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I find the views on this site to be very interesting but certain issues and misconceptions need to be addressed.I have so much to say that it will take several posts to cover it all.I hope those reading have the patience and open-mindedness to read it all.
1. Race may or may not be real but one thing is for sure...this phenomenon is not evident among modern humans. In other words there is only one human race and anyone believing otherwise is a racialist or a racist( more on the distinction later). There is no biological, physical, genetic, or anthropological evidence suggesting that humans can be divided into races.
2. The terms negroid, caucasoid, mongoloid, and australoid do not describe races. In fact they describe nothing. These terms are wholly pseudoscientific, and refer to the averages based on collected skeletal and craniometric data in different regions. Caucasoid for example does not describe any large representative population, but a collection of a few skulls in the Caucasus Mountains in Eurasia, thought to be the archetype of the white race. Similar data were collected in Africa, Asia, and Southeast Asia(including Australia), in search of these type specimens. In short there is no white race, brown race, black race, yellow race, etc...
In fact craniometry is a racist-inspired pseudoscience which can never account for the fleshy features of a human organism, which are lost in the fossilization and decomposition processes.The color and actual physical apperance of a person will never be determined through craniometry. In fact craniometric studies on extant populations have found populations that would be dubbed "negroid", "caucasoid", or "australoid" based on the assumptions of these craniometric indices, are in fact "white","black", and "Asian", respectively.
We tend to used the terms African, Asian, European, and Middle Eastern with a certain preconceived notion in our minds of what people in that region will look like. However each of these regions has a very diverse populations that are grouped collectively based on arbitrarily selected variables. For example if we were to group populations based on hair type, many, but not all Africans and Melanesians would fall into one category. If we did this for skin color, Africans, many South Asians, Australian Aborigines, and Melanesians would form one category, and Europeans, some Mediterranean populations( North Africans , "Middle Easterners")and North Asians would form another. If we did this for eye shape, Many Asians, Native Americans, and even Africans, And South Asians would form one category to the exclusion of most other human groups. Now if we did this based on genetic distance we would see a picture completely different than traditional racial divisioning and thinking would suggest. However, if we choose to look at other genetic informational evidence, it would seem that all humans fall into ONE category.
3. There have been numerous quotes here of groups having "Caucasoid", or "Australoid" features. The fact of the matter is that the physical traits these terms refer to are African in origin. Africans had straight hair, thin , lips, light hair and eyes, straight projecting noses, etc..long before the populations that exhibit these features in high frequencies ever existed. Humans have been in Africa for a million years before migration outside of Africa, and it only stands to reason that Africa would be the place of the greatest human diversity. The genetic evidence certainly bears this out.One need only to understand certain evolutionary processes, as well a populational genetics to understand how these features could have spread outside of Africa, and become more frequent outside of Africa than in Africa.
4."Australoid and Mongoloid mixed to create the Polynesian race which later colonized the Pacific islands."
No population falling outside the traditional demarcations of any racial classification can be shown to be the combination of other "races". The genetic evidence suggests that the "Australoid and Mongoloid" popualtions that are being described are all geneticaly related to the Polynesian and Micronesian populations in a way that excludes "racial admixture". The actual situation is much more complicated, and much more interesting and decidely less racist.
5."Often, black Americans make the mistake of confusing all people with black skin with the classical African/negro race. There are other people in this world who have black skin and yet are not directly related to Africans."
The person who is resonsible for this quote has been confused into believing that there is a Classic African/negro race.Africa is and has always been very diverse. The fact remains that people with dark skin can trace the origin of their dark skin to heredity. In other words their ancestors left Africa with black skin, and natural selection and heredity maintained this trait, because these populations moved into areas of the globe where it was advantageous to have dark skin. Dark skins did not develop convergently in thes regions but was merely a continuation of the ancestral condition.
6."Perhaps you should read about the laws of convergent evolution" to understand why people around the world living close the equator and tropics have dark skin. THe same law would explain why northwest Europeans are white, as are Koreans (who are mongoloid by race and thus unrelated in spite of their often similar pigmentation)."
The amount of time necessary from the time modern man left Africa until now is not sufficient for convergent evolution to be responsible for different regional populations to have similar pigmentations. These populations( those outside of Africa with very dark skins) left Africa BLACK, and moved into ecological niches that allowed natural selection to perpetuate this trait. You would actually have to espouse to a form of multiregional evolution to believe that convergent evolution is responsible for this phenomenon.
7.Lastly, I must say that racists and racialists cannot have their cake and eat it to unless they would like to choke on that cake. Saying that populations with dark skins and straight/wavy hair, straight noses, have these features as a result of Caucasoid admixture is erroneous. Saying that certain certain other dark skinned populations like the Dravidians are "Caucasoid" and not African in origin is misleading. Saying that Australian Aborigins and Melanesians are more Asian than African, does not in any way make them many less BLACK. THERE IS A GENETIC AND SPIRITUAL LINKAKE CONNECTION AMONG ALL HUMANS AND AMONG ALL BLACK POPULATIONS.WE CANNOT LET ANYONE TAKE THIS FROM US. Many scientists have tried to used the idea of genetic distance to show that certain popualtions cannot be considered "African/Negriod" because genetic distance shows these populations to be more closely related to Asians and European groups.Genetic distance only shows how long populations have been relatively separate or isolated from each other and how long ago any population or groups of populations diverged from the ancestral gene pool(s). But a black person is a black person is a black person. One can be "Caucasoid" because of a certain few traits, but NOT "AFRICAN", WHEN EXHIBITING AFRICAN TRAITS? Let's get real people!
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