Ethnic Traits

Post Reply New Topic

you can't discuss anything? you can. tell people to stfu if they want to get all offended. its none of there business

No, this is a large part of the point. The studies that do exist look for much more simple genotype/physical phenotype trait relationships because as complex as these can be, associating behavior or intellect is much more complex and fraught with uncontrollable variables, just as you suggest.

If seeing behavior and cognitive propensities in DNA were so easy as to make such research plausible, we would have long since had a comprehensive and unequivocal answer about any genetic contributors to Autism.

Ok, I thought I might be missing it all together. At first I thought this might be a discussion of medical racial traits and compared to dogs like german shepards are prone to hip dysplasia and papillons are prone to blindness. But then Magnus mentioned chow personalities and I got confused. Not only do I have trouble relating personality to race, but even to dogs. Most any dog can be made mean, to cower, or trained to fit happily into a household.

I was wondering why Chinese people seem to be better at math and why they are really bad drivers. Or, why are Jewish writers so witty. Why are black people more agile than most other races and why are white people so ambitious to take over the world.

If there were no truth to stereotypes, there wouldn't be any stereotypes.
Same goes with dogs. Not all pit bulls are potential killers. But when I see trends in ethnic traits, it makes me wonder why they exist. The US is a great place to study these differences seeing how our cultures are so mixed here.

Claire, if you study dog breeds ( just pick one) you'll see where I was going with this. Look at a Jack Russell terrier for example. They are more energetic (hyper), they have a harder time walking without leashes, they are very alert and quick to chase things, they are super intelligent.
Compare this to any lap dog. You can read the history of the breed and see how selective breeding caused differences in temperament and intelligence. They are not just different in appearance.

Now all we have to do is clarify that Voltaire, Nabokov, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, were secretly Jewish and Fred Astaire was black.

I think that we do inherit (very) basic personality traits, but that they're spread around enough that you can't really pin one giant ethnicity as having the same personality traits. The same goes with intelligence, but every society needed some intelligent people to survive.

If you wanted to categorize people by different ethnic groups, then going by language family would probably be the best way. This means that Hungarians wouldn't be put into the same group as Slovaks (because Hungarians are Uralic and Slovaks are Indo-European) even though they are both considered "white". This also means that you couldn't put all "blacks" into one group, because there are a few major language families on that continent.

Even if you do that, though, you will still find a lot of differences. The only real exception is for very small, isolated groups like the Basques. I read somewhere that over 70% of them have "negative" type blood. I don't know about personality, though.

I think the only traits that really are "race specific" are physical ones. Mental ones (usually) don't play nearly as much role in survival, so they don't need to be eliminated. Therefore, there's much more genetic diversity in those areas. The only mental trait I can think of right now that's fairly ethnic specific is alcoholism. Besides the Germanic/Slavic branches of Indo-Europeans, Native Americans are the only other group where its widespread. I watched some episode of Bill Nye where they suggested that it might double as a "fighting spirit" gene of sorts.

Now that's interesting... in the US at least, only 15% of the population is Rh negative, and I believe it is roughly the same in Western Europe.

Sand wrote:

Point proven in this case regarding witty Jew writers.

Since Fred Astaire was agile, that means Africans are not more agile than whites. noted

For a while I felt like Alice in Wonderland noticing things that no one else sees.
I must be delusional.

You weren't *completely* wrong about agile Africans. The Maasai tribe in Kenya is very agile. They're tall, slender people that play reverse limbo for fun (in other words, jumping over sticks that others hold very high in the air).

LOL

Sorry it took me so long to get back to this. First, I have to admit that my adult life has been pretty sheltered and people may find it hard to talk about these types of things with me. Also, WP is my first experience in online communication and have read many stereotypes here that I have never heard before, which has made me wonder just how naive I am about some of these things. Are Asians better at math? I have always understood that Asians were viewed as a more intelligent race, but I just assumed their culture might place more priority on education than other cultures and I had no idea there was anything specific about math. Are Asians bad drivers? I have seen this written here before but this is a new one I have never heard before wp. I would be interested in knowing where this stems from. Are there statistics anywhere which show Asians cause more traffic accidents than other races? Are blacks more agile? Looking at the Olympics, I might wonder about this statement. It seems to me all races are agile. I will leave the one about white world dominance alone, as I have found all races to be just as racist and egotistical as whites.

