Racism is baseless

[caveman1917]

This does a pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence

No it doesn't, like, at all. Not even in principle. Does showing a couple of examples of left-handed people a "pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not [genetically] predisposed to being left-handed" after being given examples of right-handed people? Think it through.

Also, is there any reason why you and macdoc are avoiding examples of early hunter-gatherers in favour of examples of post-neolithic agricultural societies and, in the latest case, complex hunter gatherers in North America (who are hunter gatherers in the sense that they do not practice agriculture but share the relevant social characteristics of agricultural societies, such as (semi-)permanent residence, private property, hierarchy, a state, ...)? Let us not forget that for the overwhelmingly largest part of human - as in genetically homo sapiens, which is what your argument is based on - history these were not the social structures of human society.

 

[caveman1917]

So they ignore -from ignorance, plain o'le ignorance- that...

{...}

Yes, the only possible reason why people would ignore your pseudo-rational musings must be because they're just plain o'le ignorant.

 

[Roboramma]

No it doesn't, like, at all. Not even in principle. Does showing a couple of examples of left-handed people a "pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not [genetically] predisposed to being left-handed" after being given examples of right-handed people? Think it through.

The point isn't that examples of violence exist but that human societies in general (and hunter-gatherer societies specifically) are violent. The link I provided looks at societies all over the world and throughout history. One of his charts is titled "Rate of violent deaths in all non-state societies for all societies that I could find data for "

Something else from that link:

My sources and procedure to collect this data

The starting point for my research was the sample presented by Pinker (2011).12 Pinker does not present the numerical data itself but instead includes two bar charts (Figures 2-2 and 2-3) from which the exact data cannot be discerned. Therefore I looked up all the sources for the data he presents.
The topic of Pinker’s book is the decline of violence in humanity’s history. That would give him an incentive to cherry-pick data that suits his narrative. For this reason I had contact with several of his critics and asked them for their evidence. After this assessment of Pinker’s data, I did not find any reason to assume that he cherry-picked. He included all the data that his sources included.
Through my contact with critics of Pinker’s book I was referred to a critique of Pinker’s data by Douglas Fry.13 Fry criticizes some of Pinker’s data. I checked the original sources for the criticized information, referred to the criticisms and the original sources in my comments and corrected the data when the criticism was justified.
An additional source that I added to my dataset and which was not yet available to Pinker is a study published by Robert Walker and Drew Bailey (published in 2013).14

Also, is there any reason why you and macdoc are avoiding examples of early hunter-gatherers in favour of examples of post-neolithic agricultural societies and, in the latest case, complex hunter gatherers in North America (who are hunter gatherers in the sense that they do not practice agriculture but share the relevant social characteristics of agricultural societies, such as (semi-)permanent residence, private property, hierarchy, a state, ...)? Let us not forget that for the overwhelmingly largest part of human - as in genetically homo sapiens, which is what your argument is based on - history these were not the social structures of human society.

Did you even look at the link I posted? The data is literally worldwide and both archeological and ethnographic.

To give a picture of what's included:

Contents
I. Empirical View
I.1 Share of Violent Deaths in Prehistoric Archeological, State and Non-State Societies
I.2 Rate of Violent Deaths in State and Non-State Societies
I.3 Archeological Evidence on Violent Deaths
I.4 Ethnographic Evidence on Violent Deaths in Nonstate Societies Compared with Violent Deaths in State Societies
II. Data Quality & Definition
II.1 Unit of Measurement: Rates vs Shares
II.2 Distinguishing between War and Murders
III. Data Sources
III.1 Violence Death Rates
III.2 Violence Death Shares
III.3 Share of Violent Deaths in State Societies
Footnotes

 

[Dancing David]

...and now we diverge again. I'm sure the anthropologist you read were a fine selection of all what the Anglosphere has to offer. The heavily contaminated and biased lexicon is evidence of that. It has to be hard to live in a culture where people don't die but pass away -with equally rotting results-. A world where all the words have to be carefully carved.

I have known many a non-anglo/non-european anthropologists, granted a limited sample of around 30, all of them thought that race was a social construct of a particular society, with less meaning than most things except as a social construct.

 

[Dancing David]

No it doesn't, like, at all. Not even in principle. Does showing a couple of examples of left-handed people a "pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not [genetically] predisposed to being left-handed" after being given examples of right-handed people? Think it through.

