On That Reddit Debate

So a handful of people reading this may be aware that there was a small debate between me and a couple alt-right asshats on Reddit. I pretty much went idle for a couple months and, admittedly that's mostly just my laziness there. But I decided to check up on it today and, it was god awful as always.

See, the main gist is that I was responding to a post about race and crime. There was a response written by a couple blokes to my post and, while they're both poor (I'll elaborate on this momentarily), ultimately I won't be responding too anytime soon for reasons detailed.

For one, I made the post prematurely. It was a few months ago, and I didn't have a coherent plan for the different concepts that I'd be tackling - which is problematic. There's a lot needed to understand about this debate, both for concepts directly stated in the Reddit posts as well as things implied in discussions. It ultimately deals with intricate points about heritability, genetic theory, supposed fallacies, how statistical measures ought to be used, et cetera. To try to demonstrate all this on Reddit of all things is hilariously bad, because it leads to a very shitty understanding of what's being talked about, as is the case with 'BasementInhabitant' - who dismisses criticisms of say national crime statistics that point out their unreliability, especially for racial minorities, and blatant inaccuracies as simply 'minor' without elaboration on what'd exactly constitute a damning criticism to him, or maybe citing a 'variance inflation factor' as a rebuttal to a point I made even though it's a factor used for statistical model comparisons that's irrelevant towards the study at hand. Not to mention his little pal who made points about articles that were directly contradicted by said articles - such as how the bulk of one's points about the probability of racial encounters directly rebutted what he said, and instead he chose out of context points, especially for ones about other studies that, with proper context, reveal his own misunderstanding of my own points (such as why I cited Hispanic individuals even though that Hispanic folk weren't being discussed - primarily because I anticipated that as a separate counterpoint) among other things.

This probably all makes little sense out of context, and that's understandable - frankly I more wanted a bit of a space to vent about it, so why not use a paragraph and confuse the twenty or so people who'll read this.

I digress though, because ultimately, along with my failure to provide adequate context (and, an admitted poor explanation of my points at some parts), and with the clear ideological motivations behind alt-rightists not interested in debate, I ultimately decided to take a step back from it. It'll be going on in circles for far too long of a time, and a better overall point can be made if I stick to this blog format - which is what I'll do from now on, bad move on my part to try to cover multiple grounds. So, while I won't be covering the race and crime bits - or even education bits - immediately, anticipate it in the next couple months or so. For now, I want to establish some basics. Which leads me to what the next non-shitpost/filler/update post will be about - and, as is likely apparent from the prior one about the concept of race, it'll be all about the fixation index and it's relevance towards the whole 'race' debate. Following that, I'll likely cover expert opinion on it, then concepts of race, and then go over some important aspects about statistical measures and genetic theory. After all that, anticipation for some discussion about that sort of a topic can be found.

Father

"The prevalence of disease in the IRL and CHS dolphins from 2010 to 2015 is shown in Table 3. There was no significant difference between the prevalence of definite disease between the IRL and CHS for 2010 to 2015, although the data for CHS were based on a single capture year."

Polytypic My Ass

CONTENT WARNING: RACISM

Looking up at the sunny sky; so shinny and blue - there's a butterfly!

It's gonna be a fantastic day~

Oh wait, no it's not, because of this shitty, racist paper by Michael A Woodley - someone who basically constantly whines about a supported 'dysgenic' - a talking point amount eugenicists saying that 'genetic fitness' is decreasing - decline in 'intelligence' and always tries to frequently justify scientific racism, such as with this paper. Entitled "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications," it's published in the journal Medical Hypotheses, one distinctly known for publishing AIDS denialism and other ridiculous bits of pseudoscience you can find on its Wikipedia page.

What a great start we're off to!

The essential crux of the paper is trying to argue that, get this, there are human subspecies, or even different human species. I wish I was fucking joking, because good lord this is going to be god awful. But it's frequently cited by scientific racist types as evidence for their trash, and as far as I'm aware no comprehensive rebuttal to it exists yet, so someone's gotta clean up the trash.

