Well, AFAIK current research has shown that race cannot be demonstrated reliably by objective scientific measures, such as genetics- that while there are variations in single genes between regional populations, those variations are in no way discrete enough to divide the human population into racial groupings. In addition, there is at least as much genetic variation within races as there is between them. So I think race doesn't exist as a 'scientific' concept at all, in the sense that there is no reliable evidence for its existence.

Well there are certain biological differences.
I am not racist.
But I wanna kick the black guy in the head a few times every time I see him with a white woman.
Anyone knows why? Anyone knows why I like to do it?
I don't hate blacks or anything (honestly).

But I don't want to see interracial relationships (Ok I admit ... the white-something relationships).

Feel free to fuck off.

This is certainly not the general rule. It is very much the exception, and I only
know of one particularly controversial example the approval by the FDA of isosobide dinitrate (BiDIl)for the treatment of congestive heart failure in African Americans.
Critical comment (http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...ce-in-a-bottle)
pointed out that the original study had been to assess the effectiveness of BiDil for congestive heart failure irrespective of racial origin.
The trial appeared to show no above chance improvement as a result of treatment.
However, subsequent analysis by the manufacturer of the trial records showed that within self described african americans there did appear to be a significant improvement in outcomes.

The critique is that if you have a drug trial that on average produces no benefit,
it will always, by judicious selection of results be possible to define some subset
of the participants who did benefit. Basically you just go through looking for
any trait that appears to correlate with improved outcome. The problem is that
this trait was not part of the original experimental design, and the selection of
the trait has been performed with prior knowledge of the results. One it thus
cherry picking data to get the result that one wanted to obtain.

Why has this racist fucker not been banned yet?

Well here I admit I am no expert, so I will take your word for it. Either way, I think everyone can agree that race-based policy making is unacceptable.

My point is that I science should be used to study regional differences as well, and incorporate those findings with research on genetics. Trying to understand how genes work requires understanding how the environment modifies them. I can guarantee you that with the shit North Americans have been eating for the past seventy years, our diet is having a long-term impact on our genetic code.

I mean, is it simply a coincidence that the hotter the environment, the darker a person's skin color is? Genes are not an island, or a vacuum. We evolve.

I started reading from the beginning, but allow me to bring my thoughts on this.

Why are people of African descent better at sprinting and running in international competition? Well, it could be their race, but I would propose another answer.

Firstly, poverty. Poor nations do not have the resources to build the huge training centers necessary for many sports. They can't afford world class facilities for swimming, weightlifting, wrestling and others.

What they can afford is a piece of flat ground, some shoes and a pair of shorts. This is ample enough for training a runner, or a soccer player, which people of African descent are also quite good at. Richer nations would rather spend their money on big impressive facilities the African nations could never afford. A similar situation can be seen with basketball and football in America. Basketball only requires a ball and a court (Which is quite easy to find) to play, and football is the male sport of choice in most public high schools, and because of this, the poor get ample opportunity to play and train at these sports.

Boxing is a great example, because although there are many great boxers from almost all ethnic backgrounds, they are/were overwhelmingly poor. The poor are often forced to fight due to their social standing, and at it's most basic, it requires no equipment.

Tradition plays a part, as well. Greco-Roman wrestling and it's derivatives are possibly the most traditional and ancient sports among Europeans, and so it is pursued to this day. Africans, on the other hand, do not have that tradition.

I don't really think that race has anything to do with it. Poverty and tradition are the keys.

As I agree that age-old tradition molded humans into what they are now, into races, into specific appearances, character traits, &c., I must say that, as far as I can see, poverty doesn't start a race or its abilities. The example that Uncle Ho chose, about Africans (or people of African descent) running faster and sprinting better than (most) others, isn't because they're poor and can't practice sophisticated forms of sport and are therefore forced to run around all day for kicks and giggles. I believe that their ability of sprinting and running started 1000's of years ago, when their African ancestors had to run and sprint fast to hunt fast prey and, if danger is afoot, run away from rapid predators. Also war plays a part. Europeans, Ancient Greeks and Romans have attacked Africans so many times, that the African people have learned to run not just from the brutal invaders, but also with spears and shields in hands towards the invaders.
War, tradition, climate, environment - all these natural and historical occurrences have benefited to the creation of individual human races.
Therefore, society itself cannot construct a race. Human instinct and Nature have a very big hand in it.

