Determine race by DNA? Psuedo science?

[drkitten]

So, Scots and English are really quite distinct races?

Ask Angus after three pints at the Dog and Duck, and he' s likely to tell you they're different species.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Aye, but Angus is fae Kashmir. And he's a pouf. And he's a catholic.

Whit the f*** wid he know aboot onythin?

 

[Roboramma]

There are 3 major races.
1.Caucasoid(Europeans)
2.Negroid(Africans,Native Australians)
3.Mongoloid(Asians)

This suggests that Native Austrailians are more closely related to Africans than they are to Asians.
But that doesn't make any sense to me. Wasn't Austrailia colonised from Asia?
Maybe I'm wrong. But if not, this just shows that trying to determine "race" by a few phenotypes isn't a good method.
In fact, I'd suggest that human variation between populations while present is too complicated to be embraced by the concept of race.

While there are differences between populations, the definition of races isn't likely to work - either there will be people who don't belong to any race (or combination of races) or there will be people that are put into one race by their dna but another by their ancestry.

Evolution doesn't tend to construct hard lines between things, at least not until all the intermediates are dead, and this is an especially true example of that.
Does this mean that we're all members of one population? Or that there has been no change in the frequences of alleles between different human populations over the past hundred thousand years or so? No. It means that variation is complex. Maybe the concept of race has meaning in some way, but certainly not in the way commonly understood.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

Dustin-
Are you aware that your division of mankind into "races" is totally based on characters of appearance?

That's exactly how it's defined.

Are you aware that your apparent inability to distinguish between the appearance of Africans and Australian Aboriginals is a failing not shared by either people?

Says who?

Who says that if you plop an African down into an australian aboriginal tribe the people there would be able to tell the difference?

I bet they would not.

I once saw a group of Chinese scientists wholly unable to tell four British scientists apart, because the four were dressed alike and the Chinese lacked the practice necessary to recognise clues to appearance in westerners.

So?

The inhabitants of a Bantu village , town or city don't look alike to each other, only to you because you are unable to tell them apart. Your failing, not their lack of variability.

Who said I could not tell two individuals apart? Where did that come from?

I can easly tell two individuals apart no matter what race they come from.

Are you aware that there is more variation in nuclear DNA between native Africans (ie excluding European settlers of the last 400 years) than among virtually everyone else on the planet?

That right there demonstrates that even they consist of various sub-races.

The use of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome DNA to establish "ethnic origin" is indeed full of potential error. So long as it's viewed as a possibly useful tool for palaeoanthropologists and as a bit of fun for the rest of us, this sort of procedure is fine- but it's at a very early stage. I would not put much faith in it's conclusions, which are also often misunderstood and misreported by journalists.

I think that's exactly what I was trying to say with this post.

Are you aware that it's highly probable that you and I are both 100% African?

In the sense that all humans ancestors come from africa..Sure.

However in the sense that there are as i've demonstrated....Various "Races" of mankind....I myself belong to the Caucasoid race. Not the African race.

Are you aware your posts seem to be acquiring distinctly racist overtones?

I'm sorry,But if you interpret my posts that way you're obviously not reading them fully.

Slavery as an economic system is not historically restricted to America. The Vikings kept slaves, for example, generally white ones. One difference was that an Icelander could be legally punished for maltreating a slave. To claim that slavery requires a physiological difference is silly.

Actually, this thread is getting pretty silly.

Now I KNOW you're not reading my thread fully. I Never said that slavery was due to race.

I'll copy and paste exactly what I said so as you can re-read it.

When Europeans came to Africa and brought Africans over to America as slaves,Why did Racism even exist if Africans don't actually generally look different than Europeans like you're claiming?

I'm asking why Racism existed between Africans & europeans in America if Africans did not generally look different physically.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

What type of DNA were they comparing? How were they comparing it? How were they identifying "race" and what do you mean when you say that they used "a few hundred people from each continent?"

This is what they were doing..

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/...hic/index.html


So apparantly looking at "markers" or mutations on the mitochondrial DNA to determine ancestory.

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

This is exactly the point. It is genetic traits that vary geographically, not some sort of composite "race." We can certainly assign race names to clusters of genetic traits, but it's a complex matter of probabilities.