Woodley starts off by claiming that the concept of 'race' is akin to subspecies by citing a paper by Alan R Templeton and an entire book by W.F. Bodmer and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. As far as I'm aware this isn't a book about taxonomic classifications and, since no pages are cited, I'll just talk about the Templeton paper.

Alan Templeton is a well known geneticist who argues against the existence of race - and this paper is pretty much no exception to it, as the whole point of it acknowledges there being very little human genetic diversity and there being no good rationale for race or subspecies as concepts. Templeton further goes on to point out many scientists actually do differentiate between the two, and that both concepts are vague and subject to much debate. This is something that I'll get into in a bit. For now, let's go through some more of his claims.

Next is a citation to a paper by Jeffry C. Long and Rick A. Skittles. This is one that I'm personally a fan of, for reasons that'll be detailed later on in my next post. For now, Woodley essentially paraphrases various proposed definitions of race detailed there and, while the paraphrases are accurate, I'll nonetheless incorporate the initial table of the definitions for a later usage, since it's inevitably going to be important for this shit.

With that said, Woodley then ironically presents a great argument against 'races' existing by saying,

"The table would seem to suggest that there is no universally agreed upon definition of race or subspecies and that the use of any particular race concept in the apportionment of human biological diversity is to a degree arbitrary. This situation has not been helped by inconsistent historical usage in the anthropological literature, where the term would frequently be used in the description of human populations at a variety of scales ranging from sub-continental to global"

Essentially, the very fact that so many definitions exist show that it's not based on any natural categories or observations that people are trying to develop classifications but rather just ad hoc explanations that aren't based on any actual scientific data to justify social norms. It's all entirely arbitrary and unscientific. But of course, Woodley believes in races - so let's see how he handles this.

"The problem with social constructivism is that it attempts to engage racial classification on a normative rather than a scientific level. Using the idea that scientific race concepts stem from a desire to apportion people into ‘inferior’ vs. ‘superior’ categories as grounds for claiming that they are wrong is simply an appeal to motive and therefore is not a logical counter to scientific theories of race, which must be assessed purely on their merits. The notion of arbitrariness in the definition of race is a significant and legitimate scientific issue in need of redress however."

So, according to Woodley, ideas that aren't based on scientific merit but rather social categories don't matter - motive is just entirely irrelevant towards assessing the validation and reason for ideas! What an annoying, centrist take this is. I see it espoused a lot, and frankly it's incredibly naive - as I said, it ignores how the ideas lack any justification and are only ad hoc nonsense formed to try to validate a socially formed idea that has racist roots. But also, I've never once seen this claim before as an argument against race per se alone, that because ideas have racist roots they're wrong. I wouldn't necessarily disagree for reasons said, but it's not really the main crux used against racial categories. It's frequently noted to point out the unscientific nature of definitions and arbitrariness of them (which, to Woodley's credit he does note is a "significant and legitimate scientific issue," but of course since he's motivated to find race in the first place rather than to realize that it isn't a valid taxonomical category he instead aims to continue research on it), but it's hardly the main point. For instance, the American Anthropological Assocation's Website's Position on Race argues against it primarily with a statement about humans having continuous and not discrete variation as well as, overall, minimal variation. While these points are disputed among scientific racist types (which I'll handle in later posts), they're empirical claims used against it alongside the points about arbitrariness. 

Woodley tries to justify that this is argued by citing two books - "Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race" by Charles Mills and "Race: The Reality of Human Difference" by Vincent M. Sarich and Frank Miele - the latter of which is an explicitly racialist book, while the former recognizes the history of racism behind the concept. Since no page is cited in either, and the latter is likely extremely biased in its view, I'd say it's fair to dismiss this claim here in light of AAA statements.

Woodley then next summarizes the controversy called "Lewontin's Fallacy," which, while I won't elaborate on here since it's a beast of it's own, you can read about it here if interested. I'll be covering it specifically at a later date. For now, I will say that he does accurately summarize the controversy, though of course supports the problematic conclusions of A.W. F. Edwards as is expected from any racialist type.

