"I do know that I've lost count of how many times senior colleagues (many of whom I respect greatly) have implored me to study anything else but race. What possible good comes from taking such a risk?"

I think this is correct. The problem with studying race is there is really is no such thing.

I recently had my DNA tested by 23 and me. I got the results back two days ago, and am anxiously awaiting my mothers results.

In order to make sense of the data, I started reading up on genetics. (A course I took many years ago in college)

It is an extremely complex subject, and something I don't have the time or the inclination to understand totally but I do know that your phenotype (what you look like) is a very small and superficial component of your genotype.
The shear overwhelming volume of the genetic data makes studying people classed by skin color and other superficial characteristics a *non scientific* exercise in futility.

http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/opp/racesnyt.html

So unless this guy is a geneticist and has narrowed his study to a specific strand of DNA with specific mutations and how it predisposes someone to a certain recognized characterisitc or disease, it is total bunkum.

One great thing about getting older is being ever-more certain that the vicissitudes of education at every level are not my problem, and no one's asking.

But why exactly are today's students such simpering fuckbabies? How on Earth could they have come to believe that their impulses describe the rights other people have to speak?

I think it was Ronald Reagan. His presidency [A.] unleashed one last huge pulse of industrial commerce (as well was a few quivers of Wall Street insanity) and [B.] ended the Cold War. Clinton spent the next decade chasing tail, suggesting to simple-hearted folk that national and international politics were just not that big a deal, nothing that required voter attention. (...So long as you were willing to put up with an occasional Rwanda, and America certainly was.)

By the time 9/11 happened, nearly twenty years of smug growth & comfort had inured our voters to the quixotic attractions of irony and thoughtful reconsideration of beliefs. These kids got no humility because the machinery of their culture never asked it of them, nor of most of their parents.

If it ever comes to them, and a sinister part of my soul hopes it does, it will be profoundly unpleasant, as delayed learning always is. They think they mean well, and it will break their hearts when it becomes obvious that they do not.

Isab, you seem to have missed this from Boutwell:

In 2005, for instance, one study demonstrated that our (p.268): "ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity -- as opposed to current residence -- is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population."

Ashkenazi Jews are not on many NBA teams. Yet they are disproportionately winners of Nobel Prizes. And we predominantly get certain diseases -- such as Tay Sachs and BRCA (I'm negative, thanks!) -- while people who are black may get sickle cell disease.

"These kids got no humility because the machinery of their culture never asked it of them, nor of most of their parents."

I think you're right, Crid.

Life kicks it into some of us, but it would be better if we got it sooner rather than later.

The humility thing is a whole new field of study -- social psychologist Mark Leary and others have been working in this area. I heard papers presented back at the big social psych conference, SPSP, in 2015.

This is from my notes from a talk by a researcher named Jennifer Stellar on some of the benefits they find for humility:

Humility benefits
-Low self-focus
-accurate self assessment
-lower need to broadcast strengths
-greater willingness to acknowledge limits
-greater “other enhancement”
-greater “other focus”

Basically -- and not surprisingly -- better feelings about you by others come out of it. The accurate self-assessment is really important.

Because I always think I could be wrong on the science, I check it and check it and check it. Not being arrogant makes me better at what I do. (My agent laughs at this because I just wrote a book on how to be confident -- doing the final polish on it now -- and I'm always the least confident about my writing...whether it has value, whether it's funny, whether it's good enough, whether it communicates.)

I think it's 100% correct (as well as appropriately kind) to acknowledge that there's precisely one human race, no matter how deeply personalized our individual slices of it might be. Each fertile person can reproduce with another of the opposite sex: One race, not races. This is correct:

The shear overwhelming volume of the genetic data makes studying people classed by skin color and other superficial characteristics a *non scientific* exercise in futility.

Read Steve Sailer on Wisconsin if you have the heart for it. (I no longer do.)

"How on Earth could they have come to believe that their impulses describe the rights other people have to speak?"

Oh, that's easy. Their parents raised them that way.

Of course, this begs the question of: why did their parents do that? Crid's explanation about the two decades of prosperity kicked off by Reagan's election carries weight. I also think there was some overcompensation / political correctness involved: the American Left had successfully created the myth that the generation of their own parents were uncaring, unfeeling drones who crushed the souls of their children by demanding impossibly high standards of them. The parents of the snowflake generation, not wanting to be accused of unfeeling (because not being highly emotional is a capital crime in leftism), erred to the opposite extreme.

