Quote from: JorgeStolfi on November 19, 2015, 03:32:22 AM

Quote from: r0ach on November 18, 2015, 09:46:04 PM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on November 18, 2015, 09:05:53 PM

That is the sort of horrible simplification that "scientific racists" must make to justify the concept of "race".

You're way more fringe leftist than I imagined, trying to claim that anyone acknolwedging different ethnic groups or races exist at all is a "scientific racist".

I have noticed that, since racism became politically incorrect in the US and other countries, many racists have simply search-replaced "race" by the politically correct "ethnic group" in their vocabulary -- and then continued to think of "ethnic groups" exactly as they thought or "race" before.

Sorry, but the two terms have completely different meaning. "Race" was assumed to be defined by biology, to be inherited, and to be immutable. "Ethnic group" is defined by culture; it is learned, and can be changed at will (given sufficient resources, and unless society prevents it). "Race" is now known to have no scientific basis. "Ethnic groups" are (for good or bad) very real.

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The word "racist" isn't even a valid word in the first place because it implies everyone on earth is identical to one another. [ ... ] you anti-Bitcoin Marxist

Stupid strawman. I am not Marxist, and nowhere have I claimed that "everyone on earth is identical". That is just what you have decided that Marxists say.

If anything, it is the racists who assume that all people of the same "race" are identical, whenever they make sweeping statements about "Caucasians", "Asians", etc. Just by putting people into five distinct buckets, they are implicitly stating that all the billion people assigned to the same bucket have something in common -- and that the bucket is hugely important when discussing those people, or dealing with them.

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Read it and weep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intelligence

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signed by 52 university professors specializing in intelligence and related fields, including around one third of the editorial board of the journal Intelligence,

Of course every fringe wants to be considered "mainstream". One could easily find 104 university professors to sign a letter saying exactly the opposite -- including two thirds of the editorial board of some anti-racism academic journal.

You can also easily find 500 nuclear engineers to sign a declaration that nuclear power is totally safe. Or 500 pyramid scam operators to back a claim that pyramid schemes are good for society.

(I may edit that article, if I get a round tuitt. Grin

)

Replace "person" by "computer" in that "mainstream view" and maybe you will realize how silly it is. Do you think that there a single number that measures how "intelligent" a computer is? There are many numbers that measure various aspects of a computer -- clock speed, memory size, disk space and speed, screen size, peripherals, power consumption, etc. -- but not even all of them together will predict which of two computers will be better suited for a certain task in a certain context. Very often, small differences in software will make a huge difference in that regard.

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on November 18, 2015, 09:05:53 PM

(The term "Caucasian", by the way, is a relic from "scientific" racial classifications of the 19th century.)

Oh joy, now anyone filling in the word "caucasian" for race on the census is now a "19th century racist".

My apologies, I have checked and the notion that the "right" race came from the Caucasus did not originate in the 19th century, but from the 18th.

So, yes: the use of "Caucasian" shows that the "race" item in US census and other US is a relic of 18th century racial thinking.

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Quote from: JorgeStolfi on November 18, 2015, 09:05:53 PM

There are known natural mechanisms that allow such jumping, and they have been adapted for genetic engineering. Again, it if such accident happens only once in a million years, that may be sufficient to transfer a gene from one to all individuals of a completely different species.)

Probably mutation + convergent evolution, which is why if life is discovered on other planets, it would likely be similar to what exists here or in the past.

Convergent evolution produces the same concrete results (legs, wings, horns, fishtails, streamlined shape, poison bite, etc.) with totally different genes and mechanisms. Horizontal genetic transfer moves very similar genes between species, which may or may not produce similar results. The chances of two similar genes evolving independently in two branches of the tree, when they are lacking in the common ancestor, is stupidly small -- much smaller than the chances of finding the private key of a funded bitcoin address by just guessing. (There, now this post is on-topic!)

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Quote from: JorgeStolfi on November 18, 2015, 09:05:53 PM

In cultures that did not have African slavery for many centuries, or which for some reason never adopted the "one drop rule", skin color is perceived as a continuous variable that is either irrelevant, or does not trigger discrimination at some magic level.

Please cut the slavery BS. Brazil didn't even get rid of slavery completely until TWENTY FIVE YEARS after the emancipation proclamation in the US. Hilarious that you would actually bring this up while trying to demonize North America.

Please read again what I wrote, and stop inventing. I was not referring to Brazil, where racial prejudices still exist (but with a different discourse).

(But, since you mention it: Brazil abolished slavery in 1850. Maybe not effectively, but without major upheavals. Whereas, in the US, abolition was forced on half of the country in ~1860, by a bloody Civil War; and a hundred years later the losing side still resented it...)

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The Roman empire also had more white slaves than black slaves ever to exist.

Indeed; and, coincidentally, the Romans did not seem to have had prejudices about skin color. (That is not to say that they were egalitarian, even towards free Roman citizens). In fact, for all I know, their success as empire-builders was due to their policy of assimilating the conquered peoples, giving them citizen rights and opportunity to ascend the power hierarchy, even to the highest levels.

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The basis of the so called "one drop rule" was most likely due to white genes being recessive.

Almost certainly not. Skin color genes are not really recessive, and (as others have pointed out) recessive genes do not work the way you think. (No shame in that, but you must read about it -- it is very basic genetics, that everybody should know.)

In Latin America, generally, that rule was never used -- not even by those "whites" who have prejudice against "blacks". One can adequately explain that cultural difference by considering the significant differences in the histories of the two countries.

The "one-drop" rule in the US, like the the (non)immigration rules of Japan, the chaste system of India, and many other similar binary barriers in many other places, almost certainly arose as a way to prevent the "leaking" of the lower class into the upper class's society through the children of mixed ancestry.

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Without an ethnocentric majority, the nation state collapses.

Yeah, sure. Look at Switzerland, for example -- it collapsed in the Middle Ages and did not even realize it yet. Or at China, which has never worked as a state because of its 20 major languages and uncountable dialects.

Louis Agassiz and Arthur Gobineau were two of many Europeans who were horrified by the miscigenation that they saw in Brazil in the early 19th century. I think it was one of them who predicted that the country would collapse in a few decades because of that.
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holy fucking shit Jorge buy a bitcoin already.