Yes, the seemingly-white can be black
At least, people who have (as Rachel Dolezal falsely claimed to have) at least one biological parent who is black can actually look unequivocally white. It shows you how strange the topic of racial affiliation is, and how there’s quite a bit of crossover in phenotype.
Does a white-looking person with a black biological parent identify solely as white on the basis of phenotype? Or does cultural identity play a role? Why do we even care, or do we—or should we?
A good example of what I’m talking about is Eartha Kitt and her biological daughter and granddaughter:
Here’s another—actress/dancer Victoria Rowell and her biological daughter and son (her daughter’s father was white and her son’s father was black; Victoria herself is mixed-race):
There are many many more examples that show the vagaries of heredity and race. But if you’re inclined to mock the Spokane NAACP for being so gullible as to accept Dolezal as a bona fide black person, it’s instructive to remember the people pictured above. How do they identify themselves? Biracial? They in fact do have one black parent.
The most intriguing examples of racial phenotypes being tricky (particularly regarding skin color) are fraternal twins where one of the pair looks black and one white. There are a number of twins featured on YouTube that fit that description—for example, these sets:
Biology shows how arbitrary many of our racial classifications can be. There are clusters of traits that vary across the globe in different combinations to create the shorthand categories known as race. As we move about more and more, and the gene pool becomes more mixed, the categories will become more fluid.
By the way—we have the heritage of Alexander Pushkin, father of Russian literature:
Ossip Abramovich Gannibal’s father, Pushkin’s great-grandfather, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696”“1781), an African page kidnapped and brought to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great. Abram wrote in a letter to Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, that Gannibal was from the town of “Lagon”. Largely on the basis of a mythical biography by Gannibal’s son-in-law Rotkirkh, some historians concluded from this that Gannibal was born in a part of what was then the Abyssinian Empire. Vladimir Nabokov, when researching Eugene Onegin, cast serious doubt on this origin theory. Later research by the scholars Dieudonné Gnammankou and Hugh Barnes eventually conclusively established that Gannibal was instead born in Central Africa, in an area bordering Lake Chad in modern-day Cameroon. After education in France as a military engineer, Gannibal became governor of Reval and eventually Général en Chef (the third most senior army rank) in charge of the building of sea forts and canals in Russia.
That black ancestry is a lot more distant than a parent, but it’s still interesting; I learned about it in college, long ago. Here’s a portrait of Pushkin:
“. . . how arbitrary many of our racial classifications . . . .”
I offer that all of our classifications are arbitrary; they are an attempt to impose some kind of digital order on an otherwise analog world. Many, if not all, of our arguments with adversaries have less to do with right or wrong, than where we prefer to draw a line or distinction. This is just the latest, and perhaps most illustrative example.
I have always been absolutely struck when I see pictures of Benjamin Jealous of the national NAACP (who is also biracial) on how much he resembles my next-youngest brother. My brother JP took after my mothers’ side of the family, who tended to be dark-haired and brown-eyed, and tan quite readily, but otherwise are so 100% WASP that it would make any organization dedicated to racial purity weep.
The amusing thing to contemplate over this whole Rachael Dolezal thing is to wonder now how many otherwise white people have faked another ethnicity to claim minority preferences on racial grounds, and done so rationally and calculatedly. Elizabeth Warren for sure is one, and Ward Churchill for another. I am certain that Neo and the others can come up with a whole list.
Interesting to see how the people claiming white privilege will explain this. That they haven’t said much so far suggests to me that they are still working out the implications.
For me anyway the bigger issue I have with this Dolezal woman is the lying. The social media pictures with a black guy she implied was her father and the apparent bogus hate crime accusations that even her boss in Idaho didn’t believe and was relieved when she left his organization. This says far more about her than whether she is one race or the other.
Oh, yes- that too, Griffin. She seems to be quite awfully unbalanced … warped, even, as well as a serious fantasist, given to telling wilder and wilder tales. It’s just a guess on my part, but I would guess her parents finally had enough, what with the over-the-top tales of childhood abuse. I can picture them, sadly and regretfully realizing they had better drop the dime before she began constructing wild fantasies of ritual satanic abuse and human sacrifice.
In one of the many articles I read yesterday, it was stated that certain members of the NAACP there in Spokane had used the services of a private detective as they were deeply suspicious of her (especially since the hate mall incident.) It was all going to come tumbling down eventually. I find it so odd when people manufacturer hate crimes in a world where I actually think these sort of hate crimes are not really as prevalent as they suppose they ‘should’ be. You just can’t get away with this stuff like you could have even 50 years ago. Every move you make … I’ll be watching you seems to be the new reality.
Dolezal did an interview earlier this year with the student newspaper at Eastern Washington University where she works. It’s very clear she’s got lots of issues. So many, in fact, as to make them and her seem thoroughly unbelievable. Even the student interviewer felt obliged to insert “according to Dolezal” in several places in the article.