Nothing to add, except that I can usually identify a Crid-comment by about line three. Must have something to do with italics.

How dare you.

You're not the first one to tease me about that.

Oh, what crap. You're pretending that pugs are Dobermans.

Race is not species, people.

Right now, claiming there isn't such a thing as race is flatly useless. I say this as the guy who points out that greedy race-baiters treat everybody with a deep tan as "African" American, despite there being more diversity on the African continent than there is in Europe. That makes money pretending they're all incapable, that there's no way they could deal with pavement, cars and stuff.

There is also something deeply disturbing to lots of people, so much so that it is deliberately denied and hidden: some ethnic groups differ with respect to brain size. Well, we can't have that, so we deny it.

If you don't know even the basics of statistics and are generally negative, you might claim that I just said that all {pick one} are inferior. Nope. Individuals still need to be developed to their ability, and surely not impeded by law.

Denying that nature has equipped some peoples, not just individuals, better than others is simply lying.

Don't.

In humanity, pugs and dobermans aren't worth distinguishing.

Ashkenazi Jews are not on many NBA teams. Yet they are disproportionately winners of Nobel Prizes. And we predominantly get certain diseases -- such as Tay Sachs and BRCA (I'm negative, thanks!) -- while people who are black may get sickle cell disease.

Amy Alkon at April 7, 2017 5:39 AM

A different form of sickle cell is carried in the Asian population that came from malaria infested areas. The reason it manifests mostly in a subset of the African population is because you need a double copy of the gene to have the disease ( this means you have to inheriit it from both parents)

Inbreeding tends to concentrate and magnify certain genetic characteristics, but Blacks, Asiains, and Ashkenazi Jews are no more a *race* than the inbred Amish are....

Jewish is a culture, and a rapidly disingrating one. And it isnt a particularly useful category scientifically. It is a loose set of genetic identifiers, Only a tiny fraction of which are relevant to either intelligence or Tay Sachs.

Im not denying that genes are an important conponent in human intelligence, diease and behavior. What I am arguing is that sorting peole by skin color, height, and eye and nose shape has no useful purpose scientifically, because individual genetic differences overwhelm group similarities.
Thus the only scientific investigation possible is at the genetic level. Sorting people into piles based on their phenotype is a waste of time.

> What I am arguing is that sorting
> peole by skin color, height, and
> eye and nose shape has no useful
> purpose scientifically, because
> individual genetic differences
> overwhelm group similarities.

...To say nothing of their social and political distinctions.

Mpet has decided to be reelee angry at the Muslims! He knows one when he sees one, even though there are 1.7 billion of them. He can see straight down into their hearts. So he says none of them will be allowed to come into the United States, because he's afraid of being killed.

That's darling, right?

I agree with you Isab. Phenotype is a really crappy way to determine current human ancestry. Especially in America. The only good thing I can say about the optical test is it's cheap. Doesn't take much effort to look at someone. But you end up with a lot of false positives and false negatives. Which is why we test for Tay Sachs and sickle cell using better methods. We may use the optical test as a first pass to reduce cost testing people with a low likely hood of those diseases. But that is it. Looking at someone you really can't tell jack.

As for the brain thing, you know what else really affects brain size? Toilets. Not walking around in garbage. Clean food and water. Thankfully this isn't too much of an issue here in the US. But even nutrition has an impact. Which is an issue with certain groups in the US with a history of lower IQ. IQ is hard enough to reliably measure that separating the genetic effects from the environmental ones doesn't work well here in the US.

"As for the brain thing, you know what else really affects brain size? Toilets. Not walking around in garbage. Clean food and water. Thankfully this isn't too much of an issue here in the US. But even nutrition has an impact."

What news!

Apparently, NE Asians have historically had better nutrition, hygiene and water supplies than white Americans!

I agree with the overall point here, that academics should not be made to fear taking up any line of study because of political correctness.

But this line of study really does have a long way to go to get away from its well-earned reputation as being all bunkum -- not only for Isab's reasons but also because the definition of crime itself is arbitrary. So long as things like sex work and sales of unapproved drugs constitute "crime", it would be a horrible thing if any researcher found a way to successfully suppress crime per se.

Read Nicholas Wade's Troublesome Inheritance.

Evolution happens faster than commonly believed and humans adapt to their environments. It is nonsense to think Innuits and Africans are the same except for niggling appearance details.

Just as it is nonsense to insist that women and men are identical, and gender is merely a product of culture.