Posted on 06/16/2006 9:32:09 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
CHICAGO -- Last September, Bruce Lahn, a professor of human genetics at the University of Chicago, stood before a packed lecture hall and reported the results of a new DNA analysis: He had found signs of recent evolution in the brains of some people, but not of others.
It was a triumphant moment for the young scientist. He was up for tenure and his research was being featured in back-to-back articles in the country's most prestigious science journal. Yet today, Dr. Lahn says he is moving away from the research. "It's getting too controversial," he says.
Dr. Lahn had touched a raw nerve in science: race and intelligence.
What Dr. Lahn told his audience was that genetic changes over the past several thousand years might be linked to brain size and intelligence. He flashed maps that showed the changes had taken hold and spread widely in Europe, Asia and the Americas, but weren't common in sub-Saharan Africa.
Web sites and magazines promoting white "racialism" quickly seized on Dr. Lahn's suggestive scientific snapshot. One magazine that blames black and Hispanic people for social ills hailed his discovery as "the moment the antiracists and egalitarians have dreaded."
Dr. Lahn has drawn sharp fire from other leading genetics researchers. They say the genetic differences he found may not signify any recent evolution -- and even if they do, it is too big a leap to suggest any link to intelligence. "This is not the place you want to report a weak association that might or might not stand up," says Francis Collins, director of the genome program at the National Institutes of Health.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I'm talking about if the mutation is fairly recent. Maybe since the advent of fuel powered engines, or electricity. Something along those lines.
Does one exception negate the "rule?"
Yep.
You could make the same corollary with beer production. So, bacon and beer make us smarter. Proof that there is a God and wants us to be happy.
The geneticist whose work gave rise to this thread claims pretty recent mutation date of a few thousand years ago - Neolithic to early Bronze Age.
Well, he was much younger then.
Ah, well, the answer is obvious then...........
Well *all* societies have that particular "b". And we are talking about anthropolgy here, I'm staying on topic.
Wondered when they screaming would start.
Great mini-rant.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7974
Title: "Human brains enjoy ongoing evolution"
More like "do not multiply unnecesary entities." Considering Ockham was a Christian theologian, he believed God was the only necessary entity. If fire burns wood, it's not because of inherent properties in either, but because God willed it to happen that one time. That attitude's sometimes crippling to science, and I've wondered how Ockham was ripped out of context and stuck into the scientific toolkit.
As for the topic: there are lots of scientists denouncing any claim that rape has a genetic basis. Somehow I've only come across the denunciations, and not the original research, so worried are they that rapists will start agitating for special rights.
None of us approve of "you can't say that" but the critics said the association was weak. Maybe he needs to take a second look at it.
A week or two ago, the GGG ping group posted something that suggested that the earliest inhabitants of North America were closely related to Australians, while the Asiatics whom Native Americans are related to were more recent.
Since the smartest people in the world are Asians and Jews, not likely a "smartness" mutation originated in Europe or among Indo-Europeans.
I don't how a liberal even exists to begin with.
You're statement is based on a implicit acceptance of social constructionism, which is the god of liberals everywhere and the foundation upon which 'gender studies' is based. It's has it's limits of validity, but beyond that limit is where junk science comes into the picture:
One of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it “paid off” in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration of power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible. (Taylor, Charles. Hegel pp.8).And from Richard Tarnas:
Let us, then, take our strategy of critical self-reflection one crucial step and perhaps inevitable step further. Let us apply it to the fundamental governing assumption and starting point of the modern view—a pervasive assumption that subtly continues to influence the postmodern turn as well—that any meaning and purpose the human mind perceives in the universe does not exist intrinsically in the universe but is constructed and projected onto it by the human mind. Might not this be the final, most global anthropocentric delusion of all? For is it not an extraordinary act of human hubris—literally, a hubris of cosmic proportions—to assume that the exclusive source of all meaning and purpose in the universe is ultimately centered in the human mind, which is therefore absolutely unique and special and in this sense superior to the entire cosmos? To presume that the universe utterly lacks what we human beings, the offspring and expression of that universe, conspicuously possess? To assume that the part somehow radically differs from and transcends the whole? To base our entire world view on the a priori principle that whenever human beings perceive any patterns of psychological or spiritual significance in the nonhuman world, any signs of interiority and mind, any suggestion of purposefully coherent order and intelligible meaning, these must be understood as no more than human constructions and projections, as ultimately rooted in the human mind and never in the world?Perhaps this complete voiding of the cosmos, this absolute privileging of the human, is the ultimate act of anthropocentric projection, the most subtle yet prodigious form of human self-aggrandizement. Perhaps the modern mind has been projecting soullessness and mindlessness on a cosmic scale, systematically filtering and eliciting all data according to its self-elevating assumptions at the very moment we believed we were “cleansing” our minds of “distortions.” Have we been living in a self-produced bubble of cosmic isolation? Perhaps the very attempt to de-anthropomorphize reality in such an absolute and simplistic manner is itself a supremely anthropocentric act. (Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. pp. 35).
Good decision. This thread will reveal more in the way of heat and prejudices than light and understanding.
"Rhetorical question:Is there anything that these isolated populations could have had in common to explain the scientists theory?"
Why assume they were isolated populations?
One of the funny discoveries in my 100% Celtic family from the genome project was shared genetic history with 40% of the population of Japan. Both cultures were seafaring but who would have thought 20-30 thousand years ago they sailed (or traveled on land) that far?!
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.