~~ Paul

That's how race is generally defined. By physical characteristics.


Native Africans have distinct physical characteristics which are different from native europeans. So based on the persons ancestory and physical characteristics we assign them to a specific race.

Say someone who's living in America who has black skin,Kinky hair,And facial features similar to the people of pictures I posted,We could accuratly determine that this person has some if not all African ancestory. I.e. this person is "African" by race.

The fact of the matter is this...The odd's of someone being a native european as far as ancestory goes...and all of their ancestors are european for 100's of years,And them having distinct african features(Black skin,kinky hair,african facial features) is incredibly slim.
The genes that determine these features number into the thousands,So for someone of the european stock to have these features randomly is astrological.
However for someone of the african stock to have these gene combonations is very very common since as we all know these people evolved these features for their environment and these specific gene combo's are proliferated among them.


I'd say more but my "e" button is not working so I have to copy paste the "e" every time!

 

[Dustin Kesselberg]

This suggests that Native Austrailians are more closely related to Africans than they are to Asians.
But that doesn't make any sense to me. Wasn't Austrailia colonised from Asia?
Maybe I'm wrong. But if not, this just shows that trying to determine "race" by a few phenotypes isn't a good method.
In fact, I'd suggest that human variation between populations while present is too complicated to be embraced by the concept of race.

I do not know if Australians are closer related to asians or africans. Maybe they are. In which case they belong to a distinct race from "Negroids" and belong to the race "Australoids".

Also it's not Phenotype. A pale white european could not ever get the skin-tone of a jetblack sub-sahran african. natural Skincolor is determined by genotype not phenotype. That's why black women have black babies,White women white babies.(With black fathers for the former and white for latter)

While there are differences between populations, the definition of races isn't likely to work - either there will be people who don't belong to any race (or combination of races) or there will be people that are put into one race by their dna but another by their ancestry.

There are mixtures of people,So what? That does not mean there is not such thing as "Race".

Evolution doesn't tend to construct hard lines between things, at least not until all the intermediates are dead, and this is an especially true example of that.

No one said it was a hard line. Actually it's a gradual blending.

The difficulties don't exist when defining the 3 or 4 major races,But with cutting them up into dozens of dinstinct races.

Judging by physical features you can pretty accuratly determine if someone is "Asian","Caucasian" or "Negroid" and other peoples such as arabs would be caucasian and Native americans asians..ect.

Does this mean that we're all members of one population? Or that there has been no change in the frequences of alleles between different human populations over the past hundred thousand years or so? No. It means that variation is complex. Maybe the concept of race has meaning in some way, but certainly not in the way commonly understood.

It has meaning enough. As i've demonstrated in my prior posts.
And it's a useful tool for grouping people.

 

[Crispy Duck]

I'm no expert, but I tend to support the view that there's no such thing as race, after reading an article about the subject in New Scientist a few years ago. Of course we can all tell the difference between a native Kenyan and a native Norwegian - that's not at issue. The issue is whether the convenient notion that all humans can be neatly categorised into 3, 5 or however many 'races' actually stands up. I think it doesn't.

Dustin, try this - take a sheet of paper and mark horizontal and vertical axes with any two of your 'obivous' racial indicators - darkness of skin, broadness of nose, etc. Any individual can be marked as a cross on the page based on where they fit on those two scales. Now, imagine you take 10,000 people at random from around the world (NB *not* just the USA, just South Africa, just Europe, etc) and plot them all on the page. Is it your contention that you would get clusters of crosses, corresponding to the different races? Or would you just have a big mess of crosses evenly distributed all over the page?

The question is generally similar to asking 'how many colours are there in a rainbow?' The 'correct' answer that everyone knows is 'seven'. But is that really true? I think not.

Also, Dustin, going back to your original point - I think your genetics / maths are faulty. If someone is 40% African, it doesn't follow that any one of their ancestors must have been 100% African - they might all have been 40% African, going back 500 generations. Or maybe two of your eight great-grandparents were 75% African, etc.

Just my thoughts...

Crispy.

 

[delphi_ote]

This is what they were doing..

