Napoleon Ier wrote:got tonkaed wrote:well fair enough. its somewhere in there somewhere basically i just called them not real scientists and made a few semantic arguments. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Oh, OK...fair enough. I think I must point you to the excellent GabonX's commentary on the matter: we don't know what each race's qualities are or what they mean, but each race is certainly more different than the PC Academic fascists would have us think.
The real truth is that even what constitutes a "race" varies with culture. In the US, it is common to refer to 4 basic races. I am old enough to remember learning in school about the white, black, red and yellow groups. I also remember the look on my teacher's face when I (and a couple of other girls) exclaimed how pretty mixing white and red were ... not precisely the "lesson" our teacher was trying to pass on. Thankfully, the best lesson I learned was at home and in my church, where even back then, in a small rural community, we had people of different races.
Any way, I got a natural history type atlas from another country and they laid out not just white/black/yellow/red, but distinguished about 12-15 different groups, including Irish as a distinct Europeann group.
In the US, everything gets more complicated because we are all pretty mixed. A couple of famous "black" personalities, for example recently took part in genetic studies and found that over 50% of their genetic makeup was northern European.
But here is the thing Genetics, biology and the way folks are raised each have so many varied impacts that it is very, very, very difficult to pick out how any one particular factor contributes to what a person becomes. For any example, there are thousands of exceptions. Take even something as Mental Retardation. I doubt anyone would suggest but that those individuals have a rougher road than the rest of us. Yet, there are a couple of well known TV stars who each have Downs, each have a relatively low IQ, yet they managed to obtain High School diplomas. Contrat that with the many geniuses or near geniuses who end up in Juvenile Detention and never do complete a degree... or anything else of note. (and I do not speak lightly... a high percentage of incarcerated juveniles ARE kids with relatively high IQs)
Two things you said are true.
1. Talking about race and racial genetics is touchy ... but something we perhaps should be able to analyze and discuss just like anything else.
2. Each individual has control over what they become, regardless of what attributes they have or don't have.