How did the different human races evolve?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by Balder1, Jan 26, 2003.

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  1. bradguth Banned Banned

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    Lets just say (speculate if you'd care), that I, or rather diatoms, can prove that none other than Sirius has been as close (possibly within 0.01 light year), enough to have influenced our global environment, and that's upon more than one occasion.

    This following link offers insight into what a few other individuals might have to offer, that which refines the notion that all is not so "impossible" as you put it. Take notice of the close by stars, one of which is surely Sirius, that cycle many times faster than of the Milky Way undulating cycle of 225 million years. Of course, that may be because the likes of Sirius, our solar system and of a few other stars are not actually part of the Milky Way galaxy, but of somewhat passing through.

    http://www.edpsciences.org/papers/aa/abs/press-releases/PR20030959/PR20030959.html
    "The last orbit of the observed stars in their motion around the Galactic Centre (GC). Each orbit takes about 225 million years. The movie shows that the stars have travelled extensively in the disk of the Milky Way before converging into the small volume where we observe them today. The Sun is marked by a blue dot; its orbit by the white curve."

    I have my poorly constructed papers that'll need some updated corrections, such as fully accredited feedback from yourself, which should offer a not so brief notion as to why I'm thinking so far outside the mainstream box: http://guthvenus.tripod.com/gv-sirius-diatoms.htm

    Other ongoing arguments, on a fairly wide range of topics, are summarized in the following UPDATE index, although it's sharing a bit further outside the box than most individuals would care to venture.
    Regards, Brad Guth (BBCI h2g2 U206251) http://guthvenus.tripod.com/update-242.htm
     
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  3. eburacum45 Valued Senior Member

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    That image of the rotation of the galaxy with projections of the historical locations of stars is an interesting link, thank you, Bradguth.

    It does not prove that Sirius has ever come close to the Sun, although , As I said before, it does not rule out the possibility; in fact if you look at the projection for the date 150 million years b.p. many of the stars now in our local volume seem to temporarily converge on our then current location.

    But the effects of the mutual gravities of all those stars would have been chaotic and makes the exact location of the Sun, and its relation to Sirius, impossible to predict accurately, even with a computer the size of the Galaxy.

    I'll give you a little information about the real motion of Sirius, if you like; Sirius is an outlying member of a loose association of stars, a former cluster known as Collinder 285; the main stars of this cluster are about eighty light years away, and are visible as the middle stars of the Big Dipper.
    For this reason the whole group is known as the Ursa Major co-moving group or the Sirius stream; Sirius, and all the stars in this group, are about 400 million years old, and have been round the Galaxy more or less together twice, slowly spreading apart (once they were a tight, young cluster like the Pleiades).

    The Sun is not a part of this co-moving group, and so has no association with the movement of Sirius or Collinder 285;
    the proper motion of the Sun is toward Vega, while that of Sirius is currently toward Sagittarius.
     
    Last edited: Aug 3, 2004
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  5. could you expound on the extra bone? like citations, URL's or links please?, I've heard of an extra leg muscle, etc.

    but we'zall one big happy African race, just a bunch of mutations that may or may not lead to speciation ,

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    as for the drift; most of it is called "founder's effect", the rest is mutations & adaptations, read more; Spencer Wells is a start, E.O. Wilson, etc...
     
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  7. ah, are you sure these ideas fit into this thread & not someother one? maybe paranormal? or sci-fi?
     
  8. yes, and what a varied, wonderful, odd, range of diffs it has, no?

    technically, we're 'domesticated man', unless you're single, then you're feral, WILDman

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  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It's not that simple. Having lived most of my life in the Western U.S., I'm keenly aware of the fact that the Native Americans (the politically correct term) or the Indians (as they tell me they would rather be called because I'm a Native American for having been born in Chicago) don't have that epicanthic fold that we refer to as "slanted eyes."

    Since the Na-Dene ethnic group that basically populated the U.S. and Canada west of the Rockies in pre-Columbian days migrated from Asia in about 4,000 BC, that physical trait is quite a recent mutation in the gene pool that stayed in Asia. And we know that the people in Asia were the ones that changed, because the Athabascans, who populated all the rest of the Americas except the Arctic regions, arrived here at least 14,000 years ago and they don't have the eyefold either.

    So that "difference in eyes" is not something that distinguishes the so-called Mongoloid race from the so-called Caucasians. It only distinguishes the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc., from their cousins, the Aztecs, Incas, Cherokees, etc.
     
  10. Alsophia Theophilos Registered Senior Member

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    The outer physical form is greatly influenced by the endocrine system which is focussed and charged by consciousness itself. Ever wonder how Americans changed in only a couple hundred years from little short guys (try walking through the door of an american house built in the late 1600's) into the large six foot creatures we are today? The way we thought about ourselves had a lot to do with it. The mind charged the endocrine system, and the body followed orders. I think there is an underlying principle there that is the key to all evolution as we know it. Problem we have with understanding this model is that we haven't really much of a clue as to what the mind/consciousness/awareness thing really is. Perhaps when we left Platonic philosophy for Aristotelean we made a wrong turn. Keep hammering at it with your logic, though.
     
  11. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    Improvement in diet, hygiene, and health care.
     
  12. thefountainhed Fully Realized Valued Senior Member

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    How about as a trait that developed due selection of mates?

    What I would really like to see is an IQ test that does not rely on the American population of 'Blacks', as the representation of a so called black race. Does the 10% rule still hold nowadays?
     
  13. Dr Lou Natic Unnecessary Surgeon Registered Senior Member

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    Hahahaha
    Whats so mysterious about that? Geeze, you don't seem to be bothered by the evolution of octapai or birds, but man, those eyes being slightly differently shaped to other races, how could that possibly come about by natural means?
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Uh.... Interesting hypothesis. But the conventional answer to that question does just as good a job and requires a lot less immersion in woo-woo.

    It was just about that time that we began taking advantage of the unbelievably low population density of a continent that hadn't yet had its resources strained by a post-Neolilthic society. Naturally we wasted little time doing exactly that, and started by using the land to provide a higher-protein diet. By the early 18th century we had imported enough breeding stock to quickly build the herds of good sturdy cattle and sheep that the incredibly rich soil would feed. Pork, chicken, and the delicious native turkey -- as well as the endless bounty of game animals -- also added protein to our diet in quantities that the inhabitants of Europe hadn't seen since the original discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry at the cusp that marked the transition from the Stone Age to civilization.

    High-protein diets make almost any species of carnivore or omnivore larger in very short order. Look at what American dog breeders have done to Irish wolfhounds and St. Bernards in just a few decades by overfeeding the puppies on high-protein feed! Those dogs have become so large that their skeletons are overloaded and they tend to die sad, decrepit, and very early deaths.

    Look at our immigrant communities for an example closer to your point. People come over here from nations where the food supply is more modest in protein content and the average height for an adult man is well below six feet (183cm), in some cases five and a half feet (168cm). Within just two generations of eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, meat loaf, pizza, and fried chicken for dinner, and Big Macs between meals whenever the adults aren't looking, their grandchildren are reaching six feet two inches (188cm).
     
  15. Alsophia Theophilos Registered Senior Member

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    I understand that there is a healthy fear of too much woo woo. It can be damaging to a good academic career. But please explain this to me: why would feeding a short 5 footer an overdose of big macs generate offspring of six footers. It seems to me it would only create a bunch of overweight shorties. You cannot show in anyway how a diet influences genetics. At least not that I have heard of. It's just a safer way to explain it all. The academic world is a slippery trail, and one step in woowoo poopoo can create a fall, and that's when the wolves appear. I understand. I think there is some validity to my idea, but it is in an area of study that is difficult to "quantify".
    Thanks for your kind reply. At least you took the time to read it and thought about it enough to reject it.
     
  16. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    Because the extra proteins influence the growth rate.
     
  17. Alsophia Theophilos Registered Senior Member

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    Eat as many bananas as you want, but please explain to me how that effects the genes. Or are all you guys saying that as soon as the diet is diminished, we will revert to short five footers. I'd say at that time we'd have a lot of skinny six footers. You're completely missing the point.
    I have to leave Peru today, but I'll be checking back in in a few days.
    Chau - and keep the old brain cells smoking.
     
  18. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It doesn't. Genetics isn't the only thing that affects size. During infancy, ingesting a high quantity of protein -- and to a significant extent even ingesting a high quantity of calories -- increases the growth rate. Just as illness can decrease it.

    Larger yearlings have larger stomachs and larger intestines and larger livers and more miles of blood vessels. They can metabolize more food than their smaller siblings or cousins from the same gene pool. So they often grow up to be proportionately larger.

    Larger females tend to have larger fetuses for similar reasons. More nutrients in the blood supply, more room in the uterus. We deal with that all the time in dog breeding.

    Of course genetics has a great effect on size, but in cases where genetic differences can be conclusively be ruled out (e.g., a bloodline of dogs that's been rigorously managed for twenty generations, only forty years), the differences can be easily correlated with nutrition (e.g. the advent of these horribly over-rich puppy chows).

    The reason Issei Japanese-American immigrants who stood five foot-five had Nisei children who stood five foot-eight, Sansei grandchildren who reached five foot-eleven, and Yossei great-grandchildren who are six foot-two, is that they got more calories and more protein in their diets when they were babies than their ancestors did in the old country. The Japanese who stayed home are slowly growing taller for the same reason.

    It's as simple as that.

    And for the record I don't categorically dismiss the two-way interaction between the brain and the endocrine system. If hormones can make us feel different, then feelings caused by outside stimuli can certainly feed back into our glands and cause them to secrete different quantities of hormones, as in the most obvious case of a shot of adrenaline at the sight of an angry elephant.

    But this has been going on forever. There's no reason to suspect that the feedback from our brains into our endocrine system has undergone a qualitative change in the last couple of centuries.

    What has undergone a qualitative change is our nutrition. I've been to the hall in the Smithsonian that carefully tracks the average height of Homo sapiens in different eras. It seems that every time life gets easier because of peace, civilization, or mild climate, resulting in more and better food for everybody's babies, we get about two inches taller.
     
  19. Repo Man Valued Senior Member

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    As the others have pointed out, the height of an individual is a classic example of how our outcome is a combination of environment and heridity.

    An individuals genetic makeup will determine the maximum possible height they could achieve. Environment takes over from there.

    Any ichthyologist can show you examples of the same principle applying to fish. You can have fish from the same batch of eggs, raise them to adulthood in different environments, and have radically different adults. An example would be freshwater Angelfish (Pterophyllum Scalare). Raise half of a brood in a 10 gallon tank with little food, and the other half in a 50 gallon tank with unlimited food. The resulting adults will be very different in size. Putting the small ones in the large tank with adequate food won't make any difference after a certain point. The opportunity has been lost.

    The early European colonists in this country had very poor nutrition on average, and were constantly plagued by infectious diseases. It is no surprise at all that present day Americans are much larger on average.
     
  20. it makes him a better eater, his kids are the ones that get the better diet, bigger bodies. If you need proof, get your browser to look up changes in average height, per population group. As an example, in my Mexican family, males are usually around 5' 6" in Mexico, but 5' 8" here in the US (in one generation) & getting bigger. Chinese, Japanese here have the same story, why? richer diet; more meat & potatoes (also known as; Big Macs & fries). The gene for taller must be already there, just needs the 'on' button
     
  21. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I missed this one when you originally posted it. The use of the term "race" with animals other than people is a bit imprecise. In many languages, people use the word for "race" to mean what we mean by "breed." They say "a pure-race Siamese cat" instead of "pure-bred."

    As for dogs, this issue has already been seen through to completion on an earlier thread of its own and the URLs to the scientific papers are posted there. DNA analysis has proven that wolves and dogs are a single species. Wolves are merely the oldest "breed" of dog. That said, there are about four subspecies of wolves, populations that have been separated for so long that they have clear genetic identifiers. One of those subspecies is the domestic dog, which is now classified as Canis lupus familiaris.

    Dogs did not self-domesticate (we didn't do it, they volunteered) spontaneously all over the world. Turns out it happened in one place, in what is now China, and people took their dogs with them as they migrated or traded them to other tribes. All domestic dogs are descended from the same wolf pack in China, and the wolves in that region still have the same genetic markers.

    Since dogs and humans didn't create the Earth's first voluntary multi-species community until about 10,000BCE, it means that the first wave of human migration from Asia to North America ca. 13,000BCE (some anthropologists say much earlier) didn't have any dogs. Poor people! They had to wait for the second wave, almost ten thousand years later. Even though that second wave didn't penetrate further south than the Rio Grande or further east than the Rockies, by the time the Europeans arrived about 5,500 years after that, dogs were well ensconced throughout the whole hemisphere. Dogs must have been quite popular as trade goods.

    btw, the only serious physiological differences between dogs and the other wolves correlate with their externally directed evolution from hunters to scavengers. They don't have the sharp teeth about halfway back that wolves use to efficiently slice fresh meat, making it difficult for a dog to "wolf" down his kill before the hyenas and vultures arrive. And they have a measurably smaller brain, which can be supported by a lower-protein diet.
     
    Last edited: Aug 22, 2004
  22. Athelwulf Rest in peace Kurt... Registered Senior Member

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    I think they can.

    Modern human beings are Homo sapiens sapiens. Neanderthals were Homo sapiens neanderthalis. They were subspecies. If my knowledge of biology serves me right, subspecies are still similar enough to each other to produce fertile offspring. That's how it works with wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis lupus domesticus).

    So technically, Neanderthals and modern humans are the same species.

    Why the did? That's the whole goal of evolution: to fit their surroundings.

    I believe Darwin came to the same conclusion.

    I think it's about 10,000 years ago.
     
  23. Alsophia Theophilos Registered Senior Member

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    "There's no reason to suspect that the feedback from our brains into our endocrine system has undergone a qualitative change in the last couple of centuries." Fraggle Rocker
    I would hold that indeed there has been a change if the "feedback" happens to be how we think of ourselves in relation to our environment, and that this would apply to Japanese who are not only eating better but feel themselves to be more "empowered" (yes, I would put our "feelings" into this "mental feedback" also), as also the Mexicans who have long since dried out their "mojado" stature. They, of all people, would have undergone a change in the way they think/feel about themselves in relation to the outer world.
    Not to say that diet is not a factor in all this. I am saying that the endocrine system plays a major role in our "changes"/evolution, and I am pointing to the fact that it is one of the least understood systems of the human/animal body. If we wish to understand the "mechanics" of evolution, I feel that we cannot separate the self-conscious/sub-conscious aspect of being from the physical outer form. Rock on and good vibes.
     
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