No, unfortunately, modern people are differing mixtures of multiple separate SPECIES of archaic humans. In other words, humans are all mongrels. Different traits vary more or less independently instead of clustering. There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be biologically defined. Up to about a century ago, everyone in the United States and Britain who wrote about "race" assumed that the Irish were clearly a separate and inferior "race," as distinct from the obviously superior English. Today everyone who deals with "race" assumes that Irish and English are the same "race." Since the second half of the 20th century, the associations of race with the ideologies and theories that grew out of the work of 19th-century anthropologists and physiologists has led to the use of the word itself becoming even more problematic. It's a common fallacy for people to think "race" is synonymous with human variation/diversity, when it isn't whatsoever. The whole Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid schemes is rooted in typology. The typological framework of delineating races in humans has no scientific or anthropological validity whatsoever and involves folk taxonomies based on perceived traits. Two animals are different species when they cannot produce fertile offspring with each other.
All humans are in fact members of the same species and subspecies, i.e., the same race. White people belong to the same race as African humans because there is insufficient genetic differentiation between human populations to properly classify them into racial categories. The classification of humans into groups based on incidence and prevalence of phenotypical characteristics (the statistical probability of your ancestors' geographical origins) as evidence of "race" is scientifically absurd and should be phased out. Science illiterates are unaware that all phenotypes and alleles for them exist in all "races." Almost all humans share the same set of genes. varying populations, however, have varying proportions of active (expressed) genes as a result of long-term, geographically distributed selective pressures.(s).. For instance, the genes associated with dark hair are present in Asian populations, which include native Americans, but are also present in European populations, albeit at a reduced rate of activation. When genes are excessively or insufficiently expressed, distinct configurations emerge.
Another major problem with the typological model is that the number of "races" you end up with depends on the number and kinds of traits employed in the classification. The more traits used, the fewer people in the world there are who share them. For example, light skin color is considered to be a defining characteristic of Europeans. However, when you add the criteria of narrow noses, straight hair, and tall stature, many Europeans would be excluded altogether or the European racial category would have to be further subdivided into several smaller "races." Since the number of "races" can be so easily changed by the way they are defined, it is clear that they do not really exist as distinct biological groupings of people. Instead, they are arbitrary creations that reflect our ethnocentric views of ourselves and other people. They are mainly cultural rather than biological groupings.
A bit of history
The term race was first used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century, to denote what was believed to be genetically differentiated human populations defined by observable characteristics. However, scientists now consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. People who believe that we should treat "race" as subspecies fail to recognize, that if that were the case, there would be very large blocks of empty spaces in PCA and MDS Plots signifying the variation. We do not observe this, instead every single population on the planet, clusters closely in an uninterrupted fashion. Today (outside of a few small circles) race is used in a social/political manner by the masses and not biological. The question of what race you belong to is a spurious one, since in Genetics, Taxonomy and Zoology, a race is the lowest taxon ranking any organism can achieve.
Most people don't know anything about genes
Some people misunderstand what genes are for and what they do in the body. People don’t understand that genes direct the production of proteins. Genes, on their own, are not the masters but the servants. And, as entirely passive strings of chemicals, it is logically impossible for them to initiate and steer development in any sense. Long before scientists even knew what the structure of DNA was, the idea of genetic or biological determinism was prevalent. Genetic determinism is the theory that an individual organism’s behavior is predominantly controlled by that individual’s genes, playing down or eliminating the role of environment entirely. In fact, this theory remained popular throughout the twentieth century, and it is only in recent decades that continuous scientific study has been capable of diminishing the role of genetic determinism in the behavior of living things.
DNA, and the genes it encodes, used to be compared to the pages of a book. The DNA was written down carefully, page after page, in a specific manner, and if this “book” was read in a specific way, the resultant interpretation would lead to genes and, by extension, a biological being. However, if any part of the DNA sequence was written down incorrectly, this would lead to errors i.e. gene mutations. This analogy corresponds very well with genetic determinism – nothing matters but the genes that are encoded.