He uses this to try to form his own definition of 'race,' being "populations expressing a composite number of traits whose distributions intercorrelate in such a way so as to give rise to a particular, distinct correlative structure." It's not at all clear what he means by a 'composite number of traits' nor what he means by a 'distinct correlative structure,' and there's extreme vagueness to it that's only supported by his attempts to say it's consistent with all four given definitions up above. From his brief elaborations though, he's essentially just repeating the 'Essentialist' definition but also positing that the traits are 'intercorrelated,' which would necessarily have to be the case if they're linked by different ancestral environments and differ by populations. But this is a pretty useless definition, because what exactly constitutes as a trait? What's the criterion for differentiation on it? Even by standards of random genetic variation, this would even be consistent with very minor differences in allele frequencies producing very minor differences in a given phenotype, which includes between say towns or villages, of which can be ancestrally differentiated. It's ultimately a vague and useless definition - both the initial Essentialist one and Woodley's - because it's not clear what's considered a different trait, or what the boundary should be, or how many traits are needed, etc. Just about any two separate groups, taking this to its extreme, can be considered different racial groups, no matter how minor. It's just silly and biologically useless. The fact that Woodley's definition can be aligned with four very different definitions too is further emphasis of how vague it is - it can essentially be shaped and fit to any definition, as it's vague enough to suit just about any desires behind it rather than serving to be an accurate classification. It's little more than racist pseudoscience.

But anyway, all of this is pretty irrelevant for the rest of the paper, hilariously enough, since now we're getting to the bulk of the claims.

After boasting about his 'demonstrations' done prior, he aims to deal with intraspecies diversity and arbitrariness by first claiming that

"An old morphological method for determining the appropriateness of a subspecies classification is the 75% rule, which holds that if 75% of the members of a given population can be grouped by eye then they constitute a subspecies."

Every time I read this I burst out laughing, because it's just so fucking incorrect it's hilarious. Woodley is referring to this classic paper by Dean Amadon, which aims to describe a criteria for subspecies. Amadon describes two interpretations of what the 75% rule is -  the first, being that, 75% of a population is grouped on a specific, measurable trait in an extreme manner such that 75% of the population is differentiated from 75% of a separate population on the trait. As Amadon put it,

"Rand had 70 specimens of the population of canadensis and 15 specimens of osgoodi which he distributed among nine color categories (shown by Roman numerals) as indicated. The brownest birds are in class III; they become progressively grayer through class IX. Seventy-five per cent of a sample of 70 is 52.5. Beginning at the left, classes III-VII, indicated by the upper bracket, will include 75 per cent of this sample (classes I and II were set up for other populations not considered here). Similarly for osgoodi 11.2 specimens are 75 per cent of a sample of 15. Beginning at the right, 75 per cent of this sample fall in the last three classes (lower bracket). Since these 75 per cent segments of canadensis and osgoodi do not overlap, the brownest 75 per cent of canadensis are browner than the grayest 75 per cent of osgoodi, at least in these samples. Rand concluded that osgoodi is subspecifically distinct from canadensis. (He has since told me that he now would prefer a separation of about 90 per cent from 90 per cent.)"

Amadon is talking about a paper by his colleague A.L. Rand, where he determined the coloration of two subspecies of spruce grouse - a North American bird. With this method, Rand was able to determine that 75% of each population is distinct from one another without overlap in traits of coloration - although he'd rather 90% separation. This serves as an example of at least one interpretation - though Amadon notes that there's an important problem with this interpretation, being that using this alone as a method, we won't know how the other 25% of each population overlaps. Because of this, we can't end up knowing whether a given individual from a population goes into one or the other immediately.

This leads Amadon to point out a second method that he and other ornithologists he's talked to find preferable - differentiating 75% of one population from over 99% of another one on a given - or multiple combined - traits. He points out this can be mathematically shown to be equivalent to 97% of each population being differentiated from one another, This is likely what Woodley was referring to, but it's clear he blatantly misrepresented it, because this measure isn't designed to group people differently 'by eye,' but rather by any given trait(s) for taxonomic classification. It's also especially important to note that this very paper points out subspecies can often be 100% differentiated from one another on a trait, which show that this method proposed is pretty liberal, albeit arbitrary. While trying to apply it to humans suffers from issues of arbitrariness for deciding what traits may be measured, it's nonetheless misrepresented by Woodley, making some his next points moot - although we'll investigate them anyway.

