Time Frames and Taboo Data Blog

The social definition of “race,” from a scientific standpoint, is little more than a reference to an optical illusion. The habit of assigning groups of persons bearing various physical features such as skin color, facial features, texture of hair, and even skeletal build into categories came into scientific use in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Unfortunately, this method of classification to the average person brought with it the erroneous implication that such physical differences indicated that there could be no unifying factor.

 
Not surprisingly, categorizing the human species in this manner became a standard by which self-absorbed people could indulge themselves with concepts of purity that allowed them to exclude those who did not mirror their imagined superiority.   This, of course, further stoked the fires of hatred, prejudice, discrimination, intolerance–i.e. all the ignoble practices that diminish the innate dignity of man.

 
Although categorization has been convenient in various forms of study–forensic anthropology for example–the category method of study of the human species does not alter the fact that there is absolutely no genetic basis for racial classification. Indeed, public interest in tracing their personal ancestry has revealed through DNA research that race as a scientific classification does not compute!  Through DNA analysis scores of persons who had believed themselves to be of one unblemished “race” were startled to discover that they embodied considerably more than appearances seemed to present.

 
DNA research has shown from samples obtained from indigenous groups worldwide that all peoples are, regardless of appearances, actually interrelated. In other words, ancestry is much more than perceptible biological indicators, for biological traits are amendable and adaptive. Everyone’s background includes ancestors who at one time or another had to adapt to their environment and extreme climatic changes, all of which would have influenced gene modification.

 
There is much left to learn about DNA and how genetics of a biological attribute may have evolved. There is such a miniscule portion of DNA that has produced all the morphological differences that account for our species’ diversity that we speak of as the “races,” and yet we all have within us a common active denominator.

Is that denominator what people fight over as the personality that they imagine to be “God”? If so, isn’t science the method used by that creative force for dispensing genuine revealed wisdom?

This entry was posted on April 1, 2009 at 8:59 pm and is filed under biological traits, freethought with tags ancestry, climatic changes, discrimination, DNA, forensic anthropology, Pantheism, prejudice, race, racial classifications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.