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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (706320)	3/28/2013 5:07:51 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578518

Hi longnshort; Moron, I was replying to your post: "millions upon millions of europeans came here from ellis island and hardly any have mated with blacks and 4 generations later they still haven't. that means the us is not mongrels" Message 28803410 not your post that blacks don't have any Neanderthal genes, but on that subject, (1) It's established that American blacks do have white genes (about 20%) and since whites have Neanderthal genes so do American blacks. (2) When they write these scientific articles they simplify certain things and they make other things more certain than they actually are. It's established that subsaharan Africa includes South Africa and since South Africa was colonized in 1652 we can be certain that white people and subsaharan black people have had babies and those babies have some Neanderthal genes. So when the scientists say they have "no" genes they can't be entirely accurate, as far as the situation is today. Instead, the focus of the scientists is on the situation in the distant past. I don't have a political or scientific opinion on Neanderthal DNA and subsaharan blacks, but it seems to be something you care about and I find it interesting, so let's take a look at the science and see how good the evidence is. Here's the article: An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations mbe.oxfordjournals.org Reading it, we discover that the tests were rather limited: (a) It's not about all of the Neanderthal's DNA. Instead it's about an "X chromosome segment". Now the history of this sort of science is that when they look at more general DNA, they end up with more matches. It was just a few years ago that the scientists were saying that modern man had NO Neanderthal DNA. At that time they were looking at mitochondrial DNA only. They were wrong then, maybe they're wrong now. Reading further you find that they only looked at "Dys44". This is an exon of a single gene on a single chromosome. (An "exon" is a part of a gene that ends up encoded in protein.) This was not anything approaching a full examination of Neanderthal DNA. Wait a few more years and see what further research uncovers. (Buy why do we care, this is a politics board.) (b) When you read the article you discover that they were looking for genes that were present in both Neanderthals and modern humans outside of Africa but were not present in subsaharan Africa. Simply finding such genes does not prove that subsaharan Africans have no Neanderthal DNA. Instead, at best, it proves that some DNA found in Neanderthals and non African humans is not found in subsaharan Africans. In fact, the article notes that there are a lot of genes common to all three groups, that is, Neanderthals, subsaharan Africans, and non Africans. On its face, this proves that subsaharan Africans do have "Neanderthal" genes, i.e. as it says in the article, "Because these populations diverged 400-800 Kya, a number of derived alleles present in the Neandertal DNA can be expected to segregate in all human populations including sub-Saharan Africans." That is, non Africans, subsaharan Africans, and Neanderthal have some genes in common. (c) Their money table is Table I. The haplotype that distinguishes subsaharan African versus Neanderthal and non African is B006. Looking at the statistics given in the table we see that this haplotype is found in 0.4% of their small sample of 1420 subsaharan Africans. Multiplying these numbers we find that, in fact, they did find the Neanderthal gene in six of their samples. In other words, the paper does not show that Neanderthal genes are not found in subsaharan Africans. It shows, at best, that one Neanderthal exon on one gene on one chromosome is found more often in non African modern humans than in subsaharan Africans. But the article most certainly shows that this gene is, in fact, found in modern subsaharan Africans. I'm not saying this is bad science. What I'm saying is that it's importance has been highly exaggerated. If you're going to believe in "purebred human" theories you need to look somewhere else. -- Carl