I am concerned that some of your well-meant examples might be dangerously close to stereotypes. To suggest that all Africans lived in a hunter-gatherer culture does disservice to the great African civilisations such as Abyssinia and Benin- even Egypt perhaps. Not all Africans are from the same "race" anyway and don't forget that Ancient Europe was always being invaded by the Carthiginians, Persians, Mongols etc. I am not aware that the Ancient Greeks, who never formed a single nation state anyway, did ever "attack" Africans, nor the Romans all that much for that matter. The sphere of Roman influence in Africa certainly did not really extend much into Sub-Saharan Africa. It seems that the biggest "persecutors" of black Africans were the Egyptians and later the Arabs right up until the time of European expansion into Africa.

Woooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Hold on there!!!

Egypt was building pyramids.... There was the mysterious city of Great Zimbabwe, there were the civilisations of Kush, Benin and Ashante, there is also Abyssinia- the oldest "Christian" civilisation in continuous existance- with science, maths, written languages and so on. They weren't all at the same time and they did not all achieve the same things monumentally or technologically but this idea that ALL of Africa was like something out of a 1950's Tarzan film is complete drivel.

Of course I don't mean that every African was hunting in such fashions or every African can run faster than any other human being, but I was just making a point, or a theory, if you will; I just looked at African traditions, abilities, records, &c. in general. You are right though, the variety of humans and the variety of their location and events in life make practically every human being a special being, an individual.

Also I should've made my example a little more specific instead of saying just Africans. My bad.

Well I did think that was what you probably meant. I think we need to be careful with these monolithic terms such as "white" people, "Africans", "communists"- etc, just about any other label too.

To talk of "Africans" really is bit like saying "Europeans" and lumping a Sicilian fisherman in with a Lapp reindeer herder, with a Swiss-German banker, with an English cider farmer etc etc.

There is no "one" African race to start with. There are a multitude of languages, beliefs and customs which overlap or influence each other but do not form one single culture so to speak. It's obvious that people who live on and from a certain area of land may develop similar customs- down to their environment but that is not a race issue as such. I read that the Hausa people, for example, are about 40% haplogroup R1b- which would biologically make them part of the Western European Atlantic haplogroup!!! So where does that leave racial theories?

As for the comments about running. Well, I was told by a biologist that people of black African decent have a different phenotype morphological build- i.e. heavier bone structure and muscle development that lends itself to running whereas Caucasian have a lighter structure that lends itself more to swimming- whether this be true or not I do not know and it does seem to play out the old stereotype of the Olympics 100m sprint being largely a black affair whilst the swimming gold medal usually goes to a white man, usually Phelps!!! Whether or not these morphological developments are the result of natural selection in an environment is difficult to say? Why would Caucasians evolve develop special swimming prowess? I could understand in the case of Polynesians for example but it is not clear in this case.

Must say very interesting ideas here.

And when a child is born into this world
It has no concept
Of the tone of the skin he's living in

Neneh Cherry & Youssou N'Dour "7 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--6sXK2xxhk&feature=fvst

you cann find differences even between two white, black, yellow, or any other "race-memburs" , we are different cuz we are not made by a fabric, we are humans, and even among the animals of one-kind, one-family, or one race there are differences.
but thiese differences dont give us the right of different rights.
the wourld is deverse and we have to respect it, just like it is.
ur´s

Hello,
This is going to be my first post here. You need to know that English is not a native language to me. If i fail at expressing myself sufficiently, i can offer nothing but my apologies.

A concept called "race" and believed to effect the human biology/social life might really exist. There is no scientific obligation to refuse its possible existence. However, the actual problem is that we did NOT discover a general concept that we can call race and make it being useful to explain psychological and social differences among homo sapiens. The mainstream belief that most people call "race" is actually a myth based on the visible human features such as skin colour (when we even don't know how much the genotype could tell about an imaginary race concept- to suggest that bio characteristics that are only depended on phenotype can give an idea, would be a very naive way of thinking. More likely, this can be named a belief). Contrarily, the biology knowledge we own tells us that even the classifications belonging to deeper roots like "being a mammal " has even not been something static in our genes. We are also related to all reptiles and we don't know if we one bilions later will still remain mammals. This aspect shows the interesting point of race thing; if even it exists and if we understand what it is entirely, it will not give any clue of our future map or our superiority - unlike current racism theories suggest.

