-Selection Spurred Recent Evolution, Researchers Say -  The gist of this new study is that recent evolution = large populations + moving from ancestral environments to quite different ones (jungle to desert for instance).  The authors claim there has been significant evolution in the last 40 years and it varies between population groups around the world.  Larger populations have more potential mutations, some of them being good and eventually sweeping across the population.  You will have more selection for a  mutation if you move to a place where they are advantageous.  If you stay in the same place and do not leave for hundreds of thousand of years and the environment rarely changes you will not evolve as fast, because you do not need to adapt to change. 

This paper is not scientific law, there are a lot of holes that need to be filled  The researchers are getting their sample data from the  hapmap, but keep in mind that although we have mapped the human genome, we do not know what most genes do.  all Humans are about 99% similar, so we are talking about  1% of the genome.  The issue I have is that people (racists with low IQs) read these studies and think evolution means “becoming superior” or that the fact different groups of people are more superior to each other or very different from each other, almost to the point of species or subspecies.  That is not the case.  Evolution just means acquire traits that will allow a person to reproduce offspring.  In some societies that can mean being more intelligent, having shinny skin, or being more less muscular or hairy.  It depends.   Most of the genes they are tracking,  that we know vary in humans, have to do with things like cancer rates, skin coloring, lactose tolerance, etc.  In everyday life for most people this is not significant.  My wife and I are “genetically distant”, especially when compared to some of my relatives, but I get on with her and her family much better than I do with some of my extended family, so although different groups might have different average frequency of genes, that does not mean there is no overlap or that different frequencies of some genes make people significantly different, especially in behavior.  Genes do not operate in a vacuum they interact with the environment as well.  The picture is much more complicated.  

Racists and other types of idiots read “divergent” and “population group” as “far apart” and “political race”.  In reality if I told you that my house was closer to the nearest store than the post office, that tells you nothing about the actual distance you need to travel or how far apart the buildings are in relations to each other in miles (km).  It could be my house is right next to the store and the post office is two buildings over from the store, or the store is 50 miles from my house and the post office is 80 miles from the store.  Without comparing “divergence” to something and giving a measure of what it means people tend to get carried away with their own political bias or stupidity. 

In the end, the old belief, that people have not evolved since the dawn of civilization (about 10K years ago) is likely false but the extent of that evolution on the species and the resulting utility is still largely “educated guess work”.

-Japan completes missile intercept test from ship - Bonzai! Looks like Japan will not be burning in a sea of North Koreans nuclear fire in the near future.

-Inquiry opened into S. Korean front-runner - Another investigation into Lee Myung-bak’s business dealings.  I’m do not know enough about the issue to determine if it is purely politically motivated or not.   I blogged Sunday on Lee’s popularity, hinging primarily on faith that he is the person who can renew the economy. Here is another interesting article on what is going on in S.Korea.  It looks like no one is sure if a sitting president can legally stand trial, so hopefully this mess will resolved without more fighting.

-Signs of TB in Ancient Skull Support Theory on Vitamin D -  The long and short of it is that tuberculosis has been found in ancient people, and scientists believe that it was an environmental pressure that led to the selection of light skin in populations that lived too far from the equator to produce enough Vitamin D, due to sun exposure, in order to maintain a healthy immune system.  Today we have fortified milk and multivitamins, in ancient times if you were dark skinned and lived in the England or Siberia you would likely get various infections, rickets, and not live very long, unless (like Inuits) you eat something rich in Vitamin D to make up the differences, such as seal blubber.  The other side of that is light skinned people who live in the tropics have to monitor their sun exposure or risk sun burn.  In ancient times repeated sunburn could lead to infection and death, you likely would not live long enough to get cancer.  Since light skin (and eyes for Europeans) is relatively recent and evolved convergently in East Asia and Europe,  I am guessing people avoided the far North due to the ice age(s) so it would not matter.

-Nigeria: Fayose, Ibori Sent to Prison - “The two men are being tried for several offences, bordering on abuse of office, corruption and money laundering”.  This is always a positive thing.  The loyalists are up in arms because they know their gravy train of kick-backs has just stopped.  The “rule of law” has to start somewhere, there is bound to be push-back.

-I will keep my promises, Chen tells US - The initial article is the more Pan-Green take, the Pan-Blue take is here. I honestly do not believe China will make any serious threats against Taiwan if the referendum goes through, they know they can block any UN resolution for Taiwanese membership. The issues is that Burghardt know the referendum will be approved, as both the Pan-Blue and Pan-Green support UN membership, they just have different takes on if the name should be Taiwan or The Republic of China. The U.S. is concerned this will put more pressure on the Sino-American relationship, giving China a edge in any future dealings. It comes down to, it is an unneeded headache for Washington and one more step in the way of nationalism for Taiwan, which will also make any future talk of reunification more difficult. I do not believe Chen will ever declare independence, he is not stupid. What he wants is to establish strong roots for Taiwanese nationalism in the population, from which he hopes a strong independence movement will grow. IMOP, it is working, but a little slower than he expected.

-No sex workers’ rights, no nation - My view on this is a libertarian one. Tax it, regulate it (disease test, red light districts, no street walking), license it, and leave it alone. The best thing any society can do is make it as safe as possible, for the workers and the clients. No society in history has stopped this industry and it is a victimless crime if you regulate the mafias and pimps out of the business.

-China denies it deleted parts of communique with Japan - Despite “Japan’s fury“, China knows nothing. I was obviously not there, so I have no clue what went on, but what I do know from years of watching China is that the CCP publicly denying things in the face of firm evidence is not unheard of, in fact, it is common.

-Researchers: Human evolution speeding up - I blogged about this once, twice, and now three times this year. People generally assume evolution is a measured slow change over time. That looks to be false. Evolution seems to be more subject to population pressure then thought. It appears it occurs in waves over thousands, not millions of years. We are not usually speaking of radical change in body shape or size. As the article points out, lactose tolerance, skin coloring, and other more subtle things are under high selection in different populations for different regions. I do not expect humans to “speciate”, likely ever, short of some type of epidemic or nuclear war that leaves very small populations geographically isolated for very long periods of time (like in the millions of years). That is unlikely. History shows that whenever slightly divergent populations come into contact gene flow commences as people do what they do. It is not shocking to me that different populations are under different selective pressures, as the world has changed in the last 200 years more than it did in the previous 2,000 years.

-Foreign trade nears US$2 trln in first 11 months -

-PM talks with Singapore minister Goh - Big trade between two Confucian neighbors.

-Banks say loan regulation unfeasible - Seems there is some push back from Vietnamese leaders over the new government initiative to temper inflation.

-Whiz Chimps Outsmart College Students - New study shows that young chimps have superior memories to adult chimps and humans. It is believed that as a primate (including us) grows older there is a trade off in detailed memory for a greater capacity abstraction/symbolism. Human children were not tested, but I believe it is logical to assume, the human drop off is sharper than the Chimp because of our far greater capacity for abstract thinking. So does this mean that people with photographic memories are closer to chimps (lacking the ability to think highly in abstraction)? I would guess, on average, they have normal or above average abstract reasoning, but have also turned on more ancestral genes for memory; or it could be that these people have some type of newly evolved ability that reorganizes the brain far differently from Chimps, but with similar results for memory. Fascinating.

-South Korean presidential candidate cleared of charges - Update on the S.Korean election. The front runner, Lee Myung Bak has been cleared of all charges. More on this here.

-The coming China crash - Another prediction of Chinese pending Chinese economic doom, think I heard this before. This person makes a much stronger argument IMO.  Are there any counter arguments out there?  I would like to hear them before I weigh in.  What would happen, if China tightened banking loan regulation and let the real value of the current debt naturally reduce over time due to inflation?

-Rui Chenggang On Japan -  I came across an excellent essay last night, by a Chinese national who visited Japan, and his views on the Sino-Japanese relationship.    For the Chinese version click here.  I want to share this passage, below the fold:

We should ask ourselves, and also all the friends who are cursing out the Japanese: “Have you been to Japan? Do you have friends that have been to Japan?” Most of the answers will be NO. My impressions of Japan had not been good, but I examined myself. Apart from that particular piece of history, most of what I knew was hearsay. I had not been to Japan. I did not have any Japanese friends. I have not even interviewed any Japanese political figures or corporate leaders.

