Category: Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity

Of mice and men

This CNN.com article should give plenty of food for thought for minimizers of racial differences. The next time one of these folks repeats that worn-out old “we are 99.9% the same” mantra you can finish the sentence “as mice”! 

What that means, of course, is that not only are tiny genetic differences important, but so are the differences in expression of genes that are present in both types of organisms (eg, the tail gene in humans vs. mice).

Note also that if mice are ~99% genetically similar to humans, with an ~80% direct one-to-one correspondence of identical genes, and even a ~40% correspondence in overall genetic regions, then the “absolute genetic similarity” argument falls apart - unless one wishes to assert that a mouse litter constitutes a greater genetic interest for a human than does another human.

Only genetic distinctions matter when comparing genetic interest, as Salter makes perfectly clear.

Posted by JW Holliday on Tuesday, May 31, 2005 at 09:36 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Cavalli-Sforza, John Ray and losing that thread

Over the last day or so a substantial debate has developed on one of the indefatigable John Ray’s threads.  I thought I would put up my views of some of the technical issues raised as a separate post.  So here goes.

John asserts that South Asians are essentially just “brown Europeans”, and when the Cavalli-Sforza data is mentioned as contrary evidence, he – with no good reason – questions the validity of that data.  Others on the thread mentioned Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA data.  The point, also, is that autosomal DNA data exists, quite besides that compiled by Cavalli-Sforza, and that demonstrates the genetic differences between European and South Asian populations.  For example, Nei and Roychoudhury, Mol Biol Evol. 1993, 927-43, 1993, demonstrated that Europeans and North Indians are genetically distinct.

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Posted by JW Holliday on Monday, May 30, 2005 at 06:49 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Human nature: Some findings

Although it would seem that Marx himself was equivocal on the matter (Geras, 1983), it has long been a major Leftist assertion that there is no such thing as an inherited “human nature”. This root and branch rejection of heredity was of course what underlay Stalin’s support of Trofim Lysenko’s otherwise thoroughly discredited theory of evolution—the idea that characteristics acquired in one’s lifetime can be passed on to one’s offspring.

Prof. Stephen Pinker gives here a brief and very readable summary of the state of our scientific knowledge about how much of ourselves we owe to our genes.  Excerpt:

It’s also been undermined by behavioral genetics, which has found that at least half of the variation in personality and intelligence in a society comes from differences in the genes. The most dramatic demonstration of this fact is that that identical twins who were separated at birth have fantastic similarities in their talents and tastes.

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Posted by jonjayray on Saturday, May 28, 2005 at 09:25 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Harvard Reaches Out to Women Scientists

The PC Army marches on.

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Monday, May 16, 2005 at 06:04 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Razib and godless in America

A reply to “GFA”

For the benefit of those many readers of MR who do not have an abiding interest in questions of a scientific nature, this post is the fourth in a series arising organically out of my first here.  It was not intended that so much space would be devoted to Frank Salter and his book, On Genetic Interest.  Nonetheless it is a book that is highly relevant to the future of Western Man, that underscores his right to racio-political activism - so contested as that is - and provides powerful ammunition for use against those who would frustrate him.

One such is GFA, whose interesting observations on my last Salter post have brought me to the consideration of what follows.  But first let me make a brief digression about some related subjects.

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Posted by JW Holliday on Wednesday, April 13, 2005 at 06:30 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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The unimportance of culture

For what small interest it may have, I have combined my two long posts on the unimportance of culture into a single article—which can be found here or here

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 at 04:03 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Genetic Patterns, Endogamy, Exogamy and Genetic Interests

This essay is based upon the work of Dr. Frank Salter as published in his On Genetic Interests and in Population and Environment, Peter Lang Publishing, Vol. 24, pages 111-140, 2002.

To begin with, a question: is endogamy superior to exogamy, and if so, why?  How can we interpret this in view of the issue of ethnic genetic interests?

Endogamous mating is superior to exogamy because it concentrates ethnic genetic interests: the more (genetically) similar one’s mate, the greater the similarity of distinctive gene frequencies one will share with offspring produced with that mate.  Conversely, the greater the genetic distance between mates, the fewer will be the similarities between parents and offspring in distinctive gene frequencies.

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Posted by JW Holliday on Tuesday, March 29, 2005 at 10:56 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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How important is culture?

How important to us today is the Protestant Christian culture that appears to have been so central in creating the modern world?  Most conservatives I know would answer:  “VERY important”.  And Leftists of course would also say that it is important—but only as something that needs to be eradicated as quickly as possible. 

I don’t agree with either.  I hark back to another important and historic conservative belief—in the importance of human nature.  I think that what is normally attributed to culture is in fact almost all due to genetics.  And the studies that are now coming out of genetics research are pretty startling confirmation of that.  It is in fact something of a wonder to me that conservatives do very often seem to maintain in their heads two rather contradictory beliefs—in the importance of culture and in the importance of genetics.  It is obviously true that what we are is the product of both but I don’t see how conservatives can assert the central importance of human nature (which they normally do) and also give a large role to culture.  Anybody I put that point to normally retreats into saying that BOTH are important—perhaps 50-50 or perhaps 60-40 but that neither can be downplayed or ignored.

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Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, March 27, 2005 at 07:48 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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The New York Times rediscovers race

Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given “race.” If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an “indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge.” Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin’s facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

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Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, March 15, 2005 at 06:27 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Genetics show race is not merely a “social construct”

Report of findings at the Stanford School of Medicine:

Checking a box next to a racial/ethnic category gives several pieces of information about people - the continent where their ancestors were born, the possible color of their skin and perhaps something about their risk of different diseases. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine finds that the checked box also says something about a person’s genetic background…

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Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, February 8, 2005 at 07:10 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Pesky!

Hilarious!  “Gene Expression” have up a post on Jared Diamond the biologist who claims that race is a myth and that there is no genetic difference between the Western European whites who created the modern world and anybody else.  All those “dead white males” did so well purely by accident, apparently.  The “Gene Expression” post however reprints one of Diamond’s scientific papers from the days before he had hopped onto the politically correct bandwagon—a paper in which Diamond shows important inherited differences between the races!  That blogospheric fact-checking sure is pesky for frauds!

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, January 4, 2005 at 03:47 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Why Race is a Meaningful Taxonomy No Matter How It Is Applied

Ever since the Human Genome Project succeeded in unraveling the human genetic code, as well as other species almost every month or so lately—including dogs—the Left has been furiously bringing up the old debate about whether races really exist, or is race just a social construct. Though there is an array of arguments used to try to deny the reality of race, the most common one is to first state that race means that there are discreet human races. Then they claim there are no discreet human races so races do not exist. This is the straw man method of debate: set up the false proposition—one that no one supports or argues for—then show that it is wrong.

One of the best comparisons between human races and other species and subraces is that of breeds of dogs—the equivalent of human races. This one is so formidable because it shows just how much we can vary the looks, temperament, and intelligence of dogs,(Continued...

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Friday, December 24, 2004 at 10:13 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Sociobiology: What’s The Message?

The subtext of Sociobiology is that Western man is left with nothing to defend but his race; that Western man, having been deprived of his heritage, is left only with his genetics and evolutionary legacy.

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Posted by leslie on Thursday, December 16, 2004 at 11:54 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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Dog bites Man. Yawn

In what has now become boringly familiar to anyone following mainstream journalism for the past half a century, the story lines are now so predictable that we needn’t even bother to read them.

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Posted by Phil Peterson on Sunday, November 28, 2004 at 07:05 AM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
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