Tuesday, May 13, 2014

what science says about race?


Time |  A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists.

In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.
New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.

Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.

Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. That said, it is hard to see anything in the new understanding of race that gives ammunition to racists. The reverse is the case. Exploration of the genome has shown that all humans, whatever their race, share the same set of genes. Each gene exists in a variety of alternative forms known as alleles, so one might suppose that races have distinguishing alleles, but even this is not the case. A few alleles have highly skewed distributions but these do not suffice to explain the difference between races. The difference between races seems to rest on the subtle matter of relative allele frequencies. The overwhelming verdict of the genome is to declare the basic unity of humankind.

3 comments:

Constructive_Feedback said...

Question For CNu: (Do not assume that I ASSUME anything about your opinion in advance):

DO YOU believe that every member of "America" has a RIGHT to have access to this life-saving drug, regardless of the EXPENSE that will ultimately be shared among the tax payers?

Is this RIGHT TO INDIVIDUAL LIFE - VALUABLE enough to motivate such socialization?

IF the price set by the distributor of this life-saving drug proves to be TOO HIGH for too many people AND causing a burden upon the tax payer................DO YOU BELIEVE that the Federal Government has the RIGHT to make a calculation that this one person's/company's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS must take a back seat to the LIFE SAVING BENEFITS?

IF another nation held these drug patents - do you believe that another sovereign nation reserves the right to REPLICATE the concoction - their APPLIED KNOWLEDGE AND CAPACITY TO DO SO trumping International I.P. rights?

CNu said...

Did I or did I not tell you within the last 36 hours, in no uncertain terms that overpopulation is the number one problem facing your species?

Given that fact, what leads you to suppose that I give even a second's thought to the minutiae of how the hardline gets packaged for mass consumption?

http://youtu.be/aNEd0_rm6kU

Vic78 said...

It'll cost around 420 billion for Medicare to take care of it. So, if you've got Hep C and no money, just charge that shit to the game.

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