Nature of Race (Published)

Below is an expanded and much improved rewrite of a draft which I had posted last year — improved thanks to the helpful commentary of Davide Piffer, Emil Kirkegaard, Kevin MacDonald, Peter Frost, Meng Hu, and others. As for the work, the intent was to  clarify the concept of race, understood from the perspective of natural history, so to render the term which describes it inessential. It is hoped that the piece will also clarify the purpose of this blog, the focus of which is human varieties, of which races as constant varieties and natural divisions are but subtypes.

Fuerst, J. (2015). The Nature of Race: the Genealogy of the Concept and the Biological Construct’s Contemporaneous Utility. Open Behavioral Genetics.

Abstract: Racial constructionists, anti-naturalists, and anti-realists have challenged users of the biological race concept to provide and defend, from the perspective of biology, biological philosophy, and ethics, a biologically informed concept of race. In this paper, an onto-epistemology of biology is developed. What it is, by this, to be “biological real” and “biologically meaningful” and to represent a “biological natural division” is explained. Early 18th century race concepts are discussed in detail and are shown to be both sensible and not greatly dissimilar to modern concepts. A general biological race concept (GBRC) is developed. It is explained what the GBRC does and does not entail and how this concept unifies the plethora of specific ones, past and present. Other race concepts as developed in the philosophical literature are discussed in relation to the GBRC. The sense in which races are both real and natural is explained. Racial essentialism of the relational sort is shown to be coherent. Next, the GBRC is discussed in relation to anthropological discourse. Traditional human racial classifications are defended from common criticisms: historical incoherence, arbitrariness, cluster discordance, etc. Whether or not these traditional human races could qualify as taxa subspecies — or even species — is considered. It is argued that they could qualify as taxa subspecies by liberal readings of conventional standards. Further, it is pointed out that some species concepts potentially allow certain human populations to be designated as species. It is explained why, by conventional population genetic and statistical standards, genetic differences between major human racial groups are at least moderate. Behavioral genetic differences associated with human races are discussed in general and in specific. The matter of race differences in cognitive ability is briefly considered. Finally, the race concept is defended from various criticisms. First, logical and empirical critiques are dissected. These include: biological scientific, sociological, ontological, onto-epistemological, semantic, and teleological arguments. None are found to have any merit. Second, moral-based arguments are investigated in context to a general ethical frame and are counter-critiqued. Racial inequality, racial nepotism, and the “Racial Worldview” are discussed. What is dubbed the Anti-Racial Worldview is rejected on both empirical and moral grounds. Finally, an area of future investigation – the politics of the destruction of the race concept – is pointed to.

Keywords: natural division, race, biology

Contents

Introduction………………………………………..………………………………………………………………………………………..4

I. Biology – A Philosophical Clarification…………………………………………..………………………………..……..5
I-A. Existing Views: Confusions Abound
I-B. Biological Concepts in General
I-C. The Validity of Biological Concepts
I-D. Biological Kinds
I-E. Natural Biological Divisions
I-F. Races as Natural Biological Divisions
I-G. The Intraspecific Natural Division as Type of Biological Variation
I-H. The Natural Division as a Taxonomic Unit
I-I. Natural Divisions and Intraspecific Variation with Regards to the Subspecies Category
I-J. Biologically Meaningful Race Concepts
I-K. Biological Reality
I-L. Biologically Important Differences
I-M. Concepts of Biological Race

II. The General Biological Race Concept………………………………………………………..………………..……..25
II-A. The Genealogy of the Concept
II-B. Semantic Complexities and the Evolution of the Race Concept
II-C. Biological Race
II-D. What the Core Biological Race Concept Does Not represent
II-E. Races, Clines, Clusters?
II-F. Clarification on the Meaning of “Arbitrary” and “Objective” in Context to Natural Divisions
II-G. Regarding Different Definitions of Biological Race: What Races Need Not Be
II-H. Genomic-Genealogical Complications
II-I. Estimated Genomic Similarity: Some Ambiguity
II-J. Race: Mixed and Undifferentiated
II-K. Essential and Cluster classes; Fuzzy and Discrete Sets
II-L. Sociological Clarifications

