RACE IS 'NOT A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT'

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Payette Jack

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This is one of those "I told you so" things. Race doesn't exist as anything more than a few minor anomolies in genetic code.

Now can we get those stupid check-boxes off of the census form???

http://www.iwon.com/home/news/news_article/0,11746,41756|top|02-11-2001::08:20|reuters,00.html

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They have also confirmed that there is no genetic basis for what people describe
as race, and found only a few small differences set one person apart from
another.

"You and I differ by 2.1 million genetic letters from each other," Craig Venter,
chief scientific officer at Celera Genomics Inc., which carried out one of the two
studies being published, said in a telephone interview.

"Probably only a few thousand of those differences account for the biological
differences between us, which means we all are essentially identical twins --
even more than I thought."

RACE IS 'NOT A SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT'

Celera used DNA from five volunteers -- three women and two men, ethnically
African-American, Chinese, Hispanic and white.

"You can clearly tell the females from the males because of the X and Y
chromosomes, but race is not a scientific concept," Venter said.
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Ho-hum. They've established races as not being real, by demanding that they be just about separate species in order to be acknowleged. Re-define something as something that doesn't exist, and then think you've proved that it doesn't exist... When all you've done is proved that you're using an excentric definition.

Race, as they've defined it for the purpose of this test, does not exist. Nope, and nobody has thought it did for a very long time. Race as most people define it still exists, though probably not for more than a few more generations, given today's rate of inter-racial marriage.
 
If you want to define race as a social convention based on skin color and appearance, then it does exist.

However, the long history of bigotry is full of crackpot genetic theories. Look at the laws against miscegentation.

So if one can demonstrate that between the "races" - no real genetic difference exist, that is a contribution.

It then implies that those who worry about such mere appearance differences really are ignorant and bigotted.
 
This looks like a job for...

...PJ O'Rourke:
"Finally, people are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian aborigine have fewer differences than a lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist." -from the introduction to Holidays in Hell
 
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