Racism among white Christians

[Angra Mainyu]

Well, it didn't, so I would say 'no'? Or do you mean the same computer with different software and inputs? I was talking about the whole thing, not just the hardware (and it's the software that makes the difference here, at least granting a distinction between the two). The point is that the computer was looking for genetic distance, using a certain metric. That was not designed to look for any specific races.

But this is not what I'm getting at though. My point (actually B20 did the hard work; I'm just taking advantage of it ) is that as the computer measuring genetic distance finds one or another group, then that group is not a social construct or a social institution, so the claims that it is are false.

ETA: if you're pointing out that there is also a genetic basis for eye color, sure, there is. Eye color is also not a social construct/social institution.

I have no idea what your point is in relation to whether or how much race is a social construct, especially since Bomb#20 agrees it partly is.

I was addressing your question the best I could. As to whether race is a social construct, well my point is that it is not just a social construct, and the evidence is as explained so far. But I do agree of course with B20's point about some of it being a social construct, and his example of such cases.

 

[Bomb#20]

But biological race has some properties that make it work differently from those other characteristics. It's different from nose size and hair and eye color in that it correlates with nearly all your genes rather than only a few.

This is where I am out of my depth. I did not in fact know this was the case. I had read, for example, that there is greater (genetic) variation within 'race' groups than between them?

Right you are; but there's no conflict between those two facts. The notion that they conflict goes back to a 1972 article by a geneticist named Richard Lewontin. It was widely circulated among non-biologists, and wound up as a standard component of progressives' rhetoric on race. The article was refuted multiple times in the biology literature, most famously in a 2003 article called "Lewontin's Fallacy" by another geneticist named Anthony Edwards.

I don't want to annoy ld with off-topic material, so I won't write much more here about whether races exist; the on-topic issue for this thread is only whether thinking races exist qualifies as racism. If anybody wants to discuss the do-races-exist issue in depth yet again, then we should start a thread in Natural Science. But for your specific question, the above-linked Wikipedia article is a good place to start. Also, although I can't find a non-paywalled link to Edwards' original article, it contained a diagram that's a good executive summary: it graphically shows the problem with people taking for granted that greater variation within a population than between populations means the populations aren't genetically distinguishable. I'll try to reproduce it from memory with ASCII art, in oversimplified form.

      Feature A
       1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8
Feature B
    1                     P
    2                  P    Q
    3               P    Q
    4            P    Q
    5         P    Q
    6      P    Q
    7   P   Q
    8     Q

P and Q are two populations of some animal. A and B are two genetically inherited features you can measure. The variation within each population in each feature is about 6 units. The variation between populations P and Q is only about 3 units. And yet it would be easy to tell which population a new specimen is from just by measuring its A and B features, because the features don't just vary -- they also correlate with each other. (This example shows an extreme correlation, of course, but that was necessary to make the effect visible on a two-dimensional chart. If you did the same thing with three features you could get the effect with more realistic amounts of correlation, but it's hard to print a 3-D chart.)

"Edwards argued that, even if the probability of misclassifying an individual based on the frequency of alleles at a single locus is as high as 30 percent (as Lewontin reported in 1972), the misclassification probability becomes close to zero if enough loci are studied."

 

[ruby sparks]

But biological race has some properties that make it work differently from those other characteristics. It's different from nose size and hair and eye color in that it correlates with nearly all your genes rather than only a few.

This is where I am out of my depth. I did not in fact know this was the case. I had read, for example, that there is greater (genetic) variation within 'race' groups than between them?

Right you are; but there's no conflict between those two facts. The notion that they conflict goes back to a 1972 article by a geneticist named Richard Lewontin. It was widely circulated among non-biologists, and wound up as a standard component of progressives' rhetoric on race. The article was refuted multiple times in the biology literature, most famously in a 2003 article called "Lewontin's Fallacy" by another geneticist named Anthony Edwards.

I don't want to annoy ld with off-topic material, so I won't write much more here about whether races exist; the on-topic issue for this thread is only whether thinking races exist qualifies as racism. If anybody wants to discuss the do-races-exist issue in depth yet again, then we should start a thread in Natural Science. But for your specific question, the above-linked Wikipedia article is a good place to start. Also, although I can't find a non-paywalled link to Edwards' original article, it contained a diagram that's a good executive summary: it graphically shows the problem with people taking for granted that greater variation within a population than between populations means the populations aren't genetically distinguishable. I'll try to reproduce it from memory with ASCII art, in oversimplified form.