III. The Ontology of Biological Race……………………………………………….……………………………………..……62
III-A. Other Defenses of Biological Race
III-B. Biological Races and Biological Reality
III-C. Thin Biological Racial Essentialism

IV. The Races of Man……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………81
IV-A. A Very Brief Historical Review
IV-B. Human Biological Races and Scientific Consensus
IV-C. Racial Classifications and Biological Race Concepts
IV-D. Traditional human Races
IV-E. THRs and Biologically Objective Races
IV-F. THRs and Migration, Intermixing, and Ancient Admixture
IV-G. THRs and Cluster Discordance
IV-H. THRs and Taxonomy
IV-I. THRs and Subspecies
IV-J. Are There Human Species?
IV-K. “Significant” Racial Differences
IV-L. Human Biodiversity (HBD) and Society
IV-M. Race and Intelligence

V. Critique of Anti-Biological Race Arguments………………………………….…………………………………….126
V-A. Anti-Biological Arguments
V-B. Biological Scientific Arguments
V-C. Sociological Arguments
V-D. Unnaturalistic Arguments and the Numbers Game
V-E. Onto-epistemology Arguments
V-F. Semantic Arguments
V-G. No-True-Race Arguments
V-H. Teleological Argument: The Future of Race
V.I. Can a Good Argument be Made Against (the) Race (concept)?

VI. A Troublesome Inheritance?…………………………………………………………………………………………………148
VI-A. The Social Destruction of a Biological Reality
VI-B. A Not So New Morality for Race
VI-C. The Moral Critiques: Arguments based on Outcome Differences
VI-D. The Moral Critiques: Arguments based on Racial Classification and Identity
VI-E. The Moral Critiques: Arguments based on Racial Favoritism
VI-F. The Moral Critiques: Arguments based on the “Racial Worldview”

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……………………169

References…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………170

 

NofRpic

19 Comments

  1. B.B.

    This is a book worthy of formal print-publication. If political incorrectness precludes an academic press, I’d think Washington Summit or Nine-Banded Books would be willing to publish it. The 9BB twitter account actually tweeted a link to this article, so I’m confident Chip Smith would be willing.

    • Chuck

      The uncertainty surrounding the race-IQ debate will be significantly narrowed before the end of the year because (1) more cognitive alleles have been found:
      http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/06/more-gwas-hits-on-cognitive-ability.html, because (2) the results from Emil and my regional admixture project will be published, and because — if I can find someone to work on it — (3) a paper on individual level genomic admixture and cognitive outcomes in the U.S. will be published (I finally procured a data set). So, I was thinking of waiting. In the meantime, the paper could still use some editing. If you know of anyone, I could pay them maybe $300.

    • Joe Doe

      >This is a book worthy of formal print-publication.

      I agree but the typesetting/typography is pretty bad: ragged alignment, ugly tables, lots of spacing issues and incosistencies.

      Latex has great support for scientific typesetting (bibliographies/citations, tables, maths and footnotes) and would produce a lot more professional looking results.

      https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
      https://www.sharelatex.com/

      • Chuck

        Half of the reason it looked like shit was because I used word 2003 to make the PDF. I did not really notice the mentioned problems as I edited and read the work primarily as a doc file. I changed it to a word 2013 PDF file. See if it looks better.

  2. samfrancis716

    Chuck, what’s your opinion of this?
    http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/

    • Meng Hu

      Too busy these days. But for what I can see, I know that Chuck won’t be impressed. Personally, I would like to see a real IQ test (not GCSE stuff) that measures cognitive ability and nothing else (e.g., culture, school-knowledge, …) such as reaction times. If in such a test, you see a sizeable black-white narrowing, larger than predicted by HH, I would start to believe that the HH is considerably weakened.

      When your article talks about culture/knowledge as a cause of the narrowing, I think the author needs to reveal it in a statistical way. For instance, by using MGCFA or IRT. I have conducted MGCFA on the Woodcock Johnson’s data, used in Charles Murray’s (2007) paper. The data have 3 waves, and all were (more or less) measurement invariant, which means there is no (or little) cultural bias. If the narrowing in the WJ was due to cultural bias, I would have expected the model fitting to be more MI in recent waves than in early waves (and the cultural bias to be one-sided, i.e., against blacks); I don’t see that. So, the narrowing in that data has (almost) nothing to do with culture. Of course, it could be that MGCFA was not really able of detecting cultural bias. Who knows; maybe MGCFA is a silly technique.

