--- On Mon, 10/12/09, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, you can't actually tell... but you can guess... and,
> then, assuming
> you're right, you gain what knowledge?
>
I gain the knowledge that the person is more likely to have been born in Bremen than in Manchester and is probably not a member of the Church of England.
>
> But more than that, really? Slavs with a heavy Asian
> component? Which Asia
> is that?
Mongols, mainly.
Turkey, do they make the cut? Or are the
> Turks more Greek, or
> Arab?
Russians think of Turks as Ottomans, and there are lots of Turkic peoples in Russia. No. They're their own thing. It's Americans who assimilate Turks to Asians. ;)
>
> There are no coherent geographic, cultural, and biological
> categories here.
Of course they're not coherent. They're broad, crude inferences based on upon physical appearance, phenotype, statistically correlating with ancestry.
Certainly, given the
> differentiations you
> make among Europeans, you'd not claim that all sub-Saharan
> Africans have the
> same skin-tone and look alike as a result?
Nope, I'm sure a Zulu can generally tell the difference between a Zulu and a Nigerian. I can't do that, beyond noting obvious differences between Ethiopians and West Africans. If I spent a lot of time in Africa, I probably could.
Surely,
> given the
> differentiations you've made among Europeans - as
> differentiated a
> homogeneous "white" group as there ever was - you're not
> going to claim that
> east Asians all look alike, despite sharing epiCANTHal
> folds.
Why would I claim that? Japanese people obviously look different from Koreans or Chinese people.
German-Americans have the genetic tendency to make typos. ;)