Vous êtes sur la page 1sur 7

|SHADOW HOME |SHADOW Staff | ShadowArchive

THE DEATH OF SCIENTIFIC RACISM


Contemporary DNA Research Proves that We Humans are All the Same
By A. Kronstadt It is a pity that in the United States, the country with the most advanced scientific/technological resources in the world, there is such a persistence of mumbo jumbo at the point where science challenges ingrained prejudice. The traditional scientific racists who still have a foothold in academia, admirers of The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, believe in the heritability of IQ, which they automatically assume correlates with some fundamental biological difference between people, transmitted through the genes. And if certain racial groups have lower average IQ scores, and if these people have different genes from other people, well, that must mean... Although little respected among practitioners of the hard science of genetics, the writings of such men as Herrnstein and Murray have had an inordinate amount of influence on conservative think tanks and the politicians that adhere to them. Right here in multicultural New York City the Manhattan Institute, which has fostered politicians such as Rudolph Giuliani and has also waged intellectual onslaughts against rent regulations and for aggressive policing has also hosted the likes of Professor Michael Levin of City College, who takes his theories

on the heritability of race one step further by declaring certain racial groups out and out genetically inferior. Many of these scientific racists claim to be scientific because they have statistical proof of the correlation between IQ and race. However, in the light of the data produced through the Human Genome Project and comparisons of DNA sequence among humans around the globe, it is now doubtful whether there is statistical correlation of race, as these men understand it, and genes. Although genes do determine traits like skin and eye color, the real differences in genetic makeup that these traits represent are much smaller than the scientific racists realize. The superficial characteristics used to define the traditional black, yellow, and white races--skin color, hair texture, shape of facial features--and even the pronounced differences in physical proportions that set apart such more exotic races as Bushmen, Pygmies, and Eskimos--count for very little in terms of difference in the sequence of bases that make up DNA, the material ultimately determining the differences in human genetic makeup. According to Dr. Harold Freeman, Chief Executive President and Director of Surgery at Manhattans North General Hospital, "If you ask what percentage of your genes is reflected in your external appearance, the basis by which we talk about race, the answer seems to be in the range of 0.01 percent. This knowledge is not even all that new. For most of the last century it had already been known that the four major blood types--A, B, AB, and O--are found in the black, yellow, and white races, as well as among Pygmies, Australian aborigines and American Indians. One would think that, even in the old days, people would have admitted that blood, being thicker than

water, is also a more fundamental marker of genetic inheritance than hair texture or lip thickness, which vary greatly even among white people. But some scientists have continued hypothesizing about significant racial differences in the genes that determine intelligence, which to this day have not been pinpointed, without taking into account the fact that the much more concretely determined characteristics that have been studied genetically, such as blood type, do not vary at all between the races. Blood types vary in their distribution within the traditional races, and between subgroups of those races, but a large percentage of the Germans have the same distribution of the ABO blood types as a large pecentage of native New Guineans--two groups of people considered highly different according to traditional racial criteria. With advances in the ability to determine the complex sequences of the DNA building blocks called bases, it is now possible to state, in terms of numbers, the differences between different peoples DNA. Genetic variation itself is measured according to the frequencies of markers, random differences in the base sequences of DNA, that are easily identified and that show variations among individuals. The genetic distance as calculated by scientists takes into account many locations in the genome that contain mere filler DNA and repetitive sequences. Such DNA does not contain real genes, and does not contribute directly to peoples physical makeup, but serves to provide useful genetic fingerprints because its very uselessness allows it to vary a great deal without killing off its carrier, as a mutation in a vital gene might. do. Markers are routinely detected and counted in cytogenetics laboratories after extracting DNA from peoples white blood cells. When

