I don't believe in race well I do believe in that there is o

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I don't believe in race well I do believe in that there is one race called the human race I know people have different skin colors and features because of the climate on the different continents but race and ethnic groups are and is a social construct Black people look the way they do because of the hot climate in Africa White people look the way they do because of the cold climate in Europe and the Asians look the way do because of the climate in Asia my point is I don't like calling myself White or Caucasian I prefer to be called Human does anyone agree ?

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 071098.php

Yeah I know and people refer to these environment caused differences as race....but we all have the same origins, and we are all human.

You can think that all you want but there are major genetic differences between people who hail from vastly different regions.

Japanese people have very high tolerance for sodium in their diet and african people very low tolerance for sodium in their diet. For example.

White europeans all seem to have some neanderthal genes but africans don't.

People from northern china are taller than people from southern china.

For the record, i'm a big white guy of mixed north sea descent. Some danish, norwegian, german, etc.

Ages ago i used to work at a call center with this big black guy. Bigger than me. Scary looking too. A total hippie, and a pothead, wouldn't harm a fly, but most americans would be wary of meeting him for the first time in a dark alley. Even though he would probably just ask if if you want a hit of his joint.

Anyway, we had this policy that if a customer called with an off-topic issue, and it was something we could solve in under a minute and get them off the phone, we should go ahead and help them rather than piss them off by pointing out that your internet tech support doesn't care if you can print. Or whatever.

So one night this lady calls, freaking out, saying she can't find anything on her computer. Gives me her username. I see that she's been hung up on about a dozen times in the last hour, which is probably why the first words out of her mouth were "ok don't hang up on me!".

It turns out that someone has fiddled with the color settings in windows so that everything in windows is the same shade of blue. Personally i find this hilarious but i can't laugh at customers.

After about 2 minutes of trying to get her to calm down and click where stuff should be even though she can't see the words, i hang up on her, totally exasperated.

The big black guy who happens to be sitting next to me turns to me and says, "That lady you were just talking to. She was black, wasn't she?"

I said, "Well, you know, I don't SEE color, We're all the same inside, right?"

He says, "Oh of course, we're ALL colorblind, and you and me, we're friends. But she WAS black. Wasn't she."

So i said, "Yeah. Near as i can tell."

He chuckled, smiled, and took his next call.

ok so that's just my favorite story of a personal experience on the subject of race relations.

I'll allow that the language we have - referring to people as being of different races - has it's roots in intolerance.

But, the roots of our nomenclature notwithstanding, there ARE differences between people from different regions. They have meaning. None of them should logically have any bearing on a person's standing in a free society, but people who have really long muscular legs are better sprinters. And people who are really tall are better at putting balls into baskets that are placed high up. And people with giant lungs are better at climbing really tall mountains.

As all humans can intermix, produce children, which then are fertile, proves that we're all part of the same exact race. Any differences are superficial.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

We are all mostly homo sapiens sapiens. Within that species are many populations. Those populations will have different genetic distributions to some degree. You can call that whatever you like. It's inevitably an abstraction because it's such a messy subject.

A recent origin out of Africa was winning until recently. Now it looks like we left Africa recently, and then mated to some degree with older groups who had long ago moved to Eurasia.

I think your article (from 1998) is long out of date on some details.

Now that is an interesting bit. Here with the data available in 1998 he sees that there is some disconnect between Melanesians and Africans. But then draws the wrong conclusion (based on what we know today). He sees it through a racial prism and thinks that if black skinned people in Africa don't connect broadly to black skinned in Melanesia , then there must be no discernable signals and everyone has the same recent heredity. That's a broad statement and it didnt pan out.

What is believed today is that Melanesians have ~8% non homo sapiens DNA. They are the most disconnected from Africans (who are closer to pure homo sapiens). He had enough data to see that. But it's not because there is no signal, but because there is a signal of a distinct evolutionary lineage within humanity.

But it's interesting to see someone noticing it earlier but not seeing the picture clearly because, well, he's trapped in 1998.



He even thinks we bred with old world types. He just doesn't see that he's looking right at the evidence of it leaving distinct fingerprints.

Last edited by simon_says on 20 Jul 2011, 4:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

Do an extensive battery of physical, psychological, and medical tests and your theory will start to crack a little. The ability to interbreed does not prove there are no differences.

Well Mike, I've seen in another post of yours that you don't accept the fact evolution happens. Whatever your sources that tell you this, they are wrong. There is so much evidence of so many different types that all clearly show evolution happens, with all evidence found the past hundred fifty years supporting it and NONE falsifying it, that to deny it is just as silly as to insist the earth is flat in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

More to the point of this thread though, I agree with you. We are all human. As others have pointed out, there are subgroups within the human population who have some genetic differences. It used to be that agencies such as the FDA would try to set nutritional guidelines for vitamins and minerals as if everyone had the same body chemistry. There is more recognition nowadays that it is incorrect to generalize about such matters.

The genetic differences for skin color and hair texture for how some people classify so-called "races" of humans are a very small part of our DNA. The whitest Ku Klux Klan member may actually have more in common genetically with someone very dark-skinned than he has with the other KKK members.

My usual response to ethnic or racist jokes is to comment, "Those dang humans!"

oops double post

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 20 Jul 2011, 5:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

So... what are you saying? That various different varieties of humans are actually not closely related? If so, then you're wrong. And those differences you brought up; that has more to do with individuals, rather than whole populations. Because as a matter of fact, black men can become Harvard professors, and white men can jump.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

A horrendously amusing and relevant rebuttal. In the end token physical differences prove nothing and that's all most of these races come to.

The notion of race is bogus. The notion of species is not. Any two humans of differing genders can (in principle) interbreed provided they are both sexually mature and capable.

We are a species of primate mutts. There has never been a pure "race" among humans.

ruveyn

Species is not a hard and fast biological term either. And we had no problem breeding with species / subspecies that were twice as different from us as neanderthals and whose mtDNA carried almost 1/3rd the total differences that chimp mtDNA carries.

But can they run? Good luck winning the sprint at the Olympics without west african DNA.

I am sitting here trying to avoid visualizing pandabear reacting to the concept of ruveyn interbreeding in principle with differently gendered humans.

That off my chest, there CAN be points on the not exactly uniformly graded continuum where motivated taxonomic cuts are possible, perhaps desirable.

Careful now, a race-baiter would call you a racist for saying that if your white or a sycophant to the white man if you aren't.

All of that is related to envrionment.....eventually when different races developed they did pass on very simular genes to their race so that is why even today there are pretty obvious different races.