Consider an American. He has never been to China. He has no Chinese friends. He has only seen some unfavorable comments about China in the media and he concludes that China is bad. I definitely cannot accept that. I would say: “You have no right of speech without investigation. You know nothing about the Chinese people. How can you make such a judgment?”

But do we understand the Japanese?

Japan is a country that is closest to us but one about which we least understand. Most of our young people know much more about the European and American countries than Japan. Of course, Japan is not an easy country to understand, and there are two sides to the Japanese people. But from the viewpoint of a third person, Japan is no more difficult to understand than China. The problem is not that Japan cannot be understood. Instead, the issue is whether we are willing to try to understand. (Ruth Benedict’s
and Lai Xiao’er’s
are excellent books).

Those foreign friends who have visited China told me almost without exception that China was more splendid and better than they imagined. A trip to China often corrected their bad or mistaken ideas through reading too many novels. If you genuinely want to know Japan, a trip to Japan can often change many things. With this purpose, I went to visit Japan and it changed many of my previous over-simplified and subjective views.

When I spoke to the students of Yale University about China, I often used the analogy of the blind men feeling the elephant to describe the misunderstanding of most Americans about China and its people, and also about the misunderstanding of the United States by the Chinese people. Often, everybody just touch some body part and then conclude that this is the whole of the elephant. They are missing the full picture. This is even true for certain American friends who have lived in China for a long time and certain Chinese friends who have settled down to live in America. They stay in certain relatively set circles and they have not attempted to understand the country in a multi-dimensional way. Therefore, they insist on holding certain biased views based upon their personal experiences.

Such is the relationship between China and Japan. I frequently hear some Chinese people who had lived in Japan denouncing the various bad things about the Japanese people. After listening to them, I often have some anti-Japanese sentiments too. But then I think about the fact if these people were living in China, they would also have a long list of complaints against the Chinese people. I also know many Chinese people who are successful in Japan, including some Chinese people who dominate and bully Japanese people in Japan to the point that I even find it unbearable to watch.

There has been a lot of news about HIV in China this week. I do not have much to say about the article below, other than I have blogged about this before, but in regard to North Western Europeans. I’m sure someone is trying to develop a vaccine based on the what makes these people immune, to my knowledge, a different protein structure on the type of immune cells that does not allow HIV to attach to them. A few years ago, I read a story concerning a group of Kenyan prostitutes who were thought to be immune, but it turned out to be bogus.

———————————

Two women found with HIV-immune mutant gene
Wang Zhuoqiong
2004-10-01 05:17

SHENZHEN: Two women have been identified as carrying a mutant gene that is immune to HIV/AIDS, the first such cases uncovered in China, a researcher said.

The finding is the joint effort of a research programme, “Association of Human Genetic Polymorphisms with HIV Affections,” jointly conducted by the University of Washington in the US State of Washington and local Infectious Disease Hospitals and medical institutions in Guangdong Province.

Tuofu Zhu, associate professor of University of Washington and associate director of the Clinical Core at the Centre for AIDS Research (CFAR), introduced the programme to China a year ago as a part of his global research in nations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.

“Before, such mutant genes were only found in Caucasians. The finding has encouraged us to do further research in China, with the aim of developing medicines to prevent and cure HIV/AIDS for different races,”said Zhu.

China is now at a key moment in adopting effective measures to control and prevent HIV/AIDS as the disease moves from high risk populations to the general population, in most cases though sexual transmission, Zhu pointed out.

Zhu said that setting up a research centre in Guangdong Province is appropriate as its population has made it the best platform for collecting diversified samples.

“With the largest mobile population in China, we can get samples from migrants who are from other parts of the country,” said Zhu.

Since a greater number of patients infected with sexual transmitted disease in particular are reported in Guangdong Province, sample collections are more efficient than other regions in China, Zhu added.

So far, according to Zhu, his programme in Shenzhen has identified 11 Exposed Seronegatives (ES) since January.

Zhu explained that the immune systems of some individuals may be capable of resisting HIV infection. These individuals who do not appear to be infected with HIV despite multiple sexual encounters with HIV infected partners are referred to as exposed seronegatives (ES).

To be specific, any one who has conducted sexual activities at least twice weekly in four consecutive months with an HIV-infected partner might be identified as ES.

Of 11 ES cases, two cases have later been identified as carrying the mutant genes.

In Zhu’s opinion, if medicine functioning similarly with the genes was put in the vagina and rectum, the HIV virus couldn’t find its carrier to enter the human body and thus would be expelled.

In Shenzhen, both confirmed samples are women who have been exposed to HIV for many years but remained uninfected.

One of them, in her 40s, has kept a regular sexual life with her husband without any protection measures for nine years. Her husband, who was infected with the deadly virus by blood transfusion in 1994, was hospitalized in Shenzhen’s Donghu Hospital in July last year.

However, due to the limited qualified samples, Zhu said it is still too early to draw any conclusion from the programme, adding “we definitely need more support from the local hospital, medical institutions and government to collect more data from ES people.”

(China Daily 10/01/2004 page1)

I am sure Taiwanese nationalists are happy about this, but reality is that no “Han Chinese” population is “pure”. There is a clear, though subtle, cline in Northern and Southern Han Chinese as both groups have absorbed non-Han ethnic groups in ancient (and fairly recent times, i.e. Manchu) and the general migration trend appears to be Northwest to South. This is well documented, so I’m not shocked that Han Chinese who went to Taiwan intermarried with the aboriginal population. I wonder how much gender bias was involved. I would assume it was mostly Han men marrying aboriginal women. In any case, this is still interesting.
—————————–

Most Hoklo, Hakka have Aboriginal genes, study finds

Eighty-five percent of Hoklo and Hakka people have Aboriginal ancestry, according to a study on the DNA of non-Aboriginal ethnic Taiwanese conducted by Mackay Memorial Hospital’s transfusion medical research director Mari Lin (林媽利).

Those 85 percent have strains from both plains and mountain Aboriginal tribes, as well as from Fujian and Guangdong and minor traces of ancestry from the Philippines, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian islands, the study found.

Only 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s population have full Aboriginal ancestry, the study found.

As an example of the nation’s ethnic diversity, Lin cited the example of Taiwan independence activist Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), whose patrilineal DNA is part Aboriginal, while his matrilineal DNA has Hakka and North Asian traces.

Lin said Hoklo and Hakka DNA was diverse. She said the tests showed that more than 90 percent of Hoklo and Hakka have at least some Vietnamese ancestry, specifically from China’s southeast coast.

Lin said genealogical analyses had shown Vietnamese are genetically more similar to Southeast Asians than northern Han.

Lin said Fujian’s mountains made it easier historically for residents to have contact with Taiwan and Southeast Asia than with the rest of China to the north, which was reflected in the genetic make-up of the population.

Official statistics show Taiwan’s population consists of approximately 73.5 percent Hoklo, 17.5 percent Hakka, 7.5 percent Mainlanders (who arrived after 1945) and 1.5 percent Aborigines. Lin’s study excluded Mainlanders.

Lin said that researchers began by recruiting volunteer blood donors. The first stage of the project consisted of analyzing the DNA of 100 Hoklo and Hakka — 58 men and 42 women.

Of these, 67 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through DNA comparison techniques. An additional 18 percent were found to have Aboriginal ancestry through HLA chromosome typing, bringing the total to 85 percent.

There is a lot in the news today that I do not have a particular opinion but I wanted to share:

-Genetic Nondiscrimination Bill Stalled in Senate - I have long felt that human genetic engineering is inevitable and the wealthy elites will augment themselves and their offspring regardless of the fact it may be illegal in the West by going to a nation where it is not. East Asia seems to be the likely location.   Long before that will happen,  genome sequencing will become decrease in expense to the point that knowledge of one’s genetic defects, can be known prenatally. If no bill is passed, imagine what insurance companies will do with the information that you might be 50% more likely to die of a stroke, or 40% more likely to get develop diabetes.  I would expect to see more legislation like this in my lifetime, a lot more.

