Should scientists study race and IQ?

[SuperJesus]

Africa is the birthplace not of humanity, it is where our ancestors stood upright and fucked off.

[RAFH]

Originally Posted by Rathpig

If the potentiality is the same, why didn't Africa develop? That is the racialist question of Shockley.

You really can't remove human development if you insist on that word from human evolution. It isn't as if I am the first person in the universe to use the word in this manner. Shockley asked, and no one has yet tried to answer, why the racial divide in development.


And something I missed earlier was you seeming denial in Africa as the birthplace of humanity, so do you reject the archeological evidence from Africa as the earliest known humanoids?

What racial divide in development? There are places in Europe even now that are nearly as primitive as anything in Africa. 500 years ago, the Chinese and even the Japanese and Koreans and most of the rest of the Asian nations did and would have considered Europeans undeveloped barbarians. Ditto for some of the South and Central American civilizations 700 to 500 years ago.

Many of the so-called 'developments' of Europe were actually imported from Africa and the near, middle and far east. That includes most of the technologies that made it possible for the Europeans to get so bloody good at warfare and so bloody rapacious with regard to material wealth.

Have you studied much of Ethiopia, it's had a very high state of development for over 2000 years. It's problem was mostly it's isolation because of religious issues and the relative undevelopment of neighboring lands and peoples. Development is often and usually a matter of competition and cooperation with neighboring lands and peoples.

If the Europeans are so developed, what were they doing during the time before and through much of the Roman Empire? Indeed, most of the conquering 'barbarians' that overran Rome, at least western Rome, were peoples moving in from the East.

And, how do you define 'race'. Is it just an area? A given territory? Or certain ethnic groups? Or do you have specific physical characteristics you use?

Were the Irish a stupid and base race? The English were convinced of it for centuries. How about the Italians, or the Spanish or the Eastern Europeans?

Are the various peoples of India 'backwards'? They would have laughed at the stupidity and backwardsness of most all Europeans a 1000 years ago.

For that matter, what race are you? And how do you know?

[Rathpig]

Originally Posted by damian

my answer is yes, but not by using crappy iq tests.

I bet your IQ is 1000

[RAFH]

Originally Posted by SuperJesus

Africa is the birthplace not of humanity, it is where our ancestors stood upright and fucked off.

And some of the stupider ones wandered off and got lost. Many never found their way back.

[Rathpig]

Originally Posted by RAFH

What racial divide in development?

There is none, every place in the world is the same. No mud huts.

[SuperJesus]

Originally Posted by Rathpig

There is none, every place in the world is the same. No mud huts.

Some are straw and rope, a step down from mudhuts, and yet were you in their environment you wouldn't live past the first day.

[AthenaAwakened]

Is Race Real?

In a March 14, 2005, Op-Ed piece published in The New York Times, Dr. Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, challenged scholarly approaches that treat race as a social construction, arguing that recent research in the biological and the social sciences offers fresh evidence that racial differences are genetically identifiable. His editorial, "A Family Tree in Every Gene," expresses a more widespread tendency among certain communities of researchers to revise longstanding scientific understandings about the relationship between race and genetics.

The SSRC believes the subject of race and genomics warrants critical reflection and debate among researchers and the broader public, given its important implications across an array of disciplines in the biological and social sciences, its potential impact on a number of policy domains, as well as broader consequences for society at large. In an effort to contribute to this discussion, we have commissioned a series of short essays by leading researchers with a diverse set of disciplinary and analytic perspectives. We hope this forum will serve as a tool for scholars, educators, policy makers and students, and promote informed debate on what is no doubt one of the most important public issues of our time.

Contributors to the forum include:

Troy Duster, member and then chair of the advisory committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (Human Genome Project), is president of the American Sociological Association and has published widely on the subject of race and genetics, including the book Back Door to Eugenics.

Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. He is president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.

Joseph L. Graves, Jr. is University Core Director and Professor of Biological Sciences at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research concerns the evolutionary genetics of postponed aging and biological concepts of race in humans. He is the author of The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994.

