Le razze esistono e hanno una base biologica. La biologia ci dice che il genoma è come una biblioteca che contiene il nostro "progetto". La biblioteca si compone di volumi (cromosomi) e i volumi di pagine (geni). I geni sono sequenze proteiche che si trasmettono in eredità tramite la riproduzione. Non si sa sempre bene dove un gene inizia e dove finisce, e nemmeno è molto utile saperlo. Più un gene è costituito da sequenze brevi, più è facilmente trasmissibile. Dire che le razze hanno una base biologica non significa che abbiano una base genetica. Tutte le razze condividono gli stessi geni. Non solo, tutte le razze condividono gli stessi alleli (varianti attraverso cui si presenta un gene). Cio' che cambia è la frequenza con cui si presentano certi alleli. La differenza è dunque di tipo statistico: si considerano tot. alleli, si analizzano tot genomi e si creano cluster statistici, ovvero gruppi omogenei di genomi per frequenza dell' allele considerato. Ebbene, i cluster coincidono all' incirca con i 5 continenti, ovvero con le 5 razze. Gli alleli considerati nella sperimentazione sopra descritta sono neutrali (non incidono sui tratti della persona) ma noi sappiamo da altri esperimenti che 1) molti geni decisivi sono tutt' ora sotto pressione evolutiva 2) i tempi evolutivi sono molto più brevi di quel che si pensava (2-3000 anni anziché 30-50.000) e 3) la pressione evolutiva si esercita a livello regionale. Edit
1 EVOLUTION, RACE AND HISTORYRead more at location 115
Note: i due dogmi: 1 le razze nn esistono 2 nn esiste evoluzione recente l evoluzione è recente e regionale il conformismo dell accademia xché non preoccupsrsi del razzismo. e se dovessimo scoprire che gli asiatici sono + intelligenti? geni e comportamento: le inclinazioni geni e storia. clark xchè alcuni paesi sono ricchi ed altri poveri? contro il multiculti Edit
It is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the past 30,000 yearsRead more at location 118
populations on each continent have evolved largely independently of one another as each adapted to its own regional environment. Under these various local pressures, there developed the major races of humankind, those of Africans, East Asians and Europeans, as well as many smaller groups.Read more at location 124
Several of the intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past. These include the assumption that there has been no human evolution in the last few thousand years and the assertion that there is no biological basis for race.Read more at location 128
New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional.Read more at location 131
Human evolution has not only been recent and extensive; it has also been regional.Read more at location 156
The three principal races are Africans (those who live south of the Sahara), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) and Caucasians (Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and the Indian subcontinent).Read more at location 158
In each of these races, a different set of genes has been changed by natural selection, as is described further in chapter 5. This is just what would be expected for populations that had to adapt to different challenges on each continent.Read more at location 159
Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is indeed a biological reality to race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations.Read more at location 163
with mixed-race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.Read more at location 165
Historians, economists, anthropologists and sociologists assume there has been no change in innate human behavior during the historical period. This belief in the recent suspension of evolution, at least for people, is shared by the major associations of social scientists,Read more at location 173
The commonsense conclusion—that race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences—has also eluded the American Sociological Association. The group states that “race is a social construct” and warns “of the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological.”Read more at location 179
The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—theRead more at location 182
Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by cultureRead more at location 184
The recent discoveries that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional severely undercut the social scientists’ official view of the world because they establish that genetics may have played a possibly substantial role alongside culture in shapingRead more at location 187
One reason is, of course, the understandable fear that exploration of racial differences will give support to racism, a question addressed below. Another is the inherent inertia of the academic world.Read more at location 190
Another kind of flaw occurs when universities allow a whole field of scholars to drift politically to the left or to the right.Read more at location 199
Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. Science is about what is, not what ought to be. Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there. Academics, who are obsessed with intelligence, fear the discovery of a gene that will prove one major race is more intelligent than another.Read more at location 209
Even if it were proved that one race were genetically more intelligent than another, what consequence would follow? In fact, not much of one. East Asians score around 105 on intelligence tests, an average above that of Europeans, whose score is 100. A higher IQ score doesn’t make East Asians morally superior to other races. East Asian societies have many virtues but are not necessarily more successful than European societies in meeting their members’ needs.Read more at location 219
it is inevitable that science will establish relative advantages in some traits. Because of genetic variants, Tibetans and Andean highlanders are better than others at living at high altitudes. At every Olympic games since 1980, every finalist in the men’s 100-meter race has had West African ancestry.Read more at location 224
this kind of inquiry will also establish a wider and more important truth, that all differences between races are variations on a common theme.Read more at location 229
Genes do not determine human behavior; they merely predispose people to act in certain ways. Genes explain a lot, probably far more than is at present understood or acknowledged. But their influence in most situations is or can be overwhelmed by learned behavior, or culture. To say that genes explain everything about human social behavior would be as absurd as to assume that they explain nothing.Read more at location 231
But though people are much the same, their societies differ greatly in their structure, their institutions and their achievements. For most of recorded history the civilization of China has been pre-eminent, followed more recently by the rise of the West as Europeans created open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human political arrangements of tribalism or autocracy.Read more at location 235
Although the emotional and intellectual differences between the world’s peoples as individuals are slight enough, even a small shift in social behavior can generate a very different kind of society.Read more at location 246
Vast changes have occurred in human social structure in all three major races within the past 15,000 years. That is the period in which people first started to switch from the nomadic life of hunter-gatherer bands to settled existence in much larger communities. This wrenching shift required living in a hierarchical society instead of an egalitarianRead more at location 252
Given that the human population supplied Malthus with the observations that led Darwin to the concept of natural selection, there is every reason to suppose that people living in agrarian societies were subject to intense forces of natural selection.Read more at location 265
Until the great demographic transition that followed industrialization, the wealthy had more surviving children than the poor. As many of the children of the rich fell in status, they would have spread throughout the population the genes that support the behaviors useful in accumulating wealth.Read more at location 268
The mechanism has so far been documented only for a population for which unusually precise records exist, that of England from 1200 to 1800.Read more at location 271
The narratives constructed by historians describe many forms of change, whether political, military, economic or social. One factor almost always assumed to be constant is human nature.Read more at location 274
China created the first modern state and enjoyed the most advanced civilization until around 1800 AD, when it slid into puzzling decline.Read more at location 280
The Islamic world in 1500 AD surpassed the West in most respects, reaching a high tide of its expansion in the siege of Vienna in 1529 AD by the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.Read more at location 281
The counterpart of Chinese and Islamic decline is the unexpected rise of the West. Europe,Read more at location 284
Why are some countries rich and others persistently poor? Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution,Read more at location 291
Africa has absorbed billions of dollars in aid over the past half century and yet, until a recent spurt of growth, its standard of living has stagnated for decades.Read more at location 293
Economists and historians attribute the major disparities between countries to factors such as resources or geography or cultural differences.Read more at location 295
True, culture provides a compelling and sufficient explanation for many such differences. In the natural experiment provided by the two Koreas, the people are the same in both countries, so it must surely be bad institutionsRead more at location 299
Institutions are not just sets of arbitrary rules. Rather, they grow out of instinctual social behaviors, such as the propensity to trust others,Read more at location 304
This would explain why it is so hard to transfer institutions from one society to another. American institutions cannot be successfully implanted in Iraq, for instance,Read more at location 307
Iraqis have different social behaviors, including a base in tribalism and a well-founded distrust of central government,Read more at location 308
