Ethnic Traits

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A chimpanzee brought up in Ireland would be doing a lot of fighting and drinking. He would beat the be-Jesus out of any of co-specifics from Africa.

ruveyn

Thanks two shots. It is fascinating and its not delusional thinking to see differences. It would be delusional to apply our subjective interpretations on these as being good or bad though. I find it odd how some people ignore the obvious simply because it can't be proven by science yet. (ahem... Sand)

Fuzzy, please go on and on...I have a feeling the that the more you do, the more interesting it will get.

Well I was often told that red hair was an Irish trait while ginger was a British one.

No no! I think the topic could be the mother of all flame fests in very short order. Its also more art than science. There are just too many variables.

I will think of some very specific examples and start a new post, ok?

You cannot take a generality and confidently apply it to an individual and racial discrimination takes place on individuals. Your family background does not apply to mine or millions of other Americans or any other nationality. Racism is based on idiot identification of individuals as possessing specific characteristics of something tied to skin color or nose size or some other basic stupidity. Even identical twins have been noted to grow up to be very different depending upon environmental influences. Recent genetic studies have indicated that an individual's genes turn on and off from environmental influence and that creates a specific individual.

It is an art more of a science I guess. It's individual perception on objects and vice verse.
To ignore one or the other is to be oblivious.

I noticed that people's appearance around the mouth area changes after many years of speaking a different language than their own.

for example- I can always tell Polish people in a crowd of foreigners. but Polish people that have lived for ex. in England for a number of years and not using Polish as their primary language I easily mistake with the locals.

I noticed the same thing about Spanish people.

I guess using a certain language makes some of the facial and lip muscles develop in different ways. there is nothing "genetic" about it, just like there is no Spanish or Polish gene- we are all mixed.

Africans tend to have much bigger teeth and mouths than let's say, Polish people. Do you think that is strictly caused by speech?

I think there are too many examples of physical racial traits being given in this thread as examples to support the notion of ethinic predispositon toward intelligence and personality.

lol of course not. but Africans are ethnically different to Europeans. Germans, Poles, Irish etc are not.

If there are differences in physical traits, why wouldn't there be differences in temperament and intelligence as well? More importantly, why does this question bother people?

It's a fact that geniuses are more commonly Jewish than any other race so why wouldn't there be some variation between the other sects of people. More importantly, why does this fact bother people?

Why would there be? Let us take your physical stereotype, blacks are more agile than other races. I do not think this is true, but I will imageine for a moment that it is. Let us say the olympics and professional sports industry both have a history of blacks being more agile than other races, leading one to conclude this is a physical ethinic trait based on factual evidence. Would you then jump to what you see as the next logical step...blacks are genetically inclined to be more likely to posess the personality traits needed to have the dedication and commitment level to become a world class athlete? I am not sure it does. I think what bothers me is you say it must be true, but are using examples which in no way support your claims.

Is this a fact based on genetics, or might it be importance of education in their culture, or is it your own observations, like agile blacks and bad driving chineese? Again, I am not sure it does.

I must be delusional then. Chinese people are excellent drivers but my delusional mind only sees the bad ones. Black people are not more athletically inclined than white people? I could swear that I witnessed more agile blacks than whites. Thank you Claire for reminding me that if something is not documented in a textbook as being factual, then it must not be true.

Because variation is an effect of causes and the causes of variation do not necessarily effect temperament and intelligence in the same way they do morphological features.

If there is a range of human temperamental and intellectual variance, and this range is more advantageous than an alternative or smaller range, then how would selective forces act on this variance to produce variation between populations?
Why does it not bother people? Why do some people like tomatoes and other people hate them? Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?


Is it a fact? I find it difficult to believe that such a thing can be plausibly tested.

Why does it bother you that it is currently impossible to establish what if any influence biological ethnicity has on temperament or intelligence?

pandd wrote:

Because it's not impossible. They do it all the time in zoology. Pick up a dog encyclopedia and see how "racist" it is. It's understood by the reader that not all dogs fit into a stereotypical mode, but when it comes to humans there is a taboo on admitting that a person can see differences in ethnic traits.

It is by any ethical means.

You might be prepared to take newborn infants and place them in a lab for your experimentation but this is not deemed an acceptable practice in many modern societies, and I do not know that academic research is a huge priority in any society where such conduct is currently lawful.

They attempt it all the time in zoology, and these things can be (and are) contested for decades on end. For goodness sake even now some zoologists would still deny that any non-human uses tools.


Dogs have been selectively bred by humans in a manner not consistent with environmental selection. Not only does this produce more marked and distinctively distributed differences, but it also facilitates prediction and influences social conditioning and interpretation of behavior. Even with all these factors in favour of being able to link lineage with behavior, it is still not uncommon for dogs to not fit their lineage-stereotype in "temperament" or "intelligence".

There is no reason to suppose that selective forces effecting humans would produce lineage-linked temperament/intelligence traits to even the extent seen with dogs, and in fact good cause to believe the contrary.


So you keep arguing, but you began by saying the taboo was evident in that these things are not studied/researched and investigated, but they are, and you insist that research with better results is plausible but have not suggested any practical means of achieving this, merely pointing out that in zoology there has been some limited success in linking lineage to some observable traits, with a failure to achieve 100% concordance. .

There is a taboo against stripping newborn humans of their families, and placing them in a controlled laboratory setting so we can control cultural variables in order to test whether traits produced in their cultured ethnic counterparts are innately temperamental, or culturally produced. As frustrating as this limit on the pursuit of knowledge is, I cannot say this is a taboo I do not fully endorse.