|
Racism
May 18, 2013 13:45:51 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 18, 2013 13:45:51 GMT 1
I could define beauty functionally, as the property of whatever gives me visual pleasure. Race is clearly supposed to be more concrete, but it's a word I don't use because it has no objective or functional definition of which I am aware. Its objective definition is determinable with mathematical precision. It's a matter of genetic similarity, and therefore of common origin, that's all: what's the mystery? Your genes, for example, almost certainly derive from one of four women who lived circa seven thousand years ago, because what defines a Jew is determined by the women: the only room for doubt is whether you're one of the 4% or so whose mother converted to Judaism - but even there she almost certainly did so because she wished to marry a Jew, who is such because of his maternal line.
|
|
|
Racism
May 18, 2013 13:48:18 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 18, 2013 13:48:18 GMT 1
What is interesting is the figure for S Africa. I would have expected it to be much higher. The question was what group of people you would not want as neighbours. Future conditional. Wise not to mention those neighbours you actually have, in a country with the highest number of guns and rate of homicide in the world..
|
|
|
Racism
May 18, 2013 20:17:18 GMT 1
Post by principled on May 18, 2013 20:17:18 GMT 1
Had to ring the DWP. At the end I was asked if I minded answering some survey questions, I agreed. First question: Was I Black, Asian, White, White British etc.? Next question: Did I feel more British, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or English? Of what use is the second question, except perhaps that an English Parliament may be on the way if Scotland vote for Independence? P
|
|
|
Racism
May 18, 2013 23:57:29 GMT 1
Post by alancalverd on May 18, 2013 23:57:29 GMT 1
So please define it. As you can see from #17, according to the DWP it has nothing to do with Jewish ancestry, but more to do with skin colour and place of birth. AFAIK it is any arbitrary classification anyone cares to think of.
|
|
|
Racism
May 19, 2013 12:27:30 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 19, 2013 12:27:30 GMT 1
I did, didn't I? It's a matter of commonality of genetic inheritance. The same way you define who your children are, what your blood family relationships are. Of course in actual use the term is going to have borders of degrees of vagueness. Go back far enough and we all share the same mother. But the degree to which any of us have diverged from that original set of genes can be measured with perfect precision. And so therefore can the commonality of groups of us. A "Chinese" person is going to have more genes in common than a "Japanese" person, even though at some point in the past the two are indistinguishable - as are, for example, Jews and Arabs, if you go back ten thousand years or so; or negroid and caucasian. Not entirely arbitrary - its objective rationale is the above. I'm not part of your family and vice versa - even though at some point, considerably over a million years ago, Eve gave birth to our common ancestors. Skin colour and place of birth are of course fairly reliable indicators of recent common ancestry, statistically - as is what ethnic origin you voluntarily choose to identify yourself with; so those criteria are not arbitrary either, even though they're not exact or entirely reliable. "Jew" happens to be far more reliable an indicator than nearly every other claim to racial identity, because of its strictly regulated matrilinear definition, that's all. One thousand years ago your ancestors numbered fewer than 30,000, now they're many million - but you're all more closely related, objectively, physically, than, say, we are.
|
|
|
Racism
May 19, 2013 12:39:42 GMT 1
Post by alancalverd on May 19, 2013 12:39:42 GMT 1
Now here comes the problem. Given the probable migration routes of homo sapiens across the globe, a British citizen, one of whose parents immigrated from Ethiopia, is likely to be more closely related to me than to one whose both parents were descended from west african slaves via Jamaica. Yet I am arbitrarily classed as "white British" and they are both called "black British". And we are expected to fill in official forms without undergoing a complete DNA sequence.
|
|
|
Racism
May 19, 2013 13:16:50 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 19, 2013 13:16:50 GMT 1
Now here comes the problem. Given the probable migration routes of homo sapiens across the globe Now scientifically traceable by such comparative genetic maps, of course. Yessssss...quite! I don't understand what I'm missing here - some meaning of "arbitrary" that you're using that doesn't gel with normal usage. As you say above, there's an objective fact about the matter. Well - a somewhat different matter to whether there's an objective meaning to the term "race". My father filled in my birth certificate without having to undergo a DNA sequence too, and nor did my mother: it doesn't mean it was an arbitrary matter who got identified on the form as such.
|
|
|
Racism
May 19, 2013 16:17:01 GMT 1
Post by fascinating on May 19, 2013 16:17:01 GMT 1
I thought that the term "race", applied to humans, meant much the same as "population" in animals.
I think a species is defined as [in my flawed grammar] a group of individual organisms which can breed with one another. So human individuals can mate with each other and produce offspring, so we are part of the same species; we cannot mate and produce offspring with any other animals, so they are of a different species.
If a species is spread over a wide geographical area, one set of individuals may become isolated from the rest, their gene mix will differ slightly because of the nature of the first individuals that first moved into that area, and further their gene expression will come to differ as they adapt to their particular environment. So there come to be marked differences in genotype and phenotype, when compared to the main body of the species - they form a separate "population".
And obviously this is observed in humans, who first originated in Africa. As groups moved away to Asia and Europe, a few of their characteristics changed, most obviously loss of pigment thus causing brown skin in Asia, and white skin in Europe. The presence of the Sahara desert, and the vast distances across Europe and Asia, almost isolated the populations, which came to be called races.
(Apologies for stating the obvious).
Now of course the differences are not large, the different populations can interbreed, and for hundreds of years they have hardly been isolated from each other, have interbred and produced a large number of mixed-race individuals So arguably the term "race" in this context is not really useful.
