stuart wrote:...I would say your race is native to a given geography when your racial traits reflect genetic adaptations that are advantageous to that geogrpahy and climate. Skin color is a fine example of this.....
I'd say you're running the possibility of having a self referential system, doing that. What exactly is a "racial trait," anyway? Skin color? Hmm, that's interesting.
There's a great book out there called Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza that I highly recommend for deconstructing one's notion of race, and racial traits. In it he examines the results of various DNA studies done on lots of different "racial" and/or ethnic groups around the world. These studies examined how similiar, or dissimilar, the DNA of different racial groups actually are. In as much as skin color is a racial trait one would expect those groups with the most differing skin tone to also have the most differning DNA, right? We say dark folk are black because of their skin color, mostly, light folk are white due to it, and so on. However, it turns out that skin color is an *awful* predictor of the difference in DNA between people.
In fact, if one does a mathmatical analysis of the numerical difference between the DNA in various races, and then groups the results into the most similar piles possible, know what we find? Every ethnic group found outside of Africa has more in common with each other than any given ethnic group within Africa. In otherwords, using DNA to determine race (and if race is indeed something one inherets then DNA seems like the best indicator available to me) shows that that there are many different human races within and from Africa, and everyone else is baically the same race. The difference between the DNA of a south east asian and a far north western European is les than the difference between two arbitrary breeding groups in/from Africa seperated by a fraction of the distance.
Indeed, this makes sense when you consdier Africa as the place where we evolved. We've been there the longest, it's where we'd have had the most time to develop the most diversity, genetically. Furthermore, most folk "from" outside of Africa probabably decended from the, or a limited number, of breeding populations that left that contintent. It also increases the value of Africa for our species, it's where most of our genetic insurance policies live. If genetic diversity is important for other species, and it is, it's also imprortant for us humans, I think.
So be careful of defining racial traits, would be my advice. Back in my undergrad physical anthropology classes the proffs spent a bunch of time quantifying differences in ear wax type, hair construction, skin tone, facial ratios, finger print patterns, and so on and finding mathematical correlations between them and what the profs already considered racial groups. As it turns out, based on DNA, most of those racial groupings were scientifically erroneous.
Race, it seems to me, is a social construction more than one of natural selection and human evolution, in as much as the nature vs. nurture idea has any validity at all. As such the things we've been trained to think mean race, like skin color, certaintly do mean race when we use them to inform our actions and bigotry. But when we look to DNA we find that those same "racial traits," don't index with DNA differences at all....
Ron, the long winded...;)
and judging by the dancing, am I to guess what your ethnic background is?