Evelynn M. Hammonds is professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical, and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a book called The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990.

Ruth Hubbard is Professor Emerita of Biology at Harvard University. She has worked and written on the politics of health care since the early 1970s. In 1993 she and her son, Elijah Wald, wrote Exploding The Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers.

Jay Kaufman is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and a fellow of the Carolina Population Center. He has written a number of articles on the ways in which health status varies by race, class and other socioeconomic quantities, and has co-written an important essay for the New England Journal of Medicine called "Race and Genomics."

Nancy Krieger is associate professor of society, human development, and health at Harvard University. She has published numerous articles on social inequalities in health and has recently edited Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives.

Roger N. Lancaster is professor of anthropology and director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at George Mason University. His most recent book is The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture.

Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body.
R.C. Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, has written a number of books and articles on evolution and human variation, including Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment.

Jonathan Marks is a molecular anthropologist who teaches at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is author of Human Biodiversity and What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee.

Ann Morning, assistant professor of sociology at New York University, has published a number of articles having to do with race and ethnicity, especially racial classification. Her most recent work is "From Sword to Plowshare: Using Race for Discrimination and Antidiscrimination in the United States" (with Daniel Sabbagh), forthcoming in International Social Science Journal.

Jenny Reardon is assistant research professor of women's studies and Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy scholar at Duke University. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in a Genomic Age (Princeton University Press). Brady Dunklee is a recent graduate of Brown University in biology and science and technology studies (STS). Kara Wentworth is completing a bachelor's degree in human biology: race and gender and a high school teaching certificate program at Brown University this year.

Jacqueline Stevens is an assistant professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She writes on how states establish taxonomies of race and ethnicity. Her publications on this topic include Reproducing the State (Princeton, 1999) and "Racial Meanings and Scientific Methods: Policy Changes for NIH-funded Publications Reporting Human Variation," Journal of Health Policy Politics and Law (2003).

[Schneibster]

Overall, considering the studies of human genetics with respect to whether "races" exist or not, I tentatively conclude that they do not. That's considerably firmer than I was before I looked into it, and it's been a few years and given I haven't heard any of this horseshit lately, my pretty good guess is that if I were to look now I'd find a few new studies that confirm it more strongly.

So the question becomes much easier: should scientists study something that apparently doesn't exist's effects? No, not really. Not much point in it. Prove race exists first, then we'll start talking about what characteristics races have.

[Febble]

Originally Posted by SuperJesus

As I understood it natural selection is the elimination of the 'unsuccessful genes/traits by the more successful in a given environment' and Evolution is the random mutation, which would be the 'adding' stage.
I sort of failed science so if I'm wrong I'm wrong, but it's just how I understood it.

Well, "evolution" is the whole process by which the genes (or variants of genes) found in a population change over time.

Random mutation is one source of variance but there are others. Natural selection is, as you say, the term used for the process by which genes that tend to reduce an organism's chance of replication become less prevalent in the population over time.

Thus, over time, the genome of the population contains information as to how to build an organism that is fitted to its environment. That information comes from the environment.

(maybe this little derail needs to go into E&O?)

[Febble]

Originally Posted by Rathpig

If the potentiality is the same, why didn't Africa develop? That is the racialist question of Shockley.

You really can't remove human development if you insist on that word from human evolution. It isn't as if I am the first person in the universe to use the word in this manner. Shockley asked, and no one has yet tried to answer, why the racial divide in development.

Well stop using "evolution" equivocally. Are you using it to mean change in allele frequency in a population over time? Or are you using it simply to mean "change"? I know of know reason to think that cultures change because allele frequencies do. On the other hand I know of several reasons to think that IQ scores rise because cultures change.

And something I missed earlier was you seeming denial in Africa as the birthplace of humanity, so do you reject the archeological evidence from Africa as the earliest known humanoids?

Well, you need to be careful with how you write. You said life evolved in Africa. I don't know of any evidence that this is the case. However, it seems likely that human beings started to evolve in Africa, and that we are all descended from Africans.

