Time.com publishes an article in defense of scientific racism

[lpetrich]

Think about it this way. All life generally shares a lot of DNA. Percent of DNA shared with:

Cat: 90%
Cow: 80%
Mouse: 75%
Fruit Fly: 60%
Banana: 50%

[source]

And the number for chimps is something like 98 or 99%.

I'd like to see sources for all that numbers. That blogger didn't source them. I'm especially suspicious of the banana one, since the banana genome hasn't been as much explored as some other plants' genomes. Like the mustard weed Arabidopsis thaliana.

I decided to compare this gene to other genes: EEF1A1 eukaryotic translation elongation factor 1 alpha 1 [Homo sapiens (human)] - Gene - NCBI -- involved in assembling protein molecules from messenger-RNA templates. I found HomoloGene - NCBI with some ready-made comparisons.

The zebrafish's version of that gene is 95% protein identical and 82% DNA identical to ours. Arabidopsis and rice were about 78-79% protein identical and 72% DNA identical to ours.

Estimating rates with a simple model gives a relative age of about 4.7. Using an approximate age of 400 million years for the human-zebrafish split, this gives 1.9 billion years for the animal-plant split. The early-eukaryote fossil record is difficult to interpret, but that number fits.

However, DNA gives a relative age of about 1.7, much less. Could part of it be synonymous-codon saturation? Molecular evolution between codons coding for the same amino acid reaching its limit.

It's been hard to find other HomoloGene listed comparisons, however.

 

[Emily Lake]

Racism, scientific or otherwise, is based on the idea that a particular racial groups has fixed differences to other racial groups that make real differences in their overall performance. This article argues that the differences aren't fixed, and have little if any measureable impact on performance.

This is undoubtedly a really ignorant question... but if we were talking about dogs or horses, would we be talking abut breed differences here? Or is "race" supposed to be addressing something different?

 

[Anon13948132]

Think about it this way. All life generally shares a lot of DNA. Percent of DNA shared with:

Cat: 90%
Cow: 80%
Mouse: 75%
Fruit Fly: 60%
Banana: 50%

[source]

And the number for chimps is something like 98 or 99%.

I'd like to see sources for all that numbers. That blogger didn't source them. I'm especially suspicious of the banana one, since the banana genome hasn't been as much explored as some other plants' genomes. Like the mustard weed Arabidopsis thaliana.

I decided to compare this gene to other genes: EEF1A1 eukaryotic translation elongation factor 1 alpha 1 [Homo sapiens (human)] - Gene - NCBI -- involved in assembling protein molecules from messenger-RNA templates. I found HomoloGene - NCBI with some ready-made comparisons.

The zebrafish's version of that gene is 95% protein identical and 82% DNA identical to ours. Arabidopsis and rice were about 78-79% protein identical and 72% DNA identical to ours.

Estimating rates with a simple model gives a relative age of about 4.7. Using an approximate age of 400 million years for the human-zebrafish split, this gives 1.9 billion years for the animal-plant split. The early-eukaryote fossil record is difficult to interpret, but that number fits.

However, DNA gives a relative age of about 1.7, much less. Could part of it be synonymous-codon saturation? Molecular evolution between codons coding for the same amino acid reaching its limit.

It's been hard to find other HomoloGene listed comparisons, however.

Actually, the blogger sourced all of them. All the numbers are links to the source. E.g. Cat -> http://genome.cshlp.org/content/17/11/1675.full

I'm not qualified to answer anything about the more low-level stuff which you mentioned.

- - - Updated - - -

Racism, scientific or otherwise, is based on the idea that a particular racial groups has fixed differences to other racial groups that make real differences in their overall performance. This article argues that the differences aren't fixed, and have little if any measureable impact on performance.

This is undoubtedly a really ignorant question... but if we were talking about dogs or horses, would we be talking abut breed differences here? Or is "race" supposed to be addressing something different?

More or less, yes.

Actually, some researchers have explored differences between dog breeds' intelligence as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligence_of_Dogs

 

[lpetrich]

Cat: Initial sequence and comparative analysis of the cat genome
Cow: The Genome Sequence of Taurine Cattle: A Window to Ruminant Biology and Evolution
Mouse: (moved)
Fruit fly: Background on Comparative Genomic Analysis -- no similarity measures given
Banana: (gone)

I searched for for CoolThingsAboutDNA.pdf and I could not find it.

Be careful of distance measures, since different ones can come up with different results. Like between a protein-coding gene's sequence and the protein it encodes. The proteins usually have more similarity than the genes, because there is usually more than one codon sequence that maps onto each amino acid, meaning much less selection between "synonymous" codons (those for the same amino acid) than between "nonsynonymous" ones (those for different amino acids).

As to how much research on the banana there has been, I decided to compare it to a model system of flowering plants, the mustard weed Arabidopsis thaliana. The banana is Musa acuminata and Musa balbsiana. I compared them by counting hits in Home - PubMed - NCBI.

Overall:

Arabidopsis	48710
banana	4018
Musa acuminata	166
Musa balbisiana	50

Protein:

Arabidopsis	1515285
banana	114904
Musa acuminata	2136
Musa balbisiana	499

Gene:

Arabidopsis	177687
banana	102
Musa acuminata	4
Musa balbisiana	0

A problem with searching using "banana" is that I got lots of hits for banana viruses' genes and proteins. So it should be evident that banana plants have not had much molecular-biology research done on them.

But there's been some progress:
The Banana Genome Hub | Resources for Musa Genomes
Musa Genomics: Musa Genomics

 

[Togo]

Racism, scientific or otherwise, is based on the idea that a particular racial groups has fixed differences to other racial groups that make real differences in their overall performance. This article argues that the differences aren't fixed, and have little if any measureable impact on performance.

This is undoubtedly a really ignorant question... but if we were talking about dogs or horses, would we be talking abut breed differences here? Or is "race" supposed to be addressing something different?

Sort of. The variation in dogs is unusually high compared to other animals. If breeds were defined by the physical characteristics of the animal, without any reference to their lineage, then you might get close.

A better example might be this. You get black Labradors and golden/yellow Labradors. You get black retrievers and golden retrievers. The golden dogs are obviously a different colour, that's going to make them different in terms of heat absorption, and hair density, and if you did an analysis on their traits you might be able find some tasks where the golden dogs as a group had slightly different results from the black dogs as a group.

But they're still not coherent groups from a genetic perspective. It's still true that Black labs are more similar to Golden Labs than they are to other dogs that happen to be black, it's still true that the differences you've found are tiny compared to the differences between dogs overall, it's still true that Retrievers aren't really a single breed but encompass many similar-looking dogs, and it's still true that if you want to look at the likely performance of a single dog, then knowing whether or not it was black is largely worthless information. Which is exactly why the Kennel club don't class dog breeds by colour.

 

[Emily Lake]

Um, okay. I know this is a sensitive topic... but are racial phenotypes a bit more well-defined than solely skin color? Anthropologists and scientists use formations of skull bones, ratios of nasal cavity, forehead, and jaw, and other skeletal characteristics to identify race in skeletons. There's more to it than just skin color. If you take Paris Hilton and dip her in dye, she doesn't look Chinese. If you put a blonde wig on Beyonce, she doesn't look caucasian.

So maybe it's not as extreme as a chihuahua and a mastiff... but perhaps an Arabian and an Andaulisan and a Fresian?

Either way, you answered my question: It's for social reasons that we use the term "race" when talking about humans, and "breed" when talking about animals... but conceptually, it's the same phenomenon.