/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11557160
see the dendrogram? huge gap between africa and rest of world due to sahara cutting off gene flow.

>>9261873
Alright here's true facts:

Scientists admit that there are genetically distinct groups of people. They will call them "ethnicities" or "populations" ("populations" is probably the most popular term these days).

The only reason they criticise "racial" categories is because they think they're fuzzy. E.g. do Polynesian people belong to the same race as East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, etc.), or are they a separate race? What about Thais, Cambodians - are they separate to Chinese/Japanese/Korean?

And Spaniards have some Arab admixture from colonisation - so are they still "European"/white? And what about Central Asians like Kazakhs, who are basically a mix of Turkic and Mongol - what race do they belong to?

And also they will point to the fact that those who are normally put together in a racial category have a lot of variation among them. E.g. Somalis in East Africa are pretty different to Bantu people in Nigeria. They look different. They're genetically distinct.

But none of this matters. What matters is that different ethnicities, however you want to group them, are genetically distinct. And it's perfect possible that we have slightly different qualities, based on our different genetics. This doesn't mean our qualities are set in stone - it doesn't mean blacks are ALWAYS going to commit more crime. It just means there could well be genetic factors at play. We admit that with health conditions, so why not with crime? When we're happy to recognise scientific studies that associate some genes with criminal behaviour, as long as race isn't involved in the study?

Anyway, I would argue that the broad races we tend to use (European, African, South Asian, East Asian, Amerindian/Native American, Australian Aborigine) are actually pretty useful. Most groups of Africans, even if distinct, are more similar to each other than they are to groups of Europeans.

Source for picture: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5866/1100/F1