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Ok, here is what I mean: I manually copied the "isochromes" on a cylindrical proection. There should be no copyvio problems with this version, but obviously, the map is less accurate. I can still improve accuracy, though, if you think this is the way to go.
dab 18:27, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
We have to use the map with caution anyway: The best known of these maps is that composed by the Italian geographer Renato Biasutti, which was based on the von Luschan skin color scale. This map has gained broad circulation in several widely distributed publications (Barsh 2003, Lewontin 1995, Roberts 1977, Walter 1971), despite the fact that, for areas with no data, Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas [1]. dab 09:14, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
my version Anyway, I added labels now. Feel free to fiddle with the rgb curves of this version. My statement about accuracy was not in reply to your comment, I just wanted to state what's in the map I uploaded. Since the numbers seem to refer to a "Luschan scale" we can now change the colours to any colours of the rainbow (although I can see them well on my screen as they are). I suggest you leave the ocean in light blue, and the empty dataset in dark blue, and just pick a scale of browns for the eight colours of the scale. dab 09:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Are you maybe colourblind? it seems than your scale is based on brightness, while the original scale is based more on hue (different amounts of green). I am re-uploading with increased brightness contrast. how is it now? dab 09:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Some time ago there was a discussion on the genetic history of the peoples of India. While looking for the general picture of human migrations presented by Spencer Well on Public TV a couple months ago I found a good summary: http://www.hindu.com/lr/2003/09/07/stories/2003090700330500.htm
§ One of the things that this article points out, in discussing Wells's book, is that there seems to be evidence that the oldest population of India resulted from the first wave of migration out of Africa, around 60K years before the present, and very much later another wave of migrants came into India from the Central Asian region, at around 30K ybp. The newspaper article suggests that the second group came as conquorers. By the Spencer Wells figures, the Americas were being populated by immigrants from over the Bering Strait already 20,000 years ago, but Europe didn't get populated (again by a wave of migration out of Central Asia) until about 10K ybp.
§ Fearing to get a slug of job-related e-mails, I haven't yet turned on my IBM to see how the new maps look using that system. All I know so far is that reading the ones using the old color scheme is like trying to see cooked white rice sprinkled on new-fallen snow. P0M 08:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ I'm not sure whether "DC" wrote all the paragraphs above. Anyway, of course there is some degree of diversity in China, just as there is some degree of diversity among First Nation peoples in the Americas. People got here from Asia 20,000 years or so ago, and in all that time they have evolved language, cultural, and even physical differences (the beginnings of which may have come with different groups during different migrations, who knows). Languages like Thai are believed by scholars such as Bernard Karlgren to have some traceable connections with the language(s) the Chinese now speak, and the Thai people are known to have lived in southern China before being forced farther south by the ethnic Han Chinese. And there are even groups such as the Taiwan aborigines who speak a polysyllabic language that has nothing to do with Chinese.
§ I don't know how one would evaluate such differences as do exist between the ethnic groups situation in India and that in China. However, there is, for instance, no social institution like the caste system in China. That's not to say that some speakers of one "dialect" of Chinese will not endeavor to prevent their kids from marrying out of their language group, and there are certain stereotypes that actually seem to be believed about people from the several provinces. But even given those rather human failings, the grand thrust of the Chinese civilization has been toward assimilation rather than toward segregation. The newspaper article for which I supplied a URL seemed to indicate that the author found explanations for some features of Indian social history in the research of Dr. Wells, so anyone who is interested in questions of why groups maintain enmities over the centuries might find some research leads in his ideas. Personally, I find his ideas fascinating but lack much of a background in ancient Indian history. P0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
for discussion § Before somebody complains about the picture or lack of them, I am putting this image up as a suggestion and these are the least unattractive people I could find in my collection of scanned pictures. (Well, the Yeti probably should go, regardless.) They can be swapped out, or the entire idea of giving the most attractive examples of faces from around the world can go. On the other hand, probably lots of people have pictures of their favorite friends whom they would like to contribute.
§ Before somebody complains about the reddish tint, I can explain. It all started when I saved an ancestor of this thing as a gif image rather than as a png image. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was allegedly due to operator error. The cyber cop is coming in the morning to put me through the wringer. However, if I survive that ideal and if the map is acceptable, the colors can be changed with a wave of the magic wand. It's just that my magic wand is off duty at 3 a.m., and with no idea of whether it will be worth any further effort I'm not going to do anything about it.
§ The good thing is that after cranking the gamma up on the original map I was able to clearly see several inclusions of lighter skin tone areas in large areas of darker skin tones. I'm not sure what software other people used to copy and manipulate these images but it evidently could not see the faint differences any more easily than I could.
§ Oh, yes. The strange white area. I'd like to know about that too. It shows up on the original map as though there were a population of mostly white folks in that part of Africa. I am not kidding. I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank.
§ One last thing. No comments about my girlfriend. It's not that I am sensitive, but she is extremely capable with a blowgun, and, uh... she may look tough, but she's very easily hurt. ;-) P0M 08:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think if you look at the map you will see what I am questioning. It appears to be anomalous. Cavalli-Aforza draws his map "after Biasutti 1959, p. 192, table 4), but does not have 0-12. Instead he has it coded 15-17. When I can find the original map I will check it again. What I did in the beginning was explain (for anybody who might wonder) that I did not put a white patch there by mistake. Media:2x2_w_missing_Biasutti.png P0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ I hope I am misunderstanding your first sentence. I certainly have not "realized [I] put the patch there by mistake." That is what is there on the map that was provided on this Talk page by copying it from somebody else, presumably already in digital form on a website. Maybe Cavalli-Sforza went to Biasutti's book and copied the map wrong. Maybe the map in Biasutti's book was wrong and Cavalli-Sforza saw a possible problem, checked the data, and corrected the omission. Maybe our first digitized map is wrong. Who knows? P0M 12:29, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I really don't know which map you want to copy. If you are copying CS's map, I cannot comment anyway, bacause I haven't seen it. dab 12:40, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ We are beginning to squabble. I think I have an axiological reaction to your manner of calling attention to differences of opinion. I will try to refrain from reacting to antagonistic- and critical-sounding statements that you make in the future. What I will say is that I agree with the recitation of facts given immediately above, disregarding the affect-laden parts. When I put in the white band (and white was an otherwise undefined color as "1-12" was colored a light tan in that version), I said: "I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank." In the way that I have been trained, calling attention to suspect data while working up any kind of a project is regarded as a normal part of doing a good job, and flagging something is not considered "[putting] the patch there by mistake. I have tentatively redrawn the map in that one regard, and I have also replaced certain regions (such as the one near the east coast of S. America at about 20 degrees south) that had fallen out along the way. The projection I have used is equal-area, and I was able to copy over small sectors of the original digitized map, size them to the approximate position on the new map, and then "stretch to fit". Since the original drafting was possibly not too accurate, I doubt that the overall accuracy of the map suffers a great deal. Anyway, nobody will try to navigate by it.
I am not sure what the ideal size to show this image may be. If reduced in size too much, the various colored areas become too small to be easily distinguished. Space on the hard drive is the same. Space on the computer screen is virtually free. P0M 02:49, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Does anyone have software that is good for doing curves? The map with the projection I borrowed had very flaky lines, and all I can do is to try to fix them by hand. It would be good (if the color level in the skin shades part cold be kept nice by never saving the map into GIF format) to refine the lines, and especially the boundary lines around the whole map. (That is why I experimented with the black oval.) Having no sense of apodictic certainty regarding the existence or non-existence of a band of white people living in Africa, I will wait until I get to the library to check the original book. Hopefully the book will have tables as well as maps to provide an additional check. P0M 19:07, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Meanwhile, I did find the following, which indicates that somebody else had the same doubts and did have access to the original book in Italian:
This site has some maps that reflect additional/later research. Unfortunately I didn't see this before I did so much work on the original map. ;-< P0M 08:29, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ When the website says, "The light-colored intra-coastal stripe from Casablanca to Tunisia is merely an accidental artifact of the copying process from Biasutti. It appears in no other publication of this figure," it sounds like it was not on Biasutti's map, but was on some family of maps that resulted when somebody copied from his map. By calling this stripe an "artifact of the copying process" the author of the website is bending over backwards to avoid saying, "Somebody copied incorrectly from Biasutti." Cavelli-Sforza has a stripe there, but it is intermediate in color. The URL I quoted seems to promise a table of data, but I don't see it.The map that has no data for the Americas only gives 5 levels of difference (instead of 8), so it doesn't show whether the people next to the southern line of the northernmost color area in Africa are any darker than those right next to the ocean. I doubt that our library has many books in the sciences written in Italian, but I'll check. P0M 12:19, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ I'm just back from raiding the library. I checked a dozen books or so, but didn't find a notably better map than what was on the website. I did find one map that showed the improved values for Africa and also showed revisions for the Americas. The skin shades are divided into 5 groups rather than 8 groups, but that may more accurately reflect the true degree to which distinctions can be measured with accuracy. I can scan that image and try to stretch fit it to an equal-area projection.
§ While I was there, I check out a book on dentition. One of the key identifiers of Chinese, shovel-shaped incisors, turns out to occur even in Europeans (at a very much lower rate) and to be even more prevalent in the Americas than it is in China.