Are you sure about that? I will concede that many stereotypes have some basis in truth, but they are truths of a portion and really cannot define an entire group of people. I learned here on wp that gays are stereotyped as child molesters. I never knew people thought this. Now, I know homosexuals are not a race, but they are discriminated and stereotyped just as equally so I find it to be a good example of a stereotype based on hatred and fear.
I would say all pit bulls are potential killers. They are animals with instincts we cannot control. I find pit bulls to be a wonderful breed, very friendly big babies. However, the difference between a pit bull bite and the bit of another dog of equal size is about one hundred stitches. This is due to their physical traits, the the strength of their jaw, not their personality. This, and the fact they are used as fight dogs, is why the media has painted pit bulls to be vicious. Pit bull attacks are often made public, while other dog attacks go unreported. They are not more vicious than other dogs. Dobermans have also been demonized by the media...maybe because the look scary?

It is the nature of any social group to consider its members superior and regard any outsiders as possessing negative characteristics. Any group that characterizes itself as simply different by dressing differently or has an obvious physical difference is pretty automatically stereotyped by the rest of society. Skin color and bone structure are outstanding in smearing an entire group of people with common characteristics, predominantly negative, which have no basis in fact. Groups can be determined by religion, nationality, physical racial characteristics, dress, age group, but the delusions of stereotypes are based on quick and easy identifications and, in the main, totally false. But the separation of groups by stereotypical pressure re-enforces the solidity of the group and, to some extent, creates some odd spurious reality out of the stereotypes.

Well, I find it odd that you say "North Europeans". In fact, the British Isles show strong genetic relation to paleolithic Europe, which is primarily a Western European phenomenon, and, although I am not familiar with the mtDNA haplogroups (which may provide a different picture), you will find higher concentration of old European R1b haplogroup y chromosomes particularly in the west of Europe (reaching highest concentrations in Spain and Ireland), while this attain quite lower prominence in traditionally "Northern" European countries in Scandinavia and even Germany (and shows significant displacement by e.g. the R1a haplogroup associated usually with the later Indo-European migrations). While those of us with ancestry in the British Isles may come from particularly inbread stock, it just so happens that this particular inbread stock is more closely related to the Spanish and the French, apparently.

Edit: and I note that, according to one article I've found, our (Irish and British) brains are similarly sized to those of people in Mediterranean regions - i.e., uncharacteristically small for people that far north. Coincidence?

Yes, I read that, too. The Palaeolithic was 10k+ years back, though. Remember, at that time there was no continous English Channel, and an ice sheet would have recently retreated after covering most of northern Britain. Obviously hunter-gatherer populations would have spread north as conditions improved after the glaciation. More recently, though, within the context of a post from Orwell, immigration would have been from NW Europe, or putting it another way, populations bordering the English Channel and N Sea.

Anyway, the point you make just reinforces mine, as you've accepted that genetics can be related to a population from a certain area.

Although the later migrations had a significant impact at least on the English (though I've heard the impact may not be as great as is sometimes thought), the Germans and Scandinavians are not historically "Old European" in the sense that the indigenous population of the British Isles as well as the Iberians (e.g., the Scandinavians, going back to y chromosomes, are about 1/3 R1a, indicating a possibly significant influx of Indo-European genetic material into the population, and are generally less R1b, which makes me wonder if there isn't relation to the Sami ) Again, I do not argue that the people of the British Isles are remarkable insular in terms of their genetic history. But drawing the line and saying that any migration from Northern Europe could not constitute a big change in the ethnic makeup does not seem terribly strong as the indigenous people of the British Isles were markedly more Western European.

Is this a special interest of yours, twoshots? I won't argue with what you're saying, especially after checking-up on where north Europe ends and west Europe starts, as it were. I certainly don't have a Nordic white supremacist angle on this. Anyway, like I said, what you're saying does supports my general argument.