groups of humans, including racial and ethnic groups, and even simply random groups of people are selected for marker analysis the same markers--distinct sequences of DNA--show up over and over again, but at different frequencies. All of these commonly recognized genetic fingerprints, with very few exceptions, occur in each of the so-called races. It is only the percentage of people in each race who show them that is a variable. The difference in the frequency of markers between different groups of people is expressed as genetic distance, which is the percentage of markers that differ between different populations, multiplied by one hundred. For instance, the genetic distance between the English and the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire is calculated as 2373, which means that 23.73% of the markers, averaged over the respective populations, are different. Subtracting from 100%, this means that 76.27% of these genetic markers show exactly the same sequences of DNA in the English and the Pygmies. The English and the Pygmies are in fact about as genetically diverse as any two groups of humans. By comparison, the genetic distance between the English and the Greeks is calculated as 204; which would mean, in a nutshell, that 97.6% of the investigated DNA of English people is identical to that of the Greeks. This must be seen in light of the fact that the vast majority of human DNA does not vary at all, particularly the most important genes where any variability is apt to be fatal. The bulk of the human DNA sequence, 98.6% is the most common estimate, is identical not only among all humans but among chimpanzees as well. When one measures variability in DNA among humans, one is therefore measuring the variability in the tiny fraction of DNA which varies among humans in the first place, And the greatest

variation, that between the English and the Pygmies is only 76.27% of whatever that tiny fraction that is. So, if one were to make the simplest assumption on the basis of data, one would have to assume that all humans are very closely related. Even though the Pygmies and English have been diverse groups of people for tens of thousands of years, their fundamental genetic material is still overwhelmingly identical. The differences seem even smaller when one considers that roughly 88-90% of total human genetic variation can be accounted for simply by the genetic differences among individuals within local populations. This suggests that there is at least as much genetic variability among the individuals within ostensibly homogeneous racial groups as there is between the traditional racial groups, taken as a whole. It has now been estimated that 99.99% of DNA is invariable among humans even of the most diverse racial backgrounds. The differences in terms of modern genetics between the members of the traditional races become even more blurred when you take into account the fact that there are ethnic groups such as the Jews which share a common genetic heritage of their own but whose members overlap the traditional races. The Ashkenazic Jews of Europe assumed for decades that the black Jews of Africa could not really be related to themselves, after all, they are black and Askenazic Jews are clearly white, like the rest of the Europeans. However, studies by British geneticists which began in 1997 have proven otherwise. There is a genetic pattern on the Y chromosome which is common among Jewish men, occurring in about 10% of the total Jewish male population and almost absent in the non-Jewish population. This gene is especially common in men believed

to be part of the ancient Jewish priestly caste called the Cohenim, represented by a host of Jewish last names such as Cohen, Kahane, and so forth, and whose herititary legacy is passed from father to son. Because only males have Y chromosomes and because each son always inherits an exact copy of his fathers Y chromosome, it stands to reason that, if this gene is really a holdover from the DNA of the ancient Hebrew ancestors of modern Jews, it would be very common among the patrilineal Cohenim. Among persons who have reason to believe themselves Cohenim, because they are named Cohen or some variant thereof, the frequency of this gene is 50%. This gene has therefore been assigned the name of Cohen Modal Haplotype, and is a marker representing the infusion of Jewish blood, to use older and less scientific terms. In 1997, British geneticists analyzed DNA from men of the Lemba tribe in South Africa, who have an oral historical tradition that they come from the Middle East, and who practice a religion with strong Jewish elements such as the avoidance of pork and the insistence on circumcision. The Lemba are black, physically difficult to distinguish from the neighboring Hausa and Zulu people. It turned out that the Cohen Modal phenotype appeared in 10% of Lemba men, the same rate at which it is found in European Jewish white men. Furthermore, among the members of the Lembas own ancient priestly clan, which they call the Bubu, the frequency of this gene was close to 50%. A similarly high frequency of the Cohen Modal Haplotype was found among members of a tribe in Yemen, across the Red Sea from Africa, to whom the Lemba, according to oral tradition are related. So contemporary DNA studies have shown that an ethnic group and even a subdivision

of an ethnic group can overlap, in terms of DNA, with counterparts among people of a different race, taken in the 19th century sense of that four-letter word. This cannot help but make the concept of race appear to be a much more minor thing than has been believed up until now. According to Dr. J. Craig Ventner, one of the most prolific American contributors to the Human Genome Project. "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one. We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the same small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.
| TOP | | SHADOW HOME || Kop Watch ||SHADOW Shop|

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi