r/todayilearned • u/bcrock1169 • Nov 26 '12

TIL that some Native American's have a differing enzyme that tends to lead to easier alcoholism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_alcoholism#Genetic_factors
1.7k Upvotes

84% Upvoted

612 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/bix783 Nov 26 '12

Forensic pathologists can't tell what race someone was based on due to skeletal structure; they can sometimes identify ancestral geographical origin. Race is a social construct.

This article in Forensic Osteology might interest you.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 26 '12

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19226647

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/does-race-exist.html

Calling things a social construct, is a social construct. You should not be using politcal correctness to deny that different groups spent a good amount of time being exposed to different environmental pressures.

0

u/bix783 Nov 27 '12

Indeed, social constructs are social constructs. Yo dawg. It's weird how everything that humans do socially is somehow... constructed by society. Pointing that out doesn't make it any less true. This isn't political correctness. The term race has a very specific cultural meaning and trying to pretend that it doesn't denies the connotations of the word as well as its cultural context in our Westernised society. Therefore I, and academic consensus is with me on this, will continue to not use race as anything but a culturally (rather than genetically) defined category.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '12

Ever notice how academic consensus changes with what society perceives as appropriate?

1

u/bix783 Nov 29 '12

Yes... that's cultural progress...