[Pharmboy]

"Sociologists don't have the competence to go there," he said.

'Scooze me, they don't have the competence to go anywhere.

Hmmm. So all these years our senses have been right and the PC police who wanted to deny reality were wrong.

Surprising that the NY Effin' Times didn't ignore this one...

[Sabertooth]

The Science authors concluded that 95 percent of the genetic variations in the human genome is found in people all over the world, as might be expected for a small ancestral population that dispersed perhaps as recently as 50,000 years ago.

But as the first human populations started reproducing independently from one another, each started to develop its own pattern of genetic differences. The five major continental groups now differ to a small degree, the Science article says, as judged by the markers. The DNA in the genes is subject to different pressures, like those of natural selection.

We Dodged Extinction
	‘Pruned’ Family Tree Leaves Little Genetic Variety Just one group of chimpanzees can have more genetic diversity than all 6 billion humans on the planet. (Corel)

Special to ABCNEWS.com
A worldwide research program has come up with astonishing evidence that humans have come so close to extinction in the past that it’s surprising we’re here at all.
    Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at San Diego, and other members of a research team studied genetic variability among humans and our closest living relatives, the great apes of Africa.
     Humanoids are believed to have split off from chimpanzees about 5 million to 6 million years ago. With the passage of all that time, humans should have grown at least as genetically diverse as our “cousins.” That turns out to be not true.
     “We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in west Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans,” Gagneux says. “In other words, chimps who live in the same little group on the Ivory Coast are genetically more different from each other than you are from any human anywhere on the planet.”

The branch lengths illustrate the number of genetic differences, not only between species, but among species as well. The pruned bush for humans shows how little genetic diversity exists. (Marco Doelling/ABCNEWS.com)

The Family Bush
“The family tree shows that the human branch has been pruned,” Gagneux says. “Our ancestors lost much of their original variability.”
     “That makes perfectly good sense,” says Bernard Wood, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University and an expert on human evolution.
     “The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere near compatible with the age” of the species, Wood says. “That means you’ve got to come up with a hypothesis for an event that wiped out the vast majority of that variation.”
     The most plausible explanation, he adds, is that at least once in our past, something caused the human population to drop drastically. When or how often that may have happened is anybody’s guess. Possible culprits include disease, environmental disaster and conflict.

Almost Extinct
“The evidence would suggest that we came within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” Wood says.
     Gagneux, who has spent the last 10 years studying chimpanzees in Africa, says the implications are profound.
     “If you have a big bag full of marbles of different colors, and you lose most of them, then you will probably end up with a small bag that won’t have all the colors that you had in the big bag,” he says.
     Similarly, if the size of the human population was severely reduced some time in the past, or several times, the “colors” that make up our genetic variability will also be reduced.
     If that is indeed what happened, then we should be more like each other, genetically speaking, than the chimps and gorillas of Africa. And that’s just what the research shows.
     “We all have this view in our minds that we [humans] started precariously as sort of an ape-like creature” and our numbers grew continuously, adds Wood. “We’re so used to the population increasing inexorably over the past few hundred years that we think it has always been like that.”
     But if it had, Gagneux notes, our genetic variability should be at least as great as that of apes.

A Stormy Past
Gagneux is the lead author of a report that appeared in the April 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, carried out with researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the first to examine large numbers of all four ape species in Africa.
     “We can do that now because new technology allows us to non-invasively take some hair, or even some fruit that these apes chew, and then we get their DNA from a couple of cells that stick to a hair or a piece of fruit they chewed.”
     Then they compared the DNA variability of apes and chimps to that of 1,070 DNA sequences collected by other researchers from humans around the world. They also added the DNA from a bone of a Neanderthal in a German museum. The results, the researchers say, are very convincing.
     “We show that these taxa [or species] have very different amounts and patterns of genetic variation, with humans being the least variable,” they state.
     Yet humans have prevailed, even though low genetic variability leaves us more susceptible to disease.
     “Humans, with what little variation they have, seem to maximize their genetic diversity,” Gagneux says.
     “It’s ironic,” he notes, that after all these years the biggest threat to chimpanzees is human intrusion into their habitats. When he returned to Africa to study a group of chimps he had researched earlier, Gagneux found them gone.
     “They were dead,” he says, “and I mean the whole population had disappeared in five years.”
     Yet as our closest living relatives, chimps still have much to teach us about ourselves.

Lee Dye’s column appears Wednesdays on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.

Thread here

[Sabertooth]

((((((growl)))))

[VOA]

Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations

The Los Angeles Times article on this topic (published yesterday, Friday
12-20-02, IIRC) was a real hoot.

The poor science writer was really torn in trying to not offend two groups:
1. The "we are all the same...can't we all just get along?" crowd......
AND
2. The "we are all different...we value 'diversity' and 'diversity' is our
strength!" crowd.

It was fun to read the article to see the writer trying not to set gored by either horn
of this dilemma.