§ I now have the book by Wells, and it has a fairly good map, with dates, of the migrations he has followed through his study of the y chromosome. It is intended to illustrate a more detailed verbal presentation, so it may be possible to improve on the somewhat impressionistic map. (I'm sure that the earliest wave of migration did not get to India via the open ocean, for instance. At least that's not what he said on the TV program. But that's the way the map is drawn to make room for drawing in the overland migrations to the north of the first wave migration path.) P0M 00:52, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ I got in touch with the owner of the website mentioned above, and he has offered to e-mail me a scanned copy of the map in the book illustration, which shows an intermediate band where the white band occurs near the northern tip of Africa. I had a closer look at the maps I found in the library, and none of them improves on what was in that website. The one major difference that a revised map probably ought to take account of is the division of Australia into two regions. I'll make overlays to check, but it looks like the only other changes involve reducing 8 zones to 5. If you check out the Cavelli-Sforza map (which I now think is a photo reproduction of the original map) you can easily understand why authors would decide to simplify the number of zones -- Cavelli-Sforza's map is o.k. for the lighter half of the shades of skin color, but the darker shades are practically indistinguishable. Sometimes, if you know where to look, you will see what looks like a little halftoning rather than straight black ink. But for practical purposes the map is pretty useless outside of the values that are shown in the Americas.
§ In a way it was a good thing that the original map was so washed out. If I hadn't really looked carefully at it I'm pretty sure I'd have missed the white band. The uncorrected map has propagated so many places on the WWW that it's hard to believe the original maker of the digitized image has any objection to others using it. P0M 03:53, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
We need to clean up the article. The sections should only treat what it says they do in the section title. For example, there shouldn't be a paragraph "
at the end of "History of the term". Nor should the "Anthropology and genetics" section, being placed after the history section, i.e. we are through with the historical aspect now, begin with
(i.e. this bit still belongs in the 'history' section). Also the case studies (USA, Brazil) should either be exported to special articles, or at least be placed after the more general phylogenetic subsection. Somebody should read the entire article and weed out repetitions, too. dab 17:24, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ The von Luschan scale was a manufactured set of standard tiles that were colored so that a researcher could in relatively rapid order sort through his/her tiles and find the one that came closest to matching a given subject's skin color. Essentially the same method is still used today, at least in this increasingly anti-scientific nation, by dentists who want to match ceramic material used for making fillings with the color of their patient's tooth. They have a little cabinet full of ceramic "teeth" on little spindles. Each specimen has a different combination of hue and brightness from the others. Although one could easily create an electronic device to measure these factors to tighter tolerances, the low-tech device seems to meet professional standards. Similarly, given the fact that a subject's skin color could vary considerably due to contingent factors such as season and weather patterns, the von Luchan tiles probably provide all the accuracy that is useful. P0M 03:10, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I seem to recall discussion a while back about the coloration of people in northern Africa during the ancient period. I just ran acrossthe article on Gallery_of_Fayum_mummy_portraits, which shows a fairly narrow range of skin colors, people mostly having proportionately large eyes, etc. Examination of the mummies themselves indicated that the people were depicted at an appropriate age. (Lots of people apparently died in their 20s and 30s.) Whether the eyes are realistic or are depicted they way they are because of esthetic preferences might be worth asking about. Anyway, DeeCee and some other may find these of interest. I find them quite attractive. P0M 02:15, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
An interesting gallery of artwork. I wasn't aware of these. Thanks for the info. Keep in mind that "ancient" is a highly relative term when dealing with dynastic Egypt. These mummy portraits date from the first century BC during the Roman occupation of Egypt, after centuries of contact with outside cultures and centuries of intermarriage. Even so, it's obvious that the majority of portraits show indigenous African features, from nappy, curly/frizzy hair to broad cheekbones, broad noses and full lips. Many are what we today would call Afro-Semitic types -- or, in another context, Sicilians à la John Turturo, but darker. (There's a reason Italians commonly were considered nonwhite in this country up until the mid 19th century. :-p) Most, if they had lived in the American South during the middle of the last century, would be on the receiving end of Jim Crow discrimination and, today, would be considered (after centuries of miscegenation with Native Americans and Europeans) typical African Americans. Facinating to see the faces! Of the 53 separate images, I'd say perhaps nine might, by today's standards, be considered "Semitic," which is to say simply a mixture of European and indigenous African phenotypes. All others are clearly African, miscegenated African or Afro-Semitic phenotypes. Two of the portraits of fairly dark-skinned black men.
The following link is a discussion about King Menes/Nahmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt -- in 3100 BCE, roughly 3,000 years before these portraits were painted. There's a photo of his statue near the top of the page and, later on, a discussion about just how old dynastic Egypt and Egyptian civilization, in general, is.
Next, a link to information regarding the melanin testing of early Eygptian royal mummies, which revealed that truly ancient Egyptian royalty were of the "black races" -- not Semitic, not Phoenician, not Caucasian, not cafe au lait; black:
Then another discussion thread on the web regarding recent facial reconstructions from mummified remains, with photos:
And, finally, once again, a link to a montage of photos from ancient dynastic Egypt of clearly black Africans, which I notice has been expanded since last I visisted the site.
Had to return to add another link with better photos of ancient Egyptian figural images of royals Amenhotep and Queen Tye (mother of Akhenaten). The people here are clearly and incontestably black Africans:
Another photo gallery:
§ Interesting! The image of Queen Tiye (18th Dynasty Egypt 1382-1344 BC) shows a band of lighter skin just below her brow band. I wonder whether there is an indication that people of that time may have decorated themselves by darkening their skins. If that would happening, it might give some insight into which groups had higher and which groups had lower status at that time. Many of the images show people who are considerably lighter than my friend from Malawi and maybe just a little darker than some of my Thai friends. I wonder how the colors have held up over the centuries. P0M 23:40, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
POM, you're wa-aaay off-base on that one! lol There's no record of such practice. Besides, the light band is where part of her headdress is missing! deeceevoice 00:39, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You know, for years I've been coming across that head of Queen Tiye, and it's always seemed really, really familiar to me. No wonder. It just dawned on me why. Queen Tiye is a dead ringer for late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. deeceevoice 02:18, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ Well, as Hu Shi said, "Make bold hypotheses, but seek verification with all due vigilence. And as for Gwendolyn Brooks, I have to agree too. See http://www.websn.com/Pride/Pride/gwendolyn_brooks.htm P0M 05:40, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Another note about African phenotypes. In general, one of the distinctive characteristics of black African phenotypes is that a majority have a forward-slanting facial profile. There are exceptions, of course. (In my own immediate family, as a matter of fact -- but we're quite a jumble, of African from God knows where, but likely the Congo or Angola; Caddo; Cherokee and Irish that we know of.) Caucasians, on the other hand -- and, again, there are exceptions -- often have flat profiles, as do Asians. That is, a fairly straight line can be drawn from the bridge of the nose to the base of the upper lip just under the nose, to the base of the lower lip, just above the chin. The forward-slanting profiles of depictions of ancient Egyptians are often quite pronounced/obvious -- one of the most distinctive and striking characteristics of their wall art. deeceevoice 10:22, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
http://www.catchpenny.org/race.html http://www.egyptianmyths.net/faq.htm#race http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/social/race.html The thing is, Egyptians were not exclusively "black" (like someone similar to Michael Jordan) like what afrocentrists would tell you, nor were they nordic like what white supremacists would say. More or less they look like modern egyptians, certaintly not "white," but wouldnt be classified as "negroes" either. They were simply egyptians. Wareware 08:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wareware, I never said all Egyptians were black. And it's quite clear from the link to the mummy portraits, they were a mix in later centuries. But what I've maintained all along is that the earliest dynastic Egyptians were dark-skinned, black Africans -- without question. Seti dates back only to the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom, approximately 1295 BCE. The first dynasty of the eary dynastic period was 2920 BCE -- and keep in mind that the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt didn't occur until 3100 BCE, centuries after civilizations along the Nile began to flourish. Indeed, the predynastic period in Egypt dates from 5,500 BCE. A hell of a lot can happen to a people ethnically over the course of 4,000+ years. Hell, take a look at African Americans in the U.S., for example. We're miscegenated beyond belief. All that in the span of only, say, 500 years -- and with segregation and laws against intermarriage on the books for a great part of that time. It's a safe bet that the people of Seti's Egypt very much resembled the present-day African American community.
