Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin

[whiskeytown]

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Anyone see this article? Pretty interesting stuff. There is no such thing as race. White skin is just a genetic mutation. What are the implications for this discovery?

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Does it explain why white men cant jump?

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or dance?

RB

[JackWhite]

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black people have faster mussle twitch fibers than white people.

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This is correct, especially with descendants of West Africa. You generally don't see East African descendants doing windmill dunks.

[cardcounter0]

The intelligent designer created man and the races about 8000 years ago. Genetic mutations and evolution is just a theory.

[BCPVP]

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The intelligent designer created man and the races about 8000 years ago. Genetic mutations and evolution is just a theory.

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[Matty]

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black people have faster mussle twitch fibers than white people.

[/ QUOTE ]I hope you aren't trying to defend the biological notion of race. It's true that some people with dark skin genotypes also have faster muscle twitch fibers. However, it is not related to their skin color. Alleles are inherited independently and there has been interbreeding among populations since before global changes allowed some populations to move north and develop lighter skin. This means that depending on what criteria you use to split humans into races, you will end up with drastically different results. If you do it by skin color (or other adaptations to being close to the equator), you end up with something totally different than if you did it by blood type (which puts Swedish populations as the same race as some African populations, and other African populations the same race as Italians and Greeks). Scientists tried very hard to split people up into biologically defined races for a long time, and draw conclusions about people based on things like skin color, but found it utterly impossible. Any introductory level textbook will go into this much more in-detail. Unless you live in Kansas.

Edited to add that you can't attribute the dominance of black athletes to genes. There is much, much more variation within a population than among populations. The primary reason there are more black athletes is because with the economic and educational opportunities presented to them, focusing on sports, and then defaulting to, say, the military is often the best choice. This is why you're recently seeing a lot of white Europeans (from poorer countries) lately in the NBA for example.

[Matty]

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The intelligent designer created man and the races about 8000 years ago. Genetic mutations and evolution is just a theory.

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[/ QUOTE ]It's not a strawman argument when by all accounts the majority of Americans think someone created us in our present form.

http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm

[BCPVP]

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It's not a strawman argument when by all accounts the majority of Americans think someone created us in our present form.

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Genetic mutation, as far as I know, is not contested all that much. We can observe mutation. Even micro-evolution can be observed. That makes his statment a strawman.

[canis582]

. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates.

Where the white women at?

[JackWhite]

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I hope you aren't trying to defend the biological notion of race. It's true that some people with dark skin genotypes also have faster muscle twitch fibers. However, it is not related to their skin color

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Then is it fair to say "Geography?" Based on what part of the world your ancestors are from, we have some different physical abilities. Is that a fair statement?

[Matty]

Yes, that's fair, but you have to be careful what physical characteristics you're talking about (don't forget all those black African pygmies), and be sure to not include any behavioral characteristics.

Instead of races scientists use clines. However you still can't make speculations about one trait based solely on the existence of another trait. Geographical cline maps for even skin color are pretty surprising. There is a correlation between nearness to the equator and skin color, but it's not absolute. For example, Eastern native Americans had lighter skin than Western Native Americans.