Bad Science: Harper's article, "Mighty White of You"

New findings undermine basis of “race isn’t real” theory

Posted Sept. 8, 2004
Special to World Science

For years, mainstream scientists have said there are no real racial differences among people. Race is purely a “social construct” – in other words, it’s imaginary, some have argued.

But two new studies raise doubts about a key calculation on which this argument rests.

This calculation, often cited publicly by world-renowned geneticists, is that all humans are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical. As geneticist Eric Lander told Wired Magazine in February, 2001, any two humans are “more than 99.9 percent identical at the molecular level. Racial and ethnic differences are all indeed only skin deep.”

Even U.S. President Bill Clinton said, in a 2000 speech: “All human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”

But two new studies suggest that percentage is too high, researchers say – although it's unclear whether the real number is much lower, or just a little.

“The 99.9 percent number is pure nonsense,” wrote Michael Wigler, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, in a recent email. “I will not say anything more about it.” However, he added, “it is true that humans are more like each other than many other species.”

Wigler is a co-author of one of the two studies, which is published in the July 23 advance online edition of the prestigious research journal Science. In it, the researchers wrote that they were surprised to find large-scale differences in human DNA. “There is considerable structural variation in the human genome [genetic code], most of which was not previously apparent,” they wrote.

Some researchers don't think the new findings should change the 99.9 percent figure that much. “Taking all types of DNA variation into consideration and looking at the entire 'content' of the genome, I would now say we are 99.7-99.8 percent identical,” said Stephen W. Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Scherer co-authored another study, whose conclusions were similar to those published in Science. His was published in the Aug. 1 advance online issue of the research journal Nature Genetics.

Scherer declined to say whether he thinks the findings mean race is real.

Lander – a researcher who has been quoted in published reports giving the 99.9 percent figure, and who works with the Whitehead Institute in Boston – didn’t respond to phone calls and emails requesting comment for this story. His secretary said he was abroad.

Also unreachable was Craig Venter, chairman of the Institute for Genomics Research in Rockville, Md., U.S.A. He was president of a company whose research produced the 99.9 percent figure in 2001, Celera Genomics. He didn't return phone calls or repeated emails.

In one of the new studies, Wigler’s group sampled DNA from 20 people from around the world. They detected 76 major differences among the people, differences known as copy number polymorphisms. This means that some sections of genetic code are repeated, but the number of repetitions vary among people.

This “could explain why people are different” – although whether it in fact does explain it, is unknown, said Scherer, whose team reached similar findings to those of the Cold Spring Harbor group.

“At first we were astonished and didn't believe our results because for years we had been taught that most variation in DNA was limited to very small changes,” Scherer said. But later, he added, he learned Harvard University researchers were making similar observations, so the groups combined their data and reached the same conclusion.

The Cold Spring Harbor team found that these changes affected the code for 70 genes. These included genes involved in Cohen syndrome – a form of mental retardation – as well as brain development, leukemia, drug resistant forms of breast cancer, regulation of eating and body weight.

The “race-isn't real” proponents have other arguments besides the 99.9 percent figure to back up their case. But that figure has become one of the most prominent pieces of their argument since about four years ago, when the number came out from scientists associated with the Human Genome Project, a 13-year program to map the human genetic code.

Another key argument that scientists have made to back up the statement that race isn’t real, is that most of the genetic differences between people are local ones, not differences between "races." In other words, as the U.S. public television channel PBS states on its website: “two random Koreans are likely to be as genetically different as a Korean and an Italian.”

However, those findings came out before the new genetic variation studies. Some researchers have suggested that the type of genetic variation these studies identified – the copy number differences – could be used as a new test for comparing the relative importance of local and group variation.

“My guess is we will see all types of LCVs [large-scale copy variations], so there will be some population or group 'prevalent'” ones, Scherer said.

Some people disputed whether any percentages, whether 99.9 or otherwise, should be cited as a measure of human differences. The figure is “entirely meaningless as a measure of functional population differences,” said Miami University’s Jon Entine, author of “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It,” in an email.

