Talk:Race (human categorization)/Archive 14

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I like the progress you have made on this! I wouldn't object to inclusion of the map as it is now. A few cocerns:
  • it may still be copyvio (it's just a distorted and colour-modified version of the original map)
  • let's find a less jarring colour for the 'empty dataset' region ;)
  • colours: I appreciate that some people have difficulties in making out the different shades. However, I think the map was intended to be in true-colour, i.e. with the colours actually corresponding to the real hues of people's skin. If you change the palette, that will be lost of course, and we can as well paint the africans blue and the europeans purple...
the projection is certainly more 'politically correct' now. it's just not really any recognizable projection anymore. but well, we don't have to navigate by it.
dab 09:20, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)


Ok, here is what I mean: I manually copied the "isochromes" on a cylindrical proection. There should be no copyvio problems with this version, but obviously, the map is less accurate. I can still improve accuracy, though, if you think this is the way to go. dab 18:27, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

original

Yup. That looks pretty good, especially with a little touchup. Are the colors web safe? Rikurzhen
the colours are identical to the original ones. But I do not think it is meant to be "true colour" anyway, so we can change them. I will add Equator/Tropics and some legend to the image. I don't think the decrease in accuracy matters much. The original is not very accurate itself (and contains no information on e.g. Hawaii, and other islands) dab 08:49, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I can't see any difference among the first 4 or 5 levels on my Mac, and even on my IBM the colors are a little hard to see. The array of brown tones I worked out in the map above (with Greenland in purple, which people may not like any better than bright red), however, show up clearly on both systems. P0M 09:04, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

We have to use the map with caution anyway: The best known of these maps is that composed by the Italian geographer Renato Biasutti, which was based on the von Luschan skin color scale. This map has gained broad circulation in several widely distributed publications (Barsh 2003, Lewontin 1995, Roberts 1977, Walter 1971), despite the fact that, for areas with no data, Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas [1]. dab 09:14, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I just mean that if we are going to use this kind of image then we should have something that is clear enough to be seen. The colors of levels 1-4 are very faint even on the Windows system, and they are totally washed out when seen on a Mac. It is the colors used that I object to, not the accuracy or lack of accuracy of the map. P0M 09:21, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

my version Anyway, I added labels now. Feel free to fiddle with the rgb curves of this version. My statement about accuracy was not in reply to your comment, I just wanted to state what's in the map I uploaded. Since the numbers seem to refer to a "Luschan scale" we can now change the colours to any colours of the rainbow (although I can see them well on my screen as they are). I suggest you leave the ocean in light blue, and the empty dataset in dark blue, and just pick a scale of browns for the eight colours of the scale. dab 09:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Are you maybe colourblind? it seems than your scale is based on brightness, while the original scale is based more on hue (different amounts of green). I am re-uploading with increased brightness contrast. how is it now? dab 09:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I am not colorblind. The image does not show up properly on at least one group of computers and browsers. P0M 23:38, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
sorry. I thought that may be a possible explanation, since the scale depends both on hue and on brightness. No, the colours are not "websafe", and would probably not display properly on a 1990 system (just like most of the photographs etc.). Feel free to fiddle with the colours of this new version; they are arbitrary: they give a rough impression (darker skins appear darker on the scale), but they are not truecolour. dab 08:53, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)


Spencer Wells, Y-chromosome, and India

§ Some time ago there was a discussion on the genetic history of the peoples of India. While looking for the general picture of human migrations presented by Spencer Well on Public TV a couple months ago I found a good summary: http://www.hindu.com/lr/2003/09/07/stories/2003090700330500.htm

§ One of the things that this article points out, in discussing Wells's book, is that there seems to be evidence that the oldest population of India resulted from the first wave of migration out of Africa, around 60K years before the present, and very much later another wave of migrants came into India from the Central Asian region, at around 30K ybp. The newspaper article suggests that the second group came as conquorers. By the Spencer Wells figures, the Americas were being populated by immigrants from over the Bering Strait already 20,000 years ago, but Europe didn't get populated (again by a wave of migration out of Central Asia) until about 10K ybp.

§ Fearing to get a slug of job-related e-mails, I haven't yet turned on my IBM to see how the new maps look using that system. All I know so far is that reading the ones using the old color scheme is like trying to see cooked white rice sprinkled on new-fallen snow. P0M 08:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I still haven't gotten around to reading the article on "race," so I haven't been keeping track of much of the discussion. (In glancing over it, I happened to see a bit about Affirmative Action, and decided I'd better save this thing for when I have a lot more patience. I keep telling myself I'll get around to it, but I keep getting distracted by other less lengthy enterprises.) Ironically, the very first link I provided in this discussion (appearing near the top of the current discussion page), if followed to the news article, provides much the same information. If I had known different information was being considered in certain models, I would have drawn a big, red arrow to it -- so as to throw a monkey wrench into things a little earlier. :-p But not for purposes of disruption; it might have gotten folks on this track a little sooner. deeceevoice 07:33, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
For anyone interested, here's that link: "...didn't ANYONE see the Spencer Wells documentary on the "Journey of Man" that aired on PBS earlier this year (or last?) in which, using DNA evidence, he traced the earliest out-migration of the San bushmen to India and Australia -- and then to points beyond? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/12/photogalleries/journey_of_man/photo8.html deeceevoice 19:10, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC) " deeceevoice 08:21, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
It wasn't quite "to points beyond" the way I remember the program. He explained it as two waves of migration, the first wave followed (and populated) the areas adjacent to the oceans, and a second wave, thousands of years later, that moved in a single arc to a place in Central Asia from which it split in several directions. His following out of the genetic trail makes it very much more clear to me why the young lady from the Golden Triangle area at the right of the map below looks so much like the young man from Malawi on the bottom row. P0M 16:25, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
(Duh) Yes, there were successive waves of migration that took different routes. Just a quickie comment/preface that, yes, could be misconstrued -- but I take it for granted that most people involved in this discussion know that fairly widely known fact (about different waves of migrations taking place over time). My point/purpose was to repeat the information (apparently largely overlooked) and provide the particular link so that anyone interested could access it easily. deeceevoice 16:35, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Actually, it was a complete revelation to me to see that people propagated themselves all the way to Australia before they populated the more northernly regions. If Wells is correct, then that explains a very great deal to me. For instance, if India and the rest of Eurasia had been populated by a diffusion process that would work the way that incense diffuses through a room, then India should have been fairly evenly populated throughout time and should have been relatively stable culturally. It should have looked more like China, where, even though there are some genetic differences north and south, most people look about the same and most people speak some version of Chinese. Religions, languages, and other cultural features can serve to keep intermixing infrequent. I wonder if there is any place on earth that is more diverse in these ways than India. Besides the incursion of conquor groups from the north, people probably populated the coastal areas of India relatively sparsely, moved to the interior and formed many centers of population and culture, and then grew apart in language, culture, and religion over the next several tens of thousands of years. P0M 17:57, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think it would be imprudent to draw such socio-cultural/political conclusions based on presumed migration and population patterns. There are far too many variables affecting societal stability: climate, war and civil strife, leadership, fluctuations in availability of food sources and potable water, disease, natural and manmade disasters. And far too many holes in the presumption of relative homogeneity in other Asian populations -- most notably, China. Actually, there are traces of aboriginal and ancient "Negroid" peoples throughout China and Asia. There are so-called "black Thai" throughout Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, in parts of China, India, who look just like the San bushmen; but, by and large, with straight/straighter hair. Tibetans are quite dark and look very different, generally, from other Chinese. There are also notable differences -- physical, linguistic and cultural -- among other ethnicities in China. Furthermore, it is fairly widely known that Chinese dialects are very divergent from one another. Source material from SPICE, the Stanford Program on International and Cross-cultural Education, states:
"In China there are many different dialects. Dialects usually refer to 'regional forms of a language.' However, many of the regional variants which are commonly referred to as 'dialects' of the Chinese language are more different from one another than French is from Spanish or Norwegian is from Swedish!"
It's one of the primary reasons that many foreigners find doing business in mainland China so hellified.
Be that as it may, my bad for assuming. deeceevoice 19:47, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

§ I'm not sure whether "DC" wrote all the paragraphs above. Anyway, of course there is some degree of diversity in China, just as there is some degree of diversity among First Nation peoples in the Americas. People got here from Asia 20,000 years or so ago, and in all that time they have evolved language, cultural, and even physical differences (the beginnings of which may have come with different groups during different migrations, who knows). Languages like Thai are believed by scholars such as Bernard Karlgren to have some traceable connections with the language(s) the Chinese now speak, and the Thai people are known to have lived in southern China before being forced farther south by the ethnic Han Chinese. And there are even groups such as the Taiwan aborigines who speak a polysyllabic language that has nothing to do with Chinese.

