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DNA Suggests Three Basic Human Groups
Death Metal writes "All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made — the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens."
Three Sons of Noah are supposed to be the ancestors of us all.
Now tell me something I DON'T know.
Don't tell me that scientists are actually confirming what Christian theologians have been saying all along about Noah's 3 sons being the division of ethnicity's... dates notwithstanding?
I've come to believe that human's are simply programmed to line themselves up in groups, to fight imagined or real enemies in other groups. We're raised on it, jocks vs nerds becomes blacks vs whites vs christians vs atheists vs global warming followers vs global warming deniers vs pro-life vs pro-choice vs republicans vs democrats vs whatever.
So who else believes this will be the next big advance in 'scientifically supported' bigotry? After all, we now have proof we're better/smarter/more virtuous/taller than *them*.
People who do things, people who don't do a thing, and people who wait for things to be done by others.
1. Those who make things happen
2. Those who watch things happen
3. Those who wonder what happened
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
More ways to be prejudiced against people.
"My genetic group is better than yours!"
As far as I can tell, this story attempts to make three points:
1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.
2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.
3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.
This pretty much follows the contours of the current orthodoxy in population genetics (with certain distinct exceptions).
So are these three points meaningfully true?
1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.
Generally speaking they /do/ cluster this way. Of course, you can make room for as few or as many clusters as you want-- if it was two, it'd be african/everything else. Three, african/eurasian/east asian. Four, perhaps african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. Five, perhaps west african/east african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. From what I've read, the most elegant statistical clusters arise when you allow for four groups (splitting native americans off from east asians). Of course, this clustering gets more complex when you consider admixture populations (e.g., the majority of south america and mexico).
2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.
It's hard to say this is true or false yet, because we simply don't know how functionally significant these differences are. Two genomes may look very similar, yet be very different in many very significant ways.
3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.
This is code for a very contentious question-- are ethnic differences merely skin-deep? The fact is, we don't know yet. There's a lot of research that points to yes; there's a lot of research that points to no. The answer to this is undoubtedly going to turn out to be: yes and no, depending on the context and the threshold you look at.
I take a general offense to the nature of this article, presenting this as though it is some sort of surprise. Researches along time ago classified people into 3 groups and this is merely genetic confirmation of the original findings. They classified people in 3 groups a long time ago, I suppose this is DNA confirmation of the initial categories: Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid.
non-PC names these days I suppose, but that's what they were called.
So if there's only three distinct ethnic groups, who's the minority now? It's very important for political correctness. Wait... Minorities are an invention of mass-delusions by the public...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Hasn't this been known for a long time? TFA described the three groups but didn't use these terms -- rampant political correctness, sigh..
Unless one of Noah's sons was black, one was white, and one was east-asian, this is pretty much not possible.
It sounds like it was written 50 years ago. At the very least I find it hard to believe the Australian Aborigines aren't a distinct group since they separated from the rest of the race before Europeans left Africa. The whole thing is an over simplification of a very complex family tree.
The Science nerds, P.E. jocks, and the Marketing schmoozers
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Dicks, pussies and assholes
I'd add a fourth point that to me is even more interesting (and apparently comes from the data):
* [The population split away from Africa 70K years ago, and then that sub-population splitting again 40K years ago into Eurasian and East Asian groups. The African source population is 130K years old.]
..you get it
Advances in communication and transportation in the last century mean that members of these three groups are migrating away from the areas their ancestors lived in. I live in Australia but my ancestors came from England. My wife was born in Malaysia but her ancestors came from China. Our son is a mix of two of the groups defined by TFA.
Yesterday he brought home a school project to work on. Each child in the class has to fill in a page in a scrap book about themselves. His classmates come from England, Spain, China, Egypt, Australia (one Aboriginal boy) and Turkey. The next generation here will be even more mixed than the last.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I think the collective hallucinations of geology, biology and paleontology that support evolution are especially fascinating. It's amazing how so many scientists imagined into being so much demonstrable evidence for their delusion.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
there were 10 types of people,
I always thought there were only 10 types of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Human, Cylon, & Human-Cylon Hybrid.
Valuable analysis. Mod to +10.
Ya i agree, Captain Obvious strikes again, and got tons of funding to do it.
