a very mixed race future

We aren't who we pretend to be. We just want to be them.
One of your best ever posts I've read.

What happens when ...
A small Terror group flies a plane into a US landmark?

Millions in Afghanistan and Iraq die. "The War on Terror" is a fantasy. It legitimises terrorists and every sort of oppression against your own and other citizens.
Internment without trial
Water boarding and other torture.
Rendition
Drone Assassinations
The TSA harassing innocent people.
NSA acting worse than Chinese Internet Surveillance
 
I'm only saying that the actual amount, or the rates of mixing is unclear, and that OP gung-ho science project makes for very poor science. So you also need to tell us where these "projections of how people will look in the future" you have seen are? Who made them? How do they arrive at them? Is it peer reviewed by other scientists?
I probably could have a look around the internet and dig the figures up, but we don't really need the projections or hard statistical evidence to know of growing "racial mixing". I had just mentioned them as an aside for anyone who wanted a loose graphical representation of what I'm talking about. And if they're bad science, only time can really tell.
Personally, I don't think it is really that important, because as others have already pointed out, we humans differ on a lot more levels than physical appearance and those differences are probably much more important for us to get along together without resorting to beating each others brains out.
Of course, I had just used appearance/genetic make-up as an example of different aspects of humanity melding (I do give other examples, more to the point).
Yes society - at least in the west - is becoming better in terms of allowing us to live more civilised lives and to allow us to believe the self image we have of ourselves as enlightened people. But how long does that last? What happens when as is shown in a number of movies, the lights go out? When hunger beckons? When law breaks down?
Well, yeah, I'm talking about the possibilities as long as we don't hit a Malthusian catastrophe, like the example I give of all-out war. I mean, even fully formed and viable hyper-utopias would crumble in the face of such an event, let alone a WIP civilization.
And I'm not all fairy dust and shooting stars. I actually believe people are not inherently good, but not bad either, just as we don't judge the animal kingdom on a moral basis. We're animals at our core. My "theory" applies as long as we don't venture near extreme negative circumstances. The challenge then, is not if we can make it to the goal, but what can we do to maintain the pace. I will not discard the possibility of us making it.
 
Dave - I believe the concept you are hinting at is "hybrid vigour". Also, if one believes that humans find others attractive because they are advertising their fitness (it's probably true that elite athletes tend to be better looking than others) this might be an explanation for the perceived good looks of humans who are somewhat of a genetic mix. I can't really say much about male attractiveness (I don't swing that way ;) ) but this seems (anecdotally, I know) to be borne out by the rather large number of good-looking female actors and the like who are obviously a genetic mix. Good examples might be Nicole Scherzinger and Halle Berry. (Just my opinion, natch!)

As an aside, I think it's rather sad that rational discussion of this sort of thing applied to humans often leads to name-calling and accusations of racism...
 
As an aside, I think it's rather sad that rational discussion of this sort of thing applied to humans often leads to name-calling and accusations of racism...

I assume you are speaking in general terms here. I saw nothing more than rational discussion, minus the name-calling and accusations of racism in this thread.

this seems (anecdotally, I know) to be borne out by the rather large number of good-looking female actors and the like who are obviously a genetic mix.

I don't dispute the good looking part of this statement. I don't however agree with the idea of a genetic mix. --- Are we not all humans? There is no such thing as a "genetic mix" or a "half-breed." I think what you are saying is that we find exotic (understand unusual in our experience) looking humans to be intriguing and often desirable.
 
to be borne out by the rather large number of good-looking female actors and the like who are obviously a genetic mix.
It's a myth. It's not because they are more mixed. Unless you are from interbred hamlet for last 1000 years we are all a genetic mix.

Females rarely get to be famous actors unless they are beautiful / distinctive. It's not much to do with their background.
 
I assume you are speaking in general terms here. I saw nothing more than rational discussion, minus the name-calling and accusations of racism in this thread.



