From: Ross A. Finlayson (extropy@apexinternetsoftware.com)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 03:50:55 MDT
On Wednesday, October 2, 2002, at 12:06 AM, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Ross wrote
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of
> Ross A. Finlayson Sent: Sunday, September 29, 2002 3:14 PM
>
>> If you don't see color you're colorblind.
>
> What do you make of the notion that race is an
> invalid concept?
>
There are broad ranges of phenotypes into which individuals fall. For
typing that I search the Internet for the word "phenotype" to check my
usage. Merriam-Webster says phenotype is "the visible properties of an
organism that are produced by the interaction of the genotype and the
environment."
I'm black, yo. Sorry, that was a little joke. Anyways, now I was
rambling sentences about how to some people there's "blacks" and
"whites" and variously "Asians", "Indians", "Indians", and sometimes
"Jews", "Italians", and "Greeks", et alia, "Turks", "Arabs", "Persians",
"Swedes", "Commies", "Mongols", "Germans", "Francs", "Egyptians",
"Anglos", "Hispanics", then I was going to use the term "veritable
panoply."
I'm a medium body brown hair/ medium dark brown eyes basically
Anglo-American, male. Sometimes I get blond whiskers and hair that
changes from brown to silver grey and back, when I was a child my hair
had lighter color.
Most people ever exposed to many races have a racial identification,
and/or racial identifications.
Also, many people hold racial identifications of others, the more
different the more directly. Oftentimes when an Anglo walks into a room
of blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, he's the white guy, when he goes home,
he's not.
Isolated cultures often generally referred to themselves as "people" or
with geographic identification. The last isolated cultures may have
been in the Phliippines and the Amazon rain forest.
There are blacks, but there are also many kinds of blacks, with black
people being negroids originating from Africa, with activated melanin
and frizzy hair, and mostly brown eyes. The skin under a black person's
fingernails is white, to check a black person's skin tone in medical
diagnostics. Within that broad phenotype, representing all the tribes
of Africa, there are some quite varying differences among peoples of
differing origin, from tall to short and big to small and slow to fast.
There are whites, of intermediate north, west, and south and east
European origin, with skin color varying from basically light brown to
pink to white, hair varying in texture and color from blonde to black
and with red, and eye color being brown, green, blue, gray, or the
changing color. Again, wide variations exist.
Asians, East Asians, Chinese, Koreans, Mongols, and Japanese have an
epicanthic fold, straight brown hair, and mostly brown eyes. As well,
wide variations exist.
Asian Indians and Persians often are dark-skinned with dark wavy hair,
with brown eyes and more green eyes than East Asians.
Those are three broad classes and are not meant to give short shrift to
people overall not of those classifications.
>> The idea is to not let it cause xenophobia.
>> Also, don't peg people for their ethnicity.
>
> Totally agree.
>
>> 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.
>
I borrowed the book from the library today, here I will take a look at
it: "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American
Life", by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Free Press, a
division of Simon sand Schuster Inc., New York, NY, 1994. It opens
after the dedication with a quote, whatever the quote before the
contents is, by Edmund Burke, er, about a "Discussion of popular
Prejudices", from "A Vindication of Natural Society" The contents list
four parts of four, eight, four, and six chapters, and then seven
appendices, "The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite", "Cognitive Class and
Social Behavior", "The National Context", and "Living Together". Four
chapter titles reflect topicality of ethnic and implicitly racial
differences, chapters 13 and 14 in part three about ethnic differences
and chapters 19 and 20 in part four referencing affirmative action,
implying those as central topics. Following the contents is the list of
illustrations denoting diagrams in terms of white, black, Latino and one
note of Asian individuals vis-a-vis income, employment, education, IQ,
marital, and family status. The following list of tables has table
titles reflecting further data of the differences between and within the
ethnic groups. Following that is "A Note to the Reader", it declares
the book to be simple to read, closing a note with a basically theistic
reference about using the masculine pronoun. The preface then reflects
the quote in saying that the book would be about racial differences, "so
sensitive that hardly anyone writes or talks about them in public." The
acknowledgments claim the author's affiliations as Harvard and the
"American Enterprise Institute", forty or fifty individuals and their
wives. The introduction thus follows and starts:
That the word "intelligence" describes something real and that it varies
from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding
about the state of being human. (Herrnstein and Murray, page 1)
Damn Masons. Heh. It goes on to talk about measurement of intelligence
and says that a cousin of Darwin, a Francis Galton, discussed
differences in intelligence in a paper "Hereditary Genius" that the
authors claim began the consideration of the difference among families
in intelligence. That seems ridiculous for Galton to have originated
the concept when the authors were just saying that differences in
inteliigence were noted by ancient cultures, like the English guy who
discovered blood flowed through veins in the eighteenth or nineteenth
century, when it was well-known. Quoth:
Galton realized that he need a precise, quantitative measure of the
mental qualities he was trying to analyze, and thus he was led to put
into formal terms what most people had always taken for granted: People
vary in their intellectual abilities and the differences matter, to them
personally and to society. ^2 (Herrnstein and Murray, page 2)
The notation refers to a note in the notes following the appendices
referring to an item in the following bibliography comprised of
approximately 750 bibliography entries.
Galton recognized the uniqueness of intellectual ability among people,
and so set about to derive a test to determine quantifications and
qualifications, measure. Galton measured dexterity in reflexes, Rich
and Chuck note "His tests failed, but others followed where Galton had
led." (Page 2). Galton's successor Alfred Binet brought forward
questions of a person's ablity to reason, draw analogies, and identify
patterns. Parallelizing analogies is a form of identifying patterns
with as well subject knowledge. One type of IQ test inuse today is the
"Stanford-Binet".
Anyway the first part of the book is about quantifying and qualifying
intelligence and then it goes on, it rapidly bores yet is readable and
not overly dry.
> Okay, so *you* may be an ethnic, and see the world
> through ethnic-colored lenses. I have known Armenians,
> and Jews, and Irish who identify with their ethnic
> group to the same extent that proud old southerners
> would sometimes identify with their families, or
> the way a Hatfield would identify with the Hatfields,
> and a McCoy with the McCoys.
>
I know this one guy who said one time, "I'm definitely a Jew."
> But why on Earth would anyone *identify* with a
> racial group? Maybe it's the same thing, but I
> just can't quite get my mind around it. I can
> no more identify with being white than I can with
> being from Silicon Valley---both these things seem to
> have just happened to me. Now if I had played any
> role whatsoever in the electronics industry of
> this area, then I might indeed be *proud* of what
> I'd done, and *proud* of what this area has
> accomplished.
>
> But I *seriously* suggest that identification with
> one's race is a very unfortunate tendency and one
> should combat it.
>
>> 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 negligible compared to
>> learned differences? Probably. Racists are trained, not bred. So are
>> egalitarians.
>
> I agree up to the last couple of sentences. I have some
> reason to believe that my lack of religiosity is in part
> genetic. It wouldn't surprise me if some people are born
> egalitarians: the parts of their brains that get a warm
> fuzzy by feeling that everyone is equal may have had a
> genetic tendency to do so. On the other hand, perhaps
> some people with inborn authoritarian personalities
> would naturally be attracted to racism, as a way of
> giving vent to their egotistic feelings of superiority.
>
>> 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.
>
> Yeah, and don't look anytime soon for an Eskimo to
> win the 100 meter dash event.
>
I think the depends partly on whether the dash is across an ice floe
after a brief rain on a "warm" day.
>> 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.
>
> Yes, as has been pointed out several times, our human
> civilization has been lucky in that the dividing line
> between human and non-human has been so clean (probably
> only because we are such a young species).
>
> Hmm. On the other hand, philosophy might be more
> developed than it is if we had had to contend with
> the vastly more difficult issues that would have
> stemmed from there being a continuum!
>
> Lee
>
There's a continuum between any two distinct points, a continuum of
points, in space-time.
Ross F.
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