      That being said, I want to remind you that your question is a little bit off-topic considering the blog article here “The Nature of Race” (you should repost it on a different blog article, for instance, this one). If you are interested, you can read and leave a comment regarding the conversation we have in the submission thread of that paper, right here.

    • Chuck

      After looking through the data, I responded:

      “@Chanda Chisala
      @pumpkinperson

      I went through the math and found similar results. Using Barro-Lee’s Data set, 1990 and 2000 Nigerian/African emigrants to the OECD were ~ 2.2 SD selected in educational attainment (years of schooling).

      Pumpkinperson makes a mistake when it comes to estimating offspring IQ, though. The kind of random variance that doesn’t pass along across generations also happens to be the kind of variance that doesn’t predict outcomes (references on request). Thus if you select for IQ by a proxy variable like EA, IQ differences will almost fully be passed on since you already mostly eliminated the noise component. Thus, given an IQ x EA correlation, the kids should be only a little less than 1.4 SD selected.

      I’m not sure that we can assume a Nigerian/African IQ x EA correlation of 0.7. But I think that it’s reasonable to posit that Black Africans are at least 1 SD selected in IQ. I just looked through the PIAAC and other assessment scores. Black African adults age 16 to 65 score not more that 1 SD below the UK white mean. It’s more like 0.8 — and this is on (cultural loaded) reading and math tests. (Wide confidence intervals, though.)

      If we assume that most of these adults are African born and if we grant that Black Africans have measured IQs ~ 1.66 to 2 SD below the white adult UK mean, there must be significant selection. Further, Rindermann et al.’s paper, “Cognitive ability and epistemic rationality”, put the educated Nigerian IQ at about 15 points above the national average. Granted the sample size was tiny. These educated Nigerians would be the type that migrated to the UK. Anyways, these three points taken together suggest that Nigerian/African emigrants fall around at least the 84% percentile in cognitive ability relative to the Nigerian/African mean.

      Of course, we don’t have Nigerian/African biometric variance component estimates, so we are kind of stuck, unless we are willing to make strong inferences.

      Now, Chanda, I looked through your data. The “Raising the Achievement of Black African Pupils: Good Practice in Schools” paper was rubbish. The Black African sample size appears to be 411. And the schools were selective. Whites at those very schools performed 13 “percent points” above the national average — and Black Caribbeans 16. Indeed, discussing the sample, the authors note:

      “Six secondary schools with a high number of Black African students that serve disadvantaged communities were selected for case studies. The case study schools’ GCSE results were exceptionally good.. Key criteria for the selection of schools were as follow:
      –an above‐average proportion of students who are eligible for free school meals
      –‘outstanding’ or ‘good with outstanding features’ grades overall in the most recent Ofsted inspection
      –exceptionally good results, high standards
      –sustained GCSE improvement over the last 10 years”

      Hmmm… When I made the appropriate adjustments only Igbo (N= 16?, d = 0.68), Ga (N= 8?, d = 0.10), and TwiFante (N=37?, d= 0.15) performed above UK Whites at the same (select) schools (where d = the standardized difference). Your whole case, in that regards, ends up resting on the performance of a tiny group of Igbo speaking kids at an unrepresentative set of schools. (Note: I computed sample sizes by multiplying 411 by the reported % who spoke the language– it’s not clear if the 411 is for each year or for all year or what; the authors just note:
      “Of the 411 Black African students who took GCSE, 21% spoke English at home, 22% Yoruba, 13% Somali, 9% Twi‐Fante, 5% French, 4% Igbo, 4% Krio…”

      To be fair, you do cited other results. You note “A 2007 report on “case study” model schools in Lambeth…” and then mention again the amazing results of Ibo. But this is by the same author as above using the same sample, one which ran from 2007 to 2011. The same problems for this subsample exist as they do for the full case study sample!

      Now the Nigerians scores are more interested. Scores by immigrant nations are problematic, in general, since many African immigrants are White European or Asian. See, for example, Table 5 in Easterly and Nyarko’s (2008) “Is the brain drain good for Africa?”. However the vast majority of Nigerian emigrants happen to be Black, so in this case the scores can be in this respect unproblematically used.

      The Nigerian scores are though problematic on other accounts. Firstly, the paper you cited along with others noted that only select schools adopted extended ethnic codes, thus nationally representative samples and scores are unavailable. Second, I was able to find papers which reported multi-school Nigerian GCSE scores for three years: 2003, 2005, 2010/2011. (The one you reported plus one with 2005 data.) The standardized differences relative to UK Whites (transforming percent into d-value based on some questionable assumptions which the GCSE reporting method forces us to make) were 0, 0, and 0.6.

      I appreciate that you feel that the 2010/2011 value is the “true” one, but it’s impossible to tell. All of the papers which discuss these extended ethnicity codes noted that across time scores are not comparable since at different times different schools adopt different extended codes.
      So where does this leave us? It leaves us with what I already wrote 3 1/2 years ago and some suggestive evidence that Nigerians may perform between 0 and 0.6 SD above the Black African ~
      White UK mean. So basically, no progression from the mean I set; you are not even close to a reasonably sound argument!

      To constructs a dispositive one, you would need:
      (a) the latent ability differences between the natives of the UK and of West Africa
      (b) the latent ability differences between natives and Black emigrants from West Africa
      (c) the latent ability differences between White natives and the children of Black emigrants from West Africa
      (d) the environmental and genetic variance components for all four groups.

      Of course, we can only hold you to Lynn’s standards — which aren’t particularly high. So we can’t expect you to move beyond manifest values.

      As for those I just checked the 2013 GCSE scores and they were roughly the same as in 2010. And in 2010 the Black African CAT3 FSIQ score would have been around 0.6 SD below the UK white mean. (The average subtlest score d-value was around 0.5 SD.) So Black African parity with UK Whites in GCSE seems to be consistent with a Black African – White cognitive d-value of around 0.6.

      Generally, assuming that emigrant Black Africans are at least 1 SD selected relative to the mean and assuming that the h2 (narrow heritability) + c2 (shared environment) in Africa is ~0.6, the data is consistent with a proposed African “genotypic IQ” — a confused concept, but one everyone seems to employ — of 85.

      This is precisely what I deduced 3.5 years ago! All you managed to do is show that for Nigerians the calculations might possibly be more complex.

      And this: “…even if hereditarians can somehow manage to convincingly argue that the Nigerian (or Igbo) children in the UK do in fact have a lower IQ than average white children, as their biological model predicts (despite our evidence), they also have to show that these West African children even have a lower IQ than average black American children”

      Get out of here. I came across this on Wikipedia:

      “Most Igbo slaves were not victims of slave-raiding wars or expeditions, but were sometimes debtors and people who committed what their communities considered to be abominations or crimes”

      Probably not the educational elite being sold off.”

  3. Anti-Hereditarian

    I have a question:

    When you create your national, racial or other IQ averages, why do you rely on values that were collected in studies that are sometimes more than 40 years old ?

    I mean, if I’m a cloth manufacturer who needs to sell merchandise to Nigeria now in 2015, I need the average height of Nigerians now and not their height in 70’s with vague estimations of what it could be now in 2015.

    Because if you are familiar with Wicherts et al. you get confused with the figures.

    Values from 2006 and 2007 based on international standardized tests of scholastic achievement indicate an IQ of 88.1 .

    Values from various studies and from various years between the 1960’s and now gave an average of 83.5 according to their authors and 69 according to Richard Lynn.

    Other values, also reported the 5 last decades were selected on systematic criteria by Wicherts et al. and gave me an average of 83.8

    So tell me, what is Nigeria’s average brain cloth size ? Who should I trust ? It’s important for me to know because I won’t sell if the merchandise does not fit their brains. I’m talking serious business, not about shaming Nigerians on the size they need…

    • Chuck

      Firstly, I do not care for snide moral shaming. Persist and you will find yourself banned.

