Posted on 12/17/2002 9:27:02 AM PST by yankeedame
Race not reflected in genes, study says
Tuesday, December 17, 2002 Posted: 10:17 AM EST (1517 GMT)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The idea of race is not reflected in a person's genes, Brazilian researchers said, confirming what scientists have long said -- that race has no meaning genetically.
The Brazilian researchers looked at one of the most racially mixed populations in the world for their study, which found there is no way to look at someone's genes and determine his or her race. Brazilians include people of European, African and Indian, or Amerindian, descent.
"There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist," Sergio Pena and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil and the University of Porto in Portugal wrote in their report, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Yet races do exist as social constructs," they said.
They found 10 gene variations that could reliably tell apart, genetically, 20 men from northern Portugal and 20 men from Sao Tome island on the west coast of Africa.
But the genetic differences did not have anything to do with physical characteristics such as skin or hair color, the researchers found.
They next tested two groups -- 173 Brazilians classified as white, black, or intermediate based on arm skin color, hair color, and nose and lip shape, and 200 men living in major metropolitan areas who classified themselves as white.
They used the 10 genetic markers that differed between people from Portugal and Africa, but found little difference among anyone in their study.
To their surprise, they found maternal DNA suggested that even the "white" people had, on average, 33 percent of genes that were of Amerindian ancestry and 28 percent African.
This suggested European men often fathered children with black and Indian women.
"It is interesting to note that the group of individuals classified as blacks had a very high proportion of non-African ancestry (48 percent)," they wrote.
"In essence our data indicate that, in Brazil as a whole, color is a weak predictor of African ancestry," they concluded.
"Our study makes clear the hazards of equating color or race with geographical ancestry and using interchangeably terms such as white, Caucasian and European on one hand, and black, Negro or African on the other, as is often done in scientific and medical literature."
It's not what's on the outside that God loves, its on the inside.
Some people's whole world view is wrecked by that fact.
"To their surprise, they found maternal DNA suggested that even the "white" people had, on average, 33 percent of genes that were of Amerindian ancestry and 28 percent African. "
On the one hand they say they can't determine race by someones genes, on the other hand they can determine that 33% of genes in whites are Amerindian and 28% African. Which is it?
I thought we all shared essentially the same genes? To say that 33% of genes in whites can be identified as Amerindian seems highly unlikely as Chimps only differ from us by about 2% of their genetic structure.
Something makes this smell like a politically motivated "scientific study" to me. My guess is the results were predetermined and the data simply filled in to support it. Not the most reliable method of scientific inquiry.
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