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Eduardo Cabrera's avatar

Lewontin knew a lot about genetics, whereas I don't know even one percent of what he knew. But the problem does not lie in this, but in drawing wrong conclusions. It is a problem of logic, not of genetics.

Lewontin was correct that the genetic variation between human populations was less than the genetic variation between individuals in each human group. His mistake was thinking that he had discovered the squaring of the circle. We must be very careful with the conclusions we draw, especially when a discovery appears to deny the obvious. What should Lewontin have made of his discovery? Well, he should have thought about how it was possible that, despite the fact that these differences were greater within than between groups, nevertheless those groups were still such; that is to say, that we could still more or less easily distinguish people as belonging to one or another group. This fact clearly demonstrated that his discovery, in reality, did little to explain what he wanted to explain.

And therein lies the crux of the matter. Lewontin wanted to reach certain conclusions pre-established by his ideology. Lewontin resented racism, but instead of explaining it, he ruled it non-existent. But the best way to deal with the problem of racism is to understand its bases, not hide them. And the basis of racism is probably as trivial as other psychological traits that emerged during our evolution as a species. Racial differences are nothing more than differences that arise in different settings. The way to handle the problem of racism is more similar to how we handle our sexual impulses than to the pretense of decreeing that, since it has no genetic basis, therefore, human races do not exist. Human races exist as long as different animal species exist. And none of those facts imply that we have the right to kill members of other species or to subdue, belittle, or humiliate people of other races.

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Gnew's avatar

"a Swiss person has no more in common with another Swiss than with a Peruvian"

How do we reconcile this with the results of Witherspoon (2007), which found that:

"we define ω as the frequency with which a pair of individuals from different populations is genetically more similar than a pair from the same population ... with data sets comprising thousands of loci genotyped in geographically distinct populations: In such cases, ω becomes zero."

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