What is next, 1/2 a million to find out men don't like condoms? oh wait, that was last week..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Three groups of people:
:)
People who know me.
People who want to know me.
People I don't want to know, no matter which of the
above two groups they're in.
Hmm, let's see here, Noah's sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth...
I'm just saying! :P
As for this comment: "Unless one of Noah's sons was black, one was white, and one was east-asian, this is pretty much not possible." This is exactly the how it would have been. Noah would've contained all the genetic diversity that we see now in himself and his sons. Cultural selection would've rendered the racial groups we see now, in the same way that the Chinese bred curly hair out of their population.
Hell, go back before the Great Flood and you might even find some even more interesting combinations. How about dark-skinned people with naturally blue eyes, and blond kinky hair. Or red-heads with asian-like tucked eyelids. There's no reason why the groups we see and associate with particular genetic features need have remained that way into the distant past. Genetics would indicate just the opposite.
As for the question of inbreeding, if the genetics of the gene pool were far less damaged in that era (having recently been created, after all), in-breeding is a non-issue.
Awww crap, there goes my joke about people knowing binary...
This can't be true because the president is a mulatto.
Seastead this.
"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Was the bottom quote of slashdot as of right now.
2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.
Seriously, how surprised can we be? We share 98% of our DNA with chimps. Hell, we share tons of DNA with single-celled algae.
Think of the genome as a computer program, and genes are little subs that do helpful things. Lots of subs are sitting unused, abandoned, all over our genomes. Lots are called at different times by barely-related parts of our 'human program'. Very different programs can share lots of lines, lots of entire subs. Very different creatures can share lots of DNA, lots of entire genes.
(Statements like "siblings share half their genes" are super misleading. Yes, you get half from Mom and half from Dad, but 99.9% of those genes are the same anyway.)
Those are the three groups.
Actually, I thought the article would say that there were Christians in one group, Muslims in the second, Hindus and everyone else in the third. Of course Jews don't count as people.
Har har har har.
Quoted on Slashdot... It must be true!
Those who divide everything into two categories and everyone else.
How close genetically are Indians (from India) to Chinese?
1. Middle managers
2. Hairdressers
3. Telephone sanitizers
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
This research typically stops at the point of agriculture and relatively fixed settlement of people, so modern population mixtures are not considered.
This is hardly recent news though, phylogenetic trees illustrating the clustering of haplogroups have been published for a decade or more (much more if you include the blood group analysis of Cavalli-Sforza et al)
Also remember that this research typically tracks Y haplotypes, so this represents direct male lineage only- this is highly correlated to overall populations but not 100%
Humans, Cylons, and descendants of the aboriginals of this planet.
Duh!
You forgot one point:
Sources, data, and statistics are irrelevant. Honestly, this story sounds like a bunch of tripe without an ounce of credibility for support.
---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
Archie Bunker was right: we're all either honky, nigger, or chink.
There was a time when such epithets could appear on national television, so that racism could be exposed for the ugly thing it is.
Sadly, these days, we prefer to pretend it doesn't exist.
In Liberty, Rene
papua new guineans, irian jayans, fijians, aeta, etc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito
non-malay natives of southeast asian are most definitely not mongoloid, and most definitely not african or caucasian
they have to be another group entirely
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.
It's hard to say this is true or false yet, because we simply don't know how functionally significant these differences are. Two genomes may look very similar, yet be very different in many very significant ways.
Well, the interesting thing they point out was that it was expected that pygmies would have a common gene (or at least a very limited set) that caused them to be short, when in fact, they have a large variety of genes that cause them to be short.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Japheth was a woodcarver who never got married and talked to puppets.
And Jesus was one of the puppets.
The African/Eurasian/East Asian thing troubles me. Does this take into account the South Pacific and Australia?
Indigenous Australians are generally considered to be from one of two major racial groups which while black, actually tend to carry recessive genes for blond hair and blue or green eyes. There are people from the Solomon Islands and Central Australia that have blond hair and very black skin.
I curious about how the various groups fit in to this picture because most people from Oceania appear on first glance to be of the African group, but then show Eurasian traits on closer inspection and are separated from both Africa and Eurasia by East Asian populations on both sides.
