Are Africans a different species?

Posted by Dasein on July 26, 2010, 12:39 PM | #

There was also this paper last year touching on this:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19695787

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 26, 2010, 01:04 PM | #

“While this may have also occurred with Eurasians, the population sizes of archaic humans would likely have been smaller or more dispersed,” (—from the log entry)

Or the archaic humans less archaic.

By the way, about the view that Europeans and West-Central African Negroes are properly classified as distinct species of human rather than distinct races (something I consider obvious totally apart from modern genetics), I predicted a few years ago that as modern science came closer to that view the usual suspects would simply resort to species-denial the way they have to race-denial.  Within the past several months I’ve seen three articles either denying the existence of distinct species or questioning the legitimacy of the species concept, calling it outdated, and so on.  I regret now that I didn’t keep the references (I think one of them was in a recent Scientific American) but there is no doubt but that we’re going to see more of species-denial in the years to come so there’ll be plenty of new articles to cite.

The goal of the usual suspects, remember, is to get the different human races (and the different human species) to mix, and it’s a goal they want so badly they’ll stop at nothing to see it to completion.  If they have to deny species they’ll deny species.  This is why today the full fury of government is unleashed against white opponents of this goal:  the usual suspects have captured control over the governmental machinery enforcing the drive toward achieving this goal.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 26, 2010, 01:11 PM | #

Notice of course that saying “A and B are not distinct races but are different enough to be properly classified as distinct species” in no way implies superiority or inferiority:  that statement can be true and either A superior to B, B superior to A, or neither superior to the other. for whatever criteria one is talking about.  It’s purely a statement about proper classification, nothing else.

Posted by Leon Haller on July 26, 2010, 02:38 PM | #

Don’t you mean “species” in the title? I thought “subspecies” is simply a synonym for “race”. Please clarify (apologies if the article did so, but I’ve only skimmed it thus far).

Posted by Dan Dare on July 26, 2010, 02:51 PM | #

It would be interesting to compare similar plots for chimpanzees and gorillas, which are currently classified into separate species amongst themselves based purely on morphology.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 26, 2010, 03:00 PM | #

Leon, Dasein will answer for himself but my sense is there is a semi-intentional blur nowadays in some academic quarters around the meaning of sub-species, such that it isn’t always clear if it means race or something more different than race but not as different as species.  Again, I think the blurring of this is semi-intentional:  “semi” because people do it out of fear; the ones driven by pure politics don’t do it at all, they simply deny race and there are some big professors (Prof. Goldstein at Duke), and other big shots — science writer Carl Zimmer is one — who still, amazingly, try to deny race.  Look, for example, at the link in Dasein’s first comment:  the author is blurring the hell out of it, deliberately, because he’s scared to use simple, clear language.

Posted by Dasein on July 26, 2010, 03:36 PM | #

Leon, thanks, I’ve just changed the title and the blog entry’s opening line to be a bit more provacative.  Like Fred said, the lines seem to be blurry here.  The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature does not acknowledge anything beyond subpecies, meaning that race and subspecies would have to be synonymous.  Although, from what I have read, we have traditionally been classified as Homo sapiens sapiens (meaning there is no room for race according to the ICZN’s definition), I’ve also read that this usage is obsolete.  The only other Homo sapiens subspecies (idaltu) is extinct.  To say that humans are forever to be a single subspecies because of historical classification seems wrong-headed.  I’m not sure if those who classified humans as all being of the same subspecies would have imagined the genetic gulf between African and non-African populations.

Part of the fuzziness is probably politically motivated, and some is likely related to massive, conflicting egos unwilling to compromise on definitions (and they’re perhaps right that one definition is inappropriate for all contexts).  As Dan suggests, it will be very interesting when sequencing becomes cheap enough (sampling will then be the expensive bit) and we can create these plots with different primates, or even animals with a large number of species, some of which can interbreed, like deer.  I suspect that the pattern seen on this PCA plot (with the separation of one group from several others accounting for the lion’s share of the genetic variance) may be more typical of species/species distinctions than subspecies/subspecies.

Posted by Leon Haller on July 26, 2010, 03:46 PM | #

Fred, thanks for the response. You may be right, though I don’t know enough to form an opinion. Isn’t the tell-tale sign (out of many genetic dissimilarities) of different species (say, dogs and cats) that they cannot interbreed? All humans are obviously of the same species (at least, I’ve thought so) because persons of different races can still reproduce together. Can’t subspecies interbreed? For years I have been referring to “different subspecies of homo sapiens” (usually in the presence of race-unrealistic Christian “conservatives"). I hope I haven’t been embarrassing myself!

Posted by Dasein on July 26, 2010, 03:55 PM | #

Perhaps 2 species: Homo africanus and Homo eurasianus (which would have different subspecies).  Once sequencing is cheap enough, we can see whether that could make sense.

