Pupil sizes also vary per race (with blacks having smaller pupils, aboriginals etc probably much smaller, who know). Race is of course a non scientific construct. Now someone might take this and "prove" that cognitive ability for certain groups are less than other groups. This is often why scientists shy away from this kind of thing.
If I can observe that the ancestry of two people have a specific shape nose, certain hair colour range, and a typical range of heights different from the members of two other bloodlines, and then make predictions about how would appear the offspring of both, then how is that not scientific?
I am aware that race is a contentious topic for USians, but I don't live in the US, so please assume good intentions and understand that I am asking to understand your viewpoint, not challenge it.
Deciding when features diverge enough to be a difference "race" is entirely arbitrary, and is largely for political reasons not scientific ones. The wikipedia articles on it are actually pretty good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_society
You're referencing extremes to argue against the concept entirely which is absurd. DNA can identify groups of people with similar clusters of genes that make up a race with high accuracy. It's tracing the lineage of you and your ancestors which isn't arbitrary, and most people are sufficiently more than a drop of a given race making the delineation quite clear.
Deciding that those "clusters of genes" represent an entirely different race is arbitrary, and it's not "clear" at all. Tracing DNA of ancestors has little to do with that. Please read the articles I linked, they're long but address your concerns.
I was watching the Olympics opening ceremony with my young son and he noticed that, at least in some cases, people from particular countries share a skin color. Was I supposed to tell him that he's mistaken and we indeed don't know why that appears to happen?
Yes, races can mix which also mixes their features, making them difficult to singularly classify. But is it necessary to not notice that in some cases larger populations have not mixed for a while and developed a common set of features?
You should explain to him that when people live in certain places for many generations some adaptations to local environment happen in their bodies. Then you could explain how it's a fairly recent thing that skin of some people got white because of living in relatively low light environment for millenia. As people now have have ability to move freely and freely eat food from around the globe this artifact of being stuck in one place will eventually disappear. But for now we can enjoy how differently people can look while being generally the same.
A good explanation of how and why specific combinations of genes get concentrated in relatively isolated populations. What we call “race” historically got based on superficial features, not analysis of similarities in DNA. It turns out that sometimes those correspond, and sometimes they don’t. Indonesians and Brazilians have similar ranges of skin color (melanin) for the same reason — adaptation to sun exposure — but only distant common ancestors and very different histories.
Does anyone consider Indonesians and Brazilians to be a single race? I think that your comment addresses a strawman that nobody stated.
If you are discounting the idea that colour is a singular indicator of race, then yes I agree with you. But that does not mean that race, as a whole, does not exist.
I was pointing out that people can end up with similar superficial features without common heritage. I doubt anyone considers Indonesians and Brazilians the same race, but then again I’m pretty sure a large number of Americans would call both “black.” As evidence I offer the fake “race” Americans call Hispanic or LatinX, a definition that includes people with very different genetic and social heritages, and one mostly rejected by members of the supposed Hispanic race. That’s a political construct and convenience, not a real thing in any sense.
Race exists as a social construct. Collections of genes concentrated in a population describe something, I called it heritage. Sometimes the social construct and the heritage correspond, sometimes not. “African” only describes a race based on superficial features, not genetic variation.
I live in east Asia among people I (white American) always thought of as members of the same race, Asian. But I have learned that the people here have different racial definitions and boundaries, more tuned to their own social constructs and ideas about heritage and history. No doubt people from the African continent have different ideas about race than I got raised with. So in that sense “race” is a social construct, because different societies have different and conflicting definitions. Which do we call correct? My American/western notion of Asian as a race, or the definitions the people of Asia use?
I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
What is the precise unambiguous definition of "race" in any case?
With Brazil you have a country in which a small few were rumoured to be exact clones of Hitler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(novel) ) a greater majority who are descended from European colonizers and former African slaves and a small number who "pure" descendants from the some 2,000 different tribal groups once totalling some 7 million people prior to the 1500 CE European contact.
Indonesia is a similar construct - it's a political boundary about many many distinct ethnologies from some 17,000 islands and over a quarter billion people.
> I don't think anybody seriously considerd either "Indonesian" nor "Brazillian" to be racial categories or groupings.
I hope not.