Gregor Mendel worked these things out 150 years ago and people today are still amazed when they see the results of simple genetics. Biologically human races are unremarkable subspecies of the genus Homo sapiens sapiens.
Why am I stating the obvious? Because the left is obsessed with race and wants to talk about race constantly while I have become weary of the subject.
Black is the new white, aristocrat privilege check em.
If Bruce Jenner can really be a girl (and let’s face it the top elites and “progressives” universally say the entity formerly known as Bruce is a girl!), then there is even less claim to race since it is only skin deep and X and Y chromosomes are in every cell of the body and every single drop of blood.
NO blood is black or white or any color but red. No cell is racial. A scant few produce slightly more melanin than other. That’s it.
Black is an invention. White is a fiction. Yellow is only yellow.
The race mongers — EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM — are every bit as fascists as Hitler himself.
They are enemies to humanity itself.
The extraordinary significance of correlation underlies social sciences and much of modern “science”. Not to mention liberal assumptions of continuity and uniformity that extends far beyond the frame-based scientific domain. It is the basis for class diversity policy of the progressive social complex (e.g. civil rights) that denigrates individual dignity (one of two moral axioms).
Mike said:
“…then there is even less claim to race since it is only skin deep and X and Y chromosomes are in every cell of the body and every single drop of blood.”
Neo’s links demonstrate that race follows normal Mendelian genetics which means that race is also embedded in every cell of the body. The remarkable thing about her links is that the individuals shown had sorted out a number of the genes which serve as markers for the black and white races which is statistically unusual but not at all surprising. Because race is based on the statistical presence of an entire suite of alleles which are generally not unique to any single race it is easy for people to deny that races actually exist – except that anyone with eyes knows that they do actually exist.
One area which is rarely discussed is the difference race makes in deeper biological processes. If a doctor does not take race into consideration when treating patients he/she is likely to commit malpractice. One example of racial medial differences is that the PSA test for prostate cancer tends to run lower in black men than it does for white men which can lead to missed prostate cancers in black men if the doctor is not aware of the issue.
I’ve told my son there is no point in pursuing an academic career as a historian because he is the wrong race. Dolezal is a case study; she wouldn’t have gotten very far as a whitie (though there is the old XX in her hiring favor).
Apparently white guilt is so severe in Eastern WA, ID and MT that they have to ennoble blackness even though there are precious few blacks there. Why does Eastern Wash U have black studies program? For the imported athletes? Or just to keep the Leftists happy?
Ma and Pa Dolezal adopted four small black kids and raised them in rural MT. Imported from Africa? Or Chicago? Not a minor thing to do. Four adoptees, all black, not an Indian, white or brown among them. I think Rachel may have grown up in a weird family, not unlike Barack Hussein. She may have grown up with “Black is Better”, “It’s Not Fair”, “Filthy Capitalists”, “Class Struggle.” Who knows?
I just finished reading “Days of Rage”, a history of the “armed struggle” in the USA 1968-1985. Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorhn, Weatherman, SLA, BLA, FALN, etc. May have colored my thinking.
Frog:
Who knows?
Maybe Dolezal’s brother Ezra, one of those adopted kids. He dates her problem to a reaction she had to going to Howard U. and being persecuted because she was white:
I still like the idea of judging a person by the content of their character not the color of their skin. Thugs, criminals, con men, grifters and bums are all the same, no matter the color of their skin.
Dolezal is a grafter, no matter what race she identifies herself as.
That is, Dolezal is a grifter.
Neo, being indoctrinated at a Leftist institute would make more sense than people who think the parents were the issue here.
In my town where I used to live in Africa we had a couple of albino people. From a distance, they looked “white”. There weren’t too many white people in my town so that was notable. But the first time I walked close to someone who turned out to be albino it was a little weird. Because they were definitely African – they had African features (aside from skin tone) and, more importantly, spoke exactly like every other African I knew there. So it was momentarily disorienting. But that also reminds me of the time the children of the missionaries I knew there visited. They were thoroughly Caucasian but they could talk exactly like the African people there because they had grown up there. So it was similarly disorienting, but in a slightly different way.
You show us the pictures of seemingly white people who have one biological black parent.
My question is, knowing this variability does actually exist, how much racial fraud (to take advantage of affirmative action benefits) actually goes on? We know Liz Warren claimed to be Native American to get preferential hiring at Penn and Harvard law schools.
How many others game the system?
How difficult would it be for a white student to apply to a top college, check off the African-American box, and get preferential treatment in the admissions process? Is the school going to ask for baby pictures of the student and his/her parents? Of course not–if they did, and the student wasn’t lying (as in those examples above), the school would be accused of racism, or at least some kind of bigotry.
