raveneye

So what? There are verifiable, measurable and real differences between you and me, too. Does that mean we're two different races?

Ustwo

The are measurable and real differences between you and a cow too. Races play a part in what I do every day, and I need to know those differences. I know the chance of an Asian having certain jaw growth problems is greater than other races. This applies to every race as we all have different facial and growth characteristics as well as anomalies. For me to ignore these and treat everyone as 'equals' is bad medicine. There is overlap of course, and many of the issues are the same for all races, but it would be wrong for me to NOT understand the racial differences and treat somewhat differently based on those differences.

This same type of thing applies to other areas in medicine as well, Arizona and Colorado isn't part of the 'skin cancer belt' because of all the blacks or mongoloids there. Another example, Eskimos, a sub group of mongoloids are better adapted for a cold environment than whites who are better adapted than blacks.

So regardless of whatever feel good thing you want to put on it, the races are different and 'race' has value as a descriptor.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

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abaya

So, Ustwo, how would you treat my jaw? I'm exactly half Asian and half (northern) European.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Ustwo

As the jaw growth issue has a strong genetic component if you had early signs of it, I'd treat it as an Asian rather than Caucasian. This would delay the beginning of your treatment, perhaps by 2-3 years. Its a better safe than sorry type of treatment as while if you didn't have the growth pattern, I've just delayed your treatment, if you did and I started too early I'd have prolonged it which is worse.

But you are correct in that racial differences are less of a predictor in mixed races, but that does not diminish the value of understanding the racial differences, as the majority of people tend to have little mixing.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

abaya

That may be true in some isolated areas... but you'd be surprised at how much mixing the "average Joe" has (at least, the average Joe undergrad who came in to get his ancestral DNA tested in the biological anthropology branch of my department). And we're talking about kids who have never left Pennsylvania, whose parents came from German or Italian immigrant stock generations ago, who are as whitebread as they come... and they still had mixed DNA. Talk to me about that...

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

raveneye

Funny, I thought the subject of the thread was racial differences in intelligence, not in relatedness to cows and rates of jaw bone growth.

I look forward to your explanation of how purely statistical differences in single genes is somehow logically relevant to human “intelligence”, which is arguably the most complex phenomenon on the planet.

I can see how replacing a complicated subject with a simple one can be “feel-good” though: it gives the false impression that the world is simple and easy to understand; it encourages one to ignore complexity and replace the truth with simple, satisfying truisms; and it can be used by intellectually insecure people to rationalize one’s need to feel superior (e.g. James Watson).

It’s easy to compare people to cows. A little harder to intelligently understand intelligence, I'm afraid.

Ustwo

Funny you said there were no races, we were all Africans, I just showed there were and now you are back to something which is far more difficult to examine instead of straight forward things like growth or disease.

When you really want to defend that position let me know. We are all Africans, we are also all mammals, NEITHER has anything to do with racial differences today beyond when the various groups migrated out of Africa.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

waltert

thats true, humans havent been in modern civilization for very long.

I would think that in a nation like the US over a long period of time, the smart should get smarter, and the dumb would get dumber.

and I think that farming and hunting is a different type of "smarts" than those needed to write windows XP, or perform any of the scientific/engineering related stuffs that allows society to advance.

Ourcrazymodern?

Do I dare say this seems not so much like a race as a destruction derby?

We should lighten up a little.
And NO, that ain't gonna happen. It doesn't matter whose statistics you use (unless you believe a racist): intelligence springs up everywhere you look, and often where you might not think to look. I think this is indicative.

I could be a cow if I had a better imagination, or more patience.

Or maybe a lap dog.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

raveneye

Nope, what you showed is a very common confusion between correlation and causation.

If you want to demonstrate the existence of races, at the very minimum you need to (1) show that the genetic variation is clustered, and (2) show that the clusters coincide with your proposed “racial” groups.

You have done neither. And you never will, because human variation is clinal, not clustered, and allele similarity decays smoothly, along a long continuum, with the geographic distance between two human populations.

Refer to the following figure:

cline2.gif
Manica, et al. 2005. Geography is a better determinant of human genetic differentiation than ethnicity. Human Genetics 118: 366-371.


Notice there are no vertical breaks. That means that you have no basis for deciding, e.g. where “european” ends and “asian” begins. You have no boundaries whatsoever. There are no natural clusters or “races” or “subspecies” whatsoever. There are only local families and local populations.