-Denial Makes the World Go Round - LOL, the entire time I read this article I kept thinking of the “intelligent design folks”.  I was also thinking that men tend to be highly in denial of their own flaws, whereas women are often in denial of the flaws of those around them.  This is something men should be thankful for everyday. :-)  The downside is that this seems to be the strongest with “in-group” people, which makes it more likely that people will show double standards with those they consider their “peers”.

-U.N. to Say It Overstated H.I.V. Cases by Millions - Just last week I was talking about how another international organization totally miscalculated China and India’s economic size. If you want my opinion on the HIV issue, well this Nigerian epigone said it best.

-Are Scientists Playing God? It Depends on Your Religion - This is very much related to what I was saying on the Genetic Discrimination Bill.

-Germany looks to Asia, at China’s expense - I’m not really sure I “get this” as many of the countries with “good human rights” in SE Asia are not the ones who are directly competing in the same industries as China is dominant.  So I am wondering how much of this is a play to the German public by competing political factions.  In any case, “I’m gonna tell you like a n1GG1 told me, Cash Rules Everything Around Me (CREAM)”.  That is pretty much where my head is at one these issues,  economics is going to trump politics, although moralistic grandstanding does make for a nice show for the “mob”.

- Asian Stocks Fall Amid Credit Concerns -

Part IV of IV

I found the series of articles below, on a site where the common opinions expressed I do not agree with, written by a person I do not care for personally, but on some things we do agree (once in a blue moon). I have never been one to ignore knowledge due to its source. I will include these as part of a series of post I have thrown together under this topic: Part I, II, III.

Historical Evolution of IQ and Eugenics:

I - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

II - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

III - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

IV - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

V - Is the Establishment Reviving Eugenics?

Detailed Breakdown of Contemporary Racialism in Regard to IQ:

Brain Evolution, Population Genetics and Armchair Kookery - I

Genes, IQ and “Race Realism”

The IQ Genes That Weren’t

Unravelling Quantitative Traits is Hard

racismreview.com » Blog Archive » DNA and Scientific Racism

One discoverer of double-helix turns out to be fool » Why Dont You B..

For Dr. Watson and Other Racists, Racism’s Beauty Lies In Its Simplic..

Eunomia · Yes, But Is Kevin Drum?

Elementary, My Dear Watson « Black on Campus

None of the Above: What IQ Doesn’t Tell Us About Race (The New Yorker)
————————–

Update:

From Dr. Brad Delong, William Saletan and the Editors of Slate Demonstrate that They Are Not Members of the Genetic Elite

From Slate, Dissecting the IQ Debate

Random:

BRAINS:

Most of those who push the racial differences in brain size augment insist that blacks have smaller brains than other groups. Ironically, the majority of empirical studies on the matter and (indeed) the default position would suggest that blacks may actually have larger brains than do others groups. Brain sizes vary considerably within any species, but this variation is not usually related to intelligence. Instead, it correlates loosely with body size (height in Homo sapiens): large people tend to have larger brains (Gould, 1981). As a result, women on average will have smaller brains than men (Peters, 1991), but this does not indicate that the level of male intelligence is higher than female intelligence; Neanderthals had larger brains than anatomically modern humans (Tattersall,1995; Gould, 1981) but most would agree that they were less intelligent than Homo Sapiens.

Tobias (1970) compared 7 racial and national groups in a study on brain size, in which he reported that the brain size of American blacks was larger than any white group, (which included American, English and French whites) except those from the Swedish sub sample (who had the largest brains of any of the groups measured), and American blacks were estimated to have some 200 million more neurons than American whites (See Tobias 1970; Weizmann et al. 1990).

S.O.Y. KEITA (2006) in his principal components analysis on male crania from the northeast quadrant of Africa and selected European and other African series found no discernable size differences in the skulls he measured. Stating: “The plots are immediately striking in that sharp patterns of segregation of individuals by group origin do not emerge in the two dimensional plots. It is striking how much ‘‘size’’ varies by individual within the European and African regions, assuming that PC 1 captures primarily this quality; Bergman’s rule is not demonstrated in these data in any easily recognizable way, since individuals from all regions exhibit variation.”

Gould (1981) discovered upon remeasuring Morton’s phony skull data that the skulls of blacks in his sample were on average larger than those of whites. Morton included in his sample of black skulls more females than he included in the white sample. After correcting for this error it was shown that the black sample had larger skulls (and presumably, larger brains) than did whites.

Genetic studies of human Brainsize have discovered two genes that when mutated can result in a small brain, or “microcephaly.” Globally the genes for this condition are young and high frequency haplotypes are “rare” in Africa. That is, Africans are less likely to carry the genes that, when mutated, can result in smaller brains than other groups (Currat et al, 2005; Mekel-Bobrov et al, 2006).

Cernovsky (1990) reported that American blacks were superior in brain weight to American whites.

Note: The arguments about racial differences in brain size are usually accompanied by claims of racial differences in penis size (i.e. they are supposedly inversely correlated)! There is not a single professional involved in Neuroscience who makes any reference to this supposed relationship. The development and size of one’s penis is controlled for by testosterone levels during puberty; and it is testosterone (and body size) that determine penis size. Keeping this in mind, employing elementary logic one may convincingly argued that because men tend to have dramatically higher levels of testosterone than do women, and on average have larger brains (due mostly to body size); that testosterone not only increases body and penis size, but also brain size! [Note: It has been suggested by prostate cancer researchers that American blacks may have higher levels of testosterone than American whites.]

INTELLIGENCE:

INTELLIGENCE:

IQ is a culturally, socially, and ideologically rooted concept; an index intended to predict success (i.e., to predict outcomes that are valued as success by some people) in a given society. Alfred Binet originally devised the IQ test to screen children for educational difficulties, and made clear its conceptual foundations (See Richardson, 2002). The items found on these tests are largely measures of achievement at various levels of competency (Sternberg, 1998, 1999, 2003a). That being said: It has been noted by some IQists (a term coined by Capron et al, 1999) that the average IQ of an undergraduate (graduate) is expected to be no less than 115 (Ostrowsky, 1999; Gottfredson, 1998), while an IQ of 125 is expected for those with more advanced professional degrees (Gottfredson, 1998). Herrnstein and Murray (1994) claimed that a dysgenic trend exists in western societies that foresee the establishment of a “cognitive elite.” While other IQists believe that a general index of cognitive ability is the best single predictor of virtually all criteria considered necessary for success in life in the Western part of the developed world (Jensen, 1998; Schmidt, Ones & Hunter, 1992).

African-born blacks comprise 13 percent of the U.S. foreign-born black population and are considerably more educated than other black immigrants (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). The vast majority come from minority white countries in East and West Africa (e.g. Kenya and Nigeria), and less than 2 percent originate from North or South Africa (World Factbook, 2004; Yearbook of immigration Statistics, 2003). In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in higher education African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group (also see U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). African immigrants to the U.S. were found to be more highly educated than any native-born ethnic group including white Americans (see also, Logan & Deane, 2003; Williams, 2005; The Economist, 1996). Between 42.3 and 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma (Dixon D, 2006; U.S. Census, 2000). This is slightly more than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly “double” the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans (Williams, 2005; The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 1999-2000). Black immigrants from Africa also have rates of college graduation that are “more” than twice that of the U.S.-born population, in general (Williams, 2005).

In the UK, 1988, the Commission for Racial Equality conducted an investigation on the admissions practices of St. George’s, and other medical colleges, who set aside a certain number of places for minority students. This informal quota system reflected the percentage of minorities in the general population. However, minority students with Chinese, Indian, or black African heritage had higher academic qualifications for university admission than did whites (Blacks in Britain from the West Indies had lower academic credentials than did whites). In fact, blacks with African origins over the age of 30 had the highest educational qualifications of any ethnic group in the British Isles. Thus, the evidence pointed to the fact that minority quotas for University admissions were actually working against students from these ethnic groups who were on average more qualified for higher education than their white peers (Cross, 1994; Also see, Dustmann, Theodoropoulos, 2006).

