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icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


The statement "Islam is violent" necessarily means Islamic countries are violent, and there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent, see Turkey, the post-Soviet Muslim states, Bangladesh, Indonesia/Malaysia, etc

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Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

icantfindaname posted:

The statement "Islam is violent" necessarily means Islamic countries are violent, and there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent, see Turkey, the post-Soviet Muslim states, Bangladesh, Indonesia/Malaysia, etc

Yeah that's what I was trying to get at, this person is probably less concerned with the intricacies of defining "Islamic" as they would be in just straight up going "Counterpoint: Turkey" or whatever.

Accretionist
Nov 7, 2012
I BELIEVE IN STUPID CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

Yeah that's what I was trying to get at, this person is probably less concerned with the intricacies of defining "Islamic" as they would be in just straight up going "Counterpoint: Turkey" or whatever.

Pretty much. I can't get the guy give me a straight yes or no to: "Are Muslims who condemn child brides not True Muslims?"

He's essentializing like a mother fucker and doesn't want to admit it to himself.


Edit: Fuckin' A. I critically stated, "... [this] discussion already treats Muslims like appliances which just happened to have unfortunate literature slipped into their I/O port," and someone loving agreed with it.

Edit 2: Welp.

Q: "[D]oes condemning pedophilia make one less of a Muslim?"

A: "If you are condemning child brides, you are condemning Mohamed."

And I am all out of shits to give.

Accretionist fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Apr 2, 2015

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

icantfindaname posted:

The statement "Islam is violent" necessarily means Islamic countries are violent, and there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent, see Turkey, the post-Soviet Muslim states, Bangladesh, Indonesia/Malaysia, etc

Although that opens the trapdoor for the argument that 'these societies are not violent to the extent to which they are not governed by religion'.

I prefer to see it in broader terms - for normal people to commit grave injustice, they normally require some sort of mytho-poetic justification. Religion is simply the most readily available supply of that matter, but you can get it from nationalism or extreme ideology almost as easily. Some religions are perhaps slightly better than others for these purposes, but it's really much of a muchness. Islam is, perhaps, in that place right now for historical reasons; but a lot of intellectual writing from the Muslim world from earlier periods makes it clear to me that something catastrophic was done in the Middle East suddenly in the last 100 years.

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin
I think a great example that's actually worked when I've used it is how ISIS is destroying the ruins of Nimrud.

How is it that that city has been able to survive the entire history of Islam, from the birth of Mohammed all the way up till 2014, and now they're being destroyed.

Something new is going on, if it was fundamental to their religion, it would have manifested at some point in the last 1000 years.

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
It is very "High School Debate" but the argument against Islam as a driving force for violence is at least well sourced. Treat it like a wiki article and rip the sources.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Not gonna read that, but yes, I think "keeping everything else equal, islam causes violence" is a more interesting and cleaner debate.
But this is I assume very often not what the average racists you may meet care about. They probably don't care about if that immigrant here would have been as or less violent if they had not become a muslim, they care about how violent that person, who happens to be a muslim, is, and what will happen if they are allowed to continue practicing their culture.

icantfindaname posted:

The statement "Islam is violent" necessarily means Islamic countries are violent, and there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent, see Turkey, the post-Soviet Muslim states, Bangladesh, Indonesia/Malaysia, etc
Indonesia is an Al-Qaeda hotspot, and the first thing I get when googling Bangladesh is a headline "secular blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh". Granted, Chechnya is not a post-Soviet Muslim state, but it's still possibly one of the worst places to be north of the equator.
If you compare Turkey to its neighbours, it's less violent than its Arab neighbours, but much more violent than e.g. the in many aspects quite similar Greece.

Now I'm not saying this is proof islam leads to violent states. I'm just saying, this is far from the obvious argument you're making it out to be.

Finally, to repeat Hitchens Argument (as made previously by Disinterested): "there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent" - okay, but isn't that actually conceding the point? That secularised states can be nonviolent, but not islamic, i.e. nonsecular, ones?

