NationStates Jolt Archive

In this morning's Globe and Mail, I read a fascinating feature article about the exploration of the genes that seperate us as Humans. The medical, societal, and ethical implications of this legitimate, non-PC research are paramount.
the article is in the next post. Here's the HapMap website:http://www.hapmap.org/

"Why does Africa produce the world's fastest runners?
Why have Jews of European descent won so many nobel prizes?
Why do chinese seem to have the trimmest waistlines?"

Before you jump on me as a eugenics-spewing racist, have a read.

At the end of the Human Genome Project, four years ago, biologists declared that humans were only seperated from each other, in the farthest case, by about 0.1% of our genomes, a much smaller margin than other species. As it says in the article, two frogs in a pond are more diveregent genetically than any two people on earth. [This is because of the youth of humanity, and the genetic bottleneck during the ice age, among other resons]. Some geneticists went so far as to label called race a biological fiction, giving rise to the "race doesn't exist" mantra often seen on this forum, for example. The Human Genome Project sent a message of unity; new research is showing that race matters.

It seems, that this 0.1 percent is eminantly important. The international Haplotype Project (link (http://http://www.hapmap.org/index.html.en) ) is attempting to 'parse' this fraction of our genomes. It seems that random mutations, amplified through natural selection, occur at particular locci in the genome. The genome is split into recognizable blocks, like chapters, that can be traced across populations. Mutations (different ones) are often found in the same locations within these chapters, in very different populations. Researchers can therefore 'flip' to the exact page of the variations in the Human genome, and compare these areas of differnt individuals. They are now finding the spots that vary skin colour, vulnerability to desease, running ability, and yes, inteligence.

Pause.

It is well documented that drugs effect different races differently. Immunity is different among populations: example, there are 10% of Ashkenazi Jews that are imune to the HIV virus, as opposed to 1% in the general caucasian poulation.
"If genes predispose groups to certain diseases and health conditions, might we also find information that hints at more socially loaded conclusions?" asks Prof. Tim Caulfield of the University of Alberta. Scientists still must struggle between the combination of genes and environment that produce trends in a group. Think insurance premiums.

I don't know if I've structured this right, but I just wanted to throw it out there. As someone who will probably end up in genetics research, this is important to me. One last note: racists and hate groups are quoting these scientists, saying, "they're going to prove us right".

Here's the article, from The Globe And Mail
The new science of race by CAROLYN ABRAHAM

Saturday, June 18, 2005 Updated at 2:28 AM EDT

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

His group's theory is that during 1,000 years of persecution, social isolation and employment restrictions in Europe that kept Ashkenazi Jews from farming, they were forced into (then disreputable) jobs such as trade and finance, which demanded mental agility. Success in these fields could lead to food, shelter and family. Under such pressures, the paper suggests, genetic traits related to intelligence became more prevalent among central and northern European Jews.

Two U.S. journals refused the paper, an unusual experience for this widely published scholar. “We finally had to send the paper to England, where they're not so obsessed with political correctness,” Prof. Harpending said.

The danger of bolstering bigots is what has scientists so nervous. If a complex trait such as intelligence can be inherited, for instance, and you say one ethnic or racial group tends to have more of it than others, does it follow that another group has less?

Ever since the eugenics movement a century ago, which led to forced sterilizations in Canada and the United States to improve the racial stock of the human species, and then the horrors of Nazi Germany, such questions have been taboo.

University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton was internationally condemned 15 years ago for claiming to discover differences in brain size, intelligence, sexual habits and personality between whites, blacks and “Orientals.”

Yet the role of race in genetics is a subject scientists now believe they can't ignore. The future of medicine may depend on it.

In fact, a massive international effort, which includes many Canadian researchers, has been quietly under way for nearly four years to catalogue and compare the genetics of people with African, Asian and European ancestry.

It is called the Haplotype Project. You may not have heard a word about it before now. But by the end of this year, society may have to start facing its implications.

It was not supposed to be this way.

When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, its most touted result was that it showed no genetic basis for race. In fact, some scientists went so far as to dub race a “biological fiction.”

The project was a 13-year international drive to map all of the three billion chemical bits, or nucleotides, that make up human DNA. Particular nucleotide sequences (represented by the letters A, C, G and T) combine to form the estimated 25,000 genes whose proteins help to produce human traits, from the way your heart beats to the wave in your hair.

The map indicated that humans as a species are 99.9 per cent genetically identical — that, in fact, there are greater differences between two frogs in a pond than between any two people who find themselves waiting for a bus.

A teeny 0.1 per cent, a mere genetic sliver, helps to account for all the profound diversity within the human race, with its freckles, dimples, afros and crimson tresses, its shy and bombastic types, its Donald Trumps and Dalai Lamas, Madonnas and Mr. Dressups, Bill Gates, Billie Holidays, George W. Bushes and Osama bin Ladens.

It was a message of harmony: Hardly a hair of code separates us.

But five years later, one of scientists' main preoccupations has become to chart the genetic variations between and within racial groups — to parse that 0.1 per cent. These differences arise through mutations, which all begin as one-time flukes, but become more prevalent in a particular place if they offer a survival advantage, carriers have more children or they result in a trait a society finds desirable.

Now, teams are panning for gene types to help explain why West Africa produces the fastest runners in the world. A University of Toronto researcher is hunting the gene types that account for skin colours.

A Pennsylvania State University scientist is teasing out the biology behind other variable physical traits, such as height or hair texture.

More crucially, it has become obvious that the 0.1 per cent may add up to the difference between sickness and health.

In Canada, researchers from McMaster and McGill Universities are breaking down heart disease by nationality to understand the interplay of genes and environment. The answers may explain why South Asians suffer high rates of high blood pressure, why heart attacks hit Middle Eastern men 10 years earlier than Europeans, or why the Chinese seem to boast the trimmest waistlines in the world.

The genes discussed in Dr. Harpending's team's paper, meanwhile, are known to be the ones that account for the high Ashkenazi rates of breast cancer, the neurological disorder Tay-Sachs and other conditions. The mystery is why these traits have persisted at high rates over generations. The Utah group's conclusion (to be published in the Cambridge University Press Journal of Biosocial Science) is that the diseases are a tragic side effect of genes selected for their role in boosting brain function.

Given the explosion of research in race and genetics, Francis Collins, a former leader of the Human Genome Project, had to admit in the journal Nature Genetics last fall that “well-intentioned statements” about the biological insignificance of race may have left the wrong impression: “It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry.”

Alan Bernstein had warned him. In the fall of 2000, the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research heard Dr. Collins speak at Harvard about there being no significant differences between races. “That's going to come back at you,” he said.

According to Dr. Bernstein, 0.1 per cent is actually far from an insignificant difference in the genome's chemical sequence. In fact, he said, the genetic distance between humans and gorillas is not much greater. “It's silly to try and be politically correct about it.” What matters, Dr. Bernstein said, is to treat it scientifically.

The most organized effort to do that to date is the International Haplotype Project. Scientists in Canada, the United States, Britain, China, Japan and Nigeria are spending $185-million to chart the genomes of people from Tokyo, residents of Beijing, the Yoruba in Nigeria and Americans of Western and Northern European descent — 270 people in all.

Using these maps to find genetic differences between ethnic groups could lay the groundwork for new treatments and cures. It might help predict a person's response to a given drug, and allow for tailor-made medications with fewer side effects. It could bring the medical advances genetics has long promised.

On the other hand, the knowledge may raise more questions about the meaning of racial differences than anyone cares to answer.

The Quebec Genome Innovation Centre at McGill University is a cold, sleek structure that screams clinical precision, with its glass walls, concrete columns and lateral steel beams. The equipment inside is as expensive as the $30-million, 50,000-square-foot building that houses it.

Its three floors of labs and DNA sequencing technology crunch genetic data at a rate no one even imagined five years ago. In 2001, it took a year to run 50,000 genetic tests. Today, said the centre's director, Tom Hudson, they can shoot out the results of 20 million tests in a week.

This speed comes courtesy of such mind-boggling gadgets as the array centrix, a small board of 96 fibre-optic spikes, the tips of which can be coated in DNA and 1,500 genetic tests run on each tip — at the same time.

“From one drop of blood, you can do hundreds of thousands of tests,” Dr. Hudson enthused.

From one drop of blood you also can discern the ethnic background of the person being tested with fairly good certainty.

So it is here, where technology has shrunk costs to just pennies per test, that major sections of the Haplotype Project's “HapMap” are being generated.

The project was born in the summer before Sept. 11, 2001. At first, it seemed destined for obscurity. Scientists at the University of Toronto, McGill and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been hunting gene mutations that increased the risk of Crohn's disease in 200 Toronto-area families of mostly European heritage — British, Polish, French and Greek.

In the process, they stumbled on a remarkable discovery. The genome's three billion chemical letters appear to be arranged in blocks — like paragraphs in a text. Some are longer, some shorter, but all have fairly clear beginnings and ends.

The pattern seemed to make sense. In the genetic mix and mingle of conception, the mother's and father's DNA are passed down to the next generation in these kinds of heritable chunks. Researchers estimate there are 100,000 such blocks in each person's genome.

What's more, gene mutations within those blocks seem to fall in the same places, even in different families. It's like a library in which every book contains a typo in the first paragraph on the second page, or the fourth paragraph on every fifth page. The misprints might be different, Dr. Hudson explained, but they occur in the same locations. For finding genetic mutations, the pattern seemed as good as an index: Instead of scanning the whole book, you could flip straight to page 2 or page 5.

The discovery seemed to cry out for a new map of the human genome, one that would show the haplotype blocks and highlight each paragraph in the book of life.

“Everyone knew this was important,” Dr. Hudson said. “But there was no big press release.” Coming out a month after Sept. 11, the discovery of haplotype blocks attracted little initial attention. But for scientists it couldn't have come at a better time.

