Re: "The blacks" -- It's Debateable

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Subject: Re: "The blacks"

Author:
Alan

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Date Posted: 06:36:22 09/29/02 Sun
In reply to: Astrid 's message, "Re: "The blacks"" on 11:27:10 09/26/02 Thu

>>Astrid, I think you've not got your facts straight
>>here. Have you got a cite? I mean, think about it...
>>
>>Alan
>
>Here is the article--I am a little bit wrong. :-)
>"The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that
>everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and
>Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is
>descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne." So it's a
>little more than a thousand, but less than you'd think!
>
>http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/05/olson.htm

I am a fan of the Atlantic Monthly, so I was pretty amazed--for about five seconds. But this presumption is based on a huge assumption (of random intermarriage, as the author admits) that doesn't hold up. It is a mathematical idea, not a genetic one. I would bet everything I own that it would not hold true under DNA testing.

However, there has been DNA research that has found that nearly all humans whose lineage traces from outside of Africa (that is, from say 500 years ago outside of Africa--obviously we all came from Africa originally) descend from the same small group that left Africa only a few tens of thousands of years ago. There were previous groups that left Africa and flourished for a time, but they and their descendants died out.

So the result, one that torpedoes the normal sense of race, is that a random Chinese person is far more similar to a random Swede genetically than are two randomly selected sub-Saharan ("black") Africans. That is, there is far more genetic diversity within Africa than the rest of the world combined. But boy, the descendants of those intrepid explorers sure succeeded evolutionarily far out of proportion to the folks they left behind in crowded Africa!

Alan

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