That wasn’t the point I meant to make. The thread I replied in started with trying to explain skin color differences to a child. I had to do that with my own kids, because kids notice that people look different. I stayed away from the concept of “race” and instead tried to explain heritage and adaptation. At first glance a child might very well think Indonesians and Brazilians belong to the same race — it would depend on what features they notice. Sadly too many adults have the same level of discrimination (in both senses).
Sure, I'm further emphasising the point that much of what some regard as "race" is superficial or "familial".
Reading older English books many years past I've seen the claim that Scottish families could be distinguished by features, I'd accept that having recognised people as being from one family or another growing, however I doubt anyone would claim the MacThoseOnes are a different race to the McThemOnes.
I saw in this post some conflation of "Africans" and "(Australian) Aboriginals", both vey large groups with very many sub groups - it's worth a mention that of all the peoples on the planet these two are perhaps the furtherest apart on the family tree as it took a good while to walk (and boat a little) to Australia and arrive here some 70K+ years past - much of Europe is likely more closely related on the great human tree to modern Africans.
I'm from central Europe, so maybe the fine details regarding this topic escape my attention, but I would understand heritage as a much more social concept than race. For example, a kid born to Japanese parents and growing up in Poland may very well feel connection to Polish heritage. This obviously doesn't make them Slavic, but that's not a requirement to be Polish. On the other hand, some people deliberately escape their countries and may find the idea of implicitly connecting them to that heritage offensive.
The issue here is slight genetic differences and/or phenotypes are being construed as significant enough to mark people as a different -race- of human, which significantly plays into racism. Whereas my understanding is Africa itself has more genetic diversity than the typical races that been demarcated more for political reasons.
Well, individual variation within what is broadly categorized as "races" exceeds the variation between "races" in aggregate, so the whole idea is nonsense. The vast majority of human genetic diversity is found in people with medium-to-dark skin color.
To take an empirical equivalent, imagine if someone gave you two lists of people, one of whom was "tall", and the other was "short". And you measured the tall and short people, and there were people in the "short" group who were taller than average for the "tall" group, and vice versa. Their height as compared by means and standard deviations didn't vary substantially.
At that point, your assumption should be that the labeling and grouping was wrong. So too for grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings like ethnic groups and national origin.
That being said, there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter - the classic example being broad African-American susceptibility to certain genetic-influenced illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. These are markers that more recent African immigrants don't show, and are likely a result of strong genetic and epigenetic selection for certain kinds of robustness as a result of the historical conditions they were subject to, i.e. slavery, discrimination, and poverty.
During the slave trade, most Africans that were brought to the Americas were from a fairly small area in West Africa. These days, African immigrants come from all over Africa. There is more human genetic variation within Africa than in the rest of the world combined. Parsimoniously it could just be that these West Africans were just more disposed to diabetes and heart disease than Africans as a whole.
In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
>grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings
This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
>there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter
>In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
First, you're completely forgetting culture. Second, nobody is claiming that there is no genetic difference between humans, it's just that the races we define don't correlate very well with them. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most human genetic diversity, so why would they be all of the same race?
I think it's an Americanism to think humans in Africa are a monolith. At least here in the UK the idea of having the most genetic diversity goes hand in hand with correlating with lots of races within.
Notice how they all come from specific population that is a small subset of black race. Probably more black people run slower then them than there is white people in total.
If you noticed that 99 of 100 finalists of some jumping discipline were Ashkenazi Jews or western Slovenians you wouldn't claim that white race is awesome at jumping.
That's why concept of race is useless. It focuses on superficial differences and similarities ignoring the real significant ones.
> In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
That's not a race. That's a particular tiny subset of a particular region with unique genetics. It's not even "Sub-Saharan", it's specific regions and tribes in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other rift countries.
> This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
Where they do, great, but often the standard "racial types" share little if anything. Skin color dictates almost nothing about the other traits of a person, so if you're concerned with "how fast do they get a sunburn", by all means group away. If you're concerned with IQ or athletic ability, try again.
Isn't the actual idea that any given individual has more genetic points of difference to any other random individual, even within a racial group, than genetic differences between races. So I don't understand the assertion that the idea that there aren't some foundational genetic correlations tied to race - there are. I'd be intrigued to get a measure of genetic distance between individual chimpanzees vs. humans to see if the standard deviation shows a similar pattern, of sexual selection selecting for diversity between individuals.