Traditional methods to find mutated genes in family studies and remote populations had hit a wall. Yes, they could find the lone mutation that led to a rare disorder such as Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis. But trying to find the dozens of mutations that increase the risk of common diseases like cancers or asthma would simply require too many patients and too much data crunching.

With a haplotype map, they would be able to search the genomes of huge numbers of people with a particular disease, in search of a common typo in a particular paragraph.

First, however, the HapMap researchers had to find out if their theory would apply to the genomes of people around the world. The maps provided by the Human Genome Project would offer little help, because they had been rough compilations based on various people, with little regard for ethnic background.

The next question was, whose genomes should they use?

When HapMap scientists met in Washington in 2002 to discuss the issue, Dr. Hudson — a 44-year-old, buttoned-down geneticist much more comfortable with technical issues than social ones — was taken aback at the incendiary debate that broke out. It was the kind of battle that seems bound to become more frequent as scientists continue to explore this sensitive area.

“As Canadians, we are not used to the high emotions around race, as they are in the U.S.,” he said. In that two-day meeting and others to come, African-American community leaders, ethicists and philosophers unleashed their fears and frustrations.

“There were two points of view,” Dr. Hudson recalled. “One of them is, ‘You're only going to be studying Caucasian chromosomes, clearly, because you only want to find tests for North Americans and U.S. people with money.' ”

But if Africans and other populations were included in the map, there was serious concern that any differences found in their genomes might leave them open to another tier of discrimination, perhaps from health-insurance companies.

In the United States, where the mortality rates for a range of diseases are higher among blacks than whites, such disputes are common. For example, scientists and sociologists continue to argue over whether African Americans' high rates of hypertension are due to genes or to environment.

One contentious theory suggests African Americans descend from those slaves who were able to survive the dry and hungry trip from Africa thanks to a genetic quirk that enabled them to retain moisture and salt — which also can contribute to high blood pressure.

But others say it is due to diet and stress. As New York University sociologist Troy Duster told The New York Times last fall, “If you follow me around Nordstrom's and put me in jail at nine times the rate of whites and refuse to give me a bank loan, I might get hypertensive.”

In the end, the HapMap team decided to include African chromosomes, along with those from Japan, China and the United States. It was a diverse enough sampling to tell them if the haplotype theory would hold up, but selective enough for their limited budget.

At the same time, ethicists joined the project to ensure that all DNA donors would be aware of the risks of participating — namely, that any dramatic genetic differences the project discovered could end up stigmatizing their communities.

“Certainly,” Dr. Hudson said, “there's enough examples already of racism in the world — before genetics, during genetics and after genetics — that there's no doubt someone would try to use the information for genetic discrimination.”

Despite the long and ugly social history of race, there is no clear-cut definition for the term. Is a person's race defined by skin colour, that most visible of markers? By language, country of birth, the food they eat or the religion they practice? Not even scientists can agree.

“If you have a [genetic] sample from Nigeria, can you really say that it represents Africans? Is that the same as African Americans? , Jews are white, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're compared to Caucasians,” said Celeste Condit, a professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia who specializes in biomedical issues.

“The scientists have been irresponsible for not developing a language for this,” Prof. Condit said. “Usually scientists are very careful in developing their technical vocabulary. But it's hard to describe the geographic dispersion of people properly — and they have these easy [racial] terms in their heads.”

Of course, geneticists already know that since people have ancestors from all over the world, no one fits neatly into any one racial box. We are all of us mixed, even if our complexions suggest otherwise. There also can be greater genetic differences within racial groups than between them.

But since no one now has the resources to uncover the secrets in every patient's DNA, both science and medicine are using “race” as an easy, if dangerous, shortcut.

“Until we can scan the genome of every individual,” said Tim Caulfield, director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, “race has become this rough proxy.”

Yet HapMap researchers are indeed finding that the genetic lines between their groups are terribly blurry. In fact, the block structures are similar in all of them.

“Humans as a species are just so young there hasn't been enough time for the genome to alter that dramatically,” Dr. Hudson said. (Frogs, on the other hand, have a few more millennia behind them than people.)

As expected, they are finding the most variations in the DNA of donors from Africa, where modern humans are believed to have arisen 150,000 years ago. It is thought that the rest of the planet's populations are all descendents of a small group who only wandered out of Africa roughly 60,000 years ago, so there has been less time for those genes to mutate in the rest of the world.

What they do know, Dr. Hudson stressed, is that the mutations they are cataloguing — the 10 million or so most common ones — appear to exist in all populations. Just not at the same frequencies.

“Almost all the differences you see in people in North America are differences you see in Africa, are differences you see in Asia,” he said. “It's very rare to have something you only see in [one place].” And when you do, he said, it's uncommon even in that population.

One stunning example is a gene variant that makes 1 per cent of Caucasians (and an estimated 10 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews) immune to HIV infection. It blocks receptors on the surface of cells where the AIDS virus would otherwise enter. Scientists suspect the trait was passed down from Europeans who survived medieval smallpox plagues thanks to the same mutation.

Another variant known to be fairly exclusive to a particular people is the “Duffy null” mutation in people from sub-Saharan Africa. Penn State genetic anthropologist Mark Shriver explained that it likely became prevalent there because it offered protection against a particular type of malaria, “but it didn't spread widely outside of Africa.”

Yet Dr. Shriver, who by all outward appearances is a white man, happens to carry it. A scan of his genome suggests that while he is predominantly European, he is also about 11 per cent West African and 3 per cent native American.

“Race just doesn't exist in a critical line,” he said. “It's more of a gradient.”

Dr. Shriver applauds the information flowing in from the HapMap project (which is freely available on-line), calling it “a revolutionary tool” for science. But others are not so impressed.

“Basically, it is a total waste of money,” Columbia University geneticist Joseph Terwilliger said.

Dr. Terwilliger argued that by focusing on the most common genetic mutations, the project would overlook the most specific differences to be found in any group. It would make “populations look systematically more similar to one another than they really are.”

Medically important traits — such as the HIV-resisting gene type — could be missed if researchers do not deliberately hone in on the rarer quirks in each particular racial group.

“Different populations have enormous differences,” Dr. Terwilliger said. “If this were not true, then there is no way we can determine how we are related and how populations migrated historically.

“You cannot put people neatly in a small number of meaningful categories like black, white or Asian. That said, Koreans and Chinese are genetically vastly more similar than either are to Germans.”

The controversy around the scientific meaning of race is already spilling over from the lab to the medical clinic. Researchers continue to debate definitions, but the age of race-based medicine is upon us.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the world's first “ethnic” medication last fall, a heart-failure drug for African Americans known as BiDil. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is developing marketing plans for a lung-cancer drug that flopped in Caucasians but seems to work for Asians.

No one yet fully understands the actual genetic traits that make these drugs effective in these groups. And scientists have every reason to believe people other than blacks or Asians may carry these traits. But for now, prescriptions for such medications are to be based on little more than physical appearances and questions about a patient's heritage.

And this, Prof. Condit argued, could lead to significant risks. Doctors may end up denying a drug to Caucasians who might benefit from it, because it is touted to work only in South Asians. Or they might prescribe a pill to a black person who actually would benefit from some other treatment. (For example, research has found that as many as 30 per cent of African-American men have a white male ancestor, a fact attributed to the sexual politics of slavery.)

Prof. Condit has tried to bring the inherent dangers of race-based science to the attention of the researchers involved. She has published journal articles, held focus groups and arranged meetings that few scientists leave their labs to attend. Without careful consideration and communication, she warned, modern medicine could set race relations back decades.

She offered this scenario: Imagine a drug marketed only for blacks, a simple pain reliever, prescribed in the millions. Now imagine that, like a certain now-notorious pain medication, it turns out to have the horrible side effect of increasing the risk of heart attacks. Result: Tens of thousands of North American blacks — and only blacks — die.

“What happens if you get a Vioxx situation with one of these drugs? And the likelihood of this happening is very high,” she said. “But until there's a catastrophe, people don't want to deal with it. You are playing with fire.”

Those watching the field of modern racial genetics explode are already concerned.

“If genes predispose groups to certain diseases or health conditions, might we also find information that hints at more socially loaded conclusions?” the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield wondered.

Last summer, Prof. Caulfield was surprised to read an article in the prestigious journal Science titled, “Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners.” It noted that all but six of the 500 fastest times for the 100-metre dash have come from sprinters of West African descent, which includes most U.S. blacks. Kenyans, meanwhile, dominate world records in long-distance races.

According to the report, Swedish physiologists trying to penetrate the “Kenyan mystique” compared runners from Africa and Scandinavia on treadmill times, lung capacity, heart rates and body weights. Limb measurements indicated that the Kenyans carried 400 grams less flesh on each calf. The report referred to their “birdlike legs,” explaining how Kenyan runners squeeze more power from their oxygen intake, since “they need less energy to swing their limbs.”

Research on West Africa's sprinters, meanwhile, revealed a body type of heavier “fast-twitch” muscles, versus the lighter “slow-twitch” muscles of endurance runners, as well as denser bones, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs and lighter calves. Efforts are now under way to decode the genetics behind all these traits.

Like Prof. Harpending's paper on Ashkenazi Jews, the report on African runners presented a positive picture of its subjects, albeit a stereotypical one. Yet it seemed eerily reminiscent of ugly 19th-century efforts to gauge racial differences with calipers and cranial measurements.

Prof. Caulfield, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, was mostly concerned about where such research would lead. Already, he said, an Australian company is cashing in on the notion that some people are born to run, offering to test a child's genes for fast- or slow-twitch muscles — “so you know which sport to put your kid in.”

While he said he loathes the idea of restricting scientific research in a free, democratic society, Prof. Caulfield described the race-based search for disease genes as a Pandora's box.