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Also, I lost a large amount of cash on the streets yesterday and an 18 year old Iranian kid found it and put a lot of effort into returning it to me while it would have been much easier to do nothing, or even steal them, so tell your racist friends they're dumb :colbert:

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

So backing us out of all the :spergin: for a moment, I think in this particular case it is safe to rephrase the statement as "Modern Islamic culture is/is not more violent than the rest of the world (probably meaning America to the hypothetical person we're arguing with)" because that's probably what the particular person intends by a statement as broad and talking-point-y as "Islam is violent." I realize "Islamic culture" is incredibly vague and varies heavily across regions, but if we're trying to argue against "Islam is violent" I think we're already at the point where the opposing party isn't going to give a gently caress about Sunnis and Shiites etc and just wants broad, overarching generalizations. I think this is probably the only statement we can usefully analyze in any sort of way that would be applicable to the actual argument the person thinks they're having rather than our weird hypothetical (though more accurate) arguments this thread loves to have.
That's actually so vague as to again leave open the argument to completely contradictory, but in themselves true positions.
For example, I could claim either 1. modern islamic culture is the sum of the behavior of muslims; most muslims are not violent criminals; or 2. islamic culture as is relevant to us is the behaviour of muslims around us, muslims who are predominantly much less violent than most people who are not around us (as 1st world people, including muslims in the 1st world, are much less violent in general than the rest of us). Or I could claim, 3., "modern islamic culture" is the culture that is specifically and genuinely islamic, so for example, not the people who're adherents to the islamic faith but living in the west, but the people who've literally made a state called "Islamic State".

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

So, what can we look at? I'd say we take a look at the violent crime statistics in predominantly Islamic areas vs. predominantly non-Islamic areas, preferably with all other variables as constant as possible (so not like, Ethiopia vs. Europe or something like that). I'm not even sure if we could get that kind of data "clean" enough though, otherwise we'd be drawing the same sort of biased conclusions as someone looking at a map of race vs. arrests and thinking black people must be more violent.
The same story - Blacks are more violent by a bunch of measures - US blacks are much more likely to commit violent murder than whites, and a black person is less likely to live in a non-violent nation than a white person, and so on - so quite literally, as a historic, empirical fact, blacks are more violent (as in, black people act violently more often than e.g. whites). This statement is true in the same way that "blacks in the US suffer from racism" and "blacks get arrested disproportionally often" are true - empirically, historically.
The important thing is to distinguish this historic, contingent fact - the black people living in this world are more violent; - from a possibly wrong essential claim - there is something essential to black people that makes them more violent; - and, more critically, from a wrong moral claim, such as, black people have a more violent essence to the extent that differential treatment is legitimate.

I think the important battle is not the first claim, but the third (the second may be up for debate, beyond its truth, in its relevance for the third). Africa and Detroit are comparatively (vs. the world/the rest of the US) bad places to be. There is a lot of violence there. So yeah, black people are violent in the sense that in this world, today, its black people engage in comparatively more violence. You don't want to argue the statement "black people are violent" as a historic contingent fact, because it's true (if read as a quantitative statement). You want to argue "black people are violent" as an essential claim about the inherent nature of black people, or as a historical, but categorical statement, and "black people's violence licenses their oppression" as a moral one.

Another related, very important issue is that racists of course are correct in saying there is a quantitative difference, but that they massively overestimate the extent. So yes, blacks and muslims are more violent, and women less intelligent, than Straight White Males, but to a much, much, much lower degree than racist intuitions.

(Just ignoring for now how I assume people in the US who are socially categorised as black are genetically probably closer to those categorised as white than they are to a member of a random east african tribe. But racism is about social, not biological categories anyways.)

I'm again basically just repeating Zizek's observation that yes, some Jews were exploiting the working class and seducing non-Jewish women, and it's not being in error about this statement what makes you a fascist, it's making a point out of this that does.

I'm :spergin: so hard about this because I'm terribly afraid, when looking at the left, that if we continue to confuse this, we'll one day face a racist who actually has convincing scientific proof that muslims, or blacks, or women, or Jews, or whatever, genetically, or as a consequence of their religion, have 2.3 IQ points less/3% worse impulse inhibition control/whatever, and if the whole argument rests on the fact that they don't, you're suddenly on the wrong side. Whereas I think we should, and would say: so what? So maybe they do. They're people, that's what matters; we treat people as people, that means equally, even if they're not actually the same. And if you disagree, that's what makes you a racist. That; not that you believe in those 2 IQ points, but that you make a point out of them.