Of course, no mention of one major world religion that states that human beings are
all "one blood"...
(not mentioning that as a true fact...just noticing that at least one scientific camp
is now scratching their head at the apparently minor variation between people of different
"ethnic" groups at the level of molecular biology...)

[CanisMajor2002]

*yawn* (not to you, but to the study :) )

In other news, scientists figure out that there were originally five different sets of marshmellows in Lucky Charms.

[xm177e2]

The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews.

I'm shocked, shocked!

[neutrino]

Hmmm. So all these years our senses have been right and the PC police who wanted to deny reality were wrong.

Wonder how long before this goes down the memory hole?

[tallhappy]

Surprising that the NY Effin' Times didn't ignore this one...

It's because this fits perfectly with the NY Times worldview (and yours as well, apparently).

It also has nothing to do with defining races in any functional way and is a major distortion.

Weird stuff. Always interesting to see people on Free Republic like you who are no different than the liberal elite in worldview.

They're leftist ideologues, what's your excuse?

[tallhappy]

Here is the actual abstract. :

Science 2002 Dec 20;298(5602):2381-2385

Genetic Structure of Human Populations.

Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK, Weber JL, Cann HM, Kidd KK, Zhivotovsky LA, Feldman MW.

Molecular and Computational Biology, 1042 West 36th Place DRB 289, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA., Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, 920 East 58th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA., Center for Medical Genetics, Marshfield Medical Research Foundation, Marshfield, WI 54449, USA., Foundation Jean Dausset-Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH), 27 rue Juliette Dodu, 75010 Paris, France., Department of Genetics, Yale University School of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, CT 06520, USA., Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 3 Gubkin Street, Moscow 117809, Russia., Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.

We studied human population structure using genotypes at 377 autosomal microsatellite loci in 1056 individuals from 52 populations. Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations. General agreement of genetic and predefined populations suggests that self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies.

Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%.

Clearly this again confirms race is not genetically based or definable.

[Rocky]

a doctor could simply ask his race or continent of origin

What about those who are incontinent?

[optimistically_conservative]

Race not reflected in genes, study says

Now I'm so confused!

[gore3000]

Some diseases are much commoner among some ethnic groups than others. Sickle cell anemia is common among Africans, while hemochromatosis, an iron metabolism disorder, occurs in 7.5 percent of Swedes. It can therefore be useful for a doctor to consider a patient's race in diagnosing disease.

No it is not because these diseases occur in only a small proportion of those populations. The role of a doctor is to ascertain the cause of a disease and every individual is different. You cannot treat a disease statistically, you have to treat it specifically. If a genetic disease is suspected one has to ascertain whether the genetic indicators are there in the individual. Therefore this study is totally worthless for treatment of disease.

[gore3000]

Because the sites have no particular function, they are free to change or mutate without harming the individual, and can become quite different over the generations.

The above is a perfect example of evo/materialist pseudo-science. These same folk told us that the appendix, the tonsils and that all the DNA not in genes were totally useless and were proved absolutely wrong by real science. Now they are claiming that some portions of the human genome are useless and therefore can be used to justify their stupid theories. A better use of foundation money would have been to try to ascertain the purpose of this DNA instead of writing it off as 'race based' DNA. To say that nature created this DNA solely for the purpose of these scientific oafs proving their racist Darwinist theory is totally ludicrous.

[sneakypete]

. The American Sociological Association, for instance, said in a recent statement that "race is a social construct" and warned of the "danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological."

Dr. Alan Goodman, a physical anthropologist at Hampshire College and an adviser to the association, said, "there is no biological basis for race."

But....but....but,how can we trust the leftist dogma that all people came from Africa,and that blacks are the true master race if this is true? Do you mean to say you and your fellow lefties are lying to us when you say "our diversity is our strength!"? How can there be diversity if we are all the same? I guess this means there is no longer any reason for affirmative-action and quotas,either? This is all SOOOO confusing!

[AFreeBird]

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas.

Geez, it took them all that time and money studying DNA to figure out what most people have known by observation for some time. Amazing.

[unspun]

Dr. Alan Goodman, a physical anthropologist at Hampshire College and an adviser to the association, said, "there is no biological basis for race." The clusters shown in the Science article were driven by geography, not race, he said.

They seem to be defining "race" in a more distinctive way than I've generally seen it defined (basically, an ethnic group).

BTW aren't we supposed to "celebrate ethnicity" while we're deploring distinctions between "races?" [sigh] "'tis a puzzlement."

[blam]

Ping.

[Cronos]

Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas

There is a big problem with this classification -- What about the Caucasians from North Africa and Asia? Most of the belt from India to Morocco is Caucasian.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG ping (multiregionalism), another missed topic.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[fishtank]

"Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas."

(1) Noah
(2) Noah's wife
(3) daughter in law #1
(4) daughter in law #2
(5) daughter in law #3

Hmmm.....