But every human being alive today is equally evolved from those African ancestors, whether we were born in Africa or elsewhere.

[Schneibster]

Originally Posted by Febble

Random mutation is one source of variance but there are others.

You should mention them. An important one is recombination; that happens in sexual reproduction. Another that's a lot less important in species that reproduce sexually, but a lot more important among microorganisms that don't, is genetic transfer, which can occur in a number of ways including by viruses, preons, and as a result of feeding (yes, really).

There is an impression that new genes arise only by mutation. That impression is incorrect, and in fact is only a small part of the likely genetic changes over time within a species, particularly one that reproduces sexually.

[Febble]

Originally Posted by Schneibster

Overall, considering the studies of human genetics with respect to whether "races" exist or not, I tentatively conclude that they do not. That's considerably firmer than I was before I looked into it, and it's been a few years and given I haven't heard any of this horseshit lately, my pretty good guess is that if I were to look now I'd find a few new studies that confirm it more strongly.

So the question becomes much easier: should scientists study something that apparently doesn't exist's effects? No, not really. Not much point in it. Prove race exists first, then we'll start talking about what characteristics races have.

Not much point in proving race exists. It's a social construct - it exists.

And we know that there are physical characteristics, reflecting ancestry, that increase the probability that certain alleles will be present in an individual from an individual from one "racial" group, relative to an individual from another.

But all that tells us is that social "race" groupings reflect social attitudes to ancestry especially where ancestry is visible in the form of superficial physical attributes.

Where an individual's ancestry does not make them part of a visible social "race" grouping, we have no way of correlating their ancestry with their genotype.

For all I know, Brits with a genotype that represents Danish ancestry may be less potentially intelligent than Brits with a genotype that reflects Celtic ancestry. But we can't know because we don't socially construct Brits into Danes and Celts.

And we have absolutely no way of knowing whether depressed mean IQ scores in a US racial grouping that is highly correlated with environmental disadvantage has anything to do with allele distributions in that group because we also know that IQ scores are highly correlated with non-hereditary factors, including environmental disadvantage, and we also know that distribution of most human alleles in the human population is pretty uniform.

So a good first place to look for causal factors would in the environmental domain. And if we are interested in the relationships between genes and IQ, we'd go should go for a far better proxy than race.

[Monad]

From an evolutionary standpoint I follow Cavalli Sforza in arguing it's better scientifically to think in terms of lineages than races. There are definitely multiple streams of humanity that diverged at various points along our evolutionary history but that can all be traced back to a common source - modern Homo sapiens in Africa. "Race" is how each of those streams appears temporarily if you treat it as a fixed point (and then draw all sorts of sociocultural conclusions from that) but in reality the streams are all connected and often merge and mix their waters before diverging again in new configurations. Race as a concept seems to be trying to fix something that is by it's nature in a state of flux. Throughout our history as a species there have been many points where whole lineages have become relatively isolated from each other and that has, through evolution, led to diversity. However when those groups have come into contact with other lineages, as we are still one species (and therefore one gene pool) the overall tendency has been for lineages to merge in various ways: through outgroup marriage, through mutual accommodation, assimilation and integration. through conquest and even enslavement. There have also always been opposite tendencies - groups of people who wished to keep their lineage "pure" for various social, political or religious reasons but reality has tended to undermine these attempts and on a grand historical scale they are limited.

The reality is the human race is in a continuous process of flux and change over time - genes that confer benefits may start out in certain lineages (how could it be otherwise?) but have the ability to spread throughout the human gene pool which is only limited by temporary separations and these days perhaps even less so.

[Schneibster]

Originally Posted by Febble

Not much point in proving race exists. It's a social construct - it exists.

But not as a genetic reality. Read this. The Human Genome Project had finding racial genetic differences as one of their goals.

Genetic variation within any traditionally or socially defined "race" actually exceeds variation between the races. In other words, people of the same race are more likely to be genetically different, and are likely to be more different, than the races are from one another, genetically.

Race is completely, entirely, and totally a social construct. It has no basis in genetic reality. That must be said, over and over again, until it is understood and we hear no more of this.