V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

we're not going to face that because we won't because it's not the case.

racism is wrong because it is not factually correct. the concept of race as a biological phenomenon makes no sense, a priori. anyone using iq scores for the purpose you're talking about here is fundamentally misunderstanding what iq is.

you're problematising something that need not be problematised. it is not necessary to ask the question "but what if we're wrong" when we're not. it is always going to be more reasonable to look to social explanations than biological ones (with the possible exception of sex in some very specific cases), because biological evidence fundamentally does not work the way you seem to think it does.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

Cingulate posted:

I'm :spergin: so hard about this because I'm terribly afraid, when looking at the left, that if we continue to confuse this, we'll one day face a racist who actually has convincing scientific proof that muslims, or blacks, or women, or Jews, or whatever, genetically, or as a consequence of their religion, have 2.3 IQ points less/3% worse impulse inhibition control/whatever, and if the whole argument rests on the fact that they don't, you're suddenly on the wrong side. Whereas I think we should, and would say: so what? So maybe they do. They're people, that's what matters; we treat people as people, that means equally, even if they're not actually the same. And if you disagree, that's what makes you a racist. That; not that you believe in those 2 IQ points, but that you make a point out of them.

I'm not saying "don't :spergin: about this at all" but rather match your responses to the situation. If someone is trying to have a serious, well-meaning academic discussion on violence and Islam by all means please be this precise and pedantic about everything since it's necessary and appropriate there, but if it's just John C. Internet repeating a talking point then responding to the idea they're working from rather than the specifics of their argument itself is going to work a lot better. I mean if you bring this argument we're having right now to any given Right-Wing Facebook Dad they're just going to say you're trying to dodge the question or they'll just ignore it and go "but what about ISIS!"

I think that big global warming rebuttal site that was recently added to the op does this really well - they have different levels of answers. The simple answer is generally a basic analogy or generalization that is true in most cases and will satisfy someone casually interested in the subject. If they go "a ha but what about x!" then you move on to the intermediate and advanced answers that provide full scientific data and show exactly how they came to the conclusions.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

V. Illych L. posted:

we're not going to face that because we won't because it's not the case.

racism is wrong because it is not factually correct. the concept of race as a biological phenomenon makes no sense, a priori. anyone using iq scores for the purpose you're talking about here is fundamentally misunderstanding what iq is.

you're problematising something that need not be problematised. it is not necessary to ask the question "but what if we're wrong" when we're not. it is always going to be more reasonable to look to social explanations than biological ones (with the possible exception of sex in some very specific cases), because biological evidence fundamentally does not work the way you seem to think it does.

Though, as you point out, while race makes no sense as a biological phenomenon, it does however make perfect sense as a social construct, and thus could be entirely reasonably correlated with any number of social ills. Drawing a causative argument between them is usually wrong, it's true, but saying that race can't ever be used as an argument when discussing social problems because it has no biological basis, seems to have a fairly obvious issue.

Personally I'd argue that racism is wrong because it is generally proper to try to find a use and place for everybody to contribute to society and try to facilitate their happiness as they do so. Essentially humans are pretty good and maybe we shouldn't be dicks to them. So even if someone did come up with scientific proof that there is some kind of provable causative relationship between one's race and some social problem, that isn't grounds for being a dick to anyone.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Parallel Paraplegic posted:

I'm not saying "don't :spergin: about this at all" but rather match your responses to the situation.
Okay, with this I completely agree - of course, the sort of argument I'm making right now would be completely out of place in most situations, and for many people, the appropriate argument is to simply yell at them a lot.

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret
Yeah, I'm with Cingulate. Race does make sense as a biological concept. "There is no such thing as race" is one of those dumb things that smart people say. Or used to say, maybe, I don't hear it too much anymore. This is a pretty good (best I've seen) version of the argument that seems reasonable
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/why-your-race-isnt-genetic-82475

but really it's just stuff you could say about almost any taxonomy in a complicated domain and fuzzing the social construct of race with the biological one and acting like the problem is on the biological side. Yeah saying "Bob is black" means almost nothing, we get it. The fact that chimpanzees show MORE race differentiation and that there are no bright distinguishing lines in the biology well poo poo 90% of stuff falls in that category but does in fact exist. BUT because "Genes certainly reflect geography" it's not a great plan to base a moral argument about treating people decently on the foundation that they don't. Biological race doesn't excuse discrimination or killing or oppression.

