Re: Do racial or cultural groups differ in character?

<MikeinCamden@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1133640433.997000.27130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Tonight I am going to throw caution to the winds and be politically
> incorrect!
>
> Now I know it's not PC to suggest that different racial and cultural
> groups have different characters with both negative and positive
> attributed. We are the same - exactly!
>
> But this is not my experience.
>
> What do others think about this? What do you ascribe to particular
> groups? Of course, we all know that there is one group with no negative
> characteristics at all. Let us not mention any other views in that case
> to avoid offence.
>
> Let me start with my own group - and to show I'm not a supremacist let
> me suggest a negative point or two about my own group - the English.
>
> 1. Don't stick together
> 2. Addicted to hypocrisy
> 3. Anti-intellectual
> 4. Inclined to short-termism
>

Well of course they do differ. Culture makes a big difference to human
societies, and genetic differences may make a contribution too though I have
seen little to suggest that personality traits differ in any substantial
sense within rather than between the gross racial categories of caucasoid,
mongoloid and congoid. If such *genetically* based differences *within*
those categories exist they are probably very subtle IMO. But two important
things to bear in mind.

A) We are talking about group averages. Whatever general rule is made there
will exist individuals who will buck the trend. This will be so whether it
is nature or nurture or both influencing the outcomes. The genetic
contribution to differences in personality between individuals will likely
be massive compared to between group differences. With cultural
contributions to personality IMO the reverse is probably true.

B) The categories will often be arbitrary. From a genetic point of view
"English" is certainly a very arbitrary category. It would be very common
for any random Englishman to share more genes in common with a random
Albanian than with another random Englishman. In fact it would be quite
likely for any given random Englishman to share more genes in common with a
random Senegalese than with another random Englishman, the probability would
probably be something around the teens percent. This does not actually mean
that it is difficult to distinguish between caucasoids and congoids
genetically - in fact it is very easy taking genes gene frequencies in
aggregate and construct a phylogeny. But a lot of people don't understand
what race (ie. subspecies) means genetically. The between group variation
will be only by such things as selection and drift, and will likely involve
only a small proportion of genes and even a small proportion of non-"junk"
genes (ie. genes that actually make a phenotypic change when you alter
them), but personality could easily be a phenotype whose genotype was
subject to selection in different environments or cultures of social
structure. There still are things that we see universally in homo sapiens
and can be ascribed to part of a "universal nature" eg. at least some level
of pair bonding, though humans are remarkably malleable to cultural
influences compared to other animals. This very malleability may however be
something of a buffer against strong genetic "racial" average personality
differences.

Arguably "English" is also culturally arbitrary. Are cultural differences
between the Scots and the English really any more than superficial when
thinking about how they may affect personality? Might not Geordies vary as
much from Devonians as Glaswegians do in terms of culture?


.

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