By the way, that last little bit about East Asian on both sides says I don't believe that the obvious forth group is native American. Aren't they mostly East Asian, or at least East Asian in the North and Eurasion in the South?
I don't therefore I'm not.
Not very close. Genetically speaking, Indians are classified as Caucasian, and share much more of their ancestry with other Caucasian groups than East Asian. And from what I can recall (and I don't have a ready citation for this) there hasn't been a very significant amount of gene flow between China and India either.
India itself is very interesting in terms of a genetic case study: as opposed to China, which is somewhat genetically homogeneous, India is composed of hundreds of rather distinct sub-ethnicities that have evolved more-or-less in isolation. Some peg this on the cultural traditions of keeping marriage within communities; some peg this on the caste system which prevents both social and geographical mobility. At any rate, especially for a population with more-or-less a common pool of ancestors, India has a huge amount of genetic non-homogeneity when looking at different communities, and to an extent, different social classes.
Generally speaking they /do/ cluster this way. Of course, you can make room for as few or as many clusters as you want-- if it was two, it'd be african/everything else.
People can be as different as you want them to be, and cluster in whatever way you want, as long as you're selective about what genetic or environmental markers you pick. Given any three people, there will be some marker that is the same in two of those people and different in the other person, just due to the sheer number of genetic and environmental features that exist.
This extends to populations, where being excessively selective about which features are picked to distinguish populations can lead to overfitting and false positive associations (i.e. what appears to be true for a subset of populations is not true for the total population). I can pick a set of genetic features that makes europeans appear to be more diverse than africans, even though that does not reflect what we expect from knowledge of the history of populations.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I think the first question is complicated by the fact that mutations in the genome will follow some sort of time-directed graph but simply counting the nodes in the graph doesn't truly reflect the number of clusters as most of those are clusters within other clusters and not truly independent groups.
The second question is complicated by the fact that we have very, very limited genetic data to work on. There are various genome projects out there, but the largest one that actually studies human history on this sort of timescale - the National Geographics "Genographics" project - only looks at 12 STRs in the Y chromosome, it makes no effort to look at anything else. All the other projects are just too small to have collected a meaningful sample size. For now, anyway.
The third point suffers from the same problem. A lot of these projects have a hundred complete genomes sampled or less. Out of a population of 7 billion. Studying a full genome is expensive - a single test can run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The Genographic Project has collected 100,000 samples (give or take) and is barely scratching the surface. Nobody is going to throw a billion dollars into full genome decodes to settle the question of the reality of ethnicity.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...geology, biology and paleontology...
All of the scientists that study this field of study and others as well, make the assumption that it is valid to extrapolate present day processes linearly into the past. The fact of the matter is that few things in nature are linear. Another assumption that is made is that the constants of nature, such as atomic clocks used to measure time are invariant over large periods of time. Again the one thing that does constant about nature is change.
All theory is gray
Human, Android, chiggers?
Chiggers? What do harvest mite larvae have to do with anything?
Actually, there are only two groups: Us and Them.
Right. One of the corners that gets cut when dividing people up into genetic clusters is that small populations get tossed out as outliers. Indigenous Australians would certainly count as a very distinct ethnic group if one did not simplify things in this way.
Native Americans are indeed /historically/ East Asian, but they split off long enough ago such that they have a relatively distinct genetic signature. This may be more due to neutral genetic drift (as the article suggests) or adaptive selection based on their environment (as I would tend to believe). It's both, of course, but I don't think the selective adaptation has been trivial in that timeframe. See, for instance, "Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution" by Hawks et al.
I can't believe this wasn't the first comment:
1. Children of Caprica
2. Cylons
3. Indigenous humans of Earth
My current thinking leans towards the DNA being akin to a "compressed stream" of traits. Meaning that looking at the individual GATACA's is like looking at the the individual characters in a gzip archive or something. Things MAY look very similar and especially if there is a lot of CRC elements sprinkled inside the stream for auto correction.
Thinking that evolution is better than our own brains leads me further to think that the compression algorithm is unbelievably good... nay... "perfect."
We would have very bad mutations much more often than we have otherwise.
