I heard this item being reported either this morning or last night: it's very
interesting in itself, but alos interesting coming from Brazil, where race may
not 'matter' in the nation's ideological profile, but a country which has an
extremely low level of black representation in all areas of life - apart from
football!
best
Harry
Harry Goulbourne
Professor of Sociology
South Bank University
Marika Sherwood wrote:
> | Wednesday, December 18, 2002 | Advertise with us
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> IN TODAY'S PAPER
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> CITY NEWSLINES
>
> It's official: race has no meaning
> Washington, Dec. 17 (Reuters): The idea of race is not reflected in a person
> 's genes, Brazilian researchers said on Monday, confirming what scientists
> have long said - that race has no meaning genetically.
>
> The Brazilian researchers looked at one of the most racially mixed
> populations in the world for their study, which found there is no way to
> look at someone's genes and determine his or her race. Brazilians include
> people of European, African and Indian, or Amerindian, descent.
>
> "There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that,
> from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist," Sergio Pena and
> colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerias in Brazil and the
> University of Porto in Portugal wrote in their report, published in the
> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
>
> "Yet races do exist as social constructs," they said. They found 10 gene
> variations that could reliably tell apart, genetically, 20 men from northern
> Portugal and 20 men from Sao Tome island on the west coast of Africa.
>
> But the genetic differences did not have anything to do with physical
> characteristics such as skin or hair colour, the researchers found. They
> next tested two groups - 173 Brazilians classified as white, black, or
> intermediate based on arm skin color, hair colour, and nose and lip shape,
> and 200 men living in major metropolitan areas who classified themselves as
> white.
>
> They used the 10 genetic markers that differed between people from Portugal
> and Africa, but found little difference among anyone in their study.
>
> They found maternal DNA suggested that even the "white" people had, on
> average, 33 per cent of genes that were of Amerindian ancestry and 28 per
> cent African. This suggested European men often fathered children with black
> and Indian women. "It is interesting to note that the group of individuals
> classified as blacks had a very high proportion of non-African ancestry (48
> per cent)," they wrote.
>
> "In essence our data indicate that, in Brazil as a whole, colour is a weak
> predictor of African ancestry," they concluded.
>
> "Our study makes clear the hazards of equating colour or race with
> geographical ancestry and using interchangeably terms such as white,
> Caucasian and European on one hand, and black, Negro or African on the
> other, as is often done in scientific and medical literature."
>
> Marika Sherwood, 13 Church Road, Oare, Kent ME13 0QA
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