Memories of the 28th Century

6/16/2015
For a change there are some things in the news that are truly funny. That woman who has been masquerading as a Black person is funny. I probably shouldn't laugh much about this, and I haven’t, because the idea of there being several races of humans was only dreamed up a few centuries ago, and there is no scientific justification for such definitions (I’ll bet the unscientific readers will complain about that comment).

The actual facts are that there no races of humans, and the groups that previously were defined as races of humans have as much genetic distance within the group as there is between such groups. "We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact." 1

Apparently, I'm not the only one who believes this, and there probably are others. Some months ago I looked into whether there were races of humans, races as defined in Merriam Webster's Medical Definition of RACE
1 a: An actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also: a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group." 2 Scientific dictionaries are starting to drop the word, because of the negative connotations and the availability of other words that mean the same thing; "subspecies" is usually defined as the same as race. In non-human animals race may be more important, and the different races of a species are sometimes misidentified as separate species; this is very clear with Northern Brown Bears. All of the Northern Brown Bears are of a single species; they readily reproduce with members of the other parts of their species. They include Eurasian Brown Bears, American Brown Bears, Alaska Brown Bears, Grizzly Bears, Kodiak Bears, and Polar Bears.

Fine, the idea of races of humans is a dead concept. Now, why did that woman masquerade as a Black person? It is far beyond me; although I can imagine her trying to build a political base and spread power from there. I think that we will be hearing about this for some time.


That story already came out, but there was more about it today. Then After lunch I opened a browser and was going to check my yahoo email, when there was an announcement that Donald Trump was going to amuse the country again by running for president. I won't hold it against him; this is the first such announcement that got a laugh from me. I hope that he's bright enough to understand why I would laugh at his announcement; although if he did understand that he probably would not have put himself forth as a candidate.




http://time.com/91081/what-science-s...-and-genetics/

1 http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...genomes-darwin
2 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race

If you are interested in races of humans, then you might read my blog in which I tried to determine whether there were remnants of other subspecies in blood types and or Rh factor. I did not make a firm conclusion, but it's more likely that there was interbreeding with related species a long time ago, and I can't determine how long that might have been, but it was more than a half million years, and probably more than 2 billion years..
link:http://www.online-literature.com/for...aces-Of-Humans