Studies are sure to appear on genes linked to complex characteristics in racial groups, such as athletic or cognitive ability or even criminal behaviour. But these traits, he stressed, are anything but a simple story of genetics.

“It's like beauty,” he said. “Being beautiful will involve the interplay of thousands of genes and social factors that dictate at a given time what is beautiful. It's a very complex story, it involves culture, socio-economic class, experience. . . . So how do you handle that information?”

As Penn State's Mark Shriver put it, “It's not that genes for IQ, athletic ability and musical ability don't exist. But you just can't tease apart the affect of environment in shaping these abilities.”

If people are starting to overestimate the role genes play in shaping human health and behaviour — and underestimate the huge impact of experience, environment and social forces — Columbia's Joseph Terwilliger said that scientists must share the blame.

“In many ways, scientists over-hyped the information in the genome, or at least what we know about it, to the point where now people are getting unnecessarily nervous about societal implications,” he said.

“The fact is that to get the funding they sold genetic determinism, which of course is nothing close to reality. And now they are paying the price.”

This year, the journal American Psychologist devoted an entire issue to the impact race and genetics could have on its field, raising a list of the difficult questions ahead. It included three papers on the controversial issue of intelligence, including one commentary arguing that genes should get more attention in studies of racial intellectual differences.

For Dr. Harpending, who admitted he would never have “even muttered in public” his theories about Ashkenazi Jews and intelligence were he not a senior professor with tenure, this type of conversation cannot come soon enough.

“There is this massive disconnect between public and private discourse; between what's said in the public arena and what your neighbour tells you [about racial groups] over the fence,” he said. “Some of those things are wrong and bigoted, but some of those are right.”

Perhaps. But would Prof. Harpending dare match his Ashkenazi study with one of India's lowest Hindu caste, the so-called untouchables, who like European Jews have historically been an isolated society — except, in this case, relegated to centuries of cleaning latrines?

“One is the mirror image of the other, I suppose,” he admitted. “I would personally find that distasteful. But if I had a theory about it, I would hope that I would publish it.”

If the race debate in science seems sticky now, it's only going to get worse.

This summer, scientists from all over the world are gathering to discuss plans for yet another map of the human genome. This one is based again on a discovery involving Canadian research — and in scientific terms, it is hard to overstate its significance.

Geneticist Steve Scherer, a senior scientist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, working with colleagues at Harvard University, discovered last August that the basic model of simple genetic inheritance science has clung to for 100 years is wrong: Mom and dad don't always make equal genetic contributions in the creation of a child's genome.

Instead, some people might end up with three, four or even more copies of a gene from one parent, instead of the single copy of each gene scientists thought each parent always contributed.

The implications could be huge. There might be greater genetic differences between individuals — and certain populations — than anyone imagined. Certainly, there are more than the HapMap is charting, Dr. Scherer said.

Might one ethnic group, for example, carry an overload or an underload of genes for a particular trait?

“I think it was premature to say that the difference between people might only be 0.1 per cent,” Dr. Scherer said. “Based on what we know now, it is probably in the 0.2 per cent range. And in the end it may even be as high as 1 per cent.”

Dr. Scherer spent two days last August fielding media calls when the news first broke. He did most of the interviews by phone, but in a few cases it was easiest to respond by e-mail.

Then came a call from his Harvard collaborators informing him that one of those e-mail interviews had been with a writer who worked for a neo-Nazi website. The writer spun the news as scientific proof of genetic differences between races — without even misquoting or twisting Dr. Scherer's words.

“As a geneticist,” the 41-year-old Dr. Scherer said, “it's your worst nightmare.”

The HapMap's Tom Hudson in Montreal has had the same one. A colleague recently referred him to an Internet hate site that declared the HapMap would finally prove the biological basis of race.

“It made me queasy, because they actually name the name of my friend, my colleague in Boston. And they actually say, ‘He's going to prove us right.'

“I didn't understand what I was reading when I first read it,” Dr. Hudson said. “I never read something that was so disgusting.”

It wasn't an isolated incident.

Morris Foster, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and one of the HapMap's leaders, said researchers are tracking racist sites for references to the HapMap, which logs 20,000 downloads a week from its public database. They have amassed quite a collection.

Not only do the hate sites keep abreast of what HapMap information has become available (such as recent data on Japanese and Nigerians), but they anxiously await findings that will help unveil genetic traits linked to such things as crime and cognitive ability by race.

“Once it is scientifically demonstrated,” one web contributor writes, “that will be the beginning of the end for the Marxist-egalitarian argument over race. Personally, I can't wait.”

Even Western Ontario's infamous J. Philippe Rushton has seized upon modern genetics as an opportunity to make his case again, in the company of Arthur Jensen, a University of California psychology professor who argues that race determines IQ.

This month, the unpopular scholars have the lead article in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law , presenting 60 pages of evidence arguing that genes explain 50 per cent of the IQ differences between races, in which Asians rank higher than whites and whites higher than blacks.

(The publisher, the American Psychological Association, invited scientists to rebut the paper in the same issue.)

And yet, despite all the social hazards of modern genetics, Dr. Scherer said scientists should not “have to fear discussing their results of their research, so long as they are open-minded and listen to criticisms and comments from others, including the public.

“I always wonder what Darwin would have done in today's world.”

The ultimate test, Dr. Harpending pointed out, lies not with researchers, but with the public.

He described projects under way involving genes potentially associated with controversial behaviours such as sexual promiscuity, adultery and family abandonment.

“A number of things are coming down the pipe,” he said, “that we are going to have to figure out how to cope with as a decent and moral society.”

[i]Carolyn Abraham is The Globe and Mail's medical reporter. Dempumblicents! I need you!

Ok, so certain genes are more common to certain peoples - and yes, as the article said this is the result of natural selection by the environment (simple biology).

Still, these changes aren't significant enough to prevent us from intermating.....

So the Left was wrong? So what. At least I now know its no longer my fault that I'm of mediocre intelligence. Now I can get people off my back about college.

In this morning's Globe and Mail, I read a fascinating feature article about the exploration of the genes that seperate us as Humans. The medical, societal, and ethical implications of this legitimate, non-PC research are paramount.
Article (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050618.wxrace0618/BNStory/Front/)

"Why does Africa produce the world's fastest runners?
Why have Jews of European descent won so many nobel prizes?
Why do chinese seem to have the trimmest waistlines?"

Before you jump on me as a eugenics-spewing racist, have a read.

At the end of the Human Genome Project, four years ago, biologists declared that humans were only seperated from each other, in the farthest case, by about 0.1% of our genomes, a much smaller margin than other species. As it says in the article, two frogs in a pond are more diveregent genetically than any two people on earth. [This is because of the youth of humanity, and the genetic bottleneck during the ice age, among other resons]. Some geneticists went so far as to label called race a biological fiction, giving rise to the "race doesn't exist" mantra often seen on this forum, for example. The Human Genome Project sent a message of unity; new research is showing that race matters.

It seems, that this 0.1 percent is eminantly important. The international Haplotype Project (link (http://http://www.hapmap.org/index.html.en) ) is attempting to 'parse' this fraction of our genomes. It seems that random mutations, amplified through natural selection, occur at particular locci in the genome. The genome is split into recognizable blocks, like chapters, that can be traced across populations. Mutations (different ones) are often found in the same locations within these chapters, in very different populations. Researchers can therefore 'flip' to the exact page of the variations in the Human genome, and compare these areas of differnt individuals. They are now finding the spots that vary skin colour, vulnerability to desease, running ability, and yes, inteligence.

Pause.

It is well documented that drugs effect different races differently. Immunity is different among populations: example, there are 10% of Ashkenazi Jews that are imune to the HIV virus, as opposed to 1% in the general caucasian poulation. If genes predispose groups to certain diseasea and health conditions, might we also find information that hints at more socially loaded conclusions?" asks Prof. Tim Caulfield of the University of Alberta. Scientists still must struggle between the combination of genes and environment that produce trends in a group. Think insurance premiums.

I don't know if I've structured this right, but I just wanted to throw it out there. As someone who will probably end up in genetics research, this is important to me. One last note: racists and hate groups are quoting these scientists, saying, "they're going to prove us right".

I don't need a study to know what happened. It's common sense: Isolation.

Over the course of a few thousand years, groups of people tended to cluster together in communities. Over a dozen or more generations of cross-breeding, separated either physically(even as little as 200 miles was a lot further than it is now. Nevermind if there are mountains or desert in the way.), religiously or politically caused these societies to develop traits that were considered useful or attractive to the people of the community. As time passed, these local traits grew more pronounced. In similar geographic areas(europe, for example), these isolated societies had similar needs, and therefore, similar useful traits came to the foreground. Even when 'tribe a' and 'tribe b' (or village, city-state. whatever) interacted, as rare as that might be, they were not so different from eachother. On the other hand, tribes c and d in Equatorial Africa, had much different needs, and therefore, the successful breeders passed on different traits, and different characteristics became more pronounced.

Asia, The Americas, all the same. The closer the tribes interacted physically and socially, the more alike they were. While tribes separated by large distances and rarely if ever coming into contact, began to diverge genetically.

100 generations later, we come up with the 'races'. In the natural world, 100 generations really isn't all that much. 1000 generations isn't all that much.

Here's the deal, however. Isolation is gone. Poof. The 'useful' traits have changed. More specifically, all races have something more pronounced and useful than any of the others have. And all the others have use for those traits in a vastly shrinking world.

So what you are going to see, inevitably, over the course of the next 100 generations are the vanishing of relatively unimportant traits(pale skin, flat noses, oval-shaped eyes, whatever) and the pronounced increase of the traits useful to modern man, which is rapidly approaching a single tribe, geographically.

Perhaps, as time goes by, new 'races' will replace the old. Perhaps people will become specialized for certain harsh environments. Aquatic humans. Arctic humans. Subterranean humans. Space humans. But regardless, the lack of geographic, political and religious isolation have made all the current races obsolete.