> Well, individual variation within what is broadly categorized as "races" exceeds the variation between "races" in aggregate, so the whole idea is nonsense.
The same is true for men and women for a wide range of characteristics yet we sometimes find useful to differentiate one from the other in some contexts.
I mean the categories that have been selected, are absolutely ridiculous. There isn't just one "black", as much as there is one "white". Imagine the differences in two white races at their most extremes: iranians and finns. Or slavs. Or irish. And blacks - are Khoisan black? If they are, they are extremely different from Nigerians, which again is an extremely ethnically diverse country. This is why I seriously dislike the categories selected by politicians and administrators.
> I mean the categories that have been selected, are absolutely ridiculous. There isn't just one "black", as much as there is one "white".
Alright, so American popular conception of race is incorrect, not the concept of race as a whole. In my country we do not refer to black and white, we use the names that each racial group calls themselves (Beduin, Arab, Ethiopian, Moroccan, etc).
I think OP's point is that it's arbitrary and context dependent where the line between races is drawn. It also includes non-genetic cultural traits, as in your example.
Should a different eye color detemine a race demarcation? Is e.g. religion a factor in detemining a race?
The examples you listed are probably better described as ethnic groups, which are not genetically detemined, not necessarily mutually exclusive and quite vaguely defined.
Here's the thing you may be missing: The complete diversity of human phenotypes (including what is socially discussed as 'race') is almost entirely present on the African continent. If you believe in evolution (and I'm assuming pretty much everyone here does), that makes a whole lot of sense – humans migrated out of Africa millenia ago and, as they moved to different environments, preferential selection for certain traits that already existed within the migrating population(s) occurred. There may be some traits that are beneficial and passed on due to spontaneous mutations post-migration, but they are relatively few and typically present in superficial features (e.g. eye color, hair color).
Your argument seems to support the notion of race, not counter it.
Italy builds many classes of cars. We still classify them as luxury vehicles, sports vehicles, economy vehicles, etc. even if some parts are interchangable. The Lamborghini Diablo used passenger bus taillights.
We can draw conceptual borders between any two things, that doesn't automatically make those categories "scientific". Something being "scientific" has the implication that is has explanatory usefulness or predictive validity beyond the tautological ability to predict the definitions used to construct the categories. A taxonomy of humans based on statistical clusters of genotypes might be a scientific way to approach race/ethnicity, but subjectively chosen phenotypes is not it.
One thing you should consider is that genetic diversity is highest between people in Africa. So two Africans who look the same to you might be more genetically different than European from Asian. In this sense race is not really scientific. Because it doesn't reflect general genetic similarity or diversity but rather a very small subset that's intersection of adaptions to local environment and things that are easily visible just by looking at someone.
Ask a random passerby if they ever heard about Haduo or Tigre races. Then ask them again if they heard about Black or White race. You can't make general claims based on how you understand the words.
Genetic inheritance is different to the social construct of race ("black","white" etc). Bloodline is best avoided as a concept where humans are concerned, because the human gene pool was and is highly mobile. "Racial purity" is an idiot concept, and to the extent it has been attempted in humans, as with dogs it mostly leads to deformities and genetic diseases.
(That Proclaimers song - "... and I would walk 500 miles" - turns out to be an order-of-magnitude underestimate of how far the 99th percentile will walk to get laid - and on a timescale of centuries/millennia, it's the 99th percentile that matters).
And remember that in the US (and, for example, South Africa), that social construct extended to become a _legal_ construct used to discriminate against those designated as black. Most of Europe doesn't share that unhappy recent history (although we have our own, of course), it's hard to appreciate just how much more contentious it is in the US than Europe.
The variance for most traits is higher within races than it is between them. I assume OPs point is the division into categories "black, white, asian, latino" is arbitrary, and you could easily reduce or add more groups as you see fit.
Theres nowhere in science you can look that will tell you how many groups there are and where to draw the lines between them - i.e a construct.
I agree that the pseudo races that you mentioned are quite arbitrary, but I suppose they could be useful terms in a population as the diverse the US. In less mixed contexts such as Ethiopia nobody is "Black" rather they would be called one of the 300 some odd races they have there. Likewise in China - nobody's "Asian" in China, rather they are Han or something.
