Do you consider yourself more left or right wing?

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sc94597 said:

JuliusHackebeil said:

I don't understand how you see race as a socially constructed group. It is just biology, no? Or am I missunderstanding you?

We don't know, by the way, that biological race would not play a role for intelligence, because the research on it is so taboo. I heard an Interview about "The Bellcurve" (or whatever the name of it is) that was pretty convincing about this being a very little researched topic. We really don't know.

But culture is definitely socially constructed. And culture can run along racial lines as borders. Nothing surprising about that. And cultures are different of course. This would have to mean that some are better at some things and worse at other things. I think this can easyily have a messurable effect on things like education.

Race is a social construct. Currently existing racial groups do not align with the genetic data on human population structure. 

If I show you this phylogenetic tree -- which groups in the tree are "Black"? For example, why do we group a Khwe person with a South Bantu person as "Black" when a Eurasian person and a South Bantu person have more recent common ancestry than either do with a Khwe person? The common "races" of "white", "black", "asian", etc are paraphyletic from the start, which means it is difficult to talk about them as representing actual historical genetic populations. And of course things get even more complicated when we consider mixing both in the pre-Colombian and post-Colombian periods. Humans are essentially one population group (in the genetic sense) in 2025, but this was also largely true before colonialism as well.

There has been pretty much constant gene-flow for the last hundred thousands years in all human populations. At best, what we call "races" are really just convergent eco-types.

Here is when those populations split. Also notice that there is mixing in all of these groups, and these splits represent non-existent "pure" populations. 

Consider another scenario. If in the United States most white people came from Italy and the Southern Balkans, and most Black people came from the Horn of Africa the common association of sickled-cell anemia being a "Black disease" would actually be reversed. 

This is why we can be pretty confident that "race", as we use it, is gibberish in a biological population sense. It doesn't align with what we know about human population genetics and phylogeny. 

But culture is definitely socially constructed. And culture can run along racial lines as borders. Nothing surprising about that. And cultures are different of course. This would have to mean that some are better at some things and worse at other things. I think this can easyily have a messurable effect on things like education.

Sure, but when we suggest culture is the source of the problem we have to explain the historical and current social forces that shape that culture. 

This "race" obsession is pretty much a US-specific thing. In a way it's understandable based on historical and cultural aspects.