Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?

Michael Andrew Turton (turtom@magritte.its.rpi.edu)
29 Jan 1995 03:13:52 GMT

In article <ebohlmanD357Bv.8wK@netcom.com>,
Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@netcom.com> wrote:
>William Tyler (wtyler@mv.us.adobe.com) wrote:
>: Now try answering the question. I'll repeat it. What do you call the
>: property or group of properties that allow you to, more often than
>: not, correctly distinguish between a Nigerian and a Swede?
>
>Group variations in phenotype. Please note that the relation of
>phenotype to genotype is many-to-many, not one-to-one. It's possible to
>have phenotypic clusters that do not correspond to genotypic clusters.
>For example, a Nigerian and an Australian aborigine both belong to the
>phenotypic cluster that corresponds to the social concept of "black."

I notice that nobody is ever willing to list just what those
"differences" "phenotypic clusters" "somatic types" and other codes
*are*.........why is that, I wonder..........

>Yet the average genotypic distance between a Nigerian and an aborigine is
>one of the largest such distances that you can find. The two groups are
>about as distantly related in ancestry as is possible.
>

NEWS FLASH: "Nigerian" has the same level of meaning as "American."
There is no "nigerian" ethnic group, just a loose (or tight) association of
a number of different people with widely varying amounts of melanin etc
etc in their skin. In fact, the distance between an australian aborigine
and a nigerian is about as far as you can get: that between fiction and
reality (!).

Mike Turton
turtom@rpi.edu