Race discussion with Big.Thirsty

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IschKabibble

IschKabibble

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More FBI forensics...

Racial Determination

A human hair can be associated with a particular racial group based on established models for each group. Forensic examiners differentiate between hairs of Caucasoid (European ancestry), Mongoloid (Asian ancestry), and Negroid (African ancestry) origin, all of which exhibit microscopic characteristics that distinguish one racial group from another. Head hairs are generally considered best for determining race, although hairs from other body areas can be useful. Racial determination from the microscopic examination of head hairs from infants, however, can be difficult, and hairs from individuals of mixed racial ancestry may possess microscopic characteristics attributed to more than one racial group.

The identification of race is most useful as an investigative tool, but it can also be an associative tool when an individual’s hairs exhibit unusual racial characteristics.

Caucasoid (European)
Hairs of Caucasoid or Caucasian origin can be of fine to medium coarseness, are generally straight or wavy in appearance, and exhibit colors ranging from blonde to brown to black. The hair shafts of Caucasian hairs vary from round to oval in cross section and have fine to medium-sized, evenly distributed pigment granules.

Mongoloid (Asian)
Hairs of Mongoloid or Asian origin are regularly coarse, straight, and circular in cross section, with a wider diameter than the hairs of the other racial groups. The outer layer of the hair, the cuticle, is usually significantly thicker than the cuticle of Negroid and Caucasian hairs, and the medulla, or central canal, is continuous and wide. The hair shaft, or cortex, of Mongoloid hair contains pigment granules that are generally larger in size than the pigment granules of Caucasian hairs and which often appear to be grouped in patchy areas within the shaft. Mongoloid hair can have a characteristic reddish appearance as a product of its pigment.

Negroid (African)
Hairs of Negroid or African origin are regularly curly or kinky, have a flattened cross section, and can appear curly, wavy, or coiled. Negroid pigment granules are larger than those found in Mongoloid and Caucasian hair and are grouped in clumps of different sizes and shapes. The density of the pigment in the hair shaft may be so great as to make the hair opaque. A Negroid hair shaft exhibits variation or apparent variation in diameter because of its flattened nature and the manner in which it lies on the microscope slide. Twisting of the hair shaft, known as buckling, can be present, and the hair shaft frequently splits along the length.
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Hairs, Fibers, Crime, and Evidence, Part 1, by Deedrick (Forensic Science Communications, July 2000)
 
maurice

maurice

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Oct 21, 2015
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At work and don't have time to read the whole thread before posting (sorry) but forensic anthropologists have a compelling financial incentive to say that they can tell a lot about a person based on their remains. Also, the FBI has an awful track record of exaggerating forensic conclusions to implicate innocent people. Just to cite a single notorious example:
Brandon Mayfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Take the claims of "forensic scientists" with a large grain of salt. Unless they can back their conclusions with replicated, peer reviewed, double-blind research, it's probably pseudo-science bullshit.
 
DFW4L

DFW4L

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maurice said:
At work and don't have time to read the whole thread before posting (sorry) but forensic anthropologists have a compelling financial incentive to say that they can tell a lot about a person based on their remains.
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...and likewise, there are decades of various social sciences, entire fields of study with corresponding industries, that have financial & idealogical incentives to maintain the opposite assertions (race being exclusively a social construct)...

if race were not biological, it wouldn't be detectable in a DNA test
 
maurice

maurice

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Big.Thirsty said:
...and likewise, there are decades of various social sciences, entire fields of study with corresponding industries, that have financial & idealogical incentives to maintain the opposite assertions
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Right. Which is why it's a waste of time to appeal to authority instead of the hard evidence.

I hope that nobody in this thread disagrees that genetic variation exists and manifests physically, especially in isolated or formerly isolated populations. That's been known (and exploited through husbandry) for centuries. At an extreme and over a long enough timeline, it results in divergent species but, within a given species, there are no real lines, just general correlations. (Even the species lines are kinda blurry.) Some of those variations were cherry picked and assigned to an arbitrary number of "races." So arbitrary that it seems like a social construct to me.

And that's without even reaching the problem of migration.
 
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maurice said:
Right. Which is why it's a waste of time to appeal to authority instead of the hard evidence.

I hope that nobody in this thread disagrees that genetic variation exists and manifests physically, especially in isolated or formerly isolated populations. That's been known (and exploited through husbandry) for centuries. At an extreme and over a long enough timeline, it results in divergent species but, within a given species, there are no real lines, just general correlations. (Even the species lines are kinda blurry.) Some of those variations were cherry picked and assigned to an arbitrary number of "races." So arbitrary that it seems like a social construct to me.

And that's without even reaching the problem of migration.
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That is really well written, man.

*edit* one thing though, aren't we forced to appeal to authority when consulting hard evidence?
 
DFW4L

DFW4L

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maurice said:
Some of those variations were cherry picked and assigned to an arbitrary number of "races." So arbitrary that it seems like a social construct to me.
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Race is absolutely a social construct, never doubted or questioned that at all, I think the best ('worst') evidence of race being a deeply ingrained social construct is how a large % of people will consider someone who is 85% white, a 'black' person.

In my own experience I grew up a Caucasian born in Hawaii being told to go back to 'where I came from' a million times by people whose 4/4 grandparents were born thousands of miles from here (as were mine, just in the opposite direction)

I also think it exists biologically, that is where Leigh and I differed, triggering the discussion.
 
Leigh

Leigh

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blank said:
That is really well written, man.

*edit* one thing though, aren't we forced to appeal to authority when consulting hard evidence?
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I guess to an extent but the degree is smaller than most people would think. We can challenge the conclusions, how the evidence was obtained, the independence of reviewers etc.
 
IschKabibble

IschKabibble

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Leigh said:
I guess to an extent but the degree is smaller than most people would think. We can challenge the conclusions, how the evidence was obtained, the independence of reviewers etc.
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Arguing about the degrees of our differences is a social construct.

 
Leigh

Leigh

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Leigh said:
Ok I had a read. There isn't much about race identification in there, other than they can recognise race from cranial remains. No description of method or accuracy.

Consider that we generally identify someone's race by looking at them, although this again isn't definitive.

So whilst it is interesting, the article doesn't provide enough info to be conclusive. I will do some more reading on it.
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I did some more reading on cranial differences between races. Evidence isn't conclusive and studies show that modern human variation is continuous rather than discrete or based on race. As with other genetic traits, there is much more variation within a race than between races.

MYTH BUSTED!
 
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