This is all pretty separate from the Islamic culture being / not being more violent stuff of course, bringing biology into that wouldn't make sense unless you're trying to set the world record for worst conversation or something.

pangstrom fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Apr 2, 2015

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

pangstrom posted:

Yeah, I'm with Cingulate. Race does make sense as a biological concept. "There is no such thing as race" is one of those dumb things that smart people say. Or used to say, maybe, I don't hear it too much anymore.

Because they say "Race is a social construct" instead.

You only have to look at the treatment of Arabs pre and post 9/11 to get that.

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret

computer parts posted:

Because they say "Race is a social construct" instead.

You only have to look at the treatment of Arabs pre and post 9/11 to get that.
Haha, no. They aren't suggesting we give "geographical sub-populations with detectable biological differences" a different label or something. The statement is that those differences don't exist, and as I said considering this issue relevant to the treatment of Arabs is a bad idea. It's bad AND wrong.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

pangstrom posted:

Haha, no. They aren't suggesting we give "geographical sub-populations with detectable biological differences" a different label or something. The statement is that those differences don't exist, and as I said considering this issue relevant to the treatment of Arabs is a bad idea. It's bad AND wrong.

Because those geographical sub populations don't correlate to the races that we (either the West or any society) knows about.

If you tested three tribes across Africa which would be otherwise labeled "Black" and someone from Beijing, you would get that there were 4 "biological" races despite the fact that culturally there are only 2.

Or as another example - culturally Greeks and Turks are fundamentally distinct, biologically they are (more or less) the same.

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret

computer parts posted:

Because those geographical sub populations don't correlate to the races that we (either the West or any society) knows about.

If you tested three tribes across Africa which would be otherwise labeled "Black" and someone from Beijing, you would get that there were 4 "biological" races despite the fact that culturally there are only 2.
"fuzzing the social construct of race with the biological one and acting like the problem is on the biological side"

Are we going for the world record, here?

V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

pangstrom posted:

Yeah, I'm with Cingulate. Race does make sense as a biological concept. "There is no such thing as race" is one of those dumb things that smart people say. Or used to say, maybe, I don't hear it too much anymore. This is a pretty good (best I've seen) version of the argument that seems reasonable
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/why-your-race-isnt-genetic-82475

but really it's just stuff you could say about almost any taxonomy in a complicated domain and fuzzing the social construct of race with the biological one and acting like the problem is on the biological side. Yeah saying "Bob is black" means almost nothing, we get it. The fact that chimpanzees show MORE race differentiation and that there are no bright distinguishing lines in the biology well poo poo 90% of stuff falls in that category but does in fact exist. BUT because "Genes certainly reflect geography" it's not a great plan to base a moral argument about treating people decently on the foundation that they don't. Biological race doesn't excuse discrimination or killing or oppression.

This is all pretty separate from the Islamic culture being / not being more violent stuff of course, bringing biology into that wouldn't make sense unless you're trying to set the world record for worst conversation or something.

wait are you arguing biological race realism here

because if so: lol no you're just wrong

e. to reiterate: the only way to make a biological definition of race that makes anything approaching sense is by making it a completely different phenomenon from what we currently know as race

and even that sort-of reasonable definition would be hugely problematic with tons of edge cases and significant cross-clustering

V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Apr 2, 2015

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

pangstrom posted:

"fuzzing the social construct of race with the biological one and acting like the problem is on the biological side"

Are we going for the world record, here?

I really don't know what you're saying anymore. We do track biological differences, e.g.:



...It's just that it doesn't correlate with anything people really care about (intelligence, skin color, language, religion, etc) except in very rare medical contexts.