It's next claimed there's controversy over the 75% rule by citing a paper by Smith, Chiszar, and Montanucci. I wasn't able to find the original, but I was able to find a repost on... a white nationalist website.

Fuck me.

If we're to assume it's accurate at all towards the source, there's no mention of controversy over the 75% rule - however this isn't to say controversy doesn't exist in regards to it. James Rising wrote a paper where he, albeit briefly, criticized the rule for being arbitrary (which, as I pointed out, while true, isn't necessarily too accurate since it's useful for identifying what's a common trend), and, more effectively, not being sufficient enough alone as a criteria, instead requiring them to be genetically independent with "distinct gene pools that predict variation in traits not originally considered." There's also more in depth discussion about what a subspecies concept needs among other important caveats that are noted within this paper, of course. Specifically, it's four points needed for a subspecies concept (I'll be paraphrasing a bit):

1. To be informative about the population's migratory history as well as their isolation from other populations.

2. To be informative of the early stages of speciation in these populations.

3. To be predictive about potential differences that may arise from the geographic location of the population

4. For it to be helpful for potential research, including into the evolution of the populations.

It should be obvious that the sole 75% rule criteria satisfies absolutely none of these requirements, so it's an inherently invalid measure. While we could stop here, let's go even further in going all out against him.

Next it's yet another pageless book citation - "Evolution and the Genetics of Populations, Volume 4. Variability Within and Among Natural Populations" by Sewall Wright. This book is among a series that's considered somewhat classic to population genetics, especially since, as will be seen in later posts, Sewall Wright is pretty crucial to the whole race debate. With that said, it's baselessly claimed that humans are 'accurately' grouped by race more than 75% of the time, which, might I add, is only begging the question. It's next claimed that, via a nonscientific visual overview, there's difficulty identifying chimpanzee subspecies. This claim is cited with a paper by Anne Stone and colleagues which doesn't at all test what was claimed. However, I assume it came from a small paragraph noting technical limitations that prevented the authors from assessing subspecies status. It's not at all clear what relevance this has for the claim since this was specifically a genomic analysis, and it likewise they never noted that an indirect - i.e. visual - measure of subspecies status was difficult or impossible.

Next of course is another pageless citation to the Sarich and Miele book that the morphological differences among human populations are either equivalent to or greater than that between different species. What a fucking claim.

Now, we're getting into the bulk of his argument, being a reference to different values of heterozygosity -  which is a measure of genetic variability, although more specifically it's two different alleles at a locus - for humans and different species. He points out that values for humans typically are higher than other animals with subspecies, and, while this is technically correct¹, is a demonstration of a really poor understanding of genetics. As detailed on pages 164 and 165 in the book Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, Woodley completely failed to understand what these measures mean, as he was essentially believing that it measured the variation between different populations - which is patently false. As the authors of RGR point out,

"The problem with this analysis is that the process of speciation (by which geographic races would develop) does not proceed by overall heterozygosity, but rather by the differences between the heterozygosity of the subpopulations from the total heterozygosity of the species: FST = (HT - HS) / HT, where this FST is the average for multiple loci; HT is the average of the expected heterozygosity in the total population over loci, and HS is the average expected heterozygosity over subpopulations. Thus, geographic races form subpopulations and begin to diverge from each other in allele frequencies. A species might have high heterozygosity, but if it is evenly distributed across its populations, then it isn't undergoing genetic change that will form geographical races that might eventually form new species."

Essentially, he applied a measure of an entire species' genetic variability, or even variability within certain populations, and assumed that measured between population variability - which isn't the case. It's entirely possible to have high genetic variability but also have no populations arise from it, as population heterogeneity is irrelevant for the differences between them. Instead, a measure of FST, or Fixation Index² is preferable. He likewise implies the 75% rule applies here, but it's clear, given prior analyses, it doesn't.

The next claim we've ought to address is his claim of different 'major races' existing, utilizing incredibly racist terms that I'd frankly rather not say here - of course, to cite this, the incredibly racist work called "The Origin of Races" by Charleton S. Coon. If only I were joking here.

He next claims that this is outdated (what an understatement - it was never dated to begin with, it's fucking pseudoscience), and that "molecular data" reveals five "continental populations (major clades or races)," being, Sub-Saharan African folk, Caucasian individuals, Northeast Asian people, Southeast Asian folk AND Pacific Islander individuals, as well as Native American individuals - I paraphrased to remove the clear racism there. It's pretty great how he lumps entirely heterogeneous ethnic groups and cultures together into large 'races,' isn't it? Isn't it just fine and dandy how it magically just so happens to be almost identical to that of which was arbitrarily formed centuries in the past to justify racism? What a coincidence.

To justify this, he cites, in order, "Evolutionary Relationships of Human Populations on a Global Scale," a paper Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, which only deals with the evolutionary history of ethnic groups and does not try to form any sort of homogeneous 'races,' a pageless citation of two books by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza (the latter also being by Paolo Manozzi and Alberto Piazza), "Genes, Peoples, and Language" and "The History and Geography of Human Genes," and lastly a paper entitled "The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense" by Robin O. Andreasen, which only contains evolutionary trees (which help detail the geneaology of different ethnic groups) and not any sort of indication of 'major races.' So he just pulled that out of his ass, didn't he?

He then claims that his vague ass 'correlation structure' explanation is supported by the cladistic race concept defended by Andreasen, and that the problem of arbitrariness is resolved by this paper.

Except, it isn't.

While the initial papers defends a pretty shite concept I'll detail in a much later post, essentially Andreasen argues that 'races' can be best conceptualized as a geneaological concept to detail the ancestral history confined to various population groups - he points out that concepts of genetic variation and phenotypes are irrelevant for it, as the latter, while it can be a proxy for ancestry, is not actually required and often will be an inaccurate proxy. He also only refers to aspects of say skin color there and notes that how we measure geneaology is going to essentially be irrelevant for phenotypic traits that Woodley is implying we refer to. While technically his proposal may be coherent with it, it'd be little more than a burden towards the definition than anything and is ultimately an unnecessary given modern genetic methods. Further, it doesn't at all absolve the issue of arbitrariness, and Andreasen's proposal is in of itself arbitrary - where do we define what's an acceptable different population? Taken to it's extreme, different towns or even neighborhoods may be considered separate 'races!' I'll be giving more of a critique of this at a later date, though, as I said.

Now, with the subspecies concept debunked, let's delve into an even worse thing - a claim of different human species.

It's important to understand what's being argued here. As Woodley correctly identifies it, one common conception is the biological species concept - being members of populations that can interbreed. While there's valid issues with it, it's sufficiently used quite a bit.

The other concept Woodley refers to - and it's the one for the crux of the shitty attempt at a point - is the phylogenic species concept. Now, Woodley cites "Phylogenetic patterns and the evolutionary process: Method and theory in comparative biology" by Niles Eldredge and Joel Cracraft in essentially saying that

 "Species are the result of clear divergence within a group of organisms sharing an ancestor whose lineage remains intact with respect to other lineages throughout time and space"

While not only is this is an inaccurate paraphrase, it's incredibly misleading towards what's actually stated about phylogenic species and how it's defined. For one, this is what's referred to as a monophyletic concept - but even then it's a misunderstanding of what it entails. See, the overall phylogenic species concepts are based on phylogenic analysis, which represents a sort of hierarchic relationship of descent. The results of this are often represented in a phylogenic tree, an example of which from that Long and Skittles paper can be seen below in humans.

This is as far as Woodley would have you believe the concept goes. This concept is nearly identical towards the 'cladistic race' concept noted before, and suffers from the fact that just about any distinct populations, regardless of phenotypic and genetic similarity, will be separate species! I don't believe I need to point out how this is ridiculous.

Fortunately, there's much more to the monophyletic concept than was let on - but to fully understand it, we'll first need the actual quote from the book:

"A diagnosable cluster of individuals within which there is a parental pattern of ancestry and descent, beyond which there is not, and which exhibits a pattern of phylogenetic ancestry and descent among units of like kind." Quoted in (Wheeler, 1999)

What does this exactly mean, one might wonder? Fortunately, John Hawks, an anthropologist and popular paleoanthropology blogger explains it well for us on his post about species concepts. As he says,

"Key to the phylogenetic species concept is the idea that species must be "diagnosable." In other words, members of the species should share a combination of characteristics that other species lack."

