Re: New findings cast doubt on "race isn't real" claim
From: dave e (dgenglish_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/16/04
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Date: 16 Sep 2004 09:18:57 -0700
"Jupiter" <jekluk@aol.com> wrote in message news:<x6J%c.32936$Ot3.23897@twister.nyc.rr.com>...
> For years, mainstream scientists have said there are no real racial
> differences among people. Race is purely a "social construct" -- in other
> words, it's imaginary, some have argued.
> But two new studies raise doubts about a key calculation on which this
> argument rests.This calculation, often cited publicly by world-renowned
> geneticists, is that all humans are more than 99.9 percent genetically
> identical.
> http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/040908_racefrm
The only novel scientific information presented in this article is the
proposal that humans are slightly more genetically dissimilar than
previous believed (0.2% different, maybe 0.3% different rather than
the 0.1% different commonly accepted).
However your interpretation of that evidence (also the interpretation
given in the article) is entirely flawed. This study has nothing to
do with race! People of different races were not segregated for this
study, and racial differences were not addressed.
Furthermore, your hypothesis "race is real" is so ill defined, that it
can not be tested. To make it testable, scientists would have to
reach some consensus about how to segregate people by race, based on a
limited set of physical characteristics. Then, having segregated
their test groups by the socially constructed definition of race, the
scientists could compare genetic differences within and between groups
to decide if these social definitions have any value for predicting
other genetic difference, not related to such superficial differences
as skin color and body fat distribution.
If you are curious about the even more politically incorrect question
of whether socially constructed definitions of race are a good
predictor of IQ scores, you can run statistically controlled studies
on that as well. So why don't you? Why point out a study which has
nothing to do with race, and claim that it does?
dave
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