Yes, there are correlations within local populations in the US. As I noted just above, my post that you quoted was addressed from a more global perspective. I would also emphasize my use of the word “unequivocally” in my post.
Colibri: BTW, I think it would be great if you’d write a staff report on the whole race/subspecies thing and how it is[n’t] applicable to humans. I’m sure we’d still get people saying they “know” there are biological races, but it would be nice to have an easy reference. Maybe sometime when you’re not too busy…?
So it’s your claim that the test could not distinguish between a foetus that’s 100% European ancestry and a foetus that’s 50% European ancestry, 50% African ancestry?
Perhaps it doesn’t make sense, but I took that qualification from the wiki article cited, which clearly allows for the possibility of hybrids in a polytiptic species.
So in effect you are saying that your own standards don’t make sense.
No, you were the one who postulated a “clear dividing line”. The wikipedia article notes that there might be some fuzzy hybrid zone, although it must be relatively small for the populations to be considered subspecies. But that’s nitpicking.
Rather than play 20 questions here, do you have some proposal that you want to make about some populations of humans being a subspecies? (And, btw, if any one population is a subspecies, then all the populations have to be a subspecies as well.) Because if you don’t, then this whole discussion is rather pointless.
It would appear that the claim has been falsified then. See Post 66 in this thread.
I’m not sure what you mean by “postulated,” but YOU were the one who incorporated the phrase “clear dividing line” into your criteria.
See Post #69.
I imagine what Brazil84 is getting at is that if you showed him pictures of Norwegians, and pictures of Nigerians, he’d be pretty successful at sorting them into correct piles.
Or, if presented with pictures of Americans, he would agree much more often than chance with the person’s self-reported race. If he identified someone as “black” it would be pretty likely that the person in question would agree that they were “black”.
But of course, this all breaks down when you try to sort Ibos from Wolofs, or Ethiopians from Eritreans, or Italians from Greeks, or Koreans from Japanese, or Spaniards from Morrocans, or Irish from English, or Germans from French. And it breaks down further because while you can separate Norwegians from Nigerians, you can’t separate Norwegians from Danes, Danes from Germans, Germans from Dutch, Dutch from Belgians, Belgians from northern French, northern French from southern French, southern french from northern Spanish, northern Spanish from southern Spanish, southern Spanish from northern Moroccan, Moroccan from…and all the way to Nigeria. Where do the people turn from White to Black? There is no border where people are White on one side of the border and black on the other side of the border, even if the border is an ocean or a desert or a mountain range.
Nonsense. If you think that, then you have completely failed to understand the significance of the article cited in that post, in particular its very limited geographical scope and the limited range of ancestral populations sampled. **John Mace ** has already explained in some detail in posts #68 and #78 some of the problems of extrapolating the results of that study on a global scale. Note also that the identification of genetic “clusters” in the samples is a statistical technique and does not indicate that particular genetic markers are found in nearly all members of a particular population, nor are they absent from nearly all members of other identified clusters.
No. Once again, that study was done on select populations in the US and those populations were from groups whose ancestors were separated by considerable distance. They looked at European, West African*, East Indian and “Hispanic” (Mexican mestizos). But they didn’t look at all European, all Asian or all African populations. Had they done so, they would have seen clines and not clusters.
Sure, people in Peking don’t look much like people in Paris, but when you walk from Peking to Paris, there is no place where the people suddenly don’t look Asian and suddenly do look European.
You seem to be wanted to assert that their are biological races. If so, what are they and what are their boundaries?
*Most US Blacks trace their (African) roots to West Africa
As an example, brazil84, when you walked from Peking to Paris, you might pass through the region where the Uzbeks live about half-way through your journey. “Oddly enough”, they don’t really look much like either the residents of Peking or Paris, but rather a little like both.
In connection with this, can you point to some part of the globe in which a clear geographic dividing line between races existed before the Age of Discovery (that is, before about 1500)? (Note that I am talking about areas connected by land or areas adjacent to each other by sea, not oceanic gaps like the Atlantic).
Ok, so if you did the same study, but instead used 3500 people from all over the world, and got similar results, then the claim has been falsified. Right?
Well, you’d have to use a lot more people than that, and such a study is already underway. Google “Genographic”.
But what some of us have been trying to tell you is that you wouldn’t end up with 100 or 1,000 or even 1,000,000 “clusters”. You’d end up with one continuum that changed imperceptibly from village to village. Those few places that were at one time relatively isolated (the Americas and Australia) are no longer so. THE SHIP HAS SAILED. We are one species all descendant from a few individuals who lived about 75,000 years ago. We spread out all over the globe in a very short time, and no population has remained isolated for any significant* amount of time.
*in evolutionary terms
How many?
Colibri, John Mace et al: How do Aboriginal Australians fit in? They first entered the continent around 60,000BC. How much gene flow occurred up to 1500CE? Another poster noted the large genetic variation within Africa and the small variation outside of it. Is Aboriginal Australia an outlier?
Good question. It depends on how precise you want to be. I know a little about statistics, but not enough to design such an experiment. You’d probably have to take an iterative approach, I would suspect.
The Genogrpahic project is shooting for about 100,000 samples from indigenous peoples around the world. (Most Americans wouldn’t qualify as “indigenous”.) That would be about 10x the current database. I don’t know if that number was picked to be authoritative, or if they just wanted 10x the current database. However, Wells is focused primarily on determining the migratory patterns of early humans and not so much at mapping out a bunch of “clusters” (probably because he knows there aren’t any on a global scale).
So after all this, you can’t describe an experiment that might falsify the claim?
Firstly, the claim is so well established that it is a fact of science.
But if you’d like to try and falsify it, why don’t you design the experiment? Show us a group that is physically and genetically distinguishable from all other groups and that has had little interbreeding with any other group in the world.
Then it should be easy to describe an experiment that might falsify it.
I did propose an experiment that you rejected. At this point, the burden is on you to describe an experiment. If you cannot do so, then the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.