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| Jul 11th, 2005 12:50 AM | ||
| ziggytrix |
Perhaps, but even the specific drug mentioned in your article was tailored to 'nitric-oxide deficiency' not 'blackness.' I'm curious just how much more prevalent this nitric-oxide deficiency is in black heart-failure patients. Quote:
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| Jul 10th, 2005 11:45 PM | ||
| theapportioner | You're not appreciating the realities of how medicine is practiced. A patient comes in to the doctor's office for the first time, complaining of whatever, and the doctor only has 15 minutes to devote to an interview. You may have to take into account the person's race, along with all other details of the patient's history, in order to prescribe the right drug, at the right dosages. In effect, the doctor has stereotype the patient along the lines of race. | |
| Jul 10th, 2005 10:56 PM | ||
| ziggytrix |
Quote:
What I'm driving at, is that when they make a black man's drug, it's not actually going to target people with dark skin, but rather people predisposed to sickle cell anemia, or some such genetic condition. |
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| Jul 10th, 2005 10:11 PM | ||
| theapportioner | Even so, that's a significant concession from "race is genetically irrelevant" - in certain cases it is clinically relevant, w.r.t. tendencies for certain diseases and pharmacological responsiveness, and so on. | |
| Jul 8th, 2005 02:41 PM | ||
| ziggytrix | The point: “Race is an approximation,” Greene says. “The eventual goal is to have individually designed drugs.” | |
| Jul 8th, 2005 01:26 PM | ||
| theapportioner |
Here's an article about the debate on BiDil, and race-based pharm generally. http://www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/archives...ty-debate.html |
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| Jul 8th, 2005 08:35 AM | ||
| Abcdxxxx | Or in colloquial terms : race. | |
| Jul 7th, 2005 07:51 AM | ||
| Sethomas |
I'm not qualified to argue genetic biology I noticed. First of all, it seems like you have a backwards understanding of what we mean by "bloodlines" and "race". A bloodline simply refers to a population that for whatever reason has for the most part had isolated reproduction, id est, its members tend to breed only amongst themselves. A bloodline could be established within a few decades, or through what is known as a "genetic bottleneck", it could be established in a single generation. In biological terms "race" refers to the level of genetic diversity among members of the same species who can all produce viable, fertile offspring with any of the others. There is a huge amount of diversity in human phenotypes, sure, but at the genetic level we're all almost exactly the same. When biologists took a serious look at race in comparison to all other organisms, it became quite apparent that humans are quite surprisingly homogeneous. Sure, a Bantu looks a hell of a lot different than an Inuit, but the difference is insignificant than say comparing an irish wolfhound to a chihuahua. Humans simply lack the genetic diversity of other organisms that leads to a cogent understanding of "race". Bloodlines, however, do exist. Chemical underpinnings of human populations varies extremely from region to region. They also vary greatly by what common convention holds erroneously to be "race", such as from Black to Hebrew to Korean to Aryan. This can reflect regional evolutionary factors, such as malanin distribution or sickle-cells in blacks, or increased lung capacity in the Inca, or short body stature in the Inuits, et cetera blah blah. At dinner tonight my sister was talking about how when she was studying the liver in med school, she was tought that Asians produce a certain enzyme in lesser quantities than the world norm and consequently have a lower alcohol threshold. I don't see any immediate evolutionary benefit to that, but hey, it seems to be true. So you can't ask how long it takes for a "race" to be established, because humans have only been around for 100,000 or so years, and have only moved out of Africa for about the past 40 millennia. There is no genetic race because we genetic bloodlines have had neither the time nor the impetus to diversify away from the norm. For example, there's a common belief that the more chromosomes a species has, the more "evolved" it is. Humans have only a few dozen, coming from mammals who evolved less than 100 million years ago. Ferns, I believe, have several hundred chromosomes, reflecting the fact that they have been around since probably before the Triassic. So, yeah. No race, just bloodlines. |
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| Jul 7th, 2005 07:23 AM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
Quote:
Anyway, I'm not qualified to argue genetic biology, and I'll be the first to admit it.... but I got trapped at a dinner party about a year ago with someone who was researching these race specific drugs for a trade publication, and I played devils advocate with her for a while.... contrary to what you're saying, there is a scientific field opening up of scientists who are exploring race specific medicine, specifically because they do not believe race is a construct. I'm not equipped to defend the merit of these studies, but when I did try and pose various questions about these genes developing as a result of persecution, climate, location, diet, lifestyle, etc. there were strong deductive reasonings for why these had been ruled out. |
