Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?
Gerold Firl (geroldf@sdd.hp.com)
2 Oct 1996 19:45:35 GMT
In article <52ppks$p9t@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>, pdeitik@bcm.tmc.edu (Philip Deitiker) writes:
|> In the north part of japan
|> one sees the presence of a group related to transcontinental eskimo.
|> Thus it appears that several groups have interacted to form what
|> japanese would almost consider a race to itself.
Almost? Ha - for the japanese, their racial purity is a tenet of faith,
and a pretty amusing one at that, given their hybrid origin.
|> I have traveled from
|> the northern parts to the southern most part of japan and its pretty
|> aparent that the face of japanese change. In the north there are alot
|> of japanese which appear as northwest asians and eskimo type faces. In
|> the central regions (tokyo south past osaka) many people are almost
|> indistuiguihable from their counterparts in korea. On the
|> southwestern island one sees alot of folks who could easily pass off
|> as mexican or other native north american. From an inhertance point
|> of view this begs the question even in a rather tightly constrained
|> situation can inheritance be judged by current genetic makeup, and can
|> this then be related to some type of stem/branch type structure. How
|> about my visual observations, are they of any relevance?
Sure. The japanese people are the result of mixtures of northeast
asians, ainu, and the okinawa-type aborigines still found in isolated
areas of the eastern pacific islands, from the phillipines to hainan,
taiwan, and up the island chain to southern japan.
There is no biological reason note to consider the japanese as a race,
a human subspecies, unless you are an extreme lumper. Of course, there
are political reasons for such denial, but that debate has gotten
pretty boring by now.
|> thus I send you back to my very simple bipartite classification with a
|> little modification.
|>
|> Those descended very genetically diverse sub-saharan africans.
|> - With alot of mixture of genetically diverse groups and some
|> radiation, produced at least one single bud from an ancient
|> regional population, then mixed some more (negro, asian,
|> caucasion).
Your use of the term "negro" could be more precise. Using the scheme
of the _penguin atlas of african history_, subsaharan africa is home to
5 races: the bushmen, pygmies, negroes, nilo-sudanese, and abysinnians.
The negro homeland is in west africa. It's only in the last 2000 years,
with the advent of metalworking and animal domestication technologies,
that the negroes have broken out from their homeland and occupied huge
areas of southern and eastern africa formerly inhabited by the bushmen
and pygmies.
|> The answer is that the racial subtype 'negro' or 'black' is a
|> useless terminolgy since it does not reconcile the genetics of
|> subsahran african diversity, or the fact that all are descended from
|> this population. IOW one could argue that a european (caucasian) is
|> 'genetically' of negro race and in genetic form be correct.
Not exactly. The human family tree appears to have complicated branches
and roots, and where and how negroes, indo-europeans, east asians etc
all branched from the main stem, and what auxiliary roots fed into each
particular stream, is not yet clear. However, the negro race is too
recent to be the ancestor of the other old world peoples, even aside
from the local roots into h. erectus and neandertal populations.
|> Thus to answer your question, racial classification being used as
|> genetic classification is simply an obsolete classification
|> methodology. Each class type probably represents different
|> heirarchical levels and thus types are not comparable. since one is a
|> subset of another which is still a subset of the thrid.
Yes - the actual evolutionary tree is still unclear, but the idea of
dividing all people into caucasian, "negro", and mongoloid is obviously
wrong. It uses different levels of lumping and splitting for different
subpopulations, which is a typological error.
--
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=---- Gerold Firl @ ..hplabs!hp-sdd!geroldf
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