\doc\web\99\07\blhyper.txt +OK 6643 octets Received: from smtp11.nwnexus.com (smtp11.nwnexus.com [206.63.63.200]) by mail3.halcyon.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA23100 for ; Sat, 8 May 1999 02:33:43 -0700 (PDT) Received: from md.egroups.com (md.egroups.com [207.138.41.139]) by smtp11.nwnexus.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id CAA16035 for ; Sat, 8 May 1999 02:33:41 -0700 Received: from [10.1.1.22] by md.egroups.com with NNFMP; 08 May 1999 10:33:41 -0000 Mailing-List: contact h-bd-owner@egroups.com X-Mailing-List: h-bd@egroups.com X-URL: http://www.egroups.com/list/h-bd/ Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-h-bd@egroups.com Received: (qmail 1079 invoked by uid 7770); 8 May 1999 09:33:38 -0000 Received: from finch-post-12.mail.demon.net (194.217.242.41) by vault.egroups.com with SMTP; 8 May 1999 09:33:38 -0000 Received: from [193.237.6.75] (helo=crispian.demon.co.uk) by finch-post-12.mail.demon.net with smtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 10g3UC-000LRS-0C; Sat, 8 May 1999 09:33:33 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 8 May 1999 10:09:18 +0100 To: SteveSlr@aol.com Cc: h-bd@egroups.com From: Chris Brand In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Turnpike Version 3.03a Subject: [h-bd] Re: Black hypertension Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Status: >medical researchers need to learn more about natural selection. >For example, Scientific American recently featured an article by scientists >who had run a massive multi-year multi-national study of high blood pressure >in people of West African descent. They announced that the high blood >pressure found among too African-Americans couldn't be related to genetic >differences because rural West Africans don't have much high blood pressure. >(The article blamed racism.) Of course, it's precisely those racial groups >that came from a low salt, low fat nutritional environment that would be >least selected for resistance to McDonald's Three Food Groups (grease, salt, >and sugar). > Chris Brand here: I thought Steve Sailer's point could do with a little expansion re what happened in the Sci. Amer. article. McDougall NewsLetter, 16 ii '99: ________________________________ A recently fashionable line among 'antiracialists' about the high levels of hypertension in US Blacks has been to attribute it to the process of enslavement. Since abiding racial differences can in no circumstances be acknowledged by latter-day Marxists (Marx and Lenin themselves didn't mind), it is preferable to argue that Blacks would have died on the wicked slave ships if they had not had such sadly valuable properties as docility, lack of imagination and a high capacity for salt retention. The latter, in particular, supposedly accounts for today's high Black rates of coronary heart disease. Sadly for the antiracialoons, this story has now turned out to be baloney, as is shown by scientists from Chicago's Loyala University in the latest Scientific American (ii '99, 'The puzzle of hypertension in Afro-Americans', by Richard Cooper, Charles Rotimi and Ryk Ward). Apparently, slave ship deaths occurred largely from TB and slave-on- slave or crew-on-slave violence rather than from salt-wasting diarrhoea; and the hypothesized genetic transformation simply could simply not have occurred so quickly. Instead, hypertension in US Blacks, which is 33% heritable, probably involves a genetic predisposition that is triggered by Snickers or T-bone steaks that are not so readily available to Blacks who did not make an escape from the Dark Continent. So how on earth did such a non-PC paper come to be published in the high-PC Scientific American? Well, the failure of previous researchers to identify the 'genetic-environmental interaction' that may yield Black hypertension is blamed on the 'racism' that had scientists looking for crucial Black genes in the first place. Though the Loyala team have no definite explanation themselves ("It may be that high angiotensinogen levels {inherited on alleles 235T and 174T} are not sufficient to trigger hypertension in people of Africa descent," they conclude), they can appear on the side of the angels by thus blaming others' 'racism.' Further establishing their 'antiracist' card-holding status, the authors opine -- as if it were either relevant to their paper or well- established -- that "physical anthropologists....long ago ceased their attempts to classify homo sapiens into various races or subspecies." {They should take a look at the article by Chinese researchers who recently published evidence of some eight to ten main human races (Nature 15 x '98, News & Views; also McDNL 3 xi '99).} Apart from illustrating the need for antiracist piety when submitting a paper to Scientific American, the Loyala team's swipes are of interest in only one particular. The plain word 'Negro' is apparently being replaced among PC types by the novelty 'Person of African Descent.' Perhaps the 21st century pack drill will be to talk of PAFRis PEURis and PASis -- and the terms Negroid, Caucasoid and Mongoloid will at last come to seem preferable? _____________________________ Chris Brand Edinburgh. Author of 'The 'g' Factor' [Wiley DePublisher, 1996]. For overview, CV, psychology articles and access to McDougall NewsLetters [for neoliberalism], see http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk. -- ''In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'' Carl SAGAN, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.'' -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tired of waiting for your stock quotes and charts to load? StockMaster is super-fast for quotes, charts, news, and portfolios. 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