Posted on 02/09/2004 1:09:47 PM PST by CobaltBlue
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:49:37 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
More than half of the class at San Jose's Piedmont Hills High School, students from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds, are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Do you mean it's contagious? It can be passed from spouse to spouse? Because if you're saying that their offspring will get it, that's genetically passed down from the black parent, not the parent who doesn't even have it. Or are you saying that the offspring of a mixed race couple will be entirely white, but still inherit diseases from the black parent? I don't think I'm following you. Could you clarify?
There are black people with lighter skin tones than certain white people.
That makes no sense. How can a black person have lighter skin tones than a white person?
The reason those breeds are, what word did you use, 'maintained,' is because stringent breeding is carried out
And different "breeds" or races of humans are maintained because it is human nature to mate with people who look alike or act alike. Human nature causes this stringent breeding and that is why we have races.
When sub-Saharan Africans mate with, say, Europeans or Asians, the skin of their children is lighter than the African parent, but many consider the child black.
But why would many consider the child "black" (unless they knew the ancestry of his parents)? Is it possible there other features that they can use to distinguish race? Isn't race more than just skin color?
I see a lot of arguing at cross-purposes on this thread, and I think the primary reason is that different people are arguing different points revolving around the same issue.
To some extent everyone's got a valid point -- race as we know it both is *and* is not genetic.
Yes, race as we understand it is based on physical features (e.g. skin color, bone structure, hair type, etc.) which are of course based on inheritable genetic differences
But no, race as we understand it from an age-old "common sense" understanding is unsupported by genetic discoveries, and this is where articles like this are interesting and eye-opening.
The first genetic observation is that there is no "caucasian gene", no "negro gene", no "asian gene", etc. Our notions of "race" are not based on a fundamental genetic divide.
The next genetic observation is that the things we *do* consider to be significant racial differences are actually just constellations of noticeable physical features which we have come to mentally lump into different "categories" and label as "race". If we see a straight-black-haired, smooth-skinned, dark-eyed, high-cheekboned person with an epicanthal fold to their eyes, we consider them "Asian", because a large number of people from the eastern Eurasian continent share this combination of traits. However, none of these traits singly are confined to eastern-Eurasian populations, they can be found almost anywhere in a mix-and-match fashion. It's only when all or most of them come together in a single individual to do we consider the result "obviously" of the Asian "race".
And so it is for other "races" and traits we consider "typical" of certain races. There is no trait which is exclusively or diagnostically "black" or "white" or "asian" or what have you. Any trait you can find in the "black" population can be found in the genepool of other "races" as well, and vice versa.
We're all a mish-mash of genetic varieties. It's only when certain visibly noticeable traits happen to be commonly found together in some populations due to geographic extent and overlap that we tend to begin thinking of specific combinations as distinctly recognizable "races". But genetically, there are no underlying fundamental "racial" differences other than the superficially visible ones.
Finally, the interesting observation made by identifying genetic tracers in tests such as done in the high school described in the article is that while people tend to presume that a much larger gulf must separate them from people who appear to be other "races" than those who appear to be their "own" race, in fact our genes often reveal that we may often be more directly related to someone of another "race" than we are to someone born thousands of miles closer and who looks much more like us in a "racial" sense.
Another poster asked whether it was supposed to be profound to "discover" that humans have traveled and intermarried a lot. The fact alone is not, but what is profound is to realize how often it has occurred, and thus how much more interrelated we all are than is commonly presumed. The human family is more closely related than it sometimes feels, and far more closely related than it would appear by looking at the superficial "racial" differences which give people rationalizations for drawing lines between different groups and playing "us versus them", for seeing some people as our "brothers" and some people as "others".
I think that's a very significant thing to learn.
What if the next potential suicide bomber finds that he has closer ancestry to the Jewish kids on the schoolbus than he does to the Hamas goon pushing him to strap on a bomb? The more and varied ways we can learn to find a brotherhood with different people, the less likely we are to be trying to kill each other because of overblown differences.
And no, I'm *not* going to use the Rodney King line... My point is just that regardless of people having a social agenda one way or another on the matter, and lord knows there are plenty, "the facts is the facts", and the (genetic) facts say that despite many centuries of people fixating on "race" as sign of a great gulf between groups of people proving some sort of fundamental human distance, difference, superiority/inferiority, or lack of kinship, it just ain't so. Our genes show that we're all the "mutts" of mankind's melting pot, some of us just have different skin, hair, and bone variations than others -- and some of us place more importance on that than it deserves.