Dustmann and Theodoropoulos (2006) provide a first thorough investigation of educational attainment and economic behavior of ethnic minority immigrants and their children in Britain. They studied how British born minorities perform in terms of education, employment and wages, when compared to their parent generation as well as to comparable groups of white natives, using 27 years of LFS data. In terms of educational attainment their results suggest a strong educational background of Britain’s ethnic minority immigrant population. In addition, they show that second generation ethnic minorities do better than their parents, and substantially better than their white peers. For both generations Black Africans topped the list in both years of schooling/educational qualifications and wages/employment.

Again, when comparing immigrants in the United States one finds that the racialist models adopted by many Psychologists do not always predict outcomes in the way one might expect. For example, it has been shown that black immigrants born from Zimbabwe (96.7 percent), Botswana (95.5 percent) have high school graduation rates that far exceed all white immigrant and native groups. Further, the average Nigerian immigrant (58.6 percent) is eight times more likely to have obtained a bachelors degree than the average Portuguese born (7.3 percent) (Dixon D, 2006; Dixon D, 2005).

The African born in the United States are concentrated in management or professional and sales or office-related occupations. Of the employed population age 16 and older in the civilian labor force, the African born are much more likely than the foreign born in general to work in management and professional occupations as well as sales and office occupations (i.e. clerical occupations). Additionally, the African born were less likely to work in service, production, transportation, material moving, construction, and maintenance occupations than the foreign born in general (Dixon D, 2006). In the UK a study by Dr Yaojun Li, from Birmingham University, and Professor Anthony Heath, from Oxford University, found that Africans are more likely to be in professional and managerial jobs than white British men, with a large proportion, about 40%, holding these positions (Li and Heath, 2006).

The above information strongly suggests that African born blacks may have IQs a full standard deviation (15 points) above that of American born whites and slightly less than a full standard deviation “above” that of whites in the UK (see, Gottfredson, 1998; Ostrowsky, 1999; Richardson, 2002 for details). In the United States African born blacks and their offspring, exceed American born whites in most socio-economic indicators in ways that closely resemble the gaps seen between native born white and black Americans (Le, 2007; Le, 2007). If these gaps can not be said to have originated because of institutionalized racism or historical discrimination against whites, then why do whites fare so poorly? The differences in academic attainment between African born blacks and native born whites are particularly striking and could, based on “IQist” like thinking (eg Jensen), be indicative of genuine underlying intelligence differences between the two populations; one in favor of African born blacks.

Higher cognitive indices are said to be predictive of more educational achievements and more education is predictive of higher intellectual outcomes (e.g., Brody, 1997; Ceci & Williams, 1997). Furthermore, upon considering the immigrant status of most African blacks in the West, it should be noted that this group must also operate within a cultural framework that is not its own, and one that is typically hostile toward blacks - Further bolstering the argument of underlying intelligence differences IN FAVOR of African born blacks.

The fact that Black Africans also tend to be concentrated in higher level occupations, considered more cognitively challenging, than the average occupation of either American or British born whites, too suggest higher level IQs for African born blacks (see Gottfredson, 1986). Moreover, as most IQ tests in popular use today were designed specifically to predict academic success and/or job status, it could thus be argued that the west’s “Cognitive Elite” — so eagerly discussed in Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) pseudo-scholarly work “The Bell Curve” — might be better described as black men and women from Africa, if not simply as non-whites from aboard. Something else to note is that for the first time in history, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade. Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more Africans have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. In other words: black African achievements can not simply be dismissed as those of a “small group” of elites entirely unrepresentative of the continent, in general. Moreover, the Academic and occupational achievements of African blacks are documented in the UK (Li and Heath, 2006; Dustmann, Theodoropoulos, 2006) as well as in Canada (Guppy and Davies, 1998; Boyd, 2002).

Crawford-Nutt (1976) found that African black students in westernized schools score higher in progressive matrix scores, a westernized concept, than American white students. His study was meant to examine the cultural-perceptual differences between groups, and demonstrated that one’s performance on western standardized tests may actually correspond more closely with quality and style of schooling than other factors. Super (1976) found that African infants sit and walk earlier than do their white counterparts in the United States and Europe. Black children in particular show more advanced psychomotor development than European children, a finding that has been evidenced in a number of different studies. Some scholars argue that “African babies actually seemed to have been born at a more advanced stage of development, since many of their activities at less than a week corresponded to those performed by European children aged four to eight weeks” (Wilson, 1978). Others believe that the more advanced psychomotor skills demonstrated by black children may be better explained by various environmental factors.

In the United States, when matched for IQ with Whites, American Blacks show superior “Short Term Memory” (Nijenhuis et al., 2004); a finding that can not simply be explained as some byproduct of their educational experience or past learning, as African Americans are typically taught by less qualified teachers than their white counterparts and are concentrated in lower educational tracks, which have less qualified teachers, and provide students with less challenging course work (Hallinan 1994; Diamond et al., 2004). For example, in Chicago, the vast majority of schools placed on academic probation as part of the district accountability efforts were majority African-American and low-income (Bryk 2003; Diamond and Spillane 2004).

Finally: In a study conducted in the Caribbean, one that seemingly bypassed socio-cultural influences, Tizard and colleagues compared black and white orphans who had all been raised in the same highly enriched institutional environment. At five years of age, white children had IQs of 103, black children had IQs of 108, and children of mixed race had IQ of 106 (Tizard et al, 1972; Flynn, 1980).

GENES:

Jorde et al. in a study published in the American journal of Human Genetics (2000) compared worldwide genetic variation among 255 individuals using autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y-chromosome polymorphisms. Their finding was that gene-diversity results showed higher levels of diversity in African populations than in non-African populations. Similar findings have been reached in numerous studies (Vigilant et al. 1991; Nei et al. 1993; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1991; Deka et al. 1995b; Jorde et al. 1997). For example, Antonio Salas et al. (2002) reported that Africa presents the most complex genetic picture of any continent with time and depth for mitochondrial DNA.

It has also been discovered that Africans have the largest total number of alleles, as well as the largest number of unique alleles, for most systems; a discovery that places Africans as possibly being the most genetically fit people on Earth, as lower genetic variation is said to lower genetic fitness (Lacy 1987). Gst (Genetic diversity) values are 11%–18% for the autosomal systems and are two to three times higher for the mtDNA sequence and Y-chromosome RSPs. Africa has higher GST values than does either Europe or Asia for all systems except the Y-chromosome STRs and Alus. All systems except the Y-chromosome STRs show less variation between populations within continents than between continents. These results are reassuring and offer broad support for an African origin of modern human populations.

A population with many different alleles at a locus may be said to have a lot of genetic variation at that locus. Genetic variation is essential for natural selection to operate since natural selection can only increase or decrease frequency of alleles already in the population. In a very real sense, genetic variation is the raw material for evolution. Without genetic variation, a population cannot evolve in response to changing environmental variables and, as a result, may face an increased risk of extinction.

Europe may actually have less genetic diversity than other continents due to the wide spread war and disease that have ravaged the continent over the last a millennia. In 1347, for example, Black Death was rapidly carried throughout Europe from the Mediterranean Basin, and eventually, areas of European settlement as isolated as Viking settlements in Greenland were ravaged by plague. By the time these plagues had run their course in 1351, between 25 and 50% of the population of Europe was dead (Gottfried, 1983). Lower genetic variation depresses individual fitness, resistance to disease and parasites, and flexibility in coping with environmental challenges. Lower variation also decreases mean fitness of populations, resilience, and long-term adaptability (Lacy, 1987).

CONCLUSION:

Whites (people of European ancestry) are not smarter than blacks (people of sub-Saharan African ancestry), they do not have larger brains, nor are they biologically superior in anyway.