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/...hic/index.html


So apparantly looking at "markers" or mutations on the mitochondrial DNA to determine ancestory.

Then your criticisms just plain don't hold water.

1.The number of people who they got their samples from around the world are just way too small. It would have to include everyone on the planet for it to be accurate.

As mitochondrial DNA is inherited almost 100% along the maternal line and is highly conserved (mutations in the "power plant" of our cells carry a high risk and little gain,) there is no reason for huge samples. I performed a similar test on plants once with only one sample from entirely different phyla, class, etc. As distantly related as tobacco, aspen, and rice are (just as an example) their mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA are virtually identical.

2.They are simply compairing the DNA to other's who are in their sample population. However it's very likely that most of someone's ancestors who were european have died off and no DNA remains in the world of those people and the only DNA remotely related to yours happens to be in africa. That does not mean you're 30 or 40% african. It just means that most of your european ancestors have died out and you only happen to have relatives in africa who share some common DNA from thousands and thousands of years back,Who are really nowhere near related to you.

The idea is to produce a phylogenetic tree by comparing similarities in the DNA sequence, and then tracing back those similiarities to common ancestors. As a toy example...

Person 1: ACACACACA
Person 2: ACACAGACA
Person 3: ACACGGACA
Person 4: ADACACACA

We would say: (1) that persons 1, 2, and 3 shared a common ancestor, (2) persons 2 and 3 shared a more recent common ancestor, and that (3) there was probably a more distant ancestor that persons 1,2,3, and 4 shared.

Even if our common ancestry died off, we still have a record of their DNA in our own mitochondiral DNA.

3.Just because someone lives in Africa it does not make them African by race. There are millions of white europeans living in Africa who's ancestors migrated there in the 16th and 17th century from europe.
The same goes for Asia or India. Just because 50% of someone's relatives happen to live in Africa it does not make them African by race.

Believe it or not, hundreds of people with PhDs are smart enough to think of something like that. By tracing our ancestry through our mitochondria, we can see who in our data set shared a common ancestor regardless of where their ancestors moved.

I think you've misunderstood the point of the study. They aren't trying to predict race from DNA. They are trying to predict maternal ancestry to gain an understanding about how the diversity we observe in the human species came to be. In some cases the results correlate with (and thus predict) race because we're studying reproductively isolated populations.

But in some cases, the results will also correlate with (and predict) language (because isolated populations develop divergent languages.) That doesn't mean your mitochondrial DNA determines your mother tongue.

 

[athon]

I wish I could just post an entire chapter I wrote for a book once, on the topic of 'races'.

Firstly, there is no clear definition for the term. Historically it related to your culture. A person who was born to white-skinned Anglo-saxon parents raised in a dark-skinned African village was 'African'. Your geographical region, language and cultural ties were your race. Hence 'Norman' and 'Saxon's' were described in texts as different races.

Today, we would disagree. In the 19th century there was an effort to classify on the basis of morphological features and academia endeavoured to divide mankind in the same way. As has been pointed out, this is difficult to do as we are designed to bias our perceptions of characterstics depending on the populations were are raised in.

Therefore, there is no clear way of distinguising race. Could we do it genetically? Yes, but that would be a construct based on the very definition of its own parameters. In other words, you would be classified 'African' because you have genes A, B and C, and 'Caucasian' because you have C, D and E.

The distinction does not exist in nature.

The problem arises when these constructed definitions are taken outside of their parameters. Assumptions are made that the definition does not cover. In addition, it takes a very strict set of rules to determine the definition to begin with. Are you still Negro if you have 'ABDE' and not 'C'?

That is where the debate gets silly. Creating definitions is definitely political over scientific. It is necessary, but keep in mind how far that goes.

Athon

 

[Rolfe]

Seems to me it's a bit like dog breeds. There are individuals you can pretty confidently say are Cocker Spaniels, or Italian Greyhounds or whatever, both on phenotypical appearance and by known pedigree. Then there are individuals without a known pedigree who nevertheless look phenotypically like good examples of these breeds. But there are also a lot of individuals who only look a bit like a breed, or a bit like one breed and a bit like another, and individuals who defy categorisation into any of the groups listed in the doggie books.