There's probably a whole Venn diagram or tree to describe different races, how far up the tree we go to describe someone pretty much depends on how far away we are from them on that tree. And then there are people of mixed race - we are all human after all.
I don't know if this is true – that pupil sizes vary meaningfully between races and folks from Africa and Aboriginal populations in Australia have smaller pupils – but it may make sense. Those are both relatively sunny places; Northern latitudes are less so. Greater dilation (or dynamic range around the dilation), more light, possibly improving certain aspects of vision in low light. Of course, the inverse may also hold – less ability for pupils to constrict in very sunny places would be problematic too. And yet, I say this knowing that hypotheses derived from first principles and uninformed of biological context tend to be very low mileage in the biological sciences. Biology is rarely so simple.
For a non scientific concept it's surprising very highly predictive. Somehow, when I was living in Japan, every Japanese could guess I was a foreigner without me saying anything! For some strange reason that also happened to my Nigerian friend. I wish science could investigate this phenomenon and give it a name...
We do have a name for it: foreigner. Meaning not from around here, and ancestors not from around here either.
In a homogenous population like Japanese the distinction seems trivial to observe. In Europe or the USA, with more heterogenous populations “foreigners” get harder to identify, and race gets based on superficial features rather than heritage. More than one stupid American politician has called out Spanish or Chinese speakers as foreigners even though their ancestors go as far back in the US as most caucasians.
I once worked with a Nigerian woman who bristled and complained when our HR manager referred to her as “African American,” the politically correct term. Yetunde insisted on Nigerian, wanting no association with African Americans. Not the same race to her. That people around the world have very different definitions and boundaries when it comes to “race” tells you that it’s a social construct.
[Before someone corrects me, I know Japanese doesn’t really describe a homogenous population or ancestry from a handful of ancient ancestors. Japanese only seem homogenous relative to the US and Europe. I live in east Asia among people who don’t see other “Asians” as members of the same race.]
Maybe I am just not familiar enough with the subject to get the point, but this article doesn't really seem to focus on their actual claim but instead it's about explaining why no one else could reproduce their findings?
I'm also still very confused on what the actual relationship is purported to be, at least based on this article. How did they determine cognitive ability here?
I'm extremely wary of claims like the title, especially this one, as it seems like something children on a playground would say and use to bully each other, and certainly I imagine that many people will use it to justify being awful to others that are perceived to be "lesser" because of the rather outrageous title of the article, the article which I still really don't get how they're even making these connections to draw such a conclusion.
A few tests, among which specific memory tests. However, the memory tests didn't correlate, they claim only "fluid intelligence" correlates (even though they've also claimed the two are correlated). Fluid intelligence was measured "with the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, letter sets, and number series."
The problem, for me, is that there is nothing to relate intelligence (fluid or otherwise) and pupil size. Without something plausible linking the two, this is just meaningless.
And of course they rely on NHST statistics and a whole raft of modeling techniques, which is enough to call the whole article in doubt.
I dare say they used very visual tasks, which may be harder for people with small pupils under less than optimal lighting conditions.
> The problem, for me, is that there is nothing to relate intelligence (fluid or otherwise) and pupil size. Without something plausible linking the two, this is just meaningless.
They're both neurotransmitters and vasoconstrictors, but the latter effect is reversed in the pupils, so they dilate your pupils. If you're low on catecholamines then your working memory is impaired and your pupils will be smaller.
This is why amphetamine dilates your pupils and is prescribed to treat ADHD.
It always makes me wonder why it is that many people seem to be extremely sensitive to the idea that cognitive capability is variable among people. There is always backlash whenever anyone does anything that seeks to measure cognitive capacity or to categorize people along those lines.
I firmly believe that cognitive ability is a -physical- trait that can be estimated with useful and actionable results.
I base this on the simple observation that age or disease related cognitive decline is a real and measurable thing.
If cognitive decline can be measured, then cognition can be measured.
If cognition can be measured, and cognitive decline is impactful, then the variability in cognition between people is meaningful.
These measurements of cognition variability correlate strongly with real-world tasking, strongly implying that cognition is a useful metric of capability.
I don’t see how any of this is in the least bit controversial.
I don’t see how cognitive capacity is somehow bad to measure, talk about, or select for in how and why we provide education to deliver maximum utility to the student.
