Some new links.... I just added Racial Myths and Refuting Racial Myths as well as Future Pundit last week. The last site has some links to the author's other blogs-I especially recommend Techie Pundit, but I don't know if most of our readers would enjoy rants against Java as much as I would (I like Java by the way, but I'm open minded). The first two sites get into the minutiae of race classification that became rather unpopular by the 1960s. I am a bit worn out by debates on whether "Catherine Zeta-Jones is a Paleo-Atlantid or a Med/Nordic mix." One of the background assumptions that is made seems to be that pure races mixed with each other to produce sub-races [1]. This draws on C. S. Coon's proto-multiregionalist ideas that individual human races (I believe he counted five) entered sapience at different times and locales. This methodology seems too simple, and the more humble and fuzzy style of talking about lineages and haplotypes (with Refuting Racial Myths does plenty of-but this doesn't come up on his message board too much) seems to be more reflective of our present state of knowledge. Also, though I think a case can be made that major racial groupings like Caucasoids and Negroids (whites and blacks) have been relatively isolated from each other because of the Sahara, but separating different white racial groups like Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans in my opinion is often an exercise in storytelling or creative writing. There are some populations like the Basques or Sardinians that are special and a people set apart, but it seems most Europeans are so mixed, and the clines are so smoothly graded, that these classifications are artificial abstractions. In any case, check out the sites though. Just don't cross any of the message board members that take the questions of Catherine Zeta-Jones' racial heritage seriously (personally, I just think she's hot). So I have two questions for you-what race is Catherine? And why is this image at britneyfreak.com?

[1] The two race sites have a dispute over whether southern Europeans or northern Europeans are "racially mixed," especially non-European mixture. Racial Myths has a somewhat counter-intuitive position that northern Europeans are just as racially mixed as southern Europeans. Looking at a map of Europe, this seems peculiar. Pulsing population movements out of the north of Africa or the Levant would almost certainly wash over southern Europe first, and dissipate over the Alps as native populations picked up the new technologies as culture finally out-ran genetics. But certainly there were movements in the north as well, Britain was settled by Celts, Romans, who brought Sarmatian mercenaries and citizen soldiers from every corner of the empire, and later the Germans came over the waters....