I'm happy, parenthetically, to find that I was correct. Additional evidence has been found.

Originally Posted by Febble

And we know that there are physical characteristics, reflecting ancestry, that increase the probability that certain alleles will be present in an individual from an individual from one "racial" group, relative to an individual from another.

On the other hand, it's also more likely that two people who share these physical characteristics are more different from one another than either is from some random third party who is a member of a different "race," than that they are not.

I say again, show it has some real meaning before you use it.

I don't argue with the rest, but you need to know this- you need to accept it, and pass it on. This is the truth: race is a lie. There is no race. It doesn't exist. And that fact is scientifically proven, in a multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars genetic fact-finding project that is one of the more well-known such projects in genetics in the world.

When we accept this, believe it, and pass it on, this bullshit will stop. Until it stops, I will keep passing it on.

ETA: My bad, my google-fu was good but my link-posting-fu let me down. Try this and this, for news sources, and Wikipedia has an excellently sourced article that goes into enormous detail. The current recommendation from the Human Genome Center at Howard University is that race is not genetically determinable; given a DNA sample, the "race" of the contributor could not be determined with certainty.

[premjan]

Originally Posted by Rathpig

If the potentiality is the same, why didn't Africa develop? That is the racialist question of Shockley.
You really can't remove human development if you insist on that word from human evolution. It isn't as if I am the first person in the universe to use the word in this manner. Shockley asked, and no one has yet tried to answer, why the racial divide in development.
And something I missed earlier was you seeming denial in Africa as the birthplace of humanity, so do you reject the archeological evidence from Africa as the earliest known humanoids?

Shockley was just a physicist trying to use statistical methods in a domain that is a lot more complex. There are some objective answers to why development does and doesn't take place in certain scenarios, but they usually aren't simple and clear-cut. Guns, Germs and Steel may give a flavor for the kinds of arguments that are plausible even if not guaranteed to be 100% correct. Unfortunately it is just so much easier to look at somebody's skin color and race (the mark of Cain) and draw all the necessary conclusions. Shockley just happened to grow past his intellectual range. A few hundred years ago, the same sorts of conclusions only worse were being drawn about e.g. Japan but Japan managed to transform itself. Shockley's unusual success and his likely lack of a liberal background reinforced his early prejudices.

My personal take is that there are some genetic differences, but that culture is a major amplifier of those differences. And those differences may account for the likelihood of developing technology at a higher rate, but in the long run they don't really stand in the way of adopting technology, and can even be completely overcome.

[SophistiCat]

Originally Posted by Febble

And we have absolutely no way of knowing whether depressed mean IQ scores in a US racial grouping that is highly correlated with environmental disadvantage has anything to do with allele distributions in that group because we also know that IQ scores are highly correlated with non-hereditary factors, including environmental disadvantage, and we also know that distribution of most human alleles in the human population is pretty uniform.

And we also know that the Flynn effect makes it virtually certain that the racial IQ gap cannot be primarily explained by genetics (unless we entertain the possibility of a genetic overhaul over the course of 2-3 generations).

[SophistiCat]

Originally Posted by Schneibster

But not as a genetic reality. Read this. The Human Genome Project had finding racial genetic differences as one of their goals.

You need to be careful about interpreting such results. The race gene does not exist - fair enough. But neither does the tallness gene, for example. Few would argue that height is a social construct, or that it is not highly heritable. Yet it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to identify any individual gene that is strongly correlated with a person's height.

Race exists both as a social construct and a physical reality. But, as Febble says, that doesn't always make it a good proxy for other heritable traits.

[Febble]

Originally Posted by Schneibster

But not as a genetic reality. Read this. The Human Genome Project had finding racial genetic differences as one of their goals.

Genetic variation within any traditionally or socially defined "race" actually exceeds variation between the races. In other words, people of the same race are more likely to be genetically different, and are likely to be more different, than the races are from one another, genetically.

Race is completely, entirely, and totally a social construct. It has no basis in genetic reality. That must be said, over and over again, until it is understood and we hear no more of this.

