I have a question(s) about genetics and evolution

Some are I agree.

I'm sure that all of this is still very much up for debate, and no doubt it would be difficult to explain the ideas to someone like myself who is not well informed on the basics.

That said, I was surprised to find how difficult it was to find scientists who were discussing the questions I had.

For anyone else mildly interested I found the following links to be informative to the totally uninformed.

amren.com/news/2008/02/race_and_physic_1/
rense.com/general79/dut.htm
udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf

dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1070671/Evolution-stops-Future-Man-look-says-scientist.html
livescience.com/34228-will-humans-eventually-all-look-like-brazilians.html

Even within an apparently similar population there's usually plenty of diversity to be found.

Even if we end up all looking the same in the future, I highly doubt gene pool homogeneity would be a problem, since we haven't gone through a population bottleneck.

So in short you don't think it is likely that us all looking the same (or at least sharing a much higher degree of similar traits to what we do now) could bring risk of us having the same strengths and weaknesses?

I think that consequence would be negligible due to the sheer number of people in the population. Usually those effects are noticeable in very small populations.

Just think, if what OP is asking were to be true, why wouldn't it happened already with the "pure races"? They are all the same as well, wouldn't you say so? But that doesn't matter, because there's always underlying diversity that you can't tell at face value.

If you want an actual case study of where gene homogeneity is fucking a species over, just look at the cheetah. Population bottle necking in the past really did one on those guys.

Is this the bi-daily designated /pol/ thread?

I am OP. I would argue it already did happen, the races do have different strengths and weaknesses that are prevalent among them.

Blacks IQ on average is lower (apparantly skull shape is the reason) - a weakness, but they develop teeth,strong bones etc faster - but their dense bones make them heavier in the water.

East asians however are small in physical stature - a weakness, but generally have higher IQ intelligence.

My question is, if these two groups meet and breed over x amount of generations, will this variation in strengths and weaknesses disappear?

Will we become one large race that shares traits? If so, this will make us share strengths and weaknesses. This is less variety and diversity.

True diversity would be different races staying separate to the point that they are literally different species.

Perhaps you are right in that the consequences would not be of any importance within the timeline I suggested since such a large global population would obviously take a long time.

But in the roughly 40k years we have been separate the different groups have developed strengths and weaknesses of their own.

Bearing this in mind, in say another 40k years even with our massive population, I would argue it is likely we will share the same strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately this is a weakness, since today something that might wipe out the whites might not wipe out the Asians or Africans, or vice versa.

Interesting shit desu.

>it's genetic variation always good?
It's generally better because it increases the chance of humanity surviving a cataclysm. Like bubonic plague or mammals after the dinosaurs were wiped out.

>Do superior genes always dominate?
Superior depends on the the environment. Superior genes will be in a higher proportion of the population.

>if previously separate gene pools were combined, would genetic variation decrease as interracial breeding continues?
No, statistically they'll be present in proportion to the initial size of the gene pool. Unless they're advantageous to having more offspring, then they will be more present in the population.

>I heard interbreeding makes gene pools stronger, why?
As mentioned above, it increases the chances of some people surviving a cataclysm and repopulating.

>will we all looks the same after centuries of interbreeding
No. Each parents pass half of their genes to the child. Unless there are evolutionary pressures, the genetics will stay statistically the same.

It's possibly true for dominant/recessive traits. Here's a good explanation of it
biology.stackexchange.com/questions/15585/do-recessive-alleles-really-exist
The genes will stay the same, the alleles might not.

Thanks man.

Humm, well I misunderstood what you meant by weakness. I thought you would mean disease resistance and so on, specially.

You are considering lower IQ as a weakness. Why? In their context it could be an advantage even.
Some people in africa have a blood condition, that is considered a weakness, until you realize that blood condition makes the individual resistant against malaria. So a weakness, becomes a strength... the generation overall is becoming weaker in comparison to the last one, but it's what allows them to survive and reproduce the most.

Again you consider small physical stature a weakness.

What is your criteria for weakness? Are you assuming weakness = not being able to survive OR = not a desirable trait in first world countries?

Either way, the scenario you are proposing in strictly hypothetical. Why? Well, if we assume that every individual in the whole world population has the same chance at reproducing with everyone, then you would have a point. But this doesn't happen. People with similar backgrounds and origins still reproduce more often than not. I guess you can even assume at some degree countries as metapopulations, with some individuals reproducing with other populations, but in overall, most reproduce with their own. If that makes any sense to you.

basically, I wouldn't get worried with what you are asking, unless an eugenics problem is to be implemented. Only then, your worries are justified.

eugenics program* :^)

Good question and point.

I think that lower IQ is a weakness in terms of the future of humanity. Despite IQ only being a measure of a certain kind of intelligence it is the most accurate tool we have. We can use the averages to determine how likely it is someone will earn x amount in a western country. I'm not saying that earning x amount is somehow furthering humanity, I am merely trying to say that it is one of our few measurements we have at our disposal and is of some value.