I don't dispute the good looking part of this statement. I don't however agree with the idea of a genetic mix. --- Are we not all humans? There is no such thing as a "genetic mix" or a "half-breed." I think what you are saying is that we find exotic (understand unusual in our experience) looking humans to be intriguing and often desirable.

All humans can interbreed, too. However, saying that all humans are the same is ridiculous IMHO. Quite apart from the obvious visual differences between (say) someone from Japan and a Zulu - there are all manner of less obvious differences in physiology between human groups. Differences in ability to digest lactose, alcohol dehydrogenase levels in the liver and blood group distribution are just some of them.

It's also true that inbred groups have a higher risk of various genetic diseases. Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazi (sp?) Jews for example, and the high incidence of all manner of inheritable problems in people from Pakistan living in Britain; the latter is probably caused by the high incidence of first-cousin marriages in that community. A less contentious example is the people of Iceland, who are a very small and genetically isolated (for the most part!) community which takes the potential for inherited problems seriously enough to promote genetic counselling before even starting a relationship. (They have a smartphone app to help, in fact.) European royal families also have this problem.

Promoting exogamy has been a feature of many cultures for most of human history; there must be a reason for that. Perhaps the lure of the exotic (I thoroughly agree that this is a feature) is part of the same phenomenon.

In any case, I find it very hard to believe that a phenomenon well-known in various domestic animals should be absent in humans. Purebred dogs, for example, strongly tend to be less healthy in general, live shorter lives and have more genetic defects than mongrels do. This problem can be controlled by culling the defectives; this may be acceptable in domestic animals but NOT in humans.
 
Quite apart from the obvious visual differences between (say) someone from Japan and a Zulu
There can be MORE genetic variation within Africa or between two people that look similar. There is almost no difference between a Japanese and a Zulu.
We are very sensitised to differences of appearance in people.

Lactose tolerance, red hair, blonde hair, green eyes and blue eyes are all comparatively recent European mutations.

There are 20,000-25,000 human protein-coding genes, or at very least 19,000.

The apparent large difference visually between a Zulu and a Japanese may only be due to small change in less than 0.01% of genes. The variation in OTHER genes between different Japanese people could be larger.

We are also influenced by mitochondrial DNA of mother, so clones with different mothers will be different.
 
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It's a myth. It's not because they are more mixed. Unless you are from interbred hamlet for last 1000 years we are all a genetic mix.
That was really what started this conversation off though. That until about 150 years ago, everyone in a valley rarely married anyone outside of the same valley, so you would always be marrying someone who was a distant cousin, and the gene pool must be limited. Now, transport makes the gene pool much larger. I accept that what makes us different from each other is not a great deal, but the recessive genes that cause disease are going to be less likely to be paired.

What people find attractive in the appearance of other people is obviously not straightforward though. If you look at the beauties painted in the Tudor period, in their flattering best, they would be unlikely to find work as actresses today.
 
That until about 150 years ago, everyone in a valley rarely married anyone outside of the same valley
All those travelling Minstrels of dubious reputation. :)

But the evidence of made goods dating from over 2,500 years is that some people did travel always, so I think inbreeding could be overstated.
Groups migrated too for various reasons. One of the early famous Roman playwrights was a Celt. Celts sacked Delphi. Some Swedes may be from the region of Troy. Finns are connected to Hungarians. Normans are from Scandinavia. The closest connections to oldest Irish Language & legends is Hittite, Hebrew, Arabic and old Indian languages and legends.
Phoenetician jewellery in Irish Burials.
European royalty may be more inbred than people in Norfolk.
I think you only need about 400 diverse people to avoid the ills of inbreeding.

Writing Bronze Age story?
Anglo-Saxons in the Crimea
Separating Myth and Fact
"Anglo-Saxon genocide" contested again
A new look at an old Roman town.


The "isolated" Glens of Antrim had poor to no road connections with rest of Ireland till 19th C. But for maybe 2000+ years they went to and fro to Scotland.
 
