Mga app ng Google
Pangunahing menu

Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Darwin: Are the races of man separate species or merely separate subspecies?"

52 Comments -

1 – 52 of 52
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Obviously Steve, you are correct. Every animal is related to every other animal, it is just a matter of going far back enough in the family tree. Along the way, there are mutations including differing numbers of chromosomes etc. that serve to make it impossible to interbreed or interbreed and produce fertile offspring. However, even two animals of a different species, genus, family, order, class, phylum or kingdom are related.

If the family trees of organisms had been recorded going back millions of years ago, there would be a link somewhere in there. That is the fundamental, mathematical truth - this iterative mixing of DNA with a few random errors over time - is how life has evolved, the phenotype changing all the while. Viewed at in this light, the human-developed categories of kingdom, phylum, etc. are at best approximations of clusters of organisms on this immense family tree.

That's not to say that this taxonomy is useless, just that one should recognise its inherent limitations.

4/6/13, 3:35 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Modern genetics - combined with the mass processing power of modern computers, chromatography etc have given us the answer, if you can to look and do a little ferreting about.

Basically 'IBD' or Identity by Descent' sections on chromosomes tell us 'who is realted to who'. Also haplotype groups both on the X and Y chromosome which have been laboriously studied and cartegorized through a lot of light on ancient patterns of migration and ethnic dominance.

4/6/13, 3:42 AM

Anonymous Londoner said...

OT (slightly) - you appear to have a fan in Cape Town Steve. The title of his report seems mighty familiar at least.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world news/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9974686/Cape-Town-student-newspaper-conducts-poll-asking-what-is-most-attractive-race.html


Much butthurt has ensued.

4/6/13, 3:54 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've thought about this in the past and decided that the ease of inter-breeding and the racial continuum that exists with races blending into one another lead me to believe that humans are one species.

4/6/13, 4:15 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Semantic differences are a favorite liberal tactic to stall any kind of serious discussion on "race."

The actual differences between peoples is something more like a spectrum, related but different, and not clear-cut enough to be summarily defined by terminology. The only measure is human perception itself.

4/6/13, 4:41 AM

Blogger Pink Arrow Gal said...

you tell me, man:

http://canovanograms.tripod.com/anthropologyandaustraliasuniquesurvivors/id2.html

The core definition of subspecies is that they do not naturally interbreed with each other. Africans and australians did not naturally interbreed with whites until whites explored those continents.

I have seen a references to australian aborigines as 'homo sapiens resens.' Take a look at those photos and tell me they are not a subspecies.

4/6/13, 4:42 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There are many animal groups that are counted as distinct species despite being basically identical physiologically and differing only in geographic distribution and slight "cultural" ways, such as different songs or calls.

4/6/13, 4:47 AM

Anonymous Glasgow said...

Since all White people have some Neanderthal DNA, and black people do not, that makes us a mixed species minority being attacked by blacks in what are clearly hate crimes.

4/6/13, 5:36 AM

Anonymous Hunsdon said...

I think that Darwin,like JFK, is idolized by the American left more for his symbolic value than for any actual beliefs he held. Darwin fills the "pushing back the ignorance of Christianity through the power of science" role, and JFK stands in for the "beautiful young hero cut down in his prime by the forces of reaction" role.

Any discussion of JFK's enthusiasm for Special Forces, the missile gap, appropriate tax rates, or Ngo Diem Dinh would reveal that JFK would have no place in today's Democratic Party, and would be shunned as a reactionary Neanderthal.

In fairness, other groups and parties can suffer from this delusion as well. (Cough, Reagan.)

4/6/13, 6:06 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6825

The Tina Fey of film criticism. Can't stand her.

4/6/13, 6:22 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Linguistics has similar issues. It has proven impossible to work out a consistent, non-arbitrary definition of the terms language and dialect. The mutual intelligibility test is flawed. There are many dialect continua (or language continua :) where the speakers of A can't understand speakers of C well at all, but speakers of B, which is geographically intermediate between A and C, can understand both A and C relatively easily. So from the perspective of B, speech varieties A, B and C are all dialects of the same language. But from the perspective of, say, A, speech varieties A and B are dialects of each other, but C is a separate language.

Also, a person's degree of intelligibility of related speech varieties may depend on his social class, IQ, the nature of his life experiences, etc.

