First point. Affirmative action is racist. Until people are judged on meritocracy alone, instead of color we can consider ourselves a racist nation. I don’t see it ever happening. Too many in our country love the crutch. Instead of viewing failure as fuel to do better and figure out a better way. They have their race excuse. “ I didn’t get in cause I’m not white”
Second point. To hell with Harvard, your kids will just graduate brainwashed full of the woke agenda. Send your kids into the trades. I know this,if you know how to weld and weld well your kids will never struggle to put food on the table. And race has nothing to do with it. Either you can do the work or you can’t. If you can’t,no matter your race. Next person please.
The best place in the country to send your kid to marry a rich person is Harvard. And marrying a rich person is a huge advancement compared to becoming an awesome plumber.
I'm blue collar background (construction) and not Ivy and very much dislike those people, but I can't hate the player. If my kid got into Harvard I'd pay for it, send them, and demand they come out of the school with a rolodex of rich people and an engagement ring. That'd be worth the investment. The education would not, but the education is secondary.
In short, it was coined as a work of satire, by someone who was quite fully aware that "merit" is defined and determined by those who have it, as a way of keeping out the riffraff. They can, and always do, change those definitions and determinations to suit their purposes.
Only in America, where we still have to pretend that there is no permanent and entrenched ruling class, could such satire be taken at face value.
There are five paths to success in the United States. Some of them are meritocratic, some are not. Some are fair, some are not. Some of the meritocratic ones are fair and some of the meritocratic ones aren't fair. The right has a focus on meritocracy and the left has a focus on fairness.
Jul 1, 2023·edited Jul 1, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
While the crunching of the numbers about implications is of interest, your read of the decision is not accurate. First, it very clearly establishes that Bakke no longer applies. Moreover, Grutter no longer applies, because time is up (see Kavanaugh’s concurrence). So, as Roberts CJ explicitly says, it is back to post-Brown jurisprudence. Affirmative action is effectively over, back to a colourblind Constitution unless you can pass strict scrutiny, which is very, very hard. Systematically advantaging any race is illegal, and it does not matter what mechanism you use to do it. (So, you can write about your experience of race in your essay as much as you want, that can’t be used to systematically advantage some group.)
Grutter said you had to have strict scrutiny back in 2003. Everyone just ignored it. I do not see anything here that changes anything about Grutter. The 25 years thing was just a suggestion.
Can you give a citation back to Grutter? There wasn't really a test established in Grutter so much as an analysis of the facts of the case.
Regarding strict scrutiny, Here's what I found:
All government racial classifications must be analyzed by a reviewing court under strict scrutiny. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 227. But not all such uses are invalidated by strict scrutiny. Race-based action necessary to further a compelling governmental interest does not violate the Equal Protection Clause so long as it is narrowly tailored to further that interest. E. g., Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 908. Context matters when reviewing such action. See Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 343-344. Not every decision influenced by race is equally objectionable, and strict scrutiny is designed to provide a framework for carefully examining the importance and the sincerity of the government's reasons for using race in a particular context. Pp. 326-327. (c) The Court endorses Justice Powell's view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions. The Court defers to the Law School's educational judgment that diversity is essential to its educational mission.
In other words in actual cases of blatant, real racism, affirmative action is a potential "temporary" solution.
Sandra Day O’Connor apparently assumed, given her "life experience" and understanding of history, that blatant racism would continue to diminish in general and that permanent affirmative action would not be appropriate.
As a number of observers have noted, as blatant racism diminished, "race grifters" had to conjure new types of fake racism to justify their extortion of "consulting fees" from corporations and government agencies.
Objections to such "woke" race grifters was then made into yet another example of fake racism by the grifters.
One potential metric for the end of blatant racism would then be the existence of significant influence of "woke" race grifters in an organization.
Once the "woke" grifters, social parasites, show up and get latched onto an organizations blood stream, there is no more rationale for affirmative action because anti-racism has become racism (see John McWhorter's analysis).
Jun 30, 2023·edited Jun 30, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Regarding Asian academic success, it seems to be both innate intelligence and culture. Intelligence is strongly correlated with results for tests such as the SAT and GRE, but work ethic or culture plays a larger role in grades.
