inexplicable ethos
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2019
You massively underestimate the genetic diversity of the old world, in particular Africa but also isolated islands in the general Austronesian area. Granted a lot of this is based on what measures of genetic diversity you care about but it's a lot more complicated than you make it sound. What applies to an African American that is descended from people from the interior of West Africa does not necessarily apply to the aforementioned Nubians, and indeed depending on the measure chosen are not actually closer to each other than they are to you (who I presume are a white European).
In any case this is still being studied quite a lot and we're far from being able to just read someone's potential from their genome Gattaca style.
I agree this is something that does merit research and consideration, just saying it's often not going to line up the way various political movements want it too no matter how hard they try to use it that way, since so much of what we consider our " racial" identity is actually more cultural than biological. Try telling two warring tribes in the Sudan that they're actually very closely related and see how far it takes you. It'll be about as useful as telling an African American they have almost as much in common with the Queen of England as they do with the east Africans they're claiming kinship with.
I feel like we aren't quite talking about the same issue here. My point wasn't that all Africans are the same or even similar, it was specifically meant to demonstrate why the "classical" races are at least a moderately useful macro-level population division when discussing overall genetic differences. You can pick out any one gene or genetic marker which I share with some specific African population that they don't share with another African population, but in aggregate, those two tribes are more genetically close to each other than either is to me. Again, required specificity level depends entirely on what you are studying, and individuals always differ within populations. That doesn't mean the idea of having a small, easily digestible number of high level racial divisions is completely useless, just that it should be understood as a basic starting point and not a comprehensive breakdown of genetic differences.