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| Jul 6th, 2005 07:29 PM | ||
| Big Papa Goat |
I don't really think that 'races' exist if that's what you're wondering abcdxxx. Nothing I said really had anything to do with that question anyway. If everyone on the slave ships were different 'races' or were taken from different populations (which they may well have been) and were subsequently reproductively isolated to a relatively large degree, the same kind of gene frequency changes would have occured. Basically, what sethomas said. |
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| Jul 6th, 2005 04:10 AM | ||
| Sethomas | The problem with that mode of thinking is that it defeats the purpose of statistics by purporting that anomaly rules. Not all blacks came in shackles, but exactly how many of them do you think flew over here in the Concorde in the twentieth century? You contradict yourself in that you accuse the use of race as a factor when you argue against a point that reflects specifically genetic bloodlines, not race. The difference is that the case of blacks in shackles would be no different than had whites or asians or whatever been brought over under the same conditions and for some reason retained homogeneous breeding. It's slightly different in that blacks (as a millennia-old bloodline, NOT a race) have adaptations against malaria that result in sickle-cell anemia, which could alter in some way their development in the New World. | |
| Jul 5th, 2005 06:23 PM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
uh. well. the greater point here is that it's incorrect to go around and claim there is no scientific proof of race existing at all, which has been a popular rebutal. what was an open and shut case to many people needs to be argued or at least discussed further. i do think people mix up their understanding of tribes, and races. i still think it's troubling to discredit the possibility that blacks are distinct by using their time spent in shackles as a unifying trait. that's a bit sick really. Like I said, you're explaining away race by using a racial stereotype. Not all of black american was brought over in extreme conditions. All we know is that Blacks are susceptable of this disease, and nothing specific has proved that only ancestry of African slaves can acquire it. the rest is wishfull thinking. |
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| Jul 4th, 2005 09:00 PM | ||
| Big Papa Goat |
Quote:
Let's say that 5 out of 100 slaves possessed some gene for saltiness or whatever else that would aid in survival on a long sea journey. And lets say that on the average trip, 30 out of 100 slaves died at sea, but only 1 of the slaves posessing that given gene. A situation like that would cause the prevalence of that gene in the population to go from 5/100 to 4/70. Let's say that on average, this kind of ratio of survival happens on all the slave ships over the 200 years or whatever of the slave trade. The entire population of Africans in America would have this 4/70 ratio for salty genes in this case, since all the Africans in that population would have experienced the same selection pressure, and they would be a largely isolated population (unless I'm mistaken) for at least several generations. I'm not saying that this is definitely what happened, all I'm saying is that it isn't entirely implausible. And again, it's only incidentally a 'racial' thing, since native Africans would have had the same salty gene frequency as any other population. All I'm really saying here is that it's plausible. As for the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, it's certainly possible that they also experienced similar selection, perhaps if you looked into it you'd see slightly higher levels of salty genes in their population, or any other population of seaborn immigrants. The African situation would probably be exaggerated however, given the higher death rate on the journey. |
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| Jul 4th, 2005 06:19 AM | ||
| Helm | Personally not afraid at all. Just that I don't think 'intelligence' as as easily quantifiable as is say, stamina or physical strength. | |
| Jul 4th, 2005 02:58 AM | ||
| theapportioner | It's a bit odd that so many people are so willing to denounce any and every theory that dares to propose a link between biology (usually but not always taken to mean genes) and race, or intelligence. I guess people are afraid of eugenics, slippery slopes and all that, but let's test the theories first. | |
| Jul 4th, 2005 02:37 AM | ||
| theapportioner | I guess I should've written more clearly - what I meant to say is that according to the hypothesis, Africans who were better able to retain salt - and thus water - had a better chance of surviving the journey across the Atlantic. I made a flippant comment about "saltier" Africans, and it didn't occur to me that the "salt" in this case could be misconstrued as sea salt. My bad. | |
| Jun 29th, 2005 11:55 AM | ||
| Zhukov |
