Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?

Peter Nosko (pete@technologist.com)
10 Nov 96 02:33:10 GMT

frank@clark.net wrote in article <5629u0$2ng@clarknet.clark.net>...
> Ron Kephart (rkephart@osprey.unf.edu) wrote:
> : Duncan@drmac.demon.co.uk ("Duncan R. MacMillan") wrote:
> : >
> : > I get the impression that a lot of people who rubbish "The Bell
Curve"
> : > seem to think that IQ was used to assign the subjects to their racial
groups,
> : > instead of the other way round.
> :
> : No, that's not the problem. The problem with the Bell Curve and other
> : pseudo scientific attempts to correlate "race" and "IQ" is that people
> : are assigned to "races" based on the US folk racial taxonomy, and then
> : differences (real or otherwise) between these groups are projected
> : onto their biology. The groups are NOT biological, but CULTURAL
> : constructs, and thus the conclusion that differences in "IQ" reflect
> : differences in genetics is wrong, wrong, wrong.
>
> We seem to be getting no closer in finding out what the race deniers
> are denying than before. But even if we do find out, folk races differ
> from one another genetically, even if they do not precisely correspond to
> races, whatever they are, as biologists might define them. If we were to
> define the race of Evens as those who have even Social Security numbers
> and Odds with Social Security numbers, these races would indeed have
> nothing to do with genetics. And the average IQs would not differ
> significantly either.
>
> I do wish you would answer the basic question of what it is that the race
> deniers are denying *before* you make the denial!

Frank, you either haven't been paying enough attention to the thread or
joined it late. Ron did in fact already answer "the basic question" back
on 10/21. For your benefit, here it is again.

Ron Kephart <rkephart@osprey.unf.edu> wrote in article
<54fpph$a9m@pelican.unf.edu>...
> hegeman@wchat.on.ca (Toby Cockcroft) wrote:
>
> > What are the race deniers denying is your question and the answer is
the
> > whole notion of 'race'.
>
> Let me come in here with one important qualification to the above.
> We, as anthropologists, are denying that it is possible to
> organize the present world-wide population of Homo sapiens sapiens
> into discrete "racial" categories in any scientific and biologically
> meaningful way. For us a much more interesting and biologically
> meaningful question is "In what ways does this world-wide population
> vary, and what are the adaptive advantages for that variation, if
> any?"

[Ron-- not that you aren't capable of handling this; you are one of the few
involved in this thread making good use of the bandwidth. I just happened
to have your prior post handy.]

-- 

Peter Nosko

pete@technologist.com

Race is a Pigment of the Imagination