The paper discussed here:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/genetic_similarities_within_and_between_human_populations/

is a useful addition with respect to the question of the genetic distinctiveness of various human races.  If there is zero genetic overlap between members of the major continental races, and minimal overlap between “intermediate/admixed” groups (which may well disappear with more markers), the “clinal” argument of Paabo loses much of its luster.

With respect to Lewontinian arguments, there was an article by a Harold Stowe in Amren a year or so ago on this topic, but it is not yet online at the Amren site.  If someone has a copy of that article from an online Amren subscription, then this may be added as one of the references, as a review article summarizing the errors in Lewontin’s logic.

I haven’t gone over the FAQs in great detail, although of course I always prefer a genetic-based definition; one possible reason why various authors have created conflicting racial categories is that they may have been in error with respect to the criteria they have used.  And Brace needs to do more to provide evidence that the craniofacial metrics he uses are really “neutral.”

Of course, one wonders - in light of the new paper released by the journal “Nature” - how much of “neutral” genetic variation is actually neutral as well.  It seems that much of the genome, including so-called “junk” DNA, is transcribed and may have regulatory functions.

That does not necessarily mean that allegedly “neutral” markers are not neutral, they very well may be, if sequence variation does not influence function.

But, most probably, we may need to start talking about a continuum of functionality vs. neutrality, rather than a yes/no sharp distinction between the two.

However, I believe that the proportion of canine genetic variation that is inter-breed is ~ twice that which is inter-racial in humans (see Stowe, Amren article).

I’m not completely sure the dog analogy is perfect for humans.  What one can say, without fear of error, is that the large phenotypic variation in dog breed results from a situation in which intra-breed variation is at least twice that of inter-breed variation (I think, 70%, 30%).

So, the Lewontinian perspective falls flat with respect to dogs.

I was under the impression that EO Wilson has talked about selective pressures altering populations in the time frames of thousands of years; for a species as long-lived as humans, thousands of years is certainly not too long for selection.  Included in this would be sexual selection as well for overall features.  Certainly, Frost’s theory with respect to pigmentation is not talking about changes that occur in decades, my impression is that this took place over several millenia at least.

This is, however, a minor topic.

Brace lacks even the slightest understanding of modern human population genetics and the simplest understanding of genetic structure.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/brace.html

He is either an incompetent, a fraud, or both.

And, if you google “Loring Brace”, you’ll see a wide range of “contributions” with respect to race denial.

Of course, this does not logically imply that his assertions of a selection-neutral aspect to his craniofacial work are incorrect.

It does suggest, however, that is judgement - clouded as it is by either incompetence or political agendas - cannot be accepted without further evidence.

Jean Depression,

2,000 years is the period required to discern the minimal detectable change in a population based on the 24 skull measurements.  This minimal detectable change is very small.  The changes that you are talking about, as in black hair turning blond or other notable changes, are of much larger magnitude/drastic.

Your assessment of C. Loring Brace is unfounded.  You cited a book review of his where he praises a race denial argument by none other than a geneticist.  Brace is in good company.  Cavalli-Sforza et al. have also explicitly denied races among humans.  Are they also incompetents or frauds or both?  Race denial is common among geneticists and physical anthropologists, and this should not reflect on their competence because they are under political pressure.  It is often not obvious whether a race-denying scientist who should know better genuinely believes in the non-existence of races or is merely avoiding trouble.  In the case of Brace I am guessing that he genuinely believes in the non-existence of races among humans, but big deal...as I have shown, he has done an excellent job to support a scientific case for racial reality among humans through his work on skulls.

Anyway, Brace’s work on skulls is on solid grounds. 

--------------

Fred Scrooby,

I do not know anything about Ronald Fonda.

John T,

Thank you for pointing out the correct spelling of Coon’s name.  I have made the correction.  I am not sure about the need to retain umlauts when writing a non-Anglo name in English, but I changed Paabo to Pääbo.

