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In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
Posted on March 5,
2008
The myth that we are 99.9% the same.
Finding said to show “race isn’t real” scrapped.
Sept. 3,
2007
Special to World Science .
A renowned scientist has Backed off a finding that he, joined by others, long touted as evidence for what they called a proven fact: that racial differences among people are imaginary. That idea—entrenched today in academia, and often used to castigate scholars who study race—
has drawn much of its scientific backing from a finding that all people are 99.9% genetically alike.
But geneticist
Craig Venter, head of a research team that reported that figure in 2001, Backed off it in an announcement this week. He said human variation now turns out to be over Seven times greater than was thought, though he’s not changing his position on race.
Some other scientists have disputed the earlier figure for years as underestimating human variation.
Venter, instead, has cited the number as key evidence that race is imaginary. He once declared that “no serious scholar” doubts that, though again, some recent studies have contradicted it.
Geneticist Armand Marie Leroi of Imperial College London wrote recently
that a recognition of race could in the future help society protect endangered races. The more common past practice was for societies to oppress other races, which is largely what led some to try to banish any recognition of race altogether. Thus, views like Leroi’s have been largely marginalized. The race-isn’t-real doctrine prevails, typically portrayed by backers as settled fact that only racists or their dupes could question...
Venter didn’t originate the notion that race isn’t real. But his support of it has carried great weight because he is something of a star, thanks to his key role in the high-profile Human Genome Project, completed in 2003.
In a teleconference on Monday, Venter and colleagues announced their revised assessment of human diversity, based on a study of Venter’s own DNA....
The findings reveal “human-to-human variation is more than Seven-fold greater than earlier estimates, proving that we are in fact very unique individuals at the genetic level,” Venter said. The 99.9 figure might need to be lowered to about 99, he added.
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He said the new findings were a pleasant surprise, as they show we’re Not all “clones” as the previous results suggested.
The original estimate showing near-zero variability in the genome, a product of the Human Genome Project, was a result of the different technology used for that work, said a colleague of Venter’s, Stephen Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.
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Some researchers said that now that Venter has dropped the 99.9% claim,
he should also admit race might exist. Denial of that “obvious” fact is “an extreme manifestation of political correctness,” wrote Richard Lynn, a psychologist who has proposed links between race and intelligence, in an email. Lynn, of the University of Ulster in Ireland, added that he thinks Venter has unfairly maligned scientists who believe race exists.
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