My thinking couldn't be considered "racist" by any objective measure. I'm not "racist" at all. Also, race is a bit more than just "skin color".
Yes I read them some time ago. They reinforce my position.
Oh yeah, the recent studies on the brain? I have a close relative who's a neurosci prof. I get exposed to more of that than you can possibly imagine. Data which hasn't even been published, etc.
Here's some primer though:
Human Brain Is Still Evolving
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers who have analyzed sequence variations in two genes that regulate brain size in human populations have found evidence that the human brain is still evolving.
They speculate that if the human species continues to survive, the human brain may continue to evolve, driven by the pressures of natural selection. Their data suggest that major variants in these genes arose at roughly the same times as the origin of culture in human populations as well as the advent of agriculture and written language.
SEPTEMBER 09, 2005
Human Brain Is Still Evolving
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers who have analyzed sequence variations in two genes that regulate brain size in human populations have found evidence that the human brain is still evolving.
They speculate that if the human species continues to survive, the human brain may continue to evolve, driven by the pressures of natural selection. Their data suggest that major variants in these genes arose at roughly the same times as the origin of culture in human populations as well as the advent of agriculture and written language.
âWe want to know how broad a trend these two genes represent. Did we get really lucky and hit on two rare examples of such genes? Or, are they representative of many other such genes throughout the genome?â
Bruce T. Lahn
The research team, which was led by Bruce T. Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of Chicago, published its findings in two articles in the September 9, 2005, issue of the journal Science .
Their analyses focused on detecting sequence changes in two genes - Microcephalin and âabnormal spindle-like microcephaly associatedâ ( ASPM ) - across different human populations. In humans, mutations in either of these genes can render the gene nonfunctional and cause microcephaly - a clinical syndrome in which the brain develops to a much smaller size than normal.
In earlier studies of non-human primates and humans, Lahn and his colleagues determined that both Microcephalin and ASPM showed significant changes under the pressure of natural selection during the making of the human species. âOur earlier studies showed that Microcephalin showed evidence of accelerated evolution along the entire primate lineage leading to humans, for the entire thirty to thirty-five million years that we sampled,â he said. âHowever, it seemed to have evolved slightly slower later on. By contrast, ASPM has evolved most rapidly in the last six million years of hominid evolution, after the divergence of humans and chimpanzees.â
In order to identify sequence changes that occurred in Microcephalin and ASPM in the evolutionary lineage leading to humans, Lahn and his colleagues took the following approach: They determined the DNA sequences of the two genes among a large number of primate species and searched for sequence differences between humans and nonhuman primates. By doing statistical analysis on these sequence differences, they could demonstrate that the differences were due to natural selection that drove significant sequence changes in the lineage leading to humans. These changes accumulated presumably because they conferred some competitive advantage.
The evidence that Microcephalin and ASPM were evolving under strong natural selection in the lineage leading to humans led Lahn and his colleagues to consider exploring whether these two genes are still evolving under selection in modern human populations. âIn the earlier studies, we looked at differences that had already been set in the human genome,â he said. âThe next logical question was to ask whether the same process is still going on today, given that these genes have been under such strong selective pressure, leading to the accumulation of advantageous changes in the human lineage. If that is the case, we reasoned we might be able to see variants within the human population that are rising in frequency due to positive selection, but haven't gone to completion yet.â
The researchers first sequenced the two genes in an ethnically diverse selection of about 90 individuals. The researchers also sequenced the genes in the chimpanzee, to determine the âancestralâ state of polymorphisms in the genes and to assess the extent of human-chimpanzee divergence.
In each gene, the researchers found distinctive sets of polymorphisms, which are sequence differences between different individuals. Blocks of linked polymorphisms are called haplotypes, whereby each haplotype is, in essence, a distinct genetic variant of the gene. They found that they could further break the haplotypes down into related variants called haplogroups. Their analysis indicated that for each of the two genes, one haplogroup occurs at a frequency far higher than that expected by chance, indicating that natural selection has driven up the frequency of the haplogroup. They referred to the high-frequency haplogroup as haplogroup D.
When the researchers compared the ethnic groups in their sample for haplogroup D of ASPM , they found that it occurs more frequently in European and related populations, including Iberians, Basques, Russians, North Africans, Middle Easterners and South Asians. That haplogroup was found at a lower incidence in East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans and New World Indians. For Microcephalin , the researchers found that haplogroup D is more abundant in populations outside of Africa than in populations from sub-Saharan Africa.
http://www.hhmi.org/news/lahn4.html
Quote from OPTIONAL777:
Did you even read the articles posted previously?
I'm not thinking you are going to change from a racist to a non racist position, but please don't ignore the recent studies of the brain and the way it works. Racism is learned, not native to a 6 month old child.
Racism is not innate. Being able to discern difference is skin color is not the same as racism.
I guess white people all have to do affirmative action best-friending, lest we be deemed "racists" 