“Dogs and wolves are 100 percent identical but functionally different,” Entine added. “Rats are about 95 percent the genetic equivalent of humans. These are ridiculous statements, although technically accurate. The use of the 99.9 percent figure by the popular press and scientists is, frankly scandalous.”

Whether or not race is real, researchers said, it doesn’t mean one race is better than another. “Great abuse has occurred in the past with notions of 'genetic superiority' of one particular group,” Stanford University's Neil Risch wrote in the July 1, 2002 issue of the research journal Genome Biology. “The notion of superiority is not scientific, only political, and can only be used for political purposes.”

http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/exclusives-nfrm/040908_race.htm

Also, in further response to Scott re: out-of-Africa and speciation:

Why not use the oppositions own figures? 4,000,000 years of Homo Sapian X .01 (percent of genetic difference)= 40,000 years.

Significance: According to Out of Africa, until recently, we were all Africans, all the same race (geographic sub-species). Ok. So if present differences are .01 then .01 of 4,000,000 is 40,000 years ago. This means all racial differences evolved within the last 40,000 years which is the same time sapiens entered Europe. And this means that sapiens has been RAPIDLY raciating since the African sapiens vs. Non-African sapiens split.

Conclusion: race is now of great importance and the paramount mechanism driving human evolution. Non-African sapiens are diverging rapidly and the change of .01 percent has probably occured here rather than in both groups since the African sapiens had 160,000 of racial evolution within a fixed environment, probably making all necessary changes early in the racial history.
 
Norsemaiden said:
Undoubtedly there is far more homogeneity amongst individuals of a wild species of animal than there is in a race of humans. Wild animals speciate (seperate themselves into further different species) that is how evolution happens. Only domesticated animals interbreed.

this is absolutely false. wild animals interbreed frequently. wholphins occur in nature, and it is only one of many examples of the interbreeding of wild species. that is how evolution happens.

Cheetahs are so homogenous, for example, that they are practically clones of eachother. This lack of variation means that they don't have the problem of genetic ill health from inbreeding that domesticated animals and humans would have (why incest causes disabilities in offspring).

again, this is false. cheetahs will probably be extinct in 20 years precisely because they are inbred to the point of all being cousins. this has lead to a myriad of health problems for every cheetah born. biologists speculate that a catastrophic event thinned the cheetah's numbers thousands of years ago.
http://www.colyerinstitute.org/cheetah_study/About_Cheetahs.htm
 
Norsemaiden said:
Here is a novel idea to consider. AIDs is affecting Black Africans much more than white Europeans. This could be partly because of sexual practices being different and partly because Europeans may have genes that make them less vulnerable to the disease. If AIDs were kill sufficient numbers of Africans it could end up with the only ones left unaffected having a particular mutation that stops them dying of AIDs while at the same time being HIV positive. These individuals would become the new population. Apparantly healthy, but HIV positive.

The result of this would most likely be that other, unaffected, people (races) would not be able to have intercourse with the Africans as HIV was endemic in the population. Are we talking speciation now?
I think your situation is slightly flawed, but I get the point you are making. Lets assume you scenario is correct. If suddenly, africans could not breed with other groups outside of africa, then yes, eventually we are looking at subspeciation, and if enough mutations arise, speciation.
 
Blaphbee said:
- The argument is just based on a quantitative gene count and says nothing about the significance or quality of differences. The implications, effects and repercussions of the existing racial differences (be they now 15%, 10% or even less of the total human genetic diversity) are obviously severe, as science has documented again and again (see Eysenck, Jensen, Herrnstein, Rushton, Brand, Lynn, Hu, & al.) and as we can observe daily around us, if we decide to observe reality with an open mind.
This is exactly why race is irrelevant. We place emphasis on external features which arent important. Nature doesnt care if we look different. Nature cares about whether two species can interbreed, or whether they are different enough to be moving in that direction. In fact, quantity of difference IS important. If the quantity gets too high you lose the potential to interbreed, because fertalization cant occur, or the offspring are born, but infertile. This is how speciation happens. So quantity is FAR more important than the shallow bias with which we view certain traits such as skin color and hair texture.
 
