#unilineal evolution

[gilliatt83]

Rethinking the Prime Directive of 'Star Trek'

Long a trope of the Star Trek multiverse, the Prime Directive was created from a place of empathy to protect vulnerable societies. But, what if it is actually continuing an outdated, damaging philosophy?

“The Prime Directive is an antiquated piece of Western thinking. FUCK colonialism,”

[cantbackdown]

Race?

Race has no basis in biology or genetics, despite attempts to prove it. According to new scientific findings, as demonstrated in the documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion, individuals from what we assume are “different races” may have more genetic similarity than two individuals from what we’d mark as the “same race.” This is because the phenotypical variations--that of skin color, nose and eye shape, hair color and texture, facial structure, etc.--are all accounted for by a minute portion of human DNA. Furthermore, all of the genes that make us human were already present within the human population by the time environmental influences began to diversify the expression of phenotype. Therefore, we truly are all more alike than we continue to think. Still, despite that “race has defied biological definition,” as Omi and Winant put it, throughout history there have been attempts to justify its legitimacy in order to understand difference. From the religious debates which “sought to reconcile the Bible with the existence of ‘racially distinct’ people” (Racial Formations, Omi and Winant) during early European colonial encounters, to other arguments regarding whether all mankind came from one species or various species (which both creationists and evolutionists alike theorized about); to the taxonomizing of human cultures on a unilineal evolutionary scale with Europeans being the most evolved and most modern, and also psychological and neurological explanations for variations in human intelligence based on race or heredity--these and more have constituted the realms and ways in which people have tried to understand what “race” is. A commonality underlying all these explanations is that they often pursue meanings (or evidence for the meanings) that we associate with “race,” and this shows that race is more than just about grouping people by features. Indeed, the inquiry into race’s legitimacy is driven by intersubjective (cultural) meanings about how and why phenotype matters in the human population, so that, as Omi and Winant argue in Racial Formations “the truth of race” for these attempts “lies in the terrain of innate characteristics, of which skin color and other physical attributes provide only the most obvious... indicators.” Thus, race, and the question of race, is about the meanings and signifiers attributed to human physical variation. These meanings are always being shaped and formed, according to socio-political and historical context.