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[Marxism] Liberal Science, Socialist Conclusions?
I don't like the tone of prediction in these pieces... whether racism
persists is a political and cultural question, not merely a scientific one.
In my view, one of the main flaws in Marx's genius was his alignment with
the predictive spirit of the natural sciences, which has caused problems for
communist theory and practice; nevertheless, this statistical analysis shows
that common ancestry ("brotherhood") is a mathematical certainty in the
recent past:
---------------------------
"With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer,
Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You
would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years -- and probably on
the low side of that range -- to find somebody who could count every person
alive today as a descendant.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a
little farther -- about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago -- everybody living today
has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was
alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living
today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.":
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Brotherhood-of-Man.html?pagewanted=all
--
So differentiation belongs primarily to the historical period?
---------------------------
"The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world
is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European
ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne":
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/CORNISH/2003-05/1051807209
--
So much for aristocracy!!
---------------------------
"Q) Why do some groups have higher incidences of particular diseases?
A) As with athletics, most of these differences are rooted in our
experiences rather than our genes. Japanese men living in Japan rarely get
prostate cancer, but their rates rise if they move to the United States.
Though many African Americans have high blood pressure, the people of rural
West Africa have the lowest blood pressure of any group in the world."
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/olson/#steve
--
This makes the possibility of "genetic weapons" extremely dangerous:
http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_03/uk/ethique/txt1.htm
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