Sadly, this is not true

This is difficult ground to tread Tim and such determinism is actually unhelpful.

Social policy has eradicated a lot of diseases that afflicted the British population eighty or more years ago.

Diet, sanitarion, living conditions all affect health and if one racial group has a tendency to illnessdue to a specific deficienc yir way of life,, then education and free medication could well be the answer.

It is vey complex in a multi racial society that was created out of nowhere after the War. As new types of immigrants arrive new health challenges arise.

“Race as we currently use it”: there is no one, single use of “race” in English; I suspect that’s true of other languages too.

What he probably means is “The great I AM will determine what “race” means, a definition I shall carefully select so that I can demonstrate that it has defects.”

That’s all – it’s just sciencey-sounding rhetoric. In other words, essentially crooked.

Kirkegaard wrote on his blog in July that “Africans are prone to violence everywhere”.

A statement that is empirically certainly justifiable even if one can find a handful of countries where it isn’t the case. I do see why the canards of ‘White Privilege’ and ‘White Supremacy’ can be invoked with apparent impunity yet the above statement causes hypoxia with the ‘army of grifters’ who play the race card. But the former statement is far more valid than the latter two concepts.

The hive of scientists in America responsible for the spread of eugenics even provided inspiration for the Third Reich, which drew direct intellectual, legal and financial support for their policies of mass sterilisation, persecution and murder

Which never really extended to Blacks or Indians and which most Moslems today would explcitly endorse (alongside a whole host of black intellectuals)

Despite the thorough debunking of race science by contemporary genetics, and the growing acceptance of our multiracial and multicultural reality

Was at any point anyone given a legitimate say if they wanted what we have now? Really – as I can’t recall anyone asking for the colonization of the country by Aliens and unlimited migration? Maybe my historical knowledge is lacking in this regard?

Dr Adam Rutherford is a lecturer in genetics at UCL and the author of How to Argue With a Racist

In fairness this guy is specifically arguing around the genetic aspects of what he perceives as ‘race science’ so on that narrow ground he might have a point.

The problem is the very term ‘racist’ is one that is fraught with a peril. I consider the leading racists in the UK are certainly not White for example. Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler, David Lammy, Lee Jasper, Dr Shola Mos- Ambigammu are all racists of considerable bitterness and vitriol but the Guardian says, absurdly, ‘Black people can’t be racist’ .

The whole area is so soaked in misinformation and double standards that sensible people steer clear. However, as so many contributors here, like Interested and Steve make the point – for Whites that is fast becoming no longer an option. If we don’t tackle ethnic minority racism – and to me I think those who use the terms like White Privilege we will have to seriously consider censuring and even if they aren’t British removing their right to stay here as a matter of basic social order. The riots revealed the extent of the powder keg we are sitting on.

A bit like feminists and the “wage gap” – a lot (probably the vast majority) of the income differences can be explained by things like who takes the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, who is willing to work odd hours, etc. Doesn’t mean there aren’t situations where a woman or even group of women are being discriminated against, but reality is that the “wage gap” is not 100% (or close to it) discrimination.

However, this is not allowed to be discussed, polite circles pretend it’s 100% “the Patriarchy”.

What travels hand in hand with poverty are diseases such as rickets or diphtheria. TB is not so much a disease of poverty, but of poor conditions ( or rather mixing with the poor ).
So my point really, is that we now have the reoccurrence of illnesses that we in the UK eradicated but are now reappearing in the immigrants of the last 25 years ( they also reappeared in the 1970s amongst the Asian immigrants back then ).

So specific diseases that afflict certain races ( sickle cell, the prostate cancer issue ) are medical conditions and not societal in their origin.

“Does that mean race is a biologically meaningful definition? It does not. Race as we currently use it is a socially constructed idea,”

“Rachel Dolezal has now entered the chat”

Smug Centrist Dad writes: Civilisation is going to pieces … if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

This is undeniably true. Go into any major “British” city and see.

Sentiments like this will be familiar to those who lurk in the less wholesome corners of the internet, where racism and other bigotries flourish. As a geneticist who specialises in racism and eugenics, I lurk so that you don’t have to.

“Racism” and “bigotry” aren’t scientific concepts, but Lysenko here is going to deny the human genome exists anyway.

Dawkins (whatever his flaws as a theologian or political analyst) is a great evolutionary biologist. Rutherford is just a TV face using an A-level biology cladist argument to ‘prove’ there’s no such thing as a fish.

I’ve £10 here that says the next Olympic 100m champion will be of West African descent. Any takers? I’ll even offer 2:1.

No use, Theo… Not as long as people misuse the biological concept or “race” and confuddle it with “tribe”.

“Race” in a biological sense is a very broad concept aggegrating typical external features of vast groups of humanity which breed true, or mix in set patterns.
Patterns which are reflected in and supported by modern DNA analysis: If you substract the admixture/immigration of the past two centuries, the original blocks line up pretty nicely.

