Do Human Races Exist?

[laconicsax]

Run time: 11:18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrKrGkgeww4   Posted on YouTube: September 15, 2011 By YouTube Member: C0nc0rdance Views on YouTube: 15693   Posted on DU: September 25, 2011 By DU Member: laconicsax Views on DU: 1096

 
What does science say about the idea of different races?

[Deep13]

1. No time for the video, but no.

My understanding is that race is a social construct has has very little basis in biology.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. That's the point of the video.

:-)

[XemaSab]

2. Some of us are "pure" humans

some of us are neanderthals, some of us are probably devonians.

Science does seem to be showing that there are racial differences.

[laconicsax]

3. We're all mutts.

Studies have shown that the most recent common ancestor of all humans lived sometime within the past 5000 years and possibly as recently as 2000 years ago.

To summarize the "identical ancestor" concept since it isn't in the video, there's a point sometime within the last 15,000 years before which every person is either an ancestor of all living humans or has no living descendants. There's no way to have separate lineages that predate that point.

[XemaSab]

4. If the most recent ancestor lived 2,000 years ago

then how do you explain the fact that Native Americans have been here for at least 12,000 years?

Or the recent research which shows that Aborigines left Africa at least 36,000 years ago?

[laconicsax]

5. They haven't remained genetically isolated.

They may have been isolated for tens of thousands of years, but once that isolation ended, everyone slept with everyone else in pretty short order.

That was the first question I had when I first learned how recent the MRCA was. It's pretty humbling to think about.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Of course there was contact with Asia well before as well as Polynesia.

The Americas were not as isolated as previously believed.

But the mestizo is the new cosmic man.

[applegrove]

6. We are all just shades of grey.

[WingDinger]

7. It has been shown that early man slummed it with any hottties, of any ilk.

Next obvious question is, are we evolving. No, we are not. Only technologically.

[laconicsax]

11. We are evolving biologically.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/science/02tibet.html

Also, lactose tolerance

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Fantastic video