      Feature A
       1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8
Feature B
    1                     P
    2                  P    Q
    3               P    Q
    4            P    Q
    5         P    Q
    6      P    Q
    7   P   Q
    8     Q

P and Q are two populations of some animal. A and B are two genetically inherited features you can measure. The variation within each population in each feature is about 6 units. The variation between populations P and Q is only about 3 units. And yet it would be easy to tell which population a new specimen is from just by measuring its A and B features, because the features don't just vary -- they also correlate with each other. (This example shows an extreme correlation, of course, but that was necessary to make the effect visible on a two-dimensional chart. If you did the same thing with three features you could get the effect with more realistic amounts of correlation, but it's hard to print a 3-D chart.)

"Edwards argued that, even if the probability of misclassifying an individual based on the frequency of alleles at a single locus is as high as 30 percent (as Lewontin reported in 1972), the misclassification probability becomes close to zero if enough loci are studied."

Thanks. That gave me some interesting but brain-hurting reading, and that was nothing more than just your post and the wiki article.

My layman's synopsis is quite short and consists only of two words, 'bloody' and 'complicated', arranged in that order. I'm out of my depth so I think I have to be on the fence. There also seems to be a fair deal of controversy and disagreement about this.

This part of the wiki article caught my eye:

"...biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks agrees with Edwards that correlations between geographical areas and genetics obviously exist in human populations, but goes on to note that "What is unclear is what this has to do with 'race' as that term has been used through much of the twentieth century—the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards' critique does not contradict that interpretation"

Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy

 

[Bomb#20]

My layman's synopsis is quite short and consists only of two words, 'bloody' and 'complicated', arranged in that order. I'm out of my depth so I think I have to be on the fence. There also seems to be a fair deal of controversy and disagreement about this.

That's a reasonable synopsis.

This part of the wiki article caught my eye:

"...biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks agrees with Edwards that correlations between geographical areas and genetics obviously exist in human populations, but goes on to note that "What is unclear is what this has to do with 'race' as that term has been used through much of the twentieth century—the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards' critique does not contradict that interpretation"

Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy

(Note: I'm not trying to make a positive case for races here, just analyzing an argument.)

Do you know what a "killer amendment" is? Legislators vote in favor of attaching a rider they oppose to a bill they oppose, in order to change the bill from a likely winner to a likely loser. Marks appears to be trying to attach a killer amendment to the meaning of "race". What evidence is there that the point of the theory of race was ever clusters "that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between"? Never mind all the non-racist 1960s physical anthropologists who obviously knew better than that and weren't making any such claims when they talked about races; not even a prescientific 1800s racist who really thought black people were all alike would have regarded his own race as principally homogeneous.

 

[Politesse]

My layman's synopsis is quite short and consists only of two words, 'bloody' and 'complicated', arranged in that order. I'm out of my depth so I think I have to be on the fence. There also seems to be a fair deal of controversy and disagreement about this.

That's a reasonable synopsis.

This part of the wiki article caught my eye:

"...biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks agrees with Edwards that correlations between geographical areas and genetics obviously exist in human populations, but goes on to note that "What is unclear is what this has to do with 'race' as that term has been used through much of the twentieth century—the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups. Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups do not exist in the human species, and Edwards' critique does not contradict that interpretation"

Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy

(Note: I'm not trying to make a positive case for races here, just analyzing an argument.)

Do you know what a "killer amendment" is? Legislators vote in favor of attaching a rider they oppose to a bill they oppose, in order to change the bill from a likely winner to a likely loser. Marks appears to be trying to attach a killer amendment to the meaning of "race". What evidence is there that the point of the theory of race was ever clusters "that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between"? Never mind all the non-racist 1960s physical anthropologists who obviously knew better than that and weren't making any such claims when they talked about races; not even a prescientific 19th-century racist who really thought black people were all alike would have regarded his own race as principally homogeneous.

Why use a term at all, if you're using it very differently than it was used historically, and it contributes nothing to the discussion but confusion, since the term is also in common use as a social identifier and legal category which have nothing to do with population genetic studies? There's no point in reviving "race" if saying "race" obfuscates your meaning rather than making it clearer.

 

[Bomb#20]

But I don't know with what term we should refer to the idea of constitutively separate races, if not "racism".