I'm happy, parenthetically, to find that I was correct. Additional evidence has been found.

On the other hand, it's also more likely that two people who share these physical characteristics are more different from one another than either is from some random third party who is a member of a different "race," than that they are not.

I say again, show it has some real meaning before you use it.

I don't argue with the rest, but you need to know this- you need to accept it, and pass it on. This is the truth: race is a lie. There is no race. It doesn't exist. And that fact is scientifically proven, in a multi-tens-of-millions-of-dollars genetic fact-finding project that is one of the more well-known such projects in genetics in the world.

When we accept this, believe it, and pass it on, this bullshit will stop. Until it stops, I will keep passing it on.

ETA: My bad, my google-fu was good but my link-posting-fu let me down. Try this and this, for news sources, and Wikipedia has an excellently sourced article that goes into enormous detail. The current recommendation from the Human Genome Center at Howard University is that race is not genetically determinable; given a DNA sample, the "race" of the contributor could not be determined with certainty.

Oh, I agree. Race is a social construct. However, social "racial" groupings roughly correlate with genes for certain superficial characteristics, as we know from the simple fact that a child with a black mother and a white father will probably be brown. The issue is whether the genes for superficial "racial" characteristics correlate with genes that have anything to do with intelligence, and I see no evidence that they do.

[Schneibster]

Originally Posted by SophistiCat

You need to be careful about interpreting such results. The race gene does not exist - fair enough. But neither does the tallness gene, for example. Few would argue that height is a social construct, or that it is not highly heritable. Yet it has turned out to be surprisingly difficult to identify any individual gene that is strongly correlated with a person's height.

Race exists both as a social construct and a physical reality. But, as Febble says, that doesn't always make it a good proxy for other heritable traits.

Well, it appears that people of the same "race" are less likely to share genes with one another than they are with some third party of a different "race," and it appears that it's not technically possible to reliably determine someone's "race" from their DNA. I don't deny it exists as a social construct, but I think it's based on superficial characteristics like skin color and hair growth patterns. From a genetic standpoint, there's only one "race;" it's called "humans." I question whether in the face of such evidence, the "physical reality" you point to has much objective existence.

I don't suppose since it's highly unlikely that any evidence regarding innate intelligence capability is likely to be found that I have much problem with looking into it, but there are three problems that will have to be addressed:
1. There are people with an agenda in this, and as we all know well, people with an agenda don't tend to get very accurate results. I won't say "lie," though that happens too; at best, it's a matter of cherry-picking.
2. In many countries, there are profound economic differences based on perceived racial characteristics. These can have a strong impact upon results unless controlled for.
3. The techniques for testing intelligence have been shown to be culturally relative, and thus don't really test for intelligence, but for adaptation to the dominant culture. So better tests that don't count on culturally relative cognitive constructs are required, and do not exist.

Given all of these things, I see it as primarily a waste of time, and secondarily a source of propaganda of unpleasant character. If anyone can see a way to avoid these deficiencies, by all means have at it, but I will remain highly skeptical of the results.

[Febble]

Originally Posted by Schneibster

Well, it appears that people of the same "race" are less likely to share genes with one another than they are with some third party of a different "race,"

No, not less likely. As likely, with most genes.

and it appears that it's not technically possible to reliably determine someone's "race" from their DNA.

But it's possible to get a probability estimate on their ancestry. Which is often interesting. And for people from small isolated places, it's sometimes possible to be quite precise.

I don't deny it exists as a social construct, but I think it's based on superficial characteristics like skin color and hair growth patterns. From a genetic standpoint, there's only one "race;" it's called "humans." I question whether in the face of such evidence, the "physical reality" you point to has much objective existence.

Well, alleles are non-uniformly distributed. But the social construct "race" is a poor guide to the distribution.