IAMAG & IAMAS
I would say that the real problem with saying anything definitive about points 2 and 3 is that we have very little to go on as far as how genetic differences influence phenotype function. We can point to some specific limited examples, but we haven't been able to construct any grand theory about how genotype change influences phenotype function.
Us and Them
Please explain this inbreeding problem thingy.
The way I understand it, inbreeding is a problem because of mutations in our genes.. with two different genes in the same place, the non-broken one can make up for the mutated one, but with inbreeding there's no redundancy.
Perhaps Noah's offspring hadn't evolved enough to have these corrupted genes - in that case, there wouldn't be a problem. (If I recall correctly there wasn't any law against marrying siblings until way later)
To hire people to wait for other people to get things done.
Quack, quack.
Actually, I think genetic comparisons are much more objective than most other real-world comparisons, because they are a digital code of finite length. Just use a very large sample of randomly chosen genes. Now if you want to join the argument of whether Republicans or Democrats are more similar to Nazis :), or whether the Iraq war is more like the Vietnam war or WWII Japan, or the economy is more like the 1970s recession or the 1930s depression, then you have a much less well-defined data set to work with.
Lots of subs are sitting unused, abandoned, all over our genomes.
Just like open source projects on Sourceforge!
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I agree, though I think your point may be related to mine - if there's no data to base such a grand unified theory on, you can't construct one. Mind you, there's no guarantee that even if we had enough data that we could construct such a theory - we don't understand enough about the way the coding works and more data might not provide that information.
eg: we know that the same codon can code for different proteins in different organisms, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that the same codon can change behaviour within the same organism, but we don't always know why.
eg: We know that instructions can migrate from peripheral nucleic acids into the DNA in the nucleus of the cell, but if the junk DNA handles tuning for a bunch of functions, how does the transfer move over the right junk and put it into the right place, when it might have no relationship with what it controls in terms of location in the DNA? It's not a simple block cut-and-paste.
Some of these things cannot be answered by studying human DNA, because humans haven't existed long enough for significant changes. But to use a programming analogy, you can only get so far with understanding a program if you can't read that language. Sure, you can understand the generic idea, but you can't possibly understand the subtlety or the specifics.
Even though all humans may have X, Y and Z in common, if you don't really know what X, Y and Z are, it doesn't help to know that they're common. You could assign them any universal trait and claim the data fit.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
India is interesting because it's a rather important case in point that culture and language often have little to do with ethnicity. I suppose you might say the peoples of Northwestern India are reasonably Caucasoid, and that may be because those regions were relatively sparsely populated when the Sentum-branch of the Indo-Europeans made their way from wherever-it-is-Indo-Europeans-came-from. India, on the other hand, even back around 2000-1500 BC when the Indo-Iranians made their big push, was already a major population center with many peoples, largely Dravidian (and maybe other folks with some kinship to Central Asian Far-Middle Eastern populations), but also of other groups that appear much more akin to other South Asian populations.
What essentially happened was that the Indo-Iranian languages spread far into the sub-Continent without leaving behind a large genetic heritage, and even where the Indo-Iranians eventually stopped, a good deal of their religion and culture found its way south into the Dravidian populations, so that even though you had all these still fairly separate groups of people, some dating back to some of the earliest migrations out of Africa, you had this overlay of culture and religion whose origins were far to the West.
In the olden days, when the scholars described migrations and invasions, they tended to talk about replacement and marginalization (ie, the Anglo-Saxons pushing the Celts out of England). What often happens, particularly with invasions, is that you don't get genetic replacement at all. Great Britain, despite the invasions of Romans and later West and North Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons and later the Danes and even later the Normans), was still really made up largely of people whose genetic markers closely align with the Continental Celtic peoples. The Celts, as a people, pretty much stayed where they were. What was marginalized was the Celtic culture and languages.
The same applies to the Muslim expansion. The Arabs invaded all over the place, but the Bedouin still remained the Bedouin, the Iranians still Iranians, the Indians still Indians, and so forth. The invaders in so many of these cases were in far too small a numbers to absorb the populations they invaded. Quite the opposite, they were absorbed into those populations, genetically speaking. The difference, even as we see with the Norman invasion of England, was that the invaders, small though their numbers be, seized the positions of power.
