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Not sure that is a great example.. Your not talking so much about dogma or wasted careers as you are talking about observing scientific progress where competing ideas and theories are over time refined and confirmed.
@TradeMinister
I am very familiar with it. Individuals have wrong theories all the time, and thats how science is suppose to work, thats how we learn we are wrong and ultimately what is correct.
And every generation, we find out that settled science from the previous was nonsense.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html
Sometimes funding can derail science and create some issues, no doubt.. A prime example of that is the whole autism vaccine nonsense where basically someone paid a bunch of money to a small minority of crooked scientists to produce a easily debunked paper. Even though the whole of the scientific community quickly rejected the paper its very existence was used as fodder by some for years to come. So yes a person with some money can certainly use psudo-science to cause some harm.
But these sorts of situations never get very far, they certainly dont pass any comprehensive peer review, and generally is not what we see from the majority of the scientific community.
Lots of areas are not explored because they are politically incorrect.
Let's look at IQ research.
There has been a great deal of research around IQ, even going so far as to investigate IQ differences among cultures we think of as different races, alot of that research is ongoing. Better IQ tests designed to be suited for tribal cultures with little contact with the outside world have been developed over the years for exactly that reason.
The issue is simply certain assertions have been made so often in the past and debunked so thuroughly, and almost always done under extreme bias, that most scientists arent going to rehash the same old nonsense unless someone actually comes up with a compelling high quality science, which is rarely the case in certain areas.
Every once in a while I come across some moron with a clearly racial bias trying to argue blacks are inherently lower IQ than whites, and every time when i give them the time and effort to review the evidence of their claim it is completely laughable the lack of evidence and the amount of bias they employed to collect it. Obviously when 99% of people arguing a particular point are always crackpots even if there is a valid point somewhere among them it isnt going to as easily get attention. Extraordinary claims take extraordinary evidence.
Hard to say. I mean we see studies that suggest black people have genetic deficiencies other races do not all the time. for example it is well known and established science that blacks have a much higher incidence of sickle cell anemia than non-blacks. Despite this effectively looking like they are genetically inferior in that regard, and thus would be something you might think couldn't get published, it tends to be free published and fairly well accepted science.
The reason such studies stand little chance of getting published isnt so much about the biases in the industry, its about the fact that we have tested the hypothesis for over a 100 years in great depth and never once have found anything to support that assertion. So naturally its not something you will see getting published unless there is some pretty solid and reproducible data, and there never is.
If I can chip my humble 50 satoshis on this, African people have way higher genetic diversity than the rest of humankind, not having experienced the bottleneck from getting out of Africa.
It's easier, therefore, to find higher diversity of problems too, and the sampling can wildly affect the results of any research. Talking about "black people" or Africans is really like putting together all the rest of humankind, papuasians, native americans, latins, australian aborigenal people etc, and say "see, they have this and that".
My main point is, we can't talk about "African people" as a group and pretend it makes sense.
This is something that until more recent genetic discovery was not well known, so a lot of studies even from a recent past have a huge bias in that sense
You can talk about any group that has something in common. For example, we say "humans do X or Y"
He never said you cant talk about africans as a group, in some respects you can.. but as he pointed out talking about africans as a group is such a huge biodiverse group that it would be like asians, indians, russians, and europeans as all one group and making generalizations about them. Sure you can get away with that some of the time, but with a group that diverse more often than not it will be far too general to be useful.
So in reality there are not three or four subspecies, there are two: sub-Saharan Africans and the recent descendants of Africans imported as livestock, and literally everyone else.
You clearly have no clue what the technical definition of sub-species is then, which is about what I'd expect from you to be honest.
Blacks don't just fail in comparison to Whites, where one could whine about slavery forever and I'm sure you would;
they fail in comparison to everyone, including Indios who were also enslaved and cruelly oppressed.
hahahah, he thinks he is high IQ... how cute. This is some first rate kruger-dunning syndrome right here.
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Nah, you are far too insignificant to be comparable to them in the least. Just an insignificant, grumpy, and not too bright, racist fool, little more.
Not ad honimen when its literally true.
To quote him from earlier in the conversation " I just love it when they argue all races are identical despite obvious empirical facts like smart Negroes being about as rare as stupid North Asians."
https://freespeechextremist.com/objects/03cac52d-1632-48e3-b799-afd4cef4fe7a
Let's see, North Asian average is somewhere around 110 and African (Negroid) average is somewhere around 80-90.
@amerika @mystik @TradeMinister @freemo @manarock
do you have a source for it? I'm not in the psychology field, so I am not very up to date with researches
It does not focus on race at all, but does show studies that human breeds perform differently on.
Just to clarify this dude (who has been excessively racist with his comments earlier in this thread) uses words like "breed" and "subspecies" in a way that is completely ignorant of the scientific definition of those terms. Apparently he things black people are a different "subspecies" from humans and now he is calling them a different "breed"... I wouldnt really trust much of what he says considering he hasnt even come to a point where he understands the most basic terminology.
Subspecies just means a different variant, like "cultivar."
No a variety from a cultivar is most certainly not a sub species and is explicitly recognized as a category that exists BELOW subspecies.
Nonsense. We can say that different groups of the same species evolved for different purposes.
That makes the different races cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli, etc.
Subspecies is a similar distinction: any group within a species that is genetically distinct.