Indeed, as noted by Jerrold I. Davis and Kevin C. Nixon in their 1992 paper, the phylogenic species concept requires all members of a species to have a given characteristic and none of the members of a separate one to have it - such as say, two arms in humans but none in cats for a bit of an elementary example to grasp the basic idea. As they point out, different populations within a species are entirely consistent with the idea that they're still a unified species provided they're defined by 'character(s),' or fixed traits in the population, that can be linked back to a common ancestor with said character(s). This spells a clear and obvious issue for Woodley, so it's clear why he omitted it - as far as I'm aware, there's no characteristic that universally is present in one human population that isn't present in another. Even folk taxonomic concepts such as skin color are, as Alan Templeton points out in a 2013 paper, incredibly variant both within and between populations and aren't clearly or reliably linked towards ancestry. From this margin it's clear that this concept fails.

Before continuing on and getting into some more problems with trying to apply human populations to the phylogenic species concept, I'd like to further point out that there are indeed other concepts - such as being defined by genetic clusters unique to that population that don't contain subgroups, being defined as exclusively monophyletic 'units,' and others detailed here and even more in its cited sources. While the exclusive monophyletic concept is proposed, it was only an example of potential  species concepts (and as a potential temporary placeholder concept called a 'metaspecies' while more research is done, though the criticisms still apply to it) in a paper by Kevin de Queiroz and Michael J Donoghue (which, incidentally, contains more concepts). So essentially, Woodley proposes a measure that isn't upheld by anyone and is completely inaccurate to the literature. In fact, his overview of species concepts so inaccurate that it neglects that there are more concepts of species beyond those listed - such as the cohesion concept, phenetic concept, and more that can be found here and in the other cited sources that I do recommend you check out if interested.

With that said, there's other objections to make with the very concept as a whole - such as Kevin Zelnoi pointing out that it ultimately results in a severe and potentially challenging inflation of the number of species or Amal Aldhebiani pointing out the difficulties in even constructing evolutionary pathways, but one of the biggest is that of gene flow - something that, as you'll see, is distinctly relevant to humans. As John Hawks points out, in populations like humans that are connected with a substantial degree of variation between populations such that we follow a clinal (more evidence in the 2013 Templeton paper above) - or gradual change, essentially a spectrum of variation - we won't be able to reliably identify populations from one another, and this can create problems for groups such as paleontologists who may note a lack of historical correspondence or even having to change their very understanding of evolution to accommodate it. Considering this important caveat, it's clear that it's hardly a good concept to even try to apply to humans in the first place.

Of course, Woodley does try to address this argument, which he claims by Norman I. Platnick and Quentin D. Wheeler in chapter 15 (A Defense of the Phylogenetic Species Concept) of "Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate" by Quentin Wheeler and Rudolf Meier. While no page was cited, I was able to find what I believe Woodley was referring to, though more on that in a minute. Woodley demonstrates his inability to science even still by claiming that the crux of this concern is interbreeding between established populations and not gene flow itself (to his credit, the source does claim this (although it actually claims that we can expect there to be no more 'human species' in due time rather than it being gone now, as disgusting as that is that it's even something believed)). However, even if he were right, how he tries to rebut it is laughable - first a citationless claim about a lack of admixture -  in spite of rising interracial marriage rates - and then a citation towards noted racial pseudoscientist J. Phillipe Rushton's main paper on his flawed 'genetic similarity theory' (contra to Wikipedia's claims, there's no support for it - I'll detail it at a later date) and Frank Salter's book (it's two citations, but Woodley just cites the original 2003 version and the republished 2005 version) that basically are a pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical view trying to justify white nationalism (I'll cover these at a later date as well. I'll likely cover both Rushton and Salter's "theories" since they're pretty similar, and the latter frequently cites the former). The main arguments in these are basically attempts to justify ethnic nationalism by saying it's 'natural' to associate with people of your 'racial group.' There's an abundance of criticisms you can find on the Wikipedia pages of them, and I'll do an in depth overview of both at a later date. For now though, it should be clear the type of 'quality' research to anticipate from them.

