ApostateAbe
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2002
- Messages
- 1,299
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Basic Beliefs
- Infotheist. I believe the gods to be mere information.
Bill Nye debated the creationist Ken Ham a year ago, and he hit the ball out of the park in the debate. Going up against creationists is easy. Going up against the scientific racists is actually more difficult, because the scientific racists take the theory of evolution most seriously out of everyone.
Otherwise it would seem odd that Nye's argument against race (shown in [video]http://bigthink.com/think-tank/bill-nye-race-is-a-social-construct[/video]) is adapted from a bad argument common among creationists (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910_1.html). The argument is that the many breeds of dogs are still dogs and the races of humans are still humans, therefore races are not biological.
The argument goes wrong from not understanding evolutionary theory. Even if human races fully diverged into two different species (at this point races would be only part of the way toward speciation and may be merging again and never speciating in the future), each species would still be humans, because evolution is a diverging hierarchy. All mammals have a common ancestor, and, no matter how much dolphins and humans evolve away from each other, each population is still mammals. Humans are still great apes, still primates, still mammals, still tetrapods, still chordates, still animals and still eukaryotes.
Sometimes, it is appropriate to share ideas with creationists, but only when they are correct. It is not appropriate to share ideas with creationists when the contrary ideas follow from both stacks of data and the theory of evolution, the only probable explanation for the diversity of life. If there were no races, evolution would be impossible. If you don't care so much for data and theory, an easy shortcut is to not share ideas with creationists when you are likewise motivated by ideology.
Bill Nye had a TV episode on race in 2005, advocating the same pseudoevolutionist position that human races are not biological.
The relevant arguments of Bill Nye and his interviewees are as follows:
Otherwise it would seem odd that Nye's argument against race (shown in [video]http://bigthink.com/think-tank/bill-nye-race-is-a-social-construct[/video]) is adapted from a bad argument common among creationists (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB910_1.html). The argument is that the many breeds of dogs are still dogs and the races of humans are still humans, therefore races are not biological.
The argument goes wrong from not understanding evolutionary theory. Even if human races fully diverged into two different species (at this point races would be only part of the way toward speciation and may be merging again and never speciating in the future), each species would still be humans, because evolution is a diverging hierarchy. All mammals have a common ancestor, and, no matter how much dolphins and humans evolve away from each other, each population is still mammals. Humans are still great apes, still primates, still mammals, still tetrapods, still chordates, still animals and still eukaryotes.
Sometimes, it is appropriate to share ideas with creationists, but only when they are correct. It is not appropriate to share ideas with creationists when the contrary ideas follow from both stacks of data and the theory of evolution, the only probable explanation for the diversity of life. If there were no races, evolution would be impossible. If you don't care so much for data and theory, an easy shortcut is to not share ideas with creationists when you are likewise motivated by ideology.
Bill Nye had a TV episode on race in 2005, advocating the same pseudoevolutionist position that human races are not biological.
The relevant arguments of Bill Nye and his interviewees are as follows:
- All humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This is true. Big number. Therefore, the 0.1% is insignificant? It is actually a self-defeating argument, because, in the surrounding context of genetics, the number is not big enough. Humans also share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. This means that the variation within the human species is on the order of 1/20th on its way to the difference between humans and chimpanzees (not that some races must be more chimp-like than others--we are all ancestrally equidistant from chimps). Humans have a brain about three times the size of chimpanzees, and the difference in brain size is fully encoded in a very small subset of that 2%. When we talk about DNA, don't be fooled by big numbers lacking context. Note: the 0.1% was misstated as 0.01% later in the video.
- After a DNA test, with only a few genetic markers, you can't tell which race you belong to. With hundreds of genetic markers, you most certainly can tell which race you belong to, but that doesn't matter. Therefore, races are biologically irrelevant. That is a hardly a hyperbolic representation of the argument presented by the geneticist Mary-Claire King at time 19:50. Accurate identification of breeds of dogs likewise requires at least a hundred genetic markers, but does it follow that breeds of dogs biologically irrelevant? The argument makes sense only with the very common strawman about races: they must be identified with only a few genes, not with many gene frequencies in combination. But, if races could be identified with only a few genes, it would fully conflict with evolutionary theory. The discrete model of races can be found only either in politics or among some biologists of the 19th century, who believed in polygenism (many races became the same human species at the same time), which really does not make sense with the theory of evolution as we now know it and not advocated by even the most controversial scientific racists today.
- We will find as much variation between two Africans as between an African and a Japanese. As the human species originated in southern Africa and therefore black Africans are the most genetically diverse race in the world, this is possibly true. But it most certainly is not true of two random Africans from two neighboring tribes: they will tend to share much more of their genes in common than between a typical African and Japanese, because of their respective ancestral histories. This follows from a fundamental of biogeography, but it also follows from data: we can do cluster analysis of hundreds of genetic markers (not just seven of them like Mary-Claire King seems to prefer) to see who is more closely related to who, and it really does correspond to common expectations of a racial paradigm. See for example, Rosenberg et al's "Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure," a study conducted in the same year as this episode, or Tishkoff et al's "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans," 2009.
- Cows are not prejudiced against each other based on the color of their cow hides, therefore it is not biologically expected that humans would be prejudiced against each other based on skin color. Not quite an argument that races are not biological, but an argument that racism is not biological. If it was purely a moral argument, then I would at least agree with the conclusion: no good reason for prejudices based on skin color. But I think it is a biological argument that racism among humans has nothing to do with biology, and I think it would work only if humans were sufficiently like domestic cows. Humans are a highly tribal species, and we seemingly retain behavioral vestiges of ancestral tribalism (us vs. them mentality common among human social groups). Maybe the ancestors of cows (aurachs) likewise had a strong violent herd mentality, but aurachs are now extinct, and domestic cows descended from thousands of years of artificial selection in which any cow who exhibits violence against another cow was immediately killed, not bred. The best indicators of human beings are human beings. The minimal group paradigm experiments show that even differences in genetically-irrelevant appearance among groups of children (i.e. red shirts and blue shirts) seems to spontaneously precede mutual group prejudices. Even though racial prejudices are immoral by the best moral theories, nature does not care so much for our morals, and racial prejudices seem to follow very easily from our human nature.
- "The features that we can easily detect when we look at people from different races are important but extremely superficial features..." That is actually an exact quote from Mary-Claire King, and I did a double-take to make sure I got it right. The contradiction within the same pair of adjectives is not the only problem. Nature does not know which phenotypes are important and which are superficial. If we call phenotypes superficial, it is not a scientific claim but a moral one.
- Race is based on superficial skin color differences. This was roughly the argument of Nina Jablonski (skin color variations being her own "superficial" scientific specialty). But, in fact, racial variations are most certainly more than just skin color variations. There are significant and apparent racial differences in every human body system--differences in bone density, height, muscle mass, brain size, lactose tolerance, lung size, penis size, blood pressure, blood type, testosterone, estrogen, pathogen resistances... again, superficiality is subjective, not scientific, but would the racial difference in smallpox resistance really be "superficial" to the only 10% of Native Americans who survived after the beginning of European exploration of the Americas?