Culture is a big part, but there's also the selection effects of immigrants being the specific families/mindsets that place a much greater emphasis on academic success for their kids
This is the greatest confounder to the "Asians have higher IQ" studies in my opinion. Like, ok, there's built in selection bias purely because of who made it over here to begin with.
Black Nigerian immigrants to the USA, usually from smart, rich, well educated, westernized families, are supposedly the most successful (if small) ethnic gene pool.
Defining a population is the first step in statistics. As Gorsuch explained in his concurrence (cribbing almost entirely from David Bernstein’s recent book) American racial categories are wholly artificial and irrational bureaucratic inventions.
Just because lots of factors influence who happens to be in the United States at the moment doesn’t make analyses of those populations invalid. Those analyses also may or may not tell you anything about ostensibly similar populations elsewhere.
Ron Unz's paper years ago explained how the Chinese meritocratic bureaucracy resulted in the lowest 20% of the economic class was unable to marry and procreate due to social exclusion (females didn't marry poor, starving peasants if a "wealthy" middle class alpha male, or a male with a job in the alpha's extended family network, was available).
After many 100s of years of brutally excluding poor people from breeding, the people with higher IQ that were better at taking entry tests to the bureaucracy raised average IQ by eliminating lots of poor people with low IQ from the gene pool (as well as some high IQ that were down on their luck).
You're absolutely correct, but Harvard getting pimp-slapped is worth celebrating anyway. Yes, I can be something of a dick at times. Unlike people at Harvard, who are dicks their entire lives.
Exactly. We're living in a post fact world. Feelings matter more than what actually happened. If everyone *perceives* that this was a massive blow against affirmative action, it's a victory.
Jun 30, 2023·edited Jun 30, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
Harvard should be compelled to make it's entire candidate selection model explicit. The academic index is not very predictive of acceptance - what are the unobserved variables that complete the model, and why can't they be observed and made public?
It is a private university/college. The tools available, such as FOI requests, would have to be justified on the basis of the federal funds and grants Harvard gets, but there are all sorts of ways that such institutions (including public universities/colleges) are able to shield themselves from scrutiny. In some cases, it has taken years and years of lawsuits to force higher education to crack open its databases. Look at the State of California's Auditor reports over the years about public education, they expose the gross level of corruption and criminal fraud that is common in higher education administration.
As HWFO states (in one of the linked articles?), Harvard is basically a dating site for the kids of rich elites.
Everything else is window dressing and virtue signaling.
Higher education lost its willingness and ability to morally police itself and halt some of the worst unethical practices a long time ago when the post-WW2 growth model crashed in the 1970s (Eric Weinstein). To keep the growth model from dying, a set of lies became inherent to the scheme of higher education administration (to maintain bloated grad school programs, etc.). The lies dis-incentivized real scholarship in the classically liberal sense (modern rationalism , Enlightenment ideals). Then administrators with sociopathic personality types began to import "corporatization" and neoliberalism into higher education, which subsequently used "woke" rhetoric to cover up the moral failures and corruption and further expand the administrative "diversity" and PR and fund raising bureaucracies.
Very informative. This is kind of what I was afraid of. The ruling actually AFFIRMS the Constitutionality of the protection of certain races from 'racism'. And in general AFFIRMS the special privileges granted to 'protected classes.'
Jul 4, 2023·edited Jul 4, 2023Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
'AA is unchanged'
Politifact pronounces, 'maybe true?'
In the three cases together, AA, 303 and Student Loans, the more lasting and greater effect could come from the dissents they produced. It is clearer than ever before that will to power and illiberality are the core of the 'liberal' triumverate's philosophy.
Is there any doubt that Kagan would be horrified if a Republican president used the Heroes Act to SPEED up the college debtor's repayment plan? To make them pay HIGHER interest rates in an effort to reduce a 'National Inflation Emergency' and reduce the suffering of blue collar plumbers? The other six votes would be identical.
Can anyone else on the planet except Sotomayor find support for Harvard's affirmative action in Justice Harlan's Plessy dissent? A strange choice to quote him given her belief that a little bit of racism of the right kind, organized by the right people, is really best for society. Trust her, she is wise, she knows these things.