How is this different from athletic capability? Some people can never be pro-level basketball players no matter how much they train.
The limiting traits in that respect are products of their genes and early development. I propose that cognitive capacity is not distinct in this regard. As in any n=10^9 sample there will be outliers, but outliers are not evidence that a strongly predictive relationship does not exist.
There is no apparent reason that cognitive capacity, which is presumably based on some kind of physical neural apparatus, is somehow intrinsically malleable and non- deterministic in kind that other physical traits are not.
To claim otherwise seems an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, of which I am at a loss to discover.
I suspect, without any substantial evidence, that this peculiar bias against the idea of determinism in cognitive ability has to do with the perception that cognitive ability is largely indeterminable externally, and many people do things to seem highly capable when they are not.
This preening behaviour is inherently threatened by the idea that it could easily be discovered, and people are defensive of this subterfuge on their own behalf and/or the behalf of others.
But, that is just a suspicion, which I would gladly be disabused of if anyone else has a better insight as to the motive behind what seems to me to be a highly illogical bias.
That is mimicry of what was once an actual indicator. Brembo brakes calipers were famously coloured, and those were added by people who modify their cars to go faster.
Mimicry won. As with many other metrics, once something becomes a metric it no longer accurately measures what it was intended to measure.
Before you check yourself in the mirror, note that the article suggests that your pupil size should be larger for improved intelligence, not smaller, which is probably, but not scientifically "proven" to align with cunningness and shrewdness.
This could explain why we naturally perceive and talk about an empty gaze or intelligent eyes. We all have a sense that someone's eyes somehow give a clue about their intelligence. Perhaps we're just inconsciously looking at pupil size.
My experience is it's more about how the eyes are used, e.g. what is being looked at, how focused they are on something, or when they intentionally unfocus their eyes, and the subtle rapid movements that indicate thought. Pupil size may factor in as well though.
My father had a brain hemorrhage 2 years ago and now dementia. Watching the only video I have of him pre accident, there is a very marked difference in eye movements.
Tangential reflection:
Little known fact: SMILE eye surgery only allows pupils up to a fixed diameter. Kind of like car seats are also designed for a standard height individual.
Interesting non-linear effects arise in low-light conditions when pupils dilate beyond the 6 mm maximum.
Apparently being intelligent (and likely needing eye correction from all that reading) as well as tall, is no fun combination. The hard life of a multi-variate outlier in the world of average ergonomics.
> likely needing eye correction from all that reading
Is reading actually proven to cause short sightedness? I read everything I could lay my hands on from the age of four. From age ten I read at at least two hundred pages a day until I was in my thirties. I still don't need glasses at the age of nearly sixty nine. I realize that this is only one data point but I also know a lot of people who do need glasses and most of them are not and never have been avid readers.
But I spent a large amount of time out of doors tramping the fields, especially in the summer. I still do spend at least an hour out of doors every day.
Apparently two hours per day of outdoor time for children has a huge impact [1]. Taiwan even has a government program to promote this among schoolkids.
Running your intelligence study in the college's psychology building, paying participants in course credits?
Calling Raven's Progressive Matrices, a measure of "reasoning about novel problems" when it's far from novel in psychology, and most of your test subjects are psychology students?
By the way, I think they mean that Raven's Matrices test (somehow) for an ability to reason about problems that are new to the test subject, not that the test itself is new.
I bet computer science majors have more of an "unfair" advantage than psych majors. It was hard not to notice how many of the patterns match bit manipulation rules such as not and xor.
I wish I could go back in time and show this study to all those cops who stopped me and asked why my pupils were so large when I was a teenager. They suspected I was high (which where I live is illegal, even if you only have it in your blood).
Same here, living in Southern California in the late nineties and being stopped all the time with that crap. But eventually you stop respecting the police and your real intelligence catches up with your perceived amount.
People who take Drugs like heroin Have really small pupils whereas people that take drugs like cocaine have very large pupils. It might not necessarily be fluid intelligence at play but rather Stimulation and adequate sleep biasing the results
This. Pupil size correlates with stimulation level, which in turn correlates with attention and performance.
And it's not a simple one-way street - drugs of course have an effect (caffeine, for a start) - but psychological factors also come into play - someone who is more able to activate their attention in response to a task will likely show a physiological response. Your pupils will "pop" in response to both pleasant (sexually attractive person) and unpleasant (unexpected large tax bill) tasks or stimuli, but the amount by which they do so is going to vary from one pair of (background conditions, situation) to the next.
