<Marmot PFL: >

Genetic studies of race are getting better, but McCulloch's classification is somewhat disputed by recent DNA data.

< <cormier> wrote : some thibetan climbers(of the everest) are the same ... more resistant to low temperatures .... >

I have a body temperature of 97.6 degrees, one degree below normal. I also often wear T-shirts late into fall, with the two facts probably connected. In fact, I once was riding in a crowded elevator (wearing a T-shirt in the late fall), when a complete stranger asked me if I had a low body temperature. Apparently, she knew someone else with a low body temperature who also dressed inappropriately for the season...

< <voratco> wrote: So I am almost half English Chimp, a quarter of a Japanese Chimp and almost a Nigerian Chimp. >

Why don't we just round everything to the nearest dollar, and save the coinages??

<WannaBe:>

It is my opinion that currencies will vanish before the penny.

Paper money and coins are a nuisance.

[Event "1969 US Jnr Chp"]
[Site "McAlpin Hotel, New York"]
[Date "1969.??.??"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Kenneth Rogoff"]
[Black "Steve Spencer"]
[Result "1-0"]

1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. c3 g6 4. f3 g7 5. h3 dxe4 6. xe4 d7 7. c3 gf6 8. xf6+ xf6 9. c4 O-O 10. O-O c7 11. e2 b6 12. g5 b5 13. b3 a5 14. a3 a6 15. fe1 e6 16. e5 xe5 17. xe5 fc8 18. xf7 xf7 19. xe6 e8 20. f6+ 1-0

97.2 here. For about 15 years, mine was 96.8 on the dot. >

<Wayne Joseph, the principal of a big suburban high school in southern California, had an unequivocal sense of his black heritage, having written extensively about race in America.

But after seeing a TV story last April about a Florida company, DNA Print Genomics, which marketed an ancestry-by-DNA test, he began to wonder exactly how much of him was African, how much wasn't, and what else there might be in his genes.

"I sent away for their kit and received the kit, happened to swab both sides of my cheek and sent the swabs in," Joseph said.

A few weeks later, the results arrived at his comfortable Claremont, Calif., home.

"I just glanced at it, just a cursory glance initially — didn't really notice it much," Joseph said. "Then, I went back to it, because all of a sudden it hit me exactly what I had read. And it read, 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian and 0 percent African.

*Nobody* has a "normal" body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, because everybody's temperature varies with weather conditions, exertion, state of health, age, time of day, etc. So where did the idea arise that 98.6 is normal?

Innumeracy, plain and simple. A typical average temperature is 37 degrees Celsius. Someone converted that to Fahrenheit using the formula T_F = (9/5)*T_C + 32 (which isn't even exact; it should be 32.2) and got 98.6, keeping three significant figures, even though the original number had just two. This implies a precision which is entirely spurious.

<The typical oral (under the tongue) measurement is [...] 36.8° ± 0.4°C (98.2° ± 0.7°F)>

<twinlark: Richard McCulloch is described in Wikipedia as being a "noted white supremacist">

I didn't think the article I posted a link to was racist. Biology doesn't support the politics of race. The article is ten years old and a little dated, but most of it is accurate. The article was dry and noncontraversial. If he draws a conclusion pf white supremacy from the article, I didn't see it and he is wrong.

<Biology doesn't support the politics of race.>

Nor does it support the <concept> of race as a valid taxonomic distinction. McCulloch divides the species up into 5 sub-species, and then further into "races" and "sub-races".

Whatever he's doing is not biology let alone zoology, especially when you consider that even the concept of a subspecies in zoology can be very tricky, and only really works where populations are prevented from interbreeding because of external factors:

<twinlark: Nor does it support the <concept> of race as a valid taxonomic distinction.>

<IIRC the aborigines are the only group who you can begin to make a case for a racial distinction.>

They have certainly made a case for cultural distinction, which in practical terms is far more important IMO, as the culture and the community that comes with that culture defines the people in their own eyes.

The overlapping, co-existence and admixture of indigenous with European and other cultures has helped produced a distinctive Aussie culture, but this intermingling of completely unrelated cultures and the concomitant conflicts of interest that this produces <within> the indigenous communities depending upon factors far too numerous to detail, produces politics within the indigenous community which are as fractured, complex and byzantine as few in the non-indigenous community can dream.

Racial stereotypes are a serious hindrance to reconciliation and I would suspect that the notion of a "racial distinction" is not one that's claimed by aborigines, but rather one that's foisted upon them by the likes of McCulloch and is probably a red herring for practical purposes. Just as Europeans, indigenous North Americans, African-Americans and just about everyone else interbred, so the same process has occurred and continues to occur in Australia.

You can say that both positions apply to human races. Or, you can say that race does not exist as a biological concept, and that both positions apply to human populations. Call it what you will, style is secondary to substance. Just as half-siblings and full-siblings are clearly genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits, so French and Chinese are genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits.>

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/g...

<The identification of racial origins is not a search for purity. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. We have always seduced or coerced our neighbors even when they have a foreign look about them and we don’t understand a word. If Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes. Even homogenous groups like native Swedes bear the genetic imprint of successive nameless migrations.

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world’s more prominent features – the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains – names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.

So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between “ethnic groups.” Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word “race,” the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term “ethnic group” conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.>