â„–3235137[Quote]
Race realism is the position that race is a biological reality, not a social construct. The foundation of race realism is not ideology, nor even science, but direct observation. Long before they acquire language, children perceive racial differences without being instructed to do so. As they mature, children begin to associate these physical differences with behavioral patterns. We observe racial differences prior to language, prior to politics, prior to ideology, and prior to science. Science does not generate, but confirms what observation already tells us. Disciplines like genetics, cranial morphometry, endocrinology, and psychometrics confirm that our intuitive distinctions track biologically meaningful patterns. Race realism, therefore, is not a hypothesis awaiting proof, but an empirical generalization resisting disproof. The social construct thesis, by contrast, fails the test of empirical adequacy as it denies that which is directly observed and statistically consistent. A social construct is a collectively maintained category or thing that is made real by convention or collective agreement. Examples include money, a symbolic medium of exchange that holds value only because institutions enforce and individuals accept its worth, and traffic rules, which are arbitrary coordination systems like driving on the right or the left side of the road. Race is not like these. Race is a biological reality that arose from evolutionary pressures long before human societies, languages, or institutional conventions existed. In fact, rather than race being a social construct, it is far more accurate to say that society is a product of race. To say race is a social construct is to invert cause and effect, like saying, clay is a sculpture. Races are different because they evolved by divergent evolutionary paths. These involved lengthy geographic isolation, different environmental selection pressures, and differential social and sexual selection. We observe racial differences across several domains, including morphological differences in cranial shape and volume, skin pigmentation, facial features, and hair texture and density, cognitive differences in general intelligence, working memory, neural connectivity patterns, time preference, and moral intuitions, and behavioral differences in aggression and impulsivity, conscientiousness, parental investment and nurturing, truthfulness, inventiveness, and cooperation. Many people assume interracial differences are due primarily to differences in culture, but culture is not so much the origin of difference as an outcome. Specifically, culture reflects one, the policies of a society's elites, and two, the underlying biological traits of the population. In this sense, culture is an extended phenotype. So let's clarify the causal sequence. First, ecological selection pressures shaped population-specific gene pools. Genes influence developmental trajectory, including the structure of the brain. Neural architecture shapes cognition and temperament, and cognition and temperament shape behavior. Therefore, thought and behavior are largely constrained by biology.
â„–3235140[Quote]
but even soyence says that different races are genetically different too
â„–3235143[Quote]
Of course, culture does exert a recursive influence, but all traits are influenced by genetics. A key variable here is neoteny, the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood, which reflects the pace of development and duration of brain plasticity. The longer the brain remains plastic, the more it can learn, plan, and coordinate with others. All races are neotenic relative to earlier hominins, but they differ significantly in degree. A group's level of neoteny reflects its life history strategy, which lies along the r-K selection spectrum, a concept from evolutionary biology describing reproductive trade-offs between quantity and quality. In r-selected environments, typically unpredictable, high-risk, and high-mortality ecologies like sub-Saharan Africa, natural selection favors early maturity, high fertility, short-term planning, and low parental investment. These traits characterize a fast life history strategy and are associated with low neoteny. In contrast, K-selected environments, such as cold, resource-scarce, and stable regions like Ice Age Europe or Northeast Asia, favor delayed reproduction, fewer offspring, extended childhoods, high parental investment, and cooperative behavior. These reflect a slow life history strategy and correlate with high neoteny.
â„–3235144[Quote]
Common objections to race realism argue that racial categories cannot be biologically real because they vary across cultures and historical periods. This reasoning assumes that for categories to be meaningful, they must be fixed, universal, and perfectly delineated, which is a category error. Taxonomies are tools for tracking regularities, not Platonic ideals. For example, a person with a white mother and a black father is biologically 50% of each ancestry. Whether such a person is socially categorized as black, as in the United States, or mixed, as in Brazil, is culturally variable, but it does not alter the underlying biological facts. Another objection claims that because human traits vary along a continuum, racial categories lack biological validity. This reflects a misunderstanding of how biological classification operates; continuous variation is the norm, not the exception, in evolutionary biology. Red and orange gradually blend into one another, yet both are distinct and meaningful categories. Likewise, the existence of racially mixed individuals does not disprove the existence of races any more than the color green disproves the existence of the colors blue and yellow. Yet another objection to race realism is that racial classification can be utilized to justify oppression of certain groups. However, this objection has nothing to do with the empirical validity of race and racial differences.