Does it matter? Only if you want to enter a dog show.

Rolfe.

 

[delphi_ote]

Does it matter? Only if you want to enter a dog show.

Or if you want to study the history of the different breeds to gain a greater understanding of the species itself.

 

[Amapola]

And I can't help but wonder if those different breeds of dog have extremely divergent DNA. I would not think so. I would think one could not tell the breed based on DNA.

 

[drkitten]

And I can't help but wonder if those different breeds of dog have extremely divergent DNA. I would not think so. I would think one could not tell the breed based on DNA.

I'd be very surprised if you couldn't. For example, I believe there is a specific gene for the short legs of dachshunds; if a dog doesn't have that gene, it's not a dachshund.

The problem with the argument from divergent DNA is that it's a red herring. It doesn't matter how much overall variance there is, either within a single breed/race or within the species as a whole. The question is whether or not there are individual markers (or marker sets) within the overall variance that can be mapped onto our externally defined notions of breed/race.

 

[ranson]

Me, I wonder where I'd fall in all this. I have a fairly well-documented family history of African slaves, native Americans, Anglo-Saxons, various Mediterranean cultures, various Semitic cultures, Aryans (the real ones, from India and Persia), and Welsh, with a few other things thrown in the mix. All this is within the last two hundred and fifty years.

What do I like like? Why, I'm one of the whitest honkies you're likely to come across

So what race am I?

Edited for grammar.

 

[delphi_ote]

And I can't help but wonder if those different breeds of dog have extremely divergent DNA. I would not think so. I would think one could not tell the breed based on DNA.

That's the problem with armchair science...

DNA identifies dog breed with 99 percent accuracy

http://www.azcentral.com/families/articles/0520SCI-DOG-BREEDS-ON.html

 

[delphi_ote]

Me, I wonder where I'd fall in all this. I have a fairly well-documented family history of African slaves, native Americans, Anglo-Saxons, various Mediterranean cultures, various Semitic cultures, Aryans (the real ones, from India and Persia), and Welsh, with a few other things thrown in the mix. All this is within the last two hundred and fifty years.

What do I like like? Why, I'm one of the whitest honkies you're likely to come across

So what race am I?

Edited for grammar.

Follow your maternal line back as far as you can and you'll get an idea. Only one of those lines of inheritance contributed to your mitochondrial DNA.

 

[ranson]

Follow your maternal line back as far as you can and you'll get an idea. Only one of those lines of inheritance contributed to your mitochondrial DNA.

That's the side that has the grand mix, and it tends to dissappear into the hills after a while. Hard to tell.

 

[delphi_ote]

That's the side that has the grand mix, and it tends to dissappear into the hills after a while. Hard to tell.

Just to make sure I'm clear on this: there is no mixing in mitochondria. You get the ENTIRE genome from your mother, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, who got etc. The path is linear. No branches. The only variations should be due to rare mutations.

So even with your jumble, we'd be able to trace back one line of inheritance. It would probably be very suprising!

My ancestry is 99.99% European, but I believe my mitochondrial DNA would actually be Native American. I only know about one such ancestor in my family tree about 7-8 generations back, but if I'm not mistaken she lies on a direct maternal path to me (i.e. she was my mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom's mom.)

 

[Soapy Sam]

1.When Europeans came to Africa and brought Africans over to America as slaves,Why did Racism even exist if Africans don't actually generally look different than Europeans like you're claiming?
Heck,Racism would not even exist if as you're claiming..There was no identifiable differences between various races. There would of been no slavery,There would of been no Holocaust,There would of been no segregation in America,There would of been none of these things if there were no identifiable physical characteristics between say people who's ancestors came from Europe and someone's who's came from Africa.- Dustin

Nonsense.
Slavery was rife in Africa, among Africans, long before Europeans settled America. The first "foreign" slavers in tropical Africa were Arab.
Europeans had been involved in Slavery in Africa since Graeco-Roman times, but they also retained slaves from Europe, including rival Greek and Italian cities.
Slavery in America was primarily an issue of colour. Nowhere else in the world. At least learn some history before basing eugenic theory on such nonsense.