Friday, February 15, 2013

Race not a social construct

I pointed out below that experts regularly claim that gender is a social construct, in spite of obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Likewise with race. A NY Times blog writes:
Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy: describing a report of something seemingly intelligent that had once been said by an African, Kant dismisses it on the grounds that “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” ...

Since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that “negroid,” “caucasoid” and so on represent real natural kinds or categories.
No, this shows how experts can be wrong. Immanuel Kant is considered a great genius, but most of what he said was worthless. As Steve Sailer points out, you can find the science behind racial traits in the same newspaper. The NY Times reports:
Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races.

The traits — thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts — are the result of a gene mutation that occurred about 35,000 years ago, the researchers have concluded.
Yes, race is measurable in terms of genes.

1 comment:

Analogical.thinking said...

Well, I agree that race is not a social construct but in many states or countries your race still causes you in a lot of troubles or brings you a lot of joys.
Even in the same country like in China, when people from Mainland go to Hongkong, the Hongkong people consider those Mainland people are second class. Or the urban look down on the rural persons.