DNA Suggests Three Basic Human Groups 459
Death Metal writes "All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made — the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens."
Will this be the future of racism? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've come to believe that human's are simply programmed to line themselves up in groups, to fight imagined or real enemies in other groups. We're raised on it, jocks vs nerds becomes blacks vs whites vs christians vs atheists vs global warming followers vs global warming deniers vs pro-life vs pro-choice vs republicans vs democrats vs whatever.
So who else believes this will be the next big advance in 'scientifically supported' bigotry? After all, we now have proof we're better/smarter/more virtuous/taller than *them*.
These are the real 3 groups (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Those who make things happen
2. Those who watch things happen
3. Those who wonder what happened
Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
More ways to be prejudiced against people.
"My genetic group is better than yours!"
What's PC now? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if there's only three distinct ethnic groups, who's the minority now? It's very important for political correctness. Wait... Minorities are an invention of mass-delusions by the public...
Re:Will this be the future of racism? (Score:3, Insightful)
Pointless article (Score:1, Insightful)
It sounds like it was written 50 years ago. At the very least I find it hard to believe the Australian Aborigines aren't a distinct group since they separated from the rest of the race before Europeans left Africa. The whole thing is an over simplification of a very complex family tree.
Re:Will this be the future of racism? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone's fretting about it at all. AC is just wondering out loud.
Anyway, the worst that will happen is some group will protest the finding. The only people who are going to take the findings to conclusions about racial superiority are people who are using it to validate their pre-existing racism. Knuckle-dragging racists aren't made by facts, they're made by ignorance.
Re:confirmation of previous grouping (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:confirmation of previous grouping (Score:5, Insightful)
I take a general offense to the nature of this article, presenting this as though it is some sort of surprise.
Then you misinterpreted it. The suprise is at the degree of genomic similarity within the three groups. The groupings you mentioned seem to have been validated, but they weren't based on genome studies. Using those old "studies" you couldn't have said anything about the genetic similarity of two ethnicities within the, er, clades? Maybe you could have/did assume, but that would have been without any evidence.
The suprise is not that there are 3 groups, the suprise is that there are 3 genetic groups.
(Terminology is a bit off because, well, I'm not in this field)
Re:What's PC now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not how evolution works, bro'. The population with the most genetic diversity is the less evolved(in the sense that it retains more characteristics from the original population).
Evolution works in the extremes where a few founding individuals exposed to higher than average pressure evolve multiple adaptations to the new conditions.
Re:I don't think so (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you actually read The Bible?
No incest, or more politely, inbreeding" had to occur at all.
Read the book Man, see for your self, the talk of "the other people" who existed at the same time.
RTFBible, because it's clear you're ignorant on some important "facts".
Re:I don't think so (Score:1, Insightful)
...There's still that bigger inbreeding problem....
You are making an assumption here, namely that the genetic pool of humanity was then the way it looks today. It is interesting that there are exactly 3 people groups and not four or five for some of that number. It is not at all impossible that all people on Earth today descended from the three sons of Noah. This is a very simple theory and as far as theories go, the simpler ones are more likely correct. Of course, this theory has unthinkable implications for those who believe that the Bible is nothing more than a bunch of myths and falsehoods. People who do not wish to believe in the Bible and the God of the Bible will go to great lengths to come up with other, usually more complicated explanations for this data.
Re:I don't think so (Score:2, Insightful)
RTFBible, because it's clear you're ignorant on some important "facts".
Wow, a preaching troll.
Anyway, I have more important things to read. Like a stack of molecular biology papers thicker than the bible. And Fallout 3, although come to think of it that's not really reading. A lot more interesting and relevant though.
Re:I don't think so (Score:2, Insightful)
Inbreeding does cause genetic issues but evolution still applies. Over generations the flawed offspring would tend to die at a faster rate than non-inbred populations.
Re:confirmation of previous grouping (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, like all the nonsense some ignorant folks made about Mitochondrial Eve, you don't know what you're talking about. No one said these three lineages separated at the same time. In fact, they didn't. So any attempt to marry this to your favorite mythology is nothing more than cherry picking certain statements, when the evidence, in fact, completely eradicates your beliefs.
Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
Asia has a history of literature at least equivalent to that of Europe, as well as visual art and music, architecture and engineering, philosophy and religion, virtually every dimension.
