[nuconvert]

pong

[CobaltBlue]

These high school kids in California found out they are all related to a common ancestor 100,000 years ago using genetic testing.

Piedmont Hills High students who share a common ancestor include, from left, Simon Bao (Chinese and Vietnamese), Beth Gomes (white), Aaron Saini (Indian), Austin Buckner (African-American and Japanese), Michael Huynh (Chinese and Vietnamese) and Andrew Tran (Vietnamese).

[Aracelis]

bump for later read

[LiteKeeper]

Christians, and particularly creationists, have been saying this for centuries. (Genesis 11) It is not a startling discovery.

[Modernman]

Read Later

[GrandEagle]

are linked in their DNA to the same ancestor, born more than 100,000 years ago in central China or Taiwan.
I believe the timing to be quite a bit off (100,000 years ago), but if you believe in a worldwide flood, then we would all have to be related to Noah.

[WinOne4TheGipper]

bttt

[whereasandsoforth]

Sorry, race has to be biological. There are distinct differences in the bone structure (between some races), and there are illnesses that one race gets and the others don't (I know there are exceptions). I'd call that biological.

[puroresu]

My guess is they were using mitochondrial DNA, which is irrelevant to race. The recent PBS series denying the existence of race also used mitochondrial DNA, and was thus dishonest.

Race can in fact be identified by one's DNA, and all of us are more closely related to members of our own race than members of other races. If you just think about it, it would be biologically and genetically impossible for it to be otherwise.

There's a lot of dishonesty floating around today on issues such as this. There's also a lot of hypocrisy, since the very people most determined to deny that race exists are also the first to notice if the racial numbers aren't balanced at a school or workplace.

[Little Pig]

So where do the physical differences come from, if not genetics? Unconscious force of will? Do chinese couples, for example, simply expect that their baby will look chinese, and therefore subconsciously determine the infant's future physical characteristics? How novel. If we had known that earlier, we'd all have hypnotized ourselves to produce progeny with high-powered immune systems and supermodel looks.


Sheesh.

Bending-science-to-fit-preconceived-notions ping.

[Seeking the truth]

Geneticists who spent years mapping the human genome, however, discovered just the...

Cautionary tale: These same geneticists anticipated finding 100,000 human genes. When the Genome Project finished mapping, they found only 30,000.

Conclusion: Even the best "experts" are wrong sometimes.

[Sloth]

What a dumb discovery. Did they previously think that a bunch of unrelated humans just sprang out of the ground and didn't intermarry?

[sphinx]

Anyone who has read The Flashman Papers knows the answer to this ....

[CobaltBlue]

Ping - cute story.

[Chris Talk]

This is really rather silly, and obvious, since science now believes that ALL humans are descended from a common ancestor in that same [100k yrs] time frame. Yawn, nothing to see here folks, move on...

This is no more remarkable than, in a creationist environment today or 200 yrs ago, to say that after all, we ought all to get along, we are all descended from Adam and Eve... The Bible goes on to say explicitly that we are all made from one flesh, in the beginning.

However, some very real and important differences have arisen since those idyllic primeval days. If you don't believe me, just TRY to get into Harvard, or a government job, if you are of my race! It is the GOVERNMENT itself that is declaring that race is all-important, it is THEY that are the "racists," and all rewards and positions in the USA are being handed out according to racial categories.

[Agnes Heep]

I've always looked upon race as little more than an adaptation to climate. Asians, for example, have their eye folds, which limit light entering the pupil, and a greater mass to surface area ratio; this is the cold-weather type. It's just the opposite with blacks, whose dark skin filters UV rays and whose greater surface area to body mass (and hair texture) helps dissipate heat. Caucasians are the perfect temperate-climate type; nothing too extreme in any regard, which is great for the cool winters and warm summers of temperate zones. Of course human migration has landed many of each type in climates to which they're not physically adapted.

[Age of Reason]

Well then . . .

Since there's no such thing as race, it won't make a difference if we go back to the kind of immigration we had before 1964.

[jpl]

If it's really true that there's no such thing as race, why do I find myself so frequently having to fill in those racial checkboxes on government forms?

[Timm]

Gee, if we pick straw man characterizations of race, guess what? We can show that there are no such things.

Obviously there *are* identifiable groups within the human species. Skin color, for example, and other physiological characteristics, arising from a common ancestry and isolated geographical origin, are what have marked races historically, and these differences *exist*. I can't understand what, but ideology, would lead someone to say these things are not "real". Northern European people have lighter skin than sub-Saharan Africans, the differences exist because of historical geographical separation between the groups, and the differences are *obviously* based on the genetic inheritance of the two groups. Whites, or caucasians, of (relatively recent) European ancestry are a distinct group from Subsaharan Africans. Both groups are distinct from central and east Asians. And so on. Sheesh.

The article tells us that these differences are owing to "environmental adaptation", and not to "race". Oh, ok. Assuming anyone wants to go to the trouble to derive a coherent remark from a claim like that we're obviously going to be dealing with a straw man notion of race.

One fallacy: because there are no clear boundary lines between two groups, there is no real difference between the groups.

You'd think no one would take such a silly thought to be "scientific", much less true. There is a real difference between children and adults, one with a biological basis, despite the fact that there is no clear boundary line between one and the other. There is a real difference between a mound and a mountain, despite there being no clear boundary between them. There is a clear difference between green and blue...Etc.

Another fallacy: if there is more variation among members of each of two groups than between the average of the two groups there is no real difference between the two groups.

Does something like this even need rebutting? Obviously it could turn out that men and women differ on average by some amount in a certain kind of weight lifting, even though the difference between the strongest and weakest man was less than that between the averages of men and women. But so what? Would that show the remarkable "discovery" that there is no real difference between men and women, even in respect to weight lifting? Ugh. The mind reels.

[Dan Evans]

"It's not that we choose to hang out specifically with Asians; it's just that we grew up together"

In other words their parents choose to hang out with Asians and vice-versa. You can homogenize the world but eventually the cream rises to the top.