Here are some “bone measurements” that refute Brace’s claims:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7151/abs/nature05951.html

There is, as well, a fundamental difference between the race denial of a Cavalli-Sforza and a Brace.  For the former, who seems to keep abreast of advances in modern science, and who understands population genetics, the denial is seemingly evidence of a character defect/political orientation, rather than a lack of competence.  Brace is seemingly both incompetent and politically correct.  He compounds his stark error about Neanderthals with the logic/character deficit by ignoring that if his assertion indeed was correct, then that would be enormous evidence for racial differences.

Thanks, GT.

Prof. C. Boring Disgrace has lots of company in academia among the nitwitted professoriate and the Jews:  as a fresh example, see how Jewish economics professor and nitwit Tyler Cowen smugly does the equivalent of denying genetic race.  Here’s someone named Eric Falkenstein commenting on it:

How to Increase Blog Comments

Say something about IQ, as [Jewish professor of economics] Tyler Cowen did over at Marginal Revolutions.  Brad DeLong did something similar, as did Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan.  All you have to do is take the issue of IQ seriously, and bam!

The debate centers around three key issues that are somewhat independent:  IQ is 1) important (has socio-economic consequences); 2) heritable (say 50%) [Scroob note:  only 50%?  Why not 80%-85%?]; and 3) varies systematically between different genetic families, e.g., races.  These factual hypotheses are, though believed in by racists, statements about reality, and people on both sides have strong opinions.  But the IQ crowd is generally more knowledgeable about what they are speaking of, because if you believe in IQ you read up on it while if you think it’s meaningless you don’t.  So when the anti-IQ crowd makes silly comments that they think definitively refute the above points they face an avalanche of commenters who know much more about the issue than they (usually the comments are double to quadruple the number for the average economics blog entry).

The standard anti-IQ clichés include the one about how poor natives are so smart (e.g., [Jewish professor] Jared Diamond’s assertion that New Guinea tribesmen are smarter than Europeans), or that “because race explains only 15% of genetic variability” races don’t exist (it’s the correlation in the variation that matters), that IQ can be altered significantly through early education (Heckman now thinks it’s the non-IQ components that can be changed and are economically important), that the Flynn Effect will save us all (it stopped), that it’s not [solely] nature but the combination [of heredity and environment] that is essential (who said 100% nature?), etc., and are smacked down by a rabid pack who have been reading GNXP and Steve Sailer.

To Cowen’s point — that natives are smart because they can fish and gossip very well — I think the key point, is that while tribesmen are much better than Cowen at living off the land, so is my dog, and I’d be hesitant to say he’s got a higher IQ (though certainly more “fit” if we were in the forest).

I’d suggest the audience of the article on race should be a typical liberal arts graduate.  These people have all been steeped in the following layers of catechism:

1) Lewontin’s fallacy:  1 gene determines racial genetic variation and 1 gene isn’t enough to distinguish populations.

2) Boas’s fallacy: even if genetic race exists, its effect is so overwhelmed by environmental influences on development as to bring it within affordable social engineering of indistinguishable capability as citizenry.

There is a catechism-of-last-resort, perhaps beyond the scope of the article on race, which is basically that, even if genetic race is real and a significant factor in social organization, Euromen bear a unique historic guilt that requires them to bear a unique burden—essentially morally requiring themselves to enslave themselves to other races.

This is a lot of territory to cover but the most important catechism to destroy up front is Lewontin’s fallacy despite the fact that most academics have now retreated to the second catechism and the few, like Lewontin himself (with coauthor Gould IIRC), have long ago retreated to the fallacy of last resort.  I think they did this because they recognized that despite the fact that virtually 100% of liberal arts college graduates have been taught Lewontin’s fallacy and regurgitate it as parents, friends, high school and junior college teachers (if not college professors), that there would come a time (advent of the Internet?) when the thin veneer of academic legitimacy their Harvard PhD’s lend to the specious argument would be punctured by the obvious challenge presented by taking the step from 1 to X genetic markers—as did Edwards in his tragically recent article “Lewontin’s Fallacy”—which he himself says could have been published decades ago.  (It is instructive as to the power of the current theocracy that Edwards seems bound to genuflect to Boas before the end of his article.)

So I think the first priority of the article should be to point out what the minimum number, X, of genetic markers requierd to cluster genetic races is and compare it to the number, Y, of genetic markers that vary within humanity.  These three numbers, 1, X and Y, of genetic markers are important to point out very early, so as to cure most target readers of their Lewontin-engineered virulent meme.

... please provice them here.  It is important to document the intellectual dishonesty of the leading “genome jocks” promoted by the mainstream media—however obvious it is for those of us not blind to reality.

Very Interesting! But why can’t East Indians be classified racially different dependent on geography?  North west as Causasion, South as Aboriginal, East as East Asian? It is done for other regions

Rubenstein and “Alun” in that Wiki discussion are simply sophistry-wielding race-deniers.  Rubenstein keeps saying that according to Dobzhansky it’s a “judgment call” as to how many races there are and (what amounts to the same thing) where to draw the lines between them, the implication in Rubenstein’s eyes being the idea of race itself is arbitrary (which of course Dobzhansky didn’t think), arbitrary in the sense that if you want you can draw 1) boundary lines around each individual in the world, giving six billion distinct races, or 2) a single line around the whole human population, giving a single human race there’s no justification for sub-dividing, or 3) in any fashion between those extremes, delineating races of intermediate size as you deem appropriate, the classical taxonomic approach being one of the virtually infinite number of different choices included in this last approach, and all of them “arbitrary” according to Rubenstein. 

The problem for Rubenstein is they’re not all arbitrary:  classical taxonomy goes by certain common-sense rules:  how do you choose the best of that infinite number of ways to sub-group all humans according to groups of evident characteristics, whether evident to people three thousand years ago or evident today only in a modern genetics, physiologcal, biochemical, or behavioral sense?  How do you justify the view that has come down to us from the Linnaean taxonomists that the best, most common-sensical way is to divide them into Negroes, Orientals, Caucasians, etc.?  By following the exact same common-sense rules as apply in any other categorization process whatsoever, so that if you reject the application of these rules in this case you reject them in every other case and no categorization is possible, giving a universe full of things you mentally refuse to categorize, a universe you insist on viewing as incoherent. 

Race-denial is possible only if you deny every other category in the universe because the exact same principles of categorization apply. 

What Rubenstein is doing here is simply denying the legitimacy of common-sense categorization of any kind, and this necessarily includes categorization such as, for example, permits to distinguish a porpoise’s broader category from a fish’s or a blade of grass’s from a giant sequoia’s:  he’s throwing them all out (except, of course, those with which he agrees politically:  those he agrees with politically he won’t dispute). 

And this is exactly what Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin and Leon Kamin were all doing in promulgating the 20th-Century’s Jewish Race-Denial Scam, the latter three merely transferring the fallacy from gross-anatomy terms to genetics terms. 

Lewontin should have seen immediately, the instant he even thought of the question, that additional loci would permit reliable genetic differentiation as to race since there were obviously genetically-distinct races in the world, exactly as common sense would tell someone who’d found insufficient genetic evidence to distinguish two species that additional loci would have to distinguish them since there are obviously genetically-distinct species in the world.  This is why, as Edwards says, refuting Lewontin’s Lie didn’t need modern genetics but could have been done as soundly in the 1920s on the basis of pre-DNA genetics. 

But what was going through Lewontin’s mind, and Kamin’s and Gould’s, wasn’t scientific truth but Marxist-Jewish race-denial from the start:  the desire to seize upon any sophistry having the potential to bolster their Marxoid-Jewish world view that it would be much better for Jews if there weren’t races just as (in their eyes) it would be much better for Jews if communism triumphed (all three were/are committed communists). 

