"Racism"

[Bengalzona]

(03-22-2018, 04:59 PM)fredtoast Wrote: The only people being "willfully ignorant" in this thread are the ones claiming that scientists don't divide people into groups called "race" when there are lots of studies out there by scientists who divide people into groups called "race".

Since you are the expert on how scientists define race why would i have to provide you a link to a study?  I have already posted one in this very thread.

There are lots of studies of race among scientists that concern examination of differences between groups with the goal of understanding human evolutionary history, and the relationship between our genes and our health.

I'm playing catch-up in this thread, so I haven't seen the study you posted earlier. Here is a link that cites several different genetic racial studies:

https://listverse.com/2015/08/02/10-contentious-explanations-for-racial-differences/

It interesting reading. For instance, did you know that white skin is a genetic rarity, a mutation that developed over time:

Quote:The pale skin associated with Europeans is something of a genetic rarity. The skin color gene SLC24A5 comes in two varieties: dark (D) and light (L). Everyone inherits one version of the gene from each of his parents. Those with the DD variety tend to be very dark-skinned, those with LL are usually very pale, and those with DL fall somewhere in between. This explains why children can be darker or lighter than their parents as well as why one of the Aylmer twins has dark skin and dark hair while the other has pale skin and red hair.

Scientists once believed that ancient European populations developed pale skin after leaving Africa 40,000 years ago as an adaptation to help them absorb more vitamin D at northern latitudes where there’s less UV light than in the tropics. The theory goes that the first dark-skinned Europeans began getting sick from vitamin D deficiency, which can weaken the bones, and those with lighter skin had an evolutionary advantage in that environment. But things are not so simple in the world of genetics.
Although humans first migrated into Europe about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, more recent studies have suggested that Europeans were dark-skinned until around 8,000 years ago, possibly even later. Genetic tests on 8,000-year-old skeletons in Spain discovered that one of the individuals had the genetic markers for blue eyes but not for light skin and was more closely related genetically to modern northern Europeans than modern southern Europeans.
The new theory is that Neolithic farmers developed light skin to get more vitamin D from the Sun but only after developing agriculture and adopting a cereal-rich diet deficient in the vitamin. Early European hunter-gatherers would likely have been tall, dark-skinned, and occasionally blue-eyed, in stark contrast to the short, pale-skinned farmers who would later take over the continent.

But dark skin was also a genetic racial mutation:

Quote:It appears that ancient humans generally had dark skin, and light skin was an evolutionary adaptation to the environment in Europe (and East Asia). However, dark skin may also have originated as an evolutionary advantage to protect against skin cancer when the very early hominids began to lose their body hair.

A study on albinism in Africa has shown that albinos in sub–Saharan Africa almost invariably die of skin cancer at an early age. Charles Darwin and other theorists had dismissed skin cancer as an evolutionary force because it usually strikes people after childbearing age in modern times. But this may not have been true two million years ago on the African savanna.
When the earliest human ancestors began to hunt and gather on the open plains, they lost most of their body hair, most likely to keep cool in their strenuous lifestyle. Beneath their hair, they most likely had pale skin, much like modern chimpanzees. However, between 1.2 million and 1.8 million years ago, ***** sapiens developed dark skin to protect against harsh UV rays.
According to researchers, humans may have developed dark skin to avoid painful sunburns, improve vision (low pigments are linked with vision problems), protect sweat glands from the Sun, and preserve the body’s folic acid supply, which is crucial for neural development and potentially damaged by UV rays. Dark skin may also protect against fungal infections in humid climates.
Darwin and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond believed that selection for dark skin was based on sexual selection pressures. But the research on albinos suggests the situation for the pale protohumans running around hunting animals may have been more dire, and the skin cancer explanation for the development of dark skin is once again being seriously considered.

Apparently, human beings have been changing colors over time to adapt to where they are living. Not at will, of course, but through evolution.

Perhaps more interesting to the recent discussion in here is this bit about Ashkenazi Jews:

Quote:It has long been noted that Ashkenazi Jews tend to perform better on standardized IQ tests, generally scoring 12–15 percent higher than the mean value of 100. In 2005, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, a controversial independent scholar, published a paper in The Journal of Biosocial Science contending that the advantage of the Ashkenazim had a genetic basis.

The paper contended that genetic lysosomal storage diseases like Tay-Sachs, Gaucher’s disease, Niemann-Pick disease, and Mucolipidosis type IV, found disproportionately in the Jewish population, might paradoxically cause increased overall intelligence. If two copies of the genes for those diseases are inherited, they’ll manifest as disorders that can weaken or kill. However, if only one copy of a gene for one of these diseases is present, it is said to promote neuron growth, accelerate interconnection of brain cells, and possibly stimulate neuron proliferation in the DNA repair genes.
Needless to say, that thesis was controversial. Harpending and Cochran’s paper was referenced but lacked footnotes, and some say it also lacked scientific rigor. Some people may have been afraid of the findings because rumors of Jewish “cunning” have always played a role in the history of European anti-Semitism. But Cochran argues that history is largely to blame for what happened. The forced isolation of Jews in ghettos and specified industries in the Middle Ages brought unusually strict evolutionary pressures that caused the rise of an adaptation with mixed results. The process could be seen as a kind of unwilling and unconscious eugenics program.
Many social scientists remain unconvinced. Some believe in a genetic answer that’s more prosaic: Jews were forced into intellectually rigorous careers in trade and finance, so those with low IQs tended to drift away from the religion and culture through conversion. Others say the history of persecution served as a kind of survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. When a pogrom or massacre struck, the wealthiest and most intellectually capable Ashkenazim were best positioned to flee for survival.
Others prefer cultural explanations. The religious edict to study the Torah is said to have boosted male literacy rates of Ashkenazi Jews to the highest in the world. Cultural traditions of bilingualism, chess, music, and high expectations may have also played a role. For many people, such arguments are especially compelling because they avoid the smell of anti-Semitism and are potentially accessible behaviors to improve intelligence across all human populations.

The difference in intellect can be measured, to some degree, and does appear to exist. The reasons why are contentious and still being debated. We may never know. Sound familiar? This reminds me a lot of the discussion here about black people in sports in the U.S. It is contentious. And for various reasons, few of which have to do with hard science, people want to believe certain things. But we may never have all of the answers.

Myself, I rather like the "Karma Concept" of one group of people enslaving and/or putting down another group of people, and in the process strengthening and enhancing future offspring of the group they are trying to put down.