I’m just pushing the envelope here, wondering whether a case could be made once sufficient sequence data is available.

Posted by Leon Haller on July 26, 2010, 04:01 PM | #

Dasein, our email paths crossed (your latest was posted as I was writing mine). Thank you for this response. This is new and interesting information to me. So zoologically, is this the proper sequence?

Species (canine) --- Subspecies (dog) --- Race (collie)

I really don’t know this stuff, though I think I once did, about 30 years ago. I’m not sure if I’m using “canine” correctly. I mean that there is a species above dog (because it would include wolves, foxes, etc), but also there are visibly distinctive breeds or ‘races’ of dogs. So for man we would have:

Homo sapiens --- Homo sapiens sapiens --- Negroids, Caucasoids, etc.

I think I may be confused. What is a species? A subspecies? A race?

Posted by gagoonies on July 26, 2010, 04:35 PM | #

Yes, they are.

They are a different sub species of man.

They are less evolved also, inferior.

Sorry.

They represent an evolutionary back step for the rest of humanity.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 26, 2010, 04:37 PM | #

Leon, the “ability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring” criterion of “species” has long since fallen by the wayside — and in fact was never universally accepted, is my understanding. 

Different species can interbreed with the production of fertile offspring.  That whole aspect is no longer considered a criterion for categorization as “species.”

Posted by James Bowery on July 26, 2010, 04:41 PM | #

I’m glad this work has finally arrived.  It provides clear support for key aspects of the Genetic OmniDominance hypothesis, although the use of geographic distance is only a proxy for the metric I posited, which is ecological distance. 

Two things I didn’t expect:

1) The Amerindian Principal Component position (though the heterozygosity is about what I expected).
2) The small variation in European heterozygosity.  I expected a visible Scandinavian low-end extrema within the Europeans.

Sorry, my website is gone now due to geocities taking everything offline.  Interesting that my primary motive for using geocities was to make sure the content would stay up even if I became financially unable to maintain fees for a website and then, about at the time I became financially unable to support a web site they took geocities down.  Mere coincidence of course but still rather perverse.  (Also, archive.org isn’t currently vending data due to “technical difficulties”.)

Posted by Dasein on July 26, 2010, 04:41 PM | #

Leon,

For dogs it’s:

Canus (genus) lupus (species) familiaris (subspecies). 

There are 37 subspecies of Canis lupus.

Breeds don’t qualify as subspecies.  The genetic differentiation between dog breeds is tiny (don’t know exact percentage, but it’s much less than between human races).

You were right to say subspecies in your conversations regarding humans, though this is not widely accepted (race is seen to be below subspecies, but not all official bodies, well, actually, probably none, acknowledge its existence).

There are different species of deer that interbreed. 

There is some dispute regarding the best definition of species.  Being able to interbreed is sometimes not considered to be enough- they must also have the chance to do so.  One could thus argue that, prior to global transportation, Africans and Amerindians were different species.  Which seems arbitrary.  I would prefer definitions based on, or at least incorporating, genomic sequence data, which should become possible when sequencing is cheap enough.

Posted by Leon Haller on July 26, 2010, 04:44 PM | #

I didn’t know that interbreeding was no longer the standard. Not all species can interbreed, obviously. Any examples of different species successfully breeding?

Posted by Leon Haller on July 26, 2010, 04:49 PM | #

dasein, we keep crossing emails, but thank you for your time. Perhaps I should finally get around to actually reading my now 10 year old copy of Sociobiology?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 26, 2010, 05:37 PM | #

“Any examples of different species successfully breeding?” (—Leon Haller)

You can google this.  Also check the Wikipedia article on “Hybrids.”

Posted by James Bowery on July 26, 2010, 06:38 PM | #

Leon, your copy of Sociobiology is only 10 years old?  What is the copyright date?

You have to keep in mind that the first edition (1975) was written in an environment that included Gould, Lewontin and his fallacy (or to be more accurate: his Jewish propaganda posing as science).  I recall shortly after the first edition came out, Lewontin, Gould and their Harvard disciples, held a conference on the “threat” posed by Sociobiology.  I sent off for their “proceedings” and it was basically polemic after polemic with the sole purpose of stripping Wilson of his professorship.  At that time, I was completely oblivious to Jewish virulence, but I recall being dismayed at such nonsense coming out of Harvard basically having all the trappings of ‘60s campus radicalism but wrapped in the legitimacy of Harvard and “science”.  Truly nauseating and I _did_ wonder what in the hell was going wrong with Harvard in particular.

Posted by Guessedworker on July 26, 2010, 07:55 PM | #

Gagoonies,

You don’t need to apologise.  You are only saying what Europeans have always said up to the last handful of decades.

