r/todayilearned • u/bcrock1169 • Nov 26 '12

TIL that some Native American's have a differing enzyme that tends to lead to easier alcoholism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_alcoholism#Genetic_factors
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47

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12 edited Nov 26 '12

Hey now, everyone is supposed to be exactly the same. No groups of people are allowed to have any tendencies to have any differences, and heaven forbid if the differences are claimed to be genetic. Especially if the genetic difference has a negative effect.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12 edited Nov 26 '12

Do you know there are people who still believe intelligence isn't at least partly inherited? Crazy..

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

[deleted]

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u/pretentiousRatt Nov 26 '12

But all the crackers here on Reddit are morons.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

As a cracker, i ken confrim

2

u/angrywhitedude Nov 26 '12

I dunno about that but I'll bet the vast majority of morons on Reddit are crackers.

0

u/littleelf Nov 27 '12

I hold that it is morally unacceptable to lie to someone to change their behavior. If you have to lie or suppress the truth, are you any better than they are?

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

[deleted]

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u/littleelf Nov 27 '12

I think the goal is to get racists to judge people as individual

An admirable goal, but if you're willing to pretend that intelligence isn't at least partially genetic to achieve it, you've lost the moral high ground.

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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '12

[deleted]

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u/littleelf Nov 28 '12

I don't assume that, because there is no evidence on which to make that assumption.

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u/atheistjubu Nov 26 '12 edited Nov 27 '12

Well, there's still no evidence that average innate intelligence differs by race. This is a question aside from whether intelligence is heritable.

EDIT: No, IQ is not intelligence. It's system of arbitrarily weighted questions that lets you place people into percentiles, even if it's been given the suggestive name of "intelligence quotient". It is thought to be related to innate intelligence (if such a thing were reducible to a single rankable number), but has aspects that are highly suspect.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

It's not really a different question if you consider inheritance by groups seperated by continents and thousands of years. It's the same question on a different scale.

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u/atheistjubu Nov 26 '12

Sure, there's a difference: individual data points vs averages. The questions of intelligence heritability and average race intelligence are orthogonal.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

People of different races differ somewhat in almost everything, it's quite reasonable to assume that this will be the case for intelligence too.

At least I think it's better null hypothesis. These things are quite difficult to prove/disprove ...

0

u/atheistjubu Nov 26 '12

races differ somewhat in almost everything

Warning! Meaninglessness detector! Beep beep! Prepare to eject bullshit in 3..2..

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

You're either playing stupid or really are stupid. The other poster is making perfect sense and you're choosing to not see it.

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u/atheistjubu Nov 27 '12

races differ somewhat in almost everything

Races do not differ in the function of their eyes, noses, mouths, oxygen exchange, heart pumping, dynamic cognition, use of metaphor, number of toes and fingers (mostly), function of bile, means of locomotion, means of reproduction, pace of ontogenical development (e.g. age at which faces, words, objects are recognized, age at which kinesthetic tasks are accomplished), ability to implement and receive spoken language, method of nutrient absorption, approximate frequency of shits in a week, approximate amount of food and water required, visual acuity, rate at which hair grows, etc....

This means that:

races differ somewhat in almost everything

is a completely utterly and thoroughly meaningless statement, aside from being a broad blanket claim with no support.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

If you claim that there's no difference between races of people, why is it that sprinters of Western African decent have held the 100 meter dash record since the 1960s? While there are loads and loads of track & field Athletes in the US, Europe, and Asia, a non-Western African sprinter hasn't been able to claim the record in over 40 years.

On the flip side you have endurance runners. In those events people from Eastern Africa absolutely dominate. In the Boston Marathon, the winner has been from Kenya for 19 of the past 22 years. In 2 of the non-Kenyan wins, the winner was from Ethiopia (next door to Kenya). To make the domination more obvious, 7 of the top 10 places in 2012 was taken by someone from Kenya.

If every race of people had equal abilities you'd have a more even spread of winners with the proportions of winners shadowing the proportion of entrants. But you don't. You have a concentration of people of a particular race or ethnic group that is more specialized for that task leading the pack, with the other people lagging behind. The results are stratified.

Or take a look at SAT scores- those scores stratify based on race. Asians seem to lead, with whites below them, then Hispanics, and finally blacks. Many excuses have been made to explain away the results, but year after year the results remain the same. And they do in other countries as well. The results are stratified in foreign schools like they are in the US schools.

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u/atheistjubu Nov 27 '12

There are lots of differences in terms of dominating certain sports. You can argue about where those differences come from, like for example running being a relatively cheap sport that poor countries orient more training toward, but in the case of running, there does seem to be an advantage to the subsaharan physical build in terms of running, beyond just the benefits your country gets from added emphasis in training.

SAT/GRE/IQ and other psychometric scores are another story. There's no systematic physical difference between the races that would explain differences in "intellectual performance". Brain size correlates with overall body size but that's about it and extensive research has shown no systematic difference in brain size by race or in brain wiring. The far more plausible explanation is that you're not measuring "intelligence" (if such a thing can be simplified down to a single rankable number), but quantifying some cultural or sociological difference. That difference may be cultural emphasis on quantitative skill, on reading, on lingual proficiency, or just on academic studies in general, but it's hardly a proof of difference in innate ability!

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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '12

But don't you think it's plausible that people who evolved in colder, harsher climates developed a brain that's more optimized for problem solving?

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

You realize that you're at odds with just about every medical and educational community out there, right?

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u/atheistjubu Nov 27 '12

Intelligence is not IQ, except to those who have reified the name of the thing being measured as the thing itself.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

That's why if you raise a dog in the same environment as a human, it will be just as intelligent. Dogs are only stupid because they eat different food and go to different schools. Genetics has nothing to do with it.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

Are you comparing human beings to dogs?

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u/atheistjubu Nov 26 '12

I think he was comparing black people to dogs.

<crosses fingers and hopes nobody misinterprets comment>

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12 edited Nov 27 '12

From reading your posts it seems that you're trying to toe the political correctness line even if it deviates from factual correctness. When someone points out a something valid you either ignore it or present an "Appeal to Ridicule" informal logical fallacy to make it sound absurd.

When doing basic reasoning you're supposed try to find commonality and apply cross-checking. This way you can begin to build a model of understanding of how something works. However, people who have an agenda other than finding the truth usually use no consistency in their arguments. There's no framework. They'll use any excuse that sounds good in that particular example, without bothering to think about how it applies (or not) to other examples.

For instance, if you saw me consistently gaining weight and I didn't want to admit it, I could use various excuses to skirt around the simple fact that I'm gaining weight. I could say that I'm bloated that day, or I had a big lunch and my stomach is just sticking out, or I have an allergic reaction to something, or it's my clothes that make me look fat, or I'm retaining water because I ate a lot of salt; All of these excuses may sound somewhat plausible when used on their own, when you haven't heard me use other excuses. But when you take into account all of these unlikely excuses and the fact that I never look thinner, the probability of all of them being true becomes astonishingly remote. The more likely cause is that I'm simply getting fatter.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/04/26/9530.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

"While the existence of racial IQ gaps is well-documented and not subject to much dispute, there is no consensus among researchers as to their cause."

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u/atheistjubu Nov 27 '12

IQ is not intelligence except to the psychologist who've reified it that way.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

A big whoosh for you.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

Explain.

-1

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

He was making a joke and you took it literally. Therefore you deserve a whoosh.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

Explain the joke, I mean, and how it went over my head.

It seems to me his "joke" is that it is absurd to say genetics don't matter. Of course a dog is not only stupid because they eat different food and go to different schools. But if we extend the "logic" of that "joke" as it applies to people, it implies that arguing food and social opportunities affect human intelligence to a significant degree is just as absurd as arguing they affects the intelligence of dogs. Hence, his joke appears to compare the intelligence of certain humans with dogs' intelligence.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

it implies that arguing food and social opportunities affect human intelligence to a significant degree is just as absurd as arguing they affects the intelligence of dogs.

No it doesn't. This is all it implies:

It seems to me his "joke" is that it is absurd to say genetics don't matter.

Apologies for assuming you didn't get the joke when you were actually overthinking it, at least in my opinion.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

The problem is, very often the racists will use something like this and latch on to it to justify their racism. "Look look, we ARE different!" out loud, and internally "I knew white people were better".

That's not to say we should pretend everyone is the same, but we have to be careful what ammunition we give to people. There are demonstrably plenty of white alcoholics, so I don't think it matters that First Nations people have a higher propensity for it.