I, as with probably most of us, would rather forget about skin colour, race etc, but the fact is that some people won't forget about it, and that can cause problems.
Most obviously, perhaps, in the past the people who were white regarded the people who lived with them, but whose skins were black, as less important, and denied them political and social rights. Legislation has since restored those rights, but it cannot be denied that people who are black now have, on average, less economic success than people who are white.
This fact has only become apparent by gathering statistics about which race individuals belong to, and aligning that information with economic data. So that is one reason why the concept of race is maintained, to determine whether people are suffering relative economic hardship because of their being perceived as non-white.
Of course the race issue has led to a whole industry of making claims about race which are suspect. Some talk of "black culture", which sounds odd to me; you may see what I mean if I put forward the notion of "brown culture" or "yellow culture".
In my view, the main reason for the fact that some are rich and some are poor is because of the inheritance laws - most of the rich have enjoyed the benefit of property acquired through birth,not through work. For most black people and as many white people, their ancestors had no access to capital, therefore none has been passed on to those on low income today. I suspect that the prevalence of poverty among black people in the USA is at least partly as a result of the fact that up to about 150 years ago, few were able to own significant amounts of capital.
|
|
|
Racism
May 20, 2013 18:39:18 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 20, 2013 18:39:18 GMT 1
I thought that the term "race", applied to humans, meant much the same as "population" in animals. It's not a question of numbers. Race is a different concept to species. It's a theory, once accepted as demonstrated, but now hotly disputed. The evidence supports the contention that there were three or possibly more "originations" as much as it does the "Out of Africa" hypothesis. At the moment. Useful for what? It's an observation of reality, that's all. Some people are more related than others. Well, they certainly won't get solved by pretending reality is other than it is. And vice versa. And between this tribe and that one. Because they've been denied their "rights"? It was apparent as soon as Europeans landed in Africa, or South America, or Asia. The reason the concept of "race" is maintained is because it's a genuine scientific aspect of reality - it cuts the universe (of people) at the joints. You can't "do away" with it, as leftwing redbrick sociologists tried to do in the 60s and 70s. You're confusing two very different things. Race and culture. Please don't - it's very racist, as people on the Left are always reminding us.
|
|
|
Racism
May 20, 2013 20:11:26 GMT 1
Post by fascinating on May 20, 2013 20:11:26 GMT 1
"The reason the concept of "race" is maintained is because it's a genuine scientific aspect of reality" How can you define exactly which race a person belongs to?
Why would we want to?
|
|
|
Racism
May 20, 2013 20:38:28 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 20, 2013 20:38:28 GMT 1
"The reason the concept of "race" is maintained is because it's a genuine scientific aspect of reality" Reason enough, isn't it? If you wished to do so exactly, you'd do a DNA analysis. Many possible reasons. You might want to know how people migrated across the world, for example. You might want to know why some groupd of people share common genetic characteristics, such as an unusual inability to metabolise alcohol, in alan's case, or most Japanese; or a propensity to sickle cell disease, in the case of most negroid people; or a vulnerability to melanoma, in the case of white people. You might want to know why there are such large differentials in average IQ test scores between groups of people that share certain characteristics, such as skin colour or countires of common origin; you might want to understand the way people think, and behave, in response to people they classify as not belonging to their kin; you might want to merely understand how humankind has evolved, and where we all come from.
|
|
|
Racism
May 20, 2013 20:57:41 GMT 1
Post by alancalverd on May 20, 2013 20:57:41 GMT 1
Historically, the concept of race predates scientific genetics by centuries if not millennia. It is therefore wrong to attempt to classify a person's race by DNA analysis or to pretend that it has any scientific value.
My question, several exchanges ago, asked for a definition of race, and I'm now going to insist that the definition can be traced to an origin that predates molecular genetics.
I am also interested to know what evidence Mr S has for my "unusual inability to metabolise alcohol". It is worth checking the facts before making an assertion. Was he perhaps drunk when he made it?
|
|
|
Racism
May 20, 2013 21:12:18 GMT 1
Post by fascinating on May 20, 2013 21:12:18 GMT 1
mrsonde, how many races are there? How do you come up with that number. Looking at DNA allows us to group peoples by ancestry, but we can have genetic groups without using the concept of "race".
If somebody has black father and white mother, what race does he belong to?
|
|
|
Racism
May 21, 2013 2:32:39 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 21, 2013 2:32:39 GMT 1
Historically, the concept of race predates scientific genetics by centuries if not millennia. It is therefore wrong to attempt to classify a person's race by DNA analysis or to pretend that it has any scientific value. The concept of family predates scientific genetics by millenia too. The concept of light predates optics, or the science of electromagnetism. Familial proximity then, if you must insist. Kinship. That's what it comes down to. And guess what that comes down to? Merely talking about the statistical distribution of certain genetic traits, that's all. It doesn't apply to all Jews, of course, or all Japanese, as not all black people have sickle cells.
|
|
|
Racism
May 21, 2013 2:36:58 GMT 1
Post by mrsonde on May 21, 2013 2:36:58 GMT 1
mrsonde, how many races are there? How do you come up with that number. I don't come up with any number. As I said, it's obviously going to have borders of vagueness, depending on how far back into human history you choose to go. Errr...that is the concept. I don't know what else you think it might mean. That's called a mixed race. The proportions can be specified precisely by DNA analysis - or by an analysis of a family tree, if you prefer.
|
|