Intelligence in my book, is good. If things were to go to shit and in some situations hot/cold dry/wet hunter gatherer or anything in between, the small stature of the asian man could indeed be a strength or a weakness depending on the situation, so you are correct it is wrong for me to imply that being small is a guaranteed weakness.

However, this in turn begs the question, an increase in the breeding between these different gene pools will result in the offspring over time having more and more consistently similar traits no?

Even a small change in these breeding habbits would engender a change would it not?

What I'm struggling with is understanding why there is not more diversity if these different gene pools remain separate.

I understand what you are saying, I think. But surely even a small amount of this breeding let alone a more pronounced scenario will have this (albeit limited) effect?

Think of it like an mmorpg, you have a wide variety of different characters with different strengths and weaknesses. If you melt them all together you will get less weaknesses and also less strengths, unless the strengths by some miracle are overwhelmingly dominant.

Maybe I'm just retarded.

If race was just a social construct mixed race individuals wouldn't have such a difficult time finding bone marrow donor matches.

Devan would need a marrow transplant. The prospect of going through chemotherapy for a second time and needing a transplant is daunting to anyone, but it's especially harrowing if — like Devan — you're of mixed race. Multiracial patients often have an incredibly hard time finding life-saving marrow matches. When Devan, whose father is Caucasian and mother is part Indian, was first diagnosed with leukemia, his family did a search of the international marrow registry that contains over 14 million donors and came up empty. "We knew there was nothing out there for him," Tatlow says.

content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1993074,00.html

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A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It

archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-01/ps_dna

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Race Is Just a Social Construct, Except ...

unz.com/isteve/race-is-just-a-social-construct-except/

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Richard Dawkins accepts the usefulness of race

blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/05/richard-dawkins-accepts-the-usefulness-of-race/

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Why race as a biological construct matters

blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/05/why-race-as-a-biological-construct-matters/

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Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15625622

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Steven Pinker: "There is a widespread myth that there is no such thing as race whatsoever, that it's purely a social construction"

youtu.be/uz5igS5n720?t=6m35s

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Do human Races Exist - with Professor Henry Harpending

youtube.com/watch?v=c4cxOT8Kd7U

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Read The Bell Curve also

Interesting stuff mate.

You are retarded.
Humanity will never look similar because of migration. Since the birth of modern human migration has been a factory in determining differences in people. Migration will never stop happening because people don't live in the same place for long. If you think about, if anything we will continue to look more different. Say 1000 years in the future if humanity hasn't been wiped the fuck out, and somehow discover interplanetary travel, that will create isolated groups. Give it another few generations, differences continue to arise within those isolated groups. Migration creates diversity.

You are being curious, that's not retarded.

>However, this in turn begs the question, an increase in the breeding between these different gene pools will result in the offspring over time having more and more consistently similar traits no?

Well yes.

>Even a small change in these breeding habits would engender a change would it not?

I don't think a small change would have big effect, it would need to be a worldwide thing.

>What I'm struggling with is understanding why there is not more diversity if these different gene pools remain separate.

Let's define diversity, a population is more diverse than other, if it's gene pool doesn't have only dominant alleles in it. So the more alleles a population has for the same trait, the more diverse it is; it means the population can adapt better to new situations. That's the definition of evolution, the change in allele frequency within a population; if the starter gene pool doesn't allow the frequency of a certain allele to change (already present in 100% of the population) then there's no diversity.

interbreeding different populations rises diversity because it functions as an "injection" of new alleles.

If population A has 1 allele for trait X, and population B has 3 alleles for the same trait; when they interbreed they will have a allele pool of 4 for the same trait, rising the diversity of the AB population.

But this depends a lot on the actual phenotypes being expressed.

youtube.com/watch?v=rafdHxBwIbQ

This video talks about a lizard species where this allele frequency is very noticeable. It's kinda funny how a trait actually never over dominates the others. In a normal population we can assume most traits balance similarly to these, but aren't as obvious.

Regarding your mmorpg statement; i don't think it works like that. The genes don't know which ones are "weak" or "strong", so they wouldn't "merge" together in the way you say so.
(1/2)

More travel = more opportunity for the dominant genes to propagate themselves does it not?

It also depends on the way how a gene is expressed in the presence of other genes. So this topic becomes difficult to talk about without knowing that.

Either way, this doesn't had much to the discussion, but if you haven't heard about epigenetics, read about it, it might interest you.

Will do, thank you for posting this.

>possibly somewhat relevant.

It increases diversity of dominate genes, not necessarily increases opportunity of them. Think about it, in one region over huge periods of time (tens of thousands of years of trial and error) is when certain genes become favored (dark skin, hair, appetite between parts of Africa and Europe, which are small regions compared to Earth as a whole). Spread this region over a much larger area, it takes much longer for certain genes to become favored in the whole of humanity because the region is huge, differences are going to be vast. Eventually a path will diverge for the "normalcy" of human lineage because it becomes isolated, most of it is by pure change because mutations are random, and the environment to favor it makes the percentage huge. This is why other sub-species of certain animals are different from each other even though they belong to the same species. They live in small populations spread over large areas.

This makes sense. Thanks user.