Re: Owed Explanation I (Was Re: Ebonic Xmas)

Nik Taylor wrote:

> hoensch@SOFTHOME.NET wrote:
> > Races: the scientific term is "sub-species", for humans
> > there are three which are clearly distinguishable, colloquially;
> > asians, blacks, and whites.
>
> Uh, no.  There is ONE subspecies of Humanity, Homo sapiens sapiens, as
> distinguished from the extinct Homo sapiens neanderthalensis.  Races are
> not scientific, they are cultural constructions, altho there are
> differences between people in different continents, there is no rigid
> division.  There is no point at which you can say "east of here, you
> have Asians, west of here you have Europeans", nor could you analyze DNA
> and say "this is Asian DNA" or "this is African DNA"
Indeed, one of the things that was always covered up about Lenin in
Soviet Communist propaganda was that under the Tsarist Regime he
counted as a lower-level aristocrat from Central Asia (otherwise a big
no-no for anyone who didn't have connections in the party apparatus).
If you look at pictures of him, he doesn't quite look European, but he
doesn't quite look Asian, either.

> And as John Cowan has already pointed out, the difference is quite small
> between the varieties of humans.  Indeed, the difference WITHIN a group
> is greater than that between groups.  That is, the difference between
> two unrelated whites is greater than the difference between blacks and
> whites, which consists almost purely of appearances, plus a few small
> genetic differences like sickle-cell anemia among blacks or cystic
> fibrosis among whites.
Right. That's the fundamental problem right now in determining the
original genetic population of the Kensington Man found in Oregon.
Some scientists say he looks European, despite the fact that that
would put him ca. 9000 years ago (long before most people think
Europeans arrived in America).  But the reality is that, based solely
on skeletal morphology, he could very well be just another Native
who happens to look different than the others we've found from that
period.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
AIM: Deuterotom ICQ: 4315704
<http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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