as in how different are whites and asians at the level of genetic make up as a percentage?
just curious, I get tired of hearing racist crap from dumbasses claiming all sorts of the usual nonsense.
Can’t cite it, but I saw a video in a class about this very thing. People of different races tested their DNA and guessed who they would be most like (they chose those of their own race of course).
They turned out absolutely wrong. Something like the white professor was closest to the Middle Eastern girl, the black guy was closest to the Asian guy, like that.
It was supposed to teach us that race has absolutely no genetic basis.
Here’s something: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php
Yes and no. You can measure the “genetic distance” between any two individuals, but you won’t always get the same number if you take different groups of two individuals from different continents. You can take an average over many people and say that the average genetic difference between X group and Y group is such-and-such percentage. Note that X and Y could be French and Germans as well as “Europeans” and “Asians”.
The key, though, is to note that the variation you will find within any of the traditional races is going to be greater than the average difference between any two races. For instance, two Blacks in different parts of Africa might very well be more genetically distant than an Englishman and Chinese person.
I’ll see if I can fish up the cite of a genticist who measured the genetic difference between various ethnic groups. It turned out that genetic distance correlated pretty well with physical distance (as if that should be a surprsie).
It is possible to measure genetic differences as %. However the average difference between what we term races is less than the variability within each race.
Perhaps it was Cavalli-Sforza?
Yea, I was looking for an on-line source of the tables he produced years ago, but can’t seem to find it. I know I’ve seen it before, so it was probably copied into someone else’s on-line site. I did some googling, but came up dry.
It’s not really anything other than you’d expect, though, showing that Irish people are less genetically distance from the English than they are from Greeks, etc. Not really any big surprsies.
Actually they almost certainly will be. There’s apparently more genetic variation between the four major sub-saharan “races” than there is between human beings in the rest of the world. The current theory is that everyone who is not native to sub-saharan Africa is decended from a relatively small group of wanderers who reached the Mediterranean a few tens of thousands of years ago. So, for example, on average there’s more genetic distance between the Pygmies (who are native to the Congo) and the Khoi-San (who are native to South Africa) than there is between the Irish and the Japanese.
I don’t know that there are “four major sub-saharan races”, even if we put “race” in quotes. There are lots and lots of ethnic groups. The San are a definite ethnic group, but there are extremely few of them, and using them as a typical example of “an African” wouldn’t make much sense. Furthermore, the Bantu ethnic group underwent a considerable geographic expansion in the last few thousands years resulting in a genetically distinct population spread out over a relatively large area.
Europeans and Asians (even East Asians) are a lot more close, genetically, than most people would think, so it would certainly be easy to find ethnic groups in Africa with average genetic distances greater than Europeans and Asians. Although there are some older, “remnant” populations in South Asia*, the peopling of Europe and Asia happened at about the same time (Asia a bit earlier than Europe), with some cross-mixing of migration routes that probably makes those two groups even more closely related than they otherwise would be.
So, yes, the dominant hypothesis these days is that humasn left Africa about 60M years ago, quickly spread thru southern Asia to Australia, and then populated Central/Northern Asia and Europe later.
*from the southern expansion form Africa into Australia and New Guinea
The big study a couple of years ago to which John Mace may have been referring with his comment about “genetic distance” could have been the one by Rosenberg et al. as reported in Science (Vol 298, 20 Dec. 2002).
They discovered that they could identify geographic origins of people by looking a clusters of alleles. Analyses of collections of alleles would demonstrate statistical probabilities that an individual was from a general region. However, they could not show direct relationships between individuals.
Every allele tended to show up in every population, but certain groupings of alleles tended to cluster geographically on a statistical basis.
To use an analogy, if they had used names instead of alleles, a person whose grandparents were named Murphy, O’Brien, Finn, and Fanning and another person whose grandparents were named O’Malley, Kilpatrick, Doyle, and Dowling would both cluster into the same general geographic group even though neither person had any grandparental families in common.
There was (as expected) the least overlap between peoples of Africa and peoples whose ancestors had been in the Americas prior to 1492, but moving across the world, there were no very large coherent groups.
very interesting, as usual the Dope comes through. I had no idea that we were THAT close, I figured there would be some slight difference between the various races but that it would be negligible.
thats actually kinda cool.
:eek: They didn’t waste any time! Right on the heels of the K/T impact!
… you mean 60,000 right? 
Yes. Thanks for cathing that! There’d be a Nobel Prize in biology waiting for anyone who discovered Humans at 60M years ago. 
Humans have far less genetic diversity than our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, evidently because we have gone through several population bottlenecks.
The most severe bottleneck seems to have occurred about 70,000 years ago, when the population of reproductive females was reduced to only about 5,000.
Compared to other animals, we are pretty much all first cousins.