nerad@closus.DEC (05/17/84)
{libation...anyone here going to Rites of Spring?} In the tradition of unpopular point raising in net.women... Sex : a BIOLOGICAL gender distinction. Homo sapiens has two sexes, biologically. Male, and Female. Genetic abherrations are known to occur rarely. A universally recognized distinction. ALSO : a SOCIOLOGICAL distinction used to delineate US from THEM (fill in the appropriate gender). Race : a SOCIOLOGICAL and fuzzy distinction, which varies as a concept from culture to culture. Usually based on skin tone. It is difficult for many individuals from a particular culture to recognize the racial background of many individuals encountered within that culture, without being able to tag the object by dress, dialect, social status, or other purely cultural cue. Race biological distinctions (to my knowledge--I am not a biologist) tend to be no more dramatic than ethnic group differences. (an example: sickle cell anemia in blacks; tay sachs (sic?) in european jews...and I don't think you can qualify european jews as being a different race than other europeans.) A controversial distinction. A sociological distinction used to delineate US from THEM (if you can figure out who US or THEM are). Racism and sexism may be similar prejudices in this culture--ergo, they are treated similarly by the "soft" (sic) sciences. However, one can not lean on "hard" science make parallels between them. They are completely contextually different. The next problem is where the "hard" and "soft" sciences delineate, and how objective anyone who studies racial and sexual biological-social borderline issues can be. We who are about to die salute you... Shava Nerad Telematic Systems (@DEC Ed. Svcs.) {decvax, allegra}!decwrl!rhea!closus!nerad
martillo@ihuxt.UUCP (Yehoyaqim Martillo) (05/18/84)
I do not quite understand the arguement. I would not be terribly upset if biologists were to prove there was a difference in gene frequency which meant that on the average East Asians were more intelligent than Europeans (or in my case North Africans). There would still be lots of statistical outliers. As for European Jews, they are not a race but an ethnic group. Studies performed in Israel have indicated that in terms of genetic diseases and blood types, the Jewish population was fairly homogenous from Soutern Poland through the Balkans and the Ukraine into Kurdistan, Daghestan, and Iraq. When you realize that the Northern border of the Ottoman Empire used to be Southern Poland, and Jewish merchants were quite common in the Ottoman Empire, this is not surprising. If Shava Nerad is Indian, she may be interested to learn that one trade route lead through Bagdad to the Persian Gulf to India. In the 16th century the Nasi' of the Jewish community in the Maharashtra region was a Polish Jew, who acted particularly cowardly when Vasco de Gama attacked the Jewish community. After that incident, the upper caste Jews ceased to marry Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazim). The middle caste Jews seem to be the descendents of Ashkenazim and the local lowest caste Jews. Not surprisingly, the middle caste Jews show some similarity with Ashkenazim in terms of genetic diseases.