One question once I tried to discover is the rate of defective births among the different races, but things like cousin marriage affect that rate. If the theory is right, defective babies should be rare in Norway and frequent in Equatorial Guinea. I have no data if that is true or not.
IQ or intelligence is also a sign of genetic health. Northern peoples should have more of it. Yet Southern Indian Brahmins and Parsis and of course Southern Chinese seem to have higher IQ levels. Hong Kong and Singapur are almost on the Equator and have people of very high quality. Slowly, also these questions are going to be solved and then become irrelevant, as we are turning ourselves into a synthetic life form.
7 comments:
J, it's not where they live now, it's where they evolved that matters.
Chinese came down through Siberia and are adapted to cold and resource scarcity, which took place over the last 40,000 years.
They only got to Singapore 4o years ago.
Anon.
And Southern Brahmins arrived recently from the North.
Maybe we should move to Sakhalin. The only problem is that the Sakhalin aborigins are among the less intelligent and attractive races of humanity. Their body odour is famous.
Isn't this just a plot of genetic diversity? Africa and South Asia were among the earliest population centers for H. sapiens. Likewise, Northern Europeans have been noted to possess only a subset of the genetic diversity of Southern Europeans. This reflects tthat Southern European populations have more genetic influences from outside of Europe and that part of Northern European ancestry is of Southern Euroepean origin. Neolithic ancestry spread from south to north, but only a subset of Neolithic Southern Europeans would have attempted the migration.
No doubt Africans possess the largest wealth of genetic diversity and we all the others are some kind of subset of the African Homo Sapiens. Geographically, the longest expedition was carried out by the Tehuelche amerindians South of Chile and the Onas and Yaconas in Tierra del Fuego. Coming from Siberia, they should share our Neanderthal mix.
Yet there is something else in this confusing potpourri of facts.
No doubt Africans possess the largest wealth of genetic diversity and we all the others are some kind of subset of the African Homo Sapiens.
We always suspected you were an African Big Man.
Me and Koko.
I aaw that at the Cochran/Harpending blog, you reiterated this belief that "soon we all are going to have semi-synthetic genotypes."
I sincerely doubt that you will have a synthetic genotype within your lifetime. I doubt it will be possible to tweak more than a few genes reliably (and without significant side effects, depending on method used to achieve the tweaks) after birth for those in my generation, and the only large-scale semi-synthetic genomes will be found among people not even born yet. That group of people may not even be born for another generation. The availablity of cheap sequencing is not the same as the availability of cheap, reliable genetic engineering. For one thing, we don't know what many of the genes do, and we don't know how they interact with other genes and other signaling molecules.
When you say "soon," what exactly do you mean?
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