A Bit of Racial Reality

It’s sad that one must continuously reinforce the obvious and proven fact of the biological basis of race.

This is one of Strom’s better efforts, emphasis added:

An article at the Harvard University Web site (and Harvard is heavily-Jewish in both student population and administration) argues that since “almost half” of alleles in the human genome are found in all seven major regions of the globe, there can’t be human races. Now, that’s really a bizarre argument. It means that by their own admission most human alleles (genetic variants) are not found in all regions, yet they persist in their claims. The article even admits (after invoking Donald Trump as one cause for all this terrible belief in human races — give me a break) that “7.4% of over 4000 alleles [studied] were specific to one geographical region” — that’s almost 300 alleles, and 7.4 per cent. — as we shall see in a moment — is a huge degree of difference, more than enough to account for human racial variation, even human-animal species variations. As one commenter pointed out, in 2012 the National Library of Medicine published a study of bears showing that having just half of the alleles shared among two populations was enough to prove that the populations were not only different races but entirely different species! In the scientists’ exact words, this degree of genetic difference was consistent with the two populations being “different species with little or no gene flow among extant populations.” So, if two groups share about half of their alleles, it proves they’re different species — if they’re bears. But if they’re humans, it proves the exact opposite — not only are they all the same species, but there’s not even any racial variation among them. It’s pretty obvious that someone is lying here, and I don’t think it’s the guys and gals studying the bears.

By the way, I call "BS" on the idea that Watson and Venter are more similar genetically to a Korean than they are to each other. If you sample sufficient number of alleles, that is NOT going to be the case.  See this.

As the authors used more and more markers to compare the three major racial groups (Europeans, East Asians, and sub-Saharan Africans), the less stringent clustering measurements rapidly fell to a 0% overlap, as expected from previous studies.  What about the more stringent measurement “w”, which looks at comparisons between individuals, and does not consider group data?  Once the authors reached 1,000 (or more) markers, the genetic overlap between these groups essentially reached zero. It is useful at this point to quote the authors about this fundamentally important finding: 

This implies that, when enough loci are considered, individuals from these population groups will always be genetically more similar to members of their own group. 

With respect to the question of whether individual members of one group may be genetically more similar to members of another group, they write: 

However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘never’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations. 

Thus, the naive “anti-racist” view, actually stated at times (e.g., the NOVA program on race), that it is possible for individual Europeans and Africans to be more genetically similar to each other than to members of their own race, is simply false.  Any such “finding” is simply due to insufficient numbers of DNA markers being used. 

With an adequate methodology, individual members of the major racial groups will always be more similar to members of their own group than to members of other groups.  Some may not like this and deem it “racist”, but these are the scientific facts, nonetheless.

Read this, which, by the way, is from a Jewish researcher, emphasis added:

What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study. That's an error rate of 0.14 percent. 

Neil Risch, PhD, a UC-San Francisco professor who led the study while he was professor of genetics at Stanford, said that the findings are particularly surprising given that people in both African-American and Hispanic ethnic groups often have a mixed background. "We might expect these individuals to cross several different genetic clusters," he noted. That's not what the study found. Instead, each self-identified racial/ethnic group clumped into the same genetic cluster. 

The people in this research were from 15 locations within the United States and in Taiwan. This broad distribution means that the results are representative of racial/ethnic groups throughout the United States rather than a small region that might not reflect the population nationwide. 

For each person in the study, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions that tend to vary between people. These regions are not necessarily within genes but are genetic signposts on chromosomes that come in a variety of forms at the same location. 

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch's team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group. 

"This shows that people's self-identified race/ethnicity is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background," Risch said.

And here is one of my old articles on the subject at Amren.

Also see this.

However, racial reality is not the same thing as “racial purity.”