What linguistics lacks is a vocal faction claiming that, since "language" and "dialect" cannot be cleanly defined, there is no such thing as language. No one's saying that the differences between languages (or dialects) shouldn't be studied.

4/6/13, 7:14 AM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

It's sad to think that 140 years ago anthropology was more advanced than it is now.

When you read Darwin, you experience a great mind thinking clearly and weighing evidence objectively. It's real science, as good as it gets.

4/6/13, 8:01 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

[T]he epistemological fuzziness at the heart of the concept of the word "species" turns out to have billion dollar consequences.

As treated in the Darwin passages you excerpt here and in your article on the golf course, this appears to be as much a metaphysical issue as an epistemological one. I think questions of classification and relevant attributes are generally seen as issues of metaphysics. Difficulty in determining what exists (for example, whether or not there is mutual fertility among human) tend to be epistemological problems. Metaphysical fuzziness and epistemological difficulty seem to be apter phrasing.

Please correct me if you are seeing this in a different way.

4/6/13, 8:18 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thus it has been asserted that the native women of Australia and Tasmania rarely produce children to European men; the evidence, however, on this head has now been shewn to be almost valueless. The half-castes are killed by the pure blacks: and an account has lately been published of eleven half-caste youths murdered and burnt at the same time, whose remains were found by the police.*

Wow. This is what some wild animals do to offspring of other males. Lions, for example, are said to kill the offspring of their females that were sired by foreign lions.

4/6/13, 8:22 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

By 1990, however, California had grown tremendously wealthy and ocean view lots were worth a fortune. (From Steve's gnatcatcher article.)

Had California grown tremendously wealthy or just tremendously crowded? Population density tends to drive up the price of land.

4/6/13, 8:24 AM

Blogger Sam Hardwick said...

I made a brief survey of the status of anthropology a while ago, finding that Wikipedia is completely ignorant of any characteristics of ethnic groups but that artists still have a very good idea.

4/6/13, 8:37 AM

Anonymous Typo, last paragraph said...

In last paragraph, you wrote generation instead do generating. Maybe the phrase should be hyphenated too. You can delete this comment.

4/6/13, 9:21 AM

Blogger Jim Bowery said...

Getting back to the 1973 act -- an act that was clearly intended to preserve "diversity" in its true sense, rather than in its mendacious political sense now foisted upon humanity -- the important phenomenon is the adaptive phenotypic correlation structure at the population level. If an action endangers that adaptive structure, then the 1973 act applies.

What people don't seem to want to come to grips with is that some phenotypic correlation structures are not only determined largely by corresponding genetic correlation structures, but that the correlated genes may be present not only on separate chromosomes -- hence largely unlinked during meiosis -- but in different demeic subpopulations.

I don't think any studies have been carried out quantifying these structures as a part of the billions of dollars at stake in the enforcement of the 1973 act.

Why?

Why is it so hard for people to understand these distinctions in the fragility/vulnerability of some adaptive phenotypic correlation structures vs the robustness/invulnerability of others?

4/6/13, 9:56 AM

Anonymous a very knowing American said...

Something that's unusual about human beings (and domesticated animals whose reproduction is managed by human beings), is what could be called "cultural speciation": groups are artificially kept from interbreeding even when there are no natural barriers to mixture. As far as we know, there's absolutely no biological problem with Jews and gentiles having kids, but gene flow into Jewish populations has nonetheless been quite low on a per-generation basis, low enough that Jewish/gentile divergence due to differing selection pressures is a possibility. And the same is true of a lot of artificial breeds among dogs and other animals. There's a lot of theoretical/conceptual work that needs to be done on the implications of cultural versus natural speciation, but it's a touchy subject, with lots of potential for generating bad feelings, so people shy away from it.

4/6/13, 10:30 AM

Blogger Eric Rasmusen said...

I was struck by something in the quotes--- it seems Darwin did not know of the idea of hybrid vigor. When was that discovered? I would have thought the ancients would have discovered it, but I guess not.

4/6/13, 10:32 AM

Anonymous Whitehall said...

I had a colleague who was very athletic and very intelligent.

His father was an American black and his mother was Japanese.

His problem was that he was continually breaking bones. His muscles were too strong for his skeleton.

There is power in hybridization but there are risks too.

4/6/13, 10:33 AM

Anonymous a very knowing American said...