With, honestly, the biggest laugh being “Caucasian” , since “European White Male” is but a variant of that race…
“Caucasian” encompasses the entire wedge from the Himalayas up to the Caucasus range, and all the way to all around the Mediterranean.
( Yes, the Pakistanian, Cousin-marrying goatf….herders are Caucasian, thus “White”….. So are all the Arabs, Jews, and other peoples generally not referred to as “Caucasian”.
Because then you’re not talking race, but culture… )

“African” is a racial description. “Black” a sociological disorder. “Caribbean”, it seems, even more so.

‘Not as long as people misuse the biological concept of “race” …’

No: you are wrong there. There may indeed be a biological concept of race; hell, it may even be firmer than the somewhat labile concept of species. But that has next-to-nothing to do with the meanings of “race” in English. Those meanings have to be inferred from what people say when they use “race” or “racial” or whatever.

This is elementary linguistics, is it not? Words mean what they mean until habits change and they begin to mean something different. What they mean cannot, in general, be determined by someone shouting loudly that he and his pals use the word in a certain way and all other ways are invalid.

It seems to me that that is a key problem with this area. Biologists shout that they, and only they, guard the Holy Grail of the meaning of “race”. A suitable response from the rest of us would be to blow a raspberry.

Maybe we need a new habit: “race*” will mean whatever biologists claim it means, and “race**” will refer to the assortment of meanings that everyone else intends.

Put otherwise, “race” is not like some technical term from, say, mathematics, the meaning of which can be agreed by mathematicians because no-one else, bar people pursuing neighbouring quantitative subjects, uses the word.

Here’s an example. For centuries “exponential” had a single, precise meaning, agreed to by all mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. But in the last decade or so the word has leaked out to the great unwashed and you now get people such as politicians using it to mean something like “big” or “dramatic”. For a decade or two the educated among us may reasonably indulge in sneering at these buffoons but if the word does gain purchase widely we’ll just have to accept that there exist “exponential*” and “exponential**”. It would, of course, be helpful if lexicologists could find a way of recording both the expert meaning and the vulgar meanings and distinguish between them, but that probably asks too much of those drudges.

To give them their due though, Britannica has a stab at presenting context: “At no point, from the first rudimentary attempts at classifying human populations in the 17th and 18th centuries to the present day, have scientists agreed on … the meaning of race itself.” The word entered English in the 16th century (says WKPD): is it really likely that it entered the language with precisely the single meaning that modern biologists wish to bully us into using?

@john77: I don’t know whom I read. But I’ve just found this (2021):

“For the Basques, this implies that they can no longer be considered a relict Paleolithic European population.” OK so an early attempt to explain their differences from their neighbours hasn’t held up.

“Rather, their main genetic component is Early Neolithic, like the rest of the South-European populations”: so in that respect they are like their neighbours – a lot of their descent is from people who came from the Near East.

“… In particular, for Bronze-Age Iberia, a Pontic-Caspian steppe ancestry of ∼40% is inferred. Shockingly, as a consequence of the Indo-European invasion of Iberia, Olalde et al. also reported an almost complete replacement of Y-chromosome lineages … The genetic composition of Iberia suffered a further increase in Northern and Central Europe ancestry during the Iron Age. Basques in particular seem to have remained stable since then.” So in the Bronze Age they were subject to the same conquest by people from the Steppes, exterminating the previous males: again, just like their neighbours. And in the Iron Age they again underwent the same changes as their neighbours.

So until about the end of the Iron Age – meaning presumably the arrival of the Romans in Spain – the Basques were much the same as their neighbours genetically in spite of speaking an entirely unrelated language. Whether you’d prefer to call the Basques of two millennia ago a different race because they spoke an unrelated language or you’d prefer not to call them a different race because genetically they were so similar to their neighbours seems to me to be entirely up to you.

In the last two millennia they’ve drifted away a little from their neighbours (I guess because they must have avoided intermarrying and also because they did less intermarrying with the Arab/Berber invaders). You can reasonably call them a different race if you like or you might prefer not to. But the differences now seem to be established as neither huge nor ancient. Discernible, though, I’ll grant you.

So who amended my post above? And why?

D’you know, I always thought “labile” was something to do with labia. Every day’s a school-day.

I’m the only person who can and I didn’t. So no one then?

Ok, but weird…

My post at 0734 should have read:

Indeed. There are at least 20 species-concepts. I am always amused that the carrion crow and the hooded crow are considered to be separate species when their genomes differ by 1%…

Indeed. There are at least 20 species-concepts. I am always amused that the carrion crow and the hooded crow are considered to be separate species when their genomes differ by less than 1%, when the genomes of a sub-Saharan and a north-western European differ by more than 1%…