In 303 the court's majority is merely catching up to the years of jokes and memes, steeped in the obvious hypocrisy that trans-lesbian jewish bakers would never be forced by the dissenters to make cupcakes celebrating the Intifada.
In each case they say the quiet part outloud. Yes, not only is an elephant in the mousehole but we love, feed and cherish that elephant. We aren't here as objective referees, we absolutely believe in redirecting the constitutional framework to support our superior policy plans. We don't care what we break to get there.
Glad you mentioned tax exempt. As almost nobody left or right points out that the court is only up in the University's discrimination business because of federal funding they receive. Harvard could just stop taking funds tomorrow and be as free with admissions as they cared to be.
"Beyond the Ferguson, Mo., media reports on the "racial divide," the facts require some correction: Despite notions to the contrary, there is only one human race. Our single race is independent of geographic origin, ethnicity, culture, color of skin or shape of eyes — we all share a single phenotype, the same or similar observable anatomical features and behavior.
Science highlights these similarities in our embryonic development, physiology (our organ-based systems), biochemistry (our metabolites and reactions), and more recently, genomics (our genetic makeup). As a molecular biologist, this last one is indeed the most important to me — data show that the DNA of any two human beings is 99.9 percent identical, and we all share the same set of genes, scientifically validating the existence of a single biological human race and one origin for all human beings. In short, we are all brothers and sisters. [What is the Difference between Race and Ethnicity? ]" — Michael Hadjiargyrou (29 Aug 2014) Race is a Social Concept, Not a Scientific One (Op-Ed), Live Science, https://tinyurl.com/25exkhrn
To be clear: "everything is a social construct" is both (A) accurate and (B) useless as an analysis tool. Race is an arbitrary grouping of genetic traits and indoctrinations, but it is absolutely useful as a categorization tool because we can see differences in things such as both health outcomes and societal outcomes that are tied to race.
" Though there’s is no scientific basis for categorizing people by race or skin color. "
This is very silly. Are we pretending that skin color, hair color etc. are not genetically determined? That sickle cell anemia or Tay-Sach's disease are completely random in who they strike? No matter how much you may want it to, "scientific" is not the same thing as "moral."
If you're defining arbitrary categories you can define them however you like. "People who look like this" is literally as justifiable categorical scheme as any other. I yield that it's arbitrary. I also maintain that it has utility.
you asked the correct and crucial questions needed to debunk the junk science article.
so yep, saying there is "only one race" is absurd ideological nonsense because the concept of "race" or any other similar concept, such as subspecies, is only valid if there is more than one.
The history of the concept of "race" was from a time when genetics didn't exist as a science, so all sorts of bad data was used to justify colonialism and classify non-Europeans into groups on the false premise that non-Europeans were "inferior" and had smaller craniums, etc.
What genetics does describe are a lot of gene pools that have distinct markers that can trace the history of human migration, and some variant on the idea of a process of radial speciation, or what would become speciation if carried out long enough: genetically distinct gene pools historically associated with geographical locations.
Razib Khan recently wrote an excellent article (on substack) summarizing the genetics of historical population dispersal from Africa during the ice ages.
in reality, genetics make clear that the oldest, most "diverse" gene pools are in central and southern africa, and all of the gene pools that migrated north/east in several waves over about 50,000 years from africa suffered genetic "bottlenecks" as populations collapsed into small survivor groups (during glacial maximums?) that later expanded.
The rates of collapse into bottlenecks, and then later mergers with other gene pools and expansion was variable over something like 50,000, with the final major expansion starting after the "end" of the ice ages about 11,000 years ago and subsequent global warming and C02 increases. Many/most of the survival adaptations to extreme climate conditions during the ice ages are what shaped modern humans and their evolution psychology as a highly eusocial species (high altruism and social cooperation within kindship groups). See Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures, Santa Fe Institute for the data modeling of biological morals in what Darwin called "primeval" times in human history.*
The radial speciation model is not strictly "arborizing" like distinct tree branches splitting into subdivisions, some of the branching structure was actually a lattice as gene pools merged, such as the Neaderthals that interbred with modern humans. I've seen anthropologists speculate that because Neanderthals were around for 100,000s of years longer than modern humans, modern humans that bred with Neanderthals probably inherited a lot of immunity to disease.
