[ExI] Race Biology (was Larks vs Night Owls)

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Wed Mar 19 03:05:23 UTC 2008


--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> What characteristics are you referring to?  Race and therefore
> "racial
> characteristics" are a scientific fallacy, as surely you realize.

Racial characteristics are simply those highly visible ones that
despite being very small subset of a person's overall genetic makeup,
are used to lump them together and judge them in less than sensible
ways. I didn't say that race was a scientific fallacy, I said it was a
biological one. Race is almost entirely cultural so it is more the
purview of anthropologists, ethnographers, and other social scientists
rather than of biologists. To a biologist, all M&Ms are chocolate on
the inside no matter color what color they are on the outside. 

Genetically there is far more variability within the so-called races
than between them. That is to say that if one were to define genetic
relatedness as how similar someone is to you in terms of how they are
"spelled" by a sequence of the As,Ts,Cs, and Gs instead of whether they
are a member of your immediate family or not, then statistically, you
should have relatives of another race that is more related to you
genetically than any member of your race short of your identical twin.

This is because unless your family has been inbreeding for several
generations, the most genetic similarity you can have with a child,
parent, or sibling is about 50%. But there likely is someone out there
in Africa that is related to you on the order 75% or more at the
genetic level.

> This is an important point. Many people today ignorantly assume
> that there is some racial difference between two of the remaining
> Democratic Party candidates running for president here in the U.S.
> Time and time I hear one of them being regarded as "black", as
> though he were of a different "race", or were partly of a different
> "race". You would not believe how widespread this fallacy is here.

I don't think it is so much a case of ignorance so much as an active
social conditioning thrust upon them from birth with an "us versus
them" mentality where the "us" is distinguished from the "them" on
arbitrary and irrational criteria. In this regard, racists are victims
as much as perpetrators.
 
> It gets worse. Much worse. The New England Journal of Medicine
> actually reported an investigation of differences in the
> effectiveness
> of two types of hypertension medication in the so-called "black"
> people and the so-called "white" people here in the U.S.  You won't
> believe this, but they even went on---surely in the full knowledge
> that race is a biological fallacy (they're surely not that un-read)
> ---to allude to a so-called "fact" that the so-called "black" people
> are more likely than the so-called "white" people to have nitric-
> oxide insufficiency. (Can you believe it??)

Yes I can. There is a gene for skin color after all. (Yes literaly one
-it's designation is SLC24A5.)

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/35078.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18166528?ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

That gene has to reside somewhere on a chromosome and be linked with
other genes in the region. So you might share one very short region of
the long arm of chromosome 21 with every other person of your so-called
race. Now it is inevitable that *some* genes must be linked to the skin
color gene because they sit very close to it on the same chromosome.
These days most drugs target a single gene. So it is certainly possible
for a given drug's effect on a person to correlate with their skin
color. It's just not very likely considering you have 23 pairs of
chromosomes and they have had those tiny syntenic regions thouroughly
shuffled over the aeons. Little bits of you change dance partners every
generation and you would be surprised who those little bits of you have
danced with over the years. Who they are currently dancing with right
now in six and half billion grand ballrooms all over this wet little
blue mote. 

> Which of course is flat-out impossible, since race doesn't exist.

Sure it does. As a cultural and socioeconomic phenomenon. Not as a
biological one. 

Maybe appealing to your engineering training would help. There are all
kinds of automobile types of all kinds of colors. You have red sports
cars, pickup trucks, SUVs etc. Now do you think it is rational that
your utility function for a particular vehicle to take color as its
sole parameter? "All red vehicles are more valuable than blue
vehicles." Would you look for spare parts for your vehicle based on the
color rather make model or type?

Or perhaps I can appeal to your programming knowledge. If you write an
800 megabyte app and I come along and change 1 byte of the program,
does the program now become sufficiently different that I can claim it
to be my program now? Does your program bear any rational relationship
to all the other programs out there that might have that one byte in
common with it? 


Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"Life is the sum of all your choices."  
Albert Camus


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