Would the school even care if the “black” student they just accepted was actually white? Probably not. As long as no one exposed the fraud, the school would be content to show another black student enrolled on paper, just as Harvard Law did (and still do) happily tout that they have a “Native American professor” on staff without specifically linking an image of her to the data.
The fact that a white girl from rural MT went across the country to attend Howard University (IF TRUE!) tends to support my thinking the “Blacks are Beautiful and Better” theme was something she grew up with, courtesy of her parents. Supports but hardly proves.
Given her other cons, it is legit to question whether she actually attended Howard.
Yeah, she went there. Her family said so and other stories reported it. Her family said she had attended on a scholarship. If that’s true, you have to wonder what type of scholarship.
Frog, this matter is not particularly important to me, so in glossing over things, here are some counters I’ve produced.
In the situation where the parents are the Authority commanding through fear or force, the child would not do anything to disobey or rebel openly against the parent. Case examples would be;
Hollywood child rape victims of Hollywood producers, actors, directors, money men, etc. They feared for their careers due to the Authority they were under, and dared not disobey or go against their abusers. Until their careers were set, they were adults, or they had a way out.
In the situation of white-black girl there, she would not accuse her parents of abuse, because she wasn’t entirely free. She knows her parents can out her, so her “escape” is only an escape from potential abuse, if she makes her parents agreeable, which she didn’t.
That speaks of a Second or Third Authority at work here, overriding parental authority.
1960-80s psychologists came up with this trick called regressive hypnosis, where they could implant as many memories or suggestions in the subject as they wished, over a long period of time (months). She would certainly qualify for that time era and her reports of child abuse would be the same memories Leftists implanted into other children and teenagers, as an experiment.
This would have primed her to get away from her parents to a black or Leftist environment, where the conditioning and brainwashing would be completed.
Dunham, for example, rebels by being an exhibitionist. She is not allowed to criticize her parents or to disobey them. She thinks she is allowed to since her parents had no rules for her, but that is not the same as being strong enough to disobey the Authority of her clan.
Dunham, because she was conditioned using Leftist force, brainwashing, or verbal violence, exhibits similar traits to other victims of abuse. They don’t dare, ever, go against the Authority of their abuser, since it’s akin to battered women syndrome or Stockholme.
When a person is too capable of rebelling and going against her abusers, that is either a sign that they are abnormal in their individual strength, like Ayan Hirsi, or they were never abused at all.
It is extremely difficult to abuse and force a system unto weaklings, in a long time such as for children growing up, and then having the slaves throw off their shackles immediately upon adulthood. That’s not how it works. Most people are too work. Unless white black girl over there thinks she is stronger than the norm or other people here think she is an Exceptional Human being, capable of surmounting personal setbacks like parental abuse or upbringing.
cantinflas
From simulations I’ve seen involving a few tens of thousands of people creating a virtual economy, fraud tends to begin about 3-6 months about the rules have been finalized. Those would be the vanguards, the smartest con men and women. After six months, it begins to be really noticed because everyone hops on the bandwagon.
By now, decades after affirmative action, I’m sure the fraud level is beyond certain people’s imagination. It’s far higher than Enron, at least.
Dennis: “Neo’s links demonstrate that race follows normal Mendelian genetics which means that race is also embedded in every cell of the body.”
I think you mean “color”, not race. There is no such thing as race – unless you want there to be.
A lot of people want there to be.
There is no “Black” gene or set of genes any more than there is an “Irish” gene. There are certain biological traits associated with certain groups of people, designated as a “race” based more on tradition and culture than chemistry.
But these days it’s all about the DNA – except when its not. Which means that it is all about power politics and who gets to take money with a clean conscious and who gets their money transferred with a guilty conscience.
It’s all as much an abuse of “science” as phrenology was.
I see on Drudge that Rev. Tawana Sharpton has jumped in on the Faux Afro side with a stern finger wag at her folks for that ruthless ‘outting’,Yo. CANNOT possibly make this S*** up!!
Classifications of race are not significantly more arbitrary than classifications of metals as gold or copper. There can be alloys or mixtures, and perhaps existing races will essentially disappear by mixing, but they are still essentially identifiable.
Genetic techniques have been refined to the point where not only the historic races (Negro, Caucasian & Asian) can be identified, but also sub-groups such as different European groups and, in some cases, right down to a probable family surname. Advances in genetic science have confirmed rather than refuted the existence of races.
This is one area where liberals and progressives abandon their professed belief in evolution (yes I believe it is a fact) because they are reluctant to accept that the existence of human races is a product of evolution. The progressive notion that all races are intellectually equal could be true only if the God they love to deny intervened to control this one human trait while everything else varied. Of course, there was no divine intervention in human evolution. Left to work on its own it’s probable that evolution would lead to different intellectual abilities in distinct races. We would expect it and, frankly, be astonished if any human characteristic –hair, dentition, skin color, disease susceptibility, etc.–remained exactly the same across different human groups who adapted to widely different environments. Same with intelligence.
