Racism is baseless

[Crazy Chainsaw]

Poison Ivy and Poison Oak. I get no grief from either of them. The family speculation is that its thanks to a somewhat distant Native American ancestor. (The founder of our line got booted out of his family for marrying a Native American woman.) But there's actually no foundation for a Native American genetic immunity.

Actually the Ojibwa and related tribes, have long been known to not have the allergic reaction too poison Ivy.

That also includes some Cherokee's and other tribes.

 

[MikeG]

Poison Ivy and Poison Oak. I get no grief from either of them. The family speculation is that its thanks to a somewhat distant Native American ancestor. (The founder of our line got booted out of his family for marrying a Native American woman.) But there's actually no foundation for a Native American genetic immunity.

You think there is such a thing? Did he not have a father and a mother?

 

[Crazy Chainsaw]

You think there is such a thing? Did he not have a father and a mother?

I looked for the genetic study that points to the immunity I know it was published in 2009.

Tied to the first migration into the Americas.

 

[fuelair]

Poison Ivy and Poison Oak. I get no grief from either of them. The family speculation is that its thanks to a somewhat distant Native American ancestor. (The founder of our line got booted out of his family for marrying a Native American woman.) But there's actually no foundation for a Native American genetic immunity.

Cool and congratulations!!!!!

 

[Apathia]

Actually the Ojibwa and related tribes, have long been known to not have the allergic reaction too poison Ivy.

That also includes some Cherokee's and other tribes.

This may be attributed to individual tolerances built up from childhood exposher.

 

[Apathia]

You think there is such a thing? Did he not have a father and a mother?

Relatively speaking, as that ancestor was disinherited and disowned from a wealthy Virginia family to found his own wretched branch of as far as I can see vile scum.

 

[Crazy Chainsaw]

This may be attributed to individual tolerances built up from childhood exposher.

It might have been but the study I was looking for linked it to loss of one specific gene that produced a deformity that lowered one specific protein.
It also only occurred in one tribe.

 

[Apathia]

It might have been but the study I was looking for linked it to loss of one specific gene that produced a deformity that lowered one specific protein.
It also only occurred in one tribe.

Haven't' found anything like that yet. But I did remember how to spell "exposure."

 

[shuttlt]

Any group that is not well situated in the community and it's ways will tend to be looked down on and be prejudiced against by that community or at least a number of it's members. The extant excuse for this is that in the early (very)time of civilization tribes competed for food and other resources so choosing to not associate with other tribes and instead to avoid or fight them was a survival tactic. Now, not so much - but it still happens.

That isn't what is being discussed by the OP. Here, we have a group who has a bunch of very negative traits.... they are uneducated, poor, underemployed, have family problems, have lots of kids, die young, and I gather from the OP have a high rate of criminality and substance abuse. For some of these issues, it's the majority of the group exhibiting the negative characteristic..

The OP says that the racist is quite justified and proportionate in having a negative view of the indigenous population. One doesn't need to go to evo psych to account for the negative view. As the OP has said, there hasn't been the same racist attitudes to different races who don't have this wealth of problems.

 

[macdoc]

different races

Oh - you are personally aquainted with some Denosovians....have a Neanderthal ghetto nearby you can observe ???

There is ONE human race that still exists, there are many human cultures some successful, some not and many human subpopulations with varying degrees of challenges endowed by their genetics including their skin colour, eye shape etc.

Move on past the "oh so Victorian" world view.

 

[Bikewer]

That's complete ********.

Thanks for the reasoned analysis. I remember reading one of Carl Sagan's books in which he talked about the research on chimp societies, and mentioned the territoriality of these "troupes" and how violent they could be...
But at the same time, researchers had observed younger chimps, both male and female, sneaking away from the troupe to have "liasons" with members of competing troupes.

Indicating, perhaps, that familiarity (and the mating imperative) might mitigate this "fear of the other" that we appear to have developed as well.
I'm not familiar with any anthropologists I've read that do not talk about the fear of the other, and that there's plenty of historical evidence of small tribal groups warring with each other even when they're of the same ethnicity.

Civilization, and the ethnic mixing that's been common in big cities since ancient times, obviously mitigates this as well.... But it always lurks beneath the surface and it doesn't take much to set it off.

 

[caveman1917]

Thanks for the reasoned analysis.

You didn't make a reasoned claim.

I remember reading one of Carl Sagan's books in which he talked about the research on chimp societies, and mentioned the territoriality of these "troupes" and how violent they could be...

Have you, at any point, considered that chimps aren't humans?

I'm not familiar with any anthropologists I've read that do not talk about the fear of the other, and that there's plenty of historical evidence of small tribal groups warring with each other even when they're of the same ethnicity.

War between hunter-gatherer groups tends to be associated with resource shortages. Practically absent in places like Central Africa, more common in places like Northern Europe (depending on the seasonal and other variations in resource availability).

 

[shuttlt]

Oh - you are personally aquainted with some Denosovians....have a Neanderthal ghetto nearby you can observe ???

There is ONE human race that still exists, there are many human cultures some successful, some not and many human subpopulations with varying degrees of challenges endowed by their genetics including their skin colour, eye shape etc.

Move on past the "oh so Victorian" world view.

If the OP argues this, surely they will just be accused of equivocating on the meaning of "race"? Its possible I'm wrong. OP? Are we talking exclusively about the meaning of the word "race" as it applies in evolutionary biology, or do we mean the colloquial meaning.... that is to say a collection of people exhibiting a cluster of genetic traits due to a shared social history?

 

[macdoc]

or do we mean the colloquial meaning.... that is to say a collection of people exhibiting a cluster of genetic traits due to a shared social history?

you using big words to cover your lack of understanding - "genetic traits due to share social history" .........

care to enlighten your readers.