In India, one can envision a rather small number of Indo-European invaders that, for any number of reasons (horses, chariots and other superior military capabilities, disorder after the collapse of the native western Indian civilizations like Harappa, and maybe even depopulation in some areas), bringing with them their Indo-European religions and languages and imposing it upon the conquered. Genetically, they would have been absorbed into the Indian populations, but they left their mark. Some historians suspect that the Indian caste system may be a survivor of those early Indo-Iranian invaders, where the "Aryans", being the conquerors, created a sort of top series of castes of priests and warriors (interestingly, the tripartite division of society into priests, warriors and farmers is a feature of many early Indo-European societies and may be a defining characteristic of those peoples), with the peoples native to those areas forceably placed lower in the social strata.
To some extent the same thing happened in England under the Norman conquest, with the Normans seizing most of the Earldoms and forcing the Anglo-Saxons into lower social strata, so that a relatively small group of Norman French warriors could impose themselves effectively on a much larger group of people.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
windows, mac, and linux users?
Wow! Only three groups of humans. Then we have only one question left to answer:
Which group do we put on the B-Ark?
--
Toro
(My apologies to the late Adams-Douglas-Adams and his estate.)
As far as I can tell, this story attempts to make three points:
1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.
Let's not ignore the fact that they picked these three populations in advance (from the original article):
In the following discussion, we focus on SNPs with extreme pairwise FST between three HGDP populations: the Yoruba, French and Han Chinese.
They then show in Figure 3 that selecting SNP that have very different distribution between these three populations also show similar distributions between African, Europe, and East Asia. However, squinting at the plot (my favourite method of statistical analysis), it looks as if these frequency distrubutions could as well be clines, partly obscured by an over-sampling of Chinese populations...
From Y-haplogroup distributions, there's very little similarity between the two. China is mosly O-haplogrooup whereas India is a spectrum with two haplogroups (L and H) that are only found in the subcontinent and The rest are mostly R1a (Indo-European/Indo-Iranian)
Linky:Y-dna distribution
They seem to share a bit of mTdna (M haplogroup).
Wasn't it obvious?
(Statements like "siblings share half their genes" are super misleading. Yes, you get half from Mom and half from Dad, but 99.9% of those genes are the same anyway.)
I recently read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, who mentions this point, and explains that what is meant is the genes above those that all humans share.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
"All of Earth's text documents can be divided into just 26 groups, taking only their starting letter into account."
Damn mosquitoes.
Seastead this.
Just use a very large sample of randomly chosen genes.
And there you hit the crux of it. If the features / markers are randomly chosen, then there is less of a problem.
It is possible to select a set of features (I'm assuming a situation in which all these groups can be genotyped / phenotyped) that demonstrates that one of Republicans/Democrats are more similar to Nazis than the other, but those differences would likely disappear once the selection of features was random.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to select these things at random. Humans have a tendency to see patterns even when they don't exist (i.e. the false positives I mentioned before), and jump on these as being significant.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The advice and truths given in the Bible are credible because they mirror the real personal stories and events that happen in the world around us. Many myths and religions try to do the same, and they get some things right, but there is always the element of mysticism that has been injected by people trying to gain personal advantage. I know that many "Christians" have tried to do this too (most notably the catholic church and their instance that only the Pope can talk to God, which is in direct contradiction to the primary message of pretty much every book of the Bible, they also asserted in the past that only a properly educated person should be allowed to read the Bible), but such lies are easily uncovered by even a cursory independent look at the Bible.
There is nowhere in the bible where it says giving sacrifices will bring a good harvest (though it does say that you should make sacrifices to atone for your sins and celebrate God), or that your God-given leader will bring you to God (though it does say that Jesus loves you and has opened they way for you). It also doesn't say that you can get to heaven through your own personal works (though it does talk about the importance bearing good fruit).
There are a number of other elements to most religions which the Bible lacks, but the main difference is that most religious are designed to promote cohesion in society by establishing a theological basis for a hierarchal leadership structure (much the same way modern economics, philosophy and political science have established a theoretical basis for the same kind of structure). The Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society (society tries to tell us that bad behaviors like promiscuity, deceitfulness, idolatry and hedonism will make us happy, while in truth those behaviors separate us from the life-giving society we are a part of and will only lead to isolation and tragedy).
