Re: markup race

[Kurt Cagle <kurt@kurtcagle.net>]

> He has also done much to show how genetic data from present human racial
> groups could be used to reconstruct their past separations. This
> reconstruction, based on the analysis of 58 genes, yields a bifurcated
> evolutionary tree with Caucasian and African races in one branch and
> Orientals, Oceanians, and Amerinds in the other. The main division
appeared,
> according to Cavalli-Sforza, some 35-40,000 years ago."
Interesting. I've had my suspicion for some time that about 40,000 years ago
man invented boats, initially to make it easier to fish locally, but over
time making it easier to follow the largest game source -- whales. The
routes where most human exploration seem to have been made are also whale
migration routes.  This is completely irrelevant to the discussions about
markup, of course.

Here's where things get complicated, however. One way of looking at HumanML
from a physical description standpoint is that it is a measure of
phenotype -- blonde hair, blue eyes, that sort of thing. We know today that
phenotype is an expressive rather than an intrinsic set of qualities that
are based upon genotype; this is one of the reasons why phenotypic
classification is so difficult ... the finer the granularity of the
classification, the more obvious it becomes that phenotype is a poor
classification mechanism, yet at the same time I think it is likely that no
one here wants to tackle the issues of creating a genetic map of human
beings. Just my two cents worth.

-- Kurt