Therefore, any division of the continuum is arbitrary. The clumsy ethnic divisions that you are proposing are no better than any other set of divisions. All divisions have about the same mediocre predictive ability, which is worse than simply using geography. The fact that a few superficial traits are correlated with ethnicity is irrelevant to the question of what causes the geographic variation, which is simply the slow migration of point mutations through the single interbreeding human population.

You might want to note the title of the above paper.

Then it sounds like you’re changing your mind about the subject of your thread. You might consider that starting a new thread is a tad more productive than complaining that the subject of your thread is being addressed.

That’s right, being mammals has nothing to do with the absence of human racial differences today. Therefore your bringing up the subject of cows was a howling non-sequitur.

However, the fact that we are all one race is the undeniable conclusion from the genetic data. The argument is simple: human genetic variation is clinal, not clustered. There are no genetic boundaries, gene flow is free, unfettered, widespread, ongoing, and has been continuously throughout the history of our species, due to constant migration and interbreeding. And the time since our last common ancestor is so short that the current geographic differences are superficial and skin-deep at best. You can call our race anything you want, it makes no biological difference, but “African” is the natural choice since that’s where our common heritage begins.

And to bring this back to the subject of the OP, I’ll point out that scientific inquiry has shown that 100% of all the genetic variation known to exist in our species still exists within every continent. Therefore the claim that Africa is somehow genetically inferior to Europe is like claiming that human genetic variation is inferior to itself.

A rather absurd claim, don’t you agree?

abaya

Thank you, raveneye.

Out of curiosity, are you an anthropologist, biologist, geneticist, or anything of the sort? Most people around here seemed to just blink at me slowly when I mentioned clinal variation...

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

roachboy

excellent raveneye.

from here it'd be interesting to pose the problem of race as an ideology all over again, and link it to the notion of culture as a discrete, self-referential social space that interacts with the "outside" only tangentially and at the risk of contamination. the above gives a good material base for it. if you put the variables together, conventional wisdom begins to come undone.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ustwo

Raven, go look up with a 'ring species' is, because thats what my next post in here is about.

That graph is really meaningless as it applies to race, and you could get the same graph for different SPECIES. Its shows absolutely nothing other than there is a constant variance based on geographic separation which is to be expected. I'd be far more surprised if there were separate groups as races, as we are not talking spontaneous mutation differences (which are there but to a lessor degree).


I have to get to work here so it will be a while.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

abaya

A noble thought, rb, but I think the problem around here (on all three of the race threads) is that very few people are willing to see conventional wisdom come undone, and in fact WILL NOT see it, no matter what. It happens all the time in our Anthro 101 undergrad classes, unfortunately... people do not like to see their dreamworks come undone (see Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches for a readable treatment by Marvin Harris).

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

roachboy

abaya:
i understand the response--tfp is far more frustrating than even a low-level undergraduate class on this kind of question. in a class, i'll generally plow straight through student reticence. i figure that i warn them up front, tell them what's coming, and encourage them to drop the class. if they dont drop, then everything is fair game. most of the interest in teaching is putting students in an uncomfortable position, undermine their sense of certainty about the world, jamming them into corners such that they have to think their way out.

but i try to give them the tools required to do the thinking, if they dont already have them. its a philosophical exercise, preliminary to any political narratives.

here, you're right: there are folk who prefer the illusions that come along with categories like race. but that doesnt mean these illusions are worth anything. and destroying them can be fun.

gotta go for the moment.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

abaya

Yeah, I think I lost sight of that a couple of threads back.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

flstf

I think you are referring to "Jimmy the Greek" Snyder who was a commentator for CBS Sports and the top sports handicapper in Vegas. He claimed black superiority in sports because of breeding practices during slavery. They fired him. I wonder if there isn't even a little bit of truth in what he claimed.

Ustwo

You know screw ring species, I don't think that will get to the real issue here. Lets cut to the chase. I will only use that if you continue to think that 'clumping' would be required for races when it isn't even required for species.

And roachy keep posting with that smug superiority, I'd feel sad if you stopped, even when you know nothing about the topic.

What We Know and What We Don’t Know: Human Genetic Variation and the Social Construction of Race
By Joseph L. Graves, Jr.
Published on: Jun 07, 2006

Joseph L. Graves, Jr. is University Core Director and Professor of Biological Sciences at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research concerns the evolutionary genetics of postponed aging and biological concepts of race in humans. He is the author of The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994.

But lets see why the word 'race' is really opposed....

Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. He is president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.

We shouldn't use the term race, because of racial prejudices.

And again....

Evelynn M. Hammonds is professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical, and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a book called The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990.

Again, the problem is that finding racial differences is bad due to the inherent racism, not that there are no racial differences.