On this occasion your comment will survive.  I wonder if you can improve from here.

Posted by Brute Truth on July 26, 2010, 10:21 PM | #

Africans aren’t a different species, they were just left very far behind in terms of human evolution.  They just sat there in SS Africa and stagnated in the jungles like primates eating, screwing, and fighting while the rest of humanity moved on to better things.  Africans are easy to make happy - food, drink, sex, and a bit of occasional entertainment is enough for them - they could care less about higher things.

Posted by Brute Truth on July 26, 2010, 10:27 PM | #

Look at how far apart the European and East Asian populations are.

More insidious to the White gene pool in the long run are Asiatics because of their insane proliferation in the last 100 years or so (around 70% of humans on Earth are at least partly Asiatic). 

Given the predilection many White men have for Asian women, the greatest threat to the White gene pool is posed by Asians.

Posted by Anti-speciesism on July 27, 2010, 01:28 AM | #

Richard Dawkins wrote an essay for the book The Great Ape Project in which he deplored “speciesism”.  The Great Ape Project wants the UN to endorse a “Declaration on Great Apes” which extends the “community of equals” to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and gives them legal rights.

Posted by Leon Haller on July 27, 2010, 10:16 AM | #

James, I don’t have my copy of Sociobiology in front of me, but I believe it was the 25th anniversary edition, which would make it 10 years old by your own publication date listing. I’m vaguely familiar with the scandal you mention from Ullica Segerstralle’s (name from memory) Defenders of the Truth (ditto title; it’s in my storage area) about the sociobiology wars (Paul Gottfried in his The Conservative Movement, rev ed, also discusses it) . I only mention this because my actual biological knowledge is much attenuated. My racial focus has always been more normative, as well as (geo)political, than science based. Most of my science I’ve gotten from the standard racialist sources (Rushton, Lynn, etc), as well as the excellent reviews Jared Taylor and Thomas Jackson have done of many of them at AR (also good stuff there from the late Glayde Whitney and Michael Rienzi).

I just need to get my scientific racial facts (from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) better (back?)grounded in actual biology as well as perhaps paleoanthropology. (I do have an amateur interest in cognitive sciences generally, at least in their more summary or popular versions.)

On another note: any thoughts from anyone on the old hypothesis from The Mankind Quarterly (I think Sir Robert Gayre, from memory) that blacks were several hundred thousand years younger/less evolved than other races (I mean had reached the human stage much later)? What is the contemporary scientific status of that view?

Posted by Johan Van Vlaams on July 27, 2010, 02:57 PM | #

For a better understanding of the Africans, please read: http://whitelocust.wordpress.com/morality-and-abstract-thinking-how-africans-may-differ-from-westerners/

Posted by Fred Scrooby on July 27, 2010, 05:00 PM | #

“any thoughts from anyone on the old hypothesis from The Mankind Quarterly (I think Sir Robert Gayre, from memory) that blacks were several hundred thousand years younger/less evolved than other races (I mean had reached the human stage much later)?” (—Leon Haller)

Several hundred thousand to two million in my view (by “blacks” we’re talking about West-Central African True Negroes, right?  the kind that were brought over as slaves).  Somewhere in that ballpark.

Posted by Dasein on July 28, 2010, 08:02 PM | #

Leon,

Sorry, it looks like I misled you with the bit about dog breed genetic variation.  I’ve addressed that here:

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/debunking_a_racialist_myth_about_the_genetic_variation_between_dog_breeds/

Posted by Leon Haller on July 29, 2010, 11:17 AM | #

Thanks.

What about the notion of whites being a much older race than Negroids? Fact/myth?

Posted by Dasein on July 29, 2010, 11:26 AM | #

I don’t know a lot about the research into human origins.  Personally, I can’t be bothered looking too much into the literature on the subject, as many of the questions will be answered when more genomes are sequenced in the coming years.

You might find the following essay interesting:

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2008/02/origins-of-black-africans.html

Posted by Leon Haller on July 29, 2010, 12:10 PM | #

Thank you. I just wondered about the matter generally, if others were familiar with that hypothesis.

I must say, you are admirably prompt in replies!

Posted by Guest on August 06, 2010, 03:09 AM | #

John R Baker of Cambridge in his Oxford University Press book, RACE, state that he thought in a taxonomic sense, that blacks were a different species. I agree.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 06, 2010, 04:04 AM | #

Googling John R. Baker just now after seeing “Guest’s” comment above, and skimming a few articles on the great scientist, I ran across a striking example of the sort of admirable, highly considerate tact for which the British upper classes were once world-renowned:

Certain tribes, such as the Hottentot, show extreme steatopygia or enlarged buttocks.  In some cases the posterior extends horizontally, almost like a shelf.  Francis Galton, who travelled among the Hottentots in 1850 and 1851, wrote of one such woman that he was “perfectly aghast at her development.” He wanted to measure her dimensions but could not bring himself to ask her permission to do so.  Instead, he took observations through his sextant and, he says, “worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.”