Also, is there any reason why you and macdoc are avoiding examples of early hunter-gatherers in favour of examples of post-neolithic agricultural societies and, in the latest case, complex hunter gatherers in North America (who are hunter gatherers in the sense that they do not practice agriculture but share the relevant social characteristics of agricultural societies, such as (semi-)permanent residence, private property, hierarchy, a state, ...)? Let us not forget that for the overwhelmingly largest part of human - as in genetically homo sapiens, which is what your argument is based on - history these were not the social structures of human society.

then they are semi-agricultural or horticultural and not hunter-gathers... please name an H-G society you think had that high a population level.

 

[Vortigern99]

You are pretty haughty for someone who refuses to distinguish between the sociopolitics of race and the biology of race. The legislation you cited deals with to sociopolitics of race while the discussion we're having addresses the biology of race.

No-one is the denying that the sociopolitics of race is real. We are just disputing that there is any coherent biological basis for the sociopolitics.

This. If I could have said this as well, I would have written it myself.

 

[caveman1917]

The point isn't that examples of violence exist but that human societies in general (and hunter-gatherer societies specifically) are violent.

No the point was quite explicitly that humans are (genetically) predisposed to violence:

Bonobos are not genetically pre-disposed to violence, humans and chimps are.

This does a pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence

If you are going to change the claim to that there can exist social and cultural conditions under which humans become violent, then sure I agree.

One of his charts is titled "Rate of violent deaths in all non-state societies for all societies that I could find data for "

What makes you think that "lumping together all data I could find" necessarily makes a good sample in a statistical sense?

Did you even look at the link I posted?

No I did not, in fact. I argued against the point you selected by quoting. If you did not intend for this point to be the main thrust of your argument, as based on the article you quoted, then why did you select it for quoting?

Even so, your original argument was predisposition of humans to violence. By this you would still have failed to show your case, which requires controlling for social and cultural factors, which you clearly (as your selection of the quote shows) did not do.

 

[Vortigern99]

Let's take a look at how this went the last time we were down this path, Vortigern...

Wow, I can see the future!

Later on, you linked to some papers that you must have hoped nobody would actually look at, because you claimed that they supported a "no such things as races" claim, which they clearly did not... and also (in the same post) tried telling everybody that what the word really means is something different from how anyone ever really uses it or what dictionaries say (behavioral differences rather than physical/physiological), again supported with links that didn't actually support it at all...

...then there was a later post in which you ran away from the original biological claim and just focused on trying to redefine the word as something else that would be easier for you to attack, this time linking to a couple of dictionaries, plus a couple of other sites that weren't dictionaries but you acted as if they were anyway, but then, even for the links that were actually to dictionaries, still lied about what even your own links said because what they actually said contradicted you.

This time, maybe we can skip the bulk of the routine, straight to the last part, where you abandon the argument over definitions too and explicitly admit that you don't care about the facts because your moral crusade trumps them.

I'll be happy to look into all that again, at your suggestion, but I would certainly appreciate it if you would drop the superior tone. If I'm mistaken, if I made an unsupportable claim, I'll do my best to own it.

That race is a biologically invalid concept I inherited from my anthropology professors in the early 90s. Initially I objected to their claim, but over the years the literature convinced me. The majority of geneticists, anthropologists, biologists reject the idea of race. Their works have persuaded me; I did not arrive at my conclusions a priori.

For the record, I didn't start this thread as you seem to be implying. I read it and commented, according to the nature of discussion forums. I left the earlier thread for the same real-life reasons I stopped posting on this forum altogether.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I could instead choose to categorise them based on the length of their second toe. Those falling into particular ranges of length are category 1, a slightly longer range puts one into category 2, etc.

Categorize them according to the length of their ring finger when compared with their index finger and you will find some interesting categories like gender and life expectancy (it has to do with the testosterone level during gestation).

 

[caveman1917]

then they are semi-agricultural or horticultural and not hunter-gathers... please name an H-G society you think had that high a population level.

They are semi-agricultural if they practice agriculture alongside hunting/gathering. The are horticultural if they practice horticulture. If they practice hunting/gathering but have the relevant social characteristics of agricultural societies then they are complex hunter-gatherers. Population level doesn't even come into it.

And even if you, for some reason, want to argue nomenclature then it still holds that, in assessing the claim of genetic predisposition of violence, the relevant aspect is their social and cultural characteristics - irrespective of whether you want to call them complex hunter-gatherers, semi-agricultural, horticultural or whatever.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Yes, the only possible reason why people would ignore your pseudo-rational musings must be because they're just plain o'le ignorant.

Yes? How?

Showing annoyance for what you don't understand is not a good argument.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I have known many a non-anglo/non-european anthropologists, granted a limited sample of around 30, all of them thought that race was a social construct of a particular society, with less meaning than most things except as a social construct.

Where were they born and where did they live?