However, nowadays DNA is akin to the hard-drive of a computer; the base sequence from which everything else is built upon. DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system through transcription factors, markers of one kind or another, interactions with the proteins. Modifications that directly affect DNA, such as mutations, are actual errors or damage to the hardware. Any additional modifications to the DNA are comparable to software installed on the computer i.e. do not directly change the DNA sequence but, rather, sit “on top of” the base data in order to change the final outcome of any given sequence.
Epigenetics is the branch of genetics which deals with changes to DNA that alter levels of gene expression, without altering the DNA sequence itself. Many epigenetic signals are known as post-translational modifications; by and large, these modifications occur at the site of gene transcription and ultimately determine whether a gene is over-expressed, under-expressed, or expressed at all. These epigenetic modifications can permanently turn genes off when they are deemed entirely unnecessary. Modifications such as these can be activated and deactivated based on particular environmental stimuli, be that stimuli from within the cell itself or externally e.g. too much sunlight, not enough food etc. Perhaps most importantly, whilst epigenetic modifications are heritable – they can be passed on to offspring - they can also be very readily reversed.
Viruses/bacteria/fungi/parasites are also the gene manipulators... as humans go, our own genetic mutation is copy/replication “mistake” error driven but when living in an environment with all the pathogens, we are constantly getting edited by these manipulators which give us cancers, diabetes, autism, etc. We have so many viruses embedded in our genome that we can’t even begin life (initial cell differentiation) without utilizing the initial control functions passed from a virus, unlike all other mammals which don’t have these virus type cell differentiators. We are symbiotic with our gut bacteria for energy and digestion and to defend against other bacteria and viruses.
There are always going to be genetic components to some aspects of why an organism is the way it is. However, human physical traits such as height, which used to be considered entirely genetic, are now considered to be epigenetics.
https://kottke.org/23/02/why-did-south- ... -100-years
Why do blacks and whites have different testosterone levels? Most significant difference is probably going to be the vitamin d levels, drop those and the body has to compensate by boosting the reservoirs for the immune system... those happen to also allow the higher testosterone levels unless the immune system needs to tone down the use of them, so it turns down testosterone when it is weak and needs access to the muscles resources...
Human intelligence
Effectively, human/“intelligence” is just a survival strategy. That is, a method of acquiring energy for structuring the growth of an organization of cells... the greater/higher the level of intelligence, as defined by both breathe of knowledge about the external reality and the temporal domain of reality (history for perspective and future for planning to be where the energy will be, or even better planting the future so energy will be there when and where we want it) is just the extension of that strategy of acquiring energy, nutrients, etc.
The human brain is not intelligence, it’s a survival mechanism optimized for selecting immune and other compatibilities. Generally speaking, intelligence is pattern matching but still requires an active context to know if you need to calculate within two seconds whether the mountain lion is going to eat you or run away from you? The high level processes of the brain are coordinating the retrieval of context mode and maintaining it, while activating different coherency regions that might be used by that context mode. Similar to the OS maintaining the partition of the programs and scheduling the access to resources like the memory or storage systems. For the most part, this means that the “lazy intelligence” only executes when it is necessary for survival. Since our world is getting a lot easier and safer, your brain has no need to emphasize memorizing frequently observed sequences (Cognitive modules) of patterns and developing invariant representations. We grow into a context of demands that then causes the growth of the required level of complexity to manage the knowledge and acquisition of details to fill in the domains.
There is no intelligence genes
They are basically allele counting and making unsubstantiated claims. The truth is that if you get a particularly nasty virus when you are young, then you are a prime suspect for developing the overactive brain that is edging towards the schizophrenia brain patterns depending on which proteins are over or under produced once the virus starts operating it’s control functions. After digging through the research on various "geniuses" throughout history, I learned a higher percentage of them had childhoods that more than likely resulted in a similar over expressed memory encoding activity in their brain due to viruses and the resulting anxiety of the heightened immune system pushed them to solve problems they had in front of them, any and all problems they could think about because that is how the brain works when it is stressed - it tries to solve problems. However, the amount of energy required to maintain that excessive brain activity and immune system will likely kill you.