Modern humans gene pools (tribes) indigenous to the Himalayas have Neanderthal genes for blood oxygenation that improve survival at high altitudes.
To be clear: human evolution ash always tended toward development of genetically distinct gene pools because of the tendency toward kinship group ("tribal") inbreeding because survival in ancient times for hunter-gatherers was mainly about social cooperation and shared learning within a given kinship group.
Because of competition and wars between tribes, there never has been, and probably never will be a single, planetwide, completely uniform human gene pool, as the pseudo-science article implies.
The article is pseudo utopian, quasi religious bs.
James Campbell's distortion of Jungian archetypes had been criticized for similar reasons: a well-intended, quasi-religious, utopian distortion of science and scholarship.
-----
* ...in another paper, Peter Richerson [UC Davis, ecologist] quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of human sympathy in "primeval times"):
Darwin:
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
My bad, I always thought it ment judged on skill and ability. So take out meritocracy and put those words in. What I’m getting at is the best people should either be allowed or get a job opening or a school position. Not picked because of their minority status. I mean would you want the best Dr for brain surgery? Or the Dr who isn’t near as good but he’s a minority of some kind?
I see your point. However, is that scene really an advancement? I really wonder. I truly believe that after a certain point more wealth turns on you and your not happy anymore. I know it’s definitely not every case out there however it is many times the case. I am blue collar (construction) also. I hope my boys end up with a similar life. It’s a good life. At least I think so.
First point. Affirmative action is racist. Until people are judged on meritocracy alone, instead of color we can consider ourselves a racist nation. I don’t see it ever happening. Too many in our country love the crutch. Instead of viewing failure as fuel to do better and figure out a better way. They have their race excuse. “ I didn’t get in cause I’m not white”
Second point. To hell with Harvard, your kids will just graduate brainwashed full of the woke agenda. Send your kids into the trades. I know this,if you know how to weld and weld well your kids will never struggle to put food on the table. And race has nothing to do with it. Either you can do the work or you can’t. If you can’t,no matter your race. Next person please.
The best place in the country to send your kid to marry a rich person is Harvard. And marrying a rich person is a huge advancement compared to becoming an awesome plumber.
I'm blue collar background (construction) and not Ivy and very much dislike those people, but I can't hate the player. If my kid got into Harvard I'd pay for it, send them, and demand they come out of the school with a rolodex of rich people and an engagement ring. That'd be worth the investment. The education would not, but the education is secondary.
"Judged on meritocracy alone"? Really? Think for a minute about what that means.
You meant "judged on merit", but since you used the word "meritocracy" un-ironically, I feel compelled to point you to the origins of the word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
In short, it was coined as a work of satire, by someone who was quite fully aware that "merit" is defined and determined by those who have it, as a way of keeping out the riffraff. They can, and always do, change those definitions and determinations to suit their purposes.
Only in America, where we still have to pretend that there is no permanent and entrenched ruling class, could such satire be taken at face value.
There are five paths to success in the United States. Some of them are meritocratic, some are not. Some are fair, some are not. Some of the meritocratic ones are fair and some of the meritocratic ones aren't fair. The right has a focus on meritocracy and the left has a focus on fairness.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-meritocracy
While the crunching of the numbers about implications is of interest, your read of the decision is not accurate. First, it very clearly establishes that Bakke no longer applies. Moreover, Grutter no longer applies, because time is up (see Kavanaugh’s concurrence). So, as Roberts CJ explicitly says, it is back to post-Brown jurisprudence. Affirmative action is effectively over, back to a colourblind Constitution unless you can pass strict scrutiny, which is very, very hard. Systematically advantaging any race is illegal, and it does not matter what mechanism you use to do it. (So, you can write about your experience of race in your essay as much as you want, that can’t be used to systematically advantage some group.)
Grutter said you had to have strict scrutiny back in 2003. Everyone just ignored it. I do not see anything here that changes anything about Grutter. The 25 years thing was just a suggestion.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.
Unlike few others, Lorenzo Warby understands why the Chief is the best writer on the Court.
Can you give a citation back to Grutter? There wasn't really a test established in Grutter so much as an analysis of the facts of the case.
Regarding strict scrutiny, Here's what I found:
All government racial classifications must be analyzed by a reviewing court under strict scrutiny. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U. S. 200, 227. But not all such uses are invalidated by strict scrutiny. Race-based action necessary to further a compelling governmental interest does not violate the Equal Protection Clause so long as it is narrowly tailored to further that interest. E. g., Shaw v. Hunt, 517 U. S. 899, 908. Context matters when reviewing such action. See Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 343-344. Not every decision influenced by race is equally objectionable, and strict scrutiny is designed to provide a framework for carefully examining the importance and the sincerity of the government's reasons for using race in a particular context. Pp. 326-327. (c) The Court endorses Justice Powell's view that student body diversity is a compelling state interest that can justify using race in university admissions. The Court defers to the Law School's educational judgment that diversity is essential to its educational mission.
In other words in actual cases of blatant, real racism, affirmative action is a potential "temporary" solution.
Sandra Day O’Connor apparently assumed, given her "life experience" and understanding of history, that blatant racism would continue to diminish in general and that permanent affirmative action would not be appropriate.
As a number of observers have noted, as blatant racism diminished, "race grifters" had to conjure new types of fake racism to justify their extortion of "consulting fees" from corporations and government agencies.
Objections to such "woke" race grifters was then made into yet another example of fake racism by the grifters.
One potential metric for the end of blatant racism would then be the existence of significant influence of "woke" race grifters in an organization.
Once the "woke" grifters, social parasites, show up and get latched onto an organizations blood stream, there is no more rationale for affirmative action because anti-racism has become racism (see John McWhorter's analysis).
This transcript of an interview with the main litigator goes into how Grutter is overruled.
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/this-opinion-breaks-open-all-sorts
If you have time, detail your reasoning (here and/or on your substack). Thanks.
Higher ed in the USA is a criminal enterprise that serves globalist elites and the PMC (Ehrenreich). That won't change.
Regarding Asian academic success, it seems to be both innate intelligence and culture. Intelligence is strongly correlated with results for tests such as the SAT and GRE, but work ethic or culture plays a larger role in grades.
Culture is a big part, but there's also the selection effects of immigrants being the specific families/mindsets that place a much greater emphasis on academic success for their kids
This is the greatest confounder to the "Asians have higher IQ" studies in my opinion. Like, ok, there's built in selection bias purely because of who made it over here to begin with.
Black Nigerian immigrants to the USA, usually from smart, rich, well educated, westernized families, are supposedly the most successful (if small) ethnic gene pool.
Or, What’s an Asian? Or a Black? Or an Hispanic?
Defining a population is the first step in statistics. As Gorsuch explained in his concurrence (cribbing almost entirely from David Bernstein’s recent book) American racial categories are wholly artificial and irrational bureaucratic inventions.
Just because lots of factors influence who happens to be in the United States at the moment doesn’t make analyses of those populations invalid. Those analyses also may or may not tell you anything about ostensibly similar populations elsewhere.
Ron Unz's paper years ago explained how the Chinese meritocratic bureaucracy resulted in the lowest 20% of the economic class was unable to marry and procreate due to social exclusion (females didn't marry poor, starving peasants if a "wealthy" middle class alpha male, or a male with a job in the alpha's extended family network, was available).
After many 100s of years of brutally excluding poor people from breeding, the people with higher IQ that were better at taking entry tests to the bureaucracy raised average IQ by eliminating lots of poor people with low IQ from the gene pool (as well as some high IQ that were down on their luck).
You're absolutely correct, but Harvard getting pimp-slapped is worth celebrating anyway. Yes, I can be something of a dick at times. Unlike people at Harvard, who are dicks their entire lives.
Exactly. We're living in a post fact world. Feelings matter more than what actually happened. If everyone *perceives* that this was a massive blow against affirmative action, it's a victory.
Harvard should be compelled to make it's entire candidate selection model explicit. The academic index is not very predictive of acceptance - what are the unobserved variables that complete the model, and why can't they be observed and made public?
Harvard did make its entire candidate selection model explicit. It’s called discovery.
It is a private university/college. The tools available, such as FOI requests, would have to be justified on the basis of the federal funds and grants Harvard gets, but there are all sorts of ways that such institutions (including public universities/colleges) are able to shield themselves from scrutiny. In some cases, it has taken years and years of lawsuits to force higher education to crack open its databases. Look at the State of California's Auditor reports over the years about public education, they expose the gross level of corruption and criminal fraud that is common in higher education administration.
As HWFO states (in one of the linked articles?), Harvard is basically a dating site for the kids of rich elites.
Everything else is window dressing and virtue signaling.
Higher education lost its willingness and ability to morally police itself and halt some of the worst unethical practices a long time ago when the post-WW2 growth model crashed in the 1970s (Eric Weinstein). To keep the growth model from dying, a set of lies became inherent to the scheme of higher education administration (to maintain bloated grad school programs, etc.). The lies dis-incentivized real scholarship in the classically liberal sense (modern rationalism , Enlightenment ideals). Then administrators with sociopathic personality types began to import "corporatization" and neoliberalism into higher education, which subsequently used "woke" rhetoric to cover up the moral failures and corruption and further expand the administrative "diversity" and PR and fund raising bureaucracies.
Very informative. This is kind of what I was afraid of. The ruling actually AFFIRMS the Constitutionality of the protection of certain races from 'racism'. And in general AFFIRMS the special privileges granted to 'protected classes.'
So it is just more AFFIRMATIVE action. Not less.
'AA is unchanged'
Politifact pronounces, 'maybe true?'
In the three cases together, AA, 303 and Student Loans, the more lasting and greater effect could come from the dissents they produced. It is clearer than ever before that will to power and illiberality are the core of the 'liberal' triumverate's philosophy.
Is there any doubt that Kagan would be horrified if a Republican president used the Heroes Act to SPEED up the college debtor's repayment plan? To make them pay HIGHER interest rates in an effort to reduce a 'National Inflation Emergency' and reduce the suffering of blue collar plumbers? The other six votes would be identical.
Can anyone else on the planet except Sotomayor find support for Harvard's affirmative action in Justice Harlan's Plessy dissent? A strange choice to quote him given her belief that a little bit of racism of the right kind, organized by the right people, is really best for society. Trust her, she is wise, she knows these things.
In 303 the court's majority is merely catching up to the years of jokes and memes, steeped in the obvious hypocrisy that trans-lesbian jewish bakers would never be forced by the dissenters to make cupcakes celebrating the Intifada.
In each case they say the quiet part outloud. Yes, not only is an elephant in the mousehole but we love, feed and cherish that elephant. We aren't here as objective referees, we absolutely believe in redirecting the constitutional framework to support our superior policy plans. We don't care what we break to get there.
Glad you mentioned tax exempt. As almost nobody left or right points out that the court is only up in the University's discrimination business because of federal funding they receive. Harvard could just stop taking funds tomorrow and be as free with admissions as they cared to be.
Team Biden/SenilePuppet will do everything in its power, which is a lot, to shield the "woke" elements of higher education from scrutiny.
"Beyond the Ferguson, Mo., media reports on the "racial divide," the facts require some correction: Despite notions to the contrary, there is only one human race. Our single race is independent of geographic origin, ethnicity, culture, color of skin or shape of eyes — we all share a single phenotype, the same or similar observable anatomical features and behavior.
Science highlights these similarities in our embryonic development, physiology (our organ-based systems), biochemistry (our metabolites and reactions), and more recently, genomics (our genetic makeup). As a molecular biologist, this last one is indeed the most important to me — data show that the DNA of any two human beings is 99.9 percent identical, and we all share the same set of genes, scientifically validating the existence of a single biological human race and one origin for all human beings. In short, we are all brothers and sisters. [What is the Difference between Race and Ethnicity? ]" — Michael Hadjiargyrou (29 Aug 2014) Race is a Social Concept, Not a Scientific One (Op-Ed), Live Science, https://tinyurl.com/25exkhrn
It is from the same bunch of "woke" pseudo-science morons that write junk science about non-binary sex.
That is stupid, bad, "woke" science.
Inbred, "tribal" and "clannish" gene pools are pre-liberal or ILLIBERAL because cousin marriage was practiced historically.
Outbred gene pools that banned cousin marriage historically are "classically liberal".
See the WERID model by Henrich @ Harvard (irony)
WEIRD model by Henrich @ Harvard
pseudo science
To be clear: "everything is a social construct" is both (A) accurate and (B) useless as an analysis tool. Race is an arbitrary grouping of genetic traits and indoctrinations, but it is absolutely useful as a categorization tool because we can see differences in things such as both health outcomes and societal outcomes that are tied to race.
For example, murder rates.
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/real-talk-about-race-and-murder-rates
" Though there’s is no scientific basis for categorizing people by race or skin color. "
This is very silly. Are we pretending that skin color, hair color etc. are not genetically determined? That sickle cell anemia or Tay-Sach's disease are completely random in who they strike? No matter how much you may want it to, "scientific" is not the same thing as "moral."
If you're defining arbitrary categories you can define them however you like. "People who look like this" is literally as justifiable categorical scheme as any other. I yield that it's arbitrary. I also maintain that it has utility.
you asked the correct and crucial questions needed to debunk the junk science article.
so yep, saying there is "only one race" is absurd ideological nonsense because the concept of "race" or any other similar concept, such as subspecies, is only valid if there is more than one.
The history of the concept of "race" was from a time when genetics didn't exist as a science, so all sorts of bad data was used to justify colonialism and classify non-Europeans into groups on the false premise that non-Europeans were "inferior" and had smaller craniums, etc.
What genetics does describe are a lot of gene pools that have distinct markers that can trace the history of human migration, and some variant on the idea of a process of radial speciation, or what would become speciation if carried out long enough: genetically distinct gene pools historically associated with geographical locations.
Razib Khan recently wrote an excellent article (on substack) summarizing the genetics of historical population dispersal from Africa during the ice ages.
in reality, genetics make clear that the oldest, most "diverse" gene pools are in central and southern africa, and all of the gene pools that migrated north/east in several waves over about 50,000 years from africa suffered genetic "bottlenecks" as populations collapsed into small survivor groups (during glacial maximums?) that later expanded.
The rates of collapse into bottlenecks, and then later mergers with other gene pools and expansion was variable over something like 50,000, with the final major expansion starting after the "end" of the ice ages about 11,000 years ago and subsequent global warming and C02 increases. Many/most of the survival adaptations to extreme climate conditions during the ice ages are what shaped modern humans and their evolution psychology as a highly eusocial species (high altruism and social cooperation within kindship groups). See Samuel Bowles' 2008 Ulam lectures, Santa Fe Institute for the data modeling of biological morals in what Darwin called "primeval" times in human history.*
The radial speciation model is not strictly "arborizing" like distinct tree branches splitting into subdivisions, some of the branching structure was actually a lattice as gene pools merged, such as the Neaderthals that interbred with modern humans. I've seen anthropologists speculate that because Neanderthals were around for 100,000s of years longer than modern humans, modern humans that bred with Neanderthals probably inherited a lot of immunity to disease.
Modern humans gene pools (tribes) indigenous to the Himalayas have Neanderthal genes for blood oxygenation that improve survival at high altitudes.
To be clear: human evolution ash always tended toward development of genetically distinct gene pools because of the tendency toward kinship group ("tribal") inbreeding because survival in ancient times for hunter-gatherers was mainly about social cooperation and shared learning within a given kinship group.
Because of competition and wars between tribes, there never has been, and probably never will be a single, planetwide, completely uniform human gene pool, as the pseudo-science article implies.
The article is pseudo utopian, quasi religious bs.
James Campbell's distortion of Jungian archetypes had been criticized for similar reasons: a well-intended, quasi-religious, utopian distortion of science and scholarship.
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* ...in another paper, Peter Richerson [UC Davis, ecologist] quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of human sympathy in "primeval times"):
Darwin:
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
My bad, I always thought it ment judged on skill and ability. So take out meritocracy and put those words in. What I’m getting at is the best people should either be allowed or get a job opening or a school position. Not picked because of their minority status. I mean would you want the best Dr for brain surgery? Or the Dr who isn’t near as good but he’s a minority of some kind?
I see your point. However, is that scene really an advancement? I really wonder. I truly believe that after a certain point more wealth turns on you and your not happy anymore. I know it’s definitely not every case out there however it is many times the case. I am blue collar (construction) also. I hope my boys end up with a similar life. It’s a good life. At least I think so.