Re: more monkey business...or...gorilla gal

Posted by anyman on Jul 23, 2002 at 10:01
(61.183.179.40)

Re: more monkey business...or...gorilla gal (DA Morgan)

... it wouldn't mean your ancesters were Adam and Eve.

well...it wouldn't necessarily mean that...but neither would it mean that they were not my ancestors :-)

(where do you get this stuff, anyway :-)

Perhaps you would like to revisit the question of which specific family members of Noah's were Chinese, black African, Pakistani, Greek, and Norwegian from the standpoint of DNA, blood type, skin color, etc. But this time do something really amazing. Revisit without using a circular reference.

hmm...i thought i did that last time, but we'll try again

the "chinese" didn't exist as such until about 2200 years ago...when the "qin" dynasty "united" *china* forcing many minority (non-han) peoples from their homes and lands and putting many many to death and forcing many many many others into servitude...burning as many of the ancient writiings (governmental policies, laws, etc) as they could find so that a totally new system could be instituted...the name "china" is derived from that dynastic appelation...but i forgive you your lack of knowledge...this is poorly understood even among many "chinese"...and that is not to say that they were alone in these activities...they are a problem common to humanity, a human problem, not a chinese problem...and virtually every empire of any historical significance has been brought forth in the same fashion...including america (but there is absolutely no difference in what america did and what china did (aside from their rationalistic philosophies, the methods and results were essentially the same)

now if you mean to refer to asiatics or so-called mongoloids, then there is almost nothing genetically distancing them as a "race" from any other people

genetically speaking there is nothing that would prevent adam and eve or noah and his wife from being able to produce several different varieties of human phenotypes

the possible variations possible even today for different offspring from ANY two healthy normal humans has been calculated to something like 1x10 2027 ...that kind of number is not even within the imagination of most people...to put it into a little context...the number of electrons thought to exist in the known universe is ~1x10 130 ...to put it another way, only a very small fraction of that far larger number of potential people could fit into the known universe :-)

such is the potential of human variation...not to forget that while that much potential is available, it will not likely ever be realized...and more importantly not to forget that while that much potential is available for variation within the human kind, human progeny have, as far as observational science is concerned, always been, and if present trends in operational science remain unchanged, human progeny will never be anything other than, human (ie genetic boundaries :-)

now back to noah for more genetics...if noah only had the genes that produce dark or light characteristics, then he would almost surely only and always produce either dark or light (but not both) progeny...but if he was, say, middle brown and had not yet lost the genetic information for the full range of human color and so-called **racial** or **ethnic** characterisitcs that we see phenotypically manifested today in the full range of humanity, then there would have been no problem for him and/or his descendants to have produced all that we see genetically today in humans...and to have done so in ~4400 years or less to boot :-)

however...once isolation entered the equation, the separated people groups would no longer have access to the full range of human genetic characteristics...they would be drawing from a limited pool of human genetic resources...some genetic information would be lost, at least to any given group, and certain other genetic charateristics would become concentrated in that group...thus the presence of various dominant phenotypical characteristic manifestations today

and nowhere is this evidence more evident than in molecular genetics :-)

as an aside. before we go to the africans and norwegians, get on your scooter and travel from subsaharan africa to japan...along the way, mark the precise junctures at which the african features cease and the asiatic features begin...no one else seems to be able to do it...you might have more success

in fact, recently, the most sophisticated computer software available was given the task of correctly identifying the national or continental origin of different dna specimens...with only a single dna sequence, it had an 80% failure rate...its very best results (with additional sequences) was a 30% failure rate (or 70% success rate)

well...let me quote the article...

he goes to dig it out...

ahh...finally, success

the notion of genetically meaningful races began to crumble in 1972, when richard lewontin,[*] a geneticist from harvard university, analyzed variations in blood proteins taken from populations around the world -- his conclusions came as a shock: humans from different "races" are not as genetically different as their appearance would suggest -- he found that nearly 85 per cent of humaity's genetic diversity occurs among individuals within a single population, such as the swedes ...only 7 per cent was accounted for by consistent differences between races -- in other words, two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races

at the same time, some researchers doubted lewontin's findings, pointing out that variation in proteins did not accurately reflect variation in dna -- but nearly 25 years later, barbujani and his colleagues surveyed dna sequence diversity directly, and their results---published in 1997---were nearly identical to lewontin's -- other labs have also replicated these results (see new scientist ref below)

