Luiseach

Sorry to butt in here, and please excuse my lack of familiarity with some of the more technical aspects of genetic research, but are you saying that there is evidence to suggest that there are measurable racial differences amongst human beings? Your discussion seems to suggest this, but I could be mistaken.

[ December 22, 2002: Message edited by: Luiseach ]</p>

RBH

Last week on this thread pz wrote One of the citations pz refers to is Bouchard, Lykken, McGue, Segal, & Tellegen, 1990. As it happens, I have known three of those authors personally for more than 30 years and to the best of my knowledge none is either a racist or an apologist for racists. I may be wrong, but pz will have to provide much more than an unsubstantiated assertion to show that.

RBH

Duck!

Ok, what heritage should I preserve?

My Celtic heritage?

My British heritage?

My Norman heritage?

My Norse Viking heritage?

My Causcasian heritage?

My European heritage?

My Irish Nationalist heritage?

My Irish Catholic heritage?

My Dundalk heritage?

My Murphy family heritage?

I'm single and desperate. Perhaps if you point me towards some articles which differentiate the exact line which differentiates normal breeding with inter-heritage breeding, then I might be able to sort the non-my-heritage people from the people I should breed with.

The last thing I want is to breed some sort of race of inter-heritage fuckers. Bastards.


Duck!

Quetzal

Duck: You must preserve your Homo sapiens heritage at all costs. No interbreeding with bears, weasels, ducks, or creationists.

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: Morpho ]</p>

Quetzal

Luis: No - that's not really what is being argued. There ARE genetic differences between various populations/clines of humans, as would be expected in any large, highly geographically diverse species. Although the 10-14% variation is above-median for most mammals, it's acually somewhat less than I would have anticipated given the incredibly varied environments humans inhabit - consider the phenotypical differences in no-doubt long-separated populations of diverse groups such as Kalahari tribesmen and Inuit. Any other mammal I can think of that had been separated in such extreme environments for X thousands of generations would have undoubtedly speciated. Humans apparently haven't - meaning in spite of relatively high level of variation, we are all amazingly similar to one another, with a fairly stable genotype. There are differences (think sickle-cell trait), but fewer than you'd think.

ps418

Well, of course there are measurable differences between ethnic groups. For instance, forensic anthropologists can usually distinguish with high probability the ethnicity (and age and sex) of a person from their skeleton (e.g. Gill, 1998). As an example, it was recently shown that the Kennewick man cranium is not likely to be closely related to extant Native Americans, but may be closely related to some Polynesian groups or tp the Ainu (<a href="http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/powell_rose.htm" target="_blank">Powell and Rose, 2002</a>). These types of differences are only slightly more than skin deep, but they do exist.

Everyone in the scientific community agrees that the racial concepts espoused by 19th century racists are totally unscientific, and based upon notions of "racial purity" and such that have been shown to be nonsense. Racial groups are not significant in the ways they were once thought to be signficant -- there is so much variability within each ethnic group that ethnicity is a very weak predictor of most interesting variables. Any generalization you make about an entire race or ethnic group is liable to be false, which is precisely why it makes sense to judge people as individuals rather than as members of some ethnic group.

On the other hand, I don't think we should go too far in the other direction and say that the concept of race is entirely meaningless, because there are some differences between ethnic groups, such as differences in gene frequencies, differences in susceptibility to various diseases, and other traits (again, most but not all human variation occurs within all ethnic groups, and the boundaries of ethnic groups can be quite fuzzy). These differences may -or may not!- turn out to be significant for things like health risk assessment and tailoring therapeutic approaches, a point made by Risch and collegues, who are medical geneticists.

Gill, G. W. 1998., Craniofacial Criteria in the Skeletal Attribution of Race. In: Forensic Osteology: Advances in the Identification of Human Remains, pp. 293-317.

Patrick

[ December 25, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]

[ December 25, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>