Robert, my confused but often intriguing sparring partner:: So your "races as different species" theory is not to be confused with scientific racism?
As Farinata and I have REPEATEDLY explained to you, "races" are NOT different species, nor do either of us consider this to be the case. Your use of this terminology is an undisguised attempt to derail the conversation by attacking straw-man arguments that you know darn well neither of us are presenting, and I really wish you would stop it. It doesn't help your side of the debate at all, since it's obviously a distortion of what we are saying, and it distracts from any real discussion we might otherwise have. If you wish to present evidence that supports your assertion, I'd be happy to hear it, however, hurling unsupported insults is not a valid or particularly effective debating style, ok?
Now, to restate the argument in the hopes that you will actually look at what we are saying, instead of what you wish we were saying: Races are not species. They are, instead, populations within a species that differ in the frequency of some alleles, relative to other members of the same species. Species are defined on the basis of reproductive isolation. Speciation takes hundreds of thousands of generations. Things like bacteria can speciate relatively quickly (within a human lifetime) because the length of their generations is so short and their DNA is so simple. This has been observed many times, both in the lab and in the field. Human generation times are considerably longer, and humans are also highly mobile, so we are not reproductively isolated. In order for humans to speciate, something as drastic as migration to another planet, as Farinata suggested, would be required. As it is, there was nearly 90,000 years between the time the first anatomically modern humans left Africa, and the time extra-African populations were reunited with African populations, and this was not enough time for speciation to occur.
Other organisms can form species relatively quickly because their generation times are much shorter and their genetic code is much simpler than ours.
Species do appear as the result of the separation of gene pools, but this separation must be maintained for considerable periods of time, relative to the complexity of the genotype.
Among humans, the concept of "race" does not even have any biological meaning-it is a scientifically invalid term. That is not to say that "race" per se does not exist among humans, but it is only possible to define in terms of culture, and not in terms of biology (see Conrad Kottak and Kathryn A. Kozaitis, 1999 On Being Different: Diversity and Multiculturalism in the North American Mainstream. McGraw Hill College Publishers, New York). "Race" is very meaningful in a cultural sense, but among humans, this has nothing to do with biology. We are not reproductively isolated, either by space or by habit, and therefore the term is meaningless and independent species can not develop out of human races.
I really hope that it's clear this time, because if you call me a racist or a nazi again, you'll make it functionally impossible for us to ever have a polite discussion, and that would defeat the whole purpose.
: God Bless.
She does.
-Floyd
