Genetic differences

I was having a discussion about genetic differences between races with a guy who wholeheartedly disagreed with it

"you are racist blah blah, we are 98% chimp etc etc"

But there is a 0.2% difference in genes between the races on average, fact.

if there is only 2% difference between us and chimps, surely that .2 leads to massive differences?

I just wondered what your opinion on this was, FES

I just wondered what your opinion on this was, FES

If your post was in any way coherent, I might have one.

Quote from: Polly on April 21, 2010, 01:05:55 AM

I just wondered what your opinion on this was, FES

If your post was in any way coherent, I might have one.

^^ This.

If we want to keep using the race concept for humans we would need to expand the number of races to some ridicilesly high number. I mean every time two people of so called different "races" have an offspring it should be considered a new race. And using skin color as the most important defining characteristic of race is just silly.

Chromosomes are only about 50% by mass composed of DNA.  Is the rest so insignificant?  I think not.  The epigenome is coming into its own.

Besides you mention a species difference.  There is a vigorous debate on what constitutes a species.  Species is one of the rungs in the Linnaeus classification/taxonomic scheme, not necessarily inferior to cladistic classification, but assumes much not in evidence about that being studied.  And then there is the biblical "kinds" which assumes everything about that being studied.

I was having a discussion about genetic differences between races with a guy who wholeheartedly disagreed with it

"you are racist blah blah, we are 98% chimp etc etc"

But there is a 0.2% difference in genes between the races on average, fact.

if there is only 2% difference between us and chimps, surely that .2 leads to massive differences?

I just wondered what your opinion on this was, FES

Sorry, but you are making baseless assumptions off of numbers with no real reference. To put this in perspective, animals that are in a separate "race" where fitness is effected when they interbreed have a difference in genetic material around 1%. Large mouth bass that look completely identical and are recognized as of the same species have 5x more genetic difference than we do with people of another "race."

In fact there is only a few thousand years of separation between say a white person and an african, while there are sometimes hundreds of thousands to millions of years separating different races in a species. The biological term race does not apply when talking about humans since there is absolutely no reduction in fitness when two "races" interbreed and in fact there is an increase in fitness due to heterozygous fitness.

Taking the side of a debate that is generally perceived as ignorant and then backing it up with pseudoscience makes you a retard.

/rant

Chromosomes are only about 50% by mass composed of DNA.  Is the rest so insignificant?  I think not.  The epigenome is coming into its own.

Besides you mention a species difference.  There is a vigorous debate on what constitutes a species.  Species is one of the rungs in the Linnaeus classification/taxonomic scheme, not necessarily inferior to cladistic classification, but assumes much not in evidence about that being studied.  And then there is the biblical "kinds" which assumes everything about that being studied.

I'd say he's going by the biological definition of species, if it is unable to interbreed and could not interbreed under any circumstances it is not of the same species (yes this definition is shit and has a giant loophole for you to say "then two males aren't of the same species" but I don't want to go find a book.) His major problem is he simply showed the genetic difference between two species and not the average genetic difference between individuals in a species. This means his figures are meaningless unless the difference between "races" is greater than the difference between humans and chimps.

I'd say he's going by the biological definition of species, ...

Maybe, but I'm not betting on it.

I was having a discussion about genetic differences between races with a guy who wholeheartedly disagreed with it

"you are racist blah blah, we are 98% chimp etc etc"

But there is a 0.2% difference in genes between the races on average, fact.

if there is only 2% difference between us and chimps, surely that .2 leads to massive differences?

I just wondered what your opinion on this was, FES

This does not lead to differences at all.

I like this wun

"This lack of any clear species concept in microbiology  has led to some authors arguing that the term "species" is not useful when studying bacterial evolution. Instead they see genes as moving freely between even distantly-related bacteria, with the entire bacterial domain being a single gene pool. Nevertheless, a kind of rule of thumb has been established, saying that species of Bacteria  or Archaea  with 16S rRNA gene sequences more similar than 97% to each other need to be checked by DNA-DNA Hybridization  if they belong to the same species or not.[10]  This concept has been updated recently, saying that the border of 97% was too low and can be raised to 98.7%"