...............FRegards
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 ...
Could also be because ignorant, hateful people seize on weak associations in order to dehumanize groups of people they don't like anyway.
A lot of the "brilliant" ideas didn't pan out over time, best to tread carefully lest you give ammunition to the yahoos.
Mutations don't occur because of a particular influence or variable; they survive and increase in the population if they confer a benefit (or sometimes have a neutral effect). Perhaps I misunderstood your point.
Wide scale racism is one of the consequences of the hypothesis of macroevolution. All humans (including those of subSahara African descent) are extremely similar in genetic makeup.Except that creationists are always so eager to assure us that they accept microevolution - just not macroevolution. And yet, this mutation is a textbook example of microevolution, a process which creationists insist that they fully recognize as existing.
What's ironic about all this is, liberals are happy to accept the truth of macroevolution yet blanch when evidence of microevolution having occurred rears its ugly head.
You have it backwards. All humans are the result of mini-mini-microevolution, and pretty small potatoes at that.
Real microevolution (on an evolutionary scale) results in larger (subspecies) changes, and macroevolution even larger (species and genus) changes. Human races are not even close to subspecies.
I have found that the more people study evolution and human races, the less racism there is because they actually understand the basis for both classic and genetic racial traits.
Racists make it up as they go, based on ignorance and prejudice. We have seen the results of that for centuries. But that is not the result of the theory of evolution (or as you put it, the "hypothesis of macroevolution"). Rather, that is the misapplication of the theory of evolution.
The oldest Mongoloid skeleton ever found is only 10k years old. (Professor Stephen Oppenheimer) If you've followed my posts, you'd know that I have been suggesting an Asian origin for Caucasians for some time now, specifically the Gansu Province of China. I think there were Caucasian 'like' people all over Asia before the Mongoloids arrived.
Further, Stephen Oppenheimer says that about 50% of Europeans can trace their DNA back to one man in the north Indus valley and this group made their way to Europe through the Middle East.
The other 50% of Europeans can trace their origins to a son of the same man who made their way to Europe a thousand years later through Russia. So...
Me.
There's nothing for it. It'll just have to await a time when people can look at it without hyperventilating.
I'm not in the field so don't know how hard it is to study this stuff, but from the outside it seems like the study of genetics is really taking off, including the interaction of genetics and behaviour.
NYTimes just carried a very in depth article on that topic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/health/15gene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
IQ is tricky, though. It's impossible to test the IQ of our ancestors, and not easy to test the IQ of very different cultures. You've been on Free Republic long enough to know that most of the people who are going to seize on the findings of this study are not going to be people with very high IQs themselves, they are just looking for justification for their prejudices.
Well, I've got a box full of photographs of my ancestors from before 1900, some of them French, some German, and some Native Americans -- who look very Asian to me.
I've got census records going back a couple of centuries and old letters that give me the history of my Chippewa ancestors, the ones that intermarried with the French Canadians, the ones that lived on Turtle Mountain, the ones that went to Indian Schools, the ones that had names I can't even pronounce.
I've got my own mtDNA, that's Haplogroup A2.
All of which tell me that some of my own ancestors walked over Berengia from Siberia, and looked more like Mongols than Kenniwick Man.
If you write about this kind of thing, you're branded a racist. You're just not supposed to notice.
With all the DNA work that's going on, we'll likely have a believeable answer within the next ten years. I hope I live long enough to see it, lol.
It's been a long time since I studied running stats, but my recollection is that milers were Europeans, 10K were Kenyans, and ultramarathons were Europeans again. (By "European" and "Kenyan" I include people descended from same.)
5K to marathon, it's about as I said. The really, really top events are won by people from a tiny area in East Africa. Minor exceptions exist, but the success of a tiny, tiny percentage of the world's population in this endeavor is a so-far largely unexamined genetic miracle.
If there is a genetic component to rape, then a pill should be developed for people who test positive for this gene, so that they will be more likely to have normal sex lives.
Don't the various races share something like 99 percent of their genes?
GONZO!!!!!!!!!!! Hi stranger, you just lurking nowadays? I've been doing more of that than anything else.
Hi stranger! The scientist may be correct. But that doesn't give the groups that I mentioned above any right to use it for more propaganda.
This is just the kind of thing that these hate groups will take out of context and use to their so-called advantage.
I'm glad to have run into you.
You're a visonary of a different sort;~)
...............FRegards
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.