Let me help you out with that. The word you require is "heresy".

But no doubt you think you're being perfectly logical. All you're saying is that if you believe races exist you're a racist for the same reason that if you believe monarchs exist you're a monarchist and if you believe communes exist you're a communist; is that it?

If someone insisted against all scientific evidence that monarchs were inherently genetically different from common citizens and therefore more naturally inclined to the role? Yes, I'd consider them a monarchist.

Nice the way you just slipped in that "and therefore more naturally inclined to the role" bit, as though believing there are "constitutively separate" races automatically made people believe some races are more naturally inclined to some roles. You keep trying to slip in the unevidenced presumption that people your made-up "racism" definition covers are also covered by the real definition.

Incidentally, monarchs really are inherently genetically different from common citizens. Everyone is inherently genetically different from common citizens. We are all unique individuals. Even monarchs.

I eat heresies for lunch, come off it. You want to argue reality, do it with fact, not whiny rhetoric about imagined persecutions. Don't be afraid, I have no power to burn you at the stake...

I didn't say you were persecuting me. I know you can't punish me for disagreeing with your religion. I'm calling you out on your misleading rhetoric because I want it to stay that way. Left-wing zealots have a long history of punishing people by inciting mobs and by force of law for expressing disagreement with their dogma, wherever the power to do so falls into their hands. Relying on your good will to keep that from happening here is a nonstarter.

The rest of your rant is attacking a point I readily conceded at the head of the post you're quoting, so I don't see the point of it.

You did? You conceded not only that your definition is different from that used by "a large subset of the population", but also that theirs is better than yours, and also that your definition was invented for a dishonorable purpose?

 

[Bomb#20]

Why use a term at all, if you're using it very differently than it was used historically, and it contributes nothing to the discussion but confusion,

Yes, exactly. That's precisely what Marks was doing when he attached "principally homogeneous within" to his characterization of the concept.

since the term is also in common use as a social identifier and legal category which have nothing to do with population genetic studies?

Why do you think that, because up until the 1990s nobody ever thought "races" referred to Caucasoids, Negroids and Mongoloids? Because the term predates DNA sequencing? That would qualify as an argument if divisions identified from DNA didn't look like divisions already discovered by classical physical anthropologists. "Legal category", you say. The US courts ruled in 1915 that Middle-Easterners were legally "white", based on anthropologists' population studies of phenotype.

There's no point in reviving "race" if saying "race" obfuscates your meaning rather than making it clearer.

"Reviving"? Outside the self-imposed boundaries of the progressive echo chamber, "race" never went away. Normal people are surprised when they find out the existence of races is even controversial.

 

[J842P]

You consider reality racist.

No, I consider baseless pejorative generalizations about racialized social classes racist. There is no extra-social existence of race in reality. Keep up with the bus.

Loren's explanation doesn't rely on extra-social existence of race in reality.

Let's use the (gross) term "people of color" to make it clear we are talking about a social category.

The fundamental disagreement, to me, seems to be to what extent institutional racism explains the disparity in various outcomes -- e.g. income, wealth, educational attainment, etc between "persons of color" and other people in the United States -- not whether various forms of institutional racism exist at all.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You consider reality racist.

No, I consider baseless pejorative generalizations about racialized social classes racist. There is no extra-social existence of race in reality. Keep up with the bus.

Loren's explanation doesn't rely on extra-social existence of race in reality.

Let's use the (gross) term "people of color" to make it clear we are talking about a social category.

The fundamental disagreement, to me, seems to be to what extent institutional racism explains the disparity in various outcomes -- e.g. income, wealth, educational attainment, etc between "persons of color" and other people in the United States -- not whether various forms of institutional racism exist at all.

And note that "persons of color" include Chinese and Japanese--which by almost all measures outperform whites. If it's discrimination against non-whites how can this be? Historically they were treated pretty badly, also. Slavery? Hispanics weren't enslaved.

 

[Bomb#20]

I'm not going to address in detail all the nonsense Politesse has written about me; there's too much, and AM has already refuted it -- thanks much! But I think a few more points are called for...