I don't suppose since it's highly unlikely that any evidence regarding innate intelligence capability is likely to be found that I have much problem with looking into it, but there are three problems that will have to be addressed:
1. There are people with an agenda in this, and as we all know well, people with an agenda don't tend to get very accurate results. I won't say "lie," though that happens too; at best, it's a matter of cherry-picking.
2. In many countries, there are profound economic differences based on perceived racial characteristics. These can have a strong impact upon results unless controlled for.
3. The techniques for testing intelligence have been shown to be culturally relative, and thus don't really test for intelligence, but for adaptation to the dominant culture. So better tests that don't count on culturally relative cognitive constructs are required, and do not exist.

Given all of these things, I see it as primarily a waste of time, and secondarily a source of propaganda of unpleasant character. If anyone can see a way to avoid these deficiencies, by all means have at it, but I will remain highly skeptical of the results.

Yup.

[Copernicus_Meme]

Originally Posted by AthenaAwakened

5. Most variation is within, not between, "races." Of the small amount of total human variation, 85% exists within any local population, be they Italians, Kurds, Koreans or Cherokees. About 94% can be found within any continent. That means two random Koreans may be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.

This reminds of something I read to the contrary of what you're saying, or rather in critique of it, and I read quite recently has it happens (got a book send to me by a friend this week). Now, this isn't something I'm well versed in, so I can't effectively comment on my own, but as it is a relevant point to this I'll transcribe a somewhat lengthy bit from the late geneticist G.Whitney on this:

The Percent Scams

Knowledge from the genome project has already helped put in perspective some previously misunderstood, or intentionally misrepresented, genetic information — what I call the “percent scams.” There have been two main scams, one at one percent, another at six percent.

The one percent scam started from genuine surprise among scientists at the similarity in base sequences between early samples of chimp and human DNA. In some comparisons it appeared that we shared about 99 percent of our genetic material with the chimpanzee, and egalitarian anthropologists immediately exploited this similarity. If there is only one percent of difference between the two species, it must follow that all men are genetically functionally equivalent. By this “proof,” racial differences must be due to historical accident and cultural differentiation — not genetic differentiation — since there is no room for genetic differentiation.

Better understanding of the genome reveals that “percent difference,” is not a relevant comparison. Small differences can matter tremendously. Mice and humans, for example, have many DNA sequences in common, and many mouse genes are very similar to human genes. It takes a lot of the same genetic blueprint to build mammalian bodies with liver, spleen, digestive tract, skeletal systems, and nervous systems. And, in fact, there are many similarities between mouse and man, as any anatomy student can verify by direct examination. There are also important differences.

With apes we share many of our genes. However, we could share 99 percent of our base pair sequences and still differ in 100 percent of our gene products, depending on how the one percent difference were distributed throughout the genome. Since genes and protein products interact in complex ways, often small differences in genes can cascade to enormous differences in final traits.

As an example, consider that among humans the manifold differences between the sexes are, on present evidence, the result of a difference in only one gene. The gene in question is a regulatory gene, that is, its primary product interacts with the DNA to regulate the expression of many other genes. With the tdf gene (testes determining factor, also known as Sry, or the Sex determining Region of the y chromosome) you get a male; without the tdf gene, a female. Sry is only one gene out of 50,000 to 100,000. The argument that the “only one percent difference” between ape and man is evidence for genetic identity among humans can now only be maintained as a deliberate scam.

The six percent scam began in 1972 with Richard Lewontin. He is the brilliant Harvard biologist who co-authored (with Leon Kamin and Steven Rose) the Marxist screed Not in Our Genes, and coined the term “jensenism” to denigrate and demonize both an outstanding scientist and an entire area of investigation. In the early days of population comparisons of allelic patterns, Lewontin catalogued the frequencies across seven racial groups for 29 alleles from 17 gene loci, from which he calculated a statistical genetic diversity index. He reported that 85.4 percent of the genetic diversity was contained within local populations, an additional 8.3 percent of the diversity was between populations within a race, and only 6.3 percent of the genetic diversity differentiated the major races. (These are percentages of Lewontin’s index, and not percentages of genes, so the numbers are not comparable to the percentage of genes shared by humans and chimps.) Other investigators have reported similar results. From the finding that only about six percent of the diversity differentiated the major races, Lewontin ended his 1972 paper with the politically correct non sequitur that:

“Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”

That paper and its conclusion became a classic in the egalitarian armamentarium but the Lewontin argument is a scam in the same way the Chimpanzee comparison is a scam. The fact that there is much genetic diversity among people within local populations is very important. However, the meaningful question about racial differences is not the percentage of total diversity, but rather how the diversity is distributed among the races, what traits it influences, and how it is patterned.
It has indeed been a surprise to many geneticists to discover how much genetic diversity there is in local populations. Two brothers, for example, share fully half their alleles by descent, but differ in countless ways. According to Lewontin’s statistical formulation they account for much genetic diversity just between the two of them.

Nevertheless, to understand how meaningless this approach is as an analysis of racial differences, one might consider the extent to which humans and macaque monkeys share genes and alleles. If the total genetic diversity of humans plus macaques is given an index of 100 percent, more than half of that diversity will be found in a troop of macaques or in the population of Belfast. This does not mean Irishmen differ more from their neighbors than they do from macaques — which is what the Lewontin approach slyly implies.

Pattern Diversity

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of population surveys looking at genetic diversity, and virtually all the serious ones find the same racial patterning. The thousand-page tome published in 1994 by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues ( The History and Geography of Human Genes) is one of the better known. They present 491 world populations using data for 128 alleles at 45 polymorphic loci. The populations are grouped in various meaningful ways, aggregated into 42 populations, which are combined into nine clusters.

Cavalli-Sforza et.al. are adamant that they are not studying races, but rather populations of humans. However, their nine clusters have a familiar ring: “Africans (sub-Saharan), Caucasoids (European) … Northern Mongoloids (excluding Arctic populations) …” (1994, p.79)

The figure on this page presents a graphic schematization of their major findings with regard to patterning of genetic diversity. In their words, from their genetic data, “the greatest difference within the human species is between Africans and non-Africans … The cluster formed by Caucasoids, northern Mongoloids, and Amerinds is reasonably compact in all analyses.” (1994, p. 83)

-- G. Whitney; "Race, Genetics & Society"

[Bartholomew Roberts]

I don't know if scientists should study race and IQ, but I do know that Sunday is my birthday.

[FIGUER]

Lawrence Summers... Despite apologizing for reckless language — which his supporters felt research supported — he later resigned.

Weakling.

[FIGUER]

Originally Posted by RAFH

What racial divide in development? There are places in Europe even now that are nearly as primitive as anything in Africa. 500 years ago, the Chinese and even the Japanese and Koreans and most of the rest of the Asian nations did and would have considered Europeans undeveloped barbarians. Ditto for some of the South and Central American civilizations 700 to 500 years ago.

Many of the so-called 'developments' of Europe were actually imported from Africa and the near, middle and far east. That includes most of the technologies that made it possible for the Europeans to get so bloody good at warfare and so bloody rapacious with regard to material wealth.

Have you studied much of Ethiopia, it's had a very high state of development for over 2000 years. It's problem was mostly it's isolation because of religious issues and the relative undevelopment of neighboring lands and peoples. Development is often and usually a matter of competition and cooperation with neighboring lands and peoples.

If the Europeans are so developed, what were they doing during the time before and through much of the Roman Empire? Indeed, most of the conquering 'barbarians' that overran Rome, at least western Rome, were peoples moving in from the East.

And, how do you define 'race'. Is it just an area? A given territory? Or certain ethnic groups? Or do you have specific physical characteristics you use?

Were the Irish a stupid and base race? The English were convinced of it for centuries. How about the Italians, or the Spanish or the Eastern Europeans?

Are the various peoples of India 'backwards'? They would have laughed at the stupidity and backwardsness of most all Europeans a 1000 years ago.

For that matter, what race are you? And how do you know?

RAFH correctly indicates why an exclusively racist/genetic explanation pertaining the situation in Africa, when compared to the development of other regions of the globe, is unconvincing. The situation seems to be mostly one of epigenetics, culture, and historical particulars, but there is no reason to exclude certain genetic factors in explanations as well (except political correctness).