The amazing part is the transparency of the sophistry:  as Harpending is quoted as saying in the Wiki discussion, his ten-year-old son could see through this sort of sophistry.  So, 1) why did these top-flight professors try to act as if this stuff, the equivalent of two-plus-two equals five, had merit when it was only a matter of time before it was laughed off the academic stage, and 2) why have non-Jewish, non-communist academics embraced the absurdity, men such as C. Boring Disgrace for example, and dozens of others?

(I was referring to the Wikipedia discussion linked in James B.’s comment just above mine.)

It’s why academics who aren’t Jewish or communist, who therefore don’t see themselves as having a vested interest in this question, adopting the sophistry?

The thing is, they do have a vested interest.  So much as hinting that those troglodyte racists might have had a point on some things could very well cost someone a fair number of status points.  I believe Sailer and Derbyshire have written about this (too lazy to dig up the links right now); Lawrence Auster has also hinted at it.  The more someone believes in some leftist idea, the more altruistic he is likely to seem, and seeming altruistic raises a person’s status. 

Understanding competitive altruism is key to understanding left-wing thought amongst upper-middle class white gentiles in paricular, and really amongst all leftists.  Jews and Asians in particular are suicidal to ally with radical Muslims and ultra-poor, disproportionately violent inner-city blacks and Latinos.  So I think there really is something other than naked self-interest driving even most minority and working-class/poor leftists.

Fred, in the Bering Sea port of Nome, Rubenstein might well feel at home :

http://www.joyfulnoise.net/tours/a;aska2.html

What makes the different races different from one another is what you haven’t explained Fred.

Lewontin and Gould haven’t attacked hot/cold or dog/sheep distinctions.

OK, if you prefer, what made the different races different from one another 3000 years ago?

What makes the different races different from one another is what you haven’t explained Fred.

Different geographic groups have different frequences of polymorphic segments of DNA.  Using enough of these polymorphisms, it is possible to distinguish nearly any two geographic groups (though differentiating Poles or Frenchmen from Germans, for example, could be difficult or impossible, with Germans near the French border being more related to many French than many Germans, Germans near the Polish border being more related to many Poles than many Germans).  However distinguishing say, a European from an East Asian is fairly trivial; it is even easier to distinguish either group from a Sub-Saharan African. 

Notably, however, there is no known single polymorphism that would distinguish these groups 100% of the time.  This fact is the origin of Lewontin’s Fallacy; though no one polymorphism or gene always distinguishes any two geographic populations (popularly known as races or ethnic groups), with enough polymorphisms, people of two different geographic ancestries can be distinguished with near 100% accuracy, indeed with probabilities of error in the trillionths (.000000000001) or less.  Indeed, with a full genome analysis, the probability of finding say, a European more related to an East Asian, African, or American Indian than another European would be less than 1 in 10^100, (.[99 zeroes]1), or (.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001).

In this thread, originally linked in one of James B’s posts above, one sees in the comments by Rubenstein, who has of course a Jewish-sounding name and is probably Jewish, all the race-denying sophistries so beloved of Jews of academe, politics, the judiciary, and the world of Jewish NGOs such as the ACLU, the ADL, and the SPLC.  Jews cling to these race-denying sophistries because this is their Jewish patriotism, their Jewish nationalism:  race-denial strengthens the Jews and weakens the enemies of Jews, as the race-denying Jews sense things.  What you have on display in Rubenstein’s comments is the phenomenon of Jewish Race-Denial, a facet of JN (Jewish nationalism).  Even if Rubenstein were signing with “O’Malley” instead of “Rubenstein” you’d know he was Jewish by these comments of his in this thread, which bear the unmistakable imprint of Jewish Race-Denial.  You’d read the thread and say to yourself, “I wonder if this guy signing as ‘O’Malley’ isn’t a Jew ...”

What’s going on with Jewish Race-Denial is, among other things, the stubborn refusal of Jews to accept that in Euro society they, and especially their children, have to feel “excluded,” that they have to feel “not like everybody else,” because of their various sorts of differences from whites (I use “whites” in the sense of “Euros”:  Jews are Caucasians but not Euros; if one uses “white” to mean Caucasian, Jews are of course white but here I don’t use it that way.  Jews have mixed with Euros to the point where a very large proportion of them strongly resemble Euros physically, look indistinguishable from them, just as a very large proportion resembles non-Euros physically and a very large proportion is somewhere in between, but genetic testing has Jews clustering with non-Euro Caucasians).

Which comes first in the Jewish mentality, the urge to deny race or the urge to be communist?  Jews feel both urges strongly but which is primordial in them, relative to the other?  It’s the urge to deny race.  The Jewish urge to deny race comes first, before Jewish love of communism, and is a big part of what attracts Jews to communism in the first place:  they see in communism a system that can get away with institutionalizing race-denial, finally freeing Jews from the need to constantly feel “not like everybody else” and so “excluded” at best and, at worst, potentially a target. 

If the Jewish urge to deny race were a result of their espousal of communism we’d get a major Jewish push to deny race only where Jews were functioning as communists, which Jews were in fact doing, by and large, for much of the XXth Century:  so many Jews were either comsymps or outright communists during that century that one or the other position (outright identification as a communist, or comsymp attitudes to one degree or another) could almost be assumed in a random Jew. 

With Russian communism’s perceived meanness toward Russian Jews in the ‘70s (which doesn’t seem to have been meanness specifically toward Jews so much as a uniform application of communism’s rules to everyone including Jews — Jews valued communism because it kept their tribal enemies prostrate but they didn’t like it when it kept them prostrate, so in the ‘70s arose the great hue and cry among the West’s Jews [which means “the great hue and cry in the West” since the Jews controlled the West’s media] about Soviet Russian “anti-Semitism” which was in reality more like “the Jews dished it out but couldn’t take it” or “what goes around comes around") and then with the economic collapse of communism itself in ‘89 a smaller proportion of Jews are now either outright communists or comsymps, but just as many are race-deniers:  communism has partly dried up among them but race-denial, which seems to have gotten its start among Jews at the beginning of the 1800s, is going as strong as ever.  This is because race-denial is the primordial urge among them, not communism, which is secondary to race-denial in the hierarchy of Jewish urges. 

As everyone knows, the diaspora Jews denounce Euro nationalism and use their power to deny to the various kinds of Euros the right to express nationalist feelings for their particular groups.  As a result, one might look at the diaspora Jews as an example of a people who reject nationalism since, apart from their support of Israel, they also don’t appear to indulge in it.  But as GW has alluded to, the very things the Jews use to destroy Euro nationalism, such as communism and race-denial, amount to diaspora-Jewish nationalism, for reasons that should be obvious, so diaspora Jews do have a nationalist dimension in their lives, of which race-denial is one part.  In the linked Wiki thread, the passion and tenacity with which Rubenstein denies race can be understood as the passion and tenacity of nationalism (diaspora-Jewish nationalism, in this case), nationalism being a thing which engenders passion and tenacity in everyone.

So the diaspora Jews do have their nationalism.

Hi, the UNESCO Statement On Race (1951) might be mentioned, too.

“The concept of race is unanimously regarded by
anthropologists as a classificatory device providing a
zoological frame within which the various groups of
mankind may be arranged and by means of which studies
of evolutionary processes can be facilitated. In its
anthropological sense, the word “race” should be
reserved for groups of mankind possessing well-developed
and primarily heritable physical differences from
other groups.”