First, Wareware, your ignorance is showing. Upper Egypt is south; Lower Egypt is north -- not the other way around. It is also clear that Upper Egypt was more advanced than Lower Egypt, with Upper Egypt conquering and unifying both lands under Menes (obviously, a black man with a big, broad nose lol). For the sake of argument, which Egypt do you suppose was whiter than the other? The one closer to NUBIA, as you claim (funny) or the one up North? (I'm having too much fun with you.) And, yes, folks always cared what color the builders of ancient Egyptian civilization were, which is why Europeans took such pains to manufacture and perpetuate the lies. You are clearly beyond the reach of reason if you contend that blacks in Egypt were all slaves; there is ample and sustained evidence to quite the contrary --monumental evidence, as a matter of fact. In short, Wareware, dang, bwoi. You a fool! :-D deeceevoice 16:59, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Man, you better stop talkin' from up under my clothes! LOL! You're an ASIAN, and you wanna talk about the size of someone's balls? ROFLMBAO. (slappin' sides) However big they may be, it's a safe bet they're bigger than yours! I think you'd better leave THAT one alone, my misguided Asian brother. This "discussion" has reached a new low. I'mma do you a favor and pretend we never had this exchange. (Still slappin' sides) BWA-HA-HA-HAAA! deeceevoice 22:54, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've just gotten around to reading a single section of this article in its entirety -- on race and intelligence -- and found a number of grammatical problems. I don't have time right now to do the same thing with the rest of the piece. (I've been avoiding reading much of it, because I sense I likely will have some problems with substance -- and I have neither the time nor the disposition right now to deal with that sort of thing.) But because this is now a featured article (if it was before, I hadn't noticed), folks need to take the time and go over this piece with an eye toward such things. deeceevoice 12:10, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I thought featured articles weren't supposed to still be "under construction" or still hotly contested. How did that happen? deeceevoice 10:32, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Understood, Sirubenstein. But it's my understanding that articles the central precepts of which are still hotly contested (even in friendly disagreements -- not "editing wars") or, at the very least, still in question should not have featured article status. Once such disagreement or doubt arises, even if an article already has been given featured status, shouldn't it be removed from that list until such time as those matters are resolved? deeceevoice 22:49, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I just did a major, painful, several-laborious-hour cleanup of the grammar and style of the first half of this article. I wasn't trying to NPOV most of this mess, just shorten it, but a little NPOV slipped in anyway. This article is in major need of reorganization, NPOVing, section deletion, and probably splitting. Any article over 32kb should by split by Wikipedia policy. This article was 56kb before my major style edit and 52kb after. I'm listing here several suggestions for the direction for this article, but this is more a list of what I will try to do in the near future than what I want others to do. I would of course prefer to know about major objections from other Wikipedians before I put work into the things on this list. My suggestions:
I'm sure as I work on these things I'll think up other things to do, so I'll probably add more later. For a while I saw this article as too intimidating to even read, let alone fix, but I have a lot of free time this weekend so I should be able to help make a dent in it. -- Schaefer 02:03, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm moving out most of the content of "History of the term" to Race (historical definitions) which is currently just a 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica article. I'll summarise the contents of the removed text as best I can in one paragraph. The final paragraph in the section doesn't pertain to the heading so I'm leaving it in this article. -- Schaefer 20:11, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
seeing that we have to really muck out this article, moving and cutting whole paragraphs, I think it is very evident now that this article is unfairly listed as 'featured'. Would you support listing it for defeaturing, and re-featuring it once it becomes stable again? dab (ᛏ) 19:50, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I suggested above that we need a list of definitions of race. Here is a starting point. -- Rikurzhen 20:55, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
Excerpted from Long JC, Kittles RA. Human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological races. Hum Biol. 2003 Aug;75(4):449-71.
Table 3. Biological definitions of race.
Concept | Reference | Definition |
Essentialist | Hooton (1926) | "A great division of mankind, characterized as a group by the sharing of a certain combination of features, which have been derived from their common descent, and constitute a vague physical background, usually more or less obscured by individual variations, and realized best in a composite picture." |
Population | Dobzhansky (1970) | "Races are genetically distinct Mendelian populations. They are neither individuals nor particular genotypes, they consist of individuals who differ genetically among themselves." |
Taxonomic | Mayr (1969) | "An aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species, inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and differing taxonomically from other populations of the species." |
Lineage | Templeton (1998) | "A subspecies (race) is a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. This definition requires that a subspecies be genetically differentiated due to barriers to genetic exchange that have persisted for long periods of time; that is, the subspecies must have historical continuity in addition to current genetic differentiation." |
References:
Commentary:
Obviously this list is not complete. But when we say that race is valid or not valid we need to say which defintion is being argued for/aginst. -- Rikurzhen 20:58, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
I like this idea, Rikurzhen. What I would even more like to see is a discussion that explains what is really out there, and then how each definition of race would be used to categorize the same set of individuals according to the characteristics that each definition treats as relevant and important. (See my remarks below.) Knowing how people use concepts and words to create relative simplicity out of bewildering multiplicity (when they for some reason do not want to deal with the world individual by individual) is exactly what is needed to help people deal with the problem of "race." P0M 01:07, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Most of the semantic problems in this article seem to stem from the confusion of race as a general form of subspecies classification, and race as it pertains to human beings. In my non-expert opinion, these aren't the same thing, as human races were defined by people who didn't know that genes existed, and those are the racial groupings people are going to continue to use regardless of what population biologists say. Declaring multiple definitions of race and specifying which version of the word race some object to is not the way to go. I honestly think we should have separate articles for race as a taxonomic classification, and race as it pertains to humans. If someone argues that race truly doesn't exist (id est, not even in honeybees), it can go in the former article. If someone argues that commonly used human races (Black, White, Asian, etc.) don't correspond to what biologists would consider to be races, then that goes in the latter.
I planned to clear up confusion regarding this with subsections and eventually good introductions, which is why I titled the section "Validity of human races". I don't think this is sufficient. Having a table of definitions to which later sections of the article can refer says to me as a reader, "This article is actually about two things with the same name, so here's a table showing the different things being discussed so we can keep them separate." It's not a bad idea, and I'd take it as a second resort to splitting the article, but I'd like to reach some consensus on this before major rewriting is done. -- Schaefer 22:52, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I disagree. The real problem is that conceptualizations make a small number of categories (the preferred number is 2) into which large numbers of diverse individuals are divided. People are introduced to categories that are named in the language(s) they learn, and insist that the categories are the realities and the diverse individuals are more-or-less perfect members of these sets. This attitude is very Platonic, and has been a plague on clear thinking ever since it first appeared.
The people who try to decide which bees are Apis mellifera meda (centered around Iraq), Apis mellifera anatolica (centered around Turkey), Apis mellifera carnica (centered in S.E. Europe), Apis mellifera ligustica (centered around Italy), Apis mellifera mellifera (centered in Germany), etc., have the same difficulties that face those who try to decide which humans are Semitic, which humans are Turkic, which humans are Caucasians, etc., etc. If you look at a bee from a typical hive in the geographical center of Italy, you will find a "textbook" yellow-and-black striped Italian [race] bee, and if you look at one from a typical hive in the center of Germany, you will find a "textbook" black bee. If you start investigating the hives in the in-between zones, you will find in-between bees, just as if you look in Khazakstan you are likely to find someone who looks mid-way between an Icelander and a Japanese. In the case of bees, people still talk about subspecies and are if anything more happy with the murkier word "race." But the reason seems to be because they need a way to make quick generalizations about the behaviors (defense behaviors, nectar gathering efficiency, pollen productivity, tendency to lacquer everything with propolis, etc., etc.) of bees that may be encountered in different parts of the world. "True" Italians are generally easy to get along with, productive of nectar, good pollenizers, etc. "True" Cyprians are generally very hard to get along with, which is about as much as the average beekeeper cares to know about them when he is searching for a new [race] of bees to try in his home environment.
When people find a hive of bees somewhere on the borderland between Italy and Yugoslavia, a bee that is darker than an Italian and lighter than a Carniolan, they tend to categorize it as a "mixed breed," assuming that there is really something called a "pure Italian" and something called a "pure Carnolian." They do not assume that there is a "bee map" upon which the central Italian type is an arbitrary point, and the central Slovenian (Carniolan) type is also an arbitrary point, and that the hive they are looking at is nothing more than one more arbitrary point that somebode might have defined as an official arbitrary point for some other [subspecies] of bee. Among the bees that I have mentioned, the one kind that is most clearly defined is the Cyprian -- and that is because its hives were quite thoroughly isolated from breeding with mainland bees by the Mediterranean up until the time when beekeepers started to import queens or colonies that were likely to be more suitable for commercial production.
The issue of genetics is not relevant to the definitions of [races] of bees. People have long been aware that characteristics such as those used to differentiate Italian bees from Cyprian bees are hereditary. In fact there is a facetious remark in one of the early Chinese classics wherein somebody says something to the effect that 'this kind of citrus fruit was always sweet until it was transplanted to the country under your rule (you monster).' And that remark came thousands of years after people in Eurasia and people in the Americas were systematically breeding better horses, tastier maize, etc. They knew that the characteristics they sought were hereditary.
Nobody doubts that many of the characteristics used to categorize things by [race] and/or [subspecies] are hereditary; the problem is twofold: (1) Language/concepts take precedence over reality. (It's a Carniolan, so you can open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil or a smoker.) (2) What is not hereditary is mixed in with what is hereditary in the form of a social construct. (It's a hive of Italian bees, so under no conditions could you open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil and a smoker, and you'd best have bicycle clips on your trouser legs, heavy gauntlets, and be sure to rub all over with peach leaves before you put your clothes on.)
