Comments on: Race is a social construct and a self fulfilling prophecy all wrapped up together

By: greg laden

greg laden — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 09:02:47 +0000

Razib: My post was not at all intended to be a diatribe regarding anything you were saying. Things can get very confused in comments-land.Regarding the dark skinned thing: I think we are both looking at the same data and seeing the same thing but possibly taking something slightly different form it. I see an equator-biased darkening of humans, which from Africa outwards is mainly caused by lightening of skin. However, keep in mind that temperate southern hemisphere Africans are relatively light skinned originaly, and the very dark skinned people living there arrived in the last few centuries, as did the lightest skinned people.Then we see the same bias in the New World, but with the effect being reverses … yes, there having been a bottleneck with melanin so the bias is not as strong, but it is there. In a fifth of the time Hawks et all are talking about for their “accelerated evolution” we have the re-invention of dark skin very much under way.OK, so you settle in Scandinavia, say 7,000 years ago. Otherwise, only Scandinavians everywhere. You have children, they have children, and so on. You settled there with 1,000 people like you and you don’t intermarry with the Scandinavians.According to Howell, Brace and others, your descendants skulls would undergo a transformation over time that the other people living in Scandinavia would also experience. For a while it would be possible to tell your people and those people apart based on basicranial differences, but those evolve over time in both populations and eventually it may be difficult to tell (and it was never more than 70% accurate anyway).The overall skull shape change is as yet not explained fully, but it is also a human universal … the Holocene skull emerges in most parts of the world regadless of whatever else is going on.So now it is 7K years later and you visit your relatives wherever you came from, and their skulls have probably undergone the same transformation.However, it is possible, assuming you come from a place where dark skin is adaptive and assuming that Scandinavia is a place where light skin is adaptive, that your descendants in Scandinavia are now lighter skinned, and indeed, your distant relatives in the original homeland may well be darker skinned (I don’t know enough about your ethnography to make guesses).I am not pulling this scenario out of my ass (as Science Avenger might assume). This is pretty much in accord with how most of us think the physical record of bones looks and acts. This is all very interesting and important but it is hard to see how “race/subspecies” as a biological construct fits in here.I wish I was going to the Sb conference, we could have a long, long talk about this!GTL

By: razib

razib — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:31:13 +0000

p.s. i think skin color is going to stand out as one of the most important differences if there is variation unless there’s a major developmental abnormality. if i looked like i do and somehow managed to settle in a northern swedish village in the 19th century i assume that the locals would refer to me as the black man (“black skull”). but if i also had 3 eyes they might refer to me as the 3-eyed-weirdo in preference to the fact that i was “black” because that’s obviously pretty salient.

By: razib

razib — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 03:22:40 +0000

razib: What about dark-skinned Amazonian people? Are you sure about Autralasians? You are probably right in the main, but I’m not sure this is entirely correct.ozzie sequences are hard to come by (for various sociopolitical reasons), but plenty of melanesians exist. and yeah, bougainville islanders cluster close with africans re: skin color genes. the example is illustrative, as these are very distant populations phylogenetically. i don’t consider amazonians very dark skinned, and it seems that the fact that these people didn’t get too dark-skinned shows that the bottleneck reduced genetic variation enough that they couldn’t gain function on some loci. and that suggests how hard or rare it is to gain function once lost. the amerindians i’ve seen don’t show some of the signatures of selection that east asians do for light skin loci, but they’re also not that dark (there’s light and dark alleles across loci). here’s a recent paper on it:Signatures of Positive Selection in Genes Associatedwith Human Skin Pigmentation as Revealed fromAnalyses of Single Nucleotide PolymorphismsO. Lao1,2, J. M. de Gruijter1,2, K. van Duijn1,2, A. Navarro3 and M. Kayser1?note where oceania clusters.as for the rest greg, you connected many lines that and engaged in some projection. i didn’t make the arguments you presume i was making, or was inferring. as for my assertion that it’s a salient trait partly, no, i think its pretty obviously always salient like having a nose and two eyes is salient. in many populations it doesn’t indicate any sociological implications, everyone is the same color. there’s no “privilege” or whatever associated with various colors when there’s no various, but if a blue skinned man showed i’d assume that people would be curious about why the skin was blue. similarly, when people of different skin colors see each other regularly that’s one of the salient traits to classify or identify them.

