If the subjects' ancestors came from all over the inhabited world, the clusters that first emerge will identify the five major races: Asians, Caucasians, sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans and the original inhabitants of Australia and Papua New Guinea.
What the heck are "Asians?
Turks, Arabs, Indians, Malaysians, Chinese?
Seems to me that's WAY too much diversity to consider a single race.
Turn out the lights, the party's over.
Over the long run, this tends to degrade the integrity of mankind's ancient search for truth, sometimes called "the Conversation."
The search for objective truth is the human race's best hope for a peaceful future. The degradation of that search process leads to division and - ultimately - violence.
Science is a system for discovering truth based on physical evidence. The language of Science - of which Mathematics is so large a part - is a medium of communication, but it is something more than that. It is a formal system, part of a larger system that enables people from different cultures, who speak different languages and live in different places... that enables all these people to make their contribution to the search of objective truth.
The Truth Shall Set You Free is much more than an aphorism.
Don’t know about the book, but the review misses two very important points.
Human evolutionary pressure since becoming intelligent has primarily operated between groups, not individuals. Losing groups were wiped out.
Or, more accurately, the males were. The females were generally kept alive as secondary wives for the victors.
So evolutionary pressures acted primarily on groups of males. IOW, the primary evolutionary pressure through most of human history was to be on the winning side of wars.
The genetic evidence shows this very clearly. The male line of inheritance is much less diverse than the female line, because of all the male lines that were wiped out when the females were allowed to live and breed.
http://takimag.com/article/the_liberal_creationists_steve_sailer#axzz30gnCQBET
He says more elegantly what many of us figured out years ago on our own: cultures that develop in harsh climates have to be tougher and smarter than those who live where food grows all year round.
Very good piece - thanks for sharing it.
Murry lays out well how, again and again, the Left is anti-science, a role they like to ascribe to our side.
But I was struck by this “[the book discusses} circumstantial evidence that the genetic characteristics of the English lower class evolved between the 13th century and the 19th.”
That is interesting, but what is meant by “lower class”, esp.in that time frame? I mean, wouldn’t that be almost everybody?
The new tool also has implications when it comes to the study of the geographical origin of certain populations, such as the Roma Gypsies or European Jews. In fact, Dr. Elhaik believes that GPS may significantly alter our perception of ethnicity. "It is impossible for any of us to tick one box on a form such as White British or African as we are much [more] complex models with our own unique identities," he said. "The notion of race is simply not plausible."
Recent data effectively confirms multiregional evolution.
Oops.
Sigh...so what’s the bottom line? The Chinese are smart and Caucasians (with the exception of Jews) and Negroid races are boobs? We’ve pretty much known this for 50 years and I speak as a completely boobish Caucasian.
Human equality can only come from G-d, not from "nature red in tooth and claw." Yet on this issue theists and atheists seem to switch places (as they do on the topic of extinction, which to the atheist should be a meaningless repetition of what has always happened and to the theist should be the eternal and tragic loss of a niche species created especially by G-d).