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret

V. Illych L. posted:

wait are you arguing biological race realism here

because if so: lol no you're just wrong

Look, whatever you want to call a world where you can have populations geneticists, Human Origins 1 Arrays, low-rent autosomal DNA testing companies that actually give you correct information, scientists doing work like this https://sites.google.com/site/josephpickrell/ etc. etc. That's what I'm arguing for.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Cingulate posted:

Not gonna read that, but yes, I think "keeping everything else equal, islam causes violence" is a more interesting and cleaner debate.
But this is I assume very often not what the average racists you may meet care about. They probably don't care about if that immigrant here would have been as or less violent if they had not become a muslim, they care about how violent that person, who happens to be a muslim, is, and what will happen if they are allowed to continue practicing their culture.
Indonesia is an Al-Qaeda hotspot, and the first thing I get when googling Bangladesh is a headline "secular blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh". Granted, Chechnya is not a post-Soviet Muslim state, but it's still possibly one of the worst places to be north of the equator.
If you compare Turkey to its neighbours, it's less violent than its Arab neighbours, but much more violent than e.g. the in many aspects quite similar Greece.

Now I'm not saying this is proof islam leads to violent states. I'm just saying, this is far from the obvious argument you're making it out to be.

Finally, to repeat Hitchens Argument (as made previously by Disinterested): "there are many Islamic countries that are secularized and not violent" - okay, but isn't that actually conceding the point? That secularised states can be nonviolent, but not islamic, i.e. nonsecular, ones?

The idea is that the Muslim Civilization is incapable of not strictly adhering to religious law and zealotry. Nobody would dispute Christianity being an important formulative and defining influence on Western civilization, but the West does not enforce state religion and religious law, IE is secularized. There's varying degrees of adherence to religion, from simply as a cultural thing to keeping the religious law to the letter. These people's argument is that Muslims somehow are all 100% zealot, which is demonstrably untrue

V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

pangstrom posted:

Look, whatever you want to call a world where you can have populations geneticists, Human Origins 1 Arrays, low-rent autosomal DNA testing companies that actually give you correct information, scientists doing work like this https://sites.google.com/site/josephpickrell/ etc. etc. That's what I'm arguing for.

yes there is biological variation among subgroups of humans, this is known

it is not, however, race, because what we know as "race" is stuff like "slav" or "black person" or "han chinese"

clustering people by genetic variation will create roughly distinguishable groups, but these will not correspond to what we call "race", and there will never be phenotypes that are absolutely reserved to certain "races", e.g. sickle cell anemia is overrepresented in areas with high prevalence of malaria, so the ethnic groups in such areas will have a higher prevalence of sickle cell anemia. this is about as clear-cut as it gets, and there are still slavs with sickle-cell anemia.

you could potentially find that people in certain climates have a genetic tendency towards hotter tempers or something, but this would never apply consistently across the group you're talking about, making it useless as a determinant of race. it is entirely possible for you to be genetically closer to a Xhosa person than you are to some white guy if you're also white.

the only reason you'd make a biological definition of race is because you really want to have race as a Thing for other reasons. it is simply not a useful concept. if you start saying "oh but look at this work in genetic archaeology using dna sattelites it shows that race is a valid concept", i will call you stupid, because that's a stupid point and misses the entire point of what "race" means

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret

V. Illych L. posted:

yes there is biological variation among subgroups of humans, this is known

it is not, however, race, because what we know as "race" is stuff like "slav" or "black person" or "han chinese"

clustering people by genetic variation will create roughly distinguishable groups, but these will not correspond to what we call "race", and there will never be phenotypes that are absolutely reserved to certain "races", e.g. sickle cell anemia is overrepresented in areas with high prevalence of malaria, so the ethnic groups in such areas will have a higher prevalence of sickle cell anemia. this is about as clear-cut as it gets, and there are still slavs with sickle-cell anemia.

you could potentially find that people in certain climates have a genetic tendency towards hotter tempers or something, but this would never apply consistently across the group you're talking about, making it useless as a determinant of race. it is entirely possible for you to be genetically closer to a Xhosa person than you are to some white guy if you're also white.

the only reason you'd make a biological definition of race is because you really want to have race as a Thing for other reasons. it is simply not a useful concept. if you start saying "oh but look at this work in genetic archaeology using dna sattelites it shows that race is a valid concept", i will call you stupid, because that's a stupid point and misses the entire point of what "race" means
First: gently caress off with that last paragraph. Second: there could very well be some "correlations with things people care about", so let's not base a moral argument off there not being any such correlations. That's all I'm saying. The mapping from social construct to biological construct is bad but it's not 100% arbitrary and what, you want to say an improved mapping would suddenly make discrimination OK? Of course not. So let's not make that a handhold.