By: greg laden

greg laden — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:26:45 +0000

razib: What about dark-skinned Amazonian people? Are you sure about Autralasians? You are probably right in the main, but I’m not sure this is entirely correct.Color as human universal salient trait is partly true, but you can’t have a universal that is partly true. It is mostly a post-hock cherry-picked construct. Yes, you can find dozens and dozens of examples of culture contact where skin color is mentioned, but you can’t demonstrate that skin color always matters, or even matters most of the time, any more than you can demonstrate that every culture has an origin myth that involves a flood, even though one can find many that do. The concept is unproven, probably wishful thinking, and also, does not make sense. As a deep and important evolutionary adaptive it makes no sense because the kinds of contact that involve people noticing, writing about, and acting on skin color would have been very very rare indeed for most of human history and prehistory.I agree completely that people will classify, by caste, stratum, dialect, language, and race. What I object to is the foundationless assertion that so often comes along with the basic race concept. I can see your skin color and therefore I can predict the likelihood that you will rape my sister, that you do not feel pain like I do, that you do or do not have a soul, that you are not as smart as I am, and so on. The distinction, compartmentalization, moderate to high degree of correlation, and internal consistency, and the degree of genetic determinism of the traits that are involved in the race concept are as close to the realities of population genetics as the fairy tales of the Magic Kingdom theme park are to day to day realities. Less close.chezjake: You are correct. If we are speaking of biological race, we are speaking of biological subspecies. the terms are interchangeable.Science Avenger: I’m giving you a special Christmas present. I’m going to ignore you for now. You really don’t need any new orifices I’m sure.

By: greg laden

greg laden — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:11:08 +0000

I wrote a post about that paper. It does not really say they have a 16-24 year life span. This is the “life expectancy” … which is not the same as lifespan, and is a number that usually seems remarkably low, but that is a result of high child mortality.The data is totally crappy for demographic data. That paper is flawed, generally, but having insufficient data. Not the author’s fault, its just that foragers are small in number and hard to collect data from.

By: DDeden

DDeden — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:07:42 +0000

Greg, you are familiar with pygmies. An article about them mentioned they have 16 – 24 year life span. What’s the truth?”The other part of the argument is that all observed pygmy populations have a short life expectancy. Indeed, this, according to Dr Migliano?s hypothesis, is the crucial evolutionary pressure. Of the six groups of pygmies for whom data exist, two have a life expectancy of 24 years and the other four about 16 years.” from some recent article…

By: Anne Gilbert

Anne Gilbert — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:53:20 +0000

[b]The reality of multiracial origins certainly softens the hard edge of bigotry, but it also seems to encourage a complacency as to blatant phenotypic biases. Selection is a powerful force and it can reshape human variation rather quickly given the appropriate environmental impetus. The race problem will not vanish through the fiat of genetics, rather, the social context can have a controlling effect upon the correlation of characters and their clusters within the population so as to reflect the values which that society holds up.[/b]My only comment on the above is that is rather strongly suggests that the “race” concept, wherever found, is rooted in [b][i]social[/i][/b] realities of one sort and another. “European style” racism empahsizes that if it is known that you have some ancestry of a “race” other than European, you are not “European”, but whatever that “race” is. Or at least you are not “fully” European. Latin countries, OTOH, recognize “gradations”. Of course, it’s still better to be “more European” than not, and people have been known to “buy” their way into a “superior” racial identity. Is this any better? I don’t know. Neither type of “racial” distinction is anything more than a ssocial construct in any case.Anne G

By: Science Avenger

Science Avenger — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 11:33:43 +0000

I agree that softening the hard edge of bigotry can lead to complacency. We see this as well in other areas, such as racialized ideas about intelligence with respect to Asians and Jews, and racialized ideas about success in sports in relation to African Americans. These are ways that insidious racism sneaks past more genteel political filters into day to day thinking. We should be equally on guard for idealized notions of humanity that would have us deny objectively observable differences in populations, whatever the relative influences of social and biological factors may be. In an era where skepticism of scientists is at a local maximum (at least in my lifetime), the last thing we need is to appear to be promoting the notion that race is an entirely social construct and that any acknowledgement of differences in group mean performance is "insidious racism".

By: razib

razib — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:27:42 +0000

my views above also are one reason i get so easily bored by creationist rambling about macroevolution.

By: razib

razib — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:26:20 +0000

Shouldn’t there be a single set of consistent rules for defining species with no favoritism for humans? “consistent rules” = cladists & phylogenetic species concept (which is why i think wilkins likes it). i’m generally with RPM of evolgen in that i look at species, subspecies, etc. through an instrumental lens in terms of what avenues toward research any given categorization may open up. species is obviously less arbitrary than subspecies or race below it, and genus, class, order, etc. above it, but i don’t think it is really as precise as all that at the end of the day. they’re all just higher level abstractions which encapsulate the biophysical reality of DNA variation (whether it be sequence, copy, karyotype, etc.).