Read “A Troublesome Inheritance” by Nicholas Wade and “The 10,000 Year Explosion” for more information.
She’s got something pathological going on, that’s obvious. That said, the original point of this piece is that some people with mixed-race heritage look black and some look white. I think that when you look at her childhood pictures, she definitely resembles some people of at least some African heritage who have very pale skin and a lot of freckles. I imagine that’s what gave her the idea. The more mixed-race people we have the less anyone is going to care; and we have the most mixed-race youth population ever. The idea that someone who is half black and half white is “actually black” — like, for instance, our President — makes no logical sense.
I’ve often thought that the reason African Americans are still discriminated against in this country (and still self-segregate) is that htey look so different from caucasians — far more different than most Asians or Hispanics do. White people my grandparents’ age were often quite prejudiced against other white people from different countries (originally), now that is mostly gone and I think that’s because they have interbred so much and “generically white” is now a possible way to regard caucasian people. Seems logical to me that the more diverse looking our population gets, especially by intermarriage, the less of a difference skin color and facial features will make to anyone.
Mike Says:
“I think you mean “color”, not race. There is no such thing as race — unless you want there to be.”
I’m not sure where you come up with the notion that there is no such thing as race. Of course there are races of humans. Anyone with eyes to see knows there are differences in human populations which include more than skin color and that there are breeding populations of humans whose offspring consistently manifest these same traits when they mate. In other words human races breed true.
If humans were just a random hodge podge of genes as you suggest with the possible exception of skin color the images Neo shows where people of mixed breeding mate would be the norm for everyone. I can verify from personal experience that that is not the case. Other than for the occasional mixed breed with parents of another race, one just does not find black Africans with African features in the middle of the Congo who will mate with other black Africans with African features and have white children who looked like Swedes. It just doesn’t happen.
If we recognize that humans follow normal Mendelian genetics we will also recognize that what we call races are nothing more than human subspecies.
}}} But if you’re inclined to mock the Spokane NAACP for being so gullible as to accept Dolezal as a bona fide black person
Nah. The simple fact is, it’s gotten so stupid I’ve started refusing to classify myself as “white” when given the chance.
I mean, it’s not like anyone will actually DARE to challenge you on it. You could look like one of the victims of The Plague in “The Omega Man”, and still no one would challenge your claim to be 100% African ancestry.
“Classifications of race are not significantly more arbitrary than classifications of metals as gold or copper. There can be alloys or mixtures, and perhaps existing races will essentially disappear by mixing, but they are still essentially identifiable.”
This is simply not true. Copper is copper. It has an Atomic number of 29 that does not change. Gold’s number is 79. The 29 and the 79 are why copper is copper and gold is gold. If the number was 30, copper would not be copper. It would be Zinc. Copper is not zinc. Zinc is zinc. And so on….
“Race” is nothing like that. For one thing, it is a person who we say has a race. There is an ontological reality that is a human being that is prior to what color that human being is.
Color is skin deep. Period and literally. There are 7 layers of skin. Some of those cells have melanin. White people have melanin. All people have melanin. Except albinos. They are albinos because they have no melanin. “Black” people have more melanin that white people.
Are there other commonalities between races? Sure. But it is an arbitrary designation. The Irish are slightly different form the Germans and the Russians and the Indians. Is being Indian a race? They are darker than some “blacks”.
Race is a social phenomenon, having to do with place, history, culture, and other attributes associated with a certain tradition. It dos not exist in the way other things exist, like copper. It is sued today as an argument and a power-play. Liberals use race to take money from some people (while feeling entitled to this injustice) so they can give it to people as a payoff for voting for them and keeping them in power.
The End.
Dennis – “Of course there are races”.
Mike – “Of course there are not”.
Dennis: I have bad news for you. I don’t think you mean to be, but you are actually a Third-Reich type racist. I am pretty sure you don’t know what the words you are using mean. “Breed true”? being one example.
People are not dog breeds. Sorry.
It would be interesting to do an etymology on the word race to see when it came into popular use. My guess is the 1700s or 1800s. If so, then prior to that why was it not so obvious as you suggest? I will check on it.
After all the usual definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary it finally says:
“No longer used as a technical designation for a major division of humankind…”
Derived from the French from the Italian “Razza”.
It’s a general term used to talk about “Oh, those people…”
Race is not an ontological term, although I admit it is used that way – by the powerful to keep the ignorant in the dark and to make them think different people are like different elements on the periodic table.
MLK was either right or wrong. I think he was right. Ironically today most American blacks and nearly all liberals think he was wrong. They actually believe people SHOULD be judged based on the color of their skin, and not the content of their characters.
When there was genuine, oppressive racial prejudice in America, black people who could manage it tried to “pass” as white.
Now white people try to “pass” as black.
What does that tell us about oppression and privilege now?
Mike says:
“Race is a social phenomenon, having to do with place, history, culture, and other attributes associated with a certain tradition. It dos not exist in the way other things exist, like copper.” In the same comment he seems to confuse skin color with race – they are not the same.
‘Race’ is increasingly objective concept by which we can genetically delineate different human populations, just as we can differentiate between different breeds of dogs. In fact, I’ve read that the genetic distance between all breeds of dogs is less than the genetic difference between all varieties of human beings.
Differences in races involve much more than skin color and skin color may not tell the whole story. Some Indians (from India, not American Indians) have very dark skin but they are essentially Caucasians and, in fact, Hindi and Sanscrit are Indo-European languages in common with the European languages.
Features that vary between races include brain size, bone density, dentition, hair, skeletal features (an African skull can easily be distinguished from a European skull), tolerance for foods (milk and alcohol come to mind) and risk factors for diseases. Any doctor treating a patient would be remiss for not being aware of the race-associated risk factors for disease that his patient may have. Even some newer drugs are more effective with some races rather than others. A drug particularly effective for blacks became controversial because its existence tended to prove that race differences are real. Apparently for the left it is better that some people (even blacks) suffer than that the delusion that ‘race’ is only in our imagination be dispelled.
Here’s a link to “FDA Approves Controversial Heart Medication for Blacks”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301762.html
Racial differences are real.
Mike and Dennis:
“Race” is a convenient way to refer to human variation. It refers to a collection of traits that people have observed to cluster in different populations in different parts of the world. But if you plot each trait separately (such as skin color, for example), you’ll find that there is a lot of variation within each race and across races. What we think of as “race” are groups in which the average, the most common, trait on each dimension, and the combination of them all, creates a certain “look.”
Races do not “breed true” in the sense of being species or anything near it. Au contraire. All races can mate with members of the same race and of all other races and cause mixtures of traits in the offspring. The reason black people who reproduce with each other tend to have black children re skin color is (a) we define a VERY wide range of skin color as “black”; and (b) genes for very light skin, although possible in black people, are highly unusual
Same is true for other traits in all races.
See this. It’s not just a recent PC teaching, either. This was very well known back when I was in college and I remember studying it in depth (although I certainly don’t recall the details) in physical anthropology. See also this for some charts/maps of traits and their variation geographically.
All races can breed just as all varieties of dogs can breed.
A white person can pretend to be ‘black’ in the US because the populations are already intermixed to a remarkable degree. However, no white person (European) can go to Africa and get away with pretending to be Negro. They know better and the differences are obvious.
Of course there are variations between and within races. Evolution uses that variation. Every human being is genetically unique even if he shares a significant proportion of his genes first with his race and then with humanity in general and then with the higher primates.
Odd, isn’t it, that ‘race’ is an unimportant social construct until it comes time for admission to college, hiring for a job, SBA minority loans, government contract set-asides, and arguments for ‘reparations’; then everyone who is black remembers his race and puts it out front as the most important thing in the world.
It can be important.
Medically it can be vital for the care of the patient to know the risk factors and available treatments for conditions associated with a particular race. Nobody is off the hook. We all have Mendelian risk factors; they just differ a little from one group to another.
Legally it can be important to recognize that ‘disparate impact’ for which there are so many legally wrenching ‘remedies’ may have much less to do with racism than genetic inheritance. Intelligence (and probably some social behaviors) vary from race to race and nearly everyone who has done actual testing in the field knows it.
‘The Bell Curve’ wasn’t discredited; it was simply screamed at. ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ and ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion’ add more recent support to ‘The Bell Curve’ discussion.
Rachelle:
All varieties of dogs cannot necessarily breed.
See this.
Plus, there are many breeds of dog that cannot deliver naturally the vast majority of the time but instead require Caesarians (see this).
Mike sayd:
“Dennis: I have bad news for you. I don’t think you mean to be, but you are actually a Third-Reich type racist. I am pretty sure you don’t know what the words you are using mean.”
Mike I was a biology major in college so yes I do know what those terms mean. Do you? Just because the Nazis used some of the same terms I use doesn’t mean I’m a Nazi – that argument is ridiculous.
Neo, if you look at my posts, I made it clear that human races are subspecies of homo sapiens not separate species so I’m not sure what you are referring to. Breeding true does not mean that an organism is a separate species, it just means that the organism is homozygous for a given trait or set of traits.
Your argument that populations tend to blend in with each other at the margins is exactly what we would expect from a species which is divided into subspecies. The fact that subspecies tend to blend over space with other subspecies doesn’t mean that subspecies don’t exist, au contraire that is exactly what one would expect from subspecies.
The argument that Africans and Northern Europeans for example can’t be different subspecies because for every trait found in Africans you can find similar traits in some other group does negate the fact that Africans are a different subspecies than Swedes. That is the nature of subspecies.
Here is the Wikipedia discussion of a monotypic species:
A monotypic species has no distinct population or races, or rather one race comprising the whole species. A taxonomist would not name a subspecies within such a species. Monotypic species can occur in several ways:
1. All members of the species are very similar and cannot be sensibly divided into biologically significant subcategories.
2. The individuals vary considerably, but the variation is essentially random and largely meaningless so far as genetic transmission of these variations is concerned.
3. The variation among individuals is noticeable and follows a pattern, but there are no clear dividing lines among separate groups: they fade imperceptibly into one another. Such clinal variation always indicates substantial gene flow among the apparently separate groups that make up the population(s). Populations that have a steady, substantial gene flow among them are likely to represent a monotypic species, even when a fair degree of genetic variation is obvious.
Of these three conditions which a species has to meet to be considered a monotypic species – one without races – the only one which could possibly apply to humans is the third condition that humans populations are interbreeding to such an extent that they blend imperceptibly into each other. That’s simply not the case. It is possible that the Caucasian race will disappear since they have welcomed immigrants into their lands and are interbreeding so it is possible that someday humans really be a monotypic species, but that is not the case now and will probably never happen on a global scale.
Necon,
The example you linked to saying not all kinds of dogs can breed is a bit silly. Physical limitations have very little to do with the underlying fact that the sperm from one physically mismatched dog can fertilize an egg from another. That ability, even if it has to be done in vitro, brings them within a single species which can produce viable young. No dog as small as a cat can produce offspring from the cat even if it successfully mounts the cat without getting its eyes clawed out. Essentially all domestic dogs are biological compatible with wolves, coyotes and distant relatives like dingos. Humans in England can successfully mate with pygmies but not with chimps. There is a biological circle that all humans (or, respectively, canines) are within and other species are not.
Rachelle:
I have no idea why you would call my point “silly.” Of course dogs are one species and can all breed with human help. My point was just to say that quite a few dogs and breeds of dog (and matings of certain breeds) need human help if they are to mate and have living offspring. Dog breeds are a human artifact that were purposely created, that is my point.
Rachelle – Please join Dennis. You are using the same “scientific” designations of “races” as Hitler et al did.
I am afraid to say that you don’t know what you are talking about, however you couch it in pseudo-scientific language.
But you said it perfectly for your side: People are like different breeds of dogs.
If that is true, then what I think we should do is take them to kennels and have them properly housed, fed, bred, etc., etc. We should spay an neuter them and give them shots. Maybe we should have race shows like dog shows. Every family can have such a dog….
Wait…
Dennis: Biology Degree with honors.
Next!
Rachelle Says:
“Necon,
The example you linked to saying not all kinds of dogs can breed is a bit silly.”
If you follow the logic of those who claim that humans are monotypic and have no races or subspecies because no human race has unique traits which are not shared with other human groups therefore race doesn’t exist then Neo’s link is not silly it is verbally incomprehensible. According to the their logic there are no dog breeds because each dog breed does not have unique characteristics which are not found in any other breed. To talk about big breeds of dogs mating with small breeds of dogs is nonsense because there are many so called breeds of dogs which are big and many other so called breeds which are small. Since bigness and smallness is shared by all dogs it can not be used as an identifier of a dog subspecies. The same can be said for coloring, length of legs, length of nose, sight vs sent orientation etc. The question is who do you believe the intellectuals who tell you those categories called dog breeds are fictional or your lying eyes?
I suspect that over time as genetic testing progresses we will probably find that there are indeed unique alleles among each race which are not found in the other races except in instances in which members of one race breed with members of another race. In other words each group may indeed have unique characteristics which are not shared with anyone else at the molecular level and possibly higher. If this occurs it will be interesting to watch those who deny that human races exist scramble for a new reason to support their position.
Mike Says:
“Dennis: Biology Degree with honors.
Next!”
Mike, if you are so sharp in biology why do you feel the need to support your ideas with ad hominem attacks?
Neocon said:
“My point was just to say that quite a few dogs and breeds of dog (and matings of certain breeds) need human help if they are to mate and have living offspring.”
Actually, that is true of a lot of humans as well, hence the increasing use of in vitro fertilization. For that matter, I am not sure how well a pygmy woman would do trying to bear the child of, say, an Austrian.
The critical point is that the sperm of one will fertilize the egg of the other–that fact unites all dogs and it unites all humans. Even though it is physically possible for a human to have sex with a chimp, or a dog or a horse, there will be no viable offspring. Your point about problems arising from the physical differences between different varieties still seems silly when the core issue is whether or not sperm from one can fertilize the egg of the other and lead to viable offspring. That speaks to the fundamental biological connection; and to the existence of a species.
Incidentally, I thought you were relying on your old university courses on this subject because you have mentioned them more than once.