Please do not think that the behavior of most people who call themselves Christians is indicative of the content of the Bible. Many people use the Church as a social club to further their own worldly goals. Instead, read the Bible (it's not much longer than Atlas Shrugged, which you should also read BTW) with an open mind and see whether or not you agree that it is a better way to go about living.
The real question is "are they smarter than you"
Odd, I aways thought it was:
1) Drivers
2)Passengers
3)Roadkill
Anything else was simply a matter of what was being driven and how.
Guess I'll have to revise that thought, now.
they used to be called "black dwarves" by the chinese when they were on the chinese mainland
they indeed were once the sole occupants of southeast asia
but they are not anywhere near the same race of peoples as the han chinese, japanese, malay, thai, etc., and they are separated by tens of thousands of years genetically from any other race
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No actually on second thought the parent was right. DNA is quaternary. Each strand can contain all four nucleotides in any order. I was making a dumb assumption and my previous post was incorrect. Please mod down.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
It is hard to know how accurate your criticisms are without reading the article, which doesn't seem to be on the website yet (http://www.plosgenetics.org/). Given the limited information available, however, what you say is sensible.
As you note, you can pick your number of clusters, and the software will happily produce that many for you. However, some numbers of clusters are more natural than others - if the closest pair of clusters in the 3-cluster analysis are much more distant than the closest pair in a 4-cluster analysis, then there is some logic in picking 3 clusters as a natural number. (But two clusters would seem even more natural in the human data.) I think this analysis is about interbreeding between subpopulations: they're saying that (e.g.) within Africa, neighbouring populations frequently interbred, so that genes flowed easily throughout the African population, but there was very much less interbreeding between Africa and West Eurasia.
(Also, in your speculations about what the 4th, 5th etc clusters would be, you've forgotten the Australians, who have been here for about 40,000 years - by comparison, the Americans split off perhaps 13,000 years ago.)
(I have done population genetics and evolution research, but not specifically on human populations.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Eric, is that you?
Sorry, but if you get that from my posts then you need to take a reading comprehension course. It is not racist to note that different races exist, and I don't feel oppressed by anyone (except the tax department).
This image sums up only 1 dimension of the 3 races, each having potential and all being the outliers of their own respective modern habits.
You said in another post that you believe the bible to be the literal truth, so I'm not surprised to see you spouting this kind of idiocy, but I strongly encourage you to actually read something (anything) about the scientific fields you are talking about. You would see exactly what the assumptions that these fields make are, and how they are tested. You won't be convinced, because your belief system apparently lets you rationalise away anything that disagrees with your belief system, but at least you may stop spouting ignorant assertions in public, which is likely to be beneficial to you in the long run.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The BBC have an excellent documentary on this subject called The Incredible Human Journey up on the iPlayer at the moment. Its focus isn't quite the same as the article's, as it discusses genetics only as a means to confirm or reject theories of how humans made their way around the planet, but it's definitely worth watching if you're in the UK or can use a UK proxy.
"Native Americans" (and I hate that term, because they're no more "native" to the Americas than Europeans) are obviously of Asian descent. You don't need a DNA test for that, you could just look at them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
....Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.
];)
Regards;
That sounds a little like wishful thinking. In just a few generations we've made tremendous progress with prejudice, however, it is rampant in its grossest forms in much of the world, and about 10% of westerners, who are "ethnocentric".
Then there's covert racism, which is till common in modern society. Peoples behaviour choices are influenced unduly by racial considerations - esp. when it's personal (eg: choosing a family doctor), or ambiguous (eg: I didn't employ the black person because of his credentials).
There are many ways to measure covert racism, however, be wary of the IAT, it's highly controversial, so take what the researchers say about it with a grain of salt. Behavioural measures are the best (ie: watching what people *do*).
It seems that prejudice is built into the human condition - at least at a subtle level:
That's just who we are as human beings, and it means that we're always going to tread a fine line between in-group preference and out-group prejudice, and have difficulty even seeing that that's what we're doing. And that's in ideal situations when there are plenty of resources for everyone.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
H. Sapiens in Europpe Interbred with the Neanderthals to make Europeans.
H. Sapiens in East Asia interbred with H. Erectus to make Asians.
and
H. Sapiens in Africa didn't interbreed at all.
So one could say that Africans have the purest form of Homo Sapiens... But the Extra diversity from breeding with other offshoots of our ancestors had advantages too.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
It might be interesting to read the original report, because the Washington Post article is Silly Science at its best (or maybe worst).
