re: #69 freetoken

Continuing on my soapbox about “race”: Looking at the post below about Hannity, we can be sure from all he has said and written before that he believes many fallacies around “race”.

However, his two black guests - do they also? Probably. it is very hard to get the general population to accept the latest science discoveries and this is especially true when it comes to genetics and anthropology.

Someone mentioned Henry Gates. He tries, at least to a certain extent, to show how mixed the entire American population truly is. But even he, when he shows those graphs (on FYR) from the genetic companies is reinforcing some misbeliefs, if he doesn’t explain all the limitations of what those graphs really mean.

It bothers me, as a scientist/science teacher, when charts say someone’s genes are 39% British Isles, 11% Middle Eastern or whatever. Those geographic designations really only have value for the last several thousand years, given the mixing of the genetic pool in Europe (and elsewhere). For example, my Y-DNA is British Isles Celtic, meaning it closely matches other samples from southern Wales and Devon. But those Celtic forebears did not originally come from the British Isles. One possible origin of the Celtic peoples is Anatolia. So, I could just as easily argue I’m Turkish — not that there was a Turkey several thousand years ago.

Ultimately, we’re all Africans.