King Tut’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match with Western European Y Chromosomes?

[olias]

Quote from Lucrum:

Haven't there been more than one human species in the past? If so, why would more than one now be so unthinkable?

Don't all species have their strengths and weaknesses?
Why can't can't different human races have various strengths/weaknesses and differences without necesarily having to be "superior"? Serious question.

The question is 'who gives a shit?' Seriously, what's the point of asking the question? ...the only point to asking is to show that 'one is superior' and discriminate accordingly.

Even if there were any differences, how the hell could they be studied scientifically? ....

And, if there truly are any differences between the 'races', I think the logical assumption is those differences would be so slight as to be meaningless

 

[phenomena]

Quote from olias:

The question is 'who gives a shit?' Seriously, what's the point of asking the question? ...the only point to asking is to show that 'one is superior' and discriminate accordingly.

Politically speaking, sure. I don't think anyone is suggesting different privilages or rights for people of different races. Civil rights is about political equality and the same rights afforded to all regardless of race. It's not about pretending that all groups or races are genetically identical. I, for one, think all people should be free from governmental discrimination. Right now the only legal form of discrimination is "affirmative action" and other race based quota programs. They were originally designed to limit the amount of Jews in elite universities. Now they have turned into anti white systemic racism. If you believe that the student with the best scores or qualifications should get into the school regardless of race, or that the job should go to the person who is the best qualified or most capable, regardless of race then YOU are the "racist"... If you want NO racial discrimination to occur then you are a "racist". It's only if you are in favor of racial discrimination against whites that you can be purged of the label "racist".

Quote from olias:

Even if there were any differences, how the hell could they be studied scientifically? ....

Population genetics, genome studies, bioinformatics. Just a few of the scientific fields devoted to genetically studying humans. Not to mention statistically studying several other measures of social and economic data. However, most any study of a racial nature typically results in harassment, personal, and even physical attacks. One such example is described here: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/06/bruce-lahn-moving-on-to-non-iq.php

Many brilliant scientists who have begun to breach this topic have ceased their efforts, as it is tantamount to career suicide. They have been silenced under a virtual gag order so as to discontinue such lines of research. This even includes some nobel laureates.

Quote from olias:

And, if there truly are any differences between the 'races', I think the logical assumption is those differences would be so slight as to be meaningless

You think do you? Are you a geneticist? a Sociobiologist? Because their opinions are often very different. In fact genetic differences are powerful enough to determine which diseases we are prone to, there are some diseases and disorders which only affect a certain racial group. There are several more which disproportionately affect a single group. I guess the microbes are also "racist"? Racial differences are the "emperor's new clothes" of the scientific world. Just as in the middle ages when people who proclaimed scientifc truths were imprisoned or burned at the stake, or when anyone proclaimed the world to be round was tortured or imprisoned. The PC orthodoxy has replaced the church as the primary distributor of ignorance and stupidity in the modern age. The PC orthodoxy is the biggest detriment to meaninful scientific progress in our time. If these differences can not be studied and understood, that comes at a great cost to humanity, and for what? To appease the PC orthodoxy and reinforce their delusional ideal of humanity...

 

[Lucrum]

Quote from olias:

...the only point to asking is to show that 'one is superior' and discriminate accordingly.

Not necesarily. Why would superiority have to automatically lead to discrimination?

Even if there were any differences, how the hell could they be studied scientifically? ....

Non sense

And, if there truly are any differences between the 'races', I think the logical assumption is those differences would be so slight as to be meaningless

An assumption you're entitled to make but that doesn't make it so.

 

[trendlover]

Quote from phenomena:

Many brilliant scientists who have begun to breach this topic have ceased their efforts, as it is tantamount to career suicide. They have been silenced under a virtual gag order so as to discontinue such lines of research. This even includes some nobel laureates.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Phenomena, this is from your link.


"Some of Dr. Lahn's co-authors are also uncomfortable with the work. Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Maryland who provided DNA from remote African groups, says she is bothered how one paper drew a link between the genetic changes and the rise of civilization. She
thinks it is too early to reach any conclusions about why the changes spread and says it is "very simplistic" to imagine that a single gene could have a major effect on complex cultural traits.

Several groups of scientists have sent letters to Science criticizing the papers. Dr. Lahn prepared responses, sending one earlier this month, but Dr. Tishkoff wasn't willing to add her name to them.

"You have to follow the data wherever it leads, but speculating in this field is dangerous," says Spencer Wells, head of the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, a five-year, $40 million effort to collect DNA samples from 100,000 indigenous people. Dr. Wells says the project team might try to find evolutionary reasons for physical differences such as why Danes are taller than pygmies. But Dr. Wells says National Geographic won't study the brain. "I think there is very little evidence of IQ differences between races," he says.

The accuracy of Dr. Lahn's work and his views on race came up in his tenure review last fall, says a person familiar with it. After debate, his department voted unanimously in his favor, according to another faculty member. A more senior committee agreed and awarded Dr. Lahn the post of full professor, although it wasn't unanimous, this person says.