It is very useful to keep the two examples of fuzzy thinking in the same article because most people have strong emotional sets to defend their ideas of race. (Those XXXs are all YYY, as anybody with any sense can clearly see.) While they do have strong emotional commmitments to being "of the finer class of human beings," most of them do not have equivalent emotional forces involved that would prevent them from understanding that, e.g., the belief that Cyprian bees are loyal to their beekeepers is a kind of fairy story that probably performs some social function but has no basis in the realities of apian behavior. (In Cyprus it is said that the colonies of bees belonging to a particular beekeeper will know about it when he dies, will mourn for him, and, as was reported in at least one case, may even swarm out of their hive and land, 50,000 or so strong, on the casket of the deceased as it is waiting on the wagon to be moved to the graveyard. Probably Cyprian beekeepers need consolation for dealing with bees that defend their hives with great fortitude -- which is good for the bees but punishing on the beekeeper. "But those bees really love me," says the myth.) P0M 00:54, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The detail is prolix because I'm trying to make real-world examples to carry the discussion forward. I do agree with you. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think splitting is a solution only for the problem of article length. If P0M wants to develop the population biology line in depth, then that could be accomodated by a branched article. Likewise, we could move "Race in politics" into a separate article as we have done with intelligence and biomedicine to save on space. However, from what Slru. and P0M have written it looks like that an article split of human vs animal would not simplify the task at hand. Perhaps we should try to construct an outline of the needed content for this article, and then we can decide if it warrants a split. -- Rikurzhen 02:07, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with what you say, especially about the outline part. I think that to write an effective article we have to state up front: (1) This is what is really out there in the world. (2) Look at all the ways that millions of individuals with hundreds (thousands, myriads?) of characteristics deemed relevant by this person or that person could be categorized. That understanding is the key.
I wasn't arguing that we need a big article about what you call population biology. Before I got into writing about bees as an example, I'd feel safer if I had more information about the migrations of honeybees from wherever they started to wherever they got themselves before humans started airmailing them hither and yon. But, on the other hand, the number of characteristics that are used to categorize honeybees are not so many. I don't know how much real research is available about characteristics because in practice beekeepers care about temperament (which has 2 or 3 dimensions), honey gathering, pollen gathering, how thoroughly they "lacquer" everything in the hive with the resins they collect, and coloration (as a handy way of telling from 5-10 feet away what you may be dealing with). Probably state departments of agriculture do a good job, region by region, evaluating what bees work out well given the local climate, local predators, etc. Temperament measures are probably pretty subjective (just my guess, I can see how they could make objective measures). d
Possibly another cause of ambiguity in this article is that it seems to not be consistent as to whether the question is race as a world-wide phenomena or race as it is used in the US. I'm not sure how to handle this problem. -- Rikurzhen 02:14, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
I think that is another very useful example of what I have been talking about. Most people in the U.S. see the people who live in China as one [race]. Hardly any of them would identify Taiwanese aborigines as anything other than as Chinese. Someone who know about genetic studies that have been done would see the Han Chinese as being divided into a northern group and a southern group. The average Chinese person, however, would lay an entirely different set of [quasi-racial] categories down on the same population. Most of them would not use the word "race", but they would nevertheless categorize Chinese by regions/provinces and also by language (recognizing that some groups like the Hakka are spread out over province lines, have their own language (with several dialects), and have cultural features that mark them as "different").
Again, the point is that we have several billion individuals with only identical twins being identical in terms of genotype, and very very many systems of categorization -- systems according to which somebody who lives in one of the crossroads regions might end up in very many different [races] or other categories depending on who was doing the dividing.
Even if somebody believes as a matter of religious faith that there are X numbers of [races] identified by Y number of characteristics, once s/he realizes that somebody else just as assuredly believes in W number of [races] identified by Z number of characteristics, then s/he has to face the question: Can one determine that one system of categorization is "more true" than some other system of categorization. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Based on what P0M has written, perhaps yet another distinction to be made early is between definitions of race based on genotype (and ancestry) and those based on phenotype. -- Rikurzhen 03:41, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Last night I got started on drafting an outline. With the echoes of past debates in my mind, it is difficult to say anything, knowing that somebody will surely object. P0M 18:19, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't have time to go into this much, but I recently looked over the current version and though many improvements were made, much topnotch material was cut. In particular, I think the old breakdown of the races according to Blumenbach and the modification by Coon is essential. The paragraph on the 19th century linking of physical traits to mental and behavioral characteristics should also be restored... Cutting and simplifying is good, but a topic this complex and controversial demands an unusually detailed treatment. It seems a lot of the cutting was driven by the 32kb limit notion, but you should be aware that this "limit" is very disputed. Personally, I don't think length under 52kb should even be a consideration for a main article on a core topic... Anyway, I'll leave these suggestions to those who are active here these days. But if I don't see the 19th century breakdown mentioned above reinserted soon, I'll do it myself. JDG 07:30, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
[P0M]: I was in the midst of trying to straighten out another problem when something I read about a long time ago came to mind. I think it offers a concept that may help to clarify our longstanding problems with ideas about [race]. In English, the years-ago article said, we have the word "typical." If we say, e.g., "John was a typical 30s something accountant," we mean to indicate nothing very special about John in relation to accounting. However, the article said, if we say in German that something is "typische" we mean that it stands as almost the Platonic ideal of its kind. Saying that John is a typische accountant would then indicate that he was everything that one would expect an accountant to be: accurate, meticulous, responsible, etc.
[P0M]: If you take your pick from among a few dozen inhabitants of a little village in Malawi you might fing the typische African of a certain group (not a typische San, however). If you took a comparable group from some village in Iceland, you might find the typische Caucasian, and so forth. There would be an arbitrary element in all of this, of course. Why not select somebody from a little town in Hungary and make him or her the typische Caucasian? (Now we can all have a flaming war about where to pick our exemplary types. ;-)
[P0M]: Once we selected our typische humans we could look at samples from, let's say, half way between Malawi and Iceland. We could grade these individuals on the number of points away from the "ideal" each of them came from the standard Icelandic human and the standard SE African human. Somewhere along the line we might find an individual who was halfway between on all the measures, but probably nowhere would we find an exact match for one of our standards (unless we just happened to pick one of a pair of identical twins).
[P0M]: To me, this idea is only interesting because it formalizes what I believe has been the thinking of many of the people who want to preserve the idea of [race]. It also happens, by making the idea less murky, to make clear what the diffiiculties with using the concept must be. P0M 11:12, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I lucked out and got a scan of the original map by Biasutti. I have colorized it, making it both more like the other maps we have looked at and also easier for the reader to interpret. (The original uses only dots and cross-hatching. It's easy to see how so many errors crept in.) I have compared it with the maps in books from the local library and my own books, the similar maps I have found on the WWW. I think I've got everything there. I've made only one significant change from what Biasutti had in the beginning. One researcher did a closer study of Australia and divided it into two bands of color. I am saving the very large image from which I have produced the small one shown here. This image will blow up about 400% and still look o.k. (although that's too big to be practical), so it is plenty big for our purposes. If anybody sees anything wrong with it (wrong color for some band or other, for instance), please let me know.
Meanwhile, I have asked Fenice whether she would write a letter in Italian to the copyright holder. No reply as yet, but Fenice is an exemplary member of the Wiki community so I have great hopes. Theoretically it might not necessary to get permission, but there is no harm in giving the author the courtesy of asking him to share his work. (After all of the detail work needed to get the areas to be colorized just right, I'm beginning to feel like I made the darned thing, but I'll bet Dr. Biasutti wouldn't feel that way.)
So, here it is:
http://www.wfu.edu/~moran/Biasutti_Skin_Colors_Map.33.png
I like it! But I am pretty open-minded about the maps. The only thing that really matters to me is that maps show that changes in skin color occur along a gradient and not discreetly, Slrubenstein 19:45, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I feel the same way. I can blur the boundaries. I'll try that idea and put it up too. (The other way is to use random colors, which one sharp map does, but that carries no meaning at all -- Purple for Europe north of Spain, and orange for people in Spain and Eastern Europe, and... You can more easily see which region is in the measured range 10-14 or whatever, but it's not a natural way to color the map. If I blur the boundaries (which will involve getting rid of the tiny red lines that really helped to get the thing colorized right) then I think you will really see something that looks pretty close to the way a map pixilated with color photos of human skin would look. P0M 20:29, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
How is a gradual process supposed to result in an absolute disconnect? Suppose that we discovered a subspecies of humans with nictitating membranes on some island that had horrendous volcanic gas emmisions to cope with. They would be different from other humans in being able to maintain good vision under those circumstances. But in what other significant way would they be different? P0M 21:18, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
In order to accurately represent the map, we would need to have access to the original data used in its construction. Obviouly only a finite number of groups were studied in order to construct the map, and so the level of precision in its display would need to reflect that -- which it may or may not do right now, we don't know. Ultimately, people are also discrete, which necessarily makes a small web image map an approximation at some level. At the moment, the skin color map is attached to the section on historical difinitions of race; we should probably just leave it alone and leave it in that context. -- Rikurzhen 13:54, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)
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Ok, here is what I mean: I manually copied the "isochromes" on a cylindrical proection. There should be no copyvio problems with this version, but obviously, the map is less accurate. I can still improve accuracy, though, if you think this is the way to go.