To single out the Chinese, since I happen to know more about them than other Asian cultures, they invented the movable type printing press before Gutenberg, but their language was so complex that it wasn't practical so it didn't see a lot of use. They invented the compass, the crossbow, sericulture, belt drive, borehole drilling (did you know the deepest hole ever excavated by man before 1835 was done by the Chinese to extract salt brine?), a calendar as accurate as the Julian four centuries earlier (and another as accurate as the Gregorian three centuries earlier), cast iron, single and multistage rockets, negative numbers, porcelain, etc.
Though I would agree that the illiterate cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas have little real, objective value, that you can try to level similar charges at Asia suggests to me that you are either ignorant or truly bigoted.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the Bible. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nowhere in the bible where it says giving sacrifices will bring a good harvest (though it does say that you should make sacrifices to atone for your sins and celebrate God), or that your God-given leader will bring you to God (though it does say that Jesus loves you and has opened they way for you). It also doesn't say that you can get to heaven through your own personal works (though it does talk about the importance bearing good fruit).
There are a number of other elements to most religions which the Bible lacks, but the main difference is that most religious are designed to promote cohesion in society by establishing a theological basis for a hierarchal leadership structure (much the same way modern economics, philosophy and political science have established a theoretical basis for the same kind of structure). The Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society (society tries to tell us that bad behaviors like promiscuity, deceitfulness, idolatry and hedonism will make us happy, while in truth those behaviors separate us from the life-giving society we are a part of and will only lead to isolation and tragedy).
Please do not think that the behavior of most people who call themselves Christians is indicative of the content of the Bible. Many people use the Church as a social club to further their own worldly goals. Instead, read the Bible (it's not much longer than Atlas Shrugged, which you should also read BTW) with an open mind and see whether or not you agree that it is a better way to go about living.
Re:I don't think so (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
Inbreeding doesn't *cause* genetic issues. It merely concentrates and thereby exposes those that are already present in a given gene pool, by increasing the chance of being homozygous for any given trait -- good OR bad.
Re:Read the Bible. (Score:3, Insightful)
But we can get people out of comas. You don't really believe that with the lack of understanding of medicine back then, that they would have the same rigorous definition of death as measured by brain activity do you?
Re:You mean the three sons of Noah? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a simplicity and all-inclusiveness to the number three -- the triangle, the Holy Trinity, three peas in a pod. So it's perhaps not surprising that the Family of Man is divided that way, too.
That's where I stopped reading.
Re:Read the Bible. (Score:5, Insightful)
But we can get people out of comas. You don't really believe that with the lack of understanding of medicine back then, that they would have the same rigorous definition of death as measured by brain activity do you?
Are you suggesting that after being nailed to a cross for the best part of a day, having his legs broken so he suffocated, and having a spear put through his side, that Jesus was not dead, but simply comatose?
Bloody hell - he's harder to kill than Jack Bauer!
Re:You mean the three sons of Noah? (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Those who keep on repeating "10 types - binary" joke.
2. Those who loves telling "3 kinds - can not count" joke repeatedly.
3. People who hate above mentioned jokes and whine about it.
4. Everybody else who does not give fuck.
Re:You mean the three sons of Noah? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think so (Score:5, Insightful)
...at the darkness. And says "Let there be light."
OMFG guys! The bible is actually a PHB! Obviously Adam wrote the MM when he named all the animals, so that only leaves the DMG, which is obviously metaphorically referred to as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil."
Adam and Eve weren't kicked out of the garden for eating fruit! they were kicked out because they were peeking at the DM's notes!
Racism will persist forever (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds a little like wishful thinking. In just a few generations we've made tremendous progress with prejudice, however, it is rampant in its grossest forms in much of the world, and about 10% of westerners, who are "ethnocentric".
Then there's covert racism, which is till common in modern society. Peoples behaviour choices are influenced unduly by racial considerations - esp. when it's personal (eg: choosing a family doctor), or ambiguous (eg: I didn't employ the black person because of his credentials).
There are many ways to measure covert racism, however, be wary of the IAT [harvard.edu], it's highly controversial, so take what the researchers say about it with a grain of salt. Behavioural measures are the best (ie: watching what people *do*).
It seems that prejudice is built into the human condition - at least at a subtle level:
That's just who we are as human beings, and it means that we're always going to tread a fine line between in-group preference and out-group prejudice, and have difficulty even seeing that that's what we're doing. And that's in ideal situations when there are plenty of resources for everyone.
Re:You mean the three sons of Noah? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, regardless of any trace of Neanderthal genes still present, one thing we know about humans is that if it looks...uh...screwable...someone, somewhere, sometime will have tried it. Just wander around the internet for examples today of just how out of the box some people think.