| > I don't know what you mean by "definitive conclusions" I mean any conclusions that follow from a baseline assumption that certain races are genetically predisposed towards abstract characteristics. For example "we should target white communities for voluntary firearm buy-back programs because white people are genetically pre-disposed to firearm suicide." We know that white people are statistically more likely to commit suicide and statistically more likely to use a gun to do it, we also know that genetics play a large role in suicide risk, what does not follow is that the common genetic factors that culminate to express the phenotypes that are unscientifically identified as "white" necessarily imply the existence of genetic factors that increase suicide risk. You might ask, "Well what's the practical difference? In your example we should still target white people for the buy-back because the statistics show the population we define as white is the most vulnerable". To this I say, that's ok, we collected data on "white" people so targeting them for assistance is the best we can do, but it doesn't mean that we cannot do better in the future by disentangling the specific genetic factors that increase suicide risk from the opaque genetic category of "white" people. > It's not a coincidence you can pass people by on the street and readily identify 95% of them as being "white", "Asian", "Indian (/Pakistani/etc)", "black", etc, and that if multiple people perform this task, the agreement will be very high. It's obviously shared genetics that are causing these groupings Right, what I'm saying is that walking down the street and categorizing people into races based on how they look is a crude and unscientific (but efficient) method for grouping people with some shared genetics. Obviously, shared genetics are at the root of these groupings because genetics are the foundation of all phenotypes, but it is not a given that the presence of the phenotypes used to define arbitrary categories like "white" or "black" or "indian" necessarily account for the genetic factors that culminate to make someone more or less prone to violence, or intelligence, or an affinity for musical composition. > These differences are already used very widely in discussions about policy, as you noted, and that's exactly part of the reason why it should be fair game to fully investigate those differences. Investigate away, I have no problem with that, we use racial categories because they are practical, what I reject is the hypothesis that we will one day be able to prove that there is an intrinsic link between the particular genes that cause the expression of a given phenotype and the specific polygenes that constitute complex characteristics like intelligence. |