Referenced Literature:

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C, Dustmann, N, Theodoropoulos (2006): Ethnic Minority Immigrants and their Children in Britain. Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, Department of Economics, University College London

Capron C., Adrian R. Vetta, Michel Duyme, and Atam Vetta (1999). Misconceptions of biometrical IQists. Current Psychology of Cognition 1999, 18 (2), 115-160

Cavalli-Sforza LL, Bowcock AM, Kidd JR, Mountain JL, Hebert JM, Carotenuto L, Kidd KK, (1991) Drift, admixture, and selection in human evolution: a study with DNA polymorphisms. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 88:839–843

Cernovsky Z.Z. (1990). Race and Brain Weight: A note on Rushton’s conclusions. Psychological Reports 66:337-38

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Cross, T. (1994). Black Africans Now the Most Educated Group in British Society. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 3 (spring, 1994), pp.92-93

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World Factbook, 2004; Yearbook of immigration Statistics, 2003

My wife and I discovered this many years ago on inspection of each others hair, and myself, growing up in a country that is about 66% white examples of varying European fair textures are everywhere.

Humans have more hair follicles than Chimps per square inch on thier body. However, where hair grows, what type of hair, and how thick it grows is determined by genes.

In the article below they mentioned East Asians. In my experience Japanese people (on average) have the thickest hair in the region, followed by Koreans and then Chinese. Many Chinese have thin hair that lays flat when short, instead of standing up like a bristle, which is quite common in the region.

Black people’s hair is hard to compare with the naked eye, because it is so curly, but, my hair is thinner than my wife’s. I also remember in junior high school, my class looked at our hair under a microscope. My hair was thicker than my lab partner (who was white) and tightly curled.

These are all averages. There are white people with very thick hair and black people with very thin hair (I mean unmixed black Africans, not African Americans). There are also whites with kinky hair (”Jew Fros”). My sister-in-law’s hair is much thinner than her hair for instance.

For some reason redheads have thick hair on average, especially the ones with curly hair or maybe it is just the coloring and the fact that the flatter the hair the more it curls and it might look “thicker” to the naked eye. Not sure, but I find this interesting.

If our kids have thick hair like my wife and curly hair like mine that is going to be a hell of a mess to try to control…I mean…for “her to control” hehe

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Japanese

Nigerian?

Swedish

A Thick Head of Hair Is in the Genes

By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
1 November 2007

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA–Whether you have a poker-straight black mane or frizzy blond locks, your hair depends on your ancestry. Now researchers have come closer to figuring out just how hair traits are passed down. According to a talk presented here last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, a single genetic variant may explain why East Asians have thicker hair fibers than other populations. The discovery is part of a wave of newly found genes that determine what individuals look like.

Anthropologists have long noticed that populations across the world differ in hair type, skin color, and facial features. Finding the genes that explain these differences became easier in 2005, when researchers unveiled the International HapMap Project, a catalog of human genetic variation that helps scientists home in on genes more quickly (ScienceNOW, 26 October 2005). Geneticists at the University of Tokyo and several other institutions in Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia have now used the HapMap to explore why Japanese and Chinese people have thick hair: The cross-sectional area of East Asian hair fibers averages about 30% larger than that of Africans and 50% larger than that of Europeans.

The researchers started with 170 candidate genes known to be involved in hair development based on mouse studies and rare inherited human diseases. They then narrowed this list by looking at how these genes varied in three HapMap populations–Yoruba from Nigeria, Europeans, and Japanese and Chinese. A variant in a gene called EDAR was present in 88% of the Japanese and Chinese but not at all in the two other groups. To see how this gene affected hair thickness, the researchers examined hair fiber dimensions and DNA from 186 individuals from two ethnic groups in Southeast Asia who have a variety of hair types. Hair fibers were thickest in people who have two copies of the East Asian version of EDAR.

The EDAR gene codes for ectodysplasin A receptor, which is part of a molecular pathway that signals hair precursor cells to begin forming a follicle. The variant may have been selected for in East Asians either because thicker hair was beneficial in the cold north Asian climate or because it is linked to some other trait, such as tooth shape, that gave East Asians an advantage, concluded presenter Akihiro Fujimoto of the University of Tokyo.

The EDAR allele wouldn’t be all that useful for figuring out what someone looks like from their DNA because it doesn’t determine whether hair is straight or curly, and hair thickness also varies with sex and age, says co-author Ryosuke Kimura of Tokai University School of Medicine in Kanagawa, Japan. However, he says it could be used as a marker for East Asian ancestry. Indeed, notes molecular anthropologist Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University in State College, the EDAR allele had already jumped out in the HapMap analysis as being distinctly East Asian. “It was only a matter of time before somebody focused in on what the phenotype was,” he says.

And more genes for physical traits are coming. At the same session, researchers from Iceland and the Netherlands described several newly discovered genes that contribute to eye and hair color–and freckling–in Europeans. The finding, published online last week in Nature Genetics, and others like it could be useful for investigating crime, as well as for genetic anthropology, notes co-author Kári Stefánsson, CEO of deCODE genetics in Iceland. For example, knowing the gene for red hair allowed researchers to report last week that some Neandertals were redheads (Science, 26 October). Using such traits for DNA forensics “is clearly where we’re headed,” says Shriver.

Accidental Blogger: Whither The Human Race?
Why genes don’t determine race. Race Against History « SF Gray ..
Icho 2004 » Blog Archive » Scientist’s Study Of Brain ..

I guess there are two ways to look at this. One is that successful (high status) men can attract more physically attractive women. Due to their status they can afford to provide a better environment for their mate and the resulting children.

Lets imagine that their were a dozen children. It could be that overtime enough female children can be born who are “curvy” and intelligent and those children would go on to procreate more so than their less curvy siblings. The idea is that, in time, traits such as curviness and intelligence could appear together in a disproportionate amount in a population as intelligent men constantly select for it and then you will have some of those men with genes from their mother and maternal grandmother for “curviness” in females which which will create a loop.

It should also be taken into account that “curvy” women have higher fertility rates in general due to hormonal reasons on top of men seeking them out more.

I am assuming that the study normed for race/ethnicity, for example, African Americans are more likely to have an hour glass shape than white Americans.

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Update: BBC Reports that curvy women have more intelligent children, but they themselves are also more intelligent than waif-like women.

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Beauty Beat: Sharp Curves
Booty and brains sit well together. Curvy-figured mothers have children with better cognitive abilities.

By:Corey Binns

A woman’s eye-popping hourglass figure offers drooling men more than just an irresistible image. Shapely hips and thighs hold essential nutrients that nurse brains and could produce smart kids too, say Steven Gaulin of the University of California at Santa Barbara and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh.

“Men respond because it’s reproductively important,” Lassek says. At a meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Lassek and Gaulin revealed that women with low waist-to-hip ratios (WHR) have children with better cognitive abilities than less curvy mothers.

The explanation lies in omega-3 fatty acids, which are tucked in the hips and thighs and also compose much of the human brain. Girls begin storing these fatty acids below the waist once puberty hits. The body hoards the biological building blocks in anticipation of a woman’s third trimester of pregnancy, when the fetal brain is in its most rapid stages of development. Lower body weight loss continues until the child stops breast-feeding. (Eating more omega-3s while expecting and nursing can contribute to development, but the body prefers its own reserves.) Meanwhile, waist fat increases brain-harming inflammation and is low in the fatty acids—not to mention its contribution to diabetes and heart disease.

Previous research had suggested the padding provides babies with a sturdy supply of energy. But, Lassek points out, “if it’s just for energy, why not have fat on your back?” Now wouldn’t that be sexy.

I do not like to discuss race much on this site because I do not like to give a lot of credence to various racist arguments by addressing them. I also do not want to invite those type of people here. Once I posted some crime stats that did not please some white supremacist. They linked to this site and started flooding it with various posts for a good weak, which got very annoying.

It seems everyone has an opinion on the Watson - Black IQ controversy. I have said all I had to say about it on Blackprof.com over the last few days. I have also talked about African developed on this site many times, as the issue interest me. I gave a very candid personal opinion of some of the root issues a few weeks ago here. I think I will let Idang Alibi, a columnist at All Africa finish the conversation for me.

