Do Human Races Exist?
By Collin Maessen on commentNot that long ago there was a little spat on YouTube when the HeyRuka made a couple of videos about the differences between human races. One of her main points was that there is a difference in IQ between these races.
Understandably this caused an outrage on YouTube as this is quite a sensitive topic. But I don’t care about the race part, I cared more about the incredibly bad logic and lack of evidence she used to try to argue for her position. She failed even at giving a basic definition of what she considers a race, in all her attempts she was most successful in telling what she didn’t consider a definition of race. This alone should be a red flag.
In the end she didn’t succeed in defining race in a scientifically meaningful way that reflects anything in todays literature, or make a good case that some of these races are more intelligent. She failed in this as something like a race doesn’t exist. Race is a social construct and we can’t identify someone as being a member of a race from just looking at their DNA. Not to mention that the IQ differences are explained by the environment people live in, malnutrition alone has a huge impact.
The following video from C0nc0rdance gives a good introduction to why the concept of race has no value whatsoever in the scientific arena:
Collin Maessen is the founder and editor of Real Skeptic and a proponent of scientific skepticism. For his content he uses the most up to date and best research as possible. Where necessary consulting or collaborating with scientists.
Hi there. I found your website while looking for some skeptical/atheist posts about this Ruka stuff on YouTube. It’s not getting much coverage on the mainstream blogs, so I wanted to say thank you for taking the time to write about it.
I’ve linked to a blog post I made on a new blog I just set up a couple of days ago about it. I basically deconstructed her entire video full of “facts” and “sources” to demonstrate how she is misusing/misrepresenting sources, outright lying about what they say, or saying the opposite of what they say (in addition to what you point out here about her failure to define race and intelligence and make any sort of logical argument).
Thanks again for attention to this matter. It’s really important, I think, that we point out the ridiculousness of these sorts of things within the skeptical community. If we cannot convince Ruka that she’s wrong, at least we can keep other people from thinking she’s right. 😉