The "three groups" is especially silly, because near the end, they describe it as the result of a split 70,000 years ago (the main exodus from Africa), followed by a second split 40,000 years ago (European vs. Asian). This isn't three groups, it's a three-level tree, with a two-way split in the trunk followed by a two-way split in one branch. If you were to look at more levels of the tree (say, Asian vs. Polynesian or Amerindian), you'd get more than three groups.
And, of course, the other top-level branch is "African", which is actually the base of the tree of human clades. It has been understood for some time that most of the genetic variance in humans is within Africa, with European and Asian branches several levels from the top. There are several other "groups" in Africa that are higher-level splits than the Eurasion split of 70,000 years ago.
I'd be tempted to guess that the "three groups" idea was made up by the Post's writers, who probably can't count much higher. They also probably don't have any concept of a genetic tree. Possibly the researchers made a few comments about these two major splits, and the writers took it to be something terribly significant.
And it's mode much more complex when you consider that below the species level, you never have a strict tree. All those subspecies/variety/race splits can and do interbreed, so within a species, the tree structure can never be much more than a rough approximation. But this is probably too much complexity for a journalist. And it just might be a major part of the explanation for much of the homogeneity that they write about.
There was a good comment on how science journalism works in today's PHD Comics. It seems like a direct comment on this Washington Post article.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
1. Windows vs Apple vs Linux
2. RIAA vs NYCL
3. Intel vs AMD
4. $ProgrammingLanguage1 vs $ProgrammingLanguage2
No, you have the groups wrong.
There's the racsists (you), anti-racists, and the people who just don't give a fuck.
only the Pope can talk to God
I don't know why this keeps coming up, it's a flat-out lie. Prayer is talking to God, and is certainly promoted for everyone! Private revelation (listening to God) is also accepted. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church to learn the doctrines, dogmas, etc.
There's some truth to that. For one thing the language and customs change and when reading one should know the context of the culture they were written, along with a foundation of the accepted doctrines. Otherwise one ends up with a bunch of disconnected, often screwy ideas, along with thinking that 10-eyed monsters are going to come from the skies. (See Revelations).
SB
HOMOSAPIENS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO MARRY. It will destroy traditional marriage. If two homosapiens marry then next people will be wanting to marry monkeys, apes, and other animals.
It seems I better bust out my copy of Animals.
Like Stargate SG1 would have you believe (yes it is just a tv show, but proves many variations are possible)...
We were all part of a greater experiment to another culture, which sent 3 separate insemination payloads
and made sure to study them over time, that they have different geographical regions.
Some developed faster then others, others were more resilient, all based on an inherent design programmed
to get the quickest and best results from this test. Once the experiment is over, we are all going to be tossed out
along with the bath water.
BTW- I for one welcome our alien scientist overlords
The author of the article refrains from offering any sort of data whatsoever. He even neglects to reference sources. It's junk reporting.
I suppose there are two types of people: those who can do science, and those who can't.
The three groups are Utlanning, Framling and Ramen?
The joy of psychological research is it tells us we're all fundamentally broken. Yes, we know that. What your research doesn't tell anybody is what to actually do about it. Nobody does.
/lots/ known about what to do. With racism, a key contribution on psychology has been understanding the flexibility societal norms. For example, if gay marriage were legalised across the USA, then in about 20yrs, nobody would care. Understanding this principle is what helped propel legislation on desegregating schools.
That ain't true. There's
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Read "What Can You Say About Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?" by Larry Niven.
Good SF.
kept*
One that hath name thou can not otter
What about the Aborigine's of Australia? I read somewhere that they are one of the oldest and most unchanged (genetically) human groups. Did they arise in Africa? Would their genes fall into the African subtype specified? Just curious. Also I find it funny that an Anonymous Coward (the guy who started the 3 sons of Noah thread at the top) could engender such a flamewar when I think it's fairly obvious he was trolling (or he would have commented under his own name, wouldn't he?)
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++