V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

no you are just wrong here dude, sorry

biology does not work the way you seem to think it does, i don't know what else to say. the reason these people use gene sattelites for their clustering is because that's basically the only thing that sort of works (and even that is far from infallible), and those sattelites are overwhelmingly silent. more to the point, the term "race" itself is completely, and i do mean completely unrelated to these genetic markers. if you want to use the term "race", you should use it for the reality that makes sense, i.e. actually existing, socially constructed racial categories on the basis of certain arbitrary phenotypes.

some groups do correlate genetically to certain conditions - certain alleles predisposing for heart disease, for instance, are more prevalent in african-american than most white american communities - but that does not make african-americans a reasonable genetic ingroup unless you specifically design the test so you find that group.

of course you can find confirmation for whatever categories you want to find in your dataset if you tweak your clustering criteria enough, but that has nothing to do with the realities of race. if people from a certain isolated valley in greenland all had the Stupid Gene through some bizarre evolutionary bottleneck, that would not make the Stupid Gene a racial trait of the inuit population, even though it would presumably be disproportionately prevalent in inuit populations for this reason - and this is literally the most favourable realistic example i could think of for your ludicrous hypothesis. race on a fundamental level does not exist as a human biological phenomenon. it does exist as a social phenomenon, however, and the only (and i do mean only) reason anyone would want to try to build a passable biological definition (and, as i have explained, it would have to be intentionally built) is to reinforce the socially defined racial hierarchy.

Prolonged Panorama
Dec 21, 2007
Holy hookrat Sally smoking crack in the alley!



Maybe you can explain it for a dummy like me, because I get worried that headlines like "Northern European DNA found to be 4% Neanderthal" give people grounds to say "hey look, "white" people are meaningfully different from Africans."

Or, to take a different angle, I've heard racists say that the different races are sort of like different breeds of dog. They look different and can have different basic personality traits. Some of which, the implication goes, are better than others. I'm sure that's a really bad and wrong analogy (esp. on the personality stuff), but I don't know how to head it off other than "that's hosed up, you're gross."

Help?

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?
When people start comparing humans to dog breeds the preferred form of argumentation is with a nailgun.

Honj Steak
May 31, 2013

Hi there.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Maybe you can explain it for a dummy like me, because I get worried that headlines like "Northern European DNA found to be 4% Neanderthal" give people grounds to say "hey look, "white" people are meaningfully different from Africans."

Or, to take a different angle, I've heard racists say that the different races are sort of like different breeds of dog. They look different and can have different basic personality traits. Some of which, the implication goes, are better than others. I'm sure that's a really bad and wrong analogy (esp. on the personality stuff), but I don't know how to head it off other than "that's hosed up, you're gross."

Help?

Genetic diversity in humans is much lower than in most other mammal species, although we are one of the largest populations by numbers. Genetic differences are mainly between individuals and only to a very small degree due to continental heritage. Just a quick google:

quote:

People today look remarkably diverse on the outside. But how much of this diversity is genetically encoded? How deep are these differences between human groups? First, compared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically far less diverse – a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and worldwide distribution. For example, the subspecies of the chimpanzee that lives just in central Africa, Pan troglodytes troglodytes, has higher levels of diversity than do humans globally, and the genetic differentiation between the western (P. t. verus) and central (P. t. troglodytes) subspecies of chimpanzees is much greater than that between human populations.

