The not so Great Racism in Canada Thread

[someone123]

I always found the 99.5% human genome overlap claim a bit strange. Humans and house cats are about 90% overlap, and tiny mutations can cause somebody to die or dramatically alter their physical appearance.

But to me this biological aspect is neither here nor there because it cannot produce the moral justification required to treat other people badly. I look at those numbers for other species and wonder why we've treated other living creatures so badly when many of them must have their own thoughts and feelings too.

Yet I also wouldn't claim that if we group people by apparent race we are guaranteed to find zero biologically-driven difference, or zero difference in some sub-area like cognition. It is clear that there are racial differences in humans; we see them physically, and it makes sense that humans would adapt to live in different environments (e.g. if you live in an area with more sunlight you tend to develop darker skin). It gets pseudo-sciencey when people make poorly-supported claims about why people from this or that region would be a certain way. And this is a difficult area to study because there are so many confounding factors.

It is actually pretty important to study genetic differences and their impact on medical outcomes and the efficacy of different treatments. But eventually I think treatments will be targeted to the individual.