Scott W said:
This is exactly why race is irrelevant. We place emphasis on external features which arent important. Nature doesnt care if we look different. Nature cares about whether two species can interbreed, or whether they are different enough to be moving in that direction. In fact, quantity of difference IS important. If the quantity gets too high you lose the potential to interbreed, because fertalization cant occur, or the offspring are born, but infertile. This is how speciation happens. So quantity is FAR more important than the shallow bias with which we view certain traits such as skin color and hair texture.
So now you're telling us what nature "cares about"? LOL. Nature doesn't have a goal in mind Scott. Nature doesn't "care" about anything, as it has no directive intelligence. It doesn't have a direction that it moves in. You're making deductive claims without any logic behind them. You're attempting to erase the concept of race by taking a simple focus on one outcome - breeding potential - as being all that is important. Are you telling me that diversity of human culture is unimportant? This is part of the life process as well, and it has a large correlative element in racial history, ancestry, and heritage.

I didn't say the quantity of difference didn't matter either.

I would like to know why you say this: "Nature doesnt care if we look different" - after you've used the same basis for your earlier argument that "All the genetic evidence points to an extreme amount of genetic variation within races, enough to have no validity to group into suybspecies." How is it valid for one argument and not the other? You use it to arrive at a still-shakily-defined conclusion (in essence, "all this wide variation within a single population against the small percentile of variation between the established races obviates the concept of race entirely" - in which mathematical dictionary did you find the definition that "a small percentile" mean "no difference whatsoever"?), and then turn immediately around and tell me that these variations aren't important? You sound very confused as to what Nature is actually doing, enough so that it doesn't lend credibility to your assumption that "race is irrelevant".

I repeat this argument, which you have also brought up earlier in the thread but seemed to have missed:
Scott W said:
So the date of 80,000-100,000 years actually appears to be even less. Something more like 40,000 to 60,000 years since the migration out of africa. Meaning that no, humans have not been living in separate places long enough to diversify into subspecies.
Blaphbee said:
Why not use the oppositions own figures? 4,000,000 years of Homo Sapian X .01 (percent of genetic difference)= 40,000 years.

Significance: According to Out of Africa, until recently, we were all Africans, all the same race (geographic sub-species). Ok. So if present differences are .01 then .01 of 4,000,000 is 40,000 years ago. This means all racial differences evolved within the last 40,000 years which is the same time sapiens entered Europe. And this means that sapiens has been RAPIDLY raciating since the African sapiens vs. Non-African sapiens split.

Conclusion: race is now of great importance and the paramount mechanism driving human evolution. Non-African sapiens are diverging rapidly and the change of .01 percent has probably occured here rather than in both groups since the African sapiens had 160,000 of racial evolution within a fixed environment, probably making all necessary changes early in the racial history.

In any case: Tell me why Africans do not have white or yellow skin pigmentation if skin colour is arbitrary, meaningless and "shallow".
 
To add to the above:

When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, its most touted result was that it showed no genetic basis for race. In fact, some scientists went so far as to dub race a “biological fiction.”

The project was a 13-year international drive to map all of the three billion chemical bits, or nucleotides, that make up human DNA. Particular nucleotide sequences (represented by the letters A, C, G and T) combine to form the estimated 25,000 genes whose proteins help to produce human traits, from the way your heart beats to the wave in your hair.

The map indicated that humans as a species are 99.9 per cent genetically identical—that, in fact, there are greater differences between two frogs in a pond than between any two people who find themselves waiting for a bus.

A teeny 0.1 per cent, a mere genetic sliver, helps to account for all the profound diversity within the human race, with its freckles, dimples, afros and crimson tresses, its shy and bombastic types, its Donald Trumps and Dalai Lamas, Madonnas and Mr. Dressups, Bill Gates, Billie Holidays, George W. Bushes and Osama bin Ladens.

It was a message of harmony: Hardly a hair of code separates us.

But five years later, one of scientists’ main preoccupations has become to chart the genetic variations between and within racial groups—to parse that 0.1 per cent. These differences arise through mutations, which all begin as one-time flukes, but become more prevalent in a particular place if they offer a survival advantage, carriers have more children or they result in a trait a society finds desirable.

