[Taxacom] Race and taxonomy

[Thomas G. Lammers]

At 07:45 AM 10/7/2008, Richard Jensen wrote:
>I think the bottom line is, is there any justification to the concept
>that there are recognizable subsets of tyhe human species, whether we
>call them subspecies or races or populations, etc.  I presume we ar all
>aware that, in terms of genetic variation, total variation among samples
>of humans is dominated by "within" population variation, with only about
>4-6 % of the total representing among-population variation.  Thus, the
>argument that the greatest difference between any two randomly chosen
>individuals from two different continents is less than the difference
>between any two randomly chosen individuals from the same continent.
>
>My question is, Is the variation that allows us to determine, with a
>high degree of probability, that my ancestry is from northern Europe and
>my colleagues' ancestry is from, say, western Africa or eastern Asia,
>biologically meaningful?

It depends on what you mean by "meaningful."  That word indicates judgment 
and interpretation.  I would be happy to say that the variation is 
biological, period.  Beyond that would be dicey.

I think that we might say that the variation observed was more meaningful 
in pre-industrial pre-literate times, before travel became easy and 
migration rates among populations skyrocketed.  Presumably, the genes that 
became most common in a given population were those that conferred some 
advantage in survivorship and/or reproduction.  Today, with increased gene 
flow among populations and development of culture that can buffer us from 
the sorts of natural selection our ancestors were subjected to, the 
differences we see today likely are no longer meaningful, merely the 
persistence of a now-defunct world.


Thomas G. Lammers, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Curator of the Herbarium (OSH)
Department of Biology and Microbiology
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901-8640 USA

e-mail:       lammers at uwosh.edu
phone:      920-424-1002
fax:           920-424-1101

Plant systematics; classification, nomenclature, evolution, and 
biogeography of the Campanulaceae s. lat.

Webpages:
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