I wish it weren't so, but it looks like one of my most key beliefs has been refuted.

Here's the deal, however. Isolation is gone. Poof. The 'useful' traits have changed. More specifically, all races have something more pronounced and useful than any of the others have. And all the others have use for those traits in a vastly shrinking world.

So what you are going to see, inevitably, over the course of the next 100 generations are the vanishing of relatively unimportant traits(pale skin, flat noses, oval-shaped eyes, whatever) and the pronounced increase of the traits useful to modern man, which is rapidly approaching a single tribe, geographically. In the very long run, yes. In fact, even now, we are all highly mixed. someone who outwardly looks like a normal caucasian most likely has some native american and black mixed in - there's a record in the genes.

Perhaps, as time goes by, new 'races' will replace the old. Perhaps people will become specialized for certain harsh environments. Aquatic humans. Arctic humans. Subterranean humans. Space humans. But regardless, the lack of geographic, political and religious isolation have made all the current races obsolete.This is pure science fiction. Aquatic humans? subterranean humans? Natural selection can only begin if the species is already IN a given environment and must adapt to survive. Humans are no longer evolving in that way. The current races are not obsolete at all: they could be key in genetic therapies, an regular drug development.

I wish it weren't so, but it looks like one of my most key beliefs has been refuted. Which belief?

So the Left was wrong? So what. At least I now know its no longer my fault that I'm of mediocre intelligence. Now I can get people off my back about college.

Wrong about what?

Which belief?

~and~

Wrong about what?

Racial equality.

Racial equality.

Never met a leftist racist? Ever hear of W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Agustinho Neto, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, etc.? Granted, most racists are right-wing, but right-wingers don't have a monopoly in racism.

Never met a leftist racist? Ever hear of W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Agustinho Neto, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, etc.? Granted, most racists are right-wing, but right-wingers don't have a monopoly in racism.

Good point, though they were a different kind of racism, really.

Good point, though they were a different kind of racism, really.
Not to mention that affirmative action is leftist racism if there was any.

Why does Africa produce the world's fastest runners?

No, not Africa. West Africa. If by fastest you mean sprinters. And if you mean marathon runners, many champions come from Kenya. Sure there could be a genetic component, but I'd also look at culture, the low cost of training to run, and Kenya's high altitude that forces Kenyan's blood to develop higher oxygen carrying capacity. Where are you going to draw the line between races? Are West Africans a different race from Kenyans? A lot of people would say they are. But are coastal Kenyans a different race from highland Kenyans? Why are they, or why aren't they? If ability to win marathons is a defining characteristic of race, then lowlanders and highlanders should be different races. This is why I generally don't find race to be a very helpful term and I expect people to define what they are talking about everytime I hear it to prevent stupid arguements.

And why are there so few African cyclists? Surely if you have a genetic advantage to run fast, you have a genetic advantage to ride a bike fast.

Why have Jews of European descent won so many nobel prizes?Probably culture. I doubt there is a genetic component, but I can't say that there isn't, who knows? If any groups are going to be smarter than average they are more likely to be populations isolated from the diseases of Eurasia and Africa because those groups proably had more selection pressure for intelligence and less for disease resistance.

And are all Jewish people members of the Jewish race? Race is a pretty weird term if it applies to your religion.

Why do chinese seem to have the trimmest waistlines?
Increasing affluence in Asian countries is resulting in increasing waistlines. Sure there could be genetic differences, but there's not a lot of evidence for it that I can see.

Not that there aren't genetic differences between populations, but a lot of what is said about race is plain silly. In the 1930's it was said that Jewish people had a racial advantage when it came to basketball. An idea that you probably won't hear these days.

Any other questions?

Not to mention that affirmative action is leftist racism if there was any.

Good point. If indeed there was "no such thing as race" then how the hell could affirmative action work? It's based on legally deferantiating races. Of course, legal matters account for jack shit when it comes to genetics so it really is arbitrary.

In the very long run, yes. In fact, even now, we are all highly mixed. someone who outwardly looks like a normal caucasian most likely has some native american and black mixed in - there's a record in the genes.

Aren’t most Sicilians and a whole lot of Italians mixed black? I would imagine rape (and legitimate relationships, they were around for a long time) was very common during the Punic Wars.

So closely related groups share more genes than other groups. What a surprise. That's like saying that you have more in common genetically with members of your family than with other people.

So closely related groups share more genes than other groups. What a surprise. That's like saying that you have more in common genetically with members of your family than with other people.

But they're also implying that the Jews are genetically superior.

But they're also implying that the Jews are genetically superior.
Maybe the article because it was written by a journalist who doesn't necessarily understand genetics or the project. The project itself simply wants to know what the relation between groups and vulnerability to disease are.

genetically superiorJust because one group is more intelligent in some ways than another group doesn't make them genetically superiour. Australians may have developed greater intelligence than Europeans but this was merely because they had less selection pressure due to disease, which allowed for greater selection pressure for intelligence. Both population's genes were optimized for their environment. My jet black/pasty white skin is helpful in some environments, not so helpful in others.

Of course the article also says this:

Of course, geneticists already know that since people have ancestors from all over the world, no one fits neatly into any one racial box. We are all of us mixed, even if our complexions suggest otherwise. There also can be greater genetic differences within racial groups than between them.

Yes, we may have 0.1% difference, but the fact that there can be greater differences within races than in comparison to other races suggests that it's not necessarily our race that's genetically important, but perhaps our particular population...

Heh, these people are genius though...

Prof. Caulfield, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, was mostly concerned about where such research would lead. Already, he said, an Australian company is cashing in on the notion that some people are born to run, offering to test a child's genes for fast- or slow-twitch muscles — “so you know which sport to put your kid in.”

Seriously, talk about getting in on the ground floor of something, they haven't even really got a clue of what's going on yet and these people are cashing in on what little is known.

The interesting question is if they took into account the idea that all modern races could actually be the result of earlier race mixing.

And also, they make an excellent point here:

Studies are sure to appear on genes linked to complex characteristics in racial groups, such as athletic or cognitive ability or even criminal behaviour. But these traits, he stressed, are anything but a simple story of genetics.

“It's like beauty,” he said. “Being beautiful will involve the interplay of thousands of genes and social factors that dictate at a given time what is beautiful. It's a very complex story, it involves culture, socio-economic class, experience. . . . So how do you handle that information?”

As Penn State's Mark Shriver put it, “It's not that genes for IQ, athletic ability and musical ability don't exist. But you just can't tease apart the affect of environment in shaping these abilities.”

If people are starting to overestimate the role genes play in shaping human health and behaviour — and underestimate the huge impact of experience, environment and social forces — Columbia's Joseph Terwilliger said that scientists must share the blame.

“In many ways, scientists over-hyped the information in the genome, or at least what we know about it, to the point where now people are getting unnecessarily nervous about societal implications,” he said.

“The fact is that to get the funding they sold genetic determinism, which of course is nothing close to reality. And now they are paying the price.”

Genetics aren't the be all and end all of ones potential achievements. You can be born to complete morons, raised in an enriched environment and be a super genius... your genes really mostly determine your appearance and other physical characteristics, the environment has a huge impact on who you are.

Also, having read the entire article, I don't see where this whole going on about jews being superior was. Perhaps I overlooked it.

The article did underline the danger of these studies... I think that it would be safer for everyone if the researchers just kept quiet about it until they found conclusive results rather than go about saying things at this stage when they haven't exactly determined what is going on.

Immunity is different among populations: example, there are 10% of Ashkenazi Jews that are imune to the HIV virus, as opposed to 1% in the general caucasian poulation.

I am calling bullshit right here! How the fuck did they determine this? Inject "jews" and "general caucasians" with all the strains of HIV and watched what happened?

Just because one group is more intelligent in some ways than another group doesn't make them genetically superiour. Australians may have developed greater intelligence than Europeans but this was merely because they had less selection pressure due to disease, which allowed for greater selection pressure for intelligence. Both population's genes were optimized for their environment. My jet black/pasty white skin is helpful in some environments, not so helpful in others.

Yes, well being of mediocre intelligence has done nothing but shatter my dreams. Some genetic advantage that is, being pushed into depression.

I am calling bullshit right here! How the fuck did they determine this? Inject "jews" and "general caucasians" with all the strains of HIV and watched what happened?

Or, they could have paid attention to hospital records about people investigating the possibility they are infected with HIV.

The whole thing will soon be moot anyway. Once the current research into manipulation of the human genone comes to fruition, parents will be able to specify which traits and characteristics they want their children to have. Eventually, we will be able to tailor the genetic makeup of humans to make them viable in virtually any enviornment, including alien ones.

One last note: racists and hate groups are quoting these scientists, saying, "they're going to prove us right".

Perhaps those scientists will find the gene for racism first?

This study looks like bad science--how do they eliminate socio-economic and cultural (i.e. non-genetic) factors in this study? Some cultures may be better suited toward promoting chess ability or academic success than others--so if you're raised in one group, regardless of genetics, the differences might still be there. There are political and economic factors to be considered, too. There's so much room for interpretation and confounded data here...

This kind of research is not honest--why even bother asking questions about race unless they've already got an opinion they're trying to prove? If they just wanted to do science, they'd phrase it all in purely bio-chemical terms. So much for objectivity.

The whole thing will soon be moot anyway. ... Eventually, we will be able to tailor the genetic makeup of humans to make them viable in virtually any enviornment, including alien ones.

That's totally true. I'm just worried that'll end in disaster. How will we know what traits future environments will demand of us? What we want in our genes, and what we need, are two different things.

I loved the movie Gattaca for this--it got right in there about genetic superiority; why the very concept is a bad idea...

That's totally true. I'm just worried that'll end in disaster. How will we know what traits future environments will demand of us? What we want in our genes, and what we need, are two different things.

I loved the movie Gattaca for this--it got right in there about genetic superiority; why the very concept is a bad idea...
Scary stuff. The development of atomic energy will seem like child's play by comparison with the potential for damage via genetic manipulation.

I loved Gattaca too ... bought a copy. :)

This study looks like bad science--how do they eliminate socio-economic and cultural (i.e. non-genetic) factors in this study? Some cultures may be better suited toward promoting chess ability or academic success than others--so if you're raised in one group, regardless of genetics, the differences might still be there. There are political and economic factors to be considered, too. There's so much room for interpretation and confounded data here...

This kind of research is not honest--why even bother asking questions about race unless they've already got an opinion they're trying to prove? If they just wanted to do science, they'd phrase it all in purely bio-chemical terms. So much for objectivity.
I'm inclined to agree when it comes to personality factors relating to genetics, sucha s intelligence and the like, it is quite possible that it is environment and the parents themselves, for instance, asians are perceived as highly intelligent, but many asian parents push their children, thus resulting in kids who are more academically successful. It's not genetics necessarily, it's at least partially cultural.

However, things like resistance to disease and body build and the like are genetic predominantly. As long as they stick to the physical aspect, what can be confirmed or disconfirmed (unless they combine studies of genetics with behaviour studies to strengthen a genetic-behaviour link first) then they should be ok.

Or, they could have paid attention to hospital records about people investigating the possibility they are infected with HIV.

Sample bias &c. :rolleyes:

However, things like resistance to disease and body build and the like are genetic predominantly...

That's true. Looking into the factors behind these can be okay, just as long as it doesn't lead to the idea that we can start building a genetically superior master race--no genome can possibly have it all.

Scary stuff. The development of atomic energy will seem like child's play by comparison with the potential for damage via genetic manipulation.

I loved Gattaca too ... bought a copy.

Too true... it's quite a can of worms we're opening, and all for the wrong reasons. Oh well. Everything is double edged. Hopefully its worth the risk, cause I guess it's going to happen anyway.

Gattaca's a great movie isn't it? :) ...the idea that a person with physical, emotional, or even genetic weaknesses may actually have an edge over apparently "superior" people. They have to work that much harder, and so they learn how to transcend all limitations. Interesting...

Not to mention that affirmative action is leftist racism if there was any.

Depends on how you define affirmative action.

If you mean the strictly quota based kind then yes, I'd agree, though it isn't my primary objection to it. But that isn't really an ideological stand that left wingers take, merely a strategy towards their ideological stand. A strategy that I think doesn't work (that would be my primary objection to it).

Those on the left who approach this from a strictly ideological approach (a deadly mistake in any plan regardless of your political inclination) tend to operate under the assumption that blacks and whites at any age will perform exactly the same if prejudice factors are removed. Under this assumption, a quota system makes sense, but the assumption is flawed. Black students come from underfunded inner city schools in disproportionate numbers. They haven't been provided with the education to pepare them for college. If they're let in anyway, then they're being set up to fail. In gender relations this is called the class cliff (as opposed to the glass cieling).

On the other hand, rightist ideology tends to assume that opportunities already are equal, and nothing needs to be done to promote equality. Statistical evidence of inequality is assumed to either be the fault of the race in question, or merely a statistical anomoly.

Both assumptions are flawed, not because either one is obviously untrue, but rather because they're assumptions. i.e. not supported by evidence.

Affirmative Action includes any efforts to promote equality of opportunity. In college for example.

If you just use a quota system then you're helping no one. It breeds resentment in the white students who feel that they are having their birthrights stolen by inferior charity cases. It reinforces the stereotype of underachieving blacks. And it doesn't result in black people being any better represented in the upper classes.

But what if you were to take a look at the primary and secondary schools that these black students attend in disproportionate numbers and try to fix those up and provide them with a good education from the begining.

That's affirmative action too. And there's nothing racist about it because you have to take a look at all underperforming schools. A lot of conflict that gets attributed to race in this country really has alot more to do with socio-economic factors than race.

No, not Africa. West Africa. If by fastest you mean sprinters. And if you mean marathon runners, many champions come from Kenya. Sure there could be a genetic component, but I'd also look at culture, the low cost of training to run, and Kenya's high altitude that forces Kenyan's blood to develop higher oxygen carrying capacity. Where are you going to draw the line between races? Are West Africans a different race from Kenyans? A lot of people would say they are. But are coastal Kenyans a different race from highland Kenyans? Why are they, or why aren't they? If ability to win marathons is a defining characteristic of race, then lowlanders and highlanders should be different races. genetically speaking, they may be. Africa contains the largest more genetic variations than all the other continents combined. The environmental situations you cite may be true, but all elite athletes train extremely hard. Did you even read the article? These scientist are talking about GENETIC differences that exist. All you are doing is finding environmental scenarios that compliment (or alternately, may have created) them. This is why I generally don't find race to be a very helpful term and I expect people to define what they are talking about everytime I hear it to prevent stupid arguements. There is certainly an issue of sematics here, and scientists need to develope neutral language to deal with these topics of research. The hapMap website has a page (http://www.hapmap.org/citinghapmap.html) on this.
And why are there so few African cyclists? Surely if you have a genetic advantage to run fast, you have a genetic advantage to ride a bike fast.They use different muscles.
[apropos Ashkenazi Jews]Probably culture. I doubt there is a genetic component, but I can't say that there isn't, who knows? If any groups are going to be smarter than average they are more likely to be populations isolated from the diseases of Eurasia and Africa because those groups proably had more selection pressure for intelligence and less for disease resistance. This is what we're talking about. Did you even read the article?
And are all Jewish people members of the Jewish race? Race is a pretty weird term if it applies to your religion.Well, the jewish population in europe was fairly isolated, so Jews of German, Polish, and Russian descent, yes, genetiacally they belong to the genetically different group classified as ashkenazi jews. There are Jews from Egypt, India, Etheopia, and other places that have nothing to do with this group in terms of genetic similarity.
Yes, we may have 0.1% difference, but the fact that there can be greater differences within races than in comparison to other races suggests that it's not necessarily our race that's genetically important, but perhaps our particular population...'Population, and 'race' in this discussion are the same thing: they are just groups of people with traits in common. I think the distinctions between the differances within, and between populations is the location of genetic variation within the genome.
The interesting question is if they took into account the idea that all modern races could actually be the result of earlier race mixing Could you elaborate? we usually think of 'races' being the product of isolation, not mixing.
I am calling bullshit right here! How the fuck did they determine this? Inject "jews" and "general caucasians" with all the strains of HIV and watched what happened? There are more elegant ways of knowing this. Genes that are known to provide resistance can be sequenced and identified in healthy individuals from a trivial skin cell sample.

This study looks like bad science--how do they eliminate socio-economic and cultural (i.e. non-genetic) factors in this study? ... This kind of research is not honest--why even bother asking questions about race unless they've already got an opinion they're trying to prove? If they just wanted to do science, they'd phrase it all in purely bio-chemical terms. So much for You clearly have not visited the website: this study is purely an examination of the genomes of about 150 people of four different races/populations. their finidings are being published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals like Nature.
The whole thing will soon be moot anyway. Once the current research into manipulation of the human genone comes to fruition, parents will be able to specify which traits and characteristics they want their children to have. Eventually, we will be able to tailor the genetic makeup of humans to make them viable in virtually any enviornment, including alien ones. You are delusional. This is no-where NEAR happening, and any geneticist will laugh you off if you suggest such a thing. We are still unable to use our own stem cells to generate identical organs, much less alter tissues to suit 'alien environments'. come on.
Affirmative actionDo not turn this into and AA debate.

Did you read the article?

Oh, so if you click on the word article it links to an article? I didn't know that. I've seen this sort of thing before, but usually it has a lot of weird stuff on the line like: http://forums.jolt.co.uk/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p etc. Well now I know.

Oh, so if you click on the word article it links to an article? I didn't know that. I've seen this sort of thing before, but usually it has a lot of weird stuff on the line like: http://forums.jolt.co.uk/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p etc. Well now I know. :) :)
EDIT: interesting, the link to the article no longer works unless you register and stuff. Maybe they took it off the front page after Saturday. That sucks. I'll attempt to find it and post it some other way.

Well here it is. Rather long, but interesting.



The new science of race by CAROLYN ABRAHAM

Saturday, June 18, 2005 Updated at 2:28 AM EDT

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

His group's theory is that during 1,000 years of persecution, social isolation and employment restrictions in Europe that kept Ashkenazi Jews from farming, they were forced into (then disreputable) jobs such as trade and finance, which demanded mental agility. Success in these fields could lead to food, shelter and family. Under such pressures, the paper suggests, genetic traits related to intelligence became more prevalent among central and northern European Jews.

Two U.S. journals refused the paper, an unusual experience for this widely published scholar. “We finally had to send the paper to England, where they're not so obsessed with political correctness,” Prof. Harpending said.

The danger of bolstering bigots is what has scientists so nervous. If a complex trait such as intelligence can be inherited, for instance, and you say one ethnic or racial group tends to have more of it than others, does it follow that another group has less?

Ever since the eugenics movement a century ago, which led to forced sterilizations in Canada and the United States to improve the racial stock of the human species, and then the horrors of Nazi Germany, such questions have been taboo.

University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton was internationally condemned 15 years ago for claiming to discover differences in brain size, intelligence, sexual habits and personality between whites, blacks and “Orientals.”

Yet the role of race in genetics is a subject scientists now believe they can't ignore. The future of medicine may depend on it.

In fact, a massive international effort, which includes many Canadian researchers, has been quietly under way for nearly four years to catalogue and compare the genetics of people with African, Asian and European ancestry.

It is called the Haplotype Project. You may not have heard a word about it before now. But by the end of this year, society may have to start facing its implications.

It was not supposed to be this way.

When the Human Genome Project was completed in 2000, its most touted result was that it showed no genetic basis for race. In fact, some scientists went so far as to dub race a “biological fiction.”

The project was a 13-year international drive to map all of the three billion chemical bits, or nucleotides, that make up human DNA. Particular nucleotide sequences (represented by the letters A, C, G and T) combine to form the estimated 25,000 genes whose proteins help to produce human traits, from the way your heart beats to the wave in your hair.

The map indicated that humans as a species are 99.9 per cent genetically identical — that, in fact, there are greater differences between two frogs in a pond than between any two people who find themselves waiting for a bus.

A teeny 0.1 per cent, a mere genetic sliver, helps to account for all the profound diversity within the human race, with its freckles, dimples, afros and crimson tresses, its shy and bombastic types, its Donald Trumps and Dalai Lamas, Madonnas and Mr. Dressups, Bill Gates, Billie Holidays, George W. Bushes and Osama bin Ladens.

It was a message of harmony: Hardly a hair of code separates us.

But five years later, one of scientists' main preoccupations has become to chart the genetic variations between and within racial groups — to parse that 0.1 per cent. These differences arise through mutations, which all begin as one-time flukes, but become more prevalent in a particular place if they offer a survival advantage, carriers have more children or they result in a trait a society finds desirable.

Now, teams are panning for gene types to help explain why West Africa produces the fastest runners in the world. A University of Toronto researcher is hunting the gene types that account for skin colours.

A Pennsylvania State University scientist is teasing out the biology behind other variable physical traits, such as height or hair texture.

More crucially, it has become obvious that the 0.1 per cent may add up to the difference between sickness and health.

In Canada, researchers from McMaster and McGill Universities are breaking down heart disease by nationality to understand the interplay of genes and environment. The answers may explain why South Asians suffer high rates of high blood pressure, why heart attacks hit Middle Eastern men 10 years earlier than Europeans, or why the Chinese seem to boast the trimmest waistlines in the world.

The genes discussed in Dr. Harpending's team's paper, meanwhile, are known to be the ones that account for the high Ashkenazi rates of breast cancer, the neurological disorder Tay-Sachs and other conditions. The mystery is why these traits have persisted at high rates over generations. The Utah group's conclusion (to be published in the Cambridge University Press Journal of Biosocial Science) is that the diseases are a tragic side effect of genes selected for their role in boosting brain function.

Given the explosion of research in race and genetics, Francis Collins, a former leader of the Human Genome Project, had to admit in the journal Nature Genetics last fall that “well-intentioned statements” about the biological insignificance of race may have left the wrong impression: “It is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry.”

Alan Bernstein had warned him. In the fall of 2000, the president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research heard Dr. Collins speak at Harvard about there being no significant differences between races. “That's going to come back at you,” he said.

According to Dr. Bernstein, 0.1 per cent is actually far from an insignificant difference in the genome's chemical sequence. In fact, he said, the genetic distance between humans and gorillas is not much greater. “It's silly to try and be politically correct about it.” What matters, Dr. Bernstein said, is to treat it scientifically.

The most organized effort to do that to date is the International Haplotype Project. Scientists in Canada, the United States, Britain, China, Japan and Nigeria are spending $185-million to chart the genomes of people from Tokyo, residents of Beijing, the Yoruba in Nigeria and Americans of Western and Northern European descent — 270 people in all.

Using these maps to find genetic differences between ethnic groups could lay the groundwork for new treatments and cures. It might help predict a person's response to a given drug, and allow for tailor-made medications with fewer side effects. It could bring the medical advances genetics has long promised.

On the other hand, the knowledge may raise more questions about the meaning of racial differences than anyone cares to answer.

The Quebec Genome Innovation Centre at McGill University is a cold, sleek structure that screams clinical precision, with its glass walls, concrete columns and lateral steel beams. The equipment inside is as expensive as the $30-million, 50,000-square-foot building that houses it.

Its three floors of labs and DNA sequencing technology crunch genetic data at a rate no one even imagined five years ago. In 2001, it took a year to run 50,000 genetic tests. Today, said the centre's director, Tom Hudson, they can shoot out the results of 20 million tests in a week.

This speed comes courtesy of such mind-boggling gadgets as the array centrix, a small board of 96 fibre-optic spikes, the tips of which can be coated in DNA and 1,500 genetic tests run on each tip — at the same time.

“From one drop of blood, you can do hundreds of thousands of tests,” Dr. Hudson enthused.

From one drop of blood you also can discern the ethnic background of the person being tested with fairly good certainty.

So it is here, where technology has shrunk costs to just pennies per test, that major sections of the Haplotype Project's “HapMap” are being generated.

The project was born in the summer before Sept. 11, 2001. At first, it seemed destined for obscurity. Scientists at the University of Toronto, McGill and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been hunting gene mutations that increased the risk of Crohn's disease in 200 Toronto-area families of mostly European heritage — British, Polish, French and Greek.

In the process, they stumbled on a remarkable discovery. The genome's three billion chemical letters appear to be arranged in blocks — like paragraphs in a text. Some are longer, some shorter, but all have fairly clear beginnings and ends.

The pattern seemed to make sense. In the genetic mix and mingle of conception, the mother's and father's DNA are passed down to the next generation in these kinds of heritable chunks. Researchers estimate there are 100,000 such blocks in each person's genome.

What's more, gene mutations within those blocks seem to fall in the same places, even in different families. It's like a library in which every book contains a typo in the first paragraph on the second page, or the fourth paragraph on every fifth page. The misprints might be different, Dr. Hudson explained, but they occur in the same locations. For finding genetic mutations, the pattern seemed as good as an index: Instead of scanning the whole book, you could flip straight to page 2 or page 5.

The discovery seemed to cry out for a new map of the human genome, one that would show the haplotype blocks and highlight each paragraph in the book of life.

“Everyone knew this was important,” Dr. Hudson said. “But there was no big press release.” Coming out a month after Sept. 11, the discovery of haplotype blocks attracted little initial attention. But for scientists it couldn't have come at a better time.

Traditional methods to find mutated genes in family studies and remote populations had hit a wall. Yes, they could find the lone mutation that led to a rare disorder such as Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis. But trying to find the dozens of mutations that increase the risk of common diseases like cancers or asthma would simply require too many patients and too much data crunching.

With a haplotype map, they would be able to search the genomes of huge numbers of people with a particular disease, in search of a common typo in a particular paragraph.

First, however, the HapMap researchers had to find out if their theory would apply to the genomes of people around the world. The maps provided by the Human Genome Project would offer little help, because they had been rough compilations based on various people, with little regard for ethnic background.

The next question was, whose genomes should they use?

When HapMap scientists met in Washington in 2002 to discuss the issue, Dr. Hudson — a 44-year-old, buttoned-down geneticist much more comfortable with technical issues than social ones — was taken aback at the incendiary debate that broke out. It was the kind of battle that seems bound to become more frequent as scientists continue to explore this sensitive area.

“As Canadians, we are not used to the high emotions around race, as they are in the U.S.,” he said. In that two-day meeting and others to come, African-American community leaders, ethicists and philosophers unleashed their fears and frustrations.

“There were two points of view,” Dr. Hudson recalled. “One of them is, ‘You're only going to be studying Caucasian chromosomes, clearly, because you only want to find tests for North Americans and U.S. people with money.' ”

But if Africans and other populations were included in the map, there was serious concern that any differences found in their genomes might leave them open to another tier of discrimination, perhaps from health-insurance companies.

In the United States, where the mortality rates for a range of diseases are higher among blacks than whites, such disputes are common. For example, scientists and sociologists continue to argue over whether African Americans' high rates of hypertension are due to genes or to environment.

One contentious theory suggests African Americans descend from those slaves who were able to survive the dry and hungry trip from Africa thanks to a genetic quirk that enabled them to retain moisture and salt — which also can contribute to high blood pressure.

But others say it is due to diet and stress. As New York University sociologist Troy Duster told The New York Times last fall, “If you follow me around Nordstrom's and put me in jail at nine times the rate of whites and refuse to give me a bank loan, I might get hypertensive.”

In the end, the HapMap team decided to include African chromosomes, along with those from Japan, China and the United States. It was a diverse enough sampling to tell them if the haplotype theory would hold up, but selective enough for their limited budget.

At the same time, ethicists joined the project to ensure that all DNA donors would be aware of the risks of participating — namely, that any dramatic genetic differences the project discovered could end up stigmatizing their communities.

“Certainly,” Dr. Hudson said, “there's enough examples already of racism in the world — before genetics, during genetics and after genetics — that there's no doubt someone would try to use the information for genetic discrimination.”

Despite the long and ugly social history of race, there is no clear-cut definition for the term. Is a person's race defined by skin colour, that most visible of markers? By language, country of birth, the food they eat or the religion they practice? Not even scientists can agree.

“If you have a [genetic] sample from Nigeria, can you really say that it represents Africans? Is that the same as African Americans? , Jews are white, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're compared to Caucasians,” said Celeste Condit, a professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia who specializes in biomedical issues.

“The scientists have been irresponsible for not developing a language for this,” Prof. Condit said. “Usually scientists are very careful in developing their technical vocabulary. But it's hard to describe the geographic dispersion of people properly — and they have these easy [racial] terms in their heads.”

Of course, geneticists already know that since people have ancestors from all over the world, no one fits neatly into any one racial box. We are all of us mixed, even if our complexions suggest otherwise. There also can be greater genetic differences within racial groups than between them.

But since no one now has the resources to uncover the secrets in every patient's DNA, both science and medicine are using “race” as an easy, if dangerous, shortcut.

“Until we can scan the genome of every individual,” said Tim Caulfield, director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, “race has become this rough proxy.”

Yet HapMap researchers are indeed finding that the genetic lines between their groups are terribly blurry. In fact, the block structures are similar in all of them.

“Humans as a species are just so young there hasn't been enough time for the genome to alter that dramatically,” Dr. Hudson said. (Frogs, on the other hand, have a few more millennia behind them than people.)

As expected, they are finding the most variations in the DNA of donors from Africa, where modern humans are believed to have arisen 150,000 years ago. It is thought that the rest of the planet's populations are all descendents of a small group who only wandered out of Africa roughly 60,000 years ago, so there has been less time for those genes to mutate in the rest of the world.

What they do know, Dr. Hudson stressed, is that the mutations they are cataloguing — the 10 million or so most common ones — appear to exist in all populations. Just not at the same frequencies.

“Almost all the differences you see in people in North America are differences you see in Africa, are differences you see in Asia,” he said. “It's very rare to have something you only see in [one place].” And when you do, he said, it's uncommon even in that population.

One stunning example is a gene variant that makes 1 per cent of Caucasians (and an estimated 10 per cent of Ashkenazi Jews) immune to HIV infection. It blocks receptors on the surface of cells where the AIDS virus would otherwise enter. Scientists suspect the trait was passed down from Europeans who survived medieval smallpox plagues thanks to the same mutation.

Another variant known to be fairly exclusive to a particular people is the “Duffy null” mutation in people from sub-Saharan Africa. Penn State genetic anthropologist Mark Shriver explained that it likely became prevalent there because it offered protection against a particular type of malaria, “but it didn't spread widely outside of Africa.”

Yet Dr. Shriver, who by all outward appearances is a white man, happens to carry it. A scan of his genome suggests that while he is predominantly European, he is also about 11 per cent West African and 3 per cent native American.

“Race just doesn't exist in a critical line,” he said. “It's more of a gradient.”

Dr. Shriver applauds the information flowing in from the HapMap project (which is freely available on-line), calling it “a revolutionary tool” for science. But others are not so impressed.

“Basically, it is a total waste of money,” Columbia University geneticist Joseph Terwilliger said.

Dr. Terwilliger argued that by focusing on the most common genetic mutations, the project would overlook the most specific differences to be found in any group. It would make “populations look systematically more similar to one another than they really are.”

Medically important traits — such as the HIV-resisting gene type — could be missed if researchers do not deliberately hone in on the rarer quirks in each particular racial group.

“Different populations have enormous differences,” Dr. Terwilliger said. “If this were not true, then there is no way we can determine how we are related and how populations migrated historically.

“You cannot put people neatly in a small number of meaningful categories like black, white or Asian. That said, Koreans and Chinese are genetically vastly more similar than either are to Germans.”

The controversy around the scientific meaning of race is already spilling over from the lab to the medical clinic. Researchers continue to debate definitions, but the age of race-based medicine is upon us.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the world's first “ethnic” medication last fall, a heart-failure drug for African Americans known as BiDil. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is developing marketing plans for a lung-cancer drug that flopped in Caucasians but seems to work for Asians.

No one yet fully understands the actual genetic traits that make these drugs effective in these groups. And scientists have every reason to believe people other than blacks or Asians may carry these traits. But for now, prescriptions for such medications are to be based on little more than physical appearances and questions about a patient's heritage.

And this, Prof. Condit argued, could lead to significant risks. Doctors may end up denying a drug to Caucasians who might benefit from it, because it is touted to work only in South Asians. Or they might prescribe a pill to a black person who actually would benefit from some other treatment. (For example, research has found that as many as 30 per cent of African-American men have a white male ancestor, a fact attributed to the sexual politics of slavery.)

Prof. Condit has tried to bring the inherent dangers of race-based science to the attention of the researchers involved. She has published journal articles, held focus groups and arranged meetings that few scientists leave their labs to attend. Without careful consideration and communication, she warned, modern medicine could set race relations back decades.

She offered this scenario: Imagine a drug marketed only for blacks, a simple pain reliever, prescribed in the millions. Now imagine that, like a certain now-notorious pain medication, it turns out to have the horrible side effect of increasing the risk of heart attacks. Result: Tens of thousands of North American blacks — and only blacks — die.

“What happens if you get a Vioxx situation with one of these drugs? And the likelihood of this happening is very high,” she said. “But until there's a catastrophe, people don't want to deal with it. You are playing with fire.”

Those watching the field of modern racial genetics explode are already concerned.

“If genes predispose groups to certain diseases or health conditions, might we also find information that hints at more socially loaded conclusions?” the University of Alberta's Tim Caulfield wondered.

Last summer, Prof. Caulfield was surprised to read an article in the prestigious journal Science titled, “Peering Under the Hood of Africa's Runners.” It noted that all but six of the 500 fastest times for the 100-metre dash have come from sprinters of West African descent, which includes most U.S. blacks. Kenyans, meanwhile, dominate world records in long-distance races.

According to the report, Swedish physiologists trying to penetrate the “Kenyan mystique” compared runners from Africa and Scandinavia on treadmill times, lung capacity, heart rates and body weights. Limb measurements indicated that the Kenyans carried 400 grams less flesh on each calf. The report referred to their “birdlike legs,” explaining how Kenyan runners squeeze more power from their oxygen intake, since “they need less energy to swing their limbs.”

Research on West Africa's sprinters, meanwhile, revealed a body type of heavier “fast-twitch” muscles, versus the lighter “slow-twitch” muscles of endurance runners, as well as denser bones, narrower hips, thicker thighs, longer legs and lighter calves. Efforts are now under way to decode the genetics behind all these traits.

Like Prof. Harpending's paper on Ashkenazi Jews, the report on African runners presented a positive picture of its subjects, albeit a stereotypical one. Yet it seemed eerily reminiscent of ugly 19th-century efforts to gauge racial differences with calipers and cranial measurements.

Prof. Caulfield, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, was mostly concerned about where such research would lead. Already, he said, an Australian company is cashing in on the notion that some people are born to run, offering to test a child's genes for fast- or slow-twitch muscles — “so you know which sport to put your kid in.”

While he said he loathes the idea of restricting scientific research in a free, democratic society, Prof. Caulfield described the race-based search for disease genes as a Pandora's box.

Studies are sure to appear on genes linked to complex characteristics in racial groups, such as athletic or cognitive ability or even criminal behaviour. But these traits, he stressed, are anything but a simple story of genetics.

“It's like beauty,” he said. “Being beautiful will involve the interplay of thousands of genes and social factors that dictate at a given time what is beautiful. It's a very complex story, it involves culture, socio-economic class, experience. . . . So how do you handle that information?”

As Penn State's Mark Shriver put it, “It's not that genes for IQ, athletic ability and musical ability don't exist. But you just can't tease apart the affect of environment in shaping these abilities.”

If people are starting to overestimate the role genes play in shaping human health and behaviour — and underestimate the huge impact of experience, environment and social forces — Columbia's Joseph Terwilliger said that scientists must share the blame.

“In many ways, scientists over-hyped the information in the genome, or at least what we know about it, to the point where now people are getting unnecessarily nervous about societal implications,” he said.

“The fact is that to get the funding they sold genetic determinism, which of course is nothing close to reality. And now they are paying the price.”

This year, the journal American Psychologist devoted an entire issue to the impact race and genetics could have on its field, raising a list of the difficult questions ahead. It included three papers on the controversial issue of intelligence, including one commentary arguing that genes should get more attention in studies of racial intellectual differences.

For Dr. Harpending, who admitted he would never have “even muttered in public” his theories about Ashkenazi Jews and intelligence were he not a senior professor with tenure, this type of conversation cannot come soon enough.

“There is this massive disconnect between public and private discourse; between what's said in the public arena and what your neighbour tells you [about racial groups] over the fence,” he said. “Some of those things are wrong and bigoted, but some of those are right.”

Perhaps. But would Prof. Harpending dare match his Ashkenazi study with one of India's lowest Hindu caste, the so-called untouchables, who like European Jews have historically been an isolated society — except, in this case, relegated to centuries of cleaning latrines?

“One is the mirror image of the other, I suppose,” he admitted. “I would personally find that distasteful. But if I had a theory about it, I would hope that I would publish it.”

If the race debate in science seems sticky now, it's only going to get worse.

This summer, scientists from all over the world are gathering to discuss plans for yet another map of the human genome. This one is based again on a discovery involving Canadian research — and in scientific terms, it is hard to overstate its significance.

Geneticist Steve Scherer, a senior scientist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children, working with colleagues at Harvard University, discovered last August that the basic model of simple genetic inheritance science has clung to for 100 years is wrong: Mom and dad don't always make equal genetic contributions in the creation of a child's genome.

Instead, some people might end up with three, four or even more copies of a gene from one parent, instead of the single copy of each gene scientists thought each parent always contributed.

The implications could be huge. There might be greater genetic differences between individuals — and certain populations — than anyone imagined. Certainly, there are more than the HapMap is charting, Dr. Scherer said.

Might one ethnic group, for example, carry an overload or an underload of genes for a particular trait?

“I think it was premature to say that the difference between people might only be 0.1 per cent,” Dr. Scherer said. “Based on what we know now, it is probably in the 0.2 per cent range. And in the end it may even be as high as 1 per cent.”

Dr. Scherer spent two days last August fielding media calls when the news first broke. He did most of the interviews by phone, but in a few cases it was easiest to respond by e-mail.

Then came a call from his Harvard collaborators informing him that one of those e-mail interviews had been with a writer who worked for a neo-Nazi website. The writer spun the news as scientific proof of genetic differences between races — without even misquoting or twisting Dr. Scherer's words.

“As a geneticist,” the 41-year-old Dr. Scherer said, “it's your worst nightmare.”

The HapMap's Tom Hudson in Montreal has had the same one. A colleague recently referred him to an Internet hate site that declared the HapMap would finally prove the biological basis of race.

“It made me queasy, because they actually name the name of my friend, my colleague in Boston. And they actually say, ‘He's going to prove us right.'

