It’s amazing how many people still cite Lewontin’s Fallacy, in support of racial egalitarianism, as if it’s a reasonable argument.
I’ve been arguing with a man on Quora about race, and he wrote:
You’ve never defined “dominant” so all your claims are BS. The reason biologists (like the one I linked to) say that “race” isn’t testable is that you can’t identify who falls into a “race”. And the similarities between people of different alleged “races” biologically end up being greater than among people within a socalled “race”. “Race” is just pseudoscientific bullshit.
But here’s how you can turn Lewontin’s Fallacy on its head to your advantage. I responded:
You wrote: “And the similarities between people of different alleged “races” biologically end up being greater than among people within a socalled “race”.”
That argument is called Lewontin’s Fallacy. You can read about it by looking it up on Wikipedia. You also wrote: “In fact the evidence is that whites are favored and blacks are three times more likely to be poor”
Don’t you know that there is more income disparity WITHIN races than BETWEEN them? Therefore, according to your own reasoning, you should not be able to cite such statistics in any meaningful way.
Yes, you can use Lewontin’s Fallacy to “disprove” income disparities between the races, along with incarceration rates, healthcare issues, graduation rates and employment differences. All of these are more pronounced among people within races than between races. I don’t expect to get a reasonable response from that man on Quora – though I do expect to get banned pretty soon. You can read the entire discussion here, and feel free to join in if you want.
I’ve also been making this point in regards to efforts to increase “diversity”. When diversity is used as an excuse to limit the number of white people in any organisation, it can be argued that since there is greater diversity within ethnic groups than between them, no significant increase in diversity can be expected by forcing non-whites into positions that whites would otherwise get.
I didn’t know there was an actual name for this fallacy. Good to know.
It is an interesting point. But the PC crowd does not care about such subtleties.
A lot of similar contradictions can be found at http://4racism.org/site-map.html / Keep checking for new articles
Race does not exist but we have racial quotas. Races are equal but Whites intinsically evil and are born with an original sin.
Lewontin’s fallacy is that people vary a lot on single features, even skin color. There are negro albinos and tan Italians. So skin color is not a clear feture to differentiate races.
But if one takes 10 different features, then race can clearly be differentiated. No one is confused about the race of a negro albino vs a sun-tanned Norwegian.