I recently listened to a criticism of a book called "Troublesome Inheritance." the podcast that I heard this criticism was called "Science for the People." it brought up a number of interesting problems with today's statute of scientific literacy of its people and its journalists. Most people's science knowledge ends with the minimal requirement that they had in high school, or at best that degree that science infringes on their chosen career, which is very small. Indeed in my current career, working in a Garden Centre, most workers know next to nothing of the biological science that they deal with on any given day; many of them actually express things that contradict the current science of plants with great authority.
People with this token understanding of scientific words and jargon often seek others to explain the concepts of science to them in words that they understand. But the problem with this model is that often the people explaining the science to the lay people do not understand the science themselves and just give the scientific headlines a pass. Another problem with science journalists is that the publications that they work for have policies that necessarily disrupt the communication of the scientific ideas. How do you express scientific language to readers of publications when the publications are geared to readers with a grade five education. The answer is that you can't. You can't use the scientific jargon because it does not translate. Keys example is the word theory. At the grade five level of understanding the word theory means an idea that has not been adequately explained or has little proof; a guess at best. But a Scientific Theory actually means much closer to the opposite, it is an idea that has been rigorously tested and proven to all tests that have been provided. The Theory of Evolution by example is more ironclad than the Theory of Gravity, yet one is never in doubt and the other is often derided as false.
In the book Troublesome Inheritance the author collates several scientific papers to prove a point and express the authors ideas. He writes in a very clear and easily understood way that the common lay person can understand and people are easily brought around to his way of thinking because of his writing style. And he is completely misrepresenting the science and the entire premise of the story he tells is not backed up by the science, at all. The ideas that he presents are true but the conclusions he reaches are false. You see the book he writes is another book that claims that there are Races within humanity and one is superior to the others and that Race is his. He uses simplistic interpretations of science to prove his points which is a little better than the scientists in the 1950s that used penis size to show that the white race was the better Race.
There are Races. But they are more cultural and linguistically defined than defined by genetics. There are appearance markers that people use to suggest that there are racial lines. Indians live on the Indian subcontinent, have brown skin and straight black hair. Africans live on Africa and have brown skin and curled black hair. Caucasians have pale skin and a variety of hair colour and are from Europe. And all of this is true and a load of crap. Persians live between India and Arabia, they share many of the same traits as both 'Race'. Turks are between Arabia and Europe and they share many of the same traits. A Turk closer to Arabia looks more Arab but is still not Arabic, and a Turk closer to Europe shares more traits with Europeans but is still not European. The Pure German Aryan was a fiction in Hitler's day as it is today and when there were an Aryan People. People fuck around and there is no homogeneous group of people any where.
Okay that is an over simplification. There are people that have been separated from other people for so long as to have become a separate race, but these are far and few between. Isolated people will take on similar traits to other people within their isolated area but they have to be separated from the people outside their area for many years for them to be racially divergent. There are examples all over the world. The people of Madagascar where thought to be Polynesian and with a few African descendants, separated from the rest of the world for a thousand of more years. The Australian Aborigines may have been isolated for forty thousand years like some people claim, but this does not hold much water given the Polynesians and Indonesians were both seafaring groups for so long and Australia is really not that far from other cultures. New Zealand might have a better claim if it were not all the trade routes the Polynesians used. The Bering Land bridge may have cut off the Natives of North America, but not from each other. Self sufficient groups within jungles might have more claim to isolation. Self restricting groups like Jews might claim to be separate racial ness, but given that rape is so common act of invading people's around the world, many of these purity claims are unlikely.
The only way that you can get true Race is through isolation for a long time, but you can get it from insulation for a long time. Insulation is the way that most of humanity's Races came about. People for the longest time did not travel far from where they were born, could not travel. Often they would marry people from within the same village or from one next door and mixing of genetics would only occur very short ranged. After a hundred generations the people of one village would more closely resemble the people of a neighbouring village than one ten villages away and them mor than one a hundred villages away. That would be an example of spatial isolation.
There are other types of isolation, language isolation where genes only mix within the same language. Religious isolation where only the genetics of a particular religion mix together. Social isolation, where a certain social stratum only mix together, like the European nobility. There are many ways that humanity has isolated itself that can cause distinct differences between ourselves. But the variation is really only minor.
There was a genetic study done a few years ago that was used to determine how many races there was in e world. In this case they used Mitochondria DNA to define the parameters. There were found to be over twenty races. Most of those races exist only within Africa. It does make sencse if you think about it. All the peoples whose origins come from outside of Africa left Africa; their ancestors left about five thousand generations ago and the were only a few hundred of them, at most. We know that those people have Neanderthal DNA and the ones that stayed in Africa do not. We know that the ones that spread to eastern Asia have other non Homo Sapiens DNA in them and there is some concern that there may be another bit of on non Homo Sapiens DNA in another area where Indonesia exists today. There may be as many as five to seven different Races outside of Africa, but there are double that many inside of Africa. Africa had more people, more diversity. Tropical environments tend to be more fertile for gathering people and Africa is quite firmly tropical. There is a lot of space with a variety of terrains and many opportunities to form isolated communities.
When people talk about Race, they most often are talking about appearance only and they are talking about differences and not similarities. Humans are bipedal, four limbed, primarily naked of hair, without tails and who have language. There are many more similarities, but we are essentially the same. There are very slight differences between the Races, that are mostly driven by the environment. People living in tropical environments did not lose the genetic variation for dark skin pigment. The dark pigment blocks sunlight better, they live in regions with intense sunlight. People in more northern environments lost that variation and picked up less pigmentation that allowed more absorption of sunlight. Sickle cell anemia in African populations allows greater protection to Malaria, which is endemic to the tropics, so is a genetic advantage. But each variation is only a variation; they are not really huge differences.
At our core, we are all nearly identical even with our variations and so there is no one model that is superior to another. The claims of superiority come from cultural superiority and technological superiority, not genetics. Our cultures are different and they impact on how we view the world and how we seek to exist in it. Our technology determines how successful we are in doing it. The idea that White people are superior to all others resulted from the domination of less technologically advanced people.
The Chinese were the first to develop gunpowder and steel and factories for producing goods, but for most of their history they believed they were the center of the world and thought that people should come to them and that the rest were not worth conquering. There was one brief period where they reversed this policy and they reached out and touched e rest of the world and sailed the breadth of the Pacific Ocean to North America, but it did not last.
The European people's sailed out to dominate the world to spread their religion and to strip the conquered of their valuables. They only did this to lesser technological cultures. No one European nation could conquer their neighbours because they were just as technologically advanced, as was shown in the World Wars, The Seven Years War, the Great War and World War II, when similar technology goes against each other lots of people die and nothing really changes. Genetics has nothing to do with it.
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