2009-02-09, 05:55 | Link #61 | |||
eyewitness
Join Date: Jan 2007
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This is wonderful, because I cannot. All I see on this continent is a vague and smoothly changing average phenotype with more than enough local variation so I wouldn't bet a single beer on anyone's ancestry. The rest is a feedback loop of generalization of stereotypes and biased perception. Which is according to my observation more prevalent among emigrants than inside Europe by the way.
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2009-02-09, 13:14 | Link #62 | |||
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The phylogenetic argument has been available for a long time and is in fact still considered one of the great opponents of drawing conclusions. For example, there are aboriginal groups in South America that have been isolated for a long time, which researchers are constantly performing psych research on. However, it's impossible to draw conclusions about core psychological concepts because--guess what, they may be genetically too dissimilar from us being so isolated. You may also want to direct your attention to the idea of the "subspecies". Quote:
tl;dr 1. There is no funding support for race differentiation studies, so there is limited research on the subject. 2. All scientists acknowledge in one way or another that race is inherent and biological--however, it is taboo to say so. Try it yourself--ask a researcher about whether or not race exists, and he/she will give you a very uneasy look. 3. Race corresponds to the scientific definition for subspecies, and if you don't buy that, it fits the definition for breed. All of these are prerequisites for speciation. Quote:
2. I suggest you look up some material on these tribes. As far as I know, I've read the research and you haven't, so here are some relevant papers if you would like to continue this debate: Dehaene, S., Izard, V., Spelke, E., & Pica, P. (2008). Log or linear? Distinct intuitions of the number scale in Western and Amazonian indigene cultures. Science, 320, 1217 – 1220. Pica, P., Lemer, C., Izard, V., & Dehaene, S. (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group. Science, 306, 499 – 503. vanMarle, K., & Wynn, K. (2006). Six-month-old infants use analog magnitudes to represent duration. Developmental Science, 9, F41 – F49. Oliveri, M., Vicario, C. M., Salerno, S., Koch, G., Turriziani, P., Mangano, R., Chillemi, G., & Caltagirone, C. (2008). Perceiving numbers alters time perception. Neuroscience Letters, 438, 308 – 311. Clearly you don't understand the concept of evolution very much either. Evolution as a whole occurs over a large scale, but guess what? It's still happening, and it's been happening recently. For example, they recently found a gene that differs between populations that gravitate towards tonal and non-tonal languages--and this is evolution. 3. Then you will offend a lot of people! |
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2009-02-09, 13:58 | Link #65 |
Senior Guest
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Athens (GMT+2)
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There's always weird people around who can't stand one thing or the other...when it comes down to movies, it's all about who the director is and what they believe in.
Goku doesn't look japanese indeed, but the super saiyan-golden hair is because few people in japan are blond. If DB was launched in,say,Russia, he would have probably had red or blue hair instead.I'd say aliens can be played by ANYONE, and if someone is discriminating on that matter they must be very stubborn. |
2009-02-09, 14:35 | Link #66 |
Ha ha ha ha ha...
Graphic Designer
Join Date: Apr 2006
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Age: 35
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Personally, I think it's pretty pathetically underdeveloped. I think Hollywood is more hungry for source material than actually interested in cultural understanding and getting the anime adaptions accurate. There are some exceptions (e.g. Transformers) but those seem pretty rare.
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2009-02-09, 14:37 | Link #67 |
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Athens (GMT+2)
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Apparently cultural understanding doesn't make money nowadays -_^
Have you seen the last samurai? It's the only movie I can remember where the (old) japanese culture has some light shed upon.Not sure if it's a hollywood production though. |
2009-02-09, 15:31 | Link #68 | ||
eyewitness
Join Date: Jan 2007
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Hardly. People might even be offended by the opposite because they take "I can clearly tell that you're (e.g.) Italian." as just another way of saying "You (Italians) all look the same anyway." But one way or the other I prefer to not drink my beer with people who are easily offended anyway. Also, "offensiveness" is not truth criterion.
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2009-02-09, 15:57 | Link #69 | |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
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@Papaya: Aye, I've read the research as well.... All of your cites are completely irrelevant to the subject. I looked them up since you didn't link them:
Spoiler for Cite #1 and #3 irrelevant to topic; only quoting the abstract for obvious reasons:
Since you started off by implying I know nothing because I disagree with your assertions - and then your scientific cites are irrelevant... <shrug>. "Race" is a colloquial term ... it simply isn't used in genetics because it is amorphous and poorly constrained. Even the soft sciences are learning it isn't meaningful when looking at categorizing populations as they migrate and shift. At best its a messy cultural or trend tag - and knowledgeable people cannot agree on where the lines are. You're simply pointing at stronger variation in your examples. Isolate those humans for a few hundred thousand years and then you may have an example. You're also playing the "conspiracy of silence" card which I find interesting ... next you're going to tell me there's a "Chinese" race or that anyone who is a Jew is a member of the "Jewish race"? The very idea of "various European races" is amusing -- there's simply too much exchange of genetic material over the last few thousand years much less further back. Modern DNA analysis is showing just how interconnected humanity is. The word "race" is simply too diluted to be useful. Quote:
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2009-02-09, 15:58 | Link #70 | |
Limited Slip
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2009-02-09, 16:25 | Link #71 |
Μ ε r c ü r υ
Join Date: Jun 2004
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I think a differentiation needs to be made when it comes to using anime/manga to defend western views. What the Japanese does is select maybe a very very low percentage of their own population (I am guessing even they must have some of their own people looking similar to the characters portrayed in those stories) to portray a character to boost the image of that character. In other words, they change their own unique characteristics to fit it to the image of others. If they are degrading something, they do that to their own culture and uniqueness. Not exactly what the westerners here are being criticized for.