None of the citations at all handle the rate of racial admixture though - I should know, I've read through them.³

With that said and done, and after more pageless citations to Cavalli-Sforza claiming a quantity of different 'species' - an absurd number approaching 40 - and another pageless citation to the Sarich and Miele book about human differentiation, Woodley writes a rebuttal - and, mind you, he treats this source as a valid scientific work - to Richard D. Fuerle's incredibly, incredibly racist and psuedoscientific work that, of all things, tries to debunk the Out of Africa hypothesis, something widely accepted and only rejected by obscure racists. Beyond legitimatizing such a ridiculous source, his response isn't something I'll address - partly because it handles FST, something I'll talk about in a later post, and partly because I see no need to respond to it currently since no pages are cited in the initial book to try my hand at a better response than Woodley's, which frankly seems particularly sympathetic.

Finally we jump to the last bit of the paper - the discussion. After promoting himself for doing some sort of great scientific achievement (he hasn't), whining about the James Watson incident (how dare we not tolerate racist hogwash), and by claiming that we need race as a concept because there's different populations (which doesn't imply a need for taxonomic classifications).

Now, next we get to a couple more empirical claims - being that, survival of transplants in surgeries varies by race (this is evidenced by citing by a paper by Abiodun Omoloja, which indeed it does vary between black and white individuals) due to a lack of ethnic matching. This claim isn't backed up by any specific source Woodley gives, although this paper by Eric Spierings is cited as evidence. It's a study dealing with ethnic differences in the frequencies of "minor histocompatibility antigens" which affect whether a transplant will be compatible varying by racial group. The authors of it themselves note that the bulk of the variance is ultimately small and practically nonsignificant, and that much of the variation (though not all - some does vary geographically but they never seem to statistically assess these patterns) is random in them. Further they also note differential phenotypic expression in each ethnic group for the specific antigens. Nonetheless I'm skeptical of this paper due to the significant replicability issues in candidate gene studies, which in my eyes is due to an inadequate p value used - though that's, again, for another time, much like discussions of race and medicine is. All of this is beyond the scope of what this post is assessing.

Next is a citation to a small, two page paper by Constance Holden about supposed racial differences in responses to medical treatment. I can't actually view it, making this pretty irrelevant, but I should note why Woodley cites all this - as supposed evidence of substantial variation. Even if it all were true, that doesn't magically make race a valid taxonomical category. Bare in mind the point of these categories is essentially to help understand the evolutionary history of populations, and they're generally given to those that exhibit great genetic differentiation. This doesn't mean there isn't any - no geneticist would deny this. What's denied is what taxonomic significance or even relevance it actually has.

And finally we conclude our endeavor by witnessing Woodley cherry pick sources of people arguing against his views (by failing to actually rebut them in any form, might I add) in medical ethics - being a paper by Troy Duster and an actual survey (of a nonrepresentative sample of geneticists) by L.M. Hunt and M.S. Megyesi that, hilariously enough, goes against him as the geneticists still argue to use race, contrary to what he implies by people being sympathetic towards 'social constructivist' arguments - and in law - by citing a paper by Dorothy E Roberts and a separate one by Erik Lillquist and Charles A. Sullivan that both argue against using rate in legal affairs of medicine - to fearmonger among his racialist types about a mass, anti-scientific, PC Egalitarian SJW Cultural Marxist Post-Modernist agenda.

I may have paraphrased there at the last bit, just slightly. What can I say, shitposting is fun!

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1. He cites this page by John Goodrum - or it was, as evidenced by web archive (which does contain the original webpage he was likely referring to). Currently, however, it's, hilariously enough, a page arguing against the existence of race by a Bobby Crawford.

2. There's many problems with FST as a whole - I'd refer back to the Long and Skittles citation for an elaboration - but I'll save that for the next post, as it's irrelevant here since none of his arguments rely on FST.

3. Although granted, I only read most of the chapters in Salter's book. There were some I skipped over because they dealt with his things that I didn't care about - like his 'policy recommendations' that I've read through a debate he had with a reviewer over - or aspects that were handled in papers he wrote on this subject.