Dr. Lahn stands by his work but says that because of the controversy he is moving into other projects. Earlier this year, Mr. Easton of the university's media department forwarded Dr. Lahn a paper by two economists looking at the IQ of infants of different races. Dr. Lahn wasn't interested. "I'm surprised anyone studies this," he replied in an email.

Dr. Lahn says he isn't as eager as he once was to continue studying brain differences. P. Thomas Schoenemann, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, says that at Dr. Lahn's request he collected DNA from 25 people whose brain sizes he had studied previously. But the two scientists haven't been in touch recently.

The university's patent office is also having second thoughts. Its director, Alan Thomas, says his office is dropping a patent application filed last year that would cover using Dr. Lahn's work as a DNA-based intelligence test. "We really don't want to end up on the front page . . . for doing eugenics," Mr. Thomas says.

More recently, Dr. Lahn says he was moved when a student asked him whether some knowledge might not be worth having. It is a notion to which he has been warming. Dr. Lahn says he once tried testing himself for which version of the brain genes he has. The experiment's outcome was blurry "but it wasn't looking good," he says. He hasn't tried testing himself again.

 

[phenomena]

Yes, it describes how the PC orthodoxy attacks scientists who study apocryphal subject matter, or who reach apocryphal conclusions with in their work.

 

[trendlover]

You can see Dr. Lahn research is not proof of 2 genes frequency to European or Asian people (cause evolution of the brain)
And you can see his research not conclusive.
So he really is not force to hide because of the political correctness.




Thursday, September 08, 2005
Human brain still evolving

"Here's some science news that's sure to cause some controversy: a research group led by Bruce Lahn at the University of Chicago is reporting here and here that they've found evidence for strong positive selection in very recent human history for certain genetic variants of two genes involved in determining brain size (one, microcephalin, is said to have been selected for within the last 37,000 years, and the other, ASPM, within the last 5,800). On its own, this is neither surprising nor controversial: natural selection never stops and still acts on human populations today. But here's the kicker:
They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37,000 years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60,000 or as late as 14,000 years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do 100 percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans.

With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14,100 and 500 years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5,800 years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
I'm bracing myself for racist misinterpretation of these results: people will grab on to this to claim that this is scientific proof that black people are genetically determined to be less intelligent than whites, Asians, and others.

The key thing to notice is that these are only two genes out of several that control brain size (and many, many others that control how the brain is wired up and how it changes with learning and memory):
[Lead author] Dr. Lahn said there may be a dozen or so genes that affect the size of the brain, each making a small difference yet one that can be acted on by natural selection. "It's likely that different populations would have a different make-up of these genes, so it may all come out in the wash," he said. In other words, East Asians and Africans probably have other brain enhancing alleles, not yet discovered, that have spread to high frequency in their populations.
And obviously, brain size is not the whole story when it comes to intelligence - so the set of interesting brain genes isn't just the "dozen or so" regulating brain size, but includes those with more subtle effects on the wiring of neural circuits.

What's more, we don't even know if the selected-for allele actually affects brain size compared to the other alleles - it could have some completely different effect that was selected for. (After all, genes don't encode brain size; they encode proteins that regulate, for example, how long neural stem cells keep dividing. These mechanisms happen at the molecular level, and so could have other effects beyond just cell proliferation.) To look at this, you'd have to examine people's actual brain size and compare that to which alleles of ASPM and/or microcephalin they have.

Fortunately, Dr. Lahn appears to be appropriately cautious about interpreting his group's results. Meanwhile, get ready for people to read too much into these results and then start claiming that it's "just political correctness" that makes this controversial and praising Lahn for his "courage in standing up against the liberal academic orthodoxy" or some other such nonsense.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://universalacid.blogspot.com/2005/09/human-brain-still-evolving.html

 

[jem]

I suggest the next time you look at university faculty or even when you see intelligent people on the news shows. Check out the size of the heads relative to shoulders. You see a lot more Newt Gingrich pumpkins heads than you do.. peanut heads

I realize big heads may be more telegenic... cause you see it in the movies too..... but.... I now starting to observe whether there is a correlation between large foreheads and apparent intelligence.

All I can say is that you do not see a lot of peanut heads wallking around with PHDs. Doctors and lawyers tend to have pumpkin heads too. (even the women tend to have larger heads than typical women... they tend to hide it with their haircuts but you can see the shapes.)

 

[phenomena]

Bruce Lahn didn't say that there was a large correlation between brain size and IQ within the human species. He said that interspecies there is a high correlation between brain size and cognitive ability. In fact he said that within the human species, there is only a .2 correlation with brain size and IQ.

Quote from jem:

I suggest the next time you look at university faculty or even when you see intelligent people on the news shows. Check out the size of the heads relative to shoulders. You see a lot more Newt Gingrich pumpkins heads than you do.. peanut heads

I realize big heads may be more telegenic... cause you see it in the movies too..... but.... I now starting to observe whether there is a correlation between large foreheads and apparent intelligence.

All I can say is that you do not see a lot of peanut heads wallking around with PHDs. Doctors and lawyers tend to have pumpkin heads too. (even the women tend to have larger heads than typical women... they tend to hide it with their haircuts but you can see the shapes.)

