If I remember correctly, the different races are about 99.84% genetically identical. (Maybe even a little less). If this is true, then wouldn’t the Neanderthals be considered a “race” if they existed today?
short freckled redheads should qualify as an underprivileged and underserved minority. Bring on the perks!! where’s those obamaphones?! /jk
Neanderthals be considered a “race” if they existed today
And competition for the race baiters
Cowboy Bob wrote: “If I remember correctly, the different races are about 99.84% genetically identical. (Maybe even a little less). If this is true, then wouldn’t the Neanderthals be considered a “race” if they existed today?”
I’ve read studies that place the genetic distance between distinct populations at between 0.1% and 0.2% for some of the more distantly related, like Bantu-speakers in West Africa and Austral Aborigines(Cavalli-Sforza), and I’ve seen a few that estimate much higher - in the range of 0.2% to 0.5% if memory serves.
To put genetic distance into perspective, as multi-cellular organisms that share a huge number of common traits like skin, hair, bones, brains, lungs, kidneys, livers, stomachs, veins and arteries, red blood and oxygen based respiration, mitochondria and cytoplasm, etc., creatures like humans and mice share a hell of a lot of the same biological building blocks. Since the basic physical makeup of the creatures are so similar, much of the “blueprint” for these organisms is going to be identical. Hence, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that most mammals share about 95% or so of the genome.
They may have different numbers of chromosomes, but most of the day-to-day functions of respiration, metabolism, meiosis and the like are virtually identical between mammals. It doesn’t take much genetic variation to radically change the appearance and physical form of an organism, sometimes a change in just one out of 3-billion basepairs results in an organism visibly and radically different. Just switching one key A to G, for example, is responsible for achondroplasia.
The huge range of variation you see between mice and men is down to a few percentage points of the genome. Fractions of a percent separate species. How much genetic difference do you imagine exist between animals we have classified as different species? What genetic distance separates a poodle from a wolf?
I wonder how an impartial observer, say an archaeologist 50,000 years in the future looking back on our world, might classify different human populations.
PeterPrinciple: "From Wikipedia: Race is an artificial construct that means what ever we want it to mean:"
Biologically speaking, the most important distinction is between populations which can & do interbreed, and those which can't & don't.
But it's a sliding scale, where interbreeding becomes increasingly difficult the longer different populations are separated from each other.
"Species" are considered at least minimally capable of interbreeding, while separate "genera" cannot under normal conditions.
In the case of Neanderthals, they were until recent years considered to be so separate they could not interbreed with modern humans, and were therefore at least a separate species, if not their own genus.
But very recent DNA analysis shows both that a) they were much more similar to us than expected and b) there was some actual interbreeding going on -- enough to give non-African humans 1% to 4% Neanderthal DNA.
That makes Neanderthals certainly the same species, but were they a separate "sub-species" or "race"?
The answer is: they were more different from us than we are from each other.
So they were more than just another "race".
"Sub-species" sounds about right.
And we can add to that growing list of human sub-species: Neanderthals, Denisovans, "Hobbits", "Red Deer Cave People" and Idaltus.
The different human races are closer to 100% genetically identical. We are all one species, the races idea is false, culture matters more