Rachelle,
It’s true of human individuals, not of human races.
All human races can mate with all other human races. Some human individuals are infertile (as are some canine individuals). That is irrelevant to the discussion, which is about how far one can analogize breeds in dogs to races in human beings.
There are certain dog breeds that generally cannot breed with certain other dog breeds. There are certain dog breeds (a rather large number, actually) that can’t give birth naturally as a rule, not just for a small percentage of individuals in the breed. There are no human races that can’t breed with other human races. And there are no human races that cannot give birth naturally as a rule.
Rachelle:
Also, here’s information about Pygmy women having children with men of normal stature (which historically has been Bantus). The gist of it is that such interbreeding has been going on for thousands of years, and it usually involves a Pygmy woman and Bantu man rather than the other way around. There is no mention of any particular sort of problem with the pregnancies:
Dennis said:
“I suspect that over time as genetic testing progresses we will probably find that there are indeed unique alleles among each race which are not found in the other races except in instances in which members of one race breed with members of another race. In other words each group may indeed have unique characteristics which are not shared with anyone else at the molecular level and possibly higher. If this occurs it will be interesting to watch those who deny that human races exist scramble for a new reason to support their position.”
Actually, Dennis, you are entirely correct except for one small point regarding ‘over time’. We don’t need to wait; it can already be done. Not only can major races be identified by genetic analysis (Ancestry.com has a service that will do it for you for about $90) http://dna.ancestry.com/ but for some populations it has been refined to the point that different sub-populations (in Europe) can be identified and often even family groups. There is talk of police using it forensically to determine the probable surname of a criminal who has left DNA behind. The actual science is far ahead of the conversation here. Races exist objectively; they are not pure social constructs. Even if we didn’t have a word for race or its polite alternatives, we would have to invent one to keep up with genetics. And yeah, the dog argument really is silly. Cocker Spaniels can’t mate with dingos because they are separated by thousands of miles and can be brought together only with human intervention. The argument regarding size is about like that.
Rachelle:
See this:
It is certainly true (as I’ve discussed in this post and the comments) that certain traits have a much higher frequency in certain races. That’s how races have come to be thought of as entities—they correspond to our visual observations, in general.
The genetic tests work in a similar fashion (frequency of traits) in that certain genetic markers have a much higher frequency in certain races. But they do not define a race, in that there is no marker that occurs in all members of that race and never in any members of any other race.
In addition, see this on human genetic diversity:
Those tests work, when they work at all, by combining the analysis of many allelles to form a strong probability that a person is a member of a certain race.
Thanks, Rachelle. Somewhere in the back of my mind I seem to remember that those unique traits have been discovered but I’m too tired to look them up right now. Our house was severely damaged in the recent Texas storms, so we’ve been super busy recently.
This has turned out to be an interesting discussion. My original post was that from a biological standpoint race is not too difficult to understand so please could we stop obsessing about it. From that post and one or two follow up posts some of the more perceptive readers here have discovered my secret that I sound like a Nazi. It’s hard to keep a secret these days.
The bottom line is that most categories of thought are somewhat nebulous. For example, what is the physical difference between a cat and a dog? Morphologically are dogs and cats exactly the same shape? Cats tend to have shorter faces, but some dogs also have short faces. Cats have retractable claws except when they don’t have retractable claws. So if I say I saw a cat, am I imagining things or is it possible to recognize the difference between a cat and a dog despite the overlap in almost every trait? This is the marvel of the human mind, that we are able to accurately identify classes of objects through experience and to recognize in which class most individuals belong even if the two classes have tremendous overlap in features in some instances.
Neocon,
Wikipedia is not particularly useful on politically sensitive subjects so I will ignore that article. Your link to Michael White’s Science 2.0 article was better and I wish you had noted this comment of his:
“By examining enough genes, we can reliably use just DNA to correctly assign people to ancestral geographical populations. Researchers can do it blindly – they can look at DNA sequence for 1,000 people whose identities are hidden, and use DNA information to assign those people to geographical populations. Once the assignments are made, the researchers take a peek at the true identities of their sample group, and it turns out that their assignments are extremely accurate.”
In other words, races can be identified by ‘blind’ genetic analysis without knowing anything about the individual who submitted the sample. I think that is what I have been saying all along.
The fact that there is more genetic variation within a race than between races proves nothing. Most genetic variation is essentially neutral. A few genes make an enormous difference. The genetic variation between human populations (races) is much greater than the genetic distance between all varieties of dogs. Yet look at the enormous variation in behavior, intelligence and physical abilities just those few genes make in the dog ‘populations’.
The fact that we assign words, classifications or races for human populations does not make the classifications invalid and wholly socially constructed. We do the same thing with geological times such as the Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, etc., where there is a lot of fuzziness and room for argument at the boundaries [Read: ‘The Great Devonian Controversy’] but on the broader scale the categories are legitimate and have a real world value.