Pupil size maybe, but those poor unfortunate folks with eyes spaced too closely together unfairly appear to be cognitively challenged. Like my former CEO, looked dumb, folks instinctively underestimated him and he always came out on top in deals.
I think the underlying mechanism is related to neuron activation in the brain itself because it’s possible that more visual stimulation, regardless of being involved in the task at hand, helps with cognitive functioning in some manner. There are some interesting questions remaining to explore here, like would direct neuron stimulation bypass the pupil size role.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadI am aware that race is a contentious topic for USians, but I don't live in the US, so please assume good intentions and understand that I am asking to understand your viewpoint, not challenge it.
Reading about historical classifications like the One drop rule shows how laughably arbitrary it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
You're referencing extremes to argue against the concept entirely which is absurd. DNA can identify groups of people with similar clusters of genes that make up a race with high accuracy. It's tracing the lineage of you and your ancestors which isn't arbitrary, and most people are sufficiently more than a drop of a given race making the delineation quite clear.
Yes, races can mix which also mixes their features, making them difficult to singularly classify. But is it necessary to not notice that in some cases larger populations have not mixed for a while and developed a common set of features?
I especially like that it emphasizes our common ancestry - we are all human.
If you are discounting the idea that colour is a singular indicator of race, then yes I agree with you. But that does not mean that race, as a whole, does not exist.
Race exists as a social construct. Collections of genes concentrated in a population describe something, I called it heritage. Sometimes the social construct and the heritage correspond, sometimes not. “African” only describes a race based on superficial features, not genetic variation.
I live in east Asia among people I (white American) always thought of as members of the same race, Asian. But I have learned that the people here have different racial definitions and boundaries, more tuned to their own social constructs and ideas about heritage and history. No doubt people from the African continent have different ideas about race than I got raised with. So in that sense “race” is a social construct, because different societies have different and conflicting definitions. Which do we call correct? My American/western notion of Asian as a race, or the definitions the people of Asia use?
What is the precise unambiguous definition of "race" in any case?
With Brazil you have a country in which a small few were rumoured to be exact clones of Hitler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_(novel) ) a greater majority who are descended from European colonizers and former African slaves and a small number who "pure" descendants from the some 2,000 different tribal groups once totalling some 7 million people prior to the 1500 CE European contact.
Indonesia is a similar construct - it's a political boundary about many many distinct ethnologies from some 17,000 islands and over a quarter billion people.
I hope not.
That wasn’t the point I meant to make. The thread I replied in started with trying to explain skin color differences to a child. I had to do that with my own kids, because kids notice that people look different. I stayed away from the concept of “race” and instead tried to explain heritage and adaptation. At first glance a child might very well think Indonesians and Brazilians belong to the same race — it would depend on what features they notice. Sadly too many adults have the same level of discrimination (in both senses).
Reading older English books many years past I've seen the claim that Scottish families could be distinguished by features, I'd accept that having recognised people as being from one family or another growing, however I doubt anyone would claim the MacThoseOnes are a different race to the McThemOnes.
I saw in this post some conflation of "Africans" and "(Australian) Aboriginals", both vey large groups with very many sub groups - it's worth a mention that of all the peoples on the planet these two are perhaps the furtherest apart on the family tree as it took a good while to walk (and boat a little) to Australia and arrive here some 70K+ years past - much of Europe is likely more closely related on the great human tree to modern Africans.
To take an empirical equivalent, imagine if someone gave you two lists of people, one of whom was "tall", and the other was "short". And you measured the tall and short people, and there were people in the "short" group who were taller than average for the "tall" group, and vice versa. Their height as compared by means and standard deviations didn't vary substantially.
At that point, your assumption should be that the labeling and grouping was wrong. So too for grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings like ethnic groups and national origin.
That being said, there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter - the classic example being broad African-American susceptibility to certain genetic-influenced illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. These are markers that more recent African immigrants don't show, and are likely a result of strong genetic and epigenetic selection for certain kinds of robustness as a result of the historical conditions they were subject to, i.e. slavery, discrimination, and poverty.