dab 18:27, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
We have to use the map with caution anyway: The best known of these maps is that composed by the Italian geographer Renato Biasutti, which was based on the von Luschan skin color scale. This map has gained broad circulation in several widely distributed publications (Barsh 2003, Lewontin 1995, Roberts 1977, Walter 1971), despite the fact that, for areas with no data, Biasutti simply filled in the map by extrapolation from findings obtained in other areas [1]. dab 09:14, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
my version Anyway, I added labels now. Feel free to fiddle with the rgb curves of this version. My statement about accuracy was not in reply to your comment, I just wanted to state what's in the map I uploaded. Since the numbers seem to refer to a "Luschan scale" we can now change the colours to any colours of the rainbow (although I can see them well on my screen as they are). I suggest you leave the ocean in light blue, and the empty dataset in dark blue, and just pick a scale of browns for the eight colours of the scale. dab 09:28, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Are you maybe colourblind? it seems than your scale is based on brightness, while the original scale is based more on hue (different amounts of green). I am re-uploading with increased brightness contrast. how is it now? dab 09:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Some time ago there was a discussion on the genetic history of the peoples of India. While looking for the general picture of human migrations presented by Spencer Well on Public TV a couple months ago I found a good summary: http://www.hindu.com/lr/2003/09/07/stories/2003090700330500.htm
§ One of the things that this article points out, in discussing Wells's book, is that there seems to be evidence that the oldest population of India resulted from the first wave of migration out of Africa, around 60K years before the present, and very much later another wave of migrants came into India from the Central Asian region, at around 30K ybp. The newspaper article suggests that the second group came as conquorers. By the Spencer Wells figures, the Americas were being populated by immigrants from over the Bering Strait already 20,000 years ago, but Europe didn't get populated (again by a wave of migration out of Central Asia) until about 10K ybp.
§ Fearing to get a slug of job-related e-mails, I haven't yet turned on my IBM to see how the new maps look using that system. All I know so far is that reading the ones using the old color scheme is like trying to see cooked white rice sprinkled on new-fallen snow. P0M 08:47, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ I'm not sure whether "DC" wrote all the paragraphs above. Anyway, of course there is some degree of diversity in China, just as there is some degree of diversity among First Nation peoples in the Americas. People got here from Asia 20,000 years or so ago, and in all that time they have evolved language, cultural, and even physical differences (the beginnings of which may have come with different groups during different migrations, who knows). Languages like Thai are believed by scholars such as Bernard Karlgren to have some traceable connections with the language(s) the Chinese now speak, and the Thai people are known to have lived in southern China before being forced farther south by the ethnic Han Chinese. And there are even groups such as the Taiwan aborigines who speak a polysyllabic language that has nothing to do with Chinese.
§ I don't know how one would evaluate such differences as do exist between the ethnic groups situation in India and that in China. However, there is, for instance, no social institution like the caste system in China. That's not to say that some speakers of one "dialect" of Chinese will not endeavor to prevent their kids from marrying out of their language group, and there are certain stereotypes that actually seem to be believed about people from the several provinces. But even given those rather human failings, the grand thrust of the Chinese civilization has been toward assimilation rather than toward segregation. The newspaper article for which I supplied a URL seemed to indicate that the author found explanations for some features of Indian social history in the research of Dr. Wells, so anyone who is interested in questions of why groups maintain enmities over the centuries might find some research leads in his ideas. Personally, I find his ideas fascinating but lack much of a background in ancient Indian history. P0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
for discussion § Before somebody complains about the picture or lack of them, I am putting this image up as a suggestion and these are the least unattractive people I could find in my collection of scanned pictures. (Well, the Yeti probably should go, regardless.) They can be swapped out, or the entire idea of giving the most attractive examples of faces from around the world can go. On the other hand, probably lots of people have pictures of their favorite friends whom they would like to contribute.
§ Before somebody complains about the reddish tint, I can explain. It all started when I saved an ancestor of this thing as a gif image rather than as a png image. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was allegedly due to operator error. The cyber cop is coming in the morning to put me through the wringer. However, if I survive that ideal and if the map is acceptable, the colors can be changed with a wave of the magic wand. It's just that my magic wand is off duty at 3 a.m., and with no idea of whether it will be worth any further effort I'm not going to do anything about it.
§ The good thing is that after cranking the gamma up on the original map I was able to clearly see several inclusions of lighter skin tone areas in large areas of darker skin tones. I'm not sure what software other people used to copy and manipulate these images but it evidently could not see the faint differences any more easily than I could.
§ Oh, yes. The strange white area. I'd like to know about that too. It shows up on the original map as though there were a population of mostly white folks in that part of Africa. I am not kidding. I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank.
§ One last thing. No comments about my girlfriend. It's not that I am sensitive, but she is extremely capable with a blowgun, and, uh... she may look tough, but she's very easily hurt. ;-) P0M 08:18, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I think if you look at the map you will see what I am questioning. It appears to be anomalous. Cavalli-Aforza draws his map "after Biasutti 1959, p. 192, table 4), but does not have 0-12. Instead he has it coded 15-17. When I can find the original map I will check it again. What I did in the beginning was explain (for anybody who might wonder) that I did not put a white patch there by mistake. Media:2x2_w_missing_Biasutti.png P0M 11:57, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ I hope I am misunderstanding your first sentence. I certainly have not "realized [I] put the patch there by mistake." That is what is there on the map that was provided on this Talk page by copying it from somebody else, presumably already in digital form on a website. Maybe Cavalli-Sforza went to Biasutti's book and copied the map wrong. Maybe the map in Biasutti's book was wrong and Cavalli-Sforza saw a possible problem, checked the data, and corrected the omission. Maybe our first digitized map is wrong. Who knows? P0M 12:29, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I really don't know which map you want to copy. If you are copying CS's map, I cannot comment anyway, bacause I haven't seen it. dab 12:40, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ We are beginning to squabble. I think I have an axiological reaction to your manner of calling attention to differences of opinion. I will try to refrain from reacting to antagonistic- and critical-sounding statements that you make in the future. What I will say is that I agree with the recitation of facts given immediately above, disregarding the affect-laden parts. When I put in the white band (and white was an otherwise undefined color as "1-12" was colored a light tan in that version), I said: "I think there must have been a mistake in the original map, or perhaps they simply did not have data for that area and left it blank." In the way that I have been trained, calling attention to suspect data while working up any kind of a project is regarded as a normal part of doing a good job, and flagging something is not considered "[putting] the patch there by mistake. I have tentatively redrawn the map in that one regard, and I have also replaced certain regions (such as the one near the east coast of S. America at about 20 degrees south) that had fallen out along the way. The projection I have used is equal-area, and I was able to copy over small sectors of the original digitized map, size them to the approximate position on the new map, and then "stretch to fit". Since the original drafting was possibly not too accurate, I doubt that the overall accuracy of the map suffers a great deal. Anyway, nobody will try to navigate by it.
I am not sure what the ideal size to show this image may be. If reduced in size too much, the various colored areas become too small to be easily distinguished. Space on the hard drive is the same. Space on the computer screen is virtually free. P0M 02:49, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Does anyone have software that is good for doing curves? The map with the projection I borrowed had very flaky lines, and all I can do is to try to fix them by hand. It would be good (if the color level in the skin shades part cold be kept nice by never saving the map into GIF format) to refine the lines, and especially the boundary lines around the whole map. (That is why I experimented with the black oval.) Having no sense of apodictic certainty regarding the existence or non-existence of a band of white people living in Africa, I will wait until I get to the library to check the original book. Hopefully the book will have tables as well as maps to provide an additional check. P0M 19:07, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ Meanwhile, I did find the following, which indicates that somebody else had the same doubts and did have access to the original book in Italian:
This site has some maps that reflect additional/later research. Unfortunately I didn't see this before I did so much work on the original map. ;-< P0M 08:29, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ When the website says, "The light-colored intra-coastal stripe from Casablanca to Tunisia is merely an accidental artifact of the copying process from Biasutti. It appears in no other publication of this figure," it sounds like it was not on Biasutti's map, but was on some family of maps that resulted when somebody copied from his map. By calling this stripe an "artifact of the copying process" the author of the website is bending over backwards to avoid saying, "Somebody copied incorrectly from Biasutti." Cavelli-Sforza has a stripe there, but it is intermediate in color. The URL I quoted seems to promise a table of data, but I don't see it.The map that has no data for the Americas only gives 5 levels of difference (instead of 8), so it doesn't show whether the people next to the southern line of the northernmost color area in Africa are any darker than those right next to the ocean. I doubt that our library has many books in the sciences written in Italian, but I'll check. P0M 12:19, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ I'm just back from raiding the library. I checked a dozen books or so, but didn't find a notably better map than what was on the website. I did find one map that showed the improved values for Africa and also showed revisions for the Americas. The skin shades are divided into 5 groups rather than 8 groups, but that may more accurately reflect the true degree to which distinctions can be measured with accuracy. I can scan that image and try to stretch fit it to an equal-area projection.
§ While I was there, I check out a book on dentition. One of the key identifiers of Chinese, shovel-shaped incisors, turns out to occur even in Europeans (at a very much lower rate) and to be even more prevalent in the Americas than it is in China.
