Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Suma who wrote (7361)	12/18/2005 4:51:38 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541857

I read about that. The article I read suggested how Europe came to be so white from just a single mutation. Fascinating. Unless, or course, you're into Intelligent Design... <g> "The work raises a raft of new questions -- not least of which is why white skin caught on so thoroughly in northern climes once it arose. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates. The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races." washingtonpost.com

To: Suma who wrote (7361)	12/18/2005 6:24:48 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 541857

IMO... someday we will discover that almost everything is genetically caused. That will be an excuse for some... I cannot change.. My GENES did it... etc I don't see anything wrong with admitting a genetic basis for any issue, better to learn not to use that as acceptance of failure. I think the far bigger problem is that over the last 50 years or so, since the major civil rights era, most people have adopted the view that there are not significant genetic difference between people, especially between racial groups. This has been widely promoted, by many scientists. Unfortunately, with the advent of faster and cheaper genetic sequencing, and the rise of systems biology, I suspect that philosophy is head for destruction. How we deal with the fallout from a moral and ethical standpoint is an important issue. The chimp genome was recently sequenced, so the first papers are starting to trickle out of research labs looking at the differences between humans and chimps as well as the other apes. As part of this, you will increasingly see reports of differences between human groups as well. The following link is one of the first examples I know of looking at such an issue wrt to brain development or function. These researchers have identified one gene important in brain development where the human variant shows significant differences from the chimp version, and may be related to why human brains are different from chimps (no doubt one of a number of such). The really interesting part is there are significant differences between humans, but the differences are greater between groups rather than within groups. So this is an example of a brain linked gene with evolutionary divergence between humans and apes, but also between human racial groups. I suspect that this is the first of many such discoveries. How are we going to deal with such knowledge, especially if it eventually contributes to an understanding of mental behavior or performance differences between racial groups? The goals of civil rights, that of extending moral and ethical treatment to those a little genetically further from oneself and ones family is one of the greatest of human achievements. Unfortunately, I fear it was somewhat accomplished by convincing ourself that we are all really identical. As long as we don't discover otherwise, I suppose that was fine, but what if we do discover such differences? See here: livescience.com