Genetic Diversity

[EndlessSky]

Yea, I'm bunch a different things, not just European.

Although much of my moms side of the family is European from Vienna, Austria.

My dad's side however is not. As my great grandma was a pure-blood Navajo Indian and I also have some far eastern infulence in that side of the family as well I believe.

I think as man continues to grow and evolve we will eventually all be similar in the terms of being one kind of race instead of having like all kinds of different ones like we do now. We all also all started out as the same so we will probably eventually come back to that as we start mixing more and more together as one.

[Bloodcinder]

If we all started to have the same race, we would be weaker as a species, because our genetic variety would decrease and that would predispose us to disastrous conditions such as a universal allergy or hereditary disorder.

As theoretically nice as it could be to be a unified race, it would kill our species.

[EndlessSky]

Not necessarily, and if that were true we wouldn't be here in the first place.

The first humans were all the same, we just got diveristy due to spreading out to different parts of the world that have different climates etc and developed adaptations to it.

That would be like saying a tribe of people would die out because they didn't breed with foreigners etc.

[Bloodcinder]

In the commonly-held opinion of the scientific community, we as a population evolved from another population, not from an individual. We humans were never all the same.

A population whose phenotypes become monomorphic is less resistant. Examples follow.

1. Large scale: remember when the Native Americans died because they had no ability to fight certain European diseases?
2. Small scale: remember the European royal families and their plethora of ailments?

If the entire planet's population lost a vital resistance to monomorphism, the entire planet's population would be at risk of dying out. Consolidating the phenotypes through inbreeding, population bottlenecks, and breeding for uniformity is dangerous. If we lose diversity we lose what makes our population strong.

[Gio Takahashi]

Thread has been split from the Surprise Segregation thread.

[Bloodcinder]

Thank you. I think this topic is worth discussing on its own merit, especially because I believe Ary and Chef will have something to say about it too.

[Arainach]

LH is certainly correct that, from a raw evolutionary standpoint, a more diversified gene pool is far superior to one unified race.

As far as what happens....there are two conflicting urges - the fact that we do occasionally merge and various demographics blend together and the fact that, socially, we stick to our little groups. For the most part, white people have kids with other white people, hispanics have kids with other hispanics, etc. Those aren't even necessarily racial biases, just the fact that people tend to be more attracted to things like them. As I don't see that changing in the immediate future, I agree with Bloodcinder that for quite a while we'll probably still have distinct races.

[Detrevni]

i dunno I'm not very white (I look freaking arab but its mexican blood that does it) but I liek the white wimmins. :)

[Bloodcinder]

i dunno I'm not very white (I look freaking arab but its mexican blood that does it) but I liek the white wimmins. :)
I think you failed to notice that the thread got split. [Stuck-out tongue of jocundity.]

[EndlessSky]

"Shortly after Homo ergaster appeared 1.9 million years ago, humans began to leave Africa for the first time and migrate to other continents."

So as you see, we did indeed all originate from Africa meaning we all came from the same place and as I said we only diversified because of the different climates etc after leaving Africa.

We did not start all over the world, we started in one place, prove me wrong.


Let me clairfy also, I don't mean all the same GENES I mean the same RACE.

[chefTENGU]

Race itself is an illusion. Merely another category humans have invented so we can categorize each other (the mind tends to do that sort of thing automatically).

Also, I've gotta repeat the classic line you'll hear in every anthropology and human genetics class: there is more genetic diversity within groups of the so-called "races" than there is between them. This is due to the fact historically, people have only had the chance to breed with members of their own race (or have chosen them over others). More mixing means more diversity.

However, bear in mind that our gene pool is somewhat biased. Humans (and much of the other life on earth) underwent a genetic bottleneck event roughly 70,000 years ago; this is confirmed by the examination of mitochondrial DNA. No matter who you are or where you're living on the planet, you can trace your ancestry to a single group of women living in Africa about 70,000 years ago.

Meaning that we're kind of inbred as a species. Ordinarily, organisms that have had as much time to spread and reproduce as we have are much more speciated and diverse.

[EndlessSky]

Yes, and that is what I mean chefTengu, that theoretically as we inbreed more and more that it will be become more apparent and that we will all start looking more similar (race wise).

I'm not saying I beleive this is gonna happen or anything, what I am saying though is that it could be possible.

Similar to H.G Wells Time Machine, where humans were divided into two species, one with all the good genes and another with all the recessive genes.

In Addition, there was also a recent discovery that as humans or early man we can ALL be traced to one single ape mother that was the first species to walk upright and I beleive she is called "Lucy".

[SomaticCorpse]

Ah, the ever evolving species 'debate'...

What complicates the idea of this debate, is for a species to become one, in the same, (as in all the same color, features, etc.), then procreation would have to occur profoundly, amongst the different races.

While, I'm not saying that this is impossible or bad, in any sense or fashion, we will never see it's fruition; we're talking about the balance of dominant and recessive genes... ...it could take hundreds of generations, before that happens.

For example, my girl is black irish and I'm red irish... She has fairer looking skin, than I, but my skin is more sensitive. Even within that one 'race', there's menial differences that must be 'conquered', before an absolving of all races can occur.

Now, again, I'm not saying that it's impossible... ...so don't get me wrong. I am saying that most of our lineage will never know who we were, by the time the races being 'blending', genetically.

Of course, the one thing that noone has pointed out, yet (which surprises me), is that some traits skip generations... So, you would have to have all generations 'blend' with other races, to 'stomp out' diversity.

Just my two-cents... ...not really worth all that much.

[chefTENGU]

Yes, and that is what I mean chefTengu, that theoretically as we inbreed more and more that it will be become more apparent and that we will all start looking more similar (race wise).
Uh... not really. What you're describing is the opposite of inbreeding, in a sense. What I meant by saying that humans are inbred as a species that that we have a lot less genetic diversity than we should have for the amount of time we've been around. With how much we've thrived, though, we're certainly making up for lost time, and our genepool has grown.

But in order to establish the kind of homogeneity you're predicting, people will have to start spreading their genes among more far-flung individuals, which is the opposite of inbreeding. In fact, if we were inbreeding, we'd see a lot more... extreme... gene combinations. Again, the opposite of what you were hypothesizing.

In Addition, there was also a recent discovery that as humans or early man we can ALL be traced to one single ape mother that was the first species to walk upright and I beleive she is called "Lucy".
No, that's not true.

Lucy was the first discovery of an Australopithecus africanus specimen. There is no evidence whatsoever that she gave birth to anything or that any living person can trace his or her ancestry to her.

What is important about Lucy (and the rest of A. africanus is that they were bipedal hominids, which is a fairly strong indicator that Australopithecus eventually gave rise to Homo, since we are the only extant bipedal hominids today (yes, it is possible for various other primate species to walk on two feet, but that does not make them bipedal. None of them have the same sort of hip and leg structure human beings do or that Lucy had, which means that none of them can maintain such movement for very long).

Also, in 1974, Lucy provided the scientific community with the earliest known example of a bipedal hominid (she lived roughly 3.2 million years ago). However, with time new discoveries have been made.

The last I heard about was a fossil that was more than 7 million years old; if it can be proven that the organism actually was bipedal, it could mean that hominids evolved the capacity to walk upright before the common ancestor diverged into what would eventually become chimpanzees and what would eventually become humans.