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Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

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Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#81

Post by danharaj »

qntty wrote: post #44
danharaj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? Interpopulation diversity of both phenotype and genotype isn't remarkably different from intrapopulation diversity. There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". The concept of race was never grounded in real science and its proponents constantly change their justifications after the fact. At one point…

This is really insightful. Can you recommend any books to introduce thinking critically about race?

There's many different angles to approach the topic from. I added a link to my post providing a legal point of view. Law is an excellent historical record in many ways and it provides a window into what the ruling class thought of race. Here's a book with a much wider scope that requires a little ambition to read: https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html

I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#82

Post by blurbleblurble »

You know what's crazy? My cousin is months away from finishing his PhD in pharmacy. Over thanksgiving break, he revealed to me that he had never heard the term "epigenetics". I explained it to him. He works for a drug company modeling interactions for new animal antibiotics and he'd never heard the term "epigenetics"

My cousin is a bright, driven guy. There are reasons I distrust the western medical establishment.

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#83

Post by blurbleblurble »

lngnmn wrote: post #76
toufka wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comment above. DNA can be commented in/out during an organism's lifetime. And these comments/silencing capabilities are in fact transferable to a child with some fidelity. And in that way those changes are heritable and genetic, if not actually altering the DNA of the child in any way. This capability is called epigenetics. You are correct that the code of the DNA itself is not being altered, but there are oth…

With generational time of almost 20 years? What you are taking about is an ordinary blood-borne sexually transmitted decease model (or a virus), and it has nothing to do with genetics (gene expression is a developmental topic), so there will be no "marks on a DNA" in principle - it does not work that way. There, however, could be some certain proteins bound to DNA, but it is a not a genetic but biochemical (pathogeni…

Even the number of twists in a DNA molecule can impact its interaction with the environment.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160105-supercoiled-dna/

Living DNA exists in complex coils, smothered in a jelly of inter-mediating molecules. It's quite messy and poorly understood! What is understood is that inheritance and expression of DNA information are absolutely non-linear.

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#84

Post by blurbleblurble »

mcjon77 wrote: post #56

One thing that I don't hear talked about in many of these discussions about the genetic components of race is how the mixed racial ancestry of many "black" people in Europe and the Americas impacts these studies. MANY blacks in the Americas and Europe have significant European DNA. For example, even though my family identifies as black, my mother and her siblings are almost 50℅ European according to DNA tests. How do…

Unfortunately, western medical practitioners and researchers often aren't aware of the complexities of race and racial identity. I spoke with my cousin recently (who is almost done with his pharmacy PhD) and was flabbergasted at how ignorant he was about race as a social, cultural and spiritual phenomenon. Yet he casually spoke of race as a simple demographic category with genetic basis. He'd never heard of "epigenetics", though when I explained it to him, he admitted that it was a plausible idea.

Racial identity translates very poorly into actual population genetics, let alone epigenetics.

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#85

Post by JamesBarney »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #82

You know what's crazy? My cousin is months away from finishing his PhD in pharmacy. Over thanksgiving break, he revealed to me that he had never heard the term "epigenetics". I explained it to him. He works for a drug company modeling interactions for new animal antibiotics and he'd never heard the term "epigenetics" My cousin is a bright, driven guy. There are reasons I distrust the western medical establishment.

The other way to look at it is epigenetics is much more important to pop-science than real science.

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#86

Post by blurbleblurble »

lngnmn wrote: post #20

Cultural changes rate are too infinitesimal compared to the time which is required for any genetic change to get a chance to form and propagate through a population to attain a stable presence (forming a distinct trait). The probability that a certain cultural difference induced mutation could be formed (given that there is no flow of information from a phenotype back to genotype) is something incalculable. What migh…

As is common with popular education, the "101" classes tend to propagate outdated information and ideas. For some reason they think they need to teach things in historical order.

https://www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/dossier/ep...

Re: Cultural differences may leave their mark on DNA

#87

Post by dqv »

danharaj wrote: post #41
dqv wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. I mean... You're the one saying it's well documented and well studied. Are you going to prove your assertion?

If someone were on Hacker News trying to insist that they had violated the laws of thermodynamics or invented a perpetual motion machine, I would not be called upon to prove those laws. Race is a crank theory. It is a most pernicious crank theory because it is tied with some of the greatest brutality the world has ever seen. You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt…

>If someone were on Hacker News trying to insist that they had violated the laws of thermodynamics or invented a perpetual motion machine, I would not be called upon to prove those laws.

1. No you wouldn't. Unless you were making the assertion that it was widely known and well researched that the laws of thermodynamics could be broken.

>Race is a crank theory. It is a most pernicious crank theory because it is tied with some of the greatest brutality the world has ever seen.

2. Yet I am supposed to take at face value that "whiteness as an ideology of European imperial powers is well documented and well studied". That does not mean that I don't think race is a crank theory, but that your initial assertion remains unproven.

>You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt and put the burden on us to bring up the same arguments over and over again to refute them.

3. Please stop using this argument. What you are saying is that you would rather hold hostage knowledge that is supposed to be widely known. The fact is that it's not a google search away. I don't expect you to do anything, but I would have hoped you would have prefaced what you said with a book or something (that isn't just ideological) to actually contextualize the assertion.

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