Some of those migrations you quote are over very long time periods. Man has been in Europe for a very long time, but I accept that some people did move around.

Europe was first settled by a wave of hunter-gatherers, then a wave of farmers followed them and interbred. We are also interbred with Neanderthals and have Neanderthal genes. The pinch-point came during the last Ice Age. Everyone died, except for a small refuge in the Balkans and a small refuge in the Basque region. All Europeans are descended from those survivors. Another more recent pinch-point was the Black Death. Again, almost everyone died and those who survived could ask for higher wages, for the first time in history having a disposable income. Also, the descendents of those who actually caught the Black Death but survived it, also have an immunity to HIV.
 
Black Death. Again, almost everyone died
25% to 75%. Maybe some places almost everyone died. But there may have been more mobility afterwards. I suppose 75% might qualify as almost everyone?
Immunity to HIV? Really?

There were also various famines, not just in Ireland and not just in 19th C. But I suspect that they caused people to migrate rather than reducing diversity. Like wars only temporarily reduce population and then everyone umm ... makes up quickly!

Anyway, the main point is that "race purity" people are completely deluded. It's no more logical than believing one team of football supporters are better than another, or that all football supporters are all Neanderthals.
Nor are "hybrids" bred from different corners of the world going to be the equivalent of mongrels vs pure bred silly breed dogs and have any noticeable extra beauty or vigour than people in healthy "indigenous" / "Ethnic" groups.
 
Immunity to HIV? Really?
There was a BBC Horizon programme about a New York Doctor who couldn't understand why some of his patients in the late 1980's with British ancestry weren't dying when all his others were. It turned out that they could trace their ancestry back to villages like Eyam. He was trying to find the genes that were responsible. Of course, it could all be absolute ******* but Horizon is usually based upon reasonable science.
 
One of your best ever posts I've read.


A small Terror group flies a plane into a US landmark?

Millions in Afghanistan and Iraq die. "The War on Terror" is a fantasy. It legitimises terrorists and every sort of oppression against your own and other citizens.
Internment without trial
Water boarding and other torture.
Rendition
Drone Assassinations
The TSA harassing innocent people.
NSA acting worse than Chinese Internet Surveillance

All bad stuff. But the list of bad stuff in 1960 (in terms of number of people affected and severity) was considerably worse. And in 1760 it was much, much worse. You didn't have to turn on a TV or the internet to see someone getting their head cut off or thrown into a cell without trial - just go to the nearest market town.

It's natural to think in binary terms. Good/bad. Hero/villain. Safe/unsafe. Us/them. However, if we weren't able to overcome those natural inclinations, and leverage rational thinking and proportionality, we'd still be stabbing each other to death at banquets and burning witches at the stake.

Reduce the incidence of all of the bad things that we see on TV - war, murder, rape, persecution - by 90 per cent and you would not reduce the amount of coverage of those crimes in the media by one minute. In a world of 7 billion people there will always be enough atrocity to fill a newscast. There will always be murder. Always be injustice. Always be cruelty. But degrees of things matter. It matters if the murder rate has dropped in half in the last 40 years. It matters that rape in most of the world is down dramatically. It matters that people in virtually every corner of the globe are less likely to be killed in war than their grandparents were. It matters that torture has become so rare that it's a shocking transgression likely to earn your state pariah status, rather than a common run-of-the-mill tactic carried out in every corner of the planet. Ideals cannot be achieved (it's what makes them ideals). In most things, incremental empirical improvements are all that matters. The trick is moving past ideals and emotions and looking at the world rationally.

I sometimes wonder if writers are part of the problem when it comes to the stubborn resistance to thinking in statistical terms. We craft simplified narratives of heroes and villains in order to give people vicarious pleasure and satisfaction. But the world, in reality, does not function that way. I think the search for easy, emotionally-satisfying answers to complex problems is responsible for more harm in this world, even though it's unintended harm, than outright malice is responsible for.
 
