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New Genetic studies will reveal there ARE genetic mental and physical differences among the Races/Ethnicities.
Research which had a medical motivation, will instead reveal some very un-PC news.
All hell may break loose when we find out why 'White men can't jump' or some even more controversial differences in mental abilities.
The looming crisis in human genetics
Nov 13th 2009
Premium content | Economist.com
RichardDawkins.net Forum • View topic - The looming crisis in human genetics
Research which had a medical motivation, will instead reveal some very un-PC news.
All hell may break loose when we find out why 'White men can't jump' or some even more controversial differences in mental abilities.
The looming crisis in human genetics
Nov 13th 2009
Premium content | Economist.com
RichardDawkins.net Forum • View topic - The looming crisis in human genetics
"...Human geneticists have reached a private Crisis of Conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races....
[..........]
The trouble is, the resequencing data will reveal much more about human evolutionary history and ethnic differences than they will about disease genes. Once enough DNA is analysed around the world, science will have a panoramic view of human genetic variation across races, ethnicities and regions. We will start reconstructing a detailed family tree that links all living humans, discovering many surprises about mis-attributed paternity and covert mating between classes, castes, regions and ethnicities.
We will also identify the many genes that create physical and mental differences across populations, and we will be able to estimate when those genes arose. Some of those differences probably occurred very recently, within recorded history. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argued in “The 10,000 Year Explosion” that some human groups experienced a vastly accelerated rate of evolutionary change within the past few thousand years, benefiting from the new genetic diversity created within far larger populations, and in response to the new survival, social and reproductive challenges of agriculture, cities, divisions of labour and social classes. Others did not experience these changes until the past few hundred years when they were subject to contact, colonisation and, all too often, extermination.
If the shift from GWAS to sequencing studies finds evidence of such politically awkward and morally perplexing facts, we can expect the usual range of ideological reactions, including nationalistic retro-racism from conservatives and outraged denial from blank-slate liberals.
The few who really understand the genetics will gain a more enlightened, live-and-let-live recognition of the biodiversity within our extraordinary species—including a clearer view of likely comparative advantages between the world’s different economies....
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