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politicartoons2017-02-09 11:52 am
tigron-x.livejournal.com) wrote in politicartoons2017-02-09 11:52 amEntry tags:
tigron-x.livejournal.com) wrote in politicartoons2017-02-09 11:52 am
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If you're born with the capacity to construct it, then you're born with the ability to identify your tribe. The distinction you're making doesn't really make much sense. Child development is all about calibrating various systems in order to function in the environment. Your born with the ability to make the 5 sounds that make up every language. Learning the particular dialect of your people is all about calibrating those innate functions.
Also, similar to the way you've stated things, you're not born with the knowledge of spacial awareness. You're born with the capacity to develop this function. By your logic, spacial awareness is a malleable and subjective construct. But, the reality is that it's just one of many systems at work that are being calibrated so that you can function properly in the environment.
I've presented you with enough information showing that race is empirically verifiable. DNA; facial features; skin color.
So, yes, race is a valid abstraction of reality because the tests are repeatable!
Clearly, there is no amount of information that will change your mind.
Hehe... "What else is at stake?"
Genocide of a group of people isn't enough for you, eh?
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You don't get that kind of victim status. Though you clearly prize it.
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Have you ever tried to learn a very foreign language? Like, as a native English speaker, tried to learn some form of Chinese? It's very difficult for two reasons. First, there are sounds the Chinese make that do not have analogues in English, and we tend to map these sounds onto ones we already know when picking up the language, and they get stuck. That leaves us with an accent that is very hard to eradicate and can even mangle our speech completely.
And second, Chinese is a tonal language. That means by varying the pitch of your voice between high and low, you actually change the meaning and structure of your words. We use tone to convey emotion and intent behind words almost exclusively, and using it to change meaning or grammar is a totally foreign idea to us, and to learn it we have to push aside a huge amount of our emotional expression, and re-learn it around the new language.
The point is, because we are already native speakers of another language, it is actually a big uphill battle learning this new language, because we have to redefine many categorizations of sounds (to reduce our accent) and we have to use sound in a totally different way.
In other words, we've been "calibrated" to communicate with one peer group, and now that "calibration" is working against us when we want to communicate with a different one.
This is different from spatial awareness. You learn spatial awareness once, and only tweak it as you go. Gravity is the same for everyone. Balance works the same way for everyone with four limbs and a spine. The length of your reach and the weight of your body changes only very slowly and that training is never an impediment unless there's some kind of accident (like you lose a limb) or you go into space, or go deep-sea diving without training first.
Race is like language. Not like spatial awareness. The shorthand and the distinctions you have learned to make with race are:
1. not universal, even across what you call "your own" race,
2. not always an advantage - and can be a huge disadvantage at times,
3. not subject to an objective standard for quality - only a subjective one.
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And as I pointed out elsewhere. There are many many facial features, and shades of distinction amongst those features, and where you draw the lines to declare a race is not objective, "ontologically" or otherwise. The races defined even vary across different disciplines - forensic anthropology versus sociology versus archaeology for example - and are even contested within those disciplines, and are also in a state of flux.
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Finally found the article I wanted to share with you: (bold emphasis added by me)
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So to suggest that humans have undergone an evolutionary makeover from Stone Age times to the present is nothing short of blasphemous. Yet a team of researchers has done just that. They find an abundance of recent adaptive mutations etched in the human genome; even more shocking, these mutations seem to be piling up faster and ever faster, like an avalanche. Over the past 10,000 years, their data show, human evolution has occurred a hundred times more quickly than in any other period in our species’ history.
The new genetic adaptations, some 2,000 in total, are not limited to the well-recognized differences among ethnic groups in superficial traits such as skin and eye color. The mutations relate to the brain, the digestive system, life span, immunity to pathogens, sperm production, and bones—in short, virtually every aspect of our functioning.
Many of these DNA variants are unique to their continent of origin, with provocative implications. “It is likely that human races are evolving away from each other,” says University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who coauthored a major paper on recent human evolution. “We are getting less alike, not merging into a single mixed humanity.”
Harpending theorizes that the attitudes and customs that distinguish today’s humans from those of the past may be more than just cultural, as historians have widely assumed. “We aren’t the same as people even a thousand or two thousand years ago,” he says. “Almost every trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.”
Not surprisingly, the new findings have raised hackles. Some scientists are alarmed by claims of ethnic differences in temperament and intelligence, fearing that they will inflame racial sensitivities. Other researchers point to limitations in the data. Yet even skeptics now admit that some human traits, at least, are evolving rapidly, challenging yesterday’s hallowed beliefs.
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Full article here:
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/09-they-dont-make-homo-sapiens-like-they-used-to
And, even this article points out how info is being suppressed.
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Fun article. From page four, emphasis added:
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Many scientists apparently worry that proof of divergent brain evolution could be so racially polarizing that we, as a society, would almost be better off in the dark. Hawks responds that the best safeguard against bigotry is educating the public. He thinks we understand enough about human genetics to know that the notion of racial superiority is absurd. Intelligence, he argues, is not a single trait but a vast suite of abilities, and each ancestral environment may have favored a different set of talents. What is sorely needed, he says, is “an ecological framework” to interpret the results. “Groups are best adapted to their own environment, which eliminates the question of superiority.” Even he concedes, though, that communicating the nuances will be no easy task.
“Whatever we find,” Wang says, “it would never be justification for abandoning the egalitarian value that all individuals, regardless of their ethnicity, are deserving of the same rights and opportunities.” Moyzis expands on that line of reasoning, putting a sunny spin on the group’s findings. “It would be boring if all the races were fundamentally the same,” he argues. “It’s exciting to think that they bring different strengths and talents to the table. That is part of what makes melting-pot cultures like our own so invigorating and creative.”
Of course, in melting-pot cultures all kinds of ethnic groups intermingle freely, and the children who result literally meld our DNA together. Even if those groups were diverging, international travel is now causing the diversity to get lost in the genetic reshuffling. “That’s the ultimate irony,” Moyzis says. “By the time we finally settle this debate, we’ll all be such a mixture of genes that we won’t care.”
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No one is making those claims. That's the hyperbole of the left.
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