§ I now have the book by Wells, and it has a fairly good map, with dates, of the migrations he has followed through his study of the y chromosome. It is intended to illustrate a more detailed verbal presentation, so it may be possible to improve on the somewhat impressionistic map. (I'm sure that the earliest wave of migration did not get to India via the open ocean, for instance. At least that's not what he said on the TV program. But that's the way the map is drawn to make room for drawing in the overland migrations to the north of the first wave migration path.) P0M 00:52, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ I got in touch with the owner of the website mentioned above, and he has offered to e-mail me a scanned copy of the map in the book illustration, which shows an intermediate band where the white band occurs near the northern tip of Africa. I had a closer look at the maps I found in the library, and none of them improves on what was in that website. The one major difference that a revised map probably ought to take account of is the division of Australia into two regions. I'll make overlays to check, but it looks like the only other changes involve reducing 8 zones to 5. If you check out the Cavelli-Sforza map (which I now think is a photo reproduction of the original map) you can easily understand why authors would decide to simplify the number of zones -- Cavelli-Sforza's map is o.k. for the lighter half of the shades of skin color, but the darker shades are practically indistinguishable. Sometimes, if you know where to look, you will see what looks like a little halftoning rather than straight black ink. But for practical purposes the map is pretty useless outside of the values that are shown in the Americas.
§ In a way it was a good thing that the original map was so washed out. If I hadn't really looked carefully at it I'm pretty sure I'd have missed the white band. The uncorrected map has propagated so many places on the WWW that it's hard to believe the original maker of the digitized image has any objection to others using it. P0M 03:53, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
We need to clean up the article. The sections should only treat what it says they do in the section title. For example, there shouldn't be a paragraph "
at the end of "History of the term". Nor should the "Anthropology and genetics" section, being placed after the history section, i.e. we are through with the historical aspect now, begin with
(i.e. this bit still belongs in the 'history' section). Also the case studies (USA, Brazil) should either be exported to special articles, or at least be placed after the more general phylogenetic subsection. Somebody should read the entire article and weed out repetitions, too. dab 17:24, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
§ The von Luschan scale was a manufactured set of standard tiles that were colored so that a researcher could in relatively rapid order sort through his/her tiles and find the one that came closest to matching a given subject's skin color. Essentially the same method is still used today, at least in this increasingly anti-scientific nation, by dentists who want to match ceramic material used for making fillings with the color of their patient's tooth. They have a little cabinet full of ceramic "teeth" on little spindles. Each specimen has a different combination of hue and brightness from the others. Although one could easily create an electronic device to measure these factors to tighter tolerances, the low-tech device seems to meet professional standards. Similarly, given the fact that a subject's skin color could vary considerably due to contingent factors such as season and weather patterns, the von Luchan tiles probably provide all the accuracy that is useful. P0M 03:10, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I seem to recall discussion a while back about the coloration of people in northern Africa during the ancient period. I just ran acrossthe article on Gallery_of_Fayum_mummy_portraits, which shows a fairly narrow range of skin colors, people mostly having proportionately large eyes, etc. Examination of the mummies themselves indicated that the people were depicted at an appropriate age. (Lots of people apparently died in their 20s and 30s.) Whether the eyes are realistic or are depicted they way they are because of esthetic preferences might be worth asking about. Anyway, DeeCee and some other may find these of interest. I find them quite attractive. P0M 02:15, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
An interesting gallery of artwork. I wasn't aware of these. Thanks for the info. Keep in mind that "ancient" is a highly relative term when dealing with dynastic Egypt. These mummy portraits date from the first century BC during the Roman occupation of Egypt, after centuries of contact with outside cultures and centuries of intermarriage. Even so, it's obvious that the majority of portraits show indigenous African features, from nappy, curly/frizzy hair to broad cheekbones, broad noses and full lips. Many are what we today would call Afro-Semitic types -- or, in another context, Sicilians à la John Turturo, but darker. (There's a reason Italians commonly were considered nonwhite in this country up until the mid 19th century. :-p) Most, if they had lived in the American South during the middle of the last century, would be on the receiving end of Jim Crow discrimination and, today, would be considered (after centuries of miscegenation with Native Americans and Europeans) typical African Americans. Facinating to see the faces! Of the 53 separate images, I'd say perhaps nine might, by today's standards, be considered "Semitic," which is to say simply a mixture of European and indigenous African phenotypes. All others are clearly African, miscegenated African or Afro-Semitic phenotypes. Two of the portraits of fairly dark-skinned black men.
The following link is a discussion about King Menes/Nahmer, who unified Upper and Lower Egypt -- in 3100 BCE, roughly 3,000 years before these portraits were painted. There's a photo of his statue near the top of the page and, later on, a discussion about just how old dynastic Egypt and Egyptian civilization, in general, is.
Next, a link to information regarding the melanin testing of early Eygptian royal mummies, which revealed that truly ancient Egyptian royalty were of the "black races" -- not Semitic, not Phoenician, not Caucasian, not cafe au lait; black:
Then another discussion thread on the web regarding recent facial reconstructions from mummified remains, with photos:
And, finally, once again, a link to a montage of photos from ancient dynastic Egypt of clearly black Africans, which I notice has been expanded since last I visisted the site.
Had to return to add another link with better photos of ancient Egyptian figural images of royals Amenhotep and Queen Tye (mother of Akhenaten). The people here are clearly and incontestably black Africans:
Another photo gallery:
§ Interesting! The image of Queen Tiye (18th Dynasty Egypt 1382-1344 BC) shows a band of lighter skin just below her brow band. I wonder whether there is an indication that people of that time may have decorated themselves by darkening their skins. If that would happening, it might give some insight into which groups had higher and which groups had lower status at that time. Many of the images show people who are considerably lighter than my friend from Malawi and maybe just a little darker than some of my Thai friends. I wonder how the colors have held up over the centuries. P0M 23:40, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
POM, you're wa-aaay off-base on that one! lol There's no record of such practice. Besides, the light band is where part of her headdress is missing! deeceevoice 00:39, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You know, for years I've been coming across that head of Queen Tiye, and it's always seemed really, really familiar to me. No wonder. It just dawned on me why. Queen Tiye is a dead ringer for late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. deeceevoice 02:18, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
§ Well, as Hu Shi said, "Make bold hypotheses, but seek verification with all due vigilence. And as for Gwendolyn Brooks, I have to agree too. See http://www.websn.com/Pride/Pride/gwendolyn_brooks.htm P0M 05:40, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Another note about African phenotypes. In general, one of the distinctive characteristics of black African phenotypes is that a majority have a forward-slanting facial profile. There are exceptions, of course. (In my own immediate family, as a matter of fact -- but we're quite a jumble, of African from God knows where, but likely the Congo or Angola; Caddo; Cherokee and Irish that we know of.) Caucasians, on the other hand -- and, again, there are exceptions -- often have flat profiles, as do Asians. That is, a fairly straight line can be drawn from the bridge of the nose to the base of the upper lip just under the nose, to the base of the lower lip, just above the chin. The forward-slanting profiles of depictions of ancient Egyptians are often quite pronounced/obvious -- one of the most distinctive and striking characteristics of their wall art. deeceevoice 10:22, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
http://www.catchpenny.org/race.html http://www.egyptianmyths.net/faq.htm#race http://www.digitalegypt.ucl.ac.uk/social/race.html The thing is, Egyptians were not exclusively "black" (like someone similar to Michael Jordan) like what afrocentrists would tell you, nor were they nordic like what white supremacists would say. More or less they look like modern egyptians, certaintly not "white," but wouldnt be classified as "negroes" either. They were simply egyptians. Wareware 08:17, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Wareware, I never said all Egyptians were black. And it's quite clear from the link to the mummy portraits, they were a mix in later centuries. But what I've maintained all along is that the earliest dynastic Egyptians were dark-skinned, black Africans -- without question. Seti dates back only to the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom, approximately 1295 BCE. The first dynasty of the eary dynastic period was 2920 BCE -- and keep in mind that the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt didn't occur until 3100 BCE, centuries after civilizations along the Nile began to flourish. Indeed, the predynastic period in Egypt dates from 5,500 BCE. A hell of a lot can happen to a people ethnically over the course of 4,000+ years. Hell, take a look at African Americans in the U.S., for example. We're miscegenated beyond belief. All that in the span of only, say, 500 years -- and with segregation and laws against intermarriage on the books for a great part of that time. It's a safe bet that the people of Seti's Egypt very much resembled the present-day African American community.
