nations have a very diverse ancestry and thus are purely cultural phenomena.
coldtea 13y ago
>If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution. The simple fact diverged doesn't tell us in what ways were they diverged. Bigotry can easily fill the remaining wholes in our knowledge (which are vast) and assume eg. that blacks are more prone to die young etc. Who cares if it needs tons of research into social conditions to exclude it as a factor, when you can just take some biological differences and ascribe stuff to them. >The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes Well, "objective science" is mostly a BS notion in an era of government and corporate grants, paid research, and tons of huge interests and prejudices. Lab results, for any stuff that's not totally trivial, don't speak themselves, they require an interpretative context. That can be either provided by relentlessly searching for the truth by the scientist or by quick copout and career/economic/governmental/social pressure.
- d0 13y ago
  You don't need to exclude social traits to get useful information but it does help objectivity. I assume your point is about the presentation of the facts rather than the facts themselves. Your second point is unfortunately the sad truth.
sillysaurus2 13y ago
There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity Good comment. Hopefully this leads to some thought-provoking material... rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots. ... Oh. Nevermind. EDIT: I see that you're new to HN. Please don't write in such an inflammatory style. In addition to being against the rules, it's also ineffective.
- d0 13y ago
  I'm not new to HN. Rules are subject to interpretation. If it draws attention to the point then it is perfectly valid. In fact I think it's just here. When your point opposes religious thinking then you have to throw your toys out of the pram. If I'd posted this from my older account then the response would be different as HN treats older more established users differently.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    What you did was completely against the rules: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." There is no interpretation to be made there. You willfully ignored it. I didn't think you were new to HN, judging by your comment history, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you've been banned before. Perhaps you feel your new identity gives you a vantage point from which to snipe at others. But either way, would you please clean up your writing? I think this is the problem: "There's too much woo and too many chipped shoulders and opportunists these days and they need a smackdown." You feel you're on a mission, and that your mission supersedes following the rules. It doesn't.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      If you're quoting rules: please downvote and ignore.
      - 13y ago
rtpg 13y ago
>If it's a fact, it's not racism. So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement. For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts : > blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population > poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism. By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place. We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.
- skwirl 13y ago
  You are right in saying that "blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population" does not prove that, if all factors were equal, people who happen to have darker skin are somehow predisposed to end up in prison. That statement on its own doesn't tell us much and endlessly repeating it is prone to lead to racist beliefs among many people. However, research that shows a group of people with a common ancestry share a genetic trait that is known to make them more or less susceptible to a certain disease or more or less responsive to certain treatments IS showing a causal link. It is most certainly worth mentioning because it will lead to better medical treatment. This is not an uninformed judgement call based on a naive interpretation of complex social issues. This isn't social science. This is natural science. I'm hopeful that this research will be done with as little mention of "race" as possible. Race is a social construct, this research is related to shared ancestry. It should be "we'll do a genetic test, and if you have this genetic marker, we'll do X, otherwise, we'll do Y." So many people in the US are of mixed ancestry that it is unlikely that any social definition of race is going to be useful for making medical decisions without a genetic test.
bayesianhorse 13y ago
"If it's a fact it's not racism" is a common misconception of someone who understands neither science nor racism. The problem isn't the result of some study. In a small part it is the interpretation. The much bigger part is the value judgement. There can't ever be a value judgement in science. If there is, it's not science. Now, people do pass judgement across ethnical lines. It's natural because these boundaries are very visible. But it's not scientific ever. The problem the author wants to address but doesn't understand is that people are finding new underpinnings for racist beliefs, and nobody calls them on their fallacy!
bendmorris 13y ago
Human races haven't diverged, though. Divergence requires isolation that isn't present in humans. People are incredibly mobile and people of different races frequently intermarry, ensuring that any traits that emerge in one get shared with all the others.
- d0 13y ago
  That's not strictly true. There are plenty of isolated genetic lines. This is a really big planet. Things like sickle-cell and neurofibromatosis are worth studying only 2-3 generations back as well for example.

by d0 13y ago

kome 13y ago

> The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes. Because also the nazi program started by saying "If it's a fact, it's not racism".