(mara, this should be of special interest to you :-)

(*btw -- richard lewontin, indubitably one of the world's leading evolutionary biolgists, is the same fellow i have quoted on other occassions...the most remarkable of which was...

we take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism -- it is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated -- moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door (richard lewontin, billions and billions of demons, __the new york review__, 9 january 1997, p31... all italicized emps in original, bold emps mine –am...the preceeding note applies to this quote only...and this is not a misquote or an out of context quote :-)

mm...sometimes life is too good, eh :-)

anyway...moving on

morevoer, the genetic make-up of human "races" overlaps so broadly that you can't accurately predict someone's race by their genes -- barjbujani [geneticist, university of ferrara] and his colleagues analyzed a set of 21 dna sequences from1330 individuals from 32 populations worldwide -- using the most sophisticated statistical software available, they asked a computer to assign each individual to his or her continent of origin -- the results, to be published in the journal genome research, show that the computer couldn't do it -- with a single dna sequence, the computer got it wrong 80 per cent of the time -- as more sequences were added, the computer got better, but even at its best the computer still failed 30 per cent of the time

so the races we think we see have little relevance to biology... (ananthaswamy a, under the skin: our dna says there's no such thing as race __new scientist__, 20 april 2002, p36 :-)

now...to africans and norwegians...i'm glad you asked :-)

and from the same article, same page...

goldstein [university college london] and his colleagues analyzed dna samples from people in eight populations from asia, africa and europe, and used statistics to sort the individuals into genetically similar groups -- they found that the people divided into four clusters, broadly corresponding to four geographical areas: western eurasia, sub-saharan africa, china and new guinea -- but the clusters did not follow established racial lines -- for instance, 62 per cent of ethiopians were assigned to the cluster containing most norwegians... and 21 per cent of afro-caribbean individuals were grouped alongside west eurasians

[[[did you catch that...62% of ethiopians were assigned to the cluster containing most norwegians...necessarily implying that while 62% of ethiopians fit into that group, not even all norwegians fit into the same genetic grouping...a larger difference within the norwegian people group than outside of it :-]]]

...barbujani and his colleagues performed a similar analysis using two entirely different sets of genetic markers and samples from over 30 populations---a much larger group than goldstein's -- to their surprise, they found that the two sets of markers yielded two entirely different clustering patterns, both different from goldstein's...the differences in the two groups are so large that babujani concludes there is no obvious way of classifying humans into a few, well-defined groups

in the creationary scenario, the farther back one goes, the more complete and readily accessible was the total genetic info of the human genome, particularly in the time of noah and earlier...that is in no way inconsistent with the known data

the evolutionary scenario fails, thus far at least, to provide an adequate response...note the words shocked and surprised in the excerpts above...why?...because evolutionary theory would never have predicted and cannot yet explain such results :-)

soooo...you tell me, tell us all, where did the chinese, africans, norwegians, etc come from...which specific members of any family were they...the book makes no clear claim to those specifics...that is not its purpose (although whenever it does touch on matters specifically "scientific" it is never in conflict with reality :-)

no "circular" (ie bilical) references above

but as a couple of afterthoughts, not necessary to the argumentation above, and therefore not to be construed as "circular references"...the book also provides the most satisfying explanation for how the people groups got separated and isolated in the first place...the tower of babel event would have done very nicely...and there is again nothing there that would conflict with the known data :-)

the book also notes that noah's son, canaan, was father to several people groups among whom were the **sinites** (genesis 10.17)...one could reasonably wonder if the **sino** or **sina** references to the people of china might come from that ancient designation...i'll look into it further :-)

but you, as always, welcome to try again :-)




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