In the last 11 Olympics, men with Sub-Saharan African ancestry have earned 87 of 88 finalist berths in the 100m dash. Is this random chance or does race correlate with some genetic traits enabling differentiation in physical abilities?
>grouping people by skin color or many other arbitrary groupings
This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
>there are groupings of people by genetic traits and things like that do matter
Yea exactly.
First, you're completely forgetting culture. Second, nobody is claiming that there is no genetic difference between humans, it's just that the races we define don't correlate very well with them. Sub-Saharan Africa has the most human genetic diversity, so why would they be all of the same race?
Notice how they all come from specific population that is a small subset of black race. Probably more black people run slower then them than there is white people in total.
If you noticed that 99 of 100 finalists of some jumping discipline were Ashkenazi Jews or western Slovenians you wouldn't claim that white race is awesome at jumping.
That's why concept of race is useless. It focuses on superficial differences and similarities ignoring the real significant ones.
That's not a race. That's a particular tiny subset of a particular region with unique genetics. It's not even "Sub-Saharan", it's specific regions and tribes in Ethiopia, Kenya, and other rift countries.
> This isn't arbitrary, when common ancestry and origin impart real world observable differences in a repeatable predictable way.
Where they do, great, but often the standard "racial types" share little if anything. Skin color dictates almost nothing about the other traits of a person, so if you're concerned with "how fast do they get a sunburn", by all means group away. If you're concerned with IQ or athletic ability, try again.
The same is true for men and women for a wide range of characteristics yet we sometimes find useful to differentiate one from the other in some contexts.
Should a different eye color detemine a race demarcation? Is e.g. religion a factor in detemining a race?
The examples you listed are probably better described as ethnic groups, which are not genetically detemined, not necessarily mutually exclusive and quite vaguely defined.
Italy builds many classes of cars. We still classify them as luxury vehicles, sports vehicles, economy vehicles, etc. even if some parts are interchangable. The Lamborghini Diablo used passenger bus taillights.
If you are lumping them together into "African", then I agree that _your_ notion of race is wrong. But not the concept as a whole.
(That Proclaimers song - "... and I would walk 500 miles" - turns out to be an order-of-magnitude underestimate of how far the 99th percentile will walk to get laid - and on a timescale of centuries/millennia, it's the 99th percentile that matters).
And remember that in the US (and, for example, South Africa), that social construct extended to become a _legal_ construct used to discriminate against those designated as black. Most of Europe doesn't share that unhappy recent history (although we have our own, of course), it's hard to appreciate just how much more contentious it is in the US than Europe.
From an also non-USian.
There's probably a whole Venn diagram or tree to describe different races, how far up the tree we go to describe someone pretty much depends on how far away we are from them on that tree. And then there are people of mixed race - we are all human after all.
For a non scientific concept it's surprising very highly predictive. Somehow, when I was living in Japan, every Japanese could guess I was a foreigner without me saying anything! For some strange reason that also happened to my Nigerian friend. I wish science could investigate this phenomenon and give it a name...
In a homogenous population like Japanese the distinction seems trivial to observe. In Europe or the USA, with more heterogenous populations “foreigners” get harder to identify, and race gets based on superficial features rather than heritage. More than one stupid American politician has called out Spanish or Chinese speakers as foreigners even though their ancestors go as far back in the US as most caucasians.
I once worked with a Nigerian woman who bristled and complained when our HR manager referred to her as “African American,” the politically correct term. Yetunde insisted on Nigerian, wanting no association with African Americans. Not the same race to her. That people around the world have very different definitions and boundaries when it comes to “race” tells you that it’s a social construct.
[Before someone corrects me, I know Japanese doesn’t really describe a homogenous population or ancestry from a handful of ancient ancestors. Japanese only seem homogenous relative to the US and Europe. I live in east Asia among people who don’t see other “Asians” as members of the same race.]
I'm also still very confused on what the actual relationship is purported to be, at least based on this article. How did they determine cognitive ability here?
I'm extremely wary of claims like the title, especially this one, as it seems like something children on a playground would say and use to bully each other, and certainly I imagine that many people will use it to justify being awful to others that are perceived to be "lesser" because of the rather outrageous title of the article, the article which I still really don't get how they're even making these connections to draw such a conclusion.
A few tests, among which specific memory tests. However, the memory tests didn't correlate, they claim only "fluid intelligence" correlates (even though they've also claimed the two are correlated). Fluid intelligence was measured "with the Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices, letter sets, and number series."
The problem, for me, is that there is nothing to relate intelligence (fluid or otherwise) and pupil size. Without something plausible linking the two, this is just meaningless.
And of course they rely on NHST statistics and a whole raft of modeling techniques, which is enough to call the whole article in doubt.
I dare say they used very visual tasks, which may be harder for people with small pupils under less than optimal lighting conditions.
Catecholamines:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catecholamine
They're both neurotransmitters and vasoconstrictors, but the latter effect is reversed in the pupils, so they dilate your pupils. If you're low on catecholamines then your working memory is impaired and your pupils will be smaller.
This is why amphetamine dilates your pupils and is prescribed to treat ADHD.
I firmly believe that cognitive ability is a -physical- trait that can be estimated with useful and actionable results.
I base this on the simple observation that age or disease related cognitive decline is a real and measurable thing.
If cognitive decline can be measured, then cognition can be measured.
If cognition can be measured, and cognitive decline is impactful, then the variability in cognition between people is meaningful.
These measurements of cognition variability correlate strongly with real-world tasking, strongly implying that cognition is a useful metric of capability.
I don’t see how any of this is in the least bit controversial.
I don’t see how cognitive capacity is somehow bad to measure, talk about, or select for in how and why we provide education to deliver maximum utility to the student.
How is this different from athletic capability? Some people can never be pro-level basketball players no matter how much they train.
The limiting traits in that respect are products of their genes and early development. I propose that cognitive capacity is not distinct in this regard. As in any n=10^9 sample there will be outliers, but outliers are not evidence that a strongly predictive relationship does not exist.
There is no apparent reason that cognitive capacity, which is presumably based on some kind of physical neural apparatus, is somehow intrinsically malleable and non- deterministic in kind that other physical traits are not.
To claim otherwise seems an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, of which I am at a loss to discover.
I suspect, without any substantial evidence, that this peculiar bias against the idea of determinism in cognitive ability has to do with the perception that cognitive ability is largely indeterminable externally, and many people do things to seem highly capable when they are not.
This preening behaviour is inherently threatened by the idea that it could easily be discovered, and people are defensive of this subterfuge on their own behalf and/or the behalf of others.
But, that is just a suspicion, which I would gladly be disabused of if anyone else has a better insight as to the motive behind what seems to me to be a highly illogical bias.
Mimicry won. As with many other metrics, once something becomes a metric it no longer accurately measures what it was intended to measure.
Apparently being intelligent (and likely needing eye correction from all that reading) as well as tall, is no fun combination. The hard life of a multi-variate outlier in the world of average ergonomics.
Is reading actually proven to cause short sightedness? I read everything I could lay my hands on from the age of four. From age ten I read at at least two hundred pages a day until I was in my thirties. I still don't need glasses at the age of nearly sixty nine. I realize that this is only one data point but I also know a lot of people who do need glasses and most of them are not and never have been avid readers.
But I spent a large amount of time out of doors tramping the fields, especially in the summer. I still do spend at least an hour out of doors every day.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/13/1250555...
It's an interesting concept, but I don't feel like the authors defend the hypothesis very well.
Calling Raven's Progressive Matrices, a measure of "reasoning about novel problems" when it's far from novel in psychology, and most of your test subjects are psychology students?
By the way, I think they mean that Raven's Matrices test (somehow) for an ability to reason about problems that are new to the test subject, not that the test itself is new.
I'm just intelligent, thankyouverymuch!
Also, F** ScienceDirect: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021....
And it's not a simple one-way street - drugs of course have an effect (caffeine, for a start) - but psychological factors also come into play - someone who is more able to activate their attention in response to a task will likely show a physiological response. Your pupils will "pop" in response to both pleasant (sexually attractive person) and unpleasant (unexpected large tax bill) tasks or stimuli, but the amount by which they do so is going to vary from one pair of (background conditions, situation) to the next.
I think the underlying mechanism is related to neuron activation in the brain itself because it’s possible that more visual stimulation, regardless of being involved in the task at hand, helps with cognitive functioning in some manner. There are some interesting questions remaining to explore here, like would direct neuron stimulation bypass the pupil size role.
poster.pdf: https://osf.io/qhjpm