The AAA has the same stance in their position paper...

Note whats not being argued is are there racial differences, but is the CONCEPT of race good. Scientists are not arguing that their are not racial differences, but that the idea is bad.

Depending on who you look at only 6-15% of the variation found in the species is divided on racial lines. I have said so myself when I pointed out that pretty much all of human diversity is found in any given race (minus that %). That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with using race as a catigory, unless of course you are afraid at what others will do with them.

You know the more I research this the more political and less scientific it becomes. Is there a racial 'blurring' where land overlaps, is there only a small amount of human variation compared to other mammals found in humans, are the racial differences small? I'd answer 'duh' to all of those and have done so in this thread already. But that being said there ARE real racial differences, they ARE able to be quantified, they are a clear as the faces of a native of Britain next to a native of Australian (not of criminal descent) yet because everyone is so worried about racism we are being TOLD by scientists to pretend they don't exist, lest a racist public use it for nefarious purposes.

The last thing anyone wants is biologic excuses for racism, but putting ones head under the sand and pretending there is only one race is asinine.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

Ourcrazymodern?

I guess life would be more dull if we weren't so uh-maze-ing.

"If we roll in the soot we can all be labradors!"

I took a nice long walk with my labrador yesterday. We saw wildlife, and met strangers, and I daresay a good time was had by all.

It's just us(the living) here, people! Would anyone care to guess my race, or how stupid I can get?

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

roachboy

there we are.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

abaya

Ustwo, I appreciate all the quotes... you actually illustrated more of my side of the argument. That is where my training lies, of course, being an anthropologist. No one is telling you to pretend that human genetic variation doesn't exist. Quite the contrary. I have not said that, none of those other anthropologists that you quoted said that, no one on TFP has said that. We have all said that it's very clear that such variation exists... that's not the problem. Repeat: biological evidence of human genetic variation (with clinal distribution) is a very clear fact, and no one is arguing about that.

The problem is when people start assigning meaning to those genetic variations... intelligence, morals, values, abilities, etc. I think you'd even agree with me that this is stretching things. Phenotype has nothing to do with intelligence, morals, values, abilities... and yet, the historical idea of "race" purported to assign these meanings to otherwise meaningless phenotypes. And that is where "race" becomes troublesome, as the AAA position paper points out most clearly. Race is a very heavily loaded word, going back to colonial times and earlier, when classification was used to denigrate particular groups based on their phenotypes, which were assumed to be linked directly to their intelligence, etc. And that is just scientifically untrue, as social scientists and biologists since Boas have proven (although again, the Nazis tried to use the old definition to justify their extermination of "lesser" races); do you have any argument with that?

So unless you have an argument with that, I think the fundamental problem we have in this discussion is YOUR definition of "race," Ustwo... and others who have taken your position. Are you really talking *only* about human genetic variation, phenotypically expressed, when you say "race?" Or are you talking about race in the traditional sense, which is to assess intelligence and moral values based on whether or not a person has dark skin, shovel-shaped teeth, etc? (My impression is that it's the former, but I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong.)

The thing is, any random person who hears you use the word "race" wouldn't know what you really meant, unless they asked you. That's why the word itself is so problematic... it means so many different things to different people, which means it doesn't have much use as a valid, reliable descriptor. Using the more accurate, biological term of clinal variation, or human genetic variation, or ancestral DNA, etc... clarifies that you are not assigning meaning that isn't there.

It doesn't mean you're ignoring human variation, quite the contrary. It means you are recognizing that there is more human variation under the sun than can possibly be described using the old Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid labels. And I think you've already admitted that you recognize that fact, a few posts back when I quoted you earlier.

So, in light of all that, why are you so attached to the word "race?" I'm genuinely curious.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

roachboy

its kind of amazing the distance that separates how my last post reads from what i thought it meant when i was writing it.
when i was writing it, i was just relaying something of my teaching experience. when i read it again, i sound like an ass.
sometimes things just get away from you, i guess.
its a bit embarrassing.

anyway

the question abaya poses above are central.
since ustwo is for some reason inclined to defend the notion of race as something more than a very limited descriptor which isolates and correlates certain physical attributes, i guess the ball is in his court.

this post is a form of squirming about in the face of embarrassment.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Ourcrazymodern?

(Thank goodness thoughts are fluid!)

