--- In
cybalist@egroups.com, Håkan Lindgren <h5@...> wrote:
> You are right, humans are not an inbred species. What I meant to
say was something else, but I tried to be as brief as possible (that
letter was getting long enough; now I have to write an even longer
explanation, which means I've failed). The genetical diversity
between individual members of a small group of people is in fact
large, but the genetical difference between separate groups of
people - let's say a group of Eskimos and a group of Namibians - is
very small. At the last turn of the century, biologists believed that
mankind was divided into distinct races, and that each race had its
own, genetically determined traits. Now biologists are able to study
genes directly and they have found that "the genetic difference
between blacks and whites is negligible as compared with the
polymorphism within each group." We are all closer related than we
used to believe. But the genetic differences between individuals are
large enough to make even a small group viable: "if everyone on Earth
became extinct except for the Kikuyu of East Africa, about 85 percent
of all human variability would still be present ---." Humans are not
like wheat, we are like weed.
You know, the recently completed Genome Map is going to disturb a lot
of "racist scholars" who used Darwin as a license to say that
Africans are more like apes than humans. The difference between the
human and the chimpanzee, genetically speaking, is something like
1%. But the difference between an African and a South American
native is a few *hundredths* of a percent!
This might shake up the theory (or hypothesis) of evolution, but
that's better discussed on another list...
DaW.