For another, you've just created the possibility that people will go "Ooh, they've got ginger hair, I'll bet they're inbred."

And finally, you started with "well that's different ... " which, in the context, suggests it's OK to be prejudiced against people who happen to have red hair.

I hope that in real life you're less prejudiced than that comment makes you appear.

Note: I am not saying that an individual ginger should be discriminated against. But a high proportion of them is a warning sign that something is going genetically wrong with a community.

Funny how eugenics doesn't work whichever way you try to slice it isn't it ?

A gene being recessive or dominant and being expressed in a group of individuals is not immediately a sign of 'inbreeding'. By that standard we are all 'inbreeding', everybody will have a number of recessive genes expressed, even if that does not lead to them having a different phenotype.

Inbreeding refers to a population too small to have a viable sized gene pool, one of the traits is exposure of recessive traits.

You're confusing the cause and the effect. Not all recessive traits are exposed by inbreeding, the vast majority of them are regular recombination in a lively genepool.

Well, yes. There are such communities, and they are inbred.

Maybe you personally aren't, and quite possibly that's not what you mean, but it is an interpretation of what you are saying.

If it's not what you mean, I suggest you think more carefully about how you say things.

Of course I'm not saying that. I know that the gene for red hair is recessive. And it's true that an entire community having mostly red hair has an increased probability of being inbred.

But think of it as a test that someone comes from a community that is inbred. Almost every positive (someone has red hair) will be a false positive (they most likely are not from a community that's inbred, although the chances are increased infintesimally). Your comment, however, seems to advocate pointing at someone and saying "They've got red hair, it's more likely they're an inbreed."

Now turn it around. Give everyone on HN a test for some rare condition (SRC). There are a few tests turn up positive, so you point at them and say "It's more likely they've got SRC." Yes, that's true, and completely unhelpful. It's almost certain to be a false positive.

On the other hand, you said:

  Quoting>> And anybody with red hair
  Quoting>> knows how true that is.

  You said> Well, that's different.

  > If everybody would be born exactly the same
  > shade of medium brown as of tomorrow I'm sure
  > we'd focus on hair colour next. And anybody
  > with red hair knows how true that is.

That's how your comment reads. That's what your comment appears to say. It may not be what you meant, but it's still deeply offensive, even if you don't realise it.

Your comments about communities, etc, are correct, but when you insert them into a discussion about prejudice, the implications and import are entirely different. It's that juxtaposition that matters.

Any outside distinction will lead to people using that distinction to draw far reaching conclusions about the people that have that distinction.

Inbreeding indeed.