One more reflection on "cultural speciation":

I get the impression that the Middle East and India really go in for cultural speciation -- groups kept reproductively isolated by cultural, not biological, barriers -- more than most other places. Probably related, they also seem very big on food taboos, compared to, say, Europeans or Chinese.

4/6/13, 10:37 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Here's a Wikipedia article on hybrid vigor:

"Corn heterosis was famously demonstrated in the early 20th century by George H. Shull and Edward M. East after hybrid corn was invented by Dr. William James Beal of Michigan State University based on work begun in 1879 at the urging of Charles Darwin. Dr. Beal's work led to the first published account of a field experiment demonstrating hybrid vigor in corn, by Eugene Davenport and Perry Holden, 1881."

Darwin married his first cousin, a Wedgwood. He had worries that his children's health problems were due to inbreeding so he had one of his son's investigate the issue. The son reported that he couldn't find evidence against cousin marriage. But, American eugenicists turned sharply against it.

Keep in mind that Darwin's descendants had both lots of health problems and lots of accomplishments.

4/6/13, 10:41 AM

Blogger pat said...

Gee Steve, when I encouraged you to write another book I didn't mean for you to do so as a blog entry.

Albertosaurus

4/6/13, 11:02 AM

Anonymous Noah C. said...

"Here's a Wikipedia article on hybrid vigor:"

Hybrid vigor does have its merits, but there are also potential drawbacks, such as the fact that many genes evolve to act in conjunction with one another. A better known example (at least among HBD circles, I've never heard it in science classes since such discussions are verboten), is one of African American heart disease. There is a certain heart condition which African Americans suffer from at 3-5x as much as Europeans or Africans. It seems that there are a set of several genes, which if you have the variants in the European set, you are fine, or if you have the variants of the African set, you are fine, but certain combinations of the two lead to a much higher rate of the heart disease. Certainly this opens the door to other combinations likely being out there which spell disaster for hybrids, but its doubtful that many liberal researchers would look for them, or that the research would get funding to specifically look for them.

In addition to that there are psychological problems which seem to plague hybrids- many feel out of place in either culture, and rates of suicide, drug use, etc can be higher.

And this is to say nothing of the impact of interracial marriage, etc on the parents, who may feel out of place in foreign cultures.

So the drive for everyone to "get down with the swirl" that the left is pushing on the US may not all its cracked up to be. Of course if you overpromote the positive and hide the negative, then a different picture is in everyone's mind.

4/6/13, 11:28 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Had California grown tremendously wealthy or just tremendously crowded? Population density tends to drive up the price of land.

How is the price of land in Bangladesh?

4/6/13, 11:29 AM

Blogger pat said...

The State Park that abuts my property is posted with signs warning people to beware of cougars. So I was discussing big cats with my neighbor the other day. I volunteered that the biggest cat was the Liger.

Is the Liger a species? Or a sub species? Jack Horner is trying to create a velociraptor out of an emu. What will it be?

The Linnaean binomial classification system only works well in carefully selected areas. It doesn't make much sense for domesticated animals much less artificial animals.

It was originally based on overt physical features. Later it was amended to group animals together based on lineage because of convergent evolution resulting in 'look alikes' from different lines.

For example, in earlier days the great apes were the chimp, gorilla and orangutan. Nowadays we have added the bonobo but split off orangutans. We are closer to chimps than any of us are to orangutans.

Domesticated animals don't fit well either. Two species of arctic terns look identical to us and behave in exactly the same way and come from the same ancestors. But they don't interbreed because of a tiny red mark near their beaks that one has and the other 'species' doesn't. They can interbreed but they don't in the wild. This contrasts with domesticated dogs. A Siberian Mastiff looks nothing like a Chihuahua but they are said to be in the same species because they can interbreed.

Quite soon companies will be creating their own species. Or will they be sub species? These animal lines will be patented. Lawyers will argue and grow rich on these kind of questions.

I think there is a better model or classification system yet to be discovered but it may be too complex for the layman or even the field biologist.

For example there is a good system to classify colors visible to humans. It is digital and assigns 8 bit numbers for red, green and blue. So some color like 'Sienna' might be 136,045,023. Painters and tourists will never call it by its numbers but digital illustrators will.

There is probably a similar digital classification system for animal and plant life. Now we just need some genius to create it.