First, Wareware, your ignorance is showing. Upper Egypt is south; Lower Egypt is north -- not the other way around. It is also clear that Upper Egypt was more advanced than Lower Egypt, with Upper Egypt conquering and unifying both lands under Menes (obviously, a black man with a big, broad nose lol). For the sake of argument, which Egypt do you suppose was whiter than the other? The one closer to NUBIA, as you claim (funny) or the one up North? (I'm having too much fun with you.) And, yes, folks always cared what color the builders of ancient Egyptian civilization were, which is why Europeans took such pains to manufacture and perpetuate the lies. You are clearly beyond the reach of reason if you contend that blacks in Egypt were all slaves; there is ample and sustained evidence to quite the contrary --monumental evidence, as a matter of fact. In short, Wareware, dang, bwoi. You a fool! :-D deeceevoice 16:59, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Man, you better stop talkin' from up under my clothes! LOL! You're an ASIAN, and you wanna talk about the size of someone's balls? ROFLMBAO. (slappin' sides) However big they may be, it's a safe bet they're bigger than yours! I think you'd better leave THAT one alone, my misguided Asian brother. This "discussion" has reached a new low. I'mma do you a favor and pretend we never had this exchange. (Still slappin' sides) BWA-HA-HA-HAAA! deeceevoice 22:54, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I've just gotten around to reading a single section of this article in its entirety -- on race and intelligence -- and found a number of grammatical problems. I don't have time right now to do the same thing with the rest of the piece. (I've been avoiding reading much of it, because I sense I likely will have some problems with substance -- and I have neither the time nor the disposition right now to deal with that sort of thing.) But because this is now a featured article (if it was before, I hadn't noticed), folks need to take the time and go over this piece with an eye toward such things. deeceevoice 12:10, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I thought featured articles weren't supposed to still be "under construction" or still hotly contested. How did that happen? deeceevoice 10:32, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Understood, Sirubenstein. But it's my understanding that articles the central precepts of which are still hotly contested (even in friendly disagreements -- not "editing wars") or, at the very least, still in question should not have featured article status. Once such disagreement or doubt arises, even if an article already has been given featured status, shouldn't it be removed from that list until such time as those matters are resolved? deeceevoice 22:49, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I just did a major, painful, several-laborious-hour cleanup of the grammar and style of the first half of this article. I wasn't trying to NPOV most of this mess, just shorten it, but a little NPOV slipped in anyway. This article is in major need of reorganization, NPOVing, section deletion, and probably splitting. Any article over 32kb should by split by Wikipedia policy. This article was 56kb before my major style edit and 52kb after. I'm listing here several suggestions for the direction for this article, but this is more a list of what I will try to do in the near future than what I want others to do. I would of course prefer to know about major objections from other Wikipedians before I put work into the things on this list. My suggestions:
I'm sure as I work on these things I'll think up other things to do, so I'll probably add more later. For a while I saw this article as too intimidating to even read, let alone fix, but I have a lot of free time this weekend so I should be able to help make a dent in it. -- Schaefer 02:03, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I'm moving out most of the content of "History of the term" to Race (historical definitions) which is currently just a 1913 Encyclopedia Britannica article. I'll summarise the contents of the removed text as best I can in one paragraph. The final paragraph in the section doesn't pertain to the heading so I'm leaving it in this article. -- Schaefer 20:11, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)
seeing that we have to really muck out this article, moving and cutting whole paragraphs, I think it is very evident now that this article is unfairly listed as 'featured'. Would you support listing it for defeaturing, and re-featuring it once it becomes stable again? dab (ᛏ) 19:50, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I suggested above that we need a list of definitions of race. Here is a starting point. -- Rikurzhen 20:55, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
Excerpted from Long JC, Kittles RA. Human genetic diversity and the nonexistence of biological races. Hum Biol. 2003 Aug;75(4):449-71.
Table 3. Biological definitions of race.
Concept | Reference | Definition |
Essentialist | Hooton (1926) | "A great division of mankind, characterized as a group by the sharing of a certain combination of features, which have been derived from their common descent, and constitute a vague physical background, usually more or less obscured by individual variations, and realized best in a composite picture." |
Population | Dobzhansky (1970) | "Races are genetically distinct Mendelian populations. They are neither individuals nor particular genotypes, they consist of individuals who differ genetically among themselves." |
Taxonomic | Mayr (1969) | "An aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species, inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and differing taxonomically from other populations of the species." |
Lineage | Templeton (1998) | "A subspecies (race) is a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. This definition requires that a subspecies be genetically differentiated due to barriers to genetic exchange that have persisted for long periods of time; that is, the subspecies must have historical continuity in addition to current genetic differentiation." |
References:
Commentary:
Obviously this list is not complete. But when we say that race is valid or not valid we need to say which defintion is being argued for/aginst. -- Rikurzhen 20:58, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
I like this idea, Rikurzhen. What I would even more like to see is a discussion that explains what is really out there, and then how each definition of race would be used to categorize the same set of individuals according to the characteristics that each definition treats as relevant and important. (See my remarks below.) Knowing how people use concepts and words to create relative simplicity out of bewildering multiplicity (when they for some reason do not want to deal with the world individual by individual) is exactly what is needed to help people deal with the problem of "race." P0M 01:07, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Most of the semantic problems in this article seem to stem from the confusion of race as a general form of subspecies classification, and race as it pertains to human beings. In my non-expert opinion, these aren't the same thing, as human races were defined by people who didn't know that genes existed, and those are the racial groupings people are going to continue to use regardless of what population biologists say. Declaring multiple definitions of race and specifying which version of the word race some object to is not the way to go. I honestly think we should have separate articles for race as a taxonomic classification, and race as it pertains to humans. If someone argues that race truly doesn't exist (id est, not even in honeybees), it can go in the former article. If someone argues that commonly used human races (Black, White, Asian, etc.) don't correspond to what biologists would consider to be races, then that goes in the latter.
I planned to clear up confusion regarding this with subsections and eventually good introductions, which is why I titled the section "Validity of human races". I don't think this is sufficient. Having a table of definitions to which later sections of the article can refer says to me as a reader, "This article is actually about two things with the same name, so here's a table showing the different things being discussed so we can keep them separate." It's not a bad idea, and I'd take it as a second resort to splitting the article, but I'd like to reach some consensus on this before major rewriting is done. -- Schaefer 22:52, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I disagree. The real problem is that conceptualizations make a small number of categories (the preferred number is 2) into which large numbers of diverse individuals are divided. People are introduced to categories that are named in the language(s) they learn, and insist that the categories are the realities and the diverse individuals are more-or-less perfect members of these sets. This attitude is very Platonic, and has been a plague on clear thinking ever since it first appeared.
The people who try to decide which bees are Apis mellifera meda (centered around Iraq), Apis mellifera anatolica (centered around Turkey), Apis mellifera carnica (centered in S.E. Europe), Apis mellifera ligustica (centered around Italy), Apis mellifera mellifera (centered in Germany), etc., have the same difficulties that face those who try to decide which humans are Semitic, which humans are Turkic, which humans are Caucasians, etc., etc. If you look at a bee from a typical hive in the geographical center of Italy, you will find a "textbook" yellow-and-black striped Italian [race] bee, and if you look at one from a typical hive in the center of Germany, you will find a "textbook" black bee. If you start investigating the hives in the in-between zones, you will find in-between bees, just as if you look in Khazakstan you are likely to find someone who looks mid-way between an Icelander and a Japanese. In the case of bees, people still talk about subspecies and are if anything more happy with the murkier word "race." But the reason seems to be because they need a way to make quick generalizations about the behaviors (defense behaviors, nectar gathering efficiency, pollen productivity, tendency to lacquer everything with propolis, etc., etc.) of bees that may be encountered in different parts of the world. "True" Italians are generally easy to get along with, productive of nectar, good pollenizers, etc. "True" Cyprians are generally very hard to get along with, which is about as much as the average beekeeper cares to know about them when he is searching for a new [race] of bees to try in his home environment.
When people find a hive of bees somewhere on the borderland between Italy and Yugoslavia, a bee that is darker than an Italian and lighter than a Carniolan, they tend to categorize it as a "mixed breed," assuming that there is really something called a "pure Italian" and something called a "pure Carnolian." They do not assume that there is a "bee map" upon which the central Italian type is an arbitrary point, and the central Slovenian (Carniolan) type is also an arbitrary point, and that the hive they are looking at is nothing more than one more arbitrary point that somebode might have defined as an official arbitrary point for some other [subspecies] of bee. Among the bees that I have mentioned, the one kind that is most clearly defined is the Cyprian -- and that is because its hives were quite thoroughly isolated from breeding with mainland bees by the Mediterranean up until the time when beekeepers started to import queens or colonies that were likely to be more suitable for commercial production.
The issue of genetics is not relevant to the definitions of [races] of bees. People have long been aware that characteristics such as those used to differentiate Italian bees from Cyprian bees are hereditary. In fact there is a facetious remark in one of the early Chinese classics wherein somebody says something to the effect that 'this kind of citrus fruit was always sweet until it was transplanted to the country under your rule (you monster).' And that remark came thousands of years after people in Eurasia and people in the Americas were systematically breeding better horses, tastier maize, etc. They knew that the characteristics they sought were hereditary.
Nobody doubts that many of the characteristics used to categorize things by [race] and/or [subspecies] are hereditary; the problem is twofold: (1) Language/concepts take precedence over reality. (It's a Carniolan, so you can open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil or a smoker.) (2) What is not hereditary is mixed in with what is hereditary in the form of a social construct. (It's a hive of Italian bees, so under no conditions could you open it for inspection without the use of a bee veil and a smoker, and you'd best have bicycle clips on your trouser legs, heavy gauntlets, and be sure to rub all over with peach leaves before you put your clothes on.)
