Unless I’m thinking things through incorrectly, that “small probability” is really, really close to 0, on the order of trillions to one. With crossing over happening, I can’t see this being an even remotely reasonable possibility.
BWAAAAAAAAAAhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah
LOL, broke the page
5 Likes
Hmmmm - there’s an Ethiopian in the fuel supply.
-WC Fields, My Little Chickadee
1 Like
There was another thread similar to this started on the BBS, but since it isn’t directly linked to a blog post, most people didn’t see it. I do love this fact so much that I thought to repeat it.
2 Likes
I had my dna done at 23andme. 99.44% white, .01% black, 4% neandertal.
That’s not exactly how reproduction works, but somebody had a black guy inside of them in his ancestry (Well, more likely a white, male slave-owner had a midnight rendezvous with one of the staff).
Sure the extreme case is extremely unlikely, but something like a 52% 48% split between a set of grandparents is fairly likely.
I have a theory. I’m not a scientist, just an amateur natural historian, writer and observer of people.
But. I think that if you did an overall survey, genetically testing every ‘white’ American, you would find a high number of people with some genetic material from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The reverse is probably true unless the individual has just emigrated here from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The idea of a ‘pure’ race is just a mystical creation for haters.
1 Like
Listening to white supremacists always makes me think of Bulworth, and his honestly brilliant plan to end racism:
“All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin’ everybody 'til they’re all the same color.”
7 Likes
LOL indeed.
And if these turkeys actually put their useless, malignant brains in gear for once when contemplating genetics, they’d see after a moment’s thought that genetic ‘purity’ is a concept they have exactly arse-about in regard to fitness.
I’m glad to have some Neanderthal in me; it’s a pretty safe bet that makes my genes hardier overall than those of a pedigree African.
1 Like
Like Clifton, I’m intrigued as to what “14% black” actually means. I’m not even sure what “100% black” means. I wasn’t aware that there was a clear genetic marker for being black.
I get the humour of the situation, but if you stop to think about this, the show seems to be validating the concept of “pure breeding” by implying that one can be x% black or white, and hence presumably that one can have or approach x=100%, which is what the white supremacist thinks. I’m not sure this is true, but are there any geneticists out there who can enlighten us?
2 Likes
American white supremacista are almost allways from “mud races”. They lots of slavic, ugri, meditarien, teutonic, nordic etc ancestry they aren’t pure X Y or Z. If they so belive in the supremacy of the aryan race why do they insist polluting it by mixing with them?
If they truely truly believed insane bullshit they would remove themselves as they are subhuman by their own definition.
Some times I lay in bed fearing that xenophobia is something everybody suffers from. Would that be xenophobiaphobia?
1 Like
Today´s lesson: basing your life philosophy on steaming bullshit and then publicly putting it to the test is a recipe for failure.
Also:
2 Likes
The 14% figure lacks context to be truly useful for outsider interpretation.
Consider this problem as an analogy: take a book and randomly open two pages. Your task is to compare these two pages and express their similarity as a single percentage. There are many ways you could go about it: you could just brute-force it, comparing letter-by-letter, or you could compare individual words, sentences, or attempt to gauge the meaning of the whole page at once. You could give a higher similarity score for words that have the same letters in a different order, or you could prioritise synonyms.
The different approaches are all valid in their own right and can be practically applied depending on your goal (e.g. hunting typos or checking accuracy of a translation), but the single number you end up with won’t really be useful unless you also say which method you used.
The same applies to genetic information. There are many ways to compare genetic samples, the results of many of which can be expressed in percentages, and they are chosen depending on the task (comparing species from different kingdoms of life, comparing closely-related species, comparing different populations of the same species, determining ancestry, identifying mutations in different cells of the same individual, etc).
There certainly are reliable genetic markers that can be used to determine ancestry (it wouldn’t be labelled “black” or “white”, but something along the lines of “possibly Senegal or generally the West African region” or “North European, most likely Sweden”) and I’m sure the test in this story did find relatively recent partial ancestry from Sub-Saharan Africa, but without more details I wouldn’t dare to speculate which or how many of the guy’s ancestors were African.
5 Likes
What a maroon, I mean octaroon.
4 Likes
More than zero, is the point. And enough that, according to South African standards he would be considered “colored” and his own standards, “impure.” The exact amount is irrelevant, just as the belief in “purity” of “race” is idiotic.
2 Likes
Thanks. It’s as I thought. 14% stripped of its methodology is meaningless. I wish people wouldn’t do this with numbers. I’ll file this under the same category as the “we only use 10% of our brains” statement.
1 Like
Actually, it isn’t. See here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2013/11/white-supremacist-part-black/#.UoN9l-ISZmp . Closer to the truth to say that about 5% of white people have admixture and that it tends to be less than 5%. Of course, this is partly because of the way that 23andme created their statistical map. If there were some set of markers derived from African ancestry that had become widespread in the white population, let’s say as a result of black immigrants to Britain in the 18th century (they were eventually completely absorbed), then they wouldn’t end up being used for this percentage-of-ancestry test.
Personally I think it’s just as likely, or even more likely, that the talk show simply made up the results in order to have a more entertaining episode.
2 Likes
So , by being 14% Black he is actually more Black than someone who is 100% Black 
Or maybe he learns the error of his ways and becomes a tireless campaigner for race relations. You’re displaying an ugly personality when you say things like the above but maybe I shouldn’t be trying to dissuade you because, like the racist in the video, at least we know where we stand when someone is so open with their hatred.
2 Likes
