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Old 10-29-2007, 08:52 AM   #90 (permalink)
raveneye
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Quote:
Funny you said there were no races, we were all Africans, I just showed there were
Nope, what you showed is a very common confusion between correlation and causation.

If you want to demonstrate the existence of races, at the very minimum you need to (1) show that the genetic variation is clustered, and (2) show that the clusters coincide with your proposed “racial” groups.

You have done neither. And you never will, because human variation is clinal, not clustered, and allele similarity decays smoothly, along a long continuum, with the geographic distance between two human populations.

Refer to the following figure:

cline2.gif
Manica, et al. 2005. Geography is a better determinant of human genetic differentiation than ethnicity. Human Genetics 118: 366-371.


Notice there are no vertical breaks. That means that you have no basis for deciding, e.g. where “european” ends and “asian” begins. You have no boundaries whatsoever. There are no natural clusters or “races” or “subspecies” whatsoever. There are only local families and local populations.

Therefore, any division of the continuum is arbitrary. The clumsy ethnic divisions that you are proposing are no better than any other set of divisions. All divisions have about the same mediocre predictive ability, which is worse than simply using geography. The fact that a few superficial traits are correlated with ethnicity is irrelevant to the question of what causes the geographic variation, which is simply the slow migration of point mutations through the single interbreeding human population.

You might want to note the title of the above paper.

Quote:
and now you are back to something which is far more difficult to examine instead of straight forward things like growth or disease.
Then it sounds like you’re changing your mind about the subject of your thread. You might consider that starting a new thread is a tad more productive than complaining that the subject of your thread is being addressed.

Quote:
When you really want to defend that position let me know. We are all Africans, we are also all mammals, NEITHER has anything to do with racial differences today beyond when the various groups migrated out of Africa.
That’s right, being mammals has nothing to do with the absence of human racial differences today. Therefore your bringing up the subject of cows was a howling non-sequitur.

However, the fact that we are all one race is the undeniable conclusion from the genetic data. The argument is simple: human genetic variation is clinal, not clustered. There are no genetic boundaries, gene flow is free, unfettered, widespread, ongoing, and has been continuously throughout the history of our species, due to constant migration and interbreeding. And the time since our last common ancestor is so short that the current geographic differences are superficial and skin-deep at best. You can call our race anything you want, it makes no biological difference, but “African” is the natural choice since that’s where our common heritage begins.

And to bring this back to the subject of the OP, I’ll point out that scientific inquiry has shown that 100% of all the genetic variation known to exist in our species still exists within every continent. Therefore the claim that Africa is somehow genetically inferior to Europe is like claiming that human genetic variation is inferior to itself.

A rather absurd claim, don’t you agree?
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