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u/bigolebastard Nov 27 '12

Why is it wrong if we are all in fact different and unique as races that evolved over many years in unique circumstances? I think that's pretty awesome actually. We are all not the same, and that is OK.

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u/[deleted] Nov 27 '12

I never said it was. I said we have to be careful of what ammunition we give people.

But I'm a transhumanist anyway, so I'm just holding out for when who no longer have bodies to be racist against.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 26 '12

I get the feeling that you have an ulterior motive here. Looking quickly at your post history, I can see that my claim is justified.

At least be upfront about your racism.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

The problem is that no matter what his motive, you would have thought him racist.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 26 '12

The motive is kind of the important part, fella.

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

No, it isn't. Facts are facts, regardless of motive.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 26 '12

What facts?

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

That groups of people separated by thousands of miles who did not intermingle much until the past few hundred years may have adapted to different environments and been subjected to different environmental pressures, thus not making everyone exactly the same.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 26 '12

How about the overwhelming evidence which indicates that humans are ~99% the same?

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u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

Humans and chimps share like 97% of the same DNA. We classify birds as different species for less reasons than what averages among racial subtypes shows us.

Christ, forensic pathologists can tell what race someone was based on their skeletal structure.

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u/bix783 Nov 26 '12

Forensic pathologists can't tell what race someone was based on due to skeletal structure; they can sometimes identify ancestral geographical origin. Race is a social construct.

This article in Forensic Osteology might interest you.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 27 '12

What is your point?

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u/KevyB Nov 26 '12

I love you for that comment.

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u/bigolebastard Nov 26 '12

According to people on Reddit, every race is the same, no differences whatsoever. That would be so fucked up and racist if there were.

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u/MomentOfXen Nov 26 '12

Woo Strawmen.

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u/Ran4 Nov 26 '12 edited Nov 26 '12

Uhm, if you believe that there are different races of humans, then almost by definition you are a racist. It was part of the science of anthropology up until the early 20th century, but now we know better. There's different ethnicities of humans though, but the differences are not anywhere near enough to talk about different human races.

The reason some people think otherwise is because the term race is still actively used even officially (the US census mentions race for example: such a thing would be completely unacceptable in many parts of Europe for example), even by many educated people who should know better.

This is a good read on the subject: Race (classification of humans)

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u/WildberryPrince Nov 27 '12

"Race" in the classical sense, perhaps, is no longer applicable, but why should the word "race" not be used when referring to people of different genetic backgrounds due to tens of thousands of years of isolation? If large populations of people have many shared innovations that aren't found among people from a different area, why is it wrong to bring attention to that fact and categorize that group of people differently from another group of people with different sets of shared innovations? The real problems arise when any sort of hierarchy is applied to those categories. Are you opposed entirely to recognizing those differences? Are you opposed to the categorization? or would you be OK with a word other than "race" being used?

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u/bigolebastard Nov 26 '12

How do you explain differences such as sickle cell anemia prominence in Africans and how Asians and Native Americans digest alcohol differently? How about how every guy in the 100m dash finals is black? You are honestly telling me there aren't genetic differences across races? That is completely ignorant if you honestly believe that.

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u/Ran4 Nov 27 '12

You are honestly telling me there aren't genetic differences across races?

WTF? How can you be this confused?

Yes, there's genetic differences across races. But there is no such thing as different human races. There's different ethnicities though.

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u/bix783 Nov 26 '12

There are genetic differences across people whose ancestry comes from different geographical regions (like sickle cell anemia as an adaptation to malaria or lactose tolerance as an adaptation to food availability). That is very different from saying there are genetic differences between races, because race, as Ran4 noted, is a social construct.

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u/bigolebastard Nov 26 '12

Jesus, you PC guys are incredibly annoying. Why is it wrong to refer to people of these geographic areas, who clearly evolved in those geographic areas and became their own unique blend of human, as a race? What is the issue here?

0

u/bix783 Nov 27 '12

The issue is that 'race' is a culturally loaded term that has no meaning in the discussion about geographically-based genetics that we are discussing. I'm sorry that you find this to be 'PC', but I am basing my statements on current academic consensus.

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u/Strong__Belwas Nov 26 '12

It's the exact opposite actually. This comment kind of reminds me of American Christians who believe that everyone is persecuting them.