From: Ross A. Finlayson (apex@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Sun Sep 29 2002 - 16:14:07 MDT
On Monday, September 23, 2002, at 09:07 PM, Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 04:25 PM 9/23/02 -0400, Rafal wrote:
>
>> thinking
>> about genetically defined groups of humans is a second nature to me
>> and my
>> perceptions are likely to be different than what the majority of humans
>> have.
>
>> I don't see "color". I see "AGTC".
>
I was reading this introductory microbiology book the other day, a
"Microbiology" and it put forward the factoid that there are the AT and
the GC pairs in all living things with Earth-life DNA and that the
percentage of a given type of pair among the millions of
deoxyribonucleotides ranges from 22 to 78 percent in known DNA. Humans
have about 60% GC pairs. What I want to know is why there aren't less
than 22% or more than 78% of a given type of pair. I think it has to do
with information density.
Vision is a very powerful sense. Some differing racial characteristics
are immediately discernible visually.
Have you ever seen "Trading Places"? It's a comedy starring Eddie
Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. One of the concepts of the film is that it's
nurture more than nature.
If you don't see color you're colorblind. The idea is to not let it
cause xenophobia. Also, don't peg people for their ethnicity.
> All this is fair enough, and I'm sorry if I seemed to be implying that
> *your* comments were racist. But this thread is about THE BELL CURVE.
> It's
> a long time since I read in that tome, but perhaps you can refresh my
> memory on what precise public policy recommendations H & M drew from the
> existence of human sub groups who are carriers of the mtDNA mutation
> 13513A
> or the mutations that produce juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, or anything
> remotely along those lines?
>
>> Sorry for the curmudgeonly tone.
>
> I didn't notice any.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
I don't put much stock into "The Bell Curve" politically. It's too
often misused. If it actually uses sound statistics to show the varying
performance on academic assessment tests by varying ethnicities, it
might be ignoring other perhaps more significant and contributing
factors, including various forms of socioeconomic stability and
privilege, which would make it unsound statistics. Using rats, take
five albino rats and five regular rats, poison the albino rats and they
die, that the regular rats make better maze-runners compared to living
albino rats is obviously not a valid conclusion.
Stability doesn't always bring excellence, some people have to scrabble
to the top. By the same token, it's difficult to achieve excellence or
even stability when there is not access to education.
There are many different ethnicities. Humans can viably interbreed,
that's what makes us one species. There are some eighty or more kinds
of negroids, hundreds of kinds of caucasoids, forty to sixty types of
mongoloids, or more. There are probably other genera than those,
australoids or so. I think those classifications are archaic. For
example, south Asians such as Indians or Arabs are different than
mongoloids, caucasoids or negroids. I think those classifications are
not adequately representative of phylogenetic variety of the species.
There are about six billion individuals, given a large group of them you
can make statistical predictions about their similarities and
differences.
Where ethnicities came from was and is geographically separated
community inbreeding. They were distinctly similar to each other and
widely varying from others. That doesn't necessarily mean first
cousins, but rather second cousins etcetera, for several hundred
generations, or less. Inbreeding brings to fore recessive mutations.
That prevalence is diminished in advanced, intermingled cultures.
Humans may have evolved from pre-humans in several different places
around the globe.
Some mutations are disadvantages. Some mutations are advantages. Some
mutations are variously advantages and/or disadvantages. Consider
vision. If you are nearsighted things are different than if you have
perfect vision. For example without corrective lenses, it may be more
difficult for you to hunt with ranged weapons. When you see people,
their body language and voice takes on more meaning than their
inscrutable facial expression. You might spend more time on pursuits
where you can enjoy a clear focus, such as reading. This practice in
your formative years might make you a better reader and thus thinker,
netting an advantage in your life, yet you can't drive without
corrective lenses. Sometimes people with bad vision and no glasses are
better looking, or worse, depending on what eye contact they would
otherwise share at longer distances, and how that reflects their
personality in their face.
Bell curve, schmell curve. A bell curve is a regular probabilistic
distribution. An assessment that is designed to get a bell curve with
its results is probably a problem already if the measure doesn't follow
that distribution. I don't like being told some ethnic group is smarter
than mine. Them's fighting words. If you're happy because the Bell
Curve says some ethnic group is dumber than yours, congratulations,
you're s stupid member of your ethnic group. Sorry, that was a kind of
cheap shot at racists.
There are certainly some genetically determined capacities for brain
formation. The brain is a huge clump of three hundred or more types of
interconnected neurons in a chemical soup with electrical patterns. The
"science" of phrenology is the measurement of cranial capacity. I have
a big bump on the back of my large head, it can hold my hat. Somebody
said my IQ was 160.
Are there differences in different ethnicities? Yeah. Are ethnic
similarities and differences abused on a group and individual scale?
Yes. In primitive cultures that's an advantage, in advanced cultures
it's a disadvantage, it's an advantage and disadvantage. It's a learned
as well as inherited trait, ethnic discrimination, yet almost completely
learned. Are racial differences in ethnicities negligable compared to
learned differences? Probably. Racists are trained, not bred. So are
egalitarians.
Any personal trait is a combination of past and present. When you're
born, your past is your pre-natal development and the circumstances into
which you are born. When you're seventy-five, those prior seventy plus
years largely outweigh the moment of your birth. That isn't to say that
much of your character isn't set when you are five or six, or perhaps
older or younger depending upon your aging and development cycles.
Different peoples mature and age at different rates. I know a guy who
had a full mustache at twelve, I didn't until twenty-something.
Speaking of facial hair, and as well cranial hair, hair, hirsuteness, I
wonder what hair patterns reveal besides genetic propensity. Some
environmental factors certainly affect hair growth. I'm somewhat
immature, emotionally, and plan to remain that way. People individually
have highly varying levels of learning capacity and drive to learn, not
to mention distraction, at various levels of physical and social
development.
There may be and probably are some differences in capacity among races
and ethnicities. Big, tall, strong guys can lift more weight
individually than can pygmy females. By the same token, there is a much
wider range among most ethnic groups' individuals than among an
"average", the strongest pygmy mother can outlift the weakest big fat
guy.
Given equal opportunity and with equal ambition, any two individuals do
have largely equal chances, where the relatively minor differences in
their native capacities would come into significance. Opportunity and
ambition mean all kinds of things.
There are probably a lot of gene combinations that yield smart people,
just as there are many definitions of intelligence. In saying there are
ten or less specific permutations that when present in combination lead
to specific capacities for thinking, I think that reflects an ignorance
of the many types of cognition and its effects, from deep-thinking to
immediate hands-on action and activation.
Ross F.
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