Australians are good at sports... like negroes! They both got shipped around in boats!! |
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| Jun 29th, 2005 03:08 AM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
I think I'm still missing the legtimacy of that sea salt theory. Slave trade Africans didn't spend entire generations on ships, to my knowledge. The idea that the only ones who had the genetics to survive such conditions can be relegated to one race, rather then the circumstances is a little suspect and fixated on race in it's own way. In order to use this theory to prove race doesn't exist, you still have to seperate the Black Africans somehow.... if not by race, then by some other reason. What reason? Time at sea exposed to salt air, with little nourishment, and brutal conditions? That aspect of the story isn't unique at all to history. Wouldn't this mean the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock would have this exact gene? Who else traveled by boat? Maybe it's not the salt air after all...maybe it's a gene procurred through survivors of extreme conditions when shackles are involved? Ahh! Don't make me get out my Viking novels! |
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| Jun 25th, 2005 10:08 PM | ||
| Emu | I think the Southern logic goes that if you have two copies of the same gene, it must work twice as well, right?! | |
| Jun 25th, 2005 10:06 PM | ||
| ziggytrix |
And we're less seperated now than ever. We could certainly do worse as a species than to discard this outdated notion of race and move on. I really really hope I'm right and the children of multicultural families will have a genetic advantage from being less inbred than "racially homogenous" children. Then people in the South can quit hatin black folk and focus on hatin Northerners. |
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| Jun 25th, 2005 04:14 AM | ||
| Big Papa Goat |
It wouldn't be exactly right to compare sailors to the African slaves regarding selection for hypertension, since sailors aren't really a population in the same way the slaves would have been. A sailor that has hypertension or whatever to survive at sea would live longer than another sailor, but that sailor will just go and have offspring that may inherit his hypertension genes but will not neccesarily be sailors dig? What I mean is that the next generation of sailors won't neccesarily be the offspring of the last generation of sailors who possessed genes for survivng at sea. Basically the point is that for natural selection to work on a group, it has to be a biological populaiton, meaning an essentially reproductively isolated group. Since sailors aren't reproductively isolated, they can't evolve common characteristics. Slaves with genes for survivng at sea would have had greater survival rates on the way to America, and this would have caused something of a founder effect. The population of slaves that arrived in America would have had a greater proportion of individuals with the genes that aided in surviving the trip over, and this could have theoretically lasted, since slaves in America were essentially reproductively isolated group for at least a couple generations. There may not be 'races' of the human species, and indeed, there are no significant differences between different populations of humans, but that doesn't mean that certain traits can't be selected for in human populations given the right selection pressures. An entire population being transported across the Atlantic in such a brutal fashion could certainly have put the kind of pressure on a population to significantly select for a paticular trait. Epidemics of diseases are a good example of pressures that rapidly cause selection for paticular traits. Within the space of a few generations, a population that was once almost completly vulnerable to a disease like smallpox or the plague can become almost entirely resistant to it. Again though, such rapid selection pressures are limited to a few circumstances, and only cause paticular genes to be selected for. The "races" of the world may have had different selection pressures for a few things since they seperated, but human populations haven't really been seperated for long enough to diverge in any really significant ways. |
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| Jun 24th, 2005 09:05 PM | ||
| Abcdxxxx |
That's funny. That would mean sailors, people who lived on houseboats, beach side communities, etc. would all be susceptable to it too. I can't see how persecution has anything to do with why Jews get Crohn's disease and it's derivatives. Anyway, it's kind of hard to say there's no scientific proof that race exists now. |
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| Jun 24th, 2005 06:07 PM | ||
| theapportioner | A theory out there tries to explain the higher rates of hypertension etc. among American blacks as a legacy of selection pressures from the slaveships. Those who were saltier, survived the trip better. | |
| Jun 23rd, 2005 11:18 PM | ||
| Abcdxxxx | So h'bout this race specific drug that got released?! | |
| Jun 16th, 2005 03:36 PM | ||
| ziggytrix | No way. Leet test-taking skillz provide an amazing advantage in academia! | |
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