Now, teams are panning for gene types to help explain why West Africa produces the fastest runners in the world. A University of Toronto researcher is hunting the gene types that account for skin colours.

A Pennsylvania State University scientist is teasing out the biology behind other variable physical traits, such as height or hair texture.

More crucially, it has become obvious that the 0.1 per cent may add up to the difference between sickness and health.

In Canada, researchers from McMaster and McGill Universities are breaking down heart disease by nationality to understand the interplay of genes and environment. The answers may explain why South Asians suffer high rates of high blood pressure, why heart attacks hit Middle Eastern men 10 years earlier than Europeans, or why the Chinese seem to boast the trimmest waistlines in the world.

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/06/the_new_science_1.php

I thought that all of that variation didn't matter.
 
Scott W said:
Race means subspecies
Scott W said:
Nature cares about whether two species can interbreed, or whether they are different enough to be moving in that direction.
...
This is how speciation happens.
Which one is it? You seem to be using different terms interchangeably.
 
Main Entry: sub·spe·cies
Pronunciation: 's&b-"spE-shEz, -sEz
Function: noun
: a subdivision of a species: as a : a category in biological classification that ranks immediately below a species and designates a population of a particular geographical region genetically distinguishable from other such populations of the same species and capable of interbreeding successfully with them where its range overlaps theirs b : a named subdivision (as a race or variety) of a species —sub·spe·cif·ic /"s&b-spi-'sif-ik/ adjective

sub·spe·cies ( P ) Pronunciation Key (sbspshz, -sz)
n. pl. subspecies
A taxonomic subdivision of a species consisting of an interbreeding, usually geographically isolated population of organisms.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=subspecies

------------------

If you keep insisting that Races are nothing but subspecies within the same species of Homo Sapien, this implicitly implies that there are differences between the variations, regardless of their ability to interbreed. You keep telling me that race does not exist because the differences are negligible between geographic populations, but by the very nature of the definition you use to describe them, a difference is created, and borne out by genetics.
 
I couldn't find the asrticle of harper's magazine... but i have to speak since i am kinda liberal without meaning that i exclude nationalism. Nationalism is a way to make a nation proud for itself, to give its people the force to go through difficulties. I can say that since i am Greek and the nationalism guided me throught many milleniums and i still exist as nation although someone had me enslaved for 4 centuries.
Currently i read a course in the Lund University (sweden) about The Viking Expansion, and i read a book called Decolonizing the Viking age written by Fredrik Svanberg. In his first chapters, he discusses about modern colonization of the big nation-empires (uk,protugal,spain etc.) and then he gives example how the nationalism worked in the nordic countries forming the national history of every each one of them and show that history books contradict each other and it doesn't really matter where the truth lies because anyway not all accept it as one.
 
the alumnus said:
this is absolutely false. wild animals interbreed frequently. wholphins occur in nature, and it is only one of many examples of the interbreeding of wild species. that is how evolution happens.



again, this is false. cheetahs will probably be extinct in 20 years precisely because they are inbred to the point of all being cousins. this has lead to a myriad of health problems for every cheetah born. biologists speculate that a catastrophic event thinned the cheetah's numbers thousands of years ago.
http://www.colyerinstitute.org/cheetah_study/About_Cheetahs.htm

If anyone wants to check these two issues out, google "wolphin" for the first and "Cheetah bottleneck" for the second.

The information you will find is that there are only about half a dozen examples of products of inter-species crosses. Not "many" examples. Most of the examples are as a result of human intervention and the others are "freak acts of nature" with a few freaky individuals who behave differently. Interbreeding species would be punished by natural selection. The offspring would be more likely targetted by a predator or not fit in to its environment in some ultimately fatal way.

The statement that evolution occurs through species mixing rather than through seperation (speciation) is presumably made as a wind-up because it is too ridiculous.

Cheetahs underwent a bottleneck situation because it seems that thousands of years ago their population was reduced to a very small number, and these individuals had to inbreed to build their numbers up. It is necessary for there to be a certain level of diversity in the population in order for it to adapt to changes in the environment without going extinct. I found nothing on google to suggest that the cheetahs had health problems. In fact no wild animal population can EVER have a miriad of health problems because the sick simply die so immediately and only the healthy survive to breed. The cheetahs problem is merely their lack of diversity - although the individuals themselves are healthy.
 