â„–3235147[Quote]
Many true and useful distinctions, like sex, age, health, or income, can likewise be abused, but misuse does not invalidate biological or epistemological validity. A final objection holds that contemporary science has refuted the concept of race. Critics often demand either a single essential trait that all members of a race possess and others lack, or b) a single causal mechanism responsible for all intergroup differences. But taxonomy does not depend on essences, singular defining traits, or unitary causes. This is because evolution does not proceed by perfectly discrete jumps, producing sharp edges, but rather by shaping populations within adaptive fitness landscapes, often forming identifiable local optima or islands of evolutionary stability which are revealed by observable clusters of traits. Population genetics routinely identifies distinct ancestral clusters, and forensic scientists can determine race from skeletal remains, oral bacteria, or a strand of hair. Artificial intelligence is now capable of identifying people's race from chest x-rays, spine radiographs, and even mammograms. Race is an important factor in determining if donors of organs and bone marrow are potential matches for patients, according to leukemia charity Gift of Life. Quote, ethnicity is the key to a perfect match between donor and recipient.
â„–3235148[Quote]
So there is no problem of scientific evidence for race, but rather a problem with scientists and other intellectuals being too afraid to speak the truth. More importantly, though, race realism does not depend on science for its validity. People observed racial differences long before the emergence of biology or genetics. Any society premised on the denial of race will collapse from accumulated error, just as any bridge built on false measurements will collapse from accumulated strain. In the workforce, general intelligence is strongly predictive of job performance. Thus, when two groups with significantly different average IQs compete in the same job market, only two equilibrium states are possible. Resistant exclusion and status frustration of the lower-performing groups, or the meritocratic standards are compromised via affirmative action, penalizing the higher-performing groups. Both of these scenarios foster resentment and conflict. The core principle here is that unequal groups cannot compete on equal footing. In education, race-blind policies routinely misfire because they are based on the foundational error of presuming all groups possess equivalent cognitive potential and so treat unequal outcomes as signs of injustice, underfunding, or lack of effort, rather than evolved group differences. Take the U.S. federal initiative No Child Left Behind, designed to close the racial achievement gap in education. Billions of dollars were spent attempting to equalize test scores across racial groups, but instead of producing convergence, the initiative exposed the persistence of the gaps, incentivizing test manipulation, grade inflation, and lowered standards. Then we have legal consequences. In societies like Northern Europe, legal norms evolved under conditions of high neoteny peoples and demographic homogeneity, favoring leniency and minimal enforcement. But when these legal norms, calibrated for high-trust, high-neoteny demographics, are extended to low-neoteny groups who require much harsher punishments and tighter oversight, the result is, not surprisingly, an increase in crime and repeat offenders. Such societies are then forced to either punish the law-abiding natives with overregulation and overenforcement, or to sacrifice justice for political optics so as not to appear racist. Judicial consequences: multiracial societies totally destroy the function of the jury system, designed to ensure a defendant is judged by his own peers. Peers are those sharing norms and moral intuitions, but when jurors come from divergent racial, cultural, and behavioral profiles, they no longer interpret evidence through a common frame, but instead base deliberations on ethnic loyalty, narrative bias, and intergroup grievances.
â„–3235157[Quote]
Nobody denies there some populations are different than others, just that it doesn't mean anything. Lewontin showed that human populations have more diversity within their groups than inbetween them, and that race could only account for 6% of human genetic diversity. This is very small, and usual retorts about "Lewontin's fallacy" fail to accurately represent his point, not that humans couldn't be classified at all, but rather that classificaiton has no significant impact. The genetic difference between a West African and a Northern European is smaller than the genetic difference between two species of chimpanzees living in neighboring forests. Humans are a unusually homogenous species and have only spread around the globe in the past couple tens of thousands of years and who originate from a small ancestral population of about 10,000. That isn't enough time for much groups to diverge, and humans generally were subject to the same evolutionary pressures due to the icce age
â„–3235161[Quote]
why is my flag rooty im not indian
â„–3235165[Quote]
>>3235157Thats a fucking lie. Chimp species have less genetic divergence than humans. There are Chimp species with 99% similarity. Even shit like wolves etc.
â„–3235168[Quote]
>>3235165>There are Chimp species with 99% similarityWith who? Humans? Other chimps? Delete this reply and make a better one
â„–3235189[Quote]
>>3235137 (OP)Thank you for this PhilBro. You blow away every colorjak ever. By comparison, they have no intelligence, they are mentally third worlders, and only reply with short sentences, often times angrily.
â„–3235195[Quote]
>>3235157>Lewontin's fallacyAlmost baited mi
â„–3235210[Quote]
>>3235189Me leak at you now