 

[LSSBB]

They are semi-agricultural if they practice agriculture alongside hunting/gathering. The are horticultural if they practice horticulture. If they practice hunting/gathering but have the relevant social characteristics of agricultural societies then they are complex hunter-gatherers. Population level doesn't even come into it.

And even if you, for some reason, want to argue nomenclature then it still holds that, in assessing the claim of genetic predisposition of violence, the relevant aspect is their social and cultural characteristics - irrespective of whether you want to call them complex hunter-gatherers, semi-agricultural, horticultural or whatever.

In the example under discussion the group that were victims of the violence are the group under discussion. The perpetrators of the violence did not appear, as I read it, to have lived in the village and hence came from elsewhere. Therefore the predisposition to violence cannot be claimed or dismissed on the basis of he characteristics of the inhabitants of the village.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Those discussing here on the total off-topic of violence (which deserves its own thread in its own right), how have you operatively defined "violent nature" and "not violent nature"? I mean, what are the rates of which class of incidents that renders one population violent and another population peaceful?

You don't need to be exact nor right, you only need to show that you are not building a castle in the air and that you're not fighting for the possession of adjectives.

 

[caveman1917]

Yes? How?

It's your assumption, you explain it.

Showing annoyance for what you don't understand is not a good argument.

I understand it just fine, it's a pseudo-rational musing. Feel free to provide some empirical evidence for it. I'm especially interested in evidence that propensity for violence is passed along a parent-offspring relation rather than, say, inter- and intra-group socio-cultural exchange.

 

[aleCcowaN]

No-one is the denying that the sociopolitics of race is real. We are just disputing that there is any coherent biological basis for the sociopolitics.

This. If I could have said this as well, I would have written it myself.

So we're in complete agreement, provided you're talking within the context of race oriented sociopolitics in apartheid, caste systems and what the civil rights movement in the USA fought.

How do you jump from there to the haughty defence of the defenestration of the concept of race just to serve political purposes, it eludes me.

 

[aleCcowaN]

comments inline

I understand it just fine [no, you clearly don't], it's a pseudo-rational musing [Again: Showing annoyance for what you don't understand is not a good argument.] . Feel free to provide some empirical evidence for it.[Specify the "it". You'll be tested for reading comprehension in every step, because that just looked like "do a lot of work so I will be able to dismiss it"] I'm especially interested in evidence that propensity for violence is passed along a parent-offspring relation rather than, say, inter- and intra-group socio-cultural exchange.

That sounds like you were onto the topic, but I regret to say you're completely off. Are you looking for evidence of a long gone past in the modern world? Tell me where do you expect to find starving populations and groups attacking other groups without any external intervention, and among all of it, statistically significant studies of violence-leaning behaviour in parents and offspring.

 

[Roboramma]

This does a pretty good job of refuting the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence:

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths/

The interesting thing of course is the data as a whole, for that please go to the link, but to quote the most shocking example:

In spite of the highlighted, somehow it's suggested that I meant the quoted example and not the data at the link, to be what refutes the idea that humans are not predisposed to violence.

I'll note, that given the diversity of societies represented in the data there's no cultural explanation for this data: if all societies are violent then violence is probably a human predisposition and not just a cultural artefact.

 

[caveman1917]

In the example under discussion the group that were victims of the violence are the group under discussion. The perpetrators of the violence did not appear, as I read it, to have lived in the village and hence came from elsewhere. Therefore the predisposition to violence cannot be claimed or dismissed on the basis of he characteristics of the inhabitants of the village.

The characteristics of the inhabitants of the village were shared by surrounding villages and cultures, and more or less by most contemporary tribes in North America in general. Which also shows the problem of the "lump together all data I can find" because North American tribes are an over-represented sample in the literature, as are all (semi-)sedentary and socially stratified human societies for the simple reason that it's easier to find evidence of them. And when you find that the relevant variables correlate with how easy it is to acquire evidence then you know that "lump together everything I can find" is a bad idea.

For one, the !Kung, even being a single datapoint, is more relevant than half the rest of the data because they more closely represent early homo sapiens than all the North American tribes in that dataset put together. Homo sapiens has existed for 200.000 years, the Neolithic revolution was only 10.000 years ago and those North American tribes and their social structures are from a couple hundred years ago. People should get some perspective on this.

 

[LSSBB]

Those discussing here on the total off-topic of violence (which deserves its own thread in its own right), how have you operatively defined "violent nature" and "not violent nature"? I mean, what are the rates of which class of incidents that renders one population violent and another population peaceful?

You don't need to be exact nor right, you only need to show that you are not building a castle in the air and that you're not fighting for the possession of adjectives.

I agree a new thread is warranted.