 

[jem]

... but when I read about this stuff years ago, I asked the next logical question and started observing... and now you will not be able to stop yourself from observing as well.

 

[phenomena]

Here's a more thorough account of the Bruce Lahn issue.

The moment the anti-racists and egalitarians have dreaded has now arrived. In September, University of Chicago geneticists published data in the prestigious journal Science that links two sets of genetic variations (alleles) to brain size, race, and spurts in human evolution. In particular, these genetic variations — arguably responsible for greater intelligence — were relatively common in Europe and Asia, but markedly less common in sub-Saharan Africa. Previously, the same researchers had shown these variations to be much more frequent in man than in other mammals, though our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, showed levels that suggest some evolution in the direction of humans.
Pygmies
Microcephalin haplogroup
D is rare in Pygmies.

This excellent new Chicago work has been carried out under the direction of a young Chinese, Dr. Bruce Lahn. His team had studied the prevalence of variants of two genes that are disabled or damaged in human cases of severe microcephaly, in which the brain develops to only 30 percent its normal size. The fact that they are damaged in microcephalics suggests they are necessary for normal brain growth.

Dr. Lahn’s researchers examined the DNA of 1,184 people around the world — though not in racially mixed areas like North America, Russia and Australia. They estimated that one undamaged variation, microcephalin haplogroup D (let us call it variation one, or V1) first appeared around 40,000 BC and has since spread to some 70 percent of humans. It is more common in Europe, Asia, South America and Latin America than in black Africa. At three percent, it is especially infrequent in Congo pygmies, whom black Africans commonly regard as inferior.

A second variant of the gene, abnormal spindle-like microcephaly-associatedhaplogroup D (let us call it V2), arrived more recently, around 6,000 BC, and has since spread to 30 percent of humans. It is most common in Europe and the Middle East, somewhat less common in Asia, and distinctly rare in black Africa.

Dr. Lahn and colleagues noted that the arrival of V1 coincided roughly with the first signs of human habitation and agriculture; V2 appeared about the time of the first cities and the development of written language. The Chicago team believes these new alleles gave rise to these important developments, and that their possessors reproduced quickly by occupying the new niches offered by agriculture and written language.

Geneticists can estimate the age of an allele by observing the number of mutations found in it and calculating back to when the allele first appeared in the most recent common ancestor. Mutations arise at predictable rates, and are considered to be a reasonably accurate measure of relatively short periods of evolution. It is by this method that scientists estimate it has been five to six million years since humans and chimpanzee had a common ancestor.
Bruce Lahn
Bruce Lahn.

Needless to say, the Chicago scientists went to great pains not to pose too great a challenge to modern sensitivities about race and genes. At their press conference, they insisted there was “not necessarily” a connection between these gene variations and brain size. However, they found that sub-Saharan blacks were the most distinct of the racial groups they studied, in that they had a markedly lower frequency of both variants. This is consistent with the distinct black African profile of smaller brains and lower IQ.

The Chicago results are exactly what we would expect from the work of Professor Phil Rushton of University of Western Ontario, who has used modern brain scanning methods to establish a correlation as high as .40 between brain size and IQ. Needless to say, the Chicago researchers could not mention Prof. Rushton’s name for fear of jeopardizing further funding. Some suspect they already have data in the pipeline linking these genetic variations directly to IQ, and that when they hold another press conference to announce these findings they want someone to attend.

Naturally, the authors wrote only of “geographical” and not of racial differences in the frequency of these alleles, but no one is fooled by this piety. They assured the press that their V work does not mean black Africans have a low IQ or any other disadvantage. At the same time, Dr. Lahn implied the opposite when he volunteered that Africans could well turn out to be blessed with still other variations that might be shown one day to give them advantages of their own. In other words, it may have been purely by accident that the advantage in Europeans and Asians had come to light first.

The findings came hard on the heels of work in Brisbane by Professor Nick Martin, who has found sizeable IQ differences within families associated with variations in the DNA on chromosomes 2 and 6. His work did not look for race differences in the distribution of these variations, but that would be an obvious area of research. At the same time, the October 24 issue of New York Magazine devoted eight pages to Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s theory that high rates of sphingolipid genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs in Ashkenazi Jews may be associated with a substantial advantage in IQ (their work originally appeared in the June issue of the British Journal of Biosocial Science).

The media and even the scientists themselves can hedge and fudge all they like, but their favorite “post-modern” pretense that there is no such thing as race is looking sillier all the time. The West’s anti-racists have succeeded in suppressing most references to the g (general intelligence) factor and the London School that discovered and developed the concept, but they now face an assault from an unexpected quarter. Dr. Bruce Lahn may be more the diplomat than one normally finds in nature vs. nurture debates, but he got his first taste of dissent as a student rebel in his home town of Peking during the Tianenmen Square demonstrations. This suggests he has a strong dislike for Communism’s tyrannical and useless environmentalism, and that he may have principles that will soon see him linked to his natural allies in the London School.