Here's a test: take a DNA sample from a random African, Arab, Native American and a Frenchman.

Unlabeled, give them to a geneticist and ask him to identify the race.

Can he?

(In one case only, the Frenchman wouldn't have a gene for a backbone; but it is a trick case, since the French don't constitute a separate race.)

Yes.

Jeff:

Here is another test. Take an African, Arab, and a Native American. Tell them the latest cutting edge Western science says there is no such thing as race and we should ignore those irrational distinctions and be one as brothers.

Then, duck.

You can have a lot of fun with DNA and race.

What you do is draw the anthropologist into an acceptance of DNA as proof of race in a politically correct context, such as proving that blonde Mongolians are descended from Amazon warrior princesses. (If you watch PBS long enough, you'll see ANYTHING)

Next take that ringing endorsement of the efficacy of that methodology and ask how it can be used to establish the "race" of the ancient Egyptians. Now anyone who has read Houston Stewart Chamberlain knows that the pyramid-builders were German, just like Jesus Christ and the people of Atlantis. Or maybe they were Black Africans, as they are teaching in my school district. Surely we could get mummy DNA to clear this up.

The result will be hilarious, as the DNA technology morphs before your very eyes into something of no moment in determining the "race" of an ethnic group.

It's 12:08 EDT oj. Something you'd like to announce?

Sorry, OJ, the geneticist can't.

Jeff:

Of course they can. Clone it, grow it, see which you have. It's not dependent on envirnment or nurture or something--you'll always get a being of the same easily identifiable race.

Actually, Orrin, you don't.

In racist societies, like the Louisiana my father grew up in or S. Africa, at a certain level of bureaucratic sophistication, a race-determining board always arises.

Doubtful cases are presented for determination.

In the South, we antiracists used to regale each other with actual stories about how this worked.

My favorite concerned the aunt of a friend who worked in the DMV. An applicant turned in the form without checking the race box.

When the aunt pointed out, "You didn't check the race box," the applicant put her arms on her hips and said, "What do you think?"

But the aunt had no idea.

Before the Europeans got here, the Hawaiians had a term, ehu, for redheads, of which there were a few. You still see them, occasionally. No one would ever identify them, superficially, as Polynesians, yet they must have been, no.

That was very good, Lou.

Harry:

Sure, we can mix races. It's not as if there was ever any speciation despite that divergence thousands of years ago.

You got that right, for once, although you don't understand why.

There has not been a human speciation event for a long time -- at least 100,000 years, probably longer.

Divergence is not speciation. Speciation is precisely defined, and just because it would devastate all your arguments to honestly use the word the way darwinists use it, does not mean your misuse of it means anything.

It means that races aren't species, so they're pretty fungible, though obviously real.

OJ:

RE cloning, you are right. But that is no different from saying that there is a reasonably strong correlation between the ancestory of the parents and the ancestory of the children.

But, given only DNA to work with, a geneticist cannot tell you which race the owner belonged to.

Jeff:

Yes, the limitations of biologists are endless. Grow the kid and you'll know.

As Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues proved, not real at the genetic level.

The only natural category of life is the species.

Everything else is a matter of convenience, variety, cultivar, race, genus, family, order, even phylum (or division) and kingdom.

It used to be thought that kingdoms, at least, were 'real' in the sense that species are real; that is, they could be precisely defined.

But among the really simple types, it is difficult to decide which kingdom an organism belongs in, or even how many there are. (Current opinion says 5, but some think 7).

It's exactly like the differences among Class D, C. B, A, AA, AAA and Big League baseball.

All artificial.

So, you're wrong, races are not only not obviously real, they are not real in any sense.

The working out of this understanding, against the obscurantism of the religionists, is one of the most attractive triumphs of science.

Harry:

You can't thiunk dog breeds are real either?

Nope. Neither does the AKC. They require papers. They know you cannot tell them apart by looking.

You can't tell a poodle from a cocker spaniel? They require papers because they want the breeds pure. Of course they can all interbreed, just as all those finches can that y'all put so much faith in.

Cavalli-Sforza's point. His tests could find no 'pure' human races.

But you are the one who said a clone would produce a somatic example that then could be assigned.

Well, each dog is a somatic type, and AKC says you're wrong: looking at it does not reveal its ancestry.

Harry:

They're not pure--you'll be able to tell one from another. Just can't sell them for as much.

It appears the corner that OJ has painted himself into is now so small that his entire case against Darwinism relies on one claim only: that it can't explain speciation, because genetically-isolated populations of a species that gradually differ under separate selective pressures, have not been observed to differ enough to be classed as new 'species'.

Unfortunately, for this claim to hold he needs to reject the scientific definition of 'species' in favour of his own.

OJ's definition of a species seems to be "things are the same species if they look roughly the same to OJ".

Which is cool for him, but not much use in biology lessons.

Brit:

Darwin observed that farmers bred animals until they differed from one another slightly and that the same thing happened to Galapogan finches. I agree. The rest he made up and it's proved false. That's the danger of believing facts to be Truth.

Do tell, when was it proven false?

When no evidence turned up over the next century and a half to support it.

Lot's of evidence turned up, you just don't like it.

But even if no evidence had turned up, that wouldn't prove it wrong.

Yes, in that sense ufoology and JFK conspiracies aren't wrong.

This is where I say all sorts of things can't be proven absolutely wrong but some things have evidence supporting them and some don't (such as darwinism vs ID), and you say that means that one thing is as good as another because they're all based on faith without proof, and I say No, we believe things so far as there is a reason to believe them based on compelling evidence and accept any incompleteness as known unknowns that one day may be knowns, and then you say reason itself is but a faith because reason cannot prove itself by reason, and I say that's feeble sixth-form pseudo-philosophy that people only resort to when they've run out of decent arguments and then I get bored and you have the last word because of your incorrigible lastwordmanship.

Ha, ha! Loser!

You know what I'm going to do, OJ?

I know what you won't do, evolve.

These debates have certainly reached an evolutionary dead end...extinction awaits.

But no, I'm going to wait a few months, til this thread is quite forgotten about, then I'm going to sneak back here in the dead of night...

...and have The Last Word.

Comments get e-mailed to me--how the heck else could I follow you lunatics?

The question is not "how?", but "why?"

Imagine the trouble you'd all get up to without adult supervision?

Bless you, OJ.

In this particular gaudy and over-baubled Christmas tree of lunatics, you are truly the teetering, gibbering, glorious, lunatic fairy on the top.

I hope your man wins tonight.

Thanks!