      Secondly, national variance in measured cognitive ability causally explains some national variance in socioeconomic outcomes. Since many are concerned about the latter, it is reasonable for them and others to be interested in the former. Concern about differences entails concern about the cause thereof. Genetic factors are plausible causal ones; moreover, deleterious congenital influences are potentially ameliorable. No further — and much less — justification is needed for this line of inquiry.

      Thirdly, the “NofR” paper was not primarily about racial differences in behavioral traits. I discussed the issue only because some contend that the race concept is harmful — and so should go unrecognized — because it conditions racial discrimination as evidenced by outcome differences. I noted that the precise cause of outcome differences is yet undetermined and I articulated an alternative (non-racial discrimination, hereditarian) model. I had imagined that I was fairly clear regarding my intent: “Our point here, though, is not to argue the case for average congenital biological racial differences in intelligence or other behavioral traits. It is simply to note that the issue is presently undetermined. This has bearing on some of the argument leveled against the biological race concept.”

      That said, I did present “racial or other IQ averages” (table 4.13). These specific scores were taken from Christainsen (2013) and were presented (1) because scores were decomposed by genetically defined racial clusters and (2) because the statistical effects of a numbers of socioeconomic factors — the types of factors that you yourself had pointed to as confounds — were controlled for. I was unable to locate a paper which both reported adjusted scores by genetic cluster and which used only very recent data. As such, my options were limited. I did refer readers to other compilations. I also noted a number of reasons on account of which “to be skeptical about the existence of a genetic basis for such differences”. Overall, I feel that my treatment of the topic was unusually even-handed. I recognize, though, that one can not please everyone.

      This all said, your concern seems to be more with various African estimates. On that matter, I would refer you to: Rindermann’s (2013) “African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations.” As noted by the author, an unadjusted measured regional African IQ of around 75 fits the data. More recent IQ data — e.g., from Lynn’s 2015/2016 compilation in progress –agrees with this.

  4. Chuck

    Sorry, I have been away. Was there something specific which you would like me to comment on? If you would like to discuss the topic in depth you can always email me at: j122177(at)hotmail.com

    • TMI

      The name above, “anti-hereditarian”, is interesting.

      All these critics like to cite the accusations against Cyril Burt. You may wish to look at Tredoux, G. (2015). Defrauding Cyril Burt: A reanalysis of the social mobility data. Intelligence, 49, 32-43.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwh8eY84NI4SUVktbk1VZzJJU2l5R0IzdldxR3hEMk1ndlNN/view?usp=sharing

      Those accusations no longer seems to have much merit.

      • TMI

        Scientific consensus is that IQ tests are not racially biased: Survey of opinions on the primacy of g and social consequences of ability testing: A comparison of expert and non-expert views. Intelligence
        Volume 36, Issue 6, November–December 2008, Pages 681–688
        Charlie L. Reeve, , Jennifer E. Charles

        https://archive.is/BU9fr

    • TMI

      These folks also like to cite Leon Kamin, but see
      Review: Intelligence and Ideology
      Author(s): D. N. Jackson
      Review by: D. N. Jackson
      Source: Science, New Series, Vol. 189, No. 4208 (Sep. 26, 1975), pp. 1078-1080

      Also see “A World of Difference: Richard Lynn Maps World Intelligence” (a defense of Richard Lynn*) by Jason Malloy, from which we read that “it is actually Kamin himself who can most convincingly be charged with data distortion and heavily compromised objectivity, see Mackintosh 1998 pp 78-79, 98-102”: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/02/world-of-difference-richard-lynn-maps.php

      *people attacking Lynn also like to attack the text “The Bell Curve”, but see “The Bell Curve, 20 years after”, on this site.

  5. Chuck

    Ben, I will look into the matter and get back to you on it. The issue is not particularly relevant to debates about the race concept: as such, I did not investigate and critically evaluate critiques of the OOA model.