I don't know what would be the point of doubting that the genetic social abilities among different homo sapiens could be identified by their skin color or any other geographical adaptation. Even, the different skin tones of humans can hardly be called "color". Because, the color of melanin pigment is one : it's brown. The density of these pigments is what you call color. And the skin itself has no color. People having least melanin are looking pinkish because of the blood vessels under the skin. Also that's why when people died, their melanin are expired faster and they turn into lighter and explains why there is no blue or purple skin. In addition, the human eyes-brain coordination can perceive the light in a strict range of frequencies. So, it's obvious that the mainstream race theory is based on very very weak scientific evidences. Its all power comes from the number of people who has slight scientific knowledge and believes "what they see" more than the biology actually suggests.

Homo sapiens is theoretically a particular group of African apes. If you think about the idea which suggested to differ homo sapiens from its cousins (like chimps), you will easily realize that it's because of the certain abilities that homo sapiens genetically gathered. These are being able to talk, to use limbs very efficiently and empathizing. If someone who was born from cat parents was able to do these, we would have no problem calling him/her a "human being." When european people first time met American Indians in 1492, they also saw a lot of other mammals they did not see before. But nobody considered those animals could be a form of humans.

As a result, no scientific finding yet stated that homo sapiens of various geographical evolutionary adventures having different muscle types might lead also difference in their social abilities -referring to the first entry-. We certainly know that all homo sapiens, independent from their skin color -or any other bio characteristics- do satisfy requirements to socially communicate and interrelate with other homo sapiens. This makes the social definition of "human race" useful and meaningful.

actually West Africans (which includes the African diaspora in the western hemisphere since the slave population were drawn from west Africa), due to skeletal-musculature that often can be more powerfully developed, due to genetic predisposition, hence very powerful leg muscles to get off the dime very quickly in a sprint. East Africans have on average a different build, and you'll notice that East African runners tend to predominate in longer distance running.

another genetic trait peculiar to west Africans is that the shape of blood cells is often shaped like a sickle. This was adaptive for a region with malarial mosquitoes as it makes a person less susceptible to malaria. but black people in other parts of Africa do not have this trait.

the existence of certain genetic features in a particular population doesn't ratify any "race" theory. as another poster pointed out, Africans differ very greatly among themselves. moreover, since Africa was the continent where the human species originated 150,000 years ago or so, all humans are related to Africans, i.e. all humans are related to each other. This is reflected, for example, in the common underlying logical structure of all natural languages.

moreover, the "race" theory developed in the 1700s to justify enslavement of west Africans was really a scheme to use an easily distinguishable trait, skin color, to differentiate two groups of laborers in the western hemisphere, those of west African and European ancestry, for purposes of assisting elite control of the laboring population. but skin color has virtually nil relationship to any "deeper" human trait...it's largely a product of which region one's ancestors lived in for a long time. Darker skin color (actually a different chemical structure of the skin) was adaptive for regions with very high levels of UV. E.g. in the USA African-Americans get skin cancer 20 times less often than Euro-Americans.

any actual genetic comparison of so-called "races" will reveal that there is vastly greater differentiation WITHIN the so-called races than between them.

that said, it doesn't follow that "race" doesn't exist. It doesn't exist as a biological differentiation, but it does exist in social patterns of how groups of people are treated by others. in other words, it has in certain countries...especially in the western hemisphere...an important role in sustaining systematic inequality. in the western hemisphere this pattern is a legacy of European conquest and settlement, oppression of the indigenous population, and importation of west African slaves.

"Race" is not something biologically real - it is definitely a social construct. "Races" are not distinct, separate groups of people. Sure, there are people who look different from each other, and there are people who look similar, but that doesn't mean you can slap an arbitrary label on them and classify them all together because of it. It's been stated over and over, but somehow people don't get it: appearances are not real dividing factors. There is nothing inherently different about a person who doesn't look like you.

OMG, I'm gone for a few months, and come back to find that you guys are still discussing this? Honestly, I don't care if race is a social construct, as real or constructed, I choose to ignore race.

When you talk of something, even to criticize it, you're still giving it attention. I realize this. If I had my way, we wouldn't need to dicuss it at all; racism would fade into nonexistence, as it should. However, not everyone is wise enough to see its stupidity and pointlessness. Therefore we have to discuss it, to change those views.