Re: Kling of KKKrap

From: Bob LeChevalier (lojbab_at_lojban.org)
Date: 09/09/04 

Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 12:48:01 -0400

ekurtz99@WhoKnowsWhere.com wrote:
>Gordon wrote:
>> If the word "race" is no longer politically correct, what word
>> should be used in its place?
>
>The current euphemisms in genetics and genomics are "population",
>"ethnic group" and "ancestry", eg:
>
>"In the initial phase of the Project, genetic data are being gathered
>from four populations with African, Asian, and European ancestry."
>http://www.hapmap.org/thehapmap.html
>
>Of course, these classifications are entirely congruent with races (by
>"Asian" they mean Chinese and Japanese - ie Oriental or "Mongoloid").

No they aren't. "Asian" would also include the Japanese Ainu, who
look "white", and the Arabic peoples who look a lot like those of
southern Europe, and Indian subcontinent peoples, who are generally
classed as "white". Australian aborigines look a lot more like
Africans than Polynesians, but are not closely related to Africans,
genetically.

The particular project cited is apparently NOT taking samples from a
highly diverse set of people, but merely from four groups. They have
several samples from Nigeria, but none from the rest of Africa. They
are not sampling African-Americans.

>If the races were genetically indistinguishable, or so close that
>differences do not matter, there would be no need to identfy haplotypes
>based on race (or "population").

You are conflating by assumption "population" and "race". There is a
Japanese "population" - they are people who live in Japan.

You are making the assumption, as yet unsupported, that the Hapmap
population in Japan will show closer affinity to the population in
China (you've called them both "Asian"), than to the American and
African populations. You may be right. It also might turn out that
there are similarities that are not known.

>However, the people behind the Hapmap Project (an extension of the Human
>Genome Project) will deny the validity of race in their public
>statements, so that "*" and those like him can fool themselves that they
>have science on their side. The reverse is true.

The Hapmap Project will not answer any question about "race". To do
that, they would have to take all those populations classified as
"black", and all those populations classified as "Asian", and all
those populations classified as "white", and find that the whites all
share some trait(s) that the blacks and Asians don't have, and vice
versa. If the racial classification does not match some genetic
reality 100%, it is subjective and hence not real according to
science.

lojbab 

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org

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