As for that "money shot", it's true I missed that one at the time, but looking at it now, I am not particularly impressed; in fact, I'm pretty sure he was counting on no one having read Cavalli-Sforza et al 1994,

If that's a sincere opinion and not just another libel, then you are deep into self-delusion. I think everybody with an interest in human genetic variation or in the Ice Age prehistory that led to that variation should read their book. It's fascinating in its own right; plus it contains a wealth of information conflicting with the far-left's politically motivated pseudoscience.

as that volume was hardly a ringing endorsement of traditional concepts of race. The very idea is if you've ever read the work in question. Which I have, it was very widely read and distributed in my grad student days, and indeed I have a copy right here on my Kindle.

From the introduction to the text, literally the third page:

"Upon the whole, every circumstance concurs in proving, that mankind are not composed of species essentially different from each other; that, on the contrary, there was originally but one species, who, after multiplying and spreading over the whole surface of the earth, have undergone various changes by the influence of climate, food, mode of living, epidemic diseases, and the mixture of dissimilar individuals... However, the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

Here you are taking your conclusion as a premise. You decided in advance, based on your own prejudice against your outgroup, that I'm arguing for "the major stereotypes". Since CS concludes there is no support in science for the major stereotypes, you deduced that I must want people not to know that CS's book doesn't support the major stereotypes. That's not me trying to put one over on readers; that's you engaging in circular reasoning and imagining you're being reasonable because of your own extreme confirmation bias. CS said nothing in that passage that I disagree with, nothing that conflicts with my arguments, and nothing to support any of your numerous false claims about me.

His book in fact strongly concluded that although populations did vary, and in some particular ways you often find continental trends with respect to certain tell-tale genes and other markers (especially the "bottleneck effect" that Cavalli-Sfroza helped define, a characteristic marker of a time of frequent intermarriage within too small a group which allowed his team to hypothesize a rough model of how and in what order the continents were settled by human beings) these differences do not rise to the level of being signifcantly more variant than the differences within those continental populations.

True, and relevant for his purposes; but not relevant to the points in dispute between you and me. If you were arguing with someone trying to prove "the major stereotypes" were valid, it would help your case, but you aren't so it doesn't.

Genetically, races would not meaningfulto the biologist

"The biologist"? Which one? Races are meaningful to some biologists and not to others, depending on their particular interests.

even if they did on some level exist, because they would be functionally useless as predictors of overall genetic variance between any given two individuals.

In the first place, that doesn't follow from the racial differences being smaller than the within-continent populations; if you think it follows then that just means you aren't good at statistics. And in the second place, there are any number of other meaningful things a biologist might use information about races for that aren't about predicting overall genetic variance between two given individuals. Reconstructing prehistoric migration and interbreeding patterns, for instance.

These well-known markers do exist, but they don't predictably correspond to racial categories, and almost all are phenotypically either meaningless or neglible in their effect, counterbalanced by the natural variability of the average human population.

So what? Nobody here is arguing for stereotyping, and you're the only one here who's doing it.

Because of this, the work in question was one of the most frequently cited documents throughout much of the early 2000's - because it had put the nail in the coffin of academic racism, not affirmed it. Only an incredibly selective reading could lead you to any other conclusion.

You are an object lesson in circular reasoning. You assume without evidence that I've been led to another conclusion, because you assume without evidence that I'm trying to affirm academic racism, because you observe that I'm using CS's academic data to affirm that races exist and you already decided without evidence that thinking races exist is racism. Good for CS for putting the nail in the coffin of academic racism. It belongs in a coffin, right alongside the left's dogma that academic data conflicts with biological races.

If you don't want to struggle with the classic itself,

I read the classic itself, cover to cover.

 

[Politesse]

I'm not going to address in detail all the nonsense Politesse has written about me; there's too much, and AM has already refuted it -- thanks much! But I think a few more points are called for...


If that's a sincere opinion and not just another libel, then you are deep into self-delusion. I think everybody with an interest in human genetic variation or in the Ice Age prehistory that led to that variation should read their book. It's fascinating in its own right; plus it contains a wealth of information conflicting with the far-left's politically motivated pseudoscience.


Here you are taking your conclusion as a premise. You decided in advance, based on your own prejudice against your outgroup, that I'm arguing for "the major stereotypes". Since CS concludes there is no support in science for the major stereotypes, you deduced that I must want people not to know that CS's book doesn't support the major stereotypes. That's not me trying to put one over on readers; that's you engaging in circular reasoning and imagining you're being reasonable because of your own extreme confirmation bias. CS said nothing in that passage that I disagree with, nothing that conflicts with my arguments, and nothing to support any of your numerous false claims about me.

His book in fact strongly concluded that although populations did vary, and in some particular ways you often find continental trends with respect to certain tell-tale genes and other markers (especially the "bottleneck effect" that Cavalli-Sfroza helped define, a characteristic marker of a time of frequent intermarriage within too small a group which allowed his team to hypothesize a rough model of how and in what order the continents were settled by human beings) these differences do not rise to the level of being signifcantly more variant than the differences within those continental populations.

True, and relevant for his purposes; but not relevant to the points in dispute between you and me. If you were arguing with someone trying to prove "the major stereotypes" were valid, it would help your case, but you aren't so it doesn't.

Genetically, races would not meaningfulto the biologist

"The biologist"? Which one? Races are meaningful to some biologists and not to others, depending on their particular interests.

even if they did on some level exist, because they would be functionally useless as predictors of overall genetic variance between any given two individuals.

In the first place, that doesn't follow from the racial differences being smaller than the within-continent populations; if you think it follows then that just means you aren't good at statistics. And in the second place, there are any number of other meaningful things a biologist might use information about races for that aren't about predicting overall genetic variance between two given individuals. Reconstructing prehistoric migration and interbreeding patterns, for instance.

These well-known markers do exist, but they don't predictably correspond to racial categories, and almost all are phenotypically either meaningless or neglible in their effect, counterbalanced by the natural variability of the average human population.

So what? Nobody here is arguing for stereotyping, and you're the only one here who's doing it.

Because of this, the work in question was one of the most frequently cited documents throughout much of the early 2000's - because it had put the nail in the coffin of academic racism, not affirmed it. Only an incredibly selective reading could lead you to any other conclusion.

You are an object lesson in circular reasoning. You assume without evidence that I've been led to another conclusion, because you assume without evidence that I'm trying to affirm academic racism, because you observe that I'm using CS's academic data to affirm that races exist and you already decided without evidence that thinking races exist is racism. Good for CS for putting the nail in the coffin of academic racism. It belongs in a coffin, right alongside the left's dogma that academic data conflicts with biological races.

If you don't want to struggle with the classic itself,

I read the classic itself, cover to cover.

So what is a race, according to you? And why is it important that we retain this term? That is, how does it benefit the scientific inquiry for us to do so?

 

[Bomb#20]

Now you just make an accusation that is both unwarranted and false. Why do you come to believe such a thing? He provided the proper references. He repeatedly tried to get you to read the arguments he made and evidence he provided. And now you are pretty sure that he was counting on no one having read it.

Because he inaccurately summarized its conclusions, obviously. See above. In detail.

He did not summarize its conclusions. He used the data.

Yes, I know he didn't.

Lovely. When posters here libel me, normally it's by making false damaging statements about me with malice and with reckless disregard for the truth. They say things about me that they believe, but that they don't fact-check and that they have no intellectually honest reason to believe; they just make them up, and then they believe their own propaganda because it matches what they want to believe. That's bad enough, but hey, at least those people don't know that what they said about me wasn't true.

Whereas, well, let's just go over that again...

Because he inaccurately summarized its conclusions, obviously.

He did not summarize its conclusions.

Yes, I know he didn't.

 

[Bomb#20]

... the belief many have in race as some kind of eternal or scientific truth is and always was a fantasy, and the basis at least if not the definition of racism.

And that, right there -- the idea that the basis of racism is the belief that race is a scientific truth -- is the delusional conviction that underlies all of the far left's collective insanity on this topic, from their choice of race denialism as a hill they want to die on and their imprudent decision to use it as a kind of loyalty oath, to their enthusiastic embrace of laughably bad arguments and their shameful willingness to use trumped-up ad hominems against people who accept the testimony of their own eyes over the far left's unceasing arguments from authority.

They've given up on liberalism: on the persuasive power of the moral argument that racism is wrong because prejudice and stereotyping are unfair and because people are all individuals who have a right to be treated as individuals and not as faceless representatives of some category in somebody else's categorization schema. So they think they need to establish that racism is scientifically wrong. And they imagine that if they can just get people to stop believing races are real then that will do the job for them.