[ http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/baker_race.htm ]

Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 06, 2010, 04:17 AM | #

The Amazon reviews of Prof. Baker’s tome on race, reviews presumably dating from the mid-‘70s when the book came out and all highly laudatory, are by three of the greatest scientists of the XXth Century:

“No book known to me tries to encompass everything relevant to the idea of race with such honesty . . . The idea of race and raciality has been systematically depreciated for political or genuinely humanitarian reasons, and it was high time someone wrote about race as Baker does, i.e., in the spirit of a one-man Royal Commission.” — Sir Peter Medawar, O.M., F.R.S., Nobel laureate

“A most impressive display of profound scholarship and vast erudition of every main aspect of this important topic.  Recent studies of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral characteristics have generally overlooked or belittled the biological, anatomical, physiological, and evolutionary lines of evidence which are highly germane to this discussion.  Baker provides the essential basis upon which any objective, rational, and scientific discussion of racial differences must proceed.” — Arthur R. Jensen, University of California

“With Professor Baker’s book we have at last a compendium of biological facts about the various groups of men — a compendium which can provide a factual basis for discussions of racial differences.” — René Dubos, Rockefeller University

Posted by Dan Dare on August 06, 2010, 05:09 AM | #

John R Baker of Cambridge in his Oxford University Press book, RACE, state that he thought in a taxonomic sense, that blacks were a different species. I agree

I have the highest regard for JR Baker, and his now suppressed magnum opus but I don’t recall him making such a statement; perhaps you could be good enough to cite chapter and verse.

What struck me as being as most impressive about Baker’s effort was his exegesis on the meaning of the term ‘race’ (he used the European Crested Newt as his exemplar) as well as his definition of the term civilisation, and why no civilisations ever developed outside the Eurasian landmass.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 06, 2010, 05:44 AM | #

“I have the highest regard for JR Baker, and his now suppressed magnum opus but I don’t recall him making such a statement” (—DD)

I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t make such a statement in an exhaustive scholarly work of this nature:  that they qualify as a different species rather than a different race couldn’t be more obvious.

Posted by Dan Dare on August 06, 2010, 05:56 AM | #

Well it might be obvious to a laymen such as we Fred, but all I am asking that the earlier poster directs us to where Baker himself makes such an assertion.

I have his book in hand but do not recall him having made such a statement. It’s quite possible I have missed it, in which case our friend would be doing us all a service by pointing us to the actual source itself.

If he can do so, I will scan in the corresponding passage for our future reference.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on August 06, 2010, 12:26 PM | #

“I have his book in hand but do not recall him having made such a statement. It’s quite possible I have missed it,” (—Dan)

Yes I’m sure that’s it Dan, you must’ve missed it.

“If he can do so, I will scan in the corresponding passage for our future reference.”

You know, it’s really no big deal, if it’s not there in the book, we all (those of us with eyes) still know it to be true, and all it means is for some perfectly trivial reason Prof. Baker left it out.  Maybe this chap who posted that heard him say it in a lecure or separate article or something elsewhere than the book.  By the way, the fact that they’re a distinct species is extremely minor news, it changes nothing, it’s a technicality, a classification reassignment such as happens literally all the time in taxonomy, we never hear of it because it’s trivial but a week doesn’t go by but a scientist somewhere isn’t reclassifying some animal or plant as to where it belongs in the taxonomy.  That’s all this is, a correction in taxonomy, rectifying an error that crept in because of Franz Boaz and the pre-WW-I-era political climate fomented with the help of organs like The (fill in the blank) ______ York Times (a correction which will restore the pre-Boazian sanity of giants like Louis Agassiz and others). 

Distinct species status doesn’t mean inferiority.  Other things may mean that but not mere assignation as a distinct species.  Neanderthals are thought to have been inferior but their status as a distinct species isn’t what’s responsible for that, other evidence is.  Had that other evidence gone the other way, which it very well might have, we might look at them as superior while still a distinct species.  It’s not intrinsically inferior to be a distinct species.  If the Vulcan race from Star Trek (Mr. Spock’s race), clearly a distinct species from humans, turned out to be real and landed on Earth claiming how superior they were to whites, West-Central-African Negroes would be thrilled and would all begin claiming they too were a distinct species and superior to whites just like the Vulcans — there’s nothing inherently inferior about distinct specieshood so don’t get your nix in a twist over this, DD.  It’s purely a minor technical issue.