§ I don't know how one would evaluate such differences as do exist between the ethnic groups situation in India and that in China. However, there is, for instance, no social institution like the caste system in China. That's not to say that some speakers of one "dialect" of Chinese will not endeavor to prevent their kids from marrying out of their language group, and there are certain stereotypes that actually seem to be believed about people from the several provinces. But even given those rather human failings, the grand thrust of the Chinese civilization has been toward assimilation rather than toward segregation. The newspaper article for which I supplied a URL seemed to indicate that the author found explanations for some features of Indian social history in the research of Dr. Wells, so anyone who is interested in questions of why groups maintain enmities over the centuries might find some research leads in his ideas. Personally, I find his ideas fascinating but lack much of a background in ancient Indian history. P0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

More Skin Tones

for discussion § Before somebody complains about the picture or lack of them, I am putting this image up as a suggestion and these are the least unattractive people I could find in my collection of scanned pictures. (Well, the Yeti probably should go, regardless.) They can be swapped out, or the entire idea of giving the most attractive examples of faces from around the world can go. On the other hand, probably lots of people have pictures of their favorite friends whom they would like to contribute.

§ Before somebody complains about the reddish tint, I can explain. It all started when I saved an ancestor of this thing as a gif image rather than as a png image. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was allegedly due to operator error. The cyber cop is coming in the morning to put me through the wringer. However, if I survive that ideal and if the map is acceptable, the colors can be changed with a wave of the magic wand. It's just that my magic wand is off duty at 3 a.m., and with no idea of whether it will be worth any further effort I'm not going to do anything about it.

§ The good thing is that after cranking the gamma up on the original map I was able to clearly see several inclusions of lighter skin tone areas in large areas of darker skin tones. I'm not sure what software other people used to copy and manipulate these images but it evidently could not see the faint differences any more easily than I could.

§ Oh, yes. The strange white area. I'd like to know about that too. It shows up on the original map as though there were a population of mostly white folks in that part of Africa. I am not kidding. I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank.

§ One last thing. No comments about my girlfriend. It's not that I am sensitive, but she is extremely capable with a blowgun, and, uh... she may look tough, but she's very easily hurt. ;-) P0M 08:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)


I really don't see the point of the faces surrounding the map. That is really pointless; even if we did have good pictures, we can give them as separate images. That said, I am glad for the equal area projection (although I think my map is more accurate:P) The white patch should have the same colour as central Europe: it's just a scale of isochromes, and the limit between the whitest and the second-whitest is "von Luschen scale 12", whatever that means. So we probably just have most of Maroc von Luschen 12.5, with southern Maroc von Luschen 11.5 (probably Tuareg). Remember this is a map of "natives" collected in the 1930s. Who qualified as "native" was probably left to the discretion of whoever collected the data, or to the map's compilator. It certainly cannot be treated as objective reality. dab 10:37, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure how a map that deletes or omits differences noted in the original map can be more accurate. And what is the objective basis for your statement that the missing (?) data should be "central Europe" skin shade? But I always like my own answers better, so here is what I found on p. 145 of Cavelli-Sforza's History and Geography of Human Genes: They have the same map that was posted here in digital form. On that map the northern tip of Africa is in range 12-14, the missing band is 15-17 (not <12 as the digital form would have it), and the next band is 18-20. That is what one would expect, just as you would not be surprised to find average temperatures in June to be 60 degrees fahrenheit, July to be 70, August to be 75, and September to be 65. If you found in one year that August was 65 and September was 70 then you would wonder what happened to depress August temperatures and boost September temperatures in that atypical year. And that is why I looked for an explanation. (There is no place in east, central, or west Europe that has skin color values higher than 12-14, the same value as is found on the opposite side of the Straits of Gibraltar.)
What is the reason for your summary judgment against the researchers who collected the data and who compiled the data? You talk as though they were not careful researchers and did not know how to take a statistically valid sample and/or did not know how to compare skin tones of individuals to a standard scale. It is desirable to confront shoddy research with facts that show it to be false, but it is unfair and disrespectful to people who dedicate their lives to scientific endeavors if you begin by assuming that they do sloppy science. Cavelli-Sforza is a reputable scholar and he seems to have found no problem with the data. In any case, there should be no a priori rejection of anybody's observations as failing to reflect "objective reality." P0M 17:31, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I am only talking about this particular map. Biasutti's. 1930s? Image:Map of skin color distribution.gif. I had no ambitions beyond representing the information in that image. And in this map, Morocco/Algeria is in the 0-12 range, not empty dataset. There is a difference in colour, you can certainly see it, if you adjust your monitor's contrast (or if you look at the map in an editor: 0-12 is light brown, empty dataset is gif transparent, i.e. you see your WP background colour. If we start mixing different maps to arrive at a more accurate map, we would be doing original research. I am catious about Biasuttis map because of the criticism I found relating to it, which I posted on the image page (have you seen it?) "Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas".
If Cavalli-Sforza's map is better, by all means, reproduce that. It will then be CF's map, and not Biasutti's map anymore. We also need to come up with background on this "von Luschen scale" (what is it? what is it based on? how is it measured?) dab 18:02, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think if you look at the map you will see what I am questioning. It appears to be anomalous. Cavalli-Aforza draws his map "after Biasutti 1959, p. 192, table 4), but does not have 0-12. Instead he has it coded 15-17. When I can find the original map I will check it again. What I did in the beginning was explain (for anybody who might wonder) that I did not put a white patch there by mistake. Media:2x2_w_missing_Biasutti.pngP0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought you hadn't realized you put the patch there by mistake. I have looked at the map, believe me. Yes it is anomalous. Sure, if it is not on the original map, we'll change it. I do not know how accurate it is, but it is by no means unbelievable. You see, the '12-15' slice stretching from Asia across Northern Africa may be related to a migration, probably the expansion of Islam (the Iberian peninsula, Al-Andalus, is also in the 12-17 range, alone in western Europe). If you subtract that slice, the 1-12 range simply stretches from Europe to northern Africa. I do not have to come up with an explanation for this though. What we are doing here is, we are simply reporducing Biasutti's map (I realize no Italy is wrong on my map. my bad) dab 12:06, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

§ I hope I am misunderstanding your first sentence. I certainly have not "realized [I] put the patch there by mistake." That is what is there on the map that was provided on this Talk page by copying it from somebody else, presumably already in digital form on a website. Maybe Cavalli-Sforza went to Biasutti's book and copied the map wrong. Maybe the map in Biasutti's book was wrong and Cavalli-Sforza saw a possible problem, checked the data, and corrected the omission. Maybe our first digitized map is wrong. Who knows? P0M 12:29, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

wait a minute. I think we do have a few misunderstandings. it's like this:
  • Biasutti made his map around 1940
  • we found the digital image, and started copying this.
  • on the digital image, the patch in question is coloured 1-12.
  • you changed it to 'white' in your version, either by mistake, or because you were uncertain if it was correct, I don't know which
  • Cavalli-Sforza published a map "after Biasutti". I don't have access to this map. You say CS changed the patch in question, either
    • because it was never 1-12 on Biasuttis map, and our digital version was wrong
    • because it was on Biasuttis map, but wrongly, and CS improved the map

I really don't know which map you want to copy. If you are copying CS's map, I cannot comment anyway, bacause I haven't seen it. dab 12:40, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

§ We are beginning to squabble. I think I have an axiological reaction to your manner of calling attention to differences of opinion. I will try to refrain from reacting to antagonistic- and critical-sounding statements that you make in the future. What I will say is that I agree with the recitation of facts given immediately above, disregarding the affect-laden parts. When I put in the white band (and white was an otherwise undefined color as "1-12" was colored a light tan in that version), I said: "I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank." In the way that I have been trained, calling attention to suspect data while working up any kind of a project is regarded as a normal part of doing a good job, and flagging something is not considered "[putting] the patch there by mistake. I have tentatively redrawn the map in that one regard, and I have also replaced certain regions (such as the one near the east coast of S. America at about 20 degrees south) that had fallen out along the way. The projection I have used is equal-area, and I was able to copy over small sectors of the original digitized map, size them to the approximate position on the new map, and then "stretch to fit". Since the original drafting was possibly not too accurate, I doubt that the overall accuracy of the map suffers a great deal. Anyway, nobody will try to navigate by it.

