Viele Wissenschaftler wie z.B. Richard Lewontin stellen infrage, ob Rassenunterschiede bezüglich bestimmter Merkmale relevant sind und verweisen darauf, dass die Genomsequenzierung erbracht hat, dass jedes menschliche Genom zu 99,7 bis 99,9 Prozent seiner DNA mit jedem anderen Menschen gemeinsam hat.
Diese Behauptung geht jedoch zuweit. Die Forschung kann inzwischen die ethnische Selbstzuschreibung eines Menschen ziemlich sicher vorhersagen. Ebenso ist die Wirksamkeit von Medikamenten teilweise beeinflußt von dessen Rassezugehörigkeit: Sichelzellenanämie ist unter Menschen afrikanischer und mediterraner Abstammung, das Tay-Sachs-Syndrom vor allem bei Aschkenasim und Multiple Sklerose bei Menschen westeuropäischer Abstammung gehäuft.
Das Risiko, dass das Antipsychotikum Clozapin schwere Nebenwirkungen auslöst, ist bei Patienten afrokaribischer Herkunft erhöhht und das Herzmedikament BiDil ist ausschließlich für schwarze Amerikaner zugelassen.
Aus: Henderson, Mark: 50 Schlüsselideen Genetik. Spektrum, Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2010.
For most of the past twenty-five years or so, the scientific community has followed Lewontin in arguing that a 10 percent genetic difference among members of different groups amounts to a small amount of genetic variation. Social scientists in particular have shown a willingness to extrapolate from LewontinÄs study that race and ethnicity are biologically meaningless, hence the refrain that “we are all the same”. The data I present here, however, showing clear genetic differences among the members of population after population, as well as hundreds of other published studies on the genetics of disease, drug response, and human variation, argue otherwise. Nor should we be surprised: there are ten million sites in the human genome that show differences among individuals. If only a small fraction of these showed differences that correlate strongly with race or ethnicity, that would still include hundreds of thousands of genetic differences. ..
Not long ago genomicists Steve Scherer and Matthew Hurles and colleagues from around the world published a paper in Nature that shocked even those of us entrenched in the “we are not all the same” camp. They reported that, although humans all have more or less the same DNA sequences, they can vary substantially in the number of copies they have of any given stretch of DNA. .. Although most of the variation is due to differences between individuals, that still leaves plenty of room for genetic differences that inform us about the histories of groups of people.
Aus: Goldstein, David B.: Jacob’s Legacy – A genetic view of Jewish History, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2008.
The second line of evidence looks at the question of human differences from a broad evolutionary and genetics perspective. Race differences in physical traits and in biochemical and genetic traits are the result of geographic separation, adaption to different climates, as well as any “genetic bottlenecks” they passed through as the earliest humans migrated out of Africa, eventually reaching every continent except Antarctica.
Contrary to what some would have to believe, the major races differ, on average, in virtually every anatomical, physiological, and biochemical characteristic that also exhibits differences between individuals within any racial group. It is, therefore, higly unlikely that there would be no race differences at all in the 50 percent or more of the total human genome that is involved in brain functions, especially in those parts of the brain that evolved most recently and most clearly distinguish Homo sapiens from all other primates.
Aus: Miele, Frank: Intelligence, Race and Genetics – Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen. Westview Press, 2004.
