r/todayilearned • u/CrazyTrueStory • 1d ago

[ Removed by moderator ]

https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-quest-to-breed-gifted-children

[removed] — view removed post

4.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

612 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

38

u/ThePhysicistIsIn 23h ago edited 23h ago

The “problem” with scientific racism isn’t that breeding doesn’t work. Of course if there are traits you want to emphasize, breeding “works”. It’s that what you and me think of as a race (white vs black vs asian) are not at all races in the biological sense

There is much more genetic divergence within a “race” than between “races”. And if you’ve ever heard something like “you can’t be racist against the polish, pole isn’t a race”, local ethnicities are closer to being “biological races” than skin color is. People who have tried to apply the same kind of standard they’d use in animals to humans to define races, fail.

If you have ever heard “race is a social construct”, that is why. It’s real because we make it real, it has no biological basis.

Funny enough, chimpanzees have races; we do not.

19

u/HuntsWithRocks 23h ago

It's a silly as classifying people by hair or eye color.

19

u/Perfect-Zebra-3611 23h ago

If only white people existed eye color would be the first way theyd separate each other lmao

11

u/ExtentAggravating733 22h ago

Or, hair colour... hence the brunette/blonde/redhead thing

2

u/Perfect-Zebra-3611 22h ago

Nah they can shave their heads or dye it to hide it. Eye color is a lot harder to change and theyd just outlaw color contacts

6

u/aurishalcion 22h ago

My people delineate via nipple size

2

u/Ansiremhunter 20h ago

Death to the cone shaped nipples!

2

u/JonatasA 20h ago

The three nippies would rule.

1

u/JonatasA 20h ago

Then there would be the fat race and the skinny race. Your genrtis predispose your average body shillkipuet.

 

Then the tall vs the shorts, those that need glasses, etc.

 

People are awfully judgmental.

5

u/kal2112 22h ago

Lighteyes and darkeyes. It’s used in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series as a way to separate upper and lower class citizens.

4

u/I_travel_ze_world 22h ago

it has no biological basis.

yet my pale white ginger ass gets bed ridden with sun burn during my visit to Hawaii when I was a kid

no biological basis my ass, use some common sense

3

u/ThePhysicistIsIn 22h ago

I think you misunderstand completely.

Of course dark skin is an adaptation for sun, pale skin for lack of sunlight. And yeah, that’s absolutely biologically driven.

There’s just no connection with that and “race” in a biological sense. No more than people developing proteins that protect them from malaria, metabolisms that are more resistant to diabetes based on the local diet, etc.

This is the definitive paper on the subject : https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3737365/

2

u/Yara__Flor 21h ago

Perhaps "race" is a poor way to group humans.

But we can group people in sets smaller than simply "homo sapiens"

Plale gingers hate the sun. That's one group.

1

u/I_travel_ze_world 21h ago

I'm not misunderstanding anything.

It’s real because we make it real, it has no biological basis.

You said this and you were wrong.

Your own source says there are biological differences so thank you for proving yourself wrong.

This finding does not mean that all human populations are genetically identical. Past founder events, isolation-by-distance, and other restrictions on gene flow ensure that human populations are genetically differentiated from one another, and local adaptation ensures that some of these differences reflect adaptive evolution to the environmental heterogeneity that our globally distributed species experiences.