Is This Cartoon Racist?

[anotheoldgit]

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/11/03/00/2E0D2C0700000578-0-image-a-18_1446512382764.jpg

Tom Jones wants to get his DNA tested, just to be 100-percent certain that he doesn’t have any black in him.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11969379/Sir-Tom-Jones-Im-going-to-have-a-DNA-test-to-see-if-I-have-black-ancestry.html

[Mosaic]

There are a broad range of skull features that suggest ancestry. Supranasal ridge, shape of orbit, proportional length or roundness of skull, position and prominence of cheekbones can indicate an ancestry drawn largely from North of Mediterranean, eastern Asia, subsaharan Africa or Australasia. What's totally clear is that as Khandro suggests it appears we inherit these features largely from the immediate population we live in. They do not confer anything social or economic. Other humans choose to do that, and to act out their obscene fantasies of racial superiority.
AOG thanks for copying my bit o'writing but I haven't a clue what your point was old love.

[anotheoldgit]

Mosaic

/// AOG thanks for copying my bit o'writing but I haven't a clue what your point was old love ///

Merely pointing out an observation, if some deny there are such things as races, then why is it the word racist is banded around so frequently?

Can we now get rid of that now out dated word, as apparently we have done with the word races?

[Mosaic]

Unfortunately we can't yet deem'racist' a word from an ancient lexicon, AOG. Modern sensible people contributing to this forum, nay this thread, adhere to the flawed notion that skin colour denotes an innate evolutionary advantage or disadvantage. While people are still prepared to be vile because of biology, we need to be able to say they are racist.

[Hypognosis]

If you drill the bones you can extract DNA to determine origin

[Khandro]

Hypo; What do you mean by "origin" ?

[Hypognosis]

@Khandro

I was getting page redirects and other hassles giving me under 15 seconds to paste and submit a one liner. I need sleep and will reply properly, later.

[Mosaic]

DNA isn't always obtainable from bone. The bone has to have benefited from specific conditions that enable collagen and / or marrow to be preserved. But I doubt Tom Jones will have anything drilled into him. Just a little bit of saliva is all that's needed.

[jourdain2]

In answer to OP - no, I don't think it's racist. I smiled. It is merely recognising different cultures and their bafflement at each other.

[Hypognosis]

@Khandro
//
Everyone has 'black' ancestry,
//

Actually, we have no way of knowing what colour/shade early the earliest hominids were. A hairy coat would serve to block out damaging UV and maybe the need to be darker didn't begin until we became less hairy. (I have no idea why the reduction in hairyness came about).

At the genetic level, the melanin gene is subject to a control protein, coded for by a second gene. The control protein is shaped to stick to a certain sequence of base pairs and physically suppresses expression of the melanin gene. Transcription proteins slide along the DNA like a train on rails until blocked by this obstruction.

However, for paler skin types, the control gene is switchable and responds to epithelial cell damage, enabling us to get a tan. The blackest white person I ever set eyes on was a fellow student who had spent the summer gap working with mineral prospectors in Australia. He had turned mahogany.

For Africans, conditions were such that having the suppressor gene all but inactive was advantageous and that variant must have arisen before they spread to other parts of the continent. Before Australasians' ancestors set off, too, I dare say.


//
and everyone, no matter what they say, is racially aware and there is nothing wrong with that. //

I think the tribal culture part of our brain is constantly looking out for strangers in our midst. City dwellers are used to the whole multicultural thing and wouldn't bat an eyelid. Country bumpkins, who only ever encounter their own kind day-in, day-out, might still look askance at "furriners", in their vicinity.


//Racism is if you believe one race is superior to another.
13:05 Tue 03rd Nov 2015
//

I've said as much, myself, in a previous AOG thread. I have said why I thought this cartoon paints (or plays on) that superiority attitude in my post of 15:13 Tue 03rd November 2015, on page 5.

The cartoon could just as easily have been set in a pharmacist's shop.

For a nasty dig, they could have set it in a genealogist's office.

[Hypognosis]

Hypognosis
If you drill the bones you can extract DNA to determine origin
17:54 Wed 04th Nov 2015Report
@Khandro

//Hypo; What do you mean by "origin" ?//

What I wanted to write was:

If you drill the bones you can extract DNA to determine the ethnic origin.

Mosaic is correct about preservation conditions being important. Even though bone looks like it is full of cavities and pockets which, you might think, would stop bacteria and fungal mycelia from digesting protein and DNA, it is actually very porous, permeated by blood capillaries. No cell is more than half a dozen cells from the nearest capillary, anywhere in the body, iirc. Peat runoff water is acidic enough to decalcify them and the collagen remnant will get eaten soon after.

Teeth are dense enough to resist decalcification for longer so tooth pulp is usually the forensic archaeologist's best hope of intact DNA, or fragments large enough to bracket each genetic marker they need to base their geographic analysis on.

There's another technique where they analyse isotopes in bone/tooth growth layers, from which they can tell where a person's food was coming from, at various stages of their life, so a skeleton found near a Roman structure in the UK which had isotopic-mix signs of growing up in southern Europe or North Africa would be interesting in terms of travel patterns of those times.

[Khandro]

Hypo; I did put the word, black, in quotation marks for you and all to see.

//Actually, we have no way of knowing what colour/shade early the earliest hominids were//



"Skin color is one of the best examples of evolution by natural selection acting on the human body. Thanks to research on the physiology of different skin-color phenotypes and on the genetic basis of skin pigmentation, we know two important facts; that the earliest Homo sapiens had dark skin, rich in protective melanin and that as small groups of modern humans dispersed out of the African tropics into less intensely sunny parts of Africa and Eurasia and into profoundly gloomy reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, they underwent genetic changes leading to the loss of melanin pigmentation."
Source; The Scientist

[Hypognosis]

@Khandro

//Hypo; I did put the word, black, in quotation marks for you and all to see. //

So you did. Shame on me for wanting to enthuse about the workings of DNA. Hopefully, this gas not been covered previously, on AB and I an breaking new ground.

I was not attempting to 'correct' your statement; I was merely expanding upon it.

For what it's worth, the melanin gene and control mechanism is truly ancient. It would probably be quicker to list all the land-based animals which generate colour using something other than melanin as a colourant. Irridescence (eg feathers, on occasion) and diffraction trickery (butterflies & moths) confuse the picture but it goes wayyyyy back.

And, before we get all full of ourselves about our evolutionary progress, those who migrated to Australia and end up suffering from skin cancers might beg to differ. Luckily, they won't have to wait 50,000 years to evolve self tanning, as tweaking that supressor protein gene might be quite an easy patch to arrange and become commercially viable mere decades from now.

Getting back on topic: it appears not a single ABer is Welsh *and* wants to react to my post about Tom being ~75% English ancestry. Will he get to appear on Coming Home? (A 30 minute genealogy program probably not screened outside Wales, even if the slebs are famous UK-wide).