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UPDATE: James Watson is 16% black. LOL

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I Agree With Dr Watson

Daily Trust (Abuja)
OPINION
25 October 2007
Posted to the web 25 October 2007

By Idang Alibi
A few days ago, the Nobel Laureate, Dr James Watson, made a remark that is now generating worldwide uproar, especially among the blacks.

He said what to me looks like a self-evident truth. He told The Sunday Times of London in an interview that in his humble opinion, black people are less intelligent than the White people.

Since then, some of us cannot hear anything else but the outrage of black people who feel demeaned by what Watson has said. So many people have called the man names. To be expected, some have said he is a racist. Some even wonder how a “foolish” man like Watson could have won the Nobel Prize. Even white people who, deep in their heart, agree with Watson want to be politically, correct so they condemn the man.

Why are we blacks becoming so reactive, so sensitive to any remarks, no matter how well-meaning, about our failure as a race? Why are we becoming like the Jews who see every accusation as a manifestation of anti-Semitism? I do not know what constitutes intelligence. I leave that to our so-called scholars. But I do know that in terms of organising society for the benefit of the people living in it, we blacks have not shown any intelligence in that direction at all. I am so ashamed of this and sometimes feel that I ought to have belonged to another race.

Nigeria my dear country is a prime example of the inferiority of the black race when compared to other races. Let somebody please tell me whether it is a manifestation of intelligence if a people cannot organise a free, fair and credible election to choose who will lead them. Is it intelligence that we cannot provide simple pipe-borne water for the people? Our public school system has virtually collapsed. Is that a sign of intelligence? Our roads are impassable. In spite of the numerous sources that nature has made available to us to tap for energy to run our industries and homes, we have no steady supply of electricity. Yet electricity is the bedrock of industrialisation. When you agree with the school of Watson, some say you are incorrect because all these failures are a result of poor leadership. Why must it be us blacks who must always suffer poor leadership? Is that not a manifestation of unintelligence?

In the name of international trade, bilateral co-operation, globalisation and other subterfuges, the norm in the world today is for smart people to appropriate the wealth of other people for themselves and their countries. But more among the blacks than any other race, the practice is to steal from their own country and salt away to other people’s country. Is it intelligence that our leaders steal billions of naira and hide in other people’s country?

Anywhere in the world today where you have a concentration of black people among other races, the poorest, the least educated, the least achieving, and the most violent group among those races will be the blacks. When indices of underdevelopment are given, black people and countries are sure to occupy the bottom of the ladder. If we are intelligent, why do we not carry first when statistics of development are given?

Look at the African continent. South Africa is the most developed country because of the presence of whites there. This may be an uncomfortable truth for many of us but it exists nevertheless. If the whites had been driven away after independence, we would have seen a steady decline of that country.

In terms of natural endowment, Africa ought to be the richest of the continents but see the mess we have made of the potential for greatness which God in his infinite wisdom has bestowed upon us. We have proved totally incapable of harnessing the abundant natural resources to become great. Today, there is a renewed scramble for the wealth of Africa. China, our new “friend”, does not bother about the genocide against fellow blacks in the Sudan by the Arabs who control the affairs of that country. They say they do not want to interfere in the internal affairs of any country. All they want is the oil in Sudan to run their industries. Yet, we blacks have not seen the Chinese action as an affront to our sensitivities. Every race takes us for granted because we are so weak and so foolish, if you permit me to say it.

I am really pained by our gross underachievement as a race. Instead of regarding bitter truths expressed by the likes of Watson as a wake-up call for us to engage in sober reflection, we take to the expression of woolly sentiment. For me, this type of reaction is a further evidence of our unintelligence. A man of intelligence recognises genuine criticism against him and takes steps to improve himself in order to prove his critics wrong. But for us blacks, our reaction is to abuse the man who expresses worries about our backwardness.

Other races are deeply worried about us because we are a problem to the world. We suffer from the five Ds: disorderliness, debts, diseases, deaths and disasters. Our disorderliness affects others or else they won’t be too bothered about us. Many are afraid because our diseases could infect them. Polio has been eradicated all over the world yet it is still found in Nigeria here. When they give us money to help us eradicate it, our thieving officials will embezzle the money; the virus will spread and endanger the health of not only our people but other people as well.

Out of a shared sense of humanity, some cannot bear to see how we die in thousands almost every day from clearly preventable diseases and causes. For years now, our people die extremely painful but perfectly preventable deaths from buildings which collapse because they were poorly constructed. How can you tell me we are as intelligent as others when we set traps for ourselves in the name of houses and others do not do so? Some people are extremely frustrated about us. If they have a way of avoiding us, they will be too glad to do so because we are a problem.

As I write this, I do so with great pains in my heart because I know that God has given intelligence in equal measure to all his children irrespective of the colour of their skin. The problem with us black people is that we have refused to use our intelligence to organise ourselves socially and politically.

It should worry us that we do not invent things. We do not go to the moon. Our societies are not well-organised. We have the shortest lifespan of all the races. Something must be wrong with us. Why are we not like others? Our scholars will be quick to say that these are not the only ways of measuring intelligence. They will quote other scholars to adumbrate their point, but the fact remains that we are not showing intelligence. Others are showing it more than we’re doing. If they are not more intelligent than we are, let someone tell me how to put it. God himself must be frustrated with his black children. They must be an embarrassment to him. He has given us everything he has given to other of his children; why are his black children not manifesting their own gift?

A few years ago, the whites used to contemptuously call the Japanese “little Japs”. Today, the Japanese and other Asians have pulled themselves up by the bootstrap and have arrived. No one speaks of the Japanese or Asians with contempt anymore. When people like Watson speak about us in unedifying terms, we should take it as a challenge to prove them wrong by sitting down to plan how we can become world-beaters.

If our political leaders are the reason for our backwardness, we should resolve to get the kind of leaders who will be instrument for our rapid progress. I may not know how intelligence is measured but my limited knowledge of intelligence is that it can also be measured by the kind of leaders a people decide to have. If, for instance, our professors preside over the massive rigging of elections, it means that we do not have very intelligent professors. Such rigged elections will no doubt produce unintelligent leaders. Such unintelligent leaders will do stupid things which will prove that we are not as intelligent as other races. Do I sound confusing or intelligent?

I am ready for some of our ‘patriotic’ intellectuals who will write and abuse me for the ‘outrage’ I have expressed here but I stick to my guns: we lack intelligence and as stated in the Bible, anyone who lacks intelligence should cry unto God who is the custodian of wisdom to bestow some upon him. We should go on our knees today and ask God why we do not appear as intelligent as our other brothers. I am confident God will reveal to us what we must do, and urgently too, to change our terribly unflattering circumstances.

I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

· Scientist has made synthetic chromosome
· Breakthrough could combat global warming

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• The Guardian
• Saturday October 6 2007

Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The announcement, which is expected within weeks and could come as early as Monday at the annual meeting of his scientific institute in San Diego, California, will herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes. It is certain to provoke heated debate about the ethics of creating new species and could unlock the door to new energy sources and techniques to combat global warming.

Mr Venter told the Guardian he thought this landmark would be “a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before”.

The Guardian can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.

The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life, removing a fifth of its genetic make-up. The wholly synthetically reconstructed chromosome, which the team have christened Mycoplasma laboratorium, has been watermarked with inks for easy recognition.

It is then transplanted into a living bacterial cell and in the final stage of the process it is expected to take control of the cell and in effect become a new life form. The team of scientists has already successfully transplanted the genome of one type of bacterium into the cell of another, effectively changing the cell’s species. Mr Venter said he was “100% confident” the same technique would work for the artificially created chromosome.

The new life form will depend for its ability to replicate itself and metabolise on the molecular machinery of the cell into which it has been injected, and in that sense it will not be a wholly synthetic life form. However, its DNA will be artificial, and it is the DNA that controls the cell and is credited with being the building block of life.

Mr Venter said he had carried out an ethical review before completing the experiment. “We feel that this is good science,” he said. He has further heightened the controversy surrounding his potential breakthrough by applying for a patent for the synthetic bacterium.

Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organisation, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. “Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?”

He said Mr Venter was creating a “chassis on which you could build almost anything. It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons”.

Mr Venter believes designer genomes have enormous positive potential if properly regulated. In the long-term, he hopes they could lead to alternative energy sources previously unthinkable. Bacteria could be created, he speculates, that could help mop up excessive carbon dioxide, thus contributing to the solution to global warming, or produce fuels such as butane or propane made entirely from sugar.

“We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking,” he said. “We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can’t expect everybody to be happy.”

I have often often seen on the web, especially on minority sites (particularly black American) comments accusing East Asians of wanting to be white because they favor light skin in their women or eyes with double lids.

The latest example is this:

I saw this today posted on Booker Rising, a site I regularly post on, owned by a person named Shay, who I admire, but sometimes she lets some of her personal hangups eat away at her ability to reason (which is usually vast). My response to her comments and the original writer of the post, John Hope Bryant:

I lived in Shanghai, China in 1999, and also in Tokyo, Japan from 2001-2002. While in Japan I managed to visit Taiwan and South Korea too.

South Koreans, like Japanese, and Chinese have had a white skin fetish for their women that preexisted any Western European contact.

You can see this reflected in Tang Dynasty China which was roughly the same time as the later part of the Western Roman Empire. There were envoys that were exchanged, but for most Chinese had never seen a European.

http://library.thinkquest.org/C005742/tang%20-%20zhou%20fang%201.jpg

There are some East Asian women naturally as pale as in the link (my sister in law is, the younger one), but most are not. Typical make up was used and in later centuries, Geisha, in Japan, also pained their faces white, as it was considered beautiful.

Geisha go back a long time before any Dutch or Portuguese contact with Japan, which would be the initial sustained European contact in the mid-16th century:

http://www.danhagerman.com/images/Pseudo%20Geisha.jpg

This is true in Korea as well:

http://www.askasia.org/images/teachers/display/670.jpg

The explanation I have heard is that the upper classes did not do physical labor and stayed in doors so they were lighter, many Asians are naturally pale but unlike many Europeans they do not burn easily, but tan darker (yellowish-brown), so being dark became a sign of being low class.

This goes back to at least the time of Confucius in China (over 2,000 years, around the 6th century BCE)…maybe longer, but that is based on the art I have seen. It is likely more ancient.

So sorry, no it is not about white people.

As far as “big eyes”…

Koreans do this surgery a lot, Japanese are probably the second most, followed distantly by the less affluent Chinese. Also on average, Chinese probably have the highest frequency of natural double lids anyway.

Typical in East Asian large eyed women were considered attractive historically in China (not sure about Korea, and not so in Japan) there is a famous Chinese poem from hundreds of years ago about the “Grape Eyed Girl” and how beautiful her large black eyes were, which I am trying to find translated into English.

To be specific the eye thing is not about “big eyes” as we would think in the West but actually double and single lid.

http://lreflection.wordpress.com/2006/08/22/double-eyelids-vs-single-eyelids/

As this link shows, 50% of Chinese are born naturally with double lids, and about 20% of Japanese and Koreans:

http://eyemd.wordpress.com/2007/02/02/are-double-eyelids-inherited-genetically/

As for average skin color:

Typical Japanese women are about this color:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/asia_pac_tokyo_views_on_masako_and_marriage/img/3.jpg

My wife is slightly lighter, but close enough, she has never used skin lightener. Her make up does have a sun screen component though, as with most make up in Japan.

Korean women are about like this:

http://kati.tiuhti.net/matkaraportti/pics/Koreans.jpg

Northern Chinese tend to be paler like Gong Li:

http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/emperorandassassin/stillsclips/scenes_001_2.jpg

Southern Chinese are more admixed with South East Asia (if you read their history Northern Vietnam was part of China for 1,000 years and there was gene flow back and forth) the people tend to be shorter, larger eyed, and darker. Genetic test show this cline in China from North to South, Southern Chinese grouping with Southeast Asians and Northern Chinese grouping with Northeast Asians and Mongolians, which is fairly intuitive.

http://www.pecunning.com/asialanddiaries/Resources/glitterwig1.jpeg

For men skin color doesn’t seem to matter much as darker skin is often considered “manly” especially in Japan, where you can see the male actors are usually tan. I am not sure about Korea though, as I see quite a few fair skin male pop stars and actors, something you do not see often in China or Japan. Women are uniformly light, similar to this:

http://english.kbs.co.kr/ICSFiles/artimage/2005/12/20/c_ent_nws/woo_l.jpg

The skin dimorphism between men and women in the media is not unusual at all, although it is a Japanese actor and I believe Korean actress, the skin color difference is common on TV in East Asia.

A few years ago in Japan it was popular for Japanese to dye their hair brown.

Some black American woman, in Japan at the same time I was, told me “they just want to be white”.

She did not know that most Japanese kids and a high percentage of Korean kids have brown hair that turn black when they grow older.

For the Japanese they thought it was cute to look like “kids” especially for the girls., which makes sense, in almost every society a woman with a youthful appearance is prized. It has nothing really to do with whites, but black people (and other Americans) project their own “white/racial issues” on other cultures they don’t understand. My sister in laws both had brown hair and my wife still has brown highlights…it is not unusual however most black Americans or white Americans don’t know that. This is similar to how blond hair is seen as useful among whites, mainly because blond hair is common among white Northern European children, and usually turns darker as they get older.

Look at his hair:

http://www1.istockphoto.com/ file…happy_child.jpg

Before people project there Western values and racial hangups on people, they should actually learn about the culture and history of the people. I’m not saying there has been NO Western influence in East Asia, there has, but the extent is often overexaggerated due to ignorance. I even here Asian Americans (who often know little about their ancestors home country) repeat this nonsense. It is sad.

——————

Update: Related Post

Steven Pinker (Harvard Experimental Psych Prof) listed major American taboos that one can not talk about or research with out being called some form of “ist” as in sexist, racist, ethnocentrist, etc.  Here they are:

This newspaper article by Steven Pinker, “In defense of dangerous ideas: In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them”:

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

Were the events in the Bible fictitious — not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe’s nuclear waste?

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

I highlighted the good parts. I often hear white Americans bragging they are like 1/24th native American or some such thing…but I can count one that actually told me they knew they had black ancestry…a Texan. He looked like any white guy.
How did this happen? Well…very simple. Just like Thomas Jefferson’s slave kids move out to Ohio, some of them looked white enough “to pass” and just married white people and hoped no kids came out with afros and some of them who could not “pass” stayed with black people.
This happened a lot! Pretty much if it was not for the massive immigration from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century the percentage would be much higher.

Since I’ve been doing the DNA testing stuff, I’ve been looking at different message boards on the net and the outrage and confusion from people who find out they have 10-20% African ancestry is amazing. haha There was one woman on the GENETREE company message board arguing with the admin swearing this was a lie and for them to redo her test. They did, and she did not respond, obviously she got the same results.

Here is an estimate of how many “passed”, from a Phd.

http://backintyme.com/essays/?p=8

“As of the 2000 census, the Black population was about 12.8 percent of the total U.S. population, but this has varied from a high of 19.27 percent in 1790 to a low of 9.65 percent in 1930. The weighted average since 1790 has been 13.51 percent. And so, the number of individuals we must account for represents a movement from the Black community to the White of some 0.1382 percent of the Black population (0.007 x / (300 x .1351) per year. As of census 2000, this comes to about 50,000 individuals per year.

The genes that build America
From the discovery that presidential hopeful Barack Obama is descended from white slave owners to the realisation that the majority of black Americans have European ancestors, a boom in ‘recreational genetics’ is forcing America to redefine its roots. Paul Harris pieces together the DNA jigsaw of what it really means to be born in the USA

Sunday July 15, 2007

Al Sharpton walked into a South Carolina pine forest just outside the sleepy southern town of Edgefield and stopped at a cluster of toothlike unmarked gravestones. This was the former plantation on which a few generations ago his ancestors had worked, lived, loved and died, owned as property by white masters. ‘You must assume that it’s family here,’ Sharpton said, referring to the abandoned slave graveyard.A few weeks previously Reverend Sharpton, one of America’s most outspoken black civil rights leaders, had not known of the cemetery’s existence. But researchers had explored his genealogy and broken the news to him. Sharpton’s story had an astonishing twist: the genealogists discovered that his ancestors had once been owned by the ancestors of Strom Thurmond, the Senator and former segregationist who once ran for president on a racist platform. The phrase ‘ironic coincidence’ did not begin to cover it.

