Racism in the 21st Century - Will DNA analysis promote it?

Racism, I realize that it is a sensitive and PIC topic that most people want to stay away from the moment they hear it but I dont think there is anything wrong is examining it from a social behavior point of view. In fact I think it is fascinating. Just remember to not get too wound up about it people, treat it as any other topic that you would talk about at happy hour and try to be non-defensive and rational.

Ok, why am I getting so deep and Philosophical about this on a Sunday nite? Well, I just read an article in the Sunday edition of NYT titled "In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice". Here is the link if you got time to read it, not a bad read honestly:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/us/11dna.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Anyway what is the big hoopla about:

-so, apparently just like you could go into a junk food store and order a burger with fries and a drink you could submit your DNA to a lab and ask them to quantify what percent of your genes are from which race! (well, it's not quite that easy but you get the drift). PS: I am personally fascinated to look at my gene analysis actually. I am pretty certain that my Irish and Jewish ancestry will be proven beyond a doubt!

-Remember we got told at the turn of this century that any two humans are 99% similar genetically (I actually remember Slick Billy (Clinton) announce it in one of his State of the Union addresses in the late 90s). So it is the 1% or so that determine whether you have a high IQ, sweat less, have pale skin, drink more Jaeger shots than others (ok, the last one I made up!). Again remember this according to Scientific experts in the field.

-so what? you ask. Well, looks like a recent study which tried to correlate a certain gene to high IQ in Asians, Europeans, and Africans was published in a scientific journal. And as you can guess non-scientific wannabes have been trying to generalize and pick tidbits of info and interpret it to fit their point of view. Apparently this one dude (blogger from Manhattan) wrote that the high IQ gene is present in higher amounts and more often in Asians and Europeans than in Africans.

-Of course this dude clearly ignored the fundamentals here: Nevermind that there are a gazillion other factors that influence basic thinking processes in humans. And that the Scientists themselves do not come to these conclusions because as is the case for most scientific studies it is almost impossible to arrive at a clear cut conclusion.

-And it is not helping that the gene guru James Watson, the Nobel Prize scientist who discovered the DNA structure, went public and proclaimed that people of African descent are "innately less intelligent than others".

-So as you can see there is social irresponsibility displayed by the so-called great scientists as well. It bothers me that someone as well regarded as Dr. Watson would make such a broad sweeping social statement (again I am assuming here that he did make this statement-I have not checked the article where he proclaimed that) without considering the how it will be interpreted. (The NYT article states that he later resigned from his job for these comments)

-Look, I understand that people from different races have characterestics that are specific to them but that does not mean that they can be extrapolated to define an entire race of people.
In this article specifically there are simple questions to consider: how reliable is an IQ test to relate to the intelligence of a person, what other factors like social environment, evolution, and personal characteristics affect the IQ. Not to mention the statistical certainity of the reported studies.

-It is very tempting for everyone, especially the over-exuberant types, to interpret any study to fit their pre-established theories. And it really grinds my gears (channeling Peter Griffin here!) that people use Darwin's evolution theory to explain general social behavior when he and various scientists specifically warn that his conclusions on evolution were arrived at from controlled experiments and should not be used to explain general social tendencies.

-One of the questions that was raised in the NYT article was "how can use it to explain the fact not oven one winner of the 100m race has been a white person since you can remember?".

-hey, like I said before there are certain characterestics that are specific to a certain race. Why that is could have to do with a gazillion factors? People of a certain run faster than others because they could train better or like Darwin said if you do a controlled experiment it could prove that with evolution necessity made them pre-disposed to run faster (I dont know this but could be).

-So people stay away from blanket statements based on partial or nit picked scientific information.

-Having said all this, I would really like to get a DNA analysis of my genes. Wouldn't you?

ok, gotto go a new episode of The Family Guy just started-looks like Stewie is going to kidnap his family!

later