Re: La Raza (right or wrong)
Tgf, the following article appeared recently, Sept. 17/00 Toronto Star, unfortunately it is not archived on their web site so i must copy it here rather than link-sorry for any spelling errors.
>>>Tracking reasons for racism. By Jay Ingram
Two of the hottest branches of science, brain imaging and genome sequencing, have inadvertently provided recent evidence that might lead to a better understanding of racism.
The first draft of the complete set of human genes, the genome, was announced a few months ago. Some geneticists close to the project now argue, based on the admittedly incomplete evidence in so far, that differences between races represent a minute amount of the total genome.
This argument is rooted in the fact that the human species is relatively young, probably 200,000 years at most, and arose from a relatively small number of individuals who migrated out of Africa and colonized the rest of the world. (There are other accounts of human origins, but this "out-of-Africa" scenario holds sway among most experts.)
In this scenario, there is too little time and too few individuals at the starting gate to have created biologically distinct "races". Added to that is the observation that those traits that define the races-skin, eye and hair colour, the shape of the eye and nose-are determined by a relatively few genes. Those traits are, therefore, easily changed in response to environmental variation. So, for example, skin becomes darker in tropical regions to protect against high doses of UV light from the sun.
It's all about external appearance, which by some estimates is controlled by as little as one one-hundredth of 1 per cent of your genes. By contraast, genes that contribute to intelligence or a variety of social behaviours are estimated to number in the hundreds or thousands.
But let's face it. Genome scientists can argue all they want that the idea of different human races is bogus buth there will still be plenty of people who will remain unswayed by those arguments, convinced that there are distinct human races.<<<<<<
the article continues on to describe studies of brain activity when test subjects are shown faces of people from different cultures than their own. interesting reading but quite long and probably not in accordance with board guidelines here. if you wish i will post complete article on bravenet forum (although it appears to be down today).
