IUBio

Re. brain sizes: Einstein's and women's

Dan Holzman holzman at panix.com
Sun Oct 6 13:54:28 EST 2002


In article <EeQn9.6465$sB3.455714 at news20.bellglobal.com>,
Parse Tree <parsetree at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> The definition of "Black" is "anyone with a Black ancestor."  Someone
>> with seven German great grandparents and one African great grandparent
>> is most likely going to be of the phenotype I described above, but
>> their passport until very recently would have read "Black" and their
>> birth certificate would have said "Octaroon."    Alternately, someone
>> with two Black parents, each of whom have White ancestors, has a
>> non-zero chance of manifesting this phenotype.
>
>I'm pretty sure Canadian passports don't list race in that respect.  They
>certainly don't have a question about it on the census.  It's just
>ethnicity.

Since it was American law which defined who was "white" and "Black,"
I'm not surprised that Canadian law would have paid much heed to it.

>> Along similar lines, there is a maximum number of generations back one
>> can trace an American Indian ancestor to be considered one by the
>> government.  I think it's one's great grandparent, but I'm uncertain.
>> That means that the child of an American Indian would be classified as
>> not an American Indian by the BIA.
>>
>> Around the turn of the century, Syrians were of the "Arabic" race, and
>> therefore not permitted to immigrate to the US.  Some Syrians
>> challenged this in court and over the course of several years, Syrians
>> went back and forth between being "White" and "Arabic."
>>
>> In each case, what race one is a member of is defined by legislation
>> or court ruling.  There's no actual science behind any of this.
>
>Except they have no power to do this.  They have no ability to define what a
>race is any more than they have to define an operating system.

That's where you're wrong.  Legislation and court ruling are the only
things that have ever meaningfully defined races.  

>> These things are categorized all the time.  There's simply no
>> scientific basis for the categories.  Scientists tried for years to
>> categorize these things.  Everything they've thought of to use to
>> categorize these things has turned out not to work.
>
>They should try harder.  The fact that they haven't in no way indicates that
>it is not possible.  Our sense indicate that people are physically
>different, in fact.

We weren't addressing what's possible.  We were addressing what has
been done.  It is possible that gravitation will be refuted tomorrow,
and about as likely as "race" being validated.



More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net