Posted on 12/21/2002 3:54:34 AM PST by Pharmboy
and this is unfortunate because we live in a world where people's lives and reputations are ruined by turning a phrase rather than by their actions.
Another ditto to that...
Please! I prefer to be herded.
I must disagree at least insofar as government is concerned. Legislation based on race is a recipe for disaster. It was during "Jim Crow" and it is now. It divides and that is bad.
Well, I'll be damned! I wonder how many Federal Grant dollars that those Professors pocketed to reach the same conclusion as my 4th grade "Weekly Reader" reached back in the dark ages. Now, let's get back to more serious stuff - like raising college tuition, so the universities can attract all these brilliant people (LOL).
Interesting side note - some recent studies suggest that there was a 'bottleneck' in human genetic diversity that occurred around 70,000 - 75,000 years ago. The implication of such a bottleneck is that the population was drastically reduced by some event or circumstance. That time perios happens to coincide with the eruiption of a supervolcano near New Zealand known as Tova.
Abstract--------------------------------------------------
A debate has arisen regarding the validity of racial/ethnic categories for biomedical and genetic research. Some claim no biological basis for race while others advocate a race-neutral approach, using genetic clustering rather than self-identified ethnicity for human genetic categorization. We provide an epidemiologic perspective on the issue of human categorization in biomedical and genetic research that strongly supports the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity.
Some claim and others
advocate. Shouldn't "science"
be more than dueling
claims and counter claims?
Is science just "Hardball" with
guys in long, white coats?
By whom?
Feldman's is the PC, leftist liberal position.
Funny how ignorant idiots fall in to line with the PC police.
Exactly.
Race is a construct based roughly on geographical considerations.
Race exists sociologically, but as this study points out, markers are in all of the five populations.
This NY Times article (and most of the PC based spin) play up the ostensible 5 groups confirming race theory, when in fact the study does not back their heacy races-based world view. Liberals like to make up as many differences in people as possible so they distort findings like this.
And who put this in this computer.
Where did the bad punctuation and grammar ("more commoner"???) come from, Pharmboy?
Illustrates how the introduction of PC'ness into science enables some to ignore facts.
But skin tone doesn't make a race ----I've seen siblings with the same parents have different needs for suntan lotion. In the same family there can be very fair skinned, blue eyed blonds and dark complected. And then there are those very pale skin, freckled red heads that almost all look like they're from the same family or race but are born to all different kinds of families.
Just an fyi.
But even then ---they have to pick an arbitrary point in time because for example look at all those regions now aren't what they were 10,000 years ago and 1,000,000 years ago they weren't the same as they were 10,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago.
But as the first human populations started reproducing independently from one another, each started to develop its own pattern of genetic differences. The five major continental groups now differ to a small degree, the Science article says, as judged by the markers. The DNA in the genes is subject to different pressures, like those of natural selection.
We Dodged Extinction
Pruned Family Tree Leaves Little Genetic Variety
Just one group of chimpanzees can have more genetic diversity than all 6 billion humans on the planet. (Corel)
Special to ABCNEWS.com
A worldwide research program has come up with astonishing evidence that humans have come so close to extinction in the past that its surprising were here at all.
Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at San Diego, and other members of a research team studied genetic variability among humans and our closest living relatives, the great apes of Africa.
Humanoids are believed to have split off from chimpanzees about 5 million to 6 million years ago. With the passage of all that time, humans should have grown at least as genetically diverse as our cousins. That turns out to be not true.
We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in west Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans, Gagneux says. In other words, chimps who live in the same little group on the Ivory Coast are genetically more different from each other than you are from any human anywhere on the planet.
The branch lengths illustrate the number of genetic differences, not only between species, but among species as well. The pruned bush for humans shows how little genetic diversity exists. (Marco Doelling/ABCNEWS.com)
The Family Bush
The family tree shows that the human branch has been pruned, Gagneux says. Our ancestors lost much of their original variability.
That makes perfectly good sense, says Bernard Wood, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University and an expert on human evolution.
The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere near compatible with the age of the species, Wood says. That means youve got to come up with a hypothesis for an event that wiped out the vast majority of that variation.
The most plausible explanation, he adds, is that at least once in our past, something caused the human population to drop drastically. When or how often that may have happened is anybodys guess. Possible culprits include disease, environmental disaster and conflict.Almost Extinct
The evidence would suggest that we came within a cigarette papers thickness of becoming extinct, Wood says.
Gagneux, who has spent the last 10 years studying chimpanzees in Africa, says the implications are profound.
If you have a big bag full of marbles of different colors, and you lose most of them, then you will probably end up with a small bag that wont have all the colors that you had in the big bag, he says.
Similarly, if the size of the human population was severely reduced some time in the past, or several times, the colors that make up our genetic variability will also be reduced.
If that is indeed what happened, then we should be more like each other, genetically speaking, than the chimps and gorillas of Africa. And thats just what the research shows.
We all have this view in our minds that we [humans] started precariously as sort of an ape-like creature and our numbers grew continuously, adds Wood. Were so used to the population increasing inexorably over the past few hundred years that we think it has always been like that.
But if it had, Gagneux notes, our genetic variability should be at least as great as that of apes.A Stormy Past
Gagneux is the lead author of a report that appeared in the April 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, carried out with researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the first to examine large numbers of all four ape species in Africa.
We can do that now because new technology allows us to non-invasively take some hair, or even some fruit that these apes chew, and then we get their DNA from a couple of cells that stick to a hair or a piece of fruit they chewed.
Then they compared the DNA variability of apes and chimps to that of 1,070 DNA sequences collected by other researchers from humans around the world. They also added the DNA from a bone of a Neanderthal in a German museum. The results, the researchers say, are very convincing.
We show that these taxa [or species] have very different amounts and patterns of genetic variation, with humans being the least variable, they state.
Yet humans have prevailed, even though low genetic variability leaves us more susceptible to disease.
Humans, with what little variation they have, seem to maximize their genetic diversity, Gagneux says.
Its ironic, he notes, that after all these years the biggest threat to chimpanzees is human intrusion into their habitats. When he returned to Africa to study a group of chimps he had researched earlier, Gagneux found them gone.
They were dead, he says, and I mean the whole population had disappeared in five years.
Yet as our closest living relatives, chimps still have much to teach us about ourselves.
Lee Dyes column appears Wednesdays on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.
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