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

sapiens

If you define race as "self identified" (which no one has here that I have noticed), there are reliable group differences in IQ scores between individuals that self-identify as members of different races. IQ is not the same as intelligence, but predicts a lot of outcomes within western cultures that are typically associated with intelligence. (I talked earlier about whether or not IQ is intelligence). Those group differences in IQ scores are not particularly amenable to environmental intervention. Adoption does seem to close much of the gap, but differences remain (Scarr, 1996; etc.). If these group differences exist, then self-identified race is more than a correlation of physical attributes.

I'm not making an argument about where such group differences come from or what such differences mean. Nor am I trying to justify treating members of different ethnic groups differently based on average group differences on a test. However, if there are group differences in IQ scores and those differences are related to important social outcomes, shouldn't someone investigate those group differences in order to equalize those social outcomes?

Personally, I don't think that measures of Big "g" (the WAIS or the WISC, etc.) are appropriate for studying group differences. Nor am I particularly interested in studying group differences.

roachboy

sapiens: it would seem to me that self-identification as the main way to link persons and race bumps the matter squarely onto ideological grounds--except that instead of focusing on the contents/definitions of the category, you focus on the effects of internalizing the category.

what these results would mean would be a function of how you decided to stage the relation of race as a category to other categories that indicate a sense of social identity or position or place.
or of a decision to treat these self-positioning markers as neutral, not problematic.

but how would you go about that?
simply exclude the problem at the level of method?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

sapiens

I'm not sure what you mean.

Whether or not the categories are problematic seems to be independent from whether or not the categories predict anything.

I think self-identification as black (or any other ethnicity) is more than simply internalizing the stereotypes associated with that category. I think that there likely social, economic, and cultural factors associated with that self-identification that contribute to the social outcomes I alluded to. Beyond that, there may be biological differences associated with the clines/races. What such differences are, what they mean, and whether you could ever adequately establish that those differences are biological in origin are separate questions.

abaya

Certainly, at least until "race" as a social category gives way to something more productive (as rb points out). This is exactly why the census continues to ask about "race," because of the social outcomes... and why every sociological study asks the same kinds of questions. Race as a proxy for so many other things...

The only question is, by asking people to continually "self-identify," are we creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by perpetuating the social acceptance of "race" as valid? I mean, let's say everyone did as I did and checked the "Other" box under "race." Then the census, and every social scientist out there, would be forced to find something else--hopefully something more productive/accurate--to use for grouping people and studying social outcomes.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

sapiens

I don't think that the effect of race is simply a function of internalizing racial stereotypes - like the argument stereotype threat researchers make.

Self-identified race, at least in America, is linked with a variety of social outcomes. Those links persist even if we control for SES. I believe that they also persist if we control for IQ, but I don't have the references handy. If a predictor (like an answer to a race/ethnicity question on a test) has a relationship with a variety of criteria, why would you toss it? It gives some information about where to look. I don't think that removing "race" from research will improve the social outcomes typically associated with race.

abaya

No, I don't think that either...quite the opposite. If my post came out sounding that way, then it was my own mistake. But I just wonder, sometimes, whether the constant question of "What are you?" (from the powers that be) perpetuates the need to self-identify with "race" in general, even a little bit... that's what I meant.

In any case, I don't think "race" can be removed as a predictor, not for a long time. And removing it right now certainly would not help with improving social outcomes... it would probably make things worse, in fact, because social programs would not be able to accurately assess which groups need help, etc. if they didn't have that data.

So I agree with you here. In order to know what the relationship is between self-identified "race" and social outcomes, we have to keep asking the racial question. It will probably be hundreds of years, if not more, before that can change.

Sidenote: someone may point out that the only reason I can get away with marking "Other" as a race (at least in the US) is because of my current level of privilege. I am aware of that fact, even if I don't like it. It's the same reason I can get away with never shopping at Walmart (as an ideological thing)... because I can afford to have those kinds of ideals. Most people don't have those choices, and I get that.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

roachboy

sapiens: i think you and abaya have basically addressed my question.

the trade-off involves the fact of some indexical value for the category race as a self-identified position--that the category may well be ideological/problematic in itself doesnt prevent its functioning as an index---folk use it even if it is not at all obvious waht it means when you think about it.

so i assume the metholodogy sections of papers which use this data make some gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the category is problematic (if the investigators see it so) and by doing that control for whatever problems one might have with the meanings assigned to the category socially.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

raveneye

Abaya, I’m a biologist and my research field is (non-human) evolutionary genetics. I’ve published a lot in population genetics, but haven’t cited myself here yet

I know what you mean about blinking slowly …. I like to ask people: if you start walking east from Berlin, when do you start saying people are Asian? And the answer is: in Berlin! The point being that we are mobile and 100% interfertile.