Norsemaiden said:
The information you will find is that there are only about half a dozen examples of products of inter-species crosses. Not "many" examples. Most of the examples are as a result of human intervention and the others are "freak acts of nature" with a few freaky individuals who behave differently. Interbreeding species would be punished by natural selection. The offspring would be more likely targetted by a predator or not fit in to its environment in some ultimately fatal way.
wrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vigor

Cheetahs underwent a bottleneck situation because it seems that thousands of years ago their population was reduced to a very small number, and these individuals had to inbreed to build their numbers up. It is necessary for there to be a certain level of diversity in the population in order for it to adapt to changes in the environment without going extinct. I found nothing on google to suggest that the cheetahs had health problems. In fact no wild animal population can EVER have a miriad of health problems because the sick simply die so immediately and only the healthy survive to breed. The cheetahs problem is merely their lack of diversity - although the individuals themselves are healthy.

wrong again, this time deceptively so. the link i provided reported health problems in cheetahs. in fact, health problems are common in wild animals. that is one reason why they become extinct. we are witnessing the end of the cheetah http://www.cheetahexpedition.com/reproductive-problems.htm
 
the alumnus said:
Wackypaedophilia has quality issues; I wouldn't rely on their assessments where anything is concerned.

A more balanced view of hybrid vigor:
the concept of heterosis, commonly called “hybrid vigor,” is often popularly referenced—albeit erroneously and out of context—by those who herald miscegenation to be a sort of panacea for eliminating deleterious recessive alleles. Those who espouse such a notion subscribe to a logic which says that the phenomenon of overdominance—the condition of a heterozygote having a phenotype that is better adapted than that of either homozygote—implies that outbreeding will ensure the heterotic state. Yet such reductionism reveals a spurious understanding of genetics. “Genes do not exist in isolation. Each is embedded in a genome containing thousands of other loci with diverse functions. Two or more genes may affect a single character or different characters. Moreover, each gene is linked to certain other genes, meaning that they are physically associated on the same chromosome.”15 Thus, while it is true that immediate inbreeding increases the frequency of deleterious recessive alleles, leading to the phenomenon of inbreeding depression (a decline in components of fitness found in offspring whose parents are directly related individuals), the inverse yield will not be had by outbreeding, as gene function cannot be measured linearly. Heterosis is only observed in “hybrids produced by crossing two different inbred lines,”16 meaning the hybrid vigor observed is only a relative qualitative assessment. The Dominance Hypothesis proposed by Charles Davenport in 1908 explained what in retrospect is more or less common sense: when the two different inbred strains “are crossed to each other, the resulting heterozygotes are homozygous and do not suffer the consequence of homozygosity for deleterious recessive alleles. In other words, the dominance of the beneficial alleles explains the observed heterosis.” 17 Such a phenomenon is most often observed in agriculture—in plants and organisms with relatively simple genomes; however, since immediate inbreeding practices are seldom had in human populations—mostly for the fact that resulting deleterious homozygous recessive alleles result in severe genetic deformities, if not death—hybrid vigor (observed once crossing two such resultant offspring from disparate genetic lines) among humans is not well documented in the literature. On the other hand, inbreeding has been employed by humans for developing agricultural breeds for millennia, and is the only means for developing strains with characteristics that the breeder desires. 18 What’s more, “about 85 percent of the genetic variation in the human species is among individuals within populations (Nei and Roychoudhury 1982),” 19 rendering inbreeding—that is, breeding within a population—no more likely to result in less fit offspring than would outbreeding.

15. Douglass J. Futuyma, Evolutionary Biology, 3rd ed. (Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer Associates, Inc.), 245.

16. Robert J. Brooker, Genetics: Analysis and Principles (New York: Benjamin Cummings, 1999), 697.

17. Ibid., 698.

18. Ibid., 711.

19. Futuyma, 737.

http://www.anus.com/zine/db/race/biology_of_race.html

One should also be aware that when one talks of "inbreeding" versus "outbreeding" in this subject, inbreeding is not synonymous with incest, which is a completely different, and only-sociologically-relevant concept. Inbreeding simply means breeding with genetically related individuals within an isolated subspecies/population group.
 
