Didn't I warn people about the coffee thing just yesterday. If you care to much about coffee, you cause racial misunderstanding.
Would you care to much about coffee?
No thanks, I only much about tea.
Sure, cause racial understanding.
I try to conduct my life so that all races appreciate me equally.
I'm not sure how long you could sustain it.
I can make valid race criticisms all night long, laydeez.
I odn't understand 7. I'm going to get some office coffee in a dirty mug and see if that doesn't wake my brain.
Is it just me or is that blog really badly written? I get that's sort of the intention: faux-naïf, and all that, but still.
10: I agree. It's not like I don't get the joke (how couldn't as one is fairly bludgeoned with it?!) but, "Oh, I love the exotic white girls with their exotic ways! They're so exotic" isn't even a parody. Each entry is just that ham fisted.
Yeah, the continual repetition of the same two or three word phrases isn't amusing in any way. It's irritating.
11: I think the problem is that she is too nice. She wants to make sure everyone gets the joke and no one is offended.
I wouldn't go that far. It would be better if it hit the high points (hair, continent-based nomenclature, mutual resemblence) and left it at that.
Isn't there a theory that blond hair and blue eyes were favored by selection exactly because they were exotic?
Ah, some science. Looks like the theory is that diversity of hair and eye color among Europeans is due to strong sexual selection of women in cold climates. Kinda interesting.
Ursyne, you appear to have just answered your earlier question.
15. OK, now what about a selectionist explanation for blonde melanesians. Any ideas?
I didn't actually read very many of the other posts, but I think the one in the OP here is hilarious. Because of linguistics.
Off to teach!
While it doesn't seem crazy that hair or eye pigmentation would be driven by sexual selection, there's something a bit glib and veldtian about the blog post linked in 15.
I wonder how it connects to the fact that northern European kids* often start off blonde and go dark as they get older?
* and presumably Aborigine/Melanesian kids, too?
Swedes: hot because they had to be. I gotta say I find that theory not very convincing.
Don't want to be a hater, but the linked site is just bad. It also seems to pull punches.
Swedes had to be hot from the neck up because it was too cold to tell how their asses looked.
One of the Melanesian explanations of blondness seems to center around the fact that populations were so small and isolated, so it was a lot easier for genes to become more dominant. I don't see why small, isolated populations wouldn't also be a huge factor in ice-age Europe.
I read some academic article awhile ago presenting data which showed significant selection pressure for dark skin around the equator, but not equally significant selection pressure against near the poles.* This explains selection against light skin/hair/eyes (to the extent skin/hair/eye color are linked alleles) around the equator, but not selection for in Europe and elsewhere. Small population pockets does seem to make the most sense, if you run models it's pretty easy for recessive genes to become 'fixed' in small populations through random genetic drift.
There's a bunch of ev-psych mumbo jumbo about blonde women being more desirable because blondness signals youth, but I would take this argument as seriously as all other ev psych arguments.
*Too lazy to look up the article, but not to summarize: Sampling DNA across subsaharan Africa, the researchers found the mutation for dark skin occurred only once, while sampling among Swedish and Irish populations found 17 different mutations for light skin, indicating a lack of selection pressure for one particular mutation in N. Europe which one would expect if the mutation were advantageous.
apologies for run-on sentences there.
On the veldt, sentences that got too long were eaten by alligators.
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Is the official Republican website really gop.com? It's weird that it's not a .org, and there's barely any platform statement there. (I'm prepping to moderate a school thing about the election.)
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I really should have put that in the "There's a party in the USA" thread.
www.gop.org redirects to gop.coml, apparently.
explanation for blonde melanesians. Any ideas?
Shipwrecks?
24: it seems weird that avoiding rickets doesn't have selective pressure, but those guys are the scientists. Hang on, though, the blonde Melanesians paper links to a different papers about lighter skin in European and Eurasian populations, which comes down more on the side of selective pressure existing.
emir,
With rickets, I think that skin color effects are not all that great and there are easy dietary workarounds, like oily fish, so it's been mostly ruled out as a force for natural selection.
On the article on E/W Eurasian skin color, yeah, I saw that too, after I posted. I'm trying to remember if the article I read was before or after 2007. I don't follow all that closely, but I think this is still an unanswered question for bio anthropology, with a lot of people coming to different conclusions with different data.
I thought being super pale was somehow good for absorbing vitamin D or one of those sun vitamins.
there's barely any platform statement there
Maybe you're not very familiar with the modern Republican party. Their platform consists entirely of (1) pablum and (2) things they (usually) know better than to put in writing.
I somehow thought there would be something about as sophisticated as you see on the Democrat site. I mean, I thought it would be stupid. But present.
"The *Democrat* site"???
heebie's a mole!
Can't talk now. Jammies wants to rape me.
And there's that weird blood vessel in your calves that opens up if you stand on something really cold, thus helping to keep heat in the core. Which means that people of European descent are superior...at standing on blocks of ice for longer. Which is also something so ridiculous that only white people would think of doing it, or indeed of living somewhere the climate makes it useful.
standing on blocks of ice for longer. Which is also something so ridiculous that only white people would think of doing it,
HEY! DON'T MAKE ME SWIM OVER THERE AND KICK YOUR ASS!
As far as I can tell from the Olympics, being of European descent makes you good at things that involve lifting or throwing heavy objects, almost as good as east Africans at running a really long way, and good at jumping over tall things. If we could just introduce 'sprinting barefoot on an icey track' ...
44: that's just a product of the imbalance of wealth between the rich North and the poor South. People in rich countries have so much stuff that they are naturally experienced in lifting it and carrying it around.
Fox's Glacier Mint Mascot: I grew up in West Yorkshire, I know where you live, and to be honest if I lived in Batley I'd stand on a block of ice in order to forget.
Just to clarify, 41 was the Republican in me talking, showing their deep misunderstanding of what "rape" means. Not my funniest joke.
47 is funny. And 48 isn't to 47.