Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin

[Andrew Fletcher]

Anyone see this article? Pretty interesting stuff. There is no such thing as race. What are the implications for this discovery?

[tolbiny]

Hey- maybe now they will find a cure for black people.
Wait, was that racist?

[ QUOTE ]
Hey- maybe now they will find a cure for black people.
Wait, was that racist?

[/ QUOTE ]

Delightfully so.

I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors were once all black people in Africa, a long time ago. Makes racism kinda funny.

[tolbiny]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Hey- maybe now they will find a cure for black people.
Wait, was that racist?

[/ QUOTE ]

Delightfully so.

I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors were once all black people in Africa, a long time ago. Makes racism kinda funny.

[/ QUOTE ]

I always thought that it was hilareous that most racists deny this as much as possible. The obvious best response for them is to embrace evolution, and to claim that since everyone was black (or dark skinned) at one point, that white people are obviously "more evolved".

[Andrew Fletcher]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Hey- maybe now they will find a cure for black people.
Wait, was that racist?

[/ QUOTE ]

Delightfully so.

I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors were once all black people in Africa, a long time ago. Makes racism kinda funny.

[/ QUOTE ]

I always thought that it was hilareous that most racists deny this as much as possible. The obvious best response for them is to embrace evolution, and to claim that since everyone was black (or dark skinned) at one point, that white people are obviously "more evolved".

[/ QUOTE ]I had an interesting discussion today with some of the students at my college. One of them was a African-American from Ohio and the other person was an African from Chad. They both said it was common knowledge among Africans and black people in the United States that whiteness was completely made up. I've always believed that race was a social construction, but it's interesting to me that so many white people seem to think there is some essential difference between blacks and whites. Meanwhile, it seems like most blacks are well aware that this difference is utter crap.

The point I am trying to make is that knowledge is often passed along in interesting ways and then "rediscovered" by science.

[ QUOTE ]
I think it's pretty clear that our ancestors were once all black people in Africa, a long time ago. Makes racism kinda funny.

[/ QUOTE ]
Our ancestors were once monkeys too.

Why does everyone subvert truth to fit a political agenda? There are differences between the races.

If a race of people can be taller, faster, shorter, hairier, more muscular, more prone to certain diseases, or blacker, why can't they also have smaller or larger brains or more aggressive tendencies?
Especially when the brain is the very thing that has been evolving rapidly in the last half million years.

A separation of 50,000 years and vastly different selection pressures (compare the frozen wastes of Europe with the tropical plains of Africa) could very easily result in different mental capacities. Whether they do or not is a matter for scientific investigation. Unfortunately, so far few have had the stones.

[tolbiny]

How about this- how about you try to define race? I'll make it easy on you, define black verses white.

[ QUOTE ]
How about this- how about you try to define race? I'll make it easy on you, define black verses white.

[/ QUOTE ]
For the purposes of this discussion, race is simply the grouping of peoples that had a long period of reproductive isolation from one another. These two groups, having been unable to mix genes for tens of thousands of years, evolved different gene frequencies and even different genes. The most obvious examples of these differences are skin color and facial features (particularly the nose).

I don't want to get into the semantics of race, because frankly it's pointless. My only point is that there are characteristics endemic to each ancestral grouping of people with common ancestral traits (i.e. race).

What I further propose is that some of the differences between these groups may be more than superficial. Do you agree that such is possible?

To get back to the original article, finding a gene mutation that causes white skin is being used as 'proof' by the feel-gooders in this thread that we're basically all the same and race is an illusion. I take exception to such politically motivated and intellectually lazy conclusions.

Are you saying that white / black people have larger / smaller brains and are more / less aggressive?

[tolbiny]

"The most obvious examples of these differences are skin color and facial features (particularly the nose)"

There were plenty of efforts by anthropologists during the 1960s and 1970s to examine genetic bases for behavior between racists. Many of these were initiated by people who believed that they would find some kind of differences. The results of these studies? Essentially none were effectively completed because the researchers found they couldn't define race by skin color. They found that the spectrum of skin pigments that they tried to use to define "Blacks" overlapped with those that they tried to define as "Whites". the most obvious example of this is the spanish. The average skin color of native spanish is signifigantly darker than (i may be off on these numbers, its been a few years since i looked at this info) the lightest 15% of Africans.
This was while ignoring people of Arabic descent, who further complicate the problem of defining race based on skin color.

"For the purposes of this discussion, race is simply the grouping of peoples that had a long period of reproductive isolation from one another. These two groups, having been unable to mix genes for tens of thousands of years, evolved different gene frequencies and even different genes"

There are groups of Black AFricans who were reproductively isolated from other Africans for longer than white europeans were. The genetic variabilty within africans is greater than the average African is different from the average European. These are the reason why skin color is not signifigant in determining differences in "race".