http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20178763

Call it tribalism, institutionalized OCD, or whatever. It pretty much comes down to cattle management of domesticated humans. As some would have it, we’re all just material serving at the pleasure of our “betters”.

Yes there are changes in genes between groups. The more the groups are separated in time the more changes will accumulate. There are thousands of differences between each of us and our parents. But not all genetic changes produce effects (neutral mutations), not all expressed genetic changes produce visible effects in complex systems with many parts (dilution effects for both positive and negative mutations), and not every system is as tolerant to changes (cognitive systems versus skin color) and less tolerant systems will produce fewer acceptable mutations.

Many times that I see people pointing to genetic data showing differences used in tracking things like migration patterns, the specific genetic differences they are pointing to have no phenotypes associated with them. The collection of data that do show phenotypic differences show inheritance patterns, and only a part of inheritance is genetic. I never see anyone like wade describe the magnitude of nurture effects on inheritance.
Inheritance is not equal to genetics. We also inherit predispositions (gene expression states, epigenetics) for responding to environments in different ways based on the experiences of our mother during conception.

On top of that there is stronger and stronger evidence accumulating that the experiences of parents and grandparents also change these expression predispositions. The recording of transgenerational “nurture” information is mixed up in a lot of inheritance data and must be separated from genetic effects if any genetic argument is to be made. Not to mention that the hardware that runs the nurture programs will also involve elements of genetics making them a new variable since they would technically be both nature and nurture.
“A review on the evidence of transgenerational transmission of posttraumatic stress disorder vulnerability.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24402183
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetics
Science and medicine usually start with the most traumatic stuff, and end up discovering systems involved in positive and negative aspects of the human condition more broadly. At this point we have no reason to dismiss the idea that whole groups of people that we see as minorities get all sorts of emotional inheritance patterns that produce effects like lower IQ (not to mention height and color may have transgenerational epigenetic effects as well. Wade and his sort are cherry-pickers with a whole set of unknown unknowns they don’t think about.

A huge part of what falls under the word Race involves claims of not just things like height and color, but claims of specialness for some races over others, or inferiority of some races relative to others. People can go on about skin color and height, but those are not meaningful differences when it comes to this strange social need to sort people into boxes. The conversation always get over to IQ, a thing with so many cultural effects that you cannot separate nurture from it and neither Wade or anyone else have outlined anything remotely convincing when it comes to genetics, race, and IQ.

That’s the silliest thing iv’e ever heard. Did you even read Wade’s book?

Are you claiming that northern and Southern Europeans are different races distinguished by height?

OK………none of that contradicts the existence of population differences on traits. But you seem to think it does.

No, greg, calling southern and and northern Europeans different “populations” instead of different “races” will not take away the height gap that exists between them.

There is another twist to that; It is simply true that whiteness is very white with little variation and anyone who isn’t all that white gets to be black or whatever. But we do tend to not do this with white-asian people … they are “mixed” and if they are white enough they are white. But in the US we have a long history of trying to manage the breeding and other aspects of society of black people/Africans (as well as women in general) because we tend to be assholes about this sort of thing.

While it is commonly said that the people of the “Black race” (Africans) tend to have the lowest adult lactose tolerance levels, the populations that have about 100% tolerance are pretty much only African populations, certain groups in Central Africa.

Among the people of the world who rely the absolutely MOST on cow milk for their food are African groups with near zero adult lactose tolerance.

Tolerance is distributed in a very whacky way in reference to the racial groups, and the association between cattle keeping and this particular allele variant is bad enough to seriously question the theory that they are linked, or at least, that they are usually linked. (I.e. the Central African 100% tolerant people are major cattle keepers).

So, like stature, this example is not a good example to support any sort of standard race concept.