From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2798
Date: 2000-07-09
----- Original Message -----From: dawier@...Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 11:42 PMSubject: [TIED] Re: We, the weed...Dear Danny,Please be fair: what does racism have to do with Darwin or science? Any scoundrel can invoke Darwin to give an appearance of justification to crackbrained racism, but the fact that he's heard of evolution doesn't make him a scholar.I know of no respectable geneticist, palaeoanthropologist or palaeontologist who would have any doubts about human populations being very closely related to one another by biological standards. This is the result of Homo sapiens being a young species -- 200 ky or so, with all our close cousins (from australopithecines to Neanderthals) having gone extinct. The lineage leading to chimps and bonobos, who are our next closest relatives, split from ours some 7 My ago, give or take a million years. This means that a black African and a native South American must be related to each other about 35 times more closely than either of them is to chimpanzees. The expected genomic difference between them should then be ... something like 0.03%.As you can see, the recent genetic estimates of our interrelatedness (the genome *map* is far from being completed, to be sure) are fully consistent with the accepted model of of human phylogeny and definitely don't "shake up" the theory of evolution.Piotr
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...