    • TMI

      Two apparently reliable sources on this issue areas follows:
      1) Genomics refutes an exclusively African origin of humans
      Vinayak Eswaran a
      , Henry Harpending b,
      *, Alan R. Rogers

      “Abstract
      Ten years ago, evidence from genetics gave strong support to the ‘‘recent African origin’’ view of the evolution of
      modern humans, which posits that Homo sapiens arose as a new species in Africa and subsequently spread, leading to
      the extinction of other archaic human species. Subsequent data from the nuclear genome not only fail to support this
      model, they do not support any simple model of human demographic history. In this paper, we study a process in which
      the modern human phenotype originates in Africa and then advances across the world by local demic diffusion,
      hybridization, and natural selection. While the multiregional model of human origins posits a number of independent
      single locus selective sweeps, and the ‘‘out of Africa’’ model posits a sweep of a new species, we study the intermediate
      case of a phenotypic sweep. Numerical simulations of this process replicate many of the seemingly contradictory
      features of the genetic data, and suggest that as much as 80% of nuclear loci have assimilated genetic material from
      non-African archaic humans.”:
      http://www.femininebeauty.info/f/human.origin.pdf

      2) Creating the Human Past: An Epistemology of Pleistocene Archaeology
      Robert G. Bednarik
      Archaeopress, 2013 – 187 pages

  6. Chuck

    Yes, I pointed this out to “Krom”. Perhaps you could leave a comment in the talk section of Rational Wiki.

    • TMI

      You and this website have been attacked on rationalwiki, contra those attacks, but OpenPsych requires a minimum of three reviewers. http://openpsych.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=5
      The reviewers are notable researchers with published articles in conventional journals: http://openpsych.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=15 (and as regards Kevin MacDonald, a well known PhD in evolutionary psychology, whose CV (particularly p. 2) reveals him to be well qualified in reviewing this work: http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Vita-pc.pdf)
      The Nature of Race was reviewed by several researchers before publication. http://openpsych.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=226 (it appears that the general objections to the concepts as put forth there have been answered in that thread)

      Charles Darwin also expresses some quite different opinions to modern dogma against the race concept: http://www.heretical.com/darwin/darwin4.html, and it is interesting in spite of dogma about Race being a “social construct” that the Scientific American article “Does Race Exist?” (Scientific American 289 no 6 78-85 D 2003) noted that “people can be sorted broadly into groups using genetic data.” and that “Last January the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued guidelines advocating the collection of race and ethnicity data in all clinical trials.”: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~wlacefie/Papers%20and%20Articles/Does%20Race%20Exist%20article.doc, and medically, Race is certainly an issue when considering Bone Marrow Transplants, on that, see the article “Bone Marrow Transplants: When Race Is an Issue” by Christopher Shay (Time. Thursday, June 03, 2010): http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1993074,00.html

      a relevant item is “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies”, the abstract of which states that “We have analyzed genetic data for 326 microsatellite markers that were typed uniformly in a large multiethnic population-based sample of individuals as part of a study of the genetics of hypertension (Family Blood Pressure Program). Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population.”: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

      Also relevant is “Modeling the 3D Geometry of the Cortical Surface with Genetic Ancestry”, which states that “Knowing how the human brain is shaped by migration and admixture is a critical step in studying human evolution [ 1, 2 ], as well as in preventing the bias of hidden population structure in brain research [ 3, 4 ]. Yet, the neuroanatomical differences engendered by population history are still poorly understood. Most of the inference relies on craniometric measurements, because morphology of the brain is presumed to be the neurocranium’s main shaping force before bones are fused and ossified [ 5 ]. Although studies have shown that the shape variations of cranial bones are consistent with population history [ 6–8 ], it is unknown how much human ancestry information is retained by the human cortical surface. In our group’s previous study, we found that area measures of cortical surface and total brain volumes of individuals of European descent in the United States correlate significantly with their ancestral geographic locations in Europe [ 9 ]. Here, we demonstrate that the three-dimensional geometry of cortical surface is highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events. The geometry of the cortical surface contains richer information about ancestry than the areal variability of the cortical surface, independent of total brain volumes. Besides explaining more ancestry variance than other brain imaging measurements, the 3D geometry of the cortical surface further characterizes distinct regional patterns in the folding and gyrification of the human brain associated with each ancestral lineage.”: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2900671-5

      Some more articles of relevance to this issue follow:
      Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa.
      Hammer MF1, Woerner AE, Mendez FL, Watkins JC, Wall JD.
      Author information
      Abstract

      “A long-debated question concerns the fate of archaic forms of the genus Homo: did they go extinct without interbreeding with anatomically modern humans, or are their genes present in contemporary populations? This question is typically focused on the genetic contribution of archaic forms outside of Africa. Here we use DNA sequence data gathered from 61 noncoding autosomal regions in a sample of three sub-Saharan African populations (Mandenka, Biaka, and San) to test models of African archaic admixture. We use two complementary approximate-likelihood approaches and a model of human evolution that involves recent population structure, with and without gene flow from an archaic population. Extensive simulation results reject the null model of no admixture and allow us to infer that contemporary African populations contain a small proportion of genetic material (≈ 2%) that introgressed ≈ 35 kya from an archaic population that split from the ancestors of anatomically modern humans ≈ 700 kya. Three candidate regions showing deep haplotype divergence, unusual patterns of linkage disequilibrium, and small basal clade size are identified and the distributions of introgressive haplotypes surveyed in a sample of populations from across sub-Saharan Africa. One candidate locus with an unusual segment of DNA that extends for >31 kb on chromosome 4 seems to have introgressed into modern Africans from a now-extinct taxon that may have lived in central Africa. Taken together our results suggest that polymorphisms present in extant populations introgressed via relatively recent interbreeding with hominin forms that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans in the Lower-Middle Pleistocene.”: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21896735

      Also, “WHEN the first modern humans left Africa they were ill-equipped to cope with unfamiliar diseases. But by interbreeding with the local hominins, it seems they picked up genes that protected them and helped them eventually spread across the planet.

      The publication of the Neanderthal genome last year offered proof that Homo sapiens bred with Neanderthals after leaving Africa. There is also evidence that suggests they enjoyed intimate relations with other hominins including the Denisovans, a species identified last year from a Siberian fossil.

      […]

      The humans that left Africa probably carried only a limited number of HLA alleles as they likely travelled in small groups. Worse, their HLAs would have been adapted to African diseases.

      When Parham compared the HLA genes of people from different regions of the world with the Neanderthal and Denisovan HLAs, he found evidence that non-African humans picked up new alleles from the hominins they interbred with.

      One allele, HLA-C*0702, is common in modern Europeans and Asians but never seen in Africans; Parham found it in the Neanderthal genome, suggesting it made its way into H. sapiens of non-African descent through interbreeding. HLA-A*11 had a similar story: it is mostly found in Asians and never in Africans, and Parham found it in the Denisovan genome, again suggesting its source was interbreeding outside of Africa.

      Parham points out that because Neanderthals and Denisovans had lived outside Africa for over 200,000 years by the time they encountered H. sapiens, their HLAs would have been well suited to local diseases, helping to protect migrating H. sapiens too.

      While only 6 per cent of the non-African modern human genome comes from other hominins, the share of HLAs acquired during interbreeding is much higher. Half of European HLA-A alleles come from other hominins, says Parham, and that figure rises to 72 per cent for people in China, and over 90 per cent for those in Papua New Guinea.

      This suggests they were increasingly selected for as H. sapiens moved east. That could be because humans migrating north would have faced fewer diseases than those heading towards the tropics of south-east Asia, says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.”:https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028174-000-breeding-with-neanderthals-helped-humans-go-global/ (Also, see: “Neanderthals may have been first human species to create cave paintings
      Estimates of the age of cave paintings in northern Spain could be the final nail in the coffin of the ‘dumb Neanderthals’ myth”: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/14/neanderthals-first-create-cave-paintings)

      More insight can be found in the article “Ancient Humans Had Sex With Mystery Species, New DNA Study Shows”, which deals with East Asians:
      “The new Denisovan genome indicates that this enigmatic population got around: Reich said at the meeting that they interbred with Neanderthals and with the ancestors of human populations that now live in China and other parts of East Asia, in addition to Oceanic populations, as his team previously reported. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the new genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago, which is neither human nor Neanderthal.