Crito 13y ago
The problem is that the Nazis were not operating with facts. Surely you understand that...
RyanZAG 13y ago
Aryan superiority was very much non-scientific and is a long way from any sort of fact. Either way, it's completely tangential. If certain nationalities are more prone to some diseases than others, then it's important to recognize this as it can be used for developing drugs that can help those nationalities directly. Sticking your head in the sand and chanting "race means nothing" doesn't help anybody dieing from a disease. As soon as someone starts actively persecuting people because of the research, then it does become racist however. That doesn't mean that the research is not important and shouldn't be done. It means education needs to improved (still).
- d0 13y ago
  This. It was more akin to religious thinking.
saykou 13y ago
Science is science, and findings in science, can be refuted in a science impartial way. But no new discoveries will ever justify the holocaust, slavery or segregation. Because one thing is the difference in race, another thing is plain murder and racism. But we can blame this, on the inability of humans, to discern things, and make extremes of trivial stuff. I know in a way this new findings will bring new (neo) forms of racism, because that's the way we operate. We tend to elevate our self's, that some how we are better then everyone else, and that in a group, that group has to be better then everyone else.

mbq 13y ago

In fact, it can actually help killing nationalism as it shows that most cultural nations have a very diverse ancestry and thus are purely cultural phenomena.

coldtea 13y ago

>If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different through evolution. The simple fact diverged doesn't tell us in what ways were they diverged. Bigotry can easily fill the remaining wholes in our knowledge (which are vast) and assume eg. that blacks are more prone to die young etc. Who cares if it needs tons of research into social conditions to exclude it as a factor, when you can just take some biological differences and ascribe stuff to them. >The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes Well, "objective science" is mostly a BS notion in an era of government and corporate grants, paid research, and tons of huge interests and prejudices. Lab results, for any stuff that's not totally trivial, don't speak themselves, they require an interpretative context. That can be either provided by relentlessly searching for the truth by the scientist or by quick copout and career/economic/governmental/social pressure.

d0 13y ago
You don't need to exclude social traits to get useful information but it does help objectivity. I assume your point is about the presentation of the facts rather than the facts themselves. Your second point is unfortunately the sad truth.

sillysaurus2 13y ago

There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity Good comment. Hopefully this leads to some thought-provoking material... rather than applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify some over-sensitive idiots. ... Oh. Nevermind. EDIT: I see that you're new to HN. Please don't write in such an inflammatory style. In addition to being against the rules, it's also ineffective.

d0 13y ago
I'm not new to HN. Rules are subject to interpretation. If it draws attention to the point then it is perfectly valid. In fact I think it's just here. When your point opposes religious thinking then you have to throw your toys out of the pram. If I'd posted this from my older account then the response would be different as HN treats older more established users differently.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  What you did was completely against the rules: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." There is no interpretation to be made there. You willfully ignored it. I didn't think you were new to HN, judging by your comment history, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps you've been banned before. Perhaps you feel your new identity gives you a vantage point from which to snipe at others. But either way, would you please clean up your writing? I think this is the problem: "There's too much woo and too many chipped shoulders and opportunists these days and they need a smackdown." You feel you're on a mission, and that your mission supersedes following the rules. It doesn't.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    If you're quoting rules: please downvote and ignore.
    - 13y ago

rtpg 13y ago

>If it's a fact, it's not racism. So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of value judgement. For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you could end up presenting two facts : > blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population > poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism. By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated in the first place. We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone. Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely worth it.

skwirl 13y ago
You are right in saying that "blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population" does not prove that, if all factors were equal, people who happen to have darker skin are somehow predisposed to end up in prison. That statement on its own doesn't tell us much and endlessly repeating it is prone to lead to racist beliefs among many people. However, research that shows a group of people with a common ancestry share a genetic trait that is known to make them more or less susceptible to a certain disease or more or less responsive to certain treatments IS showing a causal link. It is most certainly worth mentioning because it will lead to better medical treatment. This is not an uninformed judgement call based on a naive interpretation of complex social issues. This isn't social science. This is natural science. I'm hopeful that this research will be done with as little mention of "race" as possible. Race is a social construct, this research is related to shared ancestry. It should be "we'll do a genetic test, and if you have this genetic marker, we'll do X, otherwise, we'll do Y." So many people in the US are of mixed ancestry that it is unlikely that any social definition of race is going to be useful for making medical decisions without a genetic test.

bayesianhorse 13y ago

"If it's a fact it's not racism" is a common misconception of someone who understands neither science nor racism. The problem isn't the result of some study. In a small part it is the interpretation. The much bigger part is the value judgement. There can't ever be a value judgement in science. If there is, it's not science. Now, people do pass judgement across ethnical lines. It's natural because these boundaries are very visible. But it's not scientific ever. The problem the author wants to address but doesn't understand is that people are finding new underpinnings for racist beliefs, and nobody calls them on their fallacy!

bendmorris 13y ago

Human races haven't diverged, though. Divergence requires isolation that isn't present in humans. People are incredibly mobile and people of different races frequently intermarry, ensuring that any traits that emerge in one get shared with all the others.

d0 13y ago
That's not strictly true. There are plenty of isolated genetic lines. This is a really big planet. Things like sickle-cell and neurofibromatosis are worth studying only 2-3 generations back as well for example.