Early studies of human diversity showed that most genetic diversity was found between individuals rather than between populations or continents and that variation in human diversity is best described by geographic gradients, or clines. A wide-ranging study published in 2004 found that 87.6% percent of the total modern human genetic diversity isaccounted for by the differences between individuals, and only 9.2% between continents. In general, 5%–15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, with the remaining majority of the variation occurring within such groups (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005). These results show that when individuals are sampled from around the globe, the pattern seen is not a matter of discrete clusters – but rather gradients in genetic variation (gradual geographic variations in allele frequencies) that extend over the entire world. Therefore,there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between peoples on different continents or "races." The authors of the 2004 study say that they ‘see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. An exception may be genes where different selection regimes have acted in different geographical regions. However, even in those cases, the genetic discontinuities seen are generally not "racial" or continental in nature but depend on historical and cultural factors that are more local in nature’ (Serre and Pääbo 2004: 1683-1684).

http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/skin-color/modern-human-diversity-genetics

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Phoneposting: I understand race as the word for the social construct, much like sex vs gender, and regardless of how you think the biological vs socially constructed aspects are, it's clear we need distinct terminology.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Cingulate posted:

Phoneposting: I understand race as the word for the social construct, much like sex vs gender, and regardless of how you think the biological vs socially constructed aspects are, it's clear we need distinct terminology.

Yeah well we've got haplogroup. It's not a catchy word but that's pretty much where we are with that.

pangstrom
Jan 25, 2003

Wedge Regret

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Maybe you can explain it for a dummy like me, because I get worried that headlines like "Northern European DNA found to be 4% Neanderthal" give people grounds to say "hey look, "white" people are meaningfully different from Africans."

Or, to take a different angle, I've heard racists say that the different races are sort of like different breeds of dog. They look different and can have different basic personality traits. Some of which, the implication goes, are better than others. I'm sure that's a really bad and wrong analogy (esp. on the personality stuff), but I don't know how to head it off other than "that's hosed up, you're gross."

Help?
-"Africans" have more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined by most measures. It's true there is more Neanderthal DNA in most Europeans etc. but it's not like Neanderthals were "better" than humans, I mean presumbaly they were wiped out and/or Borg-ed by them.
-Dog races are super-different because they were bred for specific work or cosmetic purposes and different was sort of the goal. There isn't a human equivalent of a miniature poodle or something.

Shbobdb
Dec 16, 2010

by Reene
There are distinct haplogroups, however, these haplogroups do not match well with our concept of "race" and "races". It's not that hard. Because of inbreeding, Icelanders have a very distinct haplotype. Yet, according to our conception of "race" they are part of the white race. African-Americans are all over the place, representing a huge diversity of haplotypes. Yet, according to our conception of "race" they are one unified group.

If you want to get all scientifically racist (you shouldn't want to do this, btw) you should look at the data first then come to a conclusion as to what races there are, as opposed to grabbing arbitrary phenotypic markers and hoping the genetic data supports your initial hypothesis.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

icantfindaname posted:

The idea is that the Muslim Civilization is incapable of not strictly adhering to religious law and zealotry. ... These people's argument is that Muslims somehow are all 100% zealot, which is demonstrably untrue
I'm skeptical this is actually what racists believe. Even Goebbels liked a few Jews; racists understand, albeit badly, that it's about groups and averages, not every individual. The argument must be a bit more subtle.
I'm all for swearing at people and insulting racists, but we should at least not underestimate them to this degree. That makes it too easy for them.

Prolonged Priapism posted:

Or, to take a different angle, I've heard racists say that the different races are sort of like different breeds of dog. They look different and can have different basic personality traits. Some of which, the implication goes, are better than others.
"Better", in the sense of moral worth and value, is not a scientific term. Science has absolutely nothing to say to this. Science can tell you that this gene combination is more prevalent in this part of the world, or under people who share this characteristic (such as black skin), and that this gene correlates with some marker of cognitive performance or compliance with social norms, and that membership in these groups also correlates with cognitive performance or compliance with norms. (Science does all of these, with the exception that there are at present zero stable genetic or anatomical predictors of intelligence in healthy populations.)
It cannot say one person is better. Whatever claims to be capable of that that (e.g. Sam Harris) is not science. So the racist cannot assign the blame for their hatred to science. Science does not take the burden of that responsibility. Moral positions like that - like valuing one group of people over another based on cognitive differences - are human choices.

That's Hume's is/ought problem; from no is should be derived an ought.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Shbobdb posted:

There are distinct haplogroups, however, these haplogroups do not match well with our concept of "race" and "races". It's not that hard. Because of inbreeding, Icelanders have a very distinct haplotype. Yet, according to our conception of "race" they are part of the white race. African-Americans are all over the place, representing a huge diversity of haplotypes. Yet, according to our conception of "race" they are one unified group.
The last time I checked, this was actually false in that genes actually predict (self-described) race quite well, and that clustering of genetic markers surely doesn't reproduce racial (=social) categories, but not in the way that it would disagree with racist stereotypes either.