If there are examples of Japanese using a certain image of another nation in a certain way, be it negative or positive, and restrict that image to such usage, then yes you can set up the similarity. But, it may be better to use some examples other than the anime or manga. It is a highly fantasy world, which can make anyone become anything the creator wanted. |
2009-02-09, 16:33 | Link #72 | |
Kiss-sui.com Princess
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Gomen. This idea is alien to me and hard to understand. Where does the idea come from that if you like Japanese females you are pervert???? |
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2009-02-09, 16:45 | Link #73 | |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
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Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
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Having a Star Trek moment... ("She is not of the Body!!! She is an Outsider, an Archon! You may not date her!!")
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2009-02-09, 16:50 | Link #74 | |
Kiss-sui.com Princess
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Hi, I would like to understand what you mean, so could you please give me more example? Last edited by AyumiDesu; 2009-02-09 at 17:14. |
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2009-02-09, 17:15 | Link #75 | |
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: East Cupcake
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Additionally, the majority of film roles for Asian women are centered on their "exotic" sex appeal (this "exoticness" has been cultivated over the years by many executives in charge of films). Lucy Liu, Maggie Q, etc, only ever find work in Hollywood as "sexual" characters that the male lead can fantasize about. |
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2009-02-09, 19:19 | Link #76 | |
NePoi!
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On the one hand, rulers as far apart in time as Ashoka and Akbar have tried to introduce policies and systems which tried to promote equality and understanding between their varied peoples... ...while on the other hand, times such as the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 have seen terrible upheavals, inter-communal massacres, and the kind of bitter legacies that take a long time to try and chip away at. Time will tell whether the future of the sub-continent will prove to be as hopeful as one might wish, as dark as one might fear, or some kind of middling area in between.
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2009-02-09, 23:26 | Link #77 |
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I actually agree with Papaya's main premise, that the conception of race, although rather loosely coined nowadays, has an obvious genetic inference. I mean, on average, two East Asian individuals will have more similar DNA sequences than those of an East Asian individual compared with a Caucasian individual. Can anyone deny this?
However, I also agree that the detailed genetic correlations of physical appearance and DNA sequence are still very tenuous at this point. But it is not inconceivable that those correlations will be made clear sometime in the future, when technology has vastly advanced. We already know which alleles influence eye color, skin pigment, widows peak hairline, etc. To me, it seems entirely reasonable that geneticists in the future will be able to take blood samples from a crime scene and say with confidence, "Ah, this was a Caucasian woman." In anthropological terms, a race is basically a giant extended family, with a relatively recent common ancestor compared to other races. Humanity is thought to have originated in Africa, but as different tribes separated and colonized new lands, they diverged rapidly on the evolutionary tree (although not enough to speciate), often due to environmental pressure, but also frequently just due to random chance from founders effect. Relative genetic isolation eventually manifested in peoples with discernible physical differences from region to region, and although genetically mixing always occurred, it was far less influential on the gene pool than the far more substantial inbreeding (the evolutionary kind, not the ew kind) within geographic locales. |
2009-02-10, 00:57 | Link #78 |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
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The trick is that "race" implies that you can draw lines in the rainbow -- there's going to multiple indicators that prevent any clean line. It also implies that people can agree on the line's location at all along the spectrum. What you describe is already used to trace genetic history and in forensics. It has almost no connection to national or cultural boundaries, of course. But there's already scientific terms for those observations: variation, cline, phenotype, etc. Most scientists are fine with collecting populations by alleles for specific reasons (medical usually) but those populations are going to overlap and redistribute based on which alleles are chosen.
Trying to insert the word "race" into a scientific discussion is about like using the word "doggie" when discussing the family Canidae or the word "night twinkles" in Astronomy. Not going to be taken very seriously... Also, "race" has been used over the centuries as a reference to religion, culture, tribe, region (e.g. Germanic "race") which makes it terribly ineffective and misleading. Being able to describe someone's skin tone using a color index, skeletal features, or blood characteristics is certainly possible -- does it tell you their "race"? Who is defining? What is it being used for? A lot of energy has been spent over the last thousand-plus years by various people of many nations who misused genetic understanding to create "race theories" to justify mistreatment of anyone different..... Gattaca time?
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Last edited by Vexx; 2009-02-10 at 01:09. |
2009-02-10, 10:29 | Link #79 |
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I can agree with that statement in that the idea of race has been historically misleading. It reminds me of the debate among taxonomists concerning whether we should still use the term "reptile" because it actually is not monophyletic, since in order to become so it would have to include birds. Proponents for the term claim the word reptile is still highly descriptive, however unscientific it is in light of what we know today.
Although race isn't perfect, it stills tells you a lot about an individual. Its just a rough and tumble way of grouping phenotypes. If it weren't at least somewhat useful, it would have been discarded long ago |
2009-02-10, 10:41 | Link #80 | |
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Join Date: Jan 2009
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Although it is wrong to judge and label people based on where they were born and what they look like, it saddens me to say that most people go by that wrong concept.Good call on Gattaca, strangely enough it looks like a very probable future, save for the DNA alterations :P |
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