It’s nonsense of course: the Down’s syndrome rate in China is between 1/600 and 1/800 depending on where you look, with exactly the same risk factors.

I get the feeling that the authors of that paper have never actually seen a real life “oriental”: our hands do have flexion lines; there is a marked difference in appearance between a down’s baby and a healthy one, and the use of squatting/cross-legged sitting, continued flexibility etc are cultural. Note that second generation Britons of Chinese descent display none of these behaviours.

Great idea NuttyBat, yeah send Dawkins to rant at, oops sorry challenge these people….. makes more sense than him upsetting dowsers etc.
In these circumstances would he be classified a biological weapon or an indiscriminate cluster bomb? btw I don’t actually think that Richard Dawkins is deemed to be a weapon under any international agreement.

The italian article is idiotic. Merely being offensive isn’t enough to condem research, but being wrong is.

The reasons I would not consider Langdon Down a racist, which I thought I’d made explicit, are two fold.

1) As Manigen points out the landscape within which he was writing was one which we would all now, hopefully, consider racist…

2) Is the issue of intent. And this is where Langdon Down, and the authors of the paper Ben highlighted in the Guardian this week differ.
Langdon Down wrote papers with obviously racially (and in many other ways) inappropriate terms and containing incorrect assumptions about ‘inter-racial’ and ‘intra-racial’ differences to propose that distinctions simply along the lines of ‘race’ were a pile of arse……..

I believe from the concluding paragraph, that the authors of the paper above have written it precisely to “compare people with a genetic disorder” whom THEY consider to be ““mentally retarded” with another” whom THEY consider to be an ““inferior”, race”. Basically they’re shitting on ‘orientals’ and ‘retards’ at the same time.

There is no evidence to suggest that Langdon Down was racist, in fact he used his research to suggest that racial categories were non specific and pretty useless due to the fact that phenotypic characteristics present in white people (thought to be superior and evolutionarily more advanced at the time) with certain genetic ‘disorders’, were also present in people who are non-white.

Please read it again what you just wrote. A scientists compares people with a genetic disorder, which a great deal of the population without further consideration for political correctness would call “mentally retarded”, with another, then widely accepted as “inferior”, race and comes up with similar characteristics, which the superior white race does not have. How is that not racist?

Is all this: dangerous science ? bad science? pseudo science?

It’s very simple. Your oriental is inscrutable whereas Down’s people are very scrutable.

Also, an attack on an oriental will result in a savage beating (for you) because they are taught Kung-fu from an early age. Your Down’s person is a rubbish fighter and can not be taught Kung-Fu.

Downs people are, in fact, related closely to Mexicans. You cna tell this just by looking at them. Also if presented with a choice of hats a Down’s person will always choose a sombrero

NICE have it as Down’s in their Antenatal Care guidance and the Down’s Syndrome Association do the same nationally, though it appears that regionally some use Downs, though that seems odd as it should surely then be Down as Ben uses. The Guardian style guide goes with Down’s as well, so some copy editor might want to watch for the inevitable P45.

And to keep it on topic, the paper is offensive nonsense, and I’ll be interested to see what comes next week.

how this tripe gets published at all is close to beyond belief – good for a laugh tho, like the article Ben!

Jasper Gerald was indulging, I think, in “tongue-in-cheek” science. A decade ago, the revelation that Tony Blair has the simian line on both hands triggered quite a response in the UK conservative press. Here’s the Sunday Mail (6 December 1998):

A rare physical aberration may explain why successful and often obsessive people appear to hold the world in the palm of their hand. […] Among world leaders only Britain’s Tony Blair is known to have the simian line – and on both hands…[… ] Research shows they are generally found on people who are intense and intractable, an observation which will provoke knowing smiles among critics who have branded Mr. Blair a control freak.
www.jenniferboyer.com/simianlinenews.html

I loved the ‘Research shows …’ clincher.

Research shows that journalists who use the phrase ‘research shows’ are normally totally clueless.

Coobeastie [comment 18]: read my comment 9.

All a bit off-topic, sorry. I’ll stop now.