On Human Diversity: Why has the genetics community discarded so many phenotypes?

The Scientist ^ | 10-24-05 | Armand M. Leroi

[Pharmboy]

Leroi has guts. An interesting and dispassionate discussion of the data.

[Pharmboy]

Ping

[satchmodog9]

Killing facts.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Bird Jenkins]

I'll be a son of a gun. Sea Gypsies.

[Cenobite]

Leroi shall be burned as a heretic by the Harvard, excuse me, the Spanish Inquistion.

[Pharmboy]

Figured you might want to see this one...

[Pharmboy]

Y'know, it's interesting to note that this piece would probably never have been published in the US. The Brits are more devoted to science without the PC overlay...at least they let other voices be heard.

[Billthedrill]

The short answer is that "race" as a taxonomic classification predates the linkage between genotype and phenotype that even now is incompletely understood; hence there's a whole lot of intellectual garbage that is going to have to be culled from the field before it again becomes respectable.

It can be done - chemistry was eventually extracted from and divorced from alchemy, astronomy from astrology. But what to keep, and what to discard will be a decision process that will be hampered constantly by vestiges of racism and accusations of its further promotion. I wish the fellow luck.

[Pharmboy]

I mispoke: The Scientist is a US publication--the author is a Brit.

[Pharmboy]

Great comment. And, the Nazis set back genetic research a looooong time.

[Brillo_Breaks]

Leroi shall be burned as a heretic by the Harvard, excuse me, the Spanish Inquistion.

Leroi is generally respected by other scientists. They do point out (and quite correctly I might add) that his work is used over and over again by racists who have very little understanding of his work, which is rather unfortunate.

[Pharmboy]

Ping...

[Cenobite]

Thanks for the info, I think I suffer from professional myopia, you see when you say, phenotypes, I think immunohematology.

[Coyoteman]

Good post.

The early efforts to analyze crania met with little success as the computing power to crunch the numbers did not yet exist.

In more recent times, the computing power is there, but the study of modern cranial morphology has largely been passed over in favor of non-metric traits and, more recently, DNA, etc.

Still, I think there are still a few good studies left to do on metric cranial morphology.

[King Prout]

a minor sidebar:

... for that is the location of the gene encoding Sonic Hedgehog...

ya gotta be kiddin' me

[USConstitutionBuff]

Not in the slightest. It is a gene named by fruit fly geneticists and they are a bunch of WILD AND CRAZY GUYS! They have a gene called Decaplexaplegic, and when they found a gene that regulates that gene they named it Mothers against Decaplexaplegic. They also named a gene INDY for the Monty Python gag "I'm not dead yet", it is a gene that protects the cell from programmed cell death.

[Prime Choice]

And the moral of the story: science always loses whenever politicians start dictating what its findings should be. This is even worse when introducing "political correctness" into the mix.

[Redcloak]

Race is really more about aesthetics than anything else. You look the way you do because your ancestors found that look attractive. Studying race says more about what made Greatⁿ-grandpa hot-to-trot than it says anything about you.