Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 24

message: http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html
This argues for the existence of races. It suggests that human genetic diversity is actually not particularly low for mammals.
:when an explanation gets too complicated it often means someone is trying to confuse people like mr goodrumj.Muntuwandi 12:29, 20 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Has anyone ever encountered this article?

message: Discussions of race are made more complicated because race research has taken place on at least two scales (global and national) and from the point of view of different research aims. Evolutionary scientists are typically interested in humanity as a whole; and taxonomic racial classifications are often either unhelpful to, or refuted by, studies that focus on the question of global human diversity. Policy-makers and applied professions (such as law-enforcement or medicine), however, are typically concerned only with genetic variation at the national or sub-national scale, and find taxonomic racial categories useful.
There is a problem with this paragraph from the standpoint of the average well-informed reader. It seems that the writer must be asserting that if one looks at individuals and groups of individuals on a world-wide scale, then "taxonomic racial classifications" can't be made to apply in any useful way, but that if you narrow the scale to the level of the nations then suddenly these "taxonomic racial classifications" not only apply but are useful. The expressed view seems to be contrary to what most people would expect, e.g., in comparing Norwegians and Kenyans.  If the statement is nonetheless true, then the reader ought to be provided with enough of an explanation to get the general idea of why it is so.  Is the writer perhaps slyly insinuating that the average Kenyan would stand out among a group of average Norwegians, and vice-versa, but that the average Kenyan does not stand out against the natural background of the sea of faces in which he is ordinarily found?  Or what?  P0M 08:48, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That paragraph seems to confuse biological race with race as a social construct. What "policy-makers and applied profession[al]s" typically care about that happens "at the national or sub-national scale" is race as a social construct, not race as genetics. Indeed, the racial definitions used by law-enforcement and medical professionals are socially determined. FilipeS 15:50, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It may be that the writer was confused. Regardless, as it stands the paragraph is worse than worthless. P0M 18:22, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I am in awe too. This talk page is much more interesting than the frikken article ever was or could be. I want to have P0M's children. I don't care what sex, color, creed, natural origin, etc. P0M is!  - Jeeny Talk 05:56, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you very much. I am afraid that my tongue has sharpened as part of the same process by which I have sharpened my editing skills -- both the result of correcting so many papers by students who have something to say but need the remaining two or three years of their college education to work out exactly how to do it. (Every student takes that long, and actually it even took me four years of college, and several years of graduate school to work out how to write.) P0M 06:31, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You responded to me! OMG! <swoons> just lightening things up, nothing to see here- Jeeny Talk 06:53, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was going to tell you about the flying saucer people and how they have already had their way with me, but I was afraid you would not get the weird Irish humor. (At least that's my excuse for a certain deadpan humor that almost got me thrown out of graduate school. Everybody in the seminar got the "a funny thing happened to me on the way to give this seminar presentation" joke -- except the professor, who wrote an angry letter to the newspaper about the mistreatment I had suffered on the way...) Peace. P0M 07:09, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: A patchwork 

message: The current text has:
"Aver" means "to declare to be true."  First, I am pretty sure that one cannot declare arguments about baseball or anything else to be true. There are arguments on all sides of anything that is in question, and you have to pick sides before you can aver anything.  Second, I rather doubt that most molecular biologists aver that "race is a reality" or anything of that sort. In context I think maybe the intended meaning was that they avoid either arguing about race or giving any comfort to the idea. What was the intended meaning?P0M 13:16, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  A minor question on meaning 

message: My small contribution to the rewrite in progress:
*History of race in science
*Revisiting Race and Ethnicity in the Context of Emerging Genetic Research, at the Stanford University School of Medicine
*How heritability misleads about race, by Ned Block
FilipeS 19:31, 11 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't have any strong objections.  However, the first website (which looks very slick) appears to be still under construction, at least, many links don't go anywhere.  The avowed purpose of the site is to combat racism so I propose that it is more appropriate to put on the Racism page.  The third website is specifically on race and IQ and might be used as a reference for the appropriate section of this article, and provided as a general link on the race and intelligence page.  The middle link itself is not very informative - it seems to be part of a research institute's list of past talks page.  However talks are linked to supporting articles, many from the social sciences and some perhaps from the medical sciences.  I think we need to look at these critically - I saw one link was to BiDIL's pharmaceutical company page and frankly I would use that source very carefully, ensuring people understand it is POV.  But I think felipeS has done us a service in calling the linked articles on this page to our attention - I would propose actually going through the articles linked to see if they provide relevant and useful information or views to add to this page - in other words, i am suggesting that instead of just providing this link at the bottom of the article we do some real research, read the articles, see what could/should go in this article.Slrubenstein   |  Talk 17:11, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

text: All I meant was that we should be selective in how we draw on the linked articles for content to put into this article, that's all. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 13:29, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possibly interesting links 

message: I just deleted a link because it looks very amateurish and non-scholarly and has no educational value.  I clicked on "What is your racial time" and this was the first entry: "I know, this kind of thread has been used and abused, but we all know it's fun to google attractive people! I'll go first. I'll depart from the i'm-on-crack-and-i-need-to-brush-my-hair type of guy i like, and instead go for a 'pretty boy', Bryan Greenberg."  Not really what this article needs. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 14:11, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  deleted link 

message: there is a dispute on whether Admixture testing can work on Native Americans since they share common haplogroups with Asian populations at Talk:Race_and_genetics#Admixture_studies_in_latin_america.Muntuwandi 00:14, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Request for comment

message: If editors here have the time, I would be be grateful if someone with a knowledge of recent archaelogical anthropology or genetics would look at the Nordic race page which seems to me to contain a very dubious attempt to conflate early 20th C racial models with modern research. Paul B 16:20, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Nordic race]]

message: Even if "race" is a valid concept under some scientific definition, does it's meaning equate with "race" as used in the non-scientific community? The problem, it seems to me, is not that there are variations in femur-length and such between different populations, but whether the non-scientific community places a significance on race that is not scientifically valid. When anthropologists and politicians use the term, does it carry the same meaning or have the same foundation? If not, and the latter group's definition lacks validity, then science should either abandon the term or correct broader society's misunderstandings (the former being the easier, of course.)
:Social (used by the politicians you mention) and biological race/sub-species (used by scientists) are two very different concepts, so I don't see your point. Funkynusayri 20:21, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: More importantly, in the past 100 years anthropologists (and now molecular geneticists) have shown that scientific understandings of race current in the 19th century and held by some today are unscientific. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 13:31, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  a different question 

message: The section needs a rewrite with the inclusion of information from new studies such as . Unless new fossils are uncovered , the multiregional hypothesis is going the way of the flat earth hypothesis. Muntuwandi 03:27, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: models of human evolution

message: I removed the sentence in the introduction that stated "since the 1940s, most evolutionary scientists believe the concept of race to have no genetic basis", even though it had already been flagged as unsourced because it makes a claim about the concept of race of such force that it is, if unreferenced, doubtful and harmful to the article as a whole (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Unsourced_material). W.M. O'Quinlan 18:37, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed unsourced material