Reply #139: You assert that there is a "common American race." Show me your [View All]

[pnwmom]

source for this.

Here is one of my sources for asserting the opposite:

http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/afrgen/html/Themythofrace.html

From Dr. Joseph Graves Jr. , professor evolutionary biology, Arizona State University

"We take the entire human population and we subdivide it in logical ways based on geography or any other criterion you want to use and examine whether they are essentially the same, sharing genes across their entire range, or discrete and separate groups. If we found that groups were discrete or separate that would indicate the existence of specific races. Here we use Wright's Fst, that examines the degree to which subpopulations differ in gene frequency from the a total population, created by pooling the genes of all subpopulations. This statistic can take on a value of 0 meaning no subdivision whatsoever or 1 meaning totally subdivided in which case identifying geographical races make sense. The data for modern humans based on 133 gene sequences is 0.156--not much greater than 0.000. This is inconsistent with the existence of races in humans. To put this statistic in context, we could compare it to fruit flies, to round worms to fish, but the important thing would be to compare our value to other large bodied mammals that can move around well. Lets consider the Fst value for the gray wolf from North America, Eurasia, and in the Northern Hemisphere. Gray wolves are strongly subdivided. Wolves are in different national parks and cannot travel to mate with one another and are therefore going to diverge in gene frequencies over time.

SNIP

"There was a discussion earlier about how the new genetic technology could enhance discrimination or end the race concept. We had the means to say goodbye to the race concept a long time ago. The new genetic technology does not add anything new. We could have done it by looking at physical features. These do not define races. When we use hair type, skin color, body proportions, all the ones that everyone is convinced put you into a racial group, we do not get trees of relatedness that match our known evolutionary and migratory history. In other words, you cannot use physical features to clump people in the races. For example, this diagram of relatedness by physical characteristics shows Swedes and French people being linked together. That makes sense. It also shows that Eskimos are more closely linked to Swedes and French people than Eskimos are to North American Indians. That does not make sense. It also shows that North American Indians are more closely linked to Swedes and French people than they are South American Indians or Japanese and Chinese. So by using physical characteristics, we get a diagram that does not make migratory sense-it cannot be true. The people in Papaua, New Guinea and Australian aborigines are the most genetically distant group from sub-Saharan Africans. Yet, on this tree of physical traits they look the same. They used to call people in Australia "Negritoes" which means that they looked like Negroes. Again, using physical characteristics does not define racial groups that match the genetic codes that human beings exhibit. Ashley Montagu made this point in 1943 in Mankind's Most Dangerous Myth. It happened because physical variations to define races is discordant. Different genes respond to different pressures, and that they are not correlated with just each other in different populations."

SNIP