Since races reproduce themselves, race qualifies.
Absolutely zero credible arguments have been advanced against race, which is why ALL deniers fall back on "but muh consensus" or "but we banned publication of this data, so it doesn't exist."
Species arent defined that way... There are many aspects that are considered for a species but the most common one, at least among mammals, is their ability to mate and produce viable offspring.
As long as two people can have sex and their chance of having a viable child who is fertile is the same as the general population, then they are the same species.
For example Horse and Donkey are considered different species because if they mate and have a child the child (a mule) is less fertile than either of its parents.
Therefore the most obvious and glaring reason a cabbage and a brocoli are difference species is because they can not cross pollinate and mate.
You could try to have sex with a turnip, if you are a broccoli:
https://www.torontomastergardeners.ca/askagardener/cross-breeding-members-of-brassica-cabbage-family/
I'd love to make one thing clear here, in case it's not obvious to everyone: species do not exist. Subspecies do not exist. Phyla do not exist. Those are groups we make to make sense and get an order out the immense complexity of the living creatures. In the end, there are only individuals, and there is no definition of "species" that does not have exceptions or faults. Depends on context and aim of the analysis
That is why I push a lot to use a consensus based, conventional nomenclature: otherwise we'd go crazy. And I'm tellin' ya, those taxonomists oftentimes are already kinda there
Mostly true, there are exceptions to everything. But the whole "viable offspring" definition tends to hold true rather well for most mammals with only a small handful of exceptions.
so and so. Mammals are a very, very small group, and Myer was of course biased with animals, being a zoologist and all. Still, even in this small group there are many exceptions, and also, Myer sold this as an experimental definition: you can test whether it's working.
Now, have we ever fucked a broccoli to check if that was working out? Is it really doable? Can we have a dog screwing every living being to check if they reproduce? By Myer idea, that is what we should do. In practice, it's not used and we always default to the morphological concept of species. Even tho, to be honest, I'd love to see those experiments in action!
There is a big difference between what we can experimentally test for, vs what "is".. The most commonly held definition of a species is "a group of individuals that, in nature, are able to mate and produce viable, fertile offspring." The ability to mate and produce viable offspring is pretty much the primary definition of a species. Yes there are some expectations, and it isnt the whole picture. But it is 90% of the picture, we just need a few definitions for edge cases.
Even if we agree that it may be impractical to test this by mating every individual with every other the practicality isnt really how we define what it is or isnt. We also can infer from the patterns we see when mating that we dont actually need to test every combination to be fairly certain. Generally we know that unless two creatures naturally breed on their own and are genetically and physically somewhat similar they arent going to be able to breed. I know if i mate with a piece of brocoli the brocoli wont get pregnant with a reasonable degree of certainty without testing it because we know there is significant genetic divergence there. However we dont necessarily know if a chimpanzee is a separate species from a human unless some attempt has been made to inseminate a chimp with human ejaculate, which has been done and thus ruled out any possibility of us being the same species.
the exceptions are not for edge cases. They are a very, very significant amount of organisms in the plant and fungi kingdom, let alone in the bacteria protozoa etc
Even inside mammals you have many cases: what about a sterile person? Is he not human? What about hybrids that work but lose viability as the generations go on?
For mammals it may work somehow. Still, I don't agree: the most commonly used species concept is morphological: they look similar, they are the same species. The biological species concept it's a nice abstract definition, rarely applied and only to a very limited amount of organisms.
They phylogenetic and ecological species concept also make sense (even more IMO), but again, hard to test, hard to obtain all data: we go back to how they look like.
Fair points
No doubt the plant and fungi kingdom have many more exceptions than mammals would, but even then the trend largely follows the rule more often than to be an exception of it. But in the mammal kingdom at least the exceptions are well addressed.
Take an infertile human as an example. Since we would have to be talking about infertility brought on by genetics. This would be mirrored by the use case of a horse and a donkey producing a infertile mule, which is **not** considered its own species, there is no mule species, specifically due to their infertility.
So because the primary defining quality of a species is the ability to intermate successfully and produce viable offspring, any member of a group born infertile would not be considered a different species since it can not intermate with individuals of the same genotype as itself.
I'm not sure I agree with the notion that species are defined by how they look.. We have plenty of examples of species that look identical but are considered different species too.
though I think we may have a more productive conversation if we talk about specific edge cases and how they are handled.. the fertility question we addressed with the mule example and easily resolved.. but how about more obscure edge cases, I can think of a few.
Here are some of the more unusual exceptions I can think of that are **not** handled by the simple definition I presented for the animal kingdom, I'd be interested to hear some examples in the plant kingdom though (I can think of only a few im sure there are more):
* Ring species, in this case its hard to define species as singular things and it falls into more of a spectrum. Which muddies the definition
* parthenogenetic species, since they are asexual by nature they cant be defined via intermating. for mammals, like the whip-tail lizard, these are actually easy to handle since they arise from normal sexual species that when interspecies breeding occurs the offspring become asexual and clones of themselves. As clones its easy to define the species line without mating. This also includes species that can clone themselves by discading part of their body, such as tapeworms.
* Species whose fertility depends on a third different species as a vector. such as parasitic wasps and tapeworms
In my mind all these edge cases are reasonable reasoned through though and still in the spirit of the original definition I offered.