See the original

I am not sure what the ideal size to show this image may be. If reduced in size too much, the various colored areas become too small to be easily distinguished. Space on the hard drive is the same. Space on the computer screen is virtually free.P0M 02:49, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Your map is very nice. I would remove the black oval, though. concerning the moroccan/algerian 1-12 strip, I do think you should leave it in (because it is too obvious an anomaly to have crept in by mistake) unless you cite a newer map (Cavalli Sforza?) where it has disappeared. dab 12:04, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

§ Does anyone have software that is good for doing curves? The map with the projection I borrowed had very flaky lines, and all I can do is to try to fix them by hand. It would be good (if the color level in the skin shades part cold be kept nice by never saving the map into GIF format) to refine the lines, and especially the boundary lines around the whole map. (That is why I experimented with the black oval.) Having no sense of apodictic certainty regarding the existence or non-existence of a band of white people living in Africa, I will wait until I get to the library to check the original book. Hopefully the book will have tables as well as maps to provide an additional check. P0M 19:07, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

§ Meanwhile, I did find the following, which indicates that somebody else had the same doubts and did have access to the original book in Italian:

http://backintyme.com/Essay021215.htm
It may be of interest to know that the band of Berbers who appear as fairer than Spaniards in the above figure do not really exist. The light-colored intra-coastal stripe from Casablanca to Tunisia is merely an accidental artifact of the copying process from Biasutti. It appears in no other publication of this figure. Also, the reader should notice the small text note within the above figure from Jurmain. It says that: ?these [Biasutti?s] data are, unfortunately, the best available.? As it turns out, this complaint is not entirely accurate.

This site has some maps that reflect additional/later research. Unfortunately I didn't see this before I did so much work on the original map. ;-< P0M 08:29, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

ok, so it turns out the stripe is indeed on Biasutti's map, but was a mistake (Biasutti's). We can of course still keep the map, for "history of the term", just like the (excellent) link you found does. But it would also desirable to have a version of the 1977 update of C. Loring Brace and Ashley Montagu (which has no data on the Americas, though). Very neat is also [2], but unfortunately, no source or context is given (?). dab 08:48, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

§ When the website says, "The light-colored intra-coastal stripe from Casablanca to Tunisia is merely an accidental artifact of the copying process from Biasutti. It appears in no other publication of this figure," it sounds like it was not on Biasutti's map, but was on some family of maps that resulted when somebody copied from his map. By calling this stripe an "artifact of the copying process" the author of the website is bending over backwards to avoid saying, "Somebody copied incorrectly from Biasutti." Cavelli-Sforza has a stripe there, but it is intermediate in color. The URL I quoted seems to promise a table of data, but I don't see it.The map that has no data for the Americas only gives 5 levels of difference (instead of 8), so it doesn't show whether the people next to the southern line of the northernmost color area in Africa are any darker than those right next to the ocean. I doubt that our library has many books in the sciences written in Italian, but I'll check. P0M 12:19, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

§ I'm just back from raiding the library. I checked a dozen books or so, but didn't find a notably better map than what was on the website. I did find one map that showed the improved values for Africa and also showed revisions for the Americas. The skin shades are divided into 5 groups rather than 8 groups, but that may more accurately reflect the true degree to which distinctions can be measured with accuracy. I can scan that image and try to stretch fit it to an equal-area projection.

§ While I was there, I check out a book on dentition. One of the key identifiers of Chinese, shovel-shaped incisors, turns out to occur even in Europeans (at a very much lower rate) and to be even more prevalent in the Americas than it is in China.

§ I now have the book by Wells, and it has a fairly good map, with dates, of the migrations he has followed through his study of the y chromosome. It is intended to illustrate a more detailed verbal presentation, so it may be possible to improve on the somewhat impressionistic map. (I'm sure that the earliest wave of migration did not get to India via the open ocean, for instance. At least that's not what he said on the TV program. But that's the way the map is drawn to make room for drawing in the overland migrations to the north of the first wave migration path.) P0M 00:52, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually the map in Wells' book is fairly reasonable since he suggests that the migration took place along the (now-submerged) coastal strip (of course I haven't actually compare it with sea level maps from 50-60k years ago). Of course the "first wave" must have eventually taken to the sea to get to Australia, but that's a slightly different matter. Guettarda 17:32, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ Good point. Thanks. I would have missed it otherwise. But I think that people would have had to be terribly tall to walk through where he has drawn the line in question. Probably I will let them walk a little closer to where the shoreline is now. ;-) P0M

§ I got in touch with the owner of the website mentioned above, and he has offered to e-mail me a scanned copy of the map in the book illustration, which shows an intermediate band where the white band occurs near the northern tip of Africa. I had a closer look at the maps I found in the library, and none of them improves on what was in that website. The one major difference that a revised map probably ought to take account of is the division of Australia into two regions. I'll make overlays to check, but it looks like the only other changes involve reducing 8 zones to 5. If you check out the Cavelli-Sforza map (which I now think is a photo reproduction of the original map) you can easily understand why authors would decide to simplify the number of zones -- Cavelli-Sforza's map is o.k. for the lighter half of the shades of skin color, but the darker shades are practically indistinguishable. Sometimes, if you know where to look, you will see what looks like a little halftoning rather than straight black ink. But for practical purposes the map is pretty useless outside of the values that are shown in the Americas.

§ In a way it was a good thing that the original map was so washed out. If I hadn't really looked carefully at it I'm pretty sure I'd have missed the white band. The uncorrected map has propagated so many places on the WWW that it's hard to believe the original maker of the digitized image has any objection to others using it. P0M 03:53, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup

We need to clean up the article. The sections should only treat what it says they do in the section title. For example, there shouldn't be a paragraph "

"In everyday speech, race is often used to describe populations that are better defined as ethnic groups..."

at the end of "History of the term". Nor should the "Anthropology and genetics" section, being placed after the history section, i.e. we are through with the historical aspect now, begin with

"In the 19th century many natural scientists made three claims about race: ..."

(i.e. this bit still belongs in the 'history' section). Also the case studies (USA, Brazil) should either be exported to special articles, or at least be placed after the more general phylogenetic subsection. Somebody should read the entire article and weed out repetitions, too. dab 17:24, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Von Luschan scale

§ The von Luschan scale was a manufactured set of standard tiles that were colored so that a researcher could in relatively rapid order sort through his/her tiles and find the one that came closest to matching a given subject's skin color. Essentially the same method is still used today, at least in this increasingly anti-scientific nation, by dentists who want to match ceramic material used for making fillings with the color of their patient's tooth. They have a little cabinet full of ceramic "teeth" on little spindles. Each specimen has a different combination of hue and brightness from the others. Although one could easily create an electronic device to measure these factors to tighter tolerances, the low-tech device seems to meet professional standards. Similarly, given the fact that a subject's skin color could vary considerably due to contingent factors such as season and weather patterns, the von Luchan tiles probably provide all the accuracy that is useful. P0M 03:10, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Interest in Egyptians in the ancient period

I seem to recall discussion a while back about the coloration of people in northern Africa during the ancient period. I just ran acrossthe article on Gallery_of_Fayum_mummy_portraits, which shows a fairly narrow range of skin colors, people mostly having proportionately large eyes, etc. Examination of the mummies themselves indicated that the people were depicted at an appropriate age. (Lots of people apparently died in their 20s and 30s.) Whether the eyes are realistic or are depicted they way they are because of esthetic preferences might be worth asking about. Anyway, DeeCee and some other may find these of interest. I find them quite attractive. P0M 02:15, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

An interesting gallery of artwork. I wasn't aware of these. Thanks for the info. Keep in mind that "ancient" is a highly relative term when dealing with dynastic Egypt. These mummy portraits date from the first century BC during the Roman occupation of Egypt, after centuries of contact with outside cultures and centuries of intermarriage. Even so, it's obvious that the majority of portraits show indigenous African features, from nappy, curly/frizzy hair to broad cheekbones, broad noses and full lips. Many are what we today would call Afro-Semitic types -- or, in another context, Sicilians à la John Turturo, but darker. (There's a reason Italians commonly were considered nonwhite in this country up until the mid 19th century. :-p) Most, if they had lived in the American South during the middle of the last century, would be on the receiving end of Jim Crow discrimination and, today, would be considered (after centuries of miscegenation with Native Americans and Europeans) typical African Americans. Facinating to see the faces! Of the 53 separate images, I'd say perhaps nine might, by today's standards, be considered "Semitic," which is to say simply a mixture of European and indigenous African phenotypes. All others are clearly African, miscegenated African or Afro-Semitic phenotypes. Two of the portraits of fairly dark-skinned black men.

The following link is a discussion about King Menes/Nahmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt -- in 3100 BCE, roughly 3,000 years before these portraits were painted. There's a photo of his statue near the top of the page and, later on, a discussion about just how old dynastic Egypt and Egyptian civilization, in general, is.

Next, a link to information regarding the melanin testing of early Eygptian royal mummies, which revealed that truly ancient Egyptian royalty were of the "black races" -- not Semitic, not Phoenician, not Caucasian, not cafe au lait; black:

Then another discussion thread on the web regarding recent facial reconstructions from mummified remains, with photos:

And, finally, once again, a link to a montage of photos from ancient dynastic Egypt of clearly black Africans, which I notice has been expanded since last I visisted the site.

Had to return to add another link with better photos of ancient Egyptian figural images of royals Amenhotep and Queen Tye (mother of Akhenaten). The people here are clearly and incontestably black Africans:

Another photo gallery:

§ Interesting! The image of Queen Tiye (18th Dynasty Egypt 1382-1344 BC) shows a band of lighter skin just below her brow band. I wonder whether there is an indication that people of that time may have decorated themselves by darkening their skins. If that would happening, it might give some insight into which groups had higher and which groups had lower status at that time. Many of the images show people who are considerably lighter than my friend from Malawi and maybe just a little darker than some of my Thai friends. I wonder how the colors have held up over the centuries. P0M 23:40, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

POM, you're wa-aaay off-base on that one! lol There's no record of such practice. Besides, the light band is where part of her headdress is missing! deeceevoice 00:39, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You know, for years I've been coming across that head of Queen Tiye, and it's always seemed really, really familiar to me. No wonder. It just dawned on me why. Queen Tiye is a dead ringer for late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. deeceevoice 02:18, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

§ Well, as Hu Shi said, "Make bold hypotheses, but seek verification with all due vigilence. And as for Gwendolyn Brooks, I have to agree too. See http://www.websn.com/Pride/Pride/gwendolyn_brooks.htm P0M 05:40, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Another note about African phenotypes. In general, one of the distinctive characteristics of black African phenotypes is that a majority have a forward-slanting facial profile. There are exceptions, of course. (In my own immediate family, as a matter of fact -- but we're quite a jumble, of African from God knows where, but likely the Congo or Angola; Caddo; Cherokee and Irish that we know of.) Caucasians, on the other hand -- and, again, there are exceptions -- often have flat profiles, as do Asians. That is, a fairly straight line can be drawn from the bridge of the nose to the base of the upper lip just under the nose, to the base of the lower lip, just above the chin. The forward-slanting profiles of depictions of ancient Egyptians are often quite pronounced/obvious -- one of the most distinctive and striking characteristics of their wall art. deeceevoice 10:22, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

http://www.catchpenny.org/race.html http://www.egyptianmyths.net/faq.htm#race http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/social/race.html The thing is, Egyptians were not exclusively "black" (like someone similar to Michael Jordan) like what afrocentrists would tell you, nor were they nordic like what white supremacists would say. More or less they look like modern egyptians, certaintly not "white," but wouldnt be classified as "negroes" either. They were simply egyptians. Wareware 08:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wareware, I never said all Egyptians were black. And it's quite clear from the link to the mummy portraits, they were a mix in later centuries. But what I've maintained all along is that the earliest dynastic Egyptians were dark-skinned, black Africans -- without question. Seti dates back only to the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom, approximately 1295 BCE. The first dynasty of the eary dynastic period was 2920 BCE -- and keep in mind that the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt didn't occur until 3100 BCE, centuries after civilizations along the Nile began to flourish. Indeed, the predynastic period in Egypt dates from 5,500 BCE. A hell of a lot can happen to a people ethnically over the course of 4,000+ years. Hell, take a look at African Americans in the U.S., for example. We're miscegenated beyond belief. All that in the span of only, say, 500 years -- and with segregation and laws against intermarriage on the books for a great part of that time. It's a safe bet that the people of Seti's Egypt very much resembled the present-day African American community.

I invite you to check the links I've provided throughout this discussion thread, including the link to the stone rendering of the head of King Menes, who can be considered typical of the early Egyptian phenotype -- clearly black African. The so-called "Scorpion King" didn't look like The Rock (more race-skewed, hysteriological crap); he looked more like Djimon Honsu or, perhaps, Samuel L. Jackson. The objective historical record bears this out without question. deeceevoice 09:27, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Further, Egyptian scholarship is riddled with hacks, liars, racists and the ill-informed. Always has been. Newer scholarship untainted by the need to shore up the dying doctrine of white supremacy, performed by whites as well as blacks, provides a completely new picture of truly ancient Egypt. Keep in mind that the modern day archaeological discovery of Egypt occurred at a time when the same powers involved in the excavations and the plundering of artifacts were also engaged in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This nasty, but exceedingly profitable, enterprise that provided the underpinnings of world capitalism was justified, in part, by the contention that blacks were not only of inferior intellect and morality, but subhuman. As one southern "gentleman" put it in an infamous CBS white paper on racism years back, "We thought of them [blacks] as superior pets." So, towering above their sunburned heads, carved from centuries-old stone, were the effigies of the very same people they kept in chains, worked like dogs, used as beasts of burden amd whipped like animals back home.
My, how inconvenient! How mortifying! They must have been beside themselves with shock and rage. :-p I'd have loved to have been a fly on the toe of one of those massive structures to listen to them come upon a temple flanked by allees of stone renderings of "a bunch of royal niggers." ROFLMBAO.
At least one of your sources points to artifacts found in Nubia in a period centuries after the beginnings of earliest dynastic Egypt and even produces a fragment a pottery head that looks -- I don't know. It's got a prominent nose, a forward-slanting profile. What? It's not supposed to be black or at the very least Afro-Semitic? Hilarious. No one questions the fact that the Nubians were blue-black Africans. If this artifact was produced in Nubia, then what does that tell you? I'll answer for the cognitively challenged: it speaks volumes about miscegenation over the centuries. Yes, the earliest dynastic Egyptians were BLACK AFRICANS -- with nappy hair; big-hair, dreadlocked and braided wigs made of horse hair, human hair and, yes, lambs' wool; broad noses and full, voluptuous lips. Two words fuyyah: forensic reconstruction. It doesn't lie.  :-p deeceevoice 09:59, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Yes, egyptian studies have been clouded by hacks. Not a lot by classical Egyptologists, but a lot by people like Molefi Asante, ben-Jochannan, and the likes. If you're talking about upper egypt then the earliest people there look like modern day north africans. The blacks were brought as slaves from south. Nobody gave a damn about what race the Egyptians were until the afrocentrists started saying Cleopatra was black, Egypt was black, Greek/Roman cultures stole from blacks, and other related nonsense. Associating archaelogical discoveries of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries with slavery is just cheap shot at muckracking genuine research. Wareware 11:36, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

First, Wareware, your ignorance is showing. Upper Egypt is south; Lower Egypt is north -- not the other way around. It is also clear that Upper Egypt was more advanced than Lower Egypt, with Upper Egypt conquering and unifying both lands under Menes (obviously, a black man with a big, broad nose lol). For the sake of argument, which Egypt do you suppose was whiter than the other? The one closer to NUBIA, as you claim (funny) or the one up North? (I'm having too much fun with you.) And, yes, folks always cared what color the builders of ancient Egyptian civilization were, which is why Europeans took such pains to manufacture and perpetuate the lies. You are clearly beyond the reach of reason if you contend that blacks in Egypt were all slaves; there is ample and sustained evidence to quite the contrary --monumental evidence, as a matter of fact. In short, Wareware, dang, bwoi. You a fool! :-D deeceevoice 16:59, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/contents.html Mary Lefkowitz in her book wrote that egytologist never cared about what race were they. They cared about history, literature, their heiroglyphs, and architecture. When Napoleon discovered the Rosetta Stone did you hear him pressuring the scholars to find more about their "race"? I think they had more important stuff, like actually deciphering a language. It's wrong to say that people always cared about color when talking about Egypt. True egyptian researchers don't, but white supremacists do. (google white history if you're too dumb to differentiate between the two). It's when afrocentrists realized that sub-saharan blacks didnt develop a written language or a wheel or whatnots and refused to delve more into genuine african civilizations, like the great zimbabwe, that they started to grab whatever they felt like and portrayed egyptians as blacks and greeks and romans as cheaters. And then everything that was done by "white" scholars were portrayed as as racist sham, and that's where the issue comes from. Anyway, I guess your favorite site is this http://www.ibiblio.org/nge/blacked/tablecontents.html Buddha, the earliest Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, and Beethoven were all "negroid". Must make your balls feel big :) Wareware 22:16, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Man, you better stop talkin' from up under my clothes! LOL! You're an ASIAN, and you wanna talk about the size of someone's balls? ROFLMBAO. (slappin' sides) However big they may be, it's a safe bet they're bigger than yours! I think you'd better leave THAT one alone, my misguided Asian brother. This "discussion" has reached a new low. I'mma do you a favor and pretend we never had this exchange. (Still slappin' sides) BWA-HA-HA-HAAA! deeceevoice 22:54, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

So when presented with proof of afrocentrist idiocy, the afrocentrist goes on a rampage of insults. Very typical, like what Lefkowitz described in a lecture. Also, I've read that blacks like to show off their presumed virility because of an inferiority complex that they got nothing "man-made" (civilization, architecture, literature, philosophy...etc) that can rival those of other "races." Hey, at least the asian balls don't smell as bad as apes' right? Oooops, was that racist? Wareware 23:36, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
A "rampage of insults"?  :-D You gotta be kidding! After all, I wasn't the one who brought up "balls." Now, now, Wareware. "Apes"? Tell me you don't go 'round doing comparative sniff tests on primates' balls. Pleeze! (wink) :-p
Aw-w-w-w, I know, I know. There, there (patting this tortured soul on the head). You're just showin' your true colors, aincha, bwoi? But you can't really expect me to be offended by such hackneyed crap! I've been called far worse by far better than you, child. And guess what? It didn't (and doesn't) faze me a bit. You've succeeded only in demonstrating what an azzhole you are, and you make it abundantly clear to those who may have thought your obtuseness in this matter (why you cannot accept the fact that black Africans were anything more than slaves in ancient dynastic Egypt) simply healthy skepticism that your apparent dim-wittedness is actually a symptom of your sickness. Poor thing. I really do feel for you. You ain't stoo-pid; you're simply mentally and spiritually crippled. Better tend to yasself!
But I gotta give you one thing. You're at least good for comic relief. BWA-HA-HAAA! Keep sniffin' them balls. (slappin' sides -- still) :-p deeceevoice 00:36, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Instead of responding to the topics at hand and takinng a look at your source( every afrocentrist's favorite website), you resorted to three more paragraphs of personal attacks. If you truly are the more educated representative of your race, then I'm not really surprised that african-americans still generate the worst statistics than any other group in america. I feel sorry for you. You can write quick retorts compounded with funny spellings but you can't face the truth. Really sad. But I guess you can blame the racists and "da man" for that one.Wareware 01:38, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wareware, you've demonstrated yourself all along to be a mental cretin and a low-minded racist; you just finally came out and said what has been on your mind all along. So, now there's no need for me to be civil any longer. I got nothin' else to say to you. Stay obstinately ignorant and lost, you pathetically hateful fool. I will not address you again; as far as I'm concerned, you don't exist. You're not worthy of my attention, not even my contempt -- and certainly not of a single additional nanosecond of my time. (whistlin' as I show u my back) deeceevoice 02:39, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wow, you just labelled me a racist right after I said you might do so and I don't think you can prove my point any better. Call everyone who doesn't agree with you a "racist" instead of looking at facts. How convenient. I'll bet if I were black and made some anti-afrocentrist remarks you wouldn't have anything against me and certaintly wouldn't have labelled me a racist. Oh wait, weren't Ward Connelly, Bill Cosby, and Larry Elder called "race traitors" for presenting such views? Hey, the race card is always the trump card for some people, right? Wareware 03:08, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Come on, you can at least make one "yo mama" response to show your quick wit, no? Or did that really hit you, and you can't think of anything logical, and then said I'm not worthy of your attention? Calling people racists and then shut them out while "whistlin' away" really seem to be in the vogue nowadays. Wareware 00:37, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cleanup of Grammar, etc.

I've just gotten around to reading a single section of this article in its entirety -- on race and intelligence -- and found a number of grammatical problems. I don't have time right now to do the same thing with the rest of the piece. (I've been avoiding reading much of it, because I sense I likely will have some problems with substance -- and I have neither the time nor the disposition right now to deal with that sort of thing.) But because this is now a featured article (if it was before, I hadn't noticed), folks need to take the time and go over this piece with an eye toward such things. deeceevoice 12:10, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

it has been featured -- dubiously imho -- for a long time. It definitely needs cleanup, grammatical, stylistic, and for redundancy! dab (ᛏ) 14:21, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I thought featured articles weren't supposed to still be "under construction" or still hotly contested. How did that happen? deeceevoice 10:32, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

All Wikipedia articles are works in progress, forever -- that is the nature of Wikipedia. You are right, that a featured article must have some special merit. But the merit is not that it is "finished." Slrubenstein

Understood, Sirubenstein. But it's my understanding that articles the central precepts of which are still hotly contested (even in friendly disagreements -- not "editing wars") or, at the very least, still in question should not have featured article status. Once such disagreement or doubt arises, even if an article already has been given featured status, shouldn't it be removed from that list until such time as those matters are resolved? deeceevoice 22:49, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The recent cleanup and some suggestions

I just did a major, painful, several-laborious-hour cleanup of the grammar and style of the first half of this article. I wasn't trying to NPOV most of this mess, just shorten it, but a little NPOV slipped in anyway. This article is in major need of reorganization, NPOVing, section deletion, and probably splitting. Any article over 32kb should by split by Wikipedia policy. This article was 56kb before my major style edit and 52kb after. I'm listing here several suggestions for the direction for this article, but this is more a list of what I will try to do in the near future than what I want others to do. I would of course prefer to know about major objections from other Wikipedians before I put work into the things on this list. My suggestions:

  1. The section "Race and intelligence" is too long for an article for which there already exists a subarticle. Most of the material should be deleted as it already exists at Race and intelligence. Done. -- Schaefer
  2. "Race in biomedicine" should be moved out into its own article. It's long enough. Done. -- Schaefer
  3. "Overview" should be shortened drastically. If it actually were an overview, it would be just a paragraph or two in the intro. As it stands, it's a long back-and-forth debate of unattributed non-NPOV opinions and unsupported claims. Most of its content can be moved to other sections.
    • I've split this into two sections but it still needs major work to cut out redundancies. -- Schaefer
  4. Make a separate section for arguments against the validity of race and all this social construct talk. It pops up everwhere in the article and has no real home, making it difficult to discuss anything else.
    • This is one of the sections the overview was split into. -- Schaefer
    • It looks like "Validity of human races" could be split along that line, but I'm not sure how. --Rikurzhen

I'm sure as I work on these things I'll think up other things to do, so I'll probably add more later. For a while I saw this article as too intimidating to even read, let alone fix, but I have a lot of free time this weekend so I should be able to help make a dent in it. -- Schaefer 02:03, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm moving out most of the content of "History of the term" to Race (historical definitions) which is currently just a 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica article. I'll summarise the contents of the removed text as best I can in one paragraph. The final paragraph in the section doesn't pertain to the heading so I'm leaving it in this article. -- Schaefer 20:11, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

you are doing a great, and sorely needed, job. This is one of the articles where text tends to pile up. dab (ᛏ) 10:40, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Now that the article has been structured, it is easier to see that there is a lot of imprecise back and forth without much substance. I tried to take a stab at fixing the "genetic variation" section, but unfortunately it really just needs to be re-written. I'm afraid that much of the article will need similar attention. --Rikurzhen 02:31, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
I've moved the anthropology and genetic section before the validity section because it would be helpful if we could present background data in this section before addressing the interpretation in the validity section. --Rikurzhen 03:53, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
I too appreciate the cleanup work being done here. I have one problem, and it is a substantive one. I would rather not add this to the article myself -- Rikurzhen and Schaefer have been doing a good job, clearly have a vision of how best to organize the article and also style, and I don't want to screw around with the good work they are doing. But I hope they will find an appropriate way to incorporate the following point into the article -- in the introduction and body. Basically, my problem is this: Too much is being made of the difference between biologists and social scientists. Believe it or not, many of them actually read one another's work and talk to one another. Specifically, although it is true that some biologists continue to use the word race, those who do do so in different ways. Some, like Rushton, use it in a way that social scientists consider bad science and racist. But others use the term differently. More importantly, many biologists do not use the term race as a biological category. Under the modern synthesis of evolution by Mayr, Dobzschanskij, etc. the use of RACE as a term for a geographically delineated population (formally recognized as subspecies) was dropped. Evolutionary biologists haven't really used that word since the 1940's although it may pop up here and there. AND moreover, since the 1970's even the taxonomic category of SUBSPECIES has become very unpopular for four very good reasons:
  1. very little data to suggest that contiguous subspecies ever become species
  2. disjunct (geographically) subspecies usually can be demonstrated to actually be species
  3. subspecies were often recognized on the basis of only 2-5 phenotypic characters which often were just adaptations to local environments and didn't reflect the evolutionary differentiation of populations as a whole
  4. with the advent of molecular techniques to get a better handle on genetic introgression (gene flow), the picture afforded by looking at genetic variation was often at odds with the phenotypic variation (as is the case with looking at genes versus percentage of epidermal melanin in human populations)
I do not want to get into an argument over whether the above is right or wrong. What is important is that the above is a view held by many biologists and the article must make clear that there are biologists that hold the above view (this is simply a matter of complying with the NPOV policy).
There is a bigger issue here that gets back to my basic point about biology and social sciences. When social scientists make the claim that race is socially constructed, they rely not only on their sensitivity to political issues, they rely on biological evidence. Moreover, many biologists hold the same views as social scientists because these views are, in their minds, scientifically valid and useful. So we can't just say there is the "biologists' view" and "the social scientists" view (this is a matter of accuracy). Slrubenstein 19:14, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)


I'm not personally capable of transforming your suggestion into content. My knowledge base lends itself to the genetics sections. Perhaps you could write that up and stick it into a main section for the time being while we sort out where things should go. Also, I do not feel particularly confident in any best way to present the article. In the past, I've found that it works well to present uncontroverisial claims and raw data before the interpretation of that data. I think the structure that Schaefer setup lends itself to that kind of presentation. However, I think there are some deeper problems to the debate than just interpretation of data. What we're probably missing from this article is a list of definitions that people apply to race (e.g. typological, population, taxonomic, lineage, etc.) So that when we say this group thinks race is this, we can attach a name to their defintion. And when we say that another groups thinks race is something else, we can give a name to their alternative POV. Disagreements over definition probably account for much of the current appearance of social scientists vs biologists vs geneticsts. --Rikurzhen 20:48, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

um, btw, FA...

seeing that we have to really muck out this article, moving and cutting whole paragraphs, I think it is very evident now that this article is unfairly listed as 'featured'. Would you support listing it for defeaturing, and re-featuring it once it becomes stable again? dab (ᛏ) 19:50, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I would support defeaturing. Frankly, I was quite shocked to find this article was featured in the first place. -- Schaefer 20:53, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
did it, see WP:FARC. Would be nice to see it re-featured soon, too. dab (ᛏ) 10:42, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)


Definitions of race

I suggested above that we need a list of definitions of race. Here is a starting point. --Rikurzhen 20:55, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

Excerpted from Long JC, Kittles RA. Human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological races. Hum Biol. 2003 Aug;75(4):449-71.

Table 3. Biological definitions of race.

Biological definitions of race (Long & Kittles, 2003).
Concept Reference Definition
Essentialist Hooton (1926) "A great division of mankind, characterized as a group by the sharing of a certain combination of features, which have been derived from their common descent, and constitute a vague physical background, usually more or less obscured by individual variations, and realized best in a composite picture."
Population Dobzhansky (1970) "Races are genetically distinct Mendelian populations. They are neither individuals nor particular genotypes, they consist of individuals who differ genetically among themselves."
Taxonomic Mayr (1969) "An aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species, inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and differing taxonomically from other populations of the species."
Lineage Templeton (1998) "A subspecies (race) is a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. This definition requires that a subspecies be genetically differentiated due to barriers to genetic exchange that have persisted for long periods of time; that is, the subspecies must have historical continuity in addition to current genetic differentiation."

References:

  • Hooton, E.A. 1926. Methods of racial analysis. Science 63:75?81.
  • Dobzhansky, T. 1970. Genetics of the Evolutionary Process. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  • Mayr, E. 1969. Principles of Systematic Zoology. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
  • Templeton, A.R. 1998. Human races: A genetic and evolutionary perspective. Am. Anthropol. 100:632?650.


Commentary:

Obviously this list is not complete. But when we say that race is valid or not valid we need to say which defintion is being argued for/aginst. --Rikurzhen 20:58, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

This looks great to me, and unless anyone has objections I hope you will put it into the article. As to my point, above, I will wait to see if anyone (esp. Schaefer) comments before I do anything. The intro is good but it must be changed so that the biological and social science views are not presented in a way that might lead people to think they are mutually exclusive or even discreet. Slrubenstein 21:36, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I like this idea, Rikurzhen. What I would even more like to see is a discussion that explains what is really out there, and then how each definition of race would be used to categorize the same set of individuals according to the characteristics that each definition treats as relevant and important. (See my remarks below.) Knowing how people use concepts and words to create relative simplicity out of bewildering multiplicity (when they for some reason do not want to deal with the world individual by individual) is exactly what is needed to help people deal with the problem of "race." P0M 01:07, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Article split as a solution for clearing ambiguities

Most of the semantic problems in this article seem to stem from the confusion of race as a general form of subspecies classification, and race as it pertains to human beings. In my non-expert opinion, these aren't the same thing, as human races were defined by people who didn't know that genes existed, and those are the racial groupings people are going to continue to use regardless of what population biologists say. Declaring multiple definitions of race and specifying which version of the word race some object to is not the way to go. I honestly think we should have separate articles for race as a taxonomic classification, and race as it pertains to humans. If someone argues that race truly doesn't exist (id est, not even in honeybees), it can go in the former article. If someone argues that commonly used human races (Black, White, Asian, etc.) don't correspond to what biologists would consider to be races, then that goes in the latter.

I planned to clear up confusion regarding this with subsections and eventually good introductions, which is why I titled the section "Validity of human races". I don't think this is sufficient. Having a table of definitions to which later sections of the article can refer says to me as a reader, "This article is actually about two things with the same name, so here's a table showing the different things being discussed so we can keep them separate." It's not a bad idea, and I'd take it as a second resort to splitting the article, but I'd like to reach some consensus on this before major rewriting is done. -- Schaefer 22:52, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Your idea may have some merit. However, please note that the point I made above, that there are many biologists who do not use the term race and many who do not use the term subspecies, applies both to humans and non-humans. The various approaches to race Rik. suggests could apply equally to humans or non-humans. Slrubenstein

I disagree. The real problem is that conceptualizations make a small number of categories (the preferred number is 2) into which large numbers of diverse individuals are divided. People are introduced to categories that are named in the language(s) they learn, and insist that the categories are the realities and the diverse individuals are more-or-less perfect members of these sets. This attitude is very Platonic, and has been a plague on clear thinking ever since it first appeared.

The people who try to decide which bees are Apis mellifera meda (centered around Iraq), Apis mellifera anatolica (centered around Turkey), Apis mellifera carnica (centered in S.E. Europe), Apis mellifera ligustica (centered around Italy), Apis mellifera mellifera (centered in Germany), etc., have the same difficulties that face those who try to decide which humans are Semitic, which humans are Turkic, which humans are Caucasians, etc., etc. If you look at a bee from a typical hive in the geographical center of Italy, you will find a "textbook" yellow-and-black striped Italian [race] bee, and if you look at one from a typical hive in the center of Germany, you will find a "textbook" black bee. If you start investigating the hives in the in-between zones, you will find in-between bees, just as if you look in Khazakstan you are likely to find someone who looks mid-way between an Icelander and a Japanese. In the case of bees, people still talk about subspecies and are if anything more happy with the murkier word "race." But the reason seems to be because they need a way to make quick generalizations about the behaviors (defense behaviors, nectar gathering efficiency, pollen productivity, tendency to lacquer everything with propolis, etc., etc.) of bees that may be encountered in different parts of the world. "True" Italians are generally easy to get along with, productive of nectar, good pollenizers, etc. "True" Cyprians are generally very hard to get along with, which is about as much as the average beekeeper cares to know about them when he is searching for a new [race] of bees to try in his home environment.

When people find a hive of bees somewhere on the borderland between Italy and Yugoslavia, a bee that is darker than an Italian and lighter than a Carniolan, they tend to categorize it as a "mixed breed," assuming that there is really something called a "pure Italian" and something called a "pure Carnolian." They do not assume that there is a "bee map" upon which the central Italian type is an arbitrary point, and the central Slovenian (Carniolan) type is also an arbitrary point, and that the hive they are looking at is nothing more than one more arbitrary point that somebode might have defined as an official arbitrary point for some other [subspecies] of bee. Among the bees that I have mentioned, the one kind that is most clearly defined is the Cyprian -- and that is because its hives were quite thoroughly isolated from breeding with mainland bees by the Mediterranean up until the time when beekeepers started to import queens or colonies that were likely to be more suitable for commercial production.

The issue of genetics is not relevant to the definitions of [races] of bees. People have long been aware that characteristics such as those used to differentiate Italian bees from Cyprian bees are hereditary. In fact there is a facetious remark in one of the early Chinese classics wherein somebody says something to the effect that 'this kind of citrus fruit was always sweet until it was transplanted to the country under your rule (you monster).' And that remark came thousands of years after people in Eurasia and people in the Americas were systematically breeding better horses, tastier maize, etc. They knew that the characteristics they sought were hereditary.

Nobody doubts that many of the characteristics used to categorize things by [race] and/or [subspecies] are hereditary; the problem is twofold: (1) Language/concepts take precedence over reality. (It's a Carniolan, so you can open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil or a smoker.) (2) What is not hereditary is mixed in with what is hereditary in the form of a social construct. (It's a hive of Italian bees, so under no conditions could you open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil and a smoker, and you'd best have bicycle clips on your trouser legs, heavy gauntlets, and be sure to rub all over with peach leaves before you put your clothes on.)

It is very useful to keep the two examples of fuzzy thinking in the same article because most people have strong emotional sets to defend their ideas of race. (Those XXXs are all YYY, as anybody with any sense can clearly see.) While they do have strong emotional commmitments to being "of the finer class of human beings," most of them do not have equivalent emotional forces involved that would prevent them from understanding that, e.g., the belief that Cyprian bees are loyal to their beekeepers is a kind of fairy story that probably performs some social function but has no basis in the realities of apian behavior. (In Cyprus it is said that the colonies of bees belonging to a particular beekeeper will know about it when he dies, will mourn for him, and, as was reported in at least one case, may even swarm out of their hive and land, 50,000 or so strong, on the casket of the deceased as it is waiting on the wagon to be moved to the graveyard. Probably Cyprian beekeepers need consolation for dealing with bees that defend their hives with great fortitude -- which is good for the bees but punishing on the beekeeper. "But those bees really love me," says the myth.) P0M 00:54, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Does this mean you agree with what I wrote above, in The recent cleanup and some suggestions? I am trying to come up with a very brief way to make the point. What you suggest here is way too much detail for the article. We need to focus on improving the article. Slrubenstein 01:29, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The detail is prolix because I'm trying to make real-world examples to carry the discussion forward. I do agree with you. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think splitting is a solution only for the problem of article length. If P0M wants to develop the population biology line in depth, then that could be accomodated by a branched article. Likewise, we could move "Race in politics" into a separate article as we have done with intelligence and biomedicine to save on space. However, from what Slru. and P0M have written it looks like that an article split of human vs animal would not simplify the task at hand. Perhaps we should try to construct an outline of the needed content for this article, and then we can decide if it warrants a split. --Rikurzhen 02:07, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

I agree with what you say, especially about the outline part. I think that to write an effective article we have to state up front: (1) This is what is really out there in the world. (2) Look at all the ways that millions of individuals with hundreds (thousands, myriads?) of characteristics deemed relevant by this person or that person could be categorized. That understanding is the key.

I wasn't arguing that we need a big article about what you call population biology. Before I got into writing about bees as an example, I'd feel safer if I had more information about the migrations of honeybees from wherever they started to wherever they got themselves before humans started airmailing them hither and yon. But, on the other hand, the number of characteristics that are used to categorize honeybees are not so many. I don't know how much real research is available about characteristics because in practice beekeepers care about temperament (which has 2 or 3 dimensions), honey gathering, pollen gathering, how thoroughly they "lacquer" everything in the hive with the resins they collect, and coloration (as a handy way of telling from 5-10 feet away what you may be dealing with). Probably state departments of agriculture do a good job, region by region, evaluating what bees work out well given the local climate, local predators, etc. Temperament measures are probably pretty subjective (just my guess, I can see how they could make objective measures). d

Another source of ambiguity -- US vs world

Possibly another cause of ambiguity in this article is that it seems to not be consistent as to whether the question is race as a world-wide phenomena or race as it is used in the US. I'm not sure how to handle this problem. --Rikurzhen 02:14, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

I think that is another very useful example of what I have been talking about. Most people in the U.S. see the people who live in China as one [race]. Hardly any of them would identify Taiwanese aborigines as anything other than as Chinese. Someone who know about genetic studies that have been done would see the Han Chinese as being divided into a northern group and a southern group. The average Chinese person, however, would lay an entirely different set of [quasi-racial] categories down on the same population. Most of them would not use the word "race", but they would nevertheless categorize Chinese by regions/provinces and also by language (recognizing that some groups like the Hakka are spread out over province lines, have their own language (with several dialects), and have cultural features that mark them as "different").

Again, the point is that we have several billion individuals with only identical twins being identical in terms of genotype, and very very many systems of categorization -- systems according to which somebody who lives in one of the crossroads regions might end up in very many different [races] or other categories depending on who was doing the dividing.

Even if somebody believes as a matter of religious faith that there are X numbers of [races] identified by Y number of characteristics, once s/he realizes that somebody else just as assuredly believes in W number of [races] identified by Z number of characteristics, then s/he has to face the question: Can one determine that one system of categorization is "more true" than some other system of categorization. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Genotypical vs phenotypical definitions

Based on what P0M has written, perhaps yet another distinction to be made early is between definitions of race based on genotype (and ancestry) and those based on phenotype. --Rikurzhen 03:41, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

All of the ideas about [race] that I can think of involve some idea that [race] is a matter of heredity -- even when the major discernible differences are linguistic and/or cultural. What a cobweb of ideas. Which node is the real spot where the spider should sit?

Last night I got started on drafting an outline. With the echoes of past debates in my mind, it is difficult to say anything, knowing that somebody will surely object. P0M 18:19, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The recent "Clean Up" went too far

I don't have time to go into this much, but I recently looked over the current version and though many improvements were made, much topnotch material was cut. In particular, I think the old breakdown of the races according to Blumenbach and the modification by Coon is essential. The paragraph on the 19th century linking of physical traits to mental and behavioral characteristics should also be restored... Cutting and simplifying is good, but a topic this complex and controversial demands an unusually detailed treatment. It seems a lot of the cutting was driven by the 32kb limit notion, but you should be aware that this "limit" is very disputed. Personally, I don't think length under 52kb should even be a consideration for a main article on a core topic... Anyway, I'll leave these suggestions to those who are active here these days. But if I don't see the 19th century breakdown mentioned above reinserted soon, I'll do it myself. JDG 07:30, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This information was not deleted, it was simply moved to Race (historical definitions), since that's precisely what Blumenbach and Coon's race definitions are. If you'd like to briefly summarize their work here, feel free. I'm not an expert in Western history, so don't assign any special authority to my quick paragraph summary of the main article for the history of race.
As for the article size, I really do feel this article's bulk was hurting it. Try reading every single word of this version of the article. I don't blame you if you don't want to. When an article gets that long, people stop reading it before they contribute. They reintroduce topics that have already been introduced (in this case, the biological nonexistence of race, race as a social construct, etc.). These pile up, and over time make the article increasingly difficult to sort into subsections without major rewriting. In short, excessively long articles beget redundant edits, and redundant edits beget excessively long articles, and I can't think of any finer example of this than Race. -- Schaefer 12:21, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I dunno, I guess it's the old splitter vs. lumper debate. I like my articles big n' beefy. I don't really see the advantage of sub-articles. If one is feeling taxed while reading a long article, one can simply pause or re-read the vexing section, then proceed with the knowledge that everything you need is before you. When critical sections get spliced out, you have this nagging feeling that you haven't chased all the links you need for a rounded view... Odd how when it comes to the question of Races themselves I'm a splitter, but editorially I'm a lumper... Well, overall you're doing great work. I hope to have some time after New Year's to really make some contributions. I'll vet everything here first. JDG 14:35, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A possibly relevant German concept

[P0M]: I was in the midst of trying to straighten out another problem when something I read about a long time ago came to mind. I think it offers a concept that may help to clarify our longstanding problems with ideas about [race]. In English, the years-ago article said, we have the word "typical." If we say, e.g., "John was a typical 30s something accountant," we mean to indicate nothing very special about John in relation to accounting. However, the article said, if we say in German that something is "typische" we mean that it stands as almost the Platonic ideal of its kind. Saying that John is a typische accountant would then indicate that he was everything that one would expect an accountant to be: accurate, meticulous, responsible, etc.

[P0M]: If you take your pick from among a few dozen inhabitants of a little village in Malawi you might fing the typische African of a certain group (not a typische San, however). If you took a comparable group from some village in Iceland, you might find the typische Caucasian, and so forth. There would be an arbitrary element in all of this, of course. Why not select somebody from a little town in Hungary and make him or her the typische Caucasian? (Now we can all have a flaming war about where to pick our exemplary types. ;-)

[P0M]: Once we selected our typische humans we could look at samples from, let's say, half way between Malawi and Iceland. We could grade these individuals on the number of points away from the "ideal" each of them came from the standard Icelandic human and the standard SE African human. Somewhere along the line we might find an individual who was halfway between on all the measures, but probably nowhere would we find an exact match for one of our standards (unless we just happened to pick one of a pair of identical twins).

[P0M]: To me, this idea is only interesting because it formalizes what I believe has been the thinking of many of the people who want to preserve the idea of [race]. It also happens, by making the idea less murky, to make clear what the diffiiculties with using the concept must be. P0M 11:12, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

re, German, that sounds like the 19th century meaning of the word (when, I imagine, also the English meaning was still closer to etymology). In modern German, I think, typisch has exactly the same meaning as typical. dab (ᛏ) 11:28, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Revised map.

I lucked out and got a scan of the original map by Biasutti. I have colorized it, making it both more like the other maps we have looked at and also easier for the reader to interpret. (The original uses only dots and cross-hatching. It's easy to see how so many errors crept in.) I have compared it with the maps in books from the local library and my own books, the similar maps I have found on the WWW. I think I've got everything there. I've made only one significant change from what Biasutti had in the beginning. One researcher did a closer study of Australia and divided it into two bands of color. I am saving the very large image from which I have produced the small one shown here. This image will blow up about 400% and still look o.k. (although that's too big to be practical), so it is plenty big for our purposes. If anybody sees anything wrong with it (wrong color for some band or other, for instance), please let me know.

Meanwhile, I have asked Fenice whether she would write a letter in Italian to the copyright holder. No reply as yet, but Fenice is an exemplary member of the Wiki community so I have great hopes. Theoretically it might not necessary to get permission, but there is no harm in giving the author the courtesy of asking him to share his work. (After all of the detail work needed to get the areas to be colorized just right, I'm beginning to feel like I made the darned thing, but I'll bet Dr. Biasutti wouldn't feel that way.)

So, here it is:

http://www.wfu.edu/~moran/Biasutti_Skin_Colors_Map.33.png

I like it! But I am pretty open-minded about the maps. The only thing that really matters to me is that maps show that changes in skin color occur along a gradient and not discreetly, Slrubenstein 19:45, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I feel the same way. I can blur the boundaries. I'll try that idea and put it up too. (The other way is to use random colors, which one sharp map does, but that carries no meaning at all -- Purple for Europe north of Spain, and orange for people in Spain and Eastern Europe, and... You can more easily see which region is in the measured range 10-14 or whatever, but it's not a natural way to color the map. If I blur the boundaries (which will involve getting rid of the tiny red lines that really helped to get the thing colorized right) then I think you will really see something that looks pretty close to the way a map pixilated with color photos of human skin would look. P0M 20:29, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It's easy enough to see why SLR & P0M & Schaefer et. al. are very concerned to depict these pervasive gradients. The idea is that if one can demonstrate all these fine gradings and shadings then the overall impression given will be that All Is Clinal, that, as I think P0M said above, any given point on the color map is truly arbitrary, even the darkest black and the lightest white, because seen in totality they occupy positions on bands that are no more archetypal or essential than any other bands. Unfortunately, this logic doesn't really bear out. Think of another developing class of things-- say, firearms. Between the weakest, most inaccurate Blunderbuss and, say, a computer-controlled laser-guided Patriot missile battery, you will see just the same sort of gradient from model to model. In short, at some point, when enough gradients have been crossed, it is possible for a difference in degree to become a difference in kind... Please understand I am not arguing that human models carry essential variations of this size and depth. I do not believe in the overall superiority or inferiority of any race vs. any other race. But I *am* arguing that the All is Cline assertion does nothing logically to undermine the concept of real human races which differ enough to merit their own descriptors. JDG 03:07, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am content to disaggregate the "all is cline" discussion from the "are races real" discussion. But my only concern with the map is not it's implications for race per se, but its accuracy. If there are places where there is a real, persistant, boundary between skin colors or different heights, then the map should represent that -- but to my knowledge there is no such place. I just want a map that is accurate. Slrubenstein 19:44, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
There is a clear counter-example in the case of subspecies of honeybees, and that is because (at least until human beings started transporting them) the bees of Italy and Slovenia (between which there is a broad hybridization band) are radically different in temperament from the bees of Cyprus. The reason that they don't ordinarily breed is that bees will not, and probably cannot, fly the distance needed to cross the sea in a single trip. Bees spread across the land when one colony swarms, creates a new colony a mile or so away, that colony builds up until it is too big, that colony swarms and moves another mile away (in some random direction), and so forth. The bees in Morocco are solid black in color, so there is another clear break across the Mediterranian. Bees may have reached Cyrpus when a storm was blown there but you have to have a swarm in the air and just the right storm and then some luck to assure that the queen and enough worker bees land in the same spot to make a successful "reinvasion" of Cyprus. Human beings seem to keep boundaries between groups more by language and religion than by physical barriers, but even the most vehement "no member of our community is going to marry one of 'them" is proof against mixing.
As for JDG's assertion that "at some point, when enough gradients have been crossed, it is possible for a difference in degree to become a difference in kind", it seems to say nothing more than that if we cross the "gradients" (which we ourselves draw) from Iceland to Malawi, we will find that at one end we have "the white kind" and at the other end we have "the black kind". My response is, "So what?" It would be more interesting if there were differences among groups of humans that were unbridged, e.g., member of the human group living on some island all have nictitating membranes and members of no other human group have nictitating membranes even in partial-coverage form. That state of affairs would give grounds for calling them a second subspecies of humans, but it would not be a necessary predictor that the two groups differed in any other respect. We would, for instance, have to look to see whether their fingers and toes were webbed. We would have to make double-blind studies to determine whether they were gifted with ESP, etc.

How is a gradual process supposed to result in an absolute disconnect? Suppose that we discovered a subspecies of humans with nictitating membranes on some island that had horrendous volcanic gas emmisions to cope with. They would be different from other humans in being able to maintain good vision under those circumstances. But in what other significant way would they be different? P0M 21:18, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

In order to accurately represent the map, we would need to have access to the original data used in its construction. Obviouly only a finite number of groups were studied in order to construct the map, and so the level of precision in its display would need to reflect that -- which it may or may not do right now, we don't know. Ultimately, people are also discrete, which necessarily makes a small web image map an approximation at some level. At the moment, the skin color map is attached to the section on historical difinitions of race; we should probably just leave it alone and leave it in that context. --Rikurzhen 13:54, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

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