Races exist, can generally be recognized by mere physical appearance, and by the article you linked above, can be identified by nothing more than a spot of DNA from a donor.
Neo said:
“It is certainly true (as I’ve discussed in this post and the comments) that certain traits have a much higher frequency in certain races.”
Neo, I’d not put too much stock in that argument. It is true that for many genes all races share all the alleles but in different frequencies but there is no law which says that all alleles for all genes follow that pattern. Because the races have been fairly isolated until recently, it is highly likely that there are alleles of some genes which are unique to each race and are not shared with the other races except through interbreeding. An example of this type of allele is the alleles for skin color. I’m tired so I hope that I’m right that this link about the differing alleles for skin pigmentation will help clarify the issue. which are unique to each group.
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/03/05/oca2-makes-east-asians-white-a/
I’m not sure where you come up with the notion that there is no such thing as race. Of course there are races of humans. Anyone with eyes to see knows there are differences in human populations which include more than skin color and that there are breeding populations of humans whose offspring consistently manifest these same traits when they mate. In other words human races breed true.
The issue is that equality doesn’t exist. So there’s either one race, the human race, or there are various other factions that are subjectively unequal.
Ethnicities exist but eugenics isn’t about creating a strong culture the way previous ethnic cultures did.
Margaret Sanger also used human breeding along with abortion.
The point is, some people attach eugenics to the racial division warfare, when they see people talking about human breeding techniques.
Genetic techniques have been refined to the point where not only the historic races (Negro, Caucasian & Asian) can be identified, but also sub-groups such as different European groups and, in some cases, right down to a probable family surname. Advances in genetic science have confirmed rather than refuted the existence of races.
They’ve confirmed specific sequences that go back to migratory patterns. There is no theoretical framework that exists to explain why DNA protein patterns exist in one or more patterns for certain lineages, but even statisticians can find correlations. That doesn’t mean there’s a genetic theory or that the techniques have advanced much.
Most of the genes mapped in the human genome are unexplained and their combination factors or influences are also unexplained. So far people have arrived at correlations and explanations, but without being able to manipulate the expression and application of genes in an environment, why certain genes are the way they are, active or passive, is unknown. Merely a known unknown.
Rachelle:
I certainly don’t consider racial “classifications invalid and wholly socially constructed.” There are people who do (maybe even someone in this thread, because I haven’t read every single comment in its entirety), but I am not one of them. I think there are biological elements to the idea of race, but that in terms of biology and science it is far more reasonable to talk about traits rather than races, and that “race” is not what most people think it is.
I’m written several threads about this recently, and at no point do I make a statement that races are wholly socially constructed. I believe (if I haven’t already made it crystal clear) that race is a word that has developed to describe a very real distribution of human traits, in which some combinations of traits are more common in certain human populations. But there is a great deal more variation within races than most people think, and many traits that people commonly think are limited to one race actually occur in more races than that. In addition, the idea of how many races there are and how to divide them keeps changing.
Although this is somewhat old, it represents the a discussion between the two sides of the argument about race.
In addition, about dog genetic variation vs. human genetic variation, you wrote “The genetic variation between human populations (races) is much greater than the genetic distance between all varieties of dogs.”
But see this lengthy article on the canine genome that appeared in a publication entitled Genome Research, which states the opposite:
In other words, genetically speaking, dog breeds are more different from each other than human races are different from each other.
Neo-Neocon
The link on genetic variation of dogs was interesting. My information was picked up originally on the National Geographic special on dogs and their co-evolution with humans (yeah, we probably evolved with them) that came out a few years ago. I remembered the claim because it surprised me and was not what I expected. I’ve since seen it repeated and explained, but that is not to say that my information is correct. I will have to suspend judgment on that one until I learn more. Thanks for the link.
Ymarsakar Says:
“Margaret Sanger also used human breeding along with abortion.”
I don’t know much about Margaret Sanger but at least part of her agenda – abortion – has been adopted by the left. Before the rise of the Nazis human eugenics was quite popular in the United States and Europe. The left are still obsessed with race.
“The issue is that equality doesn’t exist. So there’s either one race, the human race, or there are various other factions that are subjectively unequal.”
So, what’s the problem with inequality? That’s another idea which for some reason obsesses the left. Personally, I relish the differences between humans. If someday humans are indeed reduced to a monotypical species that will be boring like combining the colors of a rainbow to produce a dull grey. I relish the differences between peoples of different regions and different cultures.
Rather than resenting inequality I love it. When I was a child in Africa, the Africans were extremely poor compared to Europeans, yet they were just as happy in their own way as any European. I don’t understand why the left is always looking for differences so that they can get the groups to fight each other rather than teaching people to embrace their differences and inequalities as reasons they should love each other.