What a bunch of idiots. Imagine what would happen if everybody agreed races aren't real and the traditional racial categories were just arbitrary regions with arbitrary borders in a continuum of gene-pool space. Specious scientific justifications for racism would go away? Hardly. Race denialists already lost their shot at that outcome when they stipulated that "populations did vary, and in some particular ways you often find continental trends with respect to certain tell-tale genes", and they rejected races in favor of "the much more precise and accurate language of clustered and clinal structures". Well, guess what, dumbasses: when somebody's looking for a specious scientific excuse to discriminate and prejudge people by their ethnicity, a clustered and clinally structured continental trend in tell-tale genes will serve him every bit as well as a race. When the lumper can't say "Genetically, Negros have lower average intelligence" any more, because he's been convinced there's no objective way to find out who's a Negro, that's not going to stop the lumper from saying something like "Genes for IQ are geographically distributed along a cline that reaches a maximum in China and a minimum in Congo", and then stereotype people based on where along that cline they look like their ancestors must have lived. Duh. So the entire race-denialism project was useless from the get-go: even if the race-denialists win the meme war, it's logically incapable of delivering the goods they invented it for.

So to all the PC progressives out there, making believe there are no races in the cause of the greater good: try liberalism.

 

[Bomb#20]

So what is a race, according to you?

Well, let's keep this short so as not to bore ld with off-topic material. The things we call biological human races are what botanists would call "varieties"; a "variety" is a taxonomic division of a species that's less distinctive than a subspecies. Plants are categorized as genus, species, subspecies, variety, subvariety and form; but in 1961 the "International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature" voted to get rid of that complexity from the animal naming convention and retained only genus, species and subspecies. This doesn't mean animal varieties stopped existing by a magical incantation; it just means the zoologists' naming commission is dominated by "joiners" and the botanists' naming commission is dominated by "splitters". Evolution works pretty much the same way in animals as in plants.

Since we aren't creationists, we know species don't spring into existence out of nothing: every species started out as a subspecies; likewise, every subspecies started out as a variety; and so forth. Archaic Homo sapiens had subspecies, one of which became anatomically modern humans and one of which became Neanderthals. We had them because formation of subspecies is a process that normally happens to a species with a wide geographic range; to assume humans are specially immune is pre-Copernican thinking. Tens of thousands of years ago the same process was happening to us again: long distance migration and genetic drift allowed varieties to develop. The varieties would probably have gone on to become full-blown subspecies if our ability to travel hadn't improved. But travel increased our rate of interbreeding enough to overcome the effects of genetic drift and shut down the process early, which is why we didn't develop subspecies this time around. The varieties are now gradually merging back together instead of gradually drifting apart.

And why is it important that we retain this term? That is, how does it benefit the scientific inquiry for us to do so?

Who said it's important that we retain the term, or that it benefits the scientific inquiry? I'm not going to tell zoologists' their business. People can all decide for themselves whether to retain the term. What's important is that we not spread disinformation. Disinformation does not benefit the scientific inquiry; neither does it benefit the human race. If 1970s anthropologists stop using the term because the study topic becomes unfashionable or because they invent new terms they like better, that's perfectly fine. What isn't perfectly fine is if they accuse 1960s anthropologists of being unscientific for having used the term. That's disinformation.

 

[laughing dog]

Not to bore Bomb#20 and others with the OP topic, but does anyone have any relevant observations about the significance of the finding that white Christians are more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism that white people in general?

 

[Politesse]

Not to bore Bomb#20 and others with the OP topic, but does anyone have any relevant observations about the significance of the finding that white Christians are more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism that white people in general?

Apparently white Christians are more educated in "science" than the rest of us.

 

[prideandfall]

Not to bore Bomb#20 and others with the OP topic, but does anyone have any relevant observations about the significance of the finding that white Christians are more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism that white people in general?

well it makes logical sense, since the entire premise of christianity (actually, of religion in general) is to set up a scenario wherein one groups feels that they are superior to another group on a transcendent level: in a way that goes beyond logic or argument or question and is inherent to the foundational nature of reality itself.
i'd be inclined to suspect that if you did a similar poll of any other ethnic group with strong religious beliefs, you'd find similar results - i'd be shocked if muslim arabs weren't more inclined to be racist than non-muslim arabs, for instance.

i do wonder if the same holds true for christian ethnic minorities, if black christians are more likely to be racist against mexicans or asians for example.
oddly, i wouldn't imagine that it goes the other way, that christian minorities are more inclined to be racist against whites... that feels oddly like shit rolling uphill, in some kind of bizarre cultural plateau of racial privilege.