Blaphbee said:
Wackypaedophilia has quality issues; I wouldn't rely on their assessments where anything is concerned.
funny, i would say the same about The Anus

A more balanced view of hybrid vigor:


http://www.anus.com/zine/db/race/biology_of_race.html

One should also be aware that when one talks of "inbreeding" versus "outbreeding" in this subject, inbreeding is not synonymous with incest, which is a completely different, and only-sociologically-relevant concept. Inbreeding simply means breeding with genetically related individuals within an isolated subspecies/population group.

there are quite a few errors with that article. here are a few: "inbreeding has been employed by humans for developing agricultural breeds for millennia, and is the only means for developing strains with characteristics that the breeder desires." this is not true. sophisticated breeders breed for phenotype, not genotype. therefore, they do not run the risks that inbreeding creates, because they are constantly outcrossing. also it says: "since immediate inbreeding practices are seldom had in human populations—mostly for the fact that resulting deleterious homozygous recessive alleles result in severe genetic deformities, if not death—hybrid vigor (observed once crossing two such resultant offspring from disparate genetic lines) among humans is not well documented in the literature." by your own definition of "inbreeding", this is common and well understood. a detailed case study was lead in finland. http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-05/features/finlands-fascinating-genes/
moreover, inbreeding and outcrossing has been studied thoroughly in mammals, and especially in dogs. because their genetics are more similar to humans than "agricultural breeds", the effects of gene pool size is more relevant than inbreeding an ear of corn.

as you can see, by examine reputable sources, you will see that genetics has addressed fundamental questions of gene pool size and variation within mammal populations.
 
Isn't it the case that when humans were/are breeding different breeds of dog (for phenotype) this process involves looking for individuals who have the desired characteristic that the breeder is looking for? For example two dogs of the same breed have slightly longer ears, and the breeder wishes to breed a new pedigree with longer ears - so those two individuals are bred together and the resultant offspring is looked at for the longest ears again. The same breed of dog is bred over and over again, but as the ones with the longest ears are taken to breed each next generation, the ears get longer and longer and a new breed is established when the desired characteristics have been achieved.
If the breeder kept outcrossing instead of inbreeding, looking for any breed of dog with longer ears and mating it with any other breed or mongrel, it would be a chaotic process with a lot of long eared dogs which were otherwise totally not the same breed. The whole idea of pedigree is inbreeding.

There is the problem however that this unnatural kind of inbreeding, with the weak being kept alive and bred does not allow natural selection to keep the stock healthy as it would in wild conditions. These human-bred animals do have many problems with disease. As a result of this, is it sometimes necessary to outbreed a little. This is done by bringing in a little fresh blood in a strictly controlled manner.

With race horses, for example, some Arab blood is brought in on occasion to strengthen the throroughbed stock. The Arab horse is first bred with a race horse and then the best offspring of such a union is then rebred to a racehorse once again. This next generation may then be used for some fresh blood to the racing stock. (The details were passed on to me by talking to someone so I may have made a minute mistake in terms of the exact point that this cross-breed is introduced as fresh blood).

Humans are getting more and more diseased by living in a civilisation that allows the weak to survive and breed, while medecine keeps us all from dying sooner. Someone who has any serious inherited problems like that would also find that their children could be a lot healthier if they outbred with someone from a more primitive culture. So it is understandable if they feel drawn to mix in this way. Although a lot of problems are also caused by races with small pelvic cavities breeding with others that have big heads, or mixing of bloodgroups being possibly associated with leukamia or the risk of rickets from lack of vitamin D which darkskinned people suffer in less sunny climates.
 
Scott W said:
can you provide peer reviewed journals that ARENT physical anthropology journals to back that up?

there's this one at least :

Racial groupings match genetic profiles, Stanford study finds

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-01/sumc-rgm012705.php
According to Neil Risch, PhD, a UCSF professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. "We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters," Risch said. This is especially true for Hispanics who are often a mix of Native American, white and African-American ancestry. But that's not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster.

besides the differences the physical anthropologists have discovered are real. You may believe they're irrelevant because they haven't been genetically located yet but they're very useful on crimes scenes or historical sites where there are skeletons.

and speaking of crime DNA Genomics Print is a company that the police is increasingly using to identify suspects. Their genetic test identifies ancestry and in the case below they even identified the suspect's nordic aspect

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1568/
DNAPrint genomics’ forensics laboratory had further determined that the ancestry of the person of interest was white with 96% Northern European ancestry and 4% Southeastern European.

so when someone looks at the right set of genes/markers the lineage - race/ethnic group - of a person can be identified.

Scott W said:
All the genetic evidence points to an extreme amount of genetic variation within races, enough to have no validity to group into suybspecies.

isn't that the Lewontin fallacy, the "there is more genetic variation between individuals than between groups" ? It is usually followed by a claim that for example it is possible for an african to be more genetically similar to a european than the latter to another european. I've never read or heard anyone quantify this possibility. What are the chances, 1 in 10 or 1 in 1000000000000000 ?

Scott W said:
(from another post)
This is the part I would have bolded from the same article:

Put another way, the genetic difference between two individuals of the same race can be greater than those between individuals of different races--table sugar may look like salt, but it has more similarities with corn syrup.

But again if it can so much why is it never quantified ? Have you read AWF Edwards's paper on what he calls the Lewontin fallacy, which is the base on which Lehrman's assertion quoted above is built ?

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001525.html

Scott W said:
Thats the problem with anthropology, its highly subjective. Genetics and chromosome markers arent.

those can be subjective and flawed too. Richard Lewontin and DNA Genomics Print both work with genes/DNA yet their conclusions on the existence of races are different. The marxist zoologist says the categories are meaningless because it leads to racial discrimination, the other uses genetic tests that discriminate between human groups to help the police solve crimes.

Scott W said:
...that even though race isnt biologically meaningful, you can use genetics with regards to populations, such as a tribe in africa that might be more susceptible to a disease. Race is not a necessity for this sort of thing. Ethnicity and population geography is far more important.

OK populations then. Cavalli-Sforza may be publicly politically correct because he insists that races don't exist but his research show that it is possible to distinguish groups of humans from other humans on a genetic basis.
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/may_24.htm
Cavalli-Sforza's team compiled extraordinary tables depicting the "genetic distances" separating 2,000 different racial groups from each other. For example, assume the genetic distance between the English and the Danes is equal to 1.0. Then, Cavalli-Sforza has found, the separation between the English and the Italians would be about 2.5 times as large as the English-Danish difference. On this scale, the Iranians would be 9 times more distant genetically from the English than the Danes, and the Japanese 59 times. Finally, the gap between the English and the Bantus (the main group of sub-Saharan blacks) is 109 times as large as the distance between the English and the Danish. (The genetic distance between Japanese and Bantus is even greater.)


Racial lineages can be visibly, physically and genetically distinguished.

One example of racial difference in ear wax and nitroglycerin tolerance :

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/those_pesky_race_based_genes_again/
According to the journal Nature Genetics, dry earwax is seen in up to 95 per cent of East Asians, but no more than 3 per cent of Europeans and Africans. The reason for the difference is a gene called ABCC11 which controls earwax-altering molecules. A 39-strong international team did the research.

There's even a heart pill for blacks only, BiDil.

What do race-based or population-based genetic differences mean if humans aren't supposed to be classifiable in biologico-geographical sub-groups ? The differences exist but the groups to which they are linked to don't ?
 
Scott W said:
The Multiregional hypothesis states that modern humans have originated 3 times around the planet as ancestor hominids interbred with one another and modern humans arose in Africa, Europe and Asia (negroid, caucasoid, and mongoloid respectively) independently. If this were the case, then obviosly there would be no argument to the idea of separate races, because these groups of humans are not linked by a common ancestor. But really the support for the multiregional hypothesis comes from mishapen half skulls, and teeth and fossils like that. And Im talking like a handful of fossils. Not hundreds, a few dozen or so. Its really VERY sketchy science at best, and very subjective. The DNA evidence pretty much kills the multiregional hypothesis, mtDNA and Y chromosome studies point to a tribe in africa as the oldest lineage on earth, and all people are derived from that area.