(p. 11)

also,

“It is possible, though not proved, that some types of
innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses
are commoner in one human group than in another,”

(p. 13)

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000733/073351eo.pdf

Regards,

Thomas

“geneticist Fritz Lenz argues that Negroes are not humans (homo sapiens) at all.” (—Thomas)

They’re humans obviously, but not the same species as Euros.  Euros and Negroes are distinct species (distinct species of human):  the differences between them are significant enough to so classify them.  Look, if that’s hard to grasp, do it this way:  imagine this was 40 thousand years ago instead of 2007.  There’d be us and Neanderthals running around — so, two distinct species of human (and just in case Andy Wooster pipes up here with something stupid, no, our Cro-Magnon forebears of 40K y/a weren’t just like us, but they were far more like us than like the Neanderthals their contemporaries).  In exactly the same way, there are two distinct species of human around today (maybe more than two).  (Mulattoes of every degree are interspecies hybrids.) Now, you could get away with calling Negroes non-human, analagously to the way “white” can be defined so as to exclude those Caucasians who aren’t northwestern Euros.  Then of course you’d have to call Neanderthals non-human too.  In fact this might have to be done if the emerging push among some scientists to classify chimpanzees as human gains traction.  But as things now stand, I for one see no problem with calling Euros and Negroes distinct species of human.

Germans and Slavs are not distinct races. The Nordic, Mediterranean, Alpine, East-Baltic and Dinaric races are the white races.

All European nations are racially mixed.

By the way, I hope everyone saw, in that UNESCO statement on race I linked in one of my comments above, where the Jewish race-denying author, Prof. Ashley Montagu, held Brazil up explicitly as a society whose racial characteristics white countries should strive to emulate.  Brazil! This was 1950 and already he was pushing for what we here, half-a-century later, often name as our worst nightmare!  Here was this race-denying Jew coming right out and saying white populations needed to mulattoize themselves, exactly what his latter-day equivalent, Alon Ziv, has come right out and called for in his book.  Getting Euros to mulattoize themselves — or, what is another way of saying it, getting rid of Euros plain and simple — is some sort of deep and very strong felt need, or felt desire, among the Jews.  No not all of them, but a HUGE proportion.  Usually they try to promote that goal by indirect language but sometimes the urge is too strong and they come right out and simply tell whites in plain language, “You should mix with Negroes; I want you to mix with Negroes.  It would be better for everybody if you mixed with Negroes.” It’s unfricking believable the jaw-droppingly brazen way they do that, but the evidence, in Montagu and Ziv, is right there before your eyes, as also the indirect but unmistakable evidence elsewhere literally all around us from Jewish-controlled Hollywood to Jewish-controlled book publishing to Jewish influenced politics, to you name it:  the Jews want Euros done away with by seeing them race-mixed with Negroes and they want it extremely badly.

J Richards wrote:

Your criticism of Brace is largely unfounded

Not really. Brace definitely wasn’t implying that Europeans had multiple Neanderthals as ancestors who were absorbed by numerically superior incoming moderns, as you see it; he actually meant that modern Europoid peoples directly evolved from Neanderthals, which is ridiculous. To quote from the first link Boring Lace gave:

...Trinkaus said this suggested humans and Neanderthals interbred, but Brace said it just as easily could have been an “intermediate” form of human evolving from Neanderthal into modern Homo sapiens sapiens.

Genetic studies proving the negligibility of Neanderthal DNA absorbed by prehistoric humans did exist prior to when Brace stated this, as the (poorly read) article linked to by B. Lace preceded the previous one. The date clearly reads the 11th of July, 1997, compared to the Brace article concerning Paleo-Americans and Neanderthals, which is from the year 2000. Even ignoring genetic studies one couldn’t rationally say that Europeans evolved directly from Neanderthals.

I think I’m right in saying Neanderthals have always been thought of as being restricted to Europe and the Near East, and not having traveled to Japan, Northern China and America tens of thousands of years ago.

The Ainu are also not Caucasoid.

I encourage you to search for the term “Luzia woman”, and take a closer look at the skull and reconstruction of Penon Woman, which was found very near to Luzia Woman and from a similar time period.

Other than all this, the specific work of his that you cite in the Wiki seems relevant and legitimate.