Well, at the genetic level, we are already merging
Which is largely irrelevant, given that humans are not that diverse genetically (but are very good at spotting small differences that they then see as significant in some way or other).
Culturally, we can make our presence felt across the world through media and internet, and we can absorb other cultures through it as well.
But only to those who want to, or happen to, listen. And while I think it is a real boon that people around the world can find common interests -- as on here and any number of interest-specific websites -- it also brings with it a danger -- not a new one, but one which will be seen in more varied guises -- the danger that "cultures" will interact badly (perhaps, eventually, violently with each other).

In the very-much-not Good Old Days, it could be hard being a visible minority in a society, identified by physical appearance (now called 'race'), religion, gender, sexual orientation or, even, occupation. (In some places, this past is still with us.) In a xenophobic or bigoted society, it was obviously disadvantageous, to put it mildly, to respectively look different to the "norm", to worship (or not) in a different way, etc., to the neighbours. But the "good" (on the basis of "there's a hint of water in that glass" optimism) side of this was that in most places, this both only affected relatively small numbers of people and that, because of this, could be policed (though often it wasn't).

Look to today and the forthcoming future, particularly in societies that take little notice (until they suddenly do, or are suddenly encouraged to do) of their neighbours. In normal times, the vast majority of people probably don't care what their neighbours look like, which is good in itself, and have no idea what is going on inside their neighbours' heads. They may not know or (more likely) care that some of their neighbours have common interests -- i.e. some sort of cultural connection -- with people of the same mind around the country, around the world.

This is, of course, fine in 99.999% (or more) of cases: it matters not that one person likes reading SFF while their neighbours' interests include sport, gardening, walking, meditating, watching the TV, cooking, etc. They may notice -- or not -- if a neighbour is a fervent advocate of a political or religious idea, and may notice more if a neighbour gets loud or violent after consuming too much alcohol (which they do "far too often!").

But as we have seen, our current connected world brings together people with altogether less pleasant interests, often within the privacy of their own homes. Sometimes, though not always, these interests can "easily" (or falsely) be associated with other markers (such as fervency of expressed political and religious views). However, sometimes the interests burst into view from, "apparently", nowhere: even those who know of the general direction someone's thoughts may be taking usually assume that it will go no further than being a loud bore on their chosen subject, not into violent, perhaps deadly, action.

Of course, "the authorities" may know about some of this, by trying to monitor sites and channels which encourage movement towards the more violent expressions of belief (of whatever kind). But I, as a member of the general public -- and you and others like us -- have no idea. Which may be just as well, because we aren't looking around us wondering who might want to harm us.

But imagine the situation changes. It doesn't matter how -- more atrocities, or the success of rabble-rousers, or something else entirely -- but the situation, the "environment", alters; subtly at first, but then gains momentum. We become suspicious of each other, particularly of those we don't know well (which will be just about everyone else). We can't identify those of whom we are, essentially, afraid. They don't, as they might have done in the past (where such suspicions have led to sometimes great and terrible effect), look different or have a different declared faith to ours; "they" -- They, THEY -- could be anyone.

Now tell me that this is an improvement on what most of us currently experience.


Note that I am not wearing a tinfoil hat: I am deliberately painting a very dark future, one that I hope and expect will not become ours. I just don't want people to have the false idea that the future -- the real one, not as seen in dystopian fiction -- is bound to always be an improvement on our past and present.
 
I just don't want people to have the false idea that the future -- the real one, not as seen in dystopian fiction -- is bound to always be an improvement on our past and present.
We will always have our up-and-downs as a civilization. Maybe I paint too bright a future, maybe you paint it too dark. Time will say who was more on point. ;)
 
Yes, I was thinking that.
"The EU warned Russia this week about their European land grab"
The Russians have put up signs and barbed wire a further 300m inside Georgia along the South Ossetia border. South Ossetia is now de-facto part of Russia.
 

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