Albertosaurus

4/6/13, 12:04 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"I have seen a references to australian aborigines as 'homo sapiens resens.' Take a look at those photos and tell me they are not a subspecies."

The different races of man are clearly at least subspecies, the question is whether they are different species (ie not all homo sapiens). Given the ease with which we can mix, I'd say subspecies.

4/6/13, 12:05 PM

Anonymous FirkinRidiculous said...

Steve, have you read Professor John Baker's 1974 book Race? Long out of print (Baker died in 1984), a new edition has now been made available by Ostara Publishing. He covers much of the same ground as you do but with a deeper grounding in zoology.

4/6/13, 12:18 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Had California grown tremendously wealthy or just tremendously crowded? Population density tends to drive up the price of land.

How is the price of land in Bangladesh?


The price of land in Bangladesh is more expensive than it would be if its population were half the size.

A mere 50 years ago, the U.S. population was half the size it is now.

4/6/13, 1:01 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The son reported that he couldn't find evidence against cousin marriage. But, American eugenicists turned sharply against it.

Circa when?

4/6/13, 1:03 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've thought about this in the past and decided that the ease of inter-breeding and the racial continuum that exists with races blending into one another lead me to believe that humans are one species.

So you define a species as a set of organisms that has "ease of inter-breeding"? Is that actual ease or potential ease? And if a set of organisms lacks ease of inter-breeding, are they not then of the same species?

4/6/13, 1:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The core definition of subspecies is that they do not naturally interbreed with each other. Africans and australians did not naturally interbreed with whites until whites explored those continents.

What does it mean to "naturally interbreed"?

4/6/13, 1:06 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Any discussion of JFK's enthusiasm for Special Forces, the missile gap, appropriate tax rates, or Ngo Diem Dinh would reveal that JFK would have no place in today's Democratic Party, and would be shunned as a reactionary Neanderthal.

His resistance to giving our military secrets to the Zionist entity would also make him persona non grata in today's Democratic Party.

4/6/13, 1:08 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

When you read Darwin, you experience a great mind thinking clearly and weighing evidence objectively. It's real science, as good as it gets.

So the definition of "real science" is clear thought and weighing of evidence "objectively." Care to be a little more specific?

4/6/13, 1:10 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The revelation that some humans have Neanderthal and/or Denisovan ancestry, while other humans do not have such ancestry tends to convince me that we should probably re-classify humanity as several sub species.

Alternatively we could say that everybody except Africans is partially non-human.

4/6/13, 1:10 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was struck by something in the quotes--- it seems Darwin did not know of the idea of hybrid vigor. When was that discovered? I would have thought the ancients would have discovered it, but I guess not.

Or maybe hybrid vigor is not all it is cracked up to be. Or we have a distorted perception of it because its costs and downsides are not discussed or appreciated.

4/6/13, 1:13 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

His problem was that he was continually breaking bones. His muscles were too strong for his skeleton.

His muscles broke his bones?

4/6/13, 1:14 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Probably related, they also seem very big on food taboos, compared to, say, Europeans or Chinese.

The point of food taboos is to keep groups reproductively isolated. Mealtimes are a very important activity of human socializing.

4/6/13, 1:17 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those of officially embrace the Descent of Man will not allow the dissent of man.

4/6/13, 1:41 PM

Anonymous Corn said...

"Quite soon companies will be creating their own species."

Well Albertosaurus just wait til the biotech companies start creating centaurs and elfin creatures like the Draka did in conquered North America.

4/6/13, 2:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Route 128 outside of Boston."

Actually, route 128 sort of encircles boston and a few suburbs. You should think of it as a misshapen and unbuckled beltway around Boston, not a location outside of Boston.

4/6/13, 3:18 PM

Anonymous JSM said...

"Alternatively we could say that everybody except Africans is partially non-human"


If we did that, soon enough "human" would become a pejorative, just like Negro.

4/6/13, 4:13 PM

Anonymous Silver said...

is more of a proxy for what we really want to know: who is related to whom? And how?

Most people are aware that, on some level, we're 'all related.' So what people really want to know is how closely we're related to others and what our relationship to those others should be/how we should relate to them. I think the interest is greatest in pondering what to make of one's 'racial next of kin':the racial group/type which most closely resembling one's own, which outsiders are apt to classify as 'the same thing,' but which remains too different for an insider to do the same.

You can test this idea by asking yourself on which occasions, out of all the times you've asked what background someone is, were you most interested in hearing the answer? I would bet that the times you were most interested were when the other person seemed racially related to you and you wanted more information so that you would know what to make of him or her: 'one of us' or 'next-of-kin'? Other times, when it's obvious the other person is racially very unlike, the question has more of a 'conversation filler' quality to it. For example, if you're German and you ask someone who looks SE Asian, you don't really care what his answer is going to be; Cambodian or Vietnamese, say, there's no reason to get more excited over one of those than the other.

4/6/13, 6:48 PM

Anonymous Frank Wong said...

"That is the fundamental, mathematical truth - this iterative mixing of DNA with a few random errors over time - is how life has evolved, the phenotype changing all the while. "

Iterative is the wrong term to use here - that would imply teleology.

4/7/13, 5:02 PM

Anonymous R said...

I've been arguing that the naturalists' approach to classifying humans into races / subspecies based on visible characteristics, which Darwin found so conundrum-generating, is more of a proxy for what we really want to know: who is related to whom?

When imposing discrete categories on continouous data the question is more "how useful is this category" than "how true is this category". Both the morphological (and part cultural) concept of race and the ancestral concept of race are useful in different contexts, and as they are only imperfect proxys for each other, I'd argue that they should be considered seperately.

Because of the the nature of human interaction and psychology, I think the morphological conception of race (squared off by culture)is inherently easier to discreetize, and more relevant in a social context. When some one wonders about their social identity, or someone else on the street, or when the media reports the race of somebody, they generally aren't checking a few thousand SNPs to see where that person fits on a PC plot with other hapMap populations. Epistemologically, race in these social contexts is morphological-cultural, not ancestral, whatever your opinion on evolutionary differences in psychology.

On the other hand, in a GWAS study the ancestral conception of race (I'd argue for a different term here, to escape from the colloqiual and historical connations of the word) is far more relevant.

Implying that the ancestral definition is the "truer" and more revealing definition of race runs counter to the way people live with race in the world today. Maybe this will change in the biomedical world of tomorrow, but it is morphology (and culture) primarily that matter in the social world of today.

The core definition of subspecies is that they do not naturally interbreed with each other. Africans and australians did not naturally interbreed with whites until whites explored those continents

Right, so soon after these groups were in contact, they interbred. Sounds like "natural" interbreeding by just about any definition of the word.

4/7/13, 6:54 PM

Blogger Truth said...

Garbage; I'm not aware of any recent study that suggests a significant fluxuation in rate of procreation between the races.

"Africans and australians did not naturally interbreed with whites until whites explored those continents."

Correct; horny and aroused white MALES.

4/7/13, 6:55 PM

Anonymous Svigor said...

Correct; horny and aroused white MALES.

They were also randy, engorged, lascivious, ruttish, bawdy, carnal, salacious, concupiscent, erotomaniacal, tumescent, ithyphallic, and, of course, priapic.

4/8/13, 10:00 AM

Anonymous Svigor said...

If we did that, soon enough "human" would become a pejorative, just like Negro.

Reminds me of the inverse. Just caught a bit of Rush talking about Thatcher, and how her moniker "Iron Lady" originated with TASS, from whom the western press borrowed it with gusto.

He said they didn't mean it as a compliment, but it soon became one.

4/8/13, 10:09 AM

Anonymous Svigor said...

Since my previous comment seems to have been eaten, I'll recapitulate:

If aliens from another galaxy had this conversation, one of them would surely point out that one sort of creature builds skyscrapers, and the other does not, lending credence to the idea of separate species of Earthling.

Another would point out that smaller differences become more salient in sentients.

4/8/13, 10:14 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

When imposing discrete categories on continouous data.

Is there any real life data that is NOT continuous?

4/8/13, 2:35 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ms. Rosenberg doesn't bother to investigate what, exactly, is missing in the daily living conditions of these babies that they are called "poor."

There was a time when we knew what "poor" meant in practical, realistic terms. Now, I wonder if the circumstances regarding shelter, clothing, and especially food is really so different between the "poor" and the average kid from a working class or middle class family.

4/11/13, 5:35 PM

Comments are moderated, at whim.
You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

You will be asked to sign in after submitting your comment.
OpenID LiveJournal WordPress TypePad AOL