Dozens of reporters tagged along when Sharpton first visited the Edgefield woods, yet it was clear he was genuinely stunned by what he called ‘the greatest shock’ of his life. ‘It profoundly affected him,’ said Tony Burroughs, a genealogist who worked on the project.Sharpton was not alone. America has embarked on an amazing journey to explore its own past. Millions of Americans of every creed and colour are exploring their family histories in a genealogy boom that is redefining who they are and what it means to be American. The internet has allowed people to find obscure information at the click of a mouse that was previously locked away on dusty library shelves. They are also using modern DNA techniques to research their racial history, creating a multi-million dollar industry of consumer genetics. Like Sharpton, many are making shocking discoveries. They are finding slaves and slave-owners. Far from being a nation of different races, many are finding they have mixed pasts. Blacks are discovering they have white blood, whites are finding black relatives. Native Americans are growing in numbers, not because of a high birth rate, but because many Americans are discovering unknown native ancestors written in their DNA.
And it is impacting right up to the highest in the land. Just after the Sharpton story broke, other genealogists revealed they had discovered presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s family - through his white mother - had also once owned slaves. Just like the Thurmonds. That means the man who hopes to become America’s first black president could be the direct descendant not of black slaves, but of white slave-owners. Literally, nothing is now as black and white as it once seemed. America has embarked on an identity revolution.

Last year, Professor Peter Fine at Florida Atlantic University had an idea for an art class. He would gather a group of students to produce work around their idea of their racial identity. But as part of the class he asked them to take a DNA test that would break down their racial background. His bet was that most of the class - of whom the majority saw themselves as whites of European descent - had no real idea who they were.

He was right. Of 13 students, only one turned out to be completely European. The rest displayed a mixture of European, Native American, African and Asian genes. The one black student turned out to be 21 per cent white. Fine himself - who admits to looking like a corn-fed stereotype of a white Midwesterner - discovered he was a quarter Native American. ‘I honestly think these tests could have a large effect on American consciousness of who we are. If Americans recognise themselves as a mixed group of people, that could really change things,’ he said.

Fine has a point. For centuries, America has been less a racial melting pot and more a stew, where different communities bump up against each other, but keep mostly to themselves. Yet, as millions of Americans take DNA tests, they are discovering a surprising truth: America’s strict racial lines are, in fact, blurred. One-third of white Americans, according to some tests, will possess between two and 20 per cent African genes. The majority of black Americans have some European ancestors.
For a few hundred dollars, Americans can radically alter the way they think of themselves through a new industry that has been dubbed ‘recreational genetics’. Dozens of companies now offer DNA tests, ranging from the basic - breaking down a person’s racial profile into broad categories such as European or Native American - to more detailed ones which claim to identify specific regions or tribes of the world. All a consumer usually has to do is take a swab from inside their cheek to provide a cell sample and then wait for the post.
It has led to some bizarre developments. One American discovered Jewish genes in his DNA and is now seeking to get Israeli citizenship. Some white college applicants, upon discovering they have African or Asian or Native American DNA, have applied for scholarships aimed at minorities. A black woman discovered 10 per cent British DNA in her test and has now identified the Scottish slave owners who used to own her ancestors. She has contacted their modern descendants - owners of a large fortune - and wants them to take tests, too.
Some researchers will go to extremes to get samples from others. People have stalked newly discovered relatives, even going through rubbish to snatch DNA samples if they refuse to volunteer them. Some have even plucked hair from newly deceased relatives. For the celebrity-minded, DNA profiles of descendants of famous historical figures have been released on the internet, including Thomas Jefferson, General Robert E Lee, Marie Antoinette and Genghis Khan. One website plans to add others soon, including DNA profiles of people related to Columbus and Billy the Kid.
DNA research is having a transforming effect on millions of lives. That is what happened with Issac Carter, 33, one of Fine’s students. He is black but his family history told of a Native American ancestor, while his tests showed he was a lot whiter than he thought and had no Native American blood at all. ‘My history has been all jumbled up,’ he said. In fact, the whole world of Native Americans has been thrown into turmoil. Many tribes, some of whom have become rich on the back of casino gambling, are now flooded with calls from people suddenly claiming to have discovered their Native American background.
A country known for its racial faultlines has discovered a new sense of fluidity. The identities emerging are complex and multi-faceted. Take another of Fine’s students, Shannon O’Brien. Hailing from small-town Ohio with a name like O’Brien, her identity as a white American should be secure. But O’Brien’s mother is Mexican and she has dark hair and skin. Many people assume she is Hispanic. Yet she has never felt any great affinity with a Hispanic identity and speaks no Spanish. ‘People used to tell me that I should change my name to make it more Hispanic,’ she said. But, after her test results came in, she was identified as 61 per cent European, 26 per cent Native American and 13 per cent African. Does any racial label quite cover the complexity of that? ‘I have my identity in my own mind,’ O’Brien said. ‘It is not just what people think when they see me. It is not so simple any more.’
But the one group for whom DNA tests have really stoked a sense of turmoil is black Americans. In America’s long history of immigration, they are the people who have no ‘old country’ to look back to. Slavery rendered mute any tangible links to Africa beyond having black skin. It left a cultural legacy that is easy to downplay if you are not a black American, but hard to overestimate if you are.

Issac Carter’s experiences with DNA in Professor Fine’s class have spurred him on to further exploration. He plans to take a more detailed test that could identify markers in his DNA that hint at specific regions or tribes in Africa. ‘I want to reclaim my history,’ Carter said. ‘My wife is Indian. She speaks her native language. She knows where her family is from. I want to know my history, too.’ If the tests link him to somewhere specific in Africa, Carter intends to visit and even study the local language. ‘We now have the ability to reconnect,’ he added.

He is not alone. Scientists are scouring America and Africa collecting DNA and trying to find common genetic markers that allow links to be made between black Americans and African tribes. One of the most prominent is the Roots Project, run by Boston scientist Dr Bruce Jackson. He has collected DNA samples from 10,000 black Americans and is comparing them to DNA excavated from slave burial grounds in America and back to specific African tribes.

The idea of being able to make such links has a powerful attraction for even the most high-profile black Americans. Last year a TV show called African American Lives, hosted by Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, explored the genealogy and DNA of nine black Americans, including Oprah Winfrey, comedian Chris Tucker and actress Whoopi Goldberg. It ended up drawing links back to Africa, even taking Tucker to Angola, from where, the tests seemed to indicate, his ancestors hailed. The show has had a profound effect on many black Americans, popularising the tests.

Yet experts say the science is far from perfect. They point out that beyond a few generations any human is descended from a huge pool of ancestors. The fact that a great-great-great-great-grandparent was from Ghana does not make one Ghanaian. The science is also largely reliant upon statistical analysis and not always exact DNA markers. Professor Troy Duster, of New York University, calls some DNA advocates ‘pied pipers’ for making claims that their science cannot back up and playing up to a popular feeling that anything involving genetics is 100 per cent accurate. ‘There is a cultural feeling that DNA evidence is sacrosanct. But a kind of false precision is rampant right now,’ says Duster.

But such a debate only highlights how complex race has become in America. It is not just a matter of skin colour any more; it is also about how society perceives you. O’Brien’s reflection may scream Hispanic, but that is not her choice of identity. And Professor Fine may be a quarter Native American, but he admits his pale complexion means he will always be seen as white: ‘I know I still have all the privileges of being white in America.’
Greater knowledge can pose troubling questions. While hosting African American Lives, Professor Gates, one of America’s most eminent black scholars, was