Real_Trouble
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Joined: 2/25/2008
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I had originally decided to avoid touching this, but after some deliberation, I have reconsidered...
quote:
Think of the human race as dogs.
I would prefer not to insult dogs that way.
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These are traits. We can speak of these traits in dogs but not in humans. Somebody will jump up and start shouting "Racist racist" . They will be adamant that we are all the same under the skin, a fallacy that is fucking up what little good could come from medical science.
Your metaphor begins to break down here; there is a fundamental disconnect between what you have said and the precise attribute that you have picked here. In short, this would be like claiming that because I have one German shepherd which is mostly light tan and only has a smattering of the usual black, he is a different breed of dog and is possessed of major material differences in physical ability / temperment / behavior / etc than my German shepherd who is mostly black and very dark tan. That kind of difference, incidentally, will exhibit the same degree of genetic dissimilarity that two humans of a different "race" have with each other...
The problem is not that we can't talk about material differences between human beings. We most certainly can. The problem is that "race" is an exceedingly arbitrary social characteristic - we notice it because it is rapidly visible to us, but that's all it is.
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I am an animal. But I am more than the sum of my parts, and that spark of energy, that glimmer of EMI, that could be the soul so often spoke about. The only thing that really sets us apart from the dogs, of course the opposable thumb helps, but helps what ?
This seems like a bit of random pontificating with no real evidence to back it up. What sort of similarity measures do you really intend here? There are, of course, strong similarities and then some very strong deviances between dogs and humans. Until you pin down what you are saying instead of making broad statements, it is hard to derive any meaning.
We share about 40% of our genetic makeup with freaking bananas, for instance; I would suggest that if you are going to compare, we should be careful in how we do so. I'm certainly more similar to a banana than I am to a rock by most broad criteria, but more similar to a dog than a banana. So what do you really mean here?
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I believe that primates developed into homosapiens in different places on the Earth and not all at the same time. We are different, with different body chemistry and physical attributes.
From a biological perspective, to be completely blunt, you are completely wrong:
We are extremely young as a species from an evolutionary perspective; evolution is a process that takes far, far more time than any of us will live for. Humanity is a brief blip on the radar of time at this point, and from an evolutionary perspective, yes, we did all actually develop at pretty much the same time. Certainly, the spread of humans occurred so rapidly that there was not time for meaningful genetic differences to develop; it is not the case that isolated groups of humans have been existing in various locales on this planet for hundreds of millions of years and had time to diverge meaningfully.
Second, back to the "different" thing again. I am not asian; I have different physical attributes in terms of, say, skin color or shape of my eyes. That's pretty trivial, though, when you compare that to the difference in physical attributes I have with my dog. How meaningful are these things? Especially when 1 - 2 generations of offspring can either wipe them out or fully combine them? I would suggest not very.
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Why can we accept and discuss these differences in dogs but not in ourselves?
Because we do not have the same level of genetic plasticity as a dog; they change much more rapidly than humans.
As an example, let us assume that humans are, on average, Beagles. Just a random starting point for a relatively small dog breed, though not tiny. This would mean, if we have the same sort of genetic plasticity and variability that dogs do, somewhere in the world there should be a group of Newfoundland humans.
Based on the relative size and shape differences between Beagles and Newfoundlands, these Newfoundlander humans would average a height of roughly ten to eleven feet, and weigh between one thousand and one thousand two hundred pounds!
Some food for thought.
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