20120221 (ON)
February 21, 2012
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Appearance and Reality               Language               Racial Rights               Epistemology

Distinctions: ISTMRN that all language is based on distinctions between and among things. Science, knowing, consciousness, language, attention and so much else rely on, manipulate, recognize, explore, argue about (both content and boundaries) distinctions. All names are distinctions. Science in particular is very prolific in making distinctions between and among things. Language distinguishes other things, like thoughts and ideas, objects and images. By agreeing somewhat about boundaries (always fuzzy) and content (also always fuzzy, perhaps because the boundaries are fuzzy) we can communicate with some semblance of belief that we are exchanging something external to us, something real about the universe. The universe includes the universe of thought.

Some semblance of our thought that communication is meaningful, perhaps true, perhaps of common interest, or perhaps just agreed upon fantasy, wherein perhaps lies some of the fuzziness. So we communicate with distinctions, we know more when we distinguish more. Oh yes, the new age eastern thoughts are in us all, so we recognize the oneness of everything: we're all quarks and gluons, electrons and photons, higgs bosons (perhaps) and gravitons, which acting together make "almost" stuff and energy like protons, neutrons, gravity, and chemical electromagnetic attraction, which, to make further distinctions, act together to make us among everything else.

So we, humans, selves, and all our words and ideas behind them are distinctions we recognize, shall I say create (to fuzzy a boundary), out of the oneness of the untold random motions which the Greeks named, distinguished as Chaos. We use distinctions to think about some particular facet of that universe, to manipulate some related parts thereof, to talk about, to change, to improve, to destroy, to love, to hate that distinguished thing. Science, it seems, is institutionalized procedures for making distinctions where none existed before, e.g. protons, neutrons, human haplogroups, granite, syenite, eukaryotic bacteria, income cohorts, numbers (well, they came long before "science", or did they?)(damn, always fuzziness, always fuzziness).

The second half of science is developing rational, mathematical if possible, relationships among distinguished things of nature. From most perspectives, including those at the very heart of the scientist, distinctions are good. They allow knowledge and attendant potential for human action based upon the things we distinguish.

The following entries were grist for a Letter to American Scientist a month later

Racial Rights: Now along come some interlopers who in the name of science, a most noble maker of distinctions, want to eliminate distinctions. "Race Finished", book review by Jan Sapp, reviewing "Race" Debunking a Scientific Myth" by Ian Talltersall and Rob DeSalle, 2011, and "Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture edited by Sheldon Krimksy and Kathleen Sloan, 2011, Vol. 100 No. 2. Mar-Apr 2012, p. 164 ff.

Classification of people according to race is discredited as "myth" based on "erroneous biological conceptions" and is just a "sociopolitical construct" and "technological and commercial construct", "Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance" (reviewer quote of Lewontin, 1972, who must have been behind my coming to awareness of the proposal at about the same time or somewhat later, but certainly before I mentioned it to Al Lappin in our tandem hallway desks at Sandia in 1978. (Note: I actually find all distinctions to be in a deep sense "myths" and "sociopolitical constructs", even protons, but from a less inclusive perspective the idea that the idea of race is scientifically preposterous seems to me scientifically preposterous.


These selected quotes, Sapps's entire review, and, from his reporting and approval, the two books he reviewed, are all dedicated, it seems, to eradicating the idea of race from the human mind. Having concluded that Sapp and others propose such a radical proposal as true, I, always pursuing truth myself albeit through my own biases, reviewed the evidence Sapp offered as proof. His offering: race is invalid because Genetic variation among all humans is greater than variation among subcategories of humans. His numbers about human genetic variation or diversity (used interchangeably, I think) used to support that assertion are:
  • 85.4% within races, 14.8% between local populations and regions
                (taken from Lewontin, 1972)
  • 94% can't be categorized by subgroup, 7% between races classically defined
                (average of Sapp's range of 5% to 7%)
  • 92% can't be categorized by subgroup between those subgroups
                (average of Sapp's range of 6% to 10%)
That's all! Ignoring a 6% to 10% among subgroups would wipe out many classifications of igneous rocks based on chemistry; they are all silicates with narrow SiO variances. We make distinctions with far less variance between classifications than 6%. Even 1% diagnostic association is enough to classify races.

Quotes from the author include:
    1. "The great majority of human variation was within so-called races, not between them."
    2. "Race is little more than skin deep in biological terms, and individuals are frequently
          more genetically similar to members of other so-called races than they are to their own said race."
    3. "Genetic divergence between geographical populations in the course of human evolution does not
          compare to the variation among individuals."
(note: this sentence immediately follows the comparison
          he just made as item 1a above)
    4. "Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance
          either, no justification can be offered for its continuance"
(reviewer quote of Lewontin, 1972)
    5. "The result" (of human intermixing, i.e. inbreeding of all subgroups) "is that no clear boundaries
          can be drawn around the variety of humans, no 'races' of us."
    6. "Race is void of biological foundation",
and his parting shot
    7. "Race is not just a sociocultural construct; it is a technological and commercial artifact that persists today."