The default state of a human is basically like a cow. Humans were NOT meant to ponder the whole universe their entire lives, aka philosophize and grandiosize their own take on what it means to be alive… they are meant to learn new things and how to survive but the brain isn’t supposed to be on all the time. Studies on the heritability of intelligence started over a century ago can be dismissed with new research in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience connecting the brain to the immune system. Immune molecules are actually defining how the brain is functioning.
Polygenic scores may be all the rage with halfwits, but they are a fudge. A decade’s efforts to identify individual bricks that build the house have failed: let’s just throw a few thousand suspicious bits of material together to see if they at least make a start. In a host of assumptions like additivity and linearity of effects, it entails a highly naïve – indeed outmoded – view of the gene and biological systems.
Polygenic scores can be slightly interesting from the point of view of animal/plant breeding, where they might actually be usable/measurable. but human GWAS is too much of a hot mess for these things to be even slightly interpretable. What conceivable use does a measure have when it maybe sometimes can explain 1% of the variance? Recall that polygenic scores are, basically, linear combinations of dozens of features–when there is no plausible reason to believe that these effects are statistically independent–so you’ve basically overfit the crap out of what little signal there is, and gee whiz, turns out the prediction is crap also. The method entails a formidable battery of assumptions, data corrections, and statistical maneuvers. But the most fatal assumption is that human societies can be treated as random breeding populations in randomly distributed environments with equally random distributions of genes.
On the contrary, human populations reflect continuous emigration and immigration. Immigrants with related genetic backgrounds tend not to disperse randomly in the target society. In their flow to jobs they concentrate in different social strata. This creates (entirely coincidental, non-causal) correlation between social class and genetic background persisting across many generations. For example, the Wellcome Trust’s “genetic map of Britain” shows strikingly different genetic admixtures among residents of different geographic regions of the United Kingdom.
This is what is called “population structure.” As Evan Charney notes, it is “omnipresent in all populations and it wreaks havoc with assumptions about ‘relatedness’ and ‘unrelatedness’ that cannot be ‘corrected for’ by the statistical methods [devised]”. History shows that anyone committed to a “genes as destiny” narrative, and a mythological meritocracy, based on nothing but mountains of correlations, needs to tread very cautiously.
We see this with r/K selection theory as an application for human behavior and even *racial* differences in behavior. Rushton didn’t properly understand ecological theory, nor did he understand evolution, nor did he understand anything involving r/K selection theory which means one can safely disregard what Rushton—or anyone like Molyneaux who doesn’t know about the theory—says about it.
Honestly, this is a classic case of someone over-extrapolating something in a high-school textbook and then proceed to misapply it haphazardly to something that they think sounds related. "Higher birth rates? Yep, that's r selection" *proceeds to ignore every other characteristic of r/K selection theory because they've got far enough to confirm their biases*. Definitely ignore that it's an equation that throws out more variables than you can count to focus only on the "dominant" ones under extreme conditions. Pretty much every *race* had similar birth rates until industrialization and birth control. Having few children is a modern luxury that has zero to do with race, and everything to do with circumstance, and a trivial inspection of history will tell you that near a dozen children were normal in pretty much every European country up until the 1800s. Hell it was a common convention in the roman empire to name your children numbers, like quintius, sextus, or decimus, because so many would die young. In fact, by the 1900s Europe had more than half the world's population.
In conclusion
We, in the established order, recommend is that if you insist on labeling people by groups then do by national/geographical means. "That Kenyan guy over there" makes a lot more sense then saying "that black guy over there". Not to mention the latter would be a subjective and inaccurate label. Especially considering being "black/white" etc is completely relative to the nation and culture one lives in. Being "white" 100 years ago meant something completely different then that it means today.
Good day.
