/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9428546
It totally could! I'm not making any kind of argument about populations or pockets of people having differential intelligence or traits, merely trying to explain to that anon how fucking retarded he is.

>>9428541
You measure the order of difference based quantitatively on the number of bases that are different in the entire genome- or, an alternative approach is to take markers spread out evenly (thousands of them) across the whole genome of 3 billion bases, and then you compare the differences between members of the same population, and members of different populations. Sometimes the exact methods can differ- for example a one base insertion will shift everything over 1 base, so the methods usually just test the spots with context. Recently the tests have been done wholesale, comparing the entire genome, with the same results as when they used to do them with the markers (called SNPS- pic related is what's called a 'snip-chip', which is a fantastic little tool for checking allelic variants and halplotypes).

Arbitrary would be to say "Okay let's take the genes for X, Y, and Z, and say that people who have variants A, B, and C are all in one cluster". You can do that, and it might be useful, but it's still arbitrated by what you decide are "important genes", and is not a quantitative measure for absolute classification, rather an arbitrarily set classification.

That music example made my head hurt.

Do you even know what a haplogroup is? They're groups of alleles, usually looking at the SNPs discussed before that we look at and sort of walk backwards mathematically with to determine relative heritage. What you would essentially be doing if you tried to use haplotypes to determine race is say that people who diverge in haplotype by X% from a standard are a different race- which would be retarded as all hell because you would again run into the problem of the absolute divergence being unrelated to how we classify race in modernity.