      The meeting was abuzz with conjecture about the identity of this potentially new population of humans. “We don’t have the faintest idea,” says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, who was not involved in the work. He speculates that the population could be related to Homo heidelbergensis, a species that left Africa around half a million years ago and later gave rise to Neanderthals in Europe. “Perhaps it lived on in Asia as well,” Stringer says.”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/19/ancient-humans-sex-mystery-species-dna_n_4302031.html

      • TMI

        Somethin few people address on race is the defects on race mixing. The Jews have a culture rejecting this and that is probably why they are so eugenic. Darwin himself noted this. The sources are

        Charles Darwin, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, 2nd ed., John Murray, London, 1875, vol. II, pp. 8; 19; 21; 62-63 and The Origin of Species, 1st ed., Penguin, London, 1968; pp. 196; 239 (see also 1875: 1/43); 275; 287 (see also 1875: 2/43).

        As follows, “When two distinct races are crossed, it is notorious that the tendency in the offspring to revert to one or both parent forms is strong, and endures for many generations.

        The Earl of Powis formerly imported some thoroughly domesticated humped cattle from India, and crossed them with English breeds, which belong to a distinct species; and his agent remarked to me, without any question having been asked, how oddly wild the cross-bred animals were.

        These latter facts remind us of the statements, so frequently made by travellers in all parts of the world, on the degraded state and savage disposition of crossed races of man. That many excellent and kind-hearted mulattos have existed no one will dispute; and a more mild and gentle set of men could hardly be found than the inhabitants of the island of Chilce, who consist of Indians commingled with Spaniards in various proportions. On the other hand, many years ago, long before I had thought of the present subject, I was struck with the fact that, in South America, men of complicated descent between Negroes, Indians, and Spaniards, seldom had, whatever the cause might be, a good expression.1 Livingstone,– and a more unimpeachable authority cannot be quoted,– after speaking of a half-caste man on the Zambesi, described by the Portuguese as a rare monster of inhumanity, remarks, “It is unaccountable why half-castes, such as he, are so much more cruel than the Portuguese, but such is undoubtedly the case.” An inhabitant remarked to Livingstone, “God made white men, and God made black men, but the Devil made half-castes.”2 When two races, both low in the scale, are crossed the progeny seems to be eminently bad. Thus the noble-hearted Humboldt, who felt no prejudice against the inferior races, speaks in strong terms of the bad and savage disposition of Zambos, or half-castes between Indians and Negroes; and this conclusion has been arrived at by various observers.3 From these facts we may perhaps infer that the degraded state of so many half-castes is in part due to reversion to a primitive and savage condition, induced by the act of crossing, even if mainly due to the unfavourable moral conditions under which they are generally reared.
        Journal of Researches, 1845, p. 71.
        Expedition to the Zambesi, 1865, pp. 25, 150.
        Dr. P. Broca, on ‘Hybridity in the Genus Homo,’ Eng. translat., 1864, p. 39.

        No man in his senses would expect to improve or modify a breed in any particular manner, or keep an old breed true and distinct, unless he separated his animals.

        It is a very surprising fact that characters should reappear after having been lost for many, perhaps for hundreds of generations. But when a breed has been crossed only once by some other breed, the offspring occasionally show a tendency to revert in character to the foreign breed for many generations – some say, for a dozen or even a score of generations. After twelve generations, the proportion of blood, to use a common expression, of any one ancestor, is only 1 in 2048; and yet, as we see, it is generally believed that a tendency to reversion is retained by this very small proportion of foreign blood.

        How strongly these domestic instincts, habits, and dispositions are inherited, and how curiously they become mingled, is well shown when different breeds of dogs are crossed. Thus it is known that a cross with a bull-dog has affected for many generations the courage and obstinacy of greyhounds; and a cross with a greyhound has given to a whole family of shepherd-dogs a tendency to hunt hares.

        Some species have a remarkable power of crossing with other species; other species of the same genus have a remarkable power of impressing their likeness on their hybrid offspring.

        I think these authors are right, who maintain that the ass has a prepotent power over the horse, so that both the mule and the hinny more resemble the ass than the horse; but that the prepotency runs more strongly in the male-ass than in the female, so that the mule, which is the offspring of the male-ass and mare, is more like an ass, than is the hinny, which is the offspring of the female-ass and stallion.”

  7. Chuck

    “The aforementioned friend also had at a previous time the experience of being attacked by demons while on psychedelics…This obsession with the girl was finally cured by reading Schopenhauer’s essay “On Women”, and realizing how much of her behavior was reflected by that generalization.”

    Sounds like my 20s.

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