Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobility over generations

Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by larksimian on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:18AM (#6701432)

'Race' is a dumb concept. We know that there are groups of people that are biologically distinct from others. Not to say that they can't interbreed, merely that there are genetic/phenotypic differences between groups.

Probably the most obvious example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Epidemiolog... which is a condition that mostly appears in people with ancestry in regions that expose them to malaria.

Skin color is obviously a biological difference that distinguishes different human populations, it just doesn't correlate with all the stuff we actually care about, for instance intelligence. 'Race' is loosely correlated with some specific biological traits, for instance http://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/guide/...

As for hyper-successful people breeding themselves into a sub-group with specific traits, for better or for worse, this is obviously possible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognathism#History

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Re:Surnames offer depressing clues to extent of social mobil... by jmerton on Saturday November 09, 2013 @07:46AM (#6701482)

Thanks for the links. My area of (amateur) research is "contra-science," and one sub-set I find most interesting is so-called "race." What is called "race' seems actually to be the result of environmental/geographic induced gene expression. My favorite examples is a South African sub-culture that possesses the Cohen gene (Tribe of Isaiah), but looks identical to their neighbors. They have been in South Africa for about 800 years.

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