I can dig up the studies if necessary (I hope I remember it correctly).

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

V. Illych L. posted:

it is always going to be more reasonable to look to social explanations than biological ones (with the possible exception of sex in some very specific cases), because biological evidence fundamentally does not work the way you seem to think it does.
As to the first: wrong way around. Sex differences are known to be very, very small to small on almost all studied parameters of cognitive performance. We know of race differences that are much larger, often by an order of magnitude.
Second: what do you mean by this - I am wrong about how biological evidence works?

Now I really don't want to make a large point out of how different human groups are, biologically. The point should instead be that regardless of how similar or different we are in biology, we are all morally equal.
That would be a much stronger position.
I'm also rather optimistic of the chances of this position as an answer to racists.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

pangstrom posted:

Haha, no. They aren't suggesting we give "geographical sub-populations with detectable biological differences" a different label or something. The statement is that those differences don't exist, and as I said considering this issue relevant to the treatment of Arabs is a bad idea. It's bad AND wrong.

What? No, when people say race doesn't exist as a biological construct but as a social one, they're saying that societies actual usage of "race" has little/nothing to do with biology or regional differences. People treat two black people of incredibly distinct biological/regional backgrounds as "black" but white and black people from the same area that would be virtually identical from a biological standpoint are treated quite differently. Hence the concept of 'passing', etc.

twodot
Aug 7, 2005

You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Cingulate posted:

The point should instead be that regardless of how similar or different we are in biology, we are all morally equal.
I don't understand what it means to be morally equal. Like yeah regardless of biology we shouldn't enslave each other or create a society that systemically disadvantages people based on how they look, but there's certainly biological traits that are more desirable than others.

Disinterested
Jun 29, 2011

You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?
Being good at dancing, for example.

Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Zeitgueist posted:

What? No, when people say race doesn't exist as a biological construct but as a social one, they're saying that societies actual usage of "race" has little/nothing to do with biology or regional differences.
I'd make a different emphasis. I'd say, the concepts are about different domains. They may correlate strongly, or they may not correlate at all, that's an empirical question; but we need a term for each domain.

At least with regards to the US and the black/white/asian/latino distinction, that actually correlates very strongly with genes for all I understand.

twodot posted:

I don't understand what it means to be morally equal. Like yeah regardless of biology we shouldn't enslave each other or create a society that systemically disadvantages people based on how they look, but there's certainly biological traits that are more desirable than others.
Certainly - you may personally desire your sex partner to be funny, or your friends to share your trait of a deep-seated hatred of U2. But do you think the law should treat people who like Bono differently?
Knowing that US blacks genetically have different insulin sensitivity and are therefore more prone to diabetes has medical implications. But should it happen that science learns with absolute certainty that blacks genetically have lower IQ, does that mean the law should value their lives, their desires, their cultural expressions less?

Next, science does not desire. When science says "trait X is desirable", it means "people find trait X desirable"; it's a descriptive statement about the people who judge the trait, not a moral statement about the people who have it.
If you choose to value group A less because they have trait X, that's entirely on you, regardless of whatever science says.

Zeitgueist
Aug 8, 2003

by Ralp

Cingulate posted:

I'd make a different emphasis. I'd say, the concepts are about different domains. They may correlate strongly, or they may not correlate at all, that's an empirical question; but we need a term for each domain.

At least with regards to the US and the black/white/asian/latino distinction, that actually correlates very strongly with genes for all I understand.

No not really at all, it doesn't. None of those terms have any biological background that's consistent with their usage in the USA, and I would encourage you to research the genetics of race to help disabuse yourself of this idea.

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V. Illych L.
Apr 11, 2008

ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

Cingulate posted:

As to the first: wrong way around. Sex differences are known to be very, very small to small on almost all studied parameters of cognitive performance. We know of race differences that are much larger, often by an order of magnitude.

well, you apparently cannot read, so it's no surprise that you don't understand biology

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