It is very useful to keep the two examples of fuzzy thinking in the same article because most people have strong emotional sets to defend their ideas of race. (Those XXXs are all YYY, as anybody with any sense can clearly see.) While they do have strong emotional commmitments to being "of the finer class of human beings," most of them do not have equivalent emotional forces involved that would prevent them from understanding that, e.g., the belief that Cyprian bees are loyal to their beekeepers is a kind of fairy story that probably performs some social function but has no basis in the realities of apian behavior. (In Cyprus it is said that the colonies of bees belonging to a particular beekeeper will know about it when he dies, will mourn for him, and, as was reported in at least one case, may even swarm out of their hive and land, 50,000 or so strong, on the casket of the deceased as it is waiting on the wagon to be moved to the graveyard. Probably Cyprian beekeepers need consolation for dealing with bees that defend their hives with great fortitude -- which is good for the bees but punishing on the beekeeper. "But those bees really love me," says the myth.) P0M 00:54, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The detail is prolix because I'm trying to make real-world examples to carry the discussion forward. I do agree with you. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I think splitting is a solution only for the problem of article length. If P0M wants to develop the population biology line in depth, then that could be accomodated by a branched article. Likewise, we could move "Race in politics" into a separate article as we have done with intelligence and biomedicine to save on space. However, from what Slru. and P0M have written it looks like that an article split of human vs animal would not simplify the task at hand. Perhaps we should try to construct an outline of the needed content for this article, and then we can decide if it warrants a split. -- Rikurzhen 02:07, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with what you say, especially about the outline part. I think that to write an effective article we have to state up front: (1) This is what is really out there in the world. (2) Look at all the ways that millions of individuals with hundreds (thousands, myriads?) of characteristics deemed relevant by this person or that person could be categorized. That understanding is the key.
I wasn't arguing that we need a big article about what you call population biology. Before I got into writing about bees as an example, I'd feel safer if I had more information about the migrations of honeybees from wherever they started to wherever they got themselves before humans started airmailing them hither and yon. But, on the other hand, the number of characteristics that are used to categorize honeybees are not so many. I don't know how much real research is available about characteristics because in practice beekeepers care about temperament (which has 2 or 3 dimensions), honey gathering, pollen gathering, how thoroughly they "lacquer" everything in the hive with the resins they collect, and coloration (as a handy way of telling from 5-10 feet away what you may be dealing with). Probably state departments of agriculture do a good job, region by region, evaluating what bees work out well given the local climate, local predators, etc. Temperament measures are probably pretty subjective (just my guess, I can see how they could make objective measures). d
Possibly another cause of ambiguity in this article is that it seems to not be consistent as to whether the question is race as a world-wide phenomena or race as it is used in the US. I'm not sure how to handle this problem. -- Rikurzhen 02:14, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
I think that is another very useful example of what I have been talking about. Most people in the U.S. see the people who live in China as one [race]. Hardly any of them would identify Taiwanese aborigines as anything other than as Chinese. Someone who know about genetic studies that have been done would see the Han Chinese as being divided into a northern group and a southern group. The average Chinese person, however, would lay an entirely different set of [quasi-racial] categories down on the same population. Most of them would not use the word "race", but they would nevertheless categorize Chinese by regions/provinces and also by language (recognizing that some groups like the Hakka are spread out over province lines, have their own language (with several dialects), and have cultural features that mark them as "different").
Again, the point is that we have several billion individuals with only identical twins being identical in terms of genotype, and very very many systems of categorization -- systems according to which somebody who lives in one of the crossroads regions might end up in very many different [races] or other categories depending on who was doing the dividing.
Even if somebody believes as a matter of religious faith that there are X numbers of [races] identified by Y number of characteristics, once s/he realizes that somebody else just as assuredly believes in W number of [races] identified by Z number of characteristics, then s/he has to face the question: Can one determine that one system of categorization is "more true" than some other system of categorization. P0M 03:20, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Based on what P0M has written, perhaps yet another distinction to be made early is between definitions of race based on genotype (and ancestry) and those based on phenotype. -- Rikurzhen 03:41, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Last night I got started on drafting an outline. With the echoes of past debates in my mind, it is difficult to say anything, knowing that somebody will surely object. P0M 18:19, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I don't have time to go into this much, but I recently looked over the current version and though many improvements were made, much topnotch material was cut. In particular, I think the old breakdown of the races according to Blumenbach and the modification by Coon is essential. The paragraph on the 19th century linking of physical traits to mental and behavioral characteristics should also be restored... Cutting and simplifying is good, but a topic this complex and controversial demands an unusually detailed treatment. It seems a lot of the cutting was driven by the 32kb limit notion, but you should be aware that this "limit" is very disputed. Personally, I don't think length under 52kb should even be a consideration for a main article on a core topic... Anyway, I'll leave these suggestions to those who are active here these days. But if I don't see the 19th century breakdown mentioned above reinserted soon, I'll do it myself. JDG 07:30, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
[P0M]: I was in the midst of trying to straighten out another problem when something I read about a long time ago came to mind. I think it offers a concept that may help to clarify our longstanding problems with ideas about [race]. In English, the years-ago article said, we have the word "typical." If we say, e.g., "John was a typical 30s something accountant," we mean to indicate nothing very special about John in relation to accounting. However, the article said, if we say in German that something is "typische" we mean that it stands as almost the Platonic ideal of its kind. Saying that John is a typische accountant would then indicate that he was everything that one would expect an accountant to be: accurate, meticulous, responsible, etc.
[P0M]: If you take your pick from among a few dozen inhabitants of a little village in Malawi you might fing the typische African of a certain group (not a typische San, however). If you took a comparable group from some village in Iceland, you might find the typische Caucasian, and so forth. There would be an arbitrary element in all of this, of course. Why not select somebody from a little town in Hungary and make him or her the typische Caucasian? (Now we can all have a flaming war about where to pick our exemplary types. ;-)
[P0M]: Once we selected our typische humans we could look at samples from, let's say, half way between Malawi and Iceland. We could grade these individuals on the number of points away from the "ideal" each of them came from the standard Icelandic human and the standard SE African human. Somewhere along the line we might find an individual who was halfway between on all the measures, but probably nowhere would we find an exact match for one of our standards (unless we just happened to pick one of a pair of identical twins).
[P0M]: To me, this idea is only interesting because it formalizes what I believe has been the thinking of many of the people who want to preserve the idea of [race]. It also happens, by making the idea less murky, to make clear what the diffiiculties with using the concept must be. P0M 11:12, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I lucked out and got a scan of the original map by Biasutti. I have colorized it, making it both more like the other maps we have looked at and also easier for the reader to interpret. (The original uses only dots and cross-hatching. It's easy to see how so many errors crept in.) I have compared it with the maps in books from the local library and my own books, the similar maps I have found on the WWW. I think I've got everything there. I've made only one significant change from what Biasutti had in the beginning. One researcher did a closer study of Australia and divided it into two bands of color. I am saving the very large image from which I have produced the small one shown here. This image will blow up about 400% and still look o.k. (although that's too big to be practical), so it is plenty big for our purposes. If anybody sees anything wrong with it (wrong color for some band or other, for instance), please let me know.
Meanwhile, I have asked Fenice whether she would write a letter in Italian to the copyright holder. No reply as yet, but Fenice is an exemplary member of the Wiki community so I have great hopes. Theoretically it might not necessary to get permission, but there is no harm in giving the author the courtesy of asking him to share his work. (After all of the detail work needed to get the areas to be colorized just right, I'm beginning to feel like I made the darned thing, but I'll bet Dr. Biasutti wouldn't feel that way.)
So, here it is:
http://www.wfu.edu/~moran/Biasutti_Skin_Colors_Map.33.png
I like it! But I am pretty open-minded about the maps. The only thing that really matters to me is that maps show that changes in skin color occur along a gradient and not discreetly, Slrubenstein 19:45, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I feel the same way. I can blur the boundaries. I'll try that idea and put it up too. (The other way is to use random colors, which one sharp map does, but that carries no meaning at all -- Purple for Europe north of Spain, and orange for people in Spain and Eastern Europe, and... You can more easily see which region is in the measured range 10-14 or whatever, but it's not a natural way to color the map. If I blur the boundaries (which will involve getting rid of the tiny red lines that really helped to get the thing colorized right) then I think you will really see something that looks pretty close to the way a map pixilated with color photos of human skin would look. P0M 20:29, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)
How is a gradual process supposed to result in an absolute disconnect? Suppose that we discovered a subspecies of humans with nictitating membranes on some island that had horrendous volcanic gas emmisions to cope with. They would be different from other humans in being able to maintain good vision under those circumstances. But in what other significant way would they be different? P0M 21:18, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
In order to accurately represent the map, we would need to have access to the original data used in its construction. Obviouly only a finite number of groups were studied in order to construct the map, and so the level of precision in its display would need to reflect that -- which it may or may not do right now, we don't know. Ultimately, people are also discrete, which necessarily makes a small web image map an approximation at some level. At the moment, the skin color map is attached to the section on historical difinitions of race; we should probably just leave it alone and leave it in that context. -- Rikurzhen 13:54, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)