Rushton clearly states that his hypothesis (racial trichotomy) fits with the out of Africa hypothesis.

Are you saying the physical anthropologists and racialists typically believe in The Multiregional hypothesis ?

Scott W said:
So the trick then becomes, have modern humans been around (and separated) for a long enough time to subspeciate and the answer is simply, no. As I said earlier, y chromosome haplotypes (marker regions used in DNA analysis) have pinned the date at a relatively recent date of around 60,000 years ago as the time of migration out of africa. The mtDNA date is around 100,000. With humans interbreeding and migrating pretty regularly, its really impossible to imagine that the "main" groups of humans have been reproductively isolated for a long enough time.

the not enough time argument isn't valid if the observable and detectable differences are indeed real. It would simply mean the human groups of 60,000 years ago that moved out of african moved away from there rapidly and evolved in relative isolation.

Scott W said:
While it is true that we see different appearence around the world, I would argue this has more to do with ancient humans adapting to their local environment, as opposed to subspeciating.

how about both ?

Scott W said:
The same goes with the king snake and gopher snake. There is an amazing amount of morphological diversity, and yet, they are still just a single species.

same race too ?

Scott W said:
In the case of humans, even if there WAS enough genetic diversity to support subspecies, we would be moving AWAY from that with how much we are interbreeding and migrating.

and it would be a good thing because the question of whether races exist or not will be put to rest, right ? As in "Well race doesn't matter anyway because in 100 years we'll all be a grey-beige race, I mean species". That's a bit like those saying the globalization of markets will destroy national borders anyway so having a debate on the issue is irrelevant


Scott W said:
and humans have always been interbreeding, and NOT reproductively isolated.


there wouldn't as much ethnic/racial diversity as there is right now if that had been the case.

And what do you make of Bruce Lahn's discovery ? Why are the genes he discovered rare in sub-saharan africans if these humans have not been reproductively isolated ?

Researchers Say Human Brain Is Still Evolving
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/s...&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.

With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
 
Scott W said:
Also, Sally Lehrman has made some interesting remarks that while race is not a biological reality, it is a sociological reality.

TJB. She's an activist in the Institute for Justice and Journalism and the Media Diversity Circle. Like Boas, Montagu, Gould, Lewontin, Diamond, she's a race-denier for ethno-political reasons. "Race doesn't exist so whites should disappear", that's the not so subtle message of the Lehrmans of this world.

Jews have an history of wrapping self-serving socio-politicial agendas in a scientific language. I suggest you read Kevin MacDonald's book The Culture of Critique. He details the fraudulent scientific veil that jewish activists have used, starting with leftists/marxists and psychoanalysts.

here one can read one of Lehrman's funny article where she tells her white audience that promiscuity is supposedly good by pointing at non-white tribes who have culturally never achieved anything that could be compared with the achievements of the major big bad "sexually repressive" cultures. Hey if it's good for Polynesians jungle dwellers then it must be good for whites too. Obvious, it'z.

The Virtues of Promiscuity
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13648


http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/spj.htm
The SPJ made diversity its number one cause some time ago. In March 2002, the cover story for Quill was titled “Making Diversity a Reality.” The feature article, “Getting Past a ‘white, middle-class’ America” [member archive] was written by SPJ Diversity Committee Chair Sally Lehrman.
 
Scott W said:
If races ARE genetically meaningful, that means they have ancestry in common.

Depends on how you measure it.

All of history suggests the races evolved separately; if genetics doesn't agree (and by the way, FAR from all geneticists agree with you) then genetics is in error.
 
the alumnus said:
this is absolutely false. wild animals interbreed frequently. wholphins occur in nature, and it is only one of many examples of the interbreeding of wild species. that is how evolution happens.

Incorrect - evolution happens by many mechanisms.

You'll note that most dolphins don't breed with whales, or there wouldn't be dolphins.

USE COMMON SENSE