The_FD

Hmmm not exactly... the definition of species is pretty unclear... it is mostly based on the form and the habits of a given animal... not on genes at all.

There are much more than only slave and master genes... that was just to explain real quick how it works... yet no definition is based on those notions as far as I know

And remember races is determined since the letters. And those letters make genes but are not genes. Just as letters make a word but are different from words since words have the meaning and letters are just letters.

I will be glad to explain you what I know of it if you want to

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Popodo

To those who are reading this: don't be fooled by these assertive explanations.

Race does not have one scientific definition and its acception varies a lot.

It has a sociological content (the one that would be used here and there most of the time). Thus, human beings are classified in groups in terms of predominence of certain indices like the skin colour, the hair type, the cephalic index and so on. In turn, this distinction called phenometical (physical characteristics of an organism) is broken down into subdivisions called ethnies (people are then classified on cultural differences). This is, simplified, how anthropologists distinguish human beings.

It is much more complicated that this as one can see in Wikipedia because even scientists are split upon the matter. For example:

A 1985 survey (Lieberman et al. 1992) asked 1,200 scientists how many disagree with the following proposition: "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens." The responses were:

* biologists 16%
* developmental psychologists 36%
* physical anthropologists 41%
* cultural anthropologists 53%

Speak to an English person about "dog races" and he would frown at you! Because race is a political or sociological concept it doesn't mean anything applied to dogs. The equivallent of "race" for dogs is "breed", especially because it's a human creation.

Popodo

The_FD

To Popodo:
Please Do not cut my posts out!!

That's what I wrote even before I started talking of race in this thread. I am not trying to force people to take this definition whatsoever. But this one is easy to handle with since it has no subjective judgement.

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Popodo

About me shortening your quote:

I don't understand what difference it makes... you are saying "race has a scientific definition... There are no different human races."

I answered that it is more complicated than it appears : look at the scientists that don't agree... See the 1985's survey. Closer to us, research on the genome have made out 11 families that could be apparented to races (I think I read it in Wikipedia). So allow me to have doubts on your conclusion. Unless scientists are biaised (in fact they probably are) and you're not ?! Hard to believe...

Popodo

The_FD

Well a scientist does not have to be take the scientific definition of race. When you ask a question like the one you did, people (scientist or not) will answer with the definition they have, not necessary with the definition given by the statistical analysis of nucleotid differences.
Then prior to talk of something people shall make sure they are talking of the same thing.

Of course scientist are biased but not statistical results...

And yes I said race has a scientific definition, cause it is true, but I never said it was the only one (which makes a huge difference to me).

Concerning what you read in wikipedia let me tell you that wikipedia is a kind of dictionnary not a scientific revue. then it just rewrites what is written elswhere and usually do not publish experiments results but just comment them (which introduce the point of view of the writer). Then it seems they analysed the genome which is a lot different from the whole nucleotid run.

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pluiepoco

Too scientific, what's that?

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The_FD

Well As I explained earlier in this thread, the DNA is like a language with an alphabet that has 4 different letters (A, T, G and C). Each letter and its root on the chromosome represents a nucleotid. Then, a chromosome is a run of zillions of nucleotids. On some places the run has a specific meaning (called a gene) and lets build a constitutive molecule of your body. But those significative parts (genes) are very tidy compared to the whole nucleotid run (chromosome) that makes a chromosome.
The rest of the run (the largest part) has no meaning so far.

I tried to sum it up as much as I could, hope that makes sense, does it?

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