 

[shuttlt]

you using big words to cover your lack of understanding - "genetic traits due to share social history" .........

care to enlighten your readers.

Lets take the example of the OP. There are indigenous people and non-indigenous people in Manitoba. I suspect the OP can tell which group somebody falls into with a high degree of accuracy by sight. Doubtless not with 100% accuracy, but having Googled it, I reckon I could do significantly better than chance at such a test. So, there we have a bunch of physical features (presumably there are less visible ones in there also), that I imagine are largely genetic in origin and are shared amongst a group that have a common historic/geographic heritage. That surely is what is being discussed? I presume you aren't saying that that group doesn't exist, or that they don't share physical features that allow them to be identified at a rate better than chance due to common historic/geographic heritage?

It's tricky here because the racist in the OP doesn't use the word "race". It's the OP. I'm only calling the indigenous people a race right now because the OP brought the word in by calling the chap in the OP "racist". That being the case, what is the specific argument that you are refuting, because I honestly don't know.

 

[arthwollipot]

Oh - you are personally aquainted with some Denosovians....have a Neanderthal ghetto nearby you can observe ???

There is ONE human race that still exists, there are many human cultures some successful, some not and many human subpopulations with varying degrees of challenges endowed by their genetics including their skin colour, eye shape etc.

Move on past the "oh so Victorian" world view.

There is one human species. There's one domestic dog species as well, and through selective breeding (artificial in this case, natural in the case of humans) there are a number of different ways that the species can appear.

Equating "race" with "species" isn't helpful, IMO. It's been quite a long time since Africans were considered a different species from Europeans.

 

[Roboramma]

Have you, at any point, considered that chimps aren't humans?

Chimps aren't humans but they are our closest relatives and share many traits in common.

War between hunter-gatherer groups tends to be associated with resource shortages. Practically absent in places like Central Africa, more common in places like Northern Europe (depending on the seasonal and other variations in resource availability).

Citation needed.

 

[macdoc]

AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race

Published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology,

PREAMBLE
As scientists who study human evolution and variation, we believe that we have an obligation to share with other scientists and the general public our current understanding of the structure of human variation from a biological perspective. Popular conceptualizations of race are derived from 19th and early 20th century scientific formulations. These old racial categories were based on externally visible traits, primarily skin color, features of the face, and the shape and size of the head and body, and the underlying skeleton. They were often imbued with nonbiological attributes, based on social constructions of race. These categories of race are rooted in the scientific traditions of the 19th century, and in even earlier philosophical traditions which presumed that immutable visible traits can predict the measure of all other traits in an individual or a population. Such notions have often been used to support racist doctrines. Yet old racial concepts persist as social conventions that foster institutional discrimination. The expression of prejudice may or may not undermine material well-being, but it does involve the mistreatment of people and thus it often is psychologically distressing and socially damaging. Scientists should try to keep the results of their research from being used in a biased way that would serve discriminatory ends.

POSITION
We offer the following points as revisions of the 1964 UNESCO statement on race:

1. All humans living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and share a common descent. Although there are differences of opinion regarding how and where different human groups diverged or fused to form new ones from a common ancestral group, all living populations in each of the earth's geographic areas have evolved from that ancestral group over the same amount of time. Much of the biological variation among populations involves modest degrees of variation in the frequency of shared traits. Human populations have at times been isolated, but have never genetically diverged enough to produce any biological barriers to mating between members of different populations.

2. Biological differences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments. In most cases, these differences are due to the interaction of both. The degree to which environment or heredity affects any particular trait varies greatly.

3. There is great genetic diversity within all human populations. Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.

http://physanth.org/about/position-statements/biological-aspects-race/

Time to move on from the Victorian world view and language ..it remains a very damaging meme and belongs in the trash heap along with phrenology et al.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

War between hunter-gatherer groups tends to be associated with resource shortages. Practically absent in places like Central Africa, more common in places like Northern Europe (depending on the seasonal and other variations in resource availability).

That's complete ********.

 

[shuttlt]

http://physanth.org/about/position-statements/biological-aspects-race/

Time to move on from the Victorian world view and language ..it remains a very damaging meme and belongs in the trash heap along with phrenology et al.

I'm not clear what you are arguing here. Your second highlighted section is going off on a tangent about pure races, the relevance of which I don't understand. Are you somehow disagreeing with the OP calling the racist a racist because the indigenous people aren't a race? Are you arguing that because the indigenous people aren't a race, there can't be a cluster of negative characteristics associated with them? Are you arguing that there can be no physical basis for them?

I'm going to guess that you are obtusely arguing point three that there can be no physical basis for the negative traits in the indigenous people of Manitoba. I am perfectly content to believe that that is in fact the case. The difference in the on and off reservation statistics would seem to suggest a strong environmental, and/or cultural basis, though of course that doesn't rule out a genetic component. The thing is that the OP was asking for advice on how to argue against somebody who the OP asserted believed this. Your argument, if I am guessing it correctly, is that it is necessarily the case that it is impossible for the indigenous people to have negative traits due to genetics. It seems to me that to argue this, one has to defend one of two propositions:

1. That there is no clustering of genetic traits in the indigenous population. - it seems to me that this is clearly false as evidenced by the indigenous population being identifiable fairly readily from the non-indigenous just by eye with better accuracy than chance.

2. That genetic traits can't cause negative behaviours - this also seems to me to be false. There appears to be a genetic basis for many types of mental illness, alcohol dependence, and a host of other things.

It may well be that the racist has a weak factual basis for believing that there is in fact some degree of genetic basis for the issues with the indigenous people (it would help to have more details on what he actually believed), but I don't see on what basis one can say that it is necessarily false without any discussion of the specifics of the case.

Is that what you are arguing, or something else?