So in the final analysis, supported by genetic studies, it seems that while "races" do exist in the sense of recognizable constellations of physical traits that can often be found together, they don't reflect any underlying Significant Difference. And the closer you look at the notion of "race", the more it fades as having any real meaning, no more than does blue eyes, left-handedness, attached earlobes, or other physical traits which are more common in some populations than others, but to which we attach little or no "us versus them" significance to.
Sidebar: For people who are tempted to say that historical success/failures of different "races" must indicate some sort of fundamental racial differences -- or to anyone fascinated by the topic of the flow of human history -- I strongly recommend the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies", by Jared Diamond. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and fully deserved it. It traces the factors which underly the rise of man from humble hunter-gatherer beginnings to our modern world of agricultural subsistence, literature, technology, and nationstates. Among other observations, it makes a seemingly indisputable case that the reasons for, for example, the failures of sub-Saharan Africans and native Australians to develop a "modern civilization" before or along with Eurasians is not because of any racial deficiency, but because of being "dealt a bad hand" in their geographic circumstances (details in the book, too much to go into here). Also, the lack of suitable native plant and animal species for domestication left open for them no viable options for the development of the large static agricultural communities which are the prerequisites for ultimately spawning writing, political states, and technology. This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in the forces which have shaped the directions which history (and especially pre-history) have taken. It's also a sweeping summary of the travels and triumphs of mankind starting from about 150,000 years ago.
Thank you all for resisting the urge to post images of Michael Jackson.
Sickle-cell anemia is recessive. So, if a black parent who is a carrier (one allele) has a child with a white person who does not carry the allele at all, half of their children will be carriers for the disease (note that they will not actually have SSA, which is fatal, since they do not have two alleles for it). Now, say one of these kids marries another kid who also carries the SSA allele through the same process. One quarter of their kids will get full-blown SSA.
When I say that with inter-marriage you'll eventually see white people with SSA, I really mean to say that you'll eventually see people who look white, but who have one or more black ancestors, with the disease. My point is that SSA is now almost excusively a disease found in black Americans (though, is there really such a thing as a "pure" black American? There was a lot more mixing of blood going on in America's history than a lot of people are willing to admit), but there is nothing preventing white, or Asian, or hispanic Americans from getting the disease.
Among other observations, it makes a seemingly indisputable case that the reasons for, for example, the failures of sub-Saharan Africans and native Australians to develop a "modern civilization" before or along with Eurasians is not because of any racial deficiency, but because of being "dealt a bad hand" in their geographic circumstances
The bad hand they have been dealt is the set of genes that gives them an average IQ of 70. This is why they haven't been able to learn civilized behavior from the white settlers over the centuries and it is why Zimbabwe and South Africa are doomed to return to the stone age after all of the whites are driven out.
Look at any group of black Americans and you will see substantial differences in skin coloration. If we look at celebrities, somebody like Michael Jordan certainly has a skin color much darker than that of anyone who could be characterised as white. However, look at somebody like Halle Berry (especially in Swordfish, yowsah!), and I'm sure you can find a number of white people (especially ones from, say, Spain, Greece or Italy), whose skin color is darker.
Where does this leave us? Nowhere, really. I chalenge anyone to truly define who is and isn't "black" or "white," exepcially in America today (scratch any family tree in the South, and you're sure to find that the bllod ain't lily-white). It's been tried in the past, by apartheid South Africa and the old South.
Historically, for the average human it was next to impossible to find someone outside of your "race" to mate with. Up until this century, maybe 98% of people in the world could live their lives without actually seeing a member of a different "race." That's what's known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My dog, a pure breed Doberman, is a designer dog. The breed was created by Dr. Louis Dobermann from terriers, greyhounds, rottweilers, etc. The result, a magnificent breed of dog. If I were to breed her to another "pure" breed Doberman, I would get a Doberman with all the traits of the Doberman. Same with humans. Only, the generation for such traits to develop are much longer in years.
So it comes out at last. You're assuming that a low IQ is the cause of the problem, rather than a symptom. Could it be that in Africa dysfunctional cultures and governments, which in turn cause poverty, which in turn cause malnutrition, lack of schooling and high rates of childhood diseases, create a situation where, for all we know, the next Einstein or Newton is living in a village that doesn't have clean water, never mind the internet?
Could it be that, in America, 300+ years of slavery followed by nearly a century of racist oppression and poverty, followed by 30 or so years of disastrous liberal welfare programs, have created a culture of despair in inner-cities that makes developing one's mind a very difficult thing to do?
Oh, dear, this is turning into one of "those" discussions. Well, since I started the thread, I'll bite. What is the source for your allegation that "they" have IQs of 70? And who are "they" while you're at it?
All you have really said is that humans, like various dogs cats etc., can interbreed. This has nothing to do with the existance of race per se.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.