“I didn't understand what I was reading when I first read it,” Dr. Hudson said. “I never read something that was so disgusting.”

It wasn't an isolated incident.

Morris Foster, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and one of the HapMap's leaders, said researchers are tracking racist sites for references to the HapMap, which logs 20,000 downloads a week from its public database. They have amassed quite a collection.

Not only do the hate sites keep abreast of what HapMap information has become available (such as recent data on Japanese and Nigerians), but they anxiously await findings that will help unveil genetic traits linked to such things as crime and cognitive ability by race.

“Once it is scientifically demonstrated,” one web contributor writes, “that will be the beginning of the end for the Marxist-egalitarian argument over race. Personally, I can't wait.”

Even Western Ontario's infamous J. Philippe Rushton has seized upon modern genetics as an opportunity to make his case again, in the company of Arthur Jensen, a University of California psychology professor who argues that race determines IQ.

This month, the unpopular scholars have the lead article in the journal Psychology, Public Policy and Law , presenting 60 pages of evidence arguing that genes explain 50 per cent of the IQ differences between races, in which Asians rank higher than whites and whites higher than blacks.

(The publisher, the American Psychological Association, invited scientists to rebut the paper in the same issue.)

And yet, despite all the social hazards of modern genetics, Dr. Scherer said scientists should not “have to fear discussing their results of their research, so long as they are open-minded and listen to criticisms and comments from others, including the public.

“I always wonder what Darwin would have done in today's world.”

The ultimate test, Dr. Harpending pointed out, lies not with researchers, but with the public.

He described projects under way involving genes potentially associated with controversial behaviours such as sexual promiscuity, adultery and family abandonment.

“A number of things are coming down the pipe,” he said, “that we are going to have to figure out how to cope with as a decent and moral society.”

[I]Carolyn Abraham is The Globe and Mail's medical reporter.

There are more elegant ways of knowing this. Genes that are known to provide resistance can be sequenced and identified in healthy individuals from a trivial skin cell sample.


And how were these genes identified. Again bullshit. (or troubling implications).

Also you have to remember that the race concept if used will be used by the people in power. Take the USA for example if some study proved that "white" was smarter then "black" the white majority could say hey look it's not our fault that the "black" is underrepresented it's the natural order. But if the same study showed that "asians" was smarter then "whites" I don't think the same people would say hey lets settle with mediocre jobs and let the "asians" take the most important jobs because they smarter.

Racial equality.

Races are equal. There might be a few tiny differences, but we're all still human.

Races are equal. There might be a few tiny differences, but we're all still human.
The way I see it, we're all equal before the law. But nobody dare say I am equal to anybody else otherwise. Because face it, inequality is a fact of life!

His group's theory is that during 1,000 years of persecution, social isolation and employment restrictions in Europe that kept Ashkenazi Jews from farming, they were forced into (then disreputable) jobs such as trade and finance, which demanded mental agility. Success in these fields could lead to food, shelter and family. Under such pressures, the paper suggests, genetic traits related to intelligence became more prevalent among central and northern European Jews.

isnt that like suggesting that if you keep cutting off dog's tails it will develop a breed of tailless dogs?? 1000 years is kinda quick on the evolutionary scaled and i doubt that "stupid" jews were denied marriage and family.

1000 years is not that small for something that minor. And yes if a jew was stupid he was probably denied life much less the chance to get married simply because he needed that mind to maintain his livelihood. So the hypothesis is not that flawed at all.

Races are equal. There might be a few tiny differences, but we're all still human.We are definately all Human: the Homo sapiens species is much less variable genetiacally than most other species out there. Any two humans can produce offspring succesfully. But we're not all equal in every way, apparently; there's no point going into a politically correct denial over this.

Are you telling me that some of you people were dumb enough to think that there was no such thing as racial or ethnic distinctions between people?

Liberals/left doesn't believe that. Only a dogmatic fool who tries to bury every sort of empirical and scientific evidence.

Just because we're idealists doesn't mean we aren't realistic. Don't misrepresent liberalism with some cookie cutter facade of mankind. People aren't equal.

isnt that like suggesting that if you keep cutting off dog's tails it will develop a breed of tailless dogs?? 1000 years is kinda quick on the evolutionary scaled and i doubt that "stupid" jews were denied marriage and family.
Nooooo.
It could only have an effect on something that determined how well they survived.
Cutting off a dogs tail does not change his genes.
But if there were a situation in which being a tailless dog increased your likelihood of suvival the dogs that had tailess genes would be the ones that bred the most. Hence more tailess dogs in that group.

Anyway, fascinating article. I read a bunch of stuff on the genetic studies on Icelandic peoples. Their genes are very homogenous and essentially the same as the ancient Norse, having almost no outbreeding. Cool stuff too.

...and i doubt that "stupid" jews were denied marriage and family.
You're probably right, but "smart" jews were likely to make more money, which would allow them to raise more healthy children than they would have otherwise been able to.

Interesting but I really don't see the connection between genetics and 'race'.
I mean not all members of a specified 'race' excel in the associated area, just those who carry the right genes. Really, what's the point of this research? To prove that certain abilities are inherited, well duh! But the delineation by race is meaningless, especially to someone like me whose genetic makeup literally includes half of the 'races' on the planet.

Just to throw more wood on the fire, a couple of years ago I heard that Ashkenazi Jews (The same group of Jews mentioned in this study) had a 20% prevailance of a genetic type that makes the experience of being intoxicated with Alcohol less pleasant than for other people, basically a mild allergy. Some Asian peoples have around a 5% occurance of this mutation, while in the rest of the world it is negligable, below 1%.

It was thought that this is the reason that there are significantly less Alcoholics amongst Ashkenazi Jews than there are in any other racial group.

Oh yeah, 1% of Ashkenazi Jews also carry a gene that causes Colon cancer, and d'ya know what? Colon cancer is the most common form of cancer in Israel.

I wonder if it affects insurance premiums any?

<snip>
Why have Jews of European descent won so many nobel prizes?
<snip>
A friend of mine who is studying physics told me about this.
Originally a Jew could only get a job as a lecturer/professor/etc. if there was no non-Jew to do the job.
So Jews (who were studying the sciences) went into all the useless, pointless fields that nobody cared about like theoretical physics.
Next thing we know these are some incredibly important/interesting fields and the only people who have bothered to study them are Jews.

Dempumblicents! I need you!

In truth, this article doesn't say anything different from what I have said. Essentially, there isn't much difference between the ethnic groups that society has labeled "races", but that the differences that exist are very noticeable. And I certainly never claimed that these differences weren't genetically based.

The problem with calling them "race", is that, while there certainly have been isolated populations for small (in evolutionary terms) periods of time, these groups have never been separated for long enough to have traits that occur solely in one ethnic group. Do those we would label black get Sickle Cell more often? Yes, but it occurs in other groups as well - at a smaller percentage. Same for all of the other traits they are discussing. Basically what it means is that, if we actually kept our little ethnic groups completely and totally isolated from each other for a very long time, true biological races would develop and some of the traits we now statistically see being higher in certain groups would be evident in those races. However, I don't really think that's going to happen - and the evidence shows that it hasn't happened in the history of the species.

So, yeah, looks like people are worried about stepping out of the PC boundaries they created by not being clear in what they were saying in the first place. No one in the scientific community was ever claiming that there weren't statistical genetic differences between the ethnic groups that society terms "races". However, a lot of people took it that way and ran with it. Now that we are possibly teasing out what those genetic differences actually are, people are afraid of the PC train.

Just another example of the media running away with a comment and screwing up the public's view of it.

I am calling bullshit right here! How the fuck did they determine this? Inject "jews" and "general caucasians" with all the strains of HIV and watched what happened?

Or perhaps they noticed that less people in these populations who were exposed to the virus actually contracted it, and then took blood samples and found that their cells could not be infected?

1000 years is not that small for something that minor. And yes if a jew was stupid he was probably denied life much less the chance to get married simply because he needed that mind to maintain his livelihood. So the hypothesis is not that flawed at all.

You really think intelligence is a "minor" trait? Interesting.

And yes, it is a very small period of time for an evolutionary change, especially considering the fact that even the less intelligent members of the community would have families that would want to take care of them. Thus, a less intelligent man who married a woman whose family was perhaps better at their jobs would have tried to pull the couple through, etc.

It's nice to know my race is the reason why I have no talent at anything.

I reject your reality and replace it with this;

we are all human, so who cares? ;)
off topic:
parents choosing their childrens' traits/personalities would be the epidomy of selfishness. where would be the individuality?

It's nice to know my race is the reason why I have no talent at anything.
what race ARE you, letila, that is so talentless?

ya know, alot of people have hidden ancestors of other races, you may have a jewish great grandmother or a black great grandfather for all you know.

It's nice to know my race is the reason why I have no talent at anything.I hope this is somehow ironic - your self-pittying posts are starting to get kind of taxing.

So closely related groups share more genes than other groups. What a surprise. That's like saying that you have more in common genetically with members of your family than with other people.
You'd be surprised how militanly people oppose the concept of important, documetneted genetic differences between populations. Just look at the responses here. Anyway, it is the extent of the phenotypic differences produces by the simmilarities and differencesin genotype that are really the utilmate object of this research, not just a genetic map.

I hope this is somehow ironic - your self-pittying posts are starting to get kind of taxing.

As a probable untermensch, I really don't care.

what race ARE you, letila, that is so talentless?

White.

*beats topic over head*

come on guys and girls, this stuff is cool!

Maybe the article because it was written by a journalist who doesn't necessarily understand genetics or the project. The project itself simply wants to know what the relation between groups and vulnerability to disease are.

Exactically!

The article doesn't mesh well with what is actually posted on the Halotype Project website.

Exactically!

The article doesn't mesh well with what is actually posted on the Halotype Project website.
Where is the discrepancy? the haplotype project is only one of the research projects cited...