On the subject of the census in your later posts, it is interesting that the 2000 census allowed multiple answers on the race question, and almost 7 million people identified themselves as more than one race; 800,000 said they were both white and black.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/13/na...aa2721&ei=5070

Similar but slightly smaller numbers did the same on the 2005 census.

It’s probably controversial to say it, but I consider that progress. As more people become aware of the arbitrary nature of those categories, and of their own ancestry, they will continue to reject the idea that they must be pigeonholed in that way. It’s unfortunate that society seems to force the idea of racial singularity, which is absurd.

Tiger Woods calls himself Cablinasian (Caucasian, Black, American Indian, and Asian). We’re all mixtures, and there are no boundaries.

Yep. I would say that’s clearly the most profitable and (dare I say?) intelligent line of discussion from this point.

abaya

Good to know... somehow, I'm not surprised! I'm still curious about what field sapiens is in, but perhaps he likes a little mystery. I've never heard that about Tiger Woods before, but that's awesome. My husband is Lebanese, so we also joke that our kids will be "ThaiceLebandic," hehe... but of course, we don't really care "what" they are. (I've said it before, but I'm all for "hybrid vigor.")

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

raveneye

I’m sure your post will be very informative about gulls, salamanders, and butterflies (maybe we’ll finally get the sunspot kind too if we’re lucky), but unfortunately it will be not be relevant whatsoever to Homo sapiens, because H. sapiens is not a ring species.
Willful refusal to understand?

Of course it would be different. Every mixed pair would spike towards positive infinity.
How would you divvy up your “races” then if all you have is a genetic continuum? How would you show that one classification is any better than any of a million others? Why would european/asian be better at dividing eurasia than, say siberian/indian? Or anything else?

Of course you need discrete genetic units above local families. Otherwise you’ll just work up a sweat waving your arms around and squinting your eyes to separate shades of gray. That ain’t scientific inquiry, I’m afraid.

Tell you what. Go ahead and propose the criterion set that is commonly used by evolutionary geneticists for delineating species boundaries, or subspecies boundaries, or racial boundaries. Use any ring species you want, if that works for you.

Then I’ll be happy to take your criterion set and show that it is flat-out useless in delineating any genetic races in humans.

Or, try this. Tell us what you believe all the races are in humans. Then I’ll show that your groupings are arbitrary and have absolutely no objective, quantifiable basis in genetics.
This is the most revealing thing you’ve written in this entire thread.

Here is exactly the arm-waving that I’m talking about. You have an internalized, personal, arbitrary, and subjective preconception of how different a face must be to qualify as a different genetic race. And you think your personal, subjective preconception is somehow the biological truth, and can be quantified. I hate to have to break this to you, but your personal hunch is not science. It’s not quantifiable. It’s not objective. It’s just a garden-variety taste, like whether you like salt on your peas or not.

And let’s also keep in mind that humans are experts at recognizing tiny differences in faces, practically from birth. That means that what registers psychologically as a “very large” difference in facial dimensions or expressions, can be nothing more than a twitch of a muscle, or a change in one DNA base pair out of billions.

If you want to make a coherent argument about human evolutionary genetics, I’m afraid you’ll have to do a bit more than this.

abaya

I'm still waiting for the "race"-defenders to come back and answer my three questions from post #101. May be a while, given the punch that raveneye has just delivered...

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Ourcrazymodern?

The agnostic, dyslexic insomniac then thinks:
"Dog, I'm so happy you made me a humanist. Otherwise all the know-all-ege would be tiresome rather than entertaining."

P.S. I'm definitely marking "other" next time I have the chance.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

abaya

Heh, apparently the punch was fatal. What happened to you all?

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Infinite_Loser

I haven't really been reading this thread since page one but I do have something to say. Way to toot your own horn, there. And I thought I was self-absorbed... >_>

Anyway, everyone knows there are distinguishable differences between races. We black folk are, after all, naturally gifted physically

(That's a joke. Don't take it seriously.)

__________________
I believe in equality; Everyone is equally inferior to me.

Ustwo

I forgot about this thread tbh. Though since this thread I happened to be reading a new book and it mentioned more about Watson in his early years. The guy was quite the scientific stud, shame to see his name being dragged in the mud when he was crazy old.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

abaya

Who are you talking to, and what are you talking about? And no, sorry to say, you're not the only asshole on this board.

__________________
And think not you can direct the course of Love;
for Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
--Khalil Gibran

Ourcrazymodern?

another asshole
Will freely tell you all, mine,
We are not the same.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT