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posted by martyb on Saturday February 16 2019, @08:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the Better-than-a-rat-race dept.

Is a religious group a 'race' or isn't it? Is someone 'racist' if they publicly state their dislike of a religious group? An Australian tribunal has answered this question by ruling that Muslim is not a race, and as such, a person who vilifies them in public, an act which is currently illegal in Australia, would not have broken the law.

In 2016 Sonia Kruger 'called for an end to migration from Islamic countries' saying that she wanted people to feel safe when going out to celebrate Australia day. Sam Ekermawi, a Muslim, filed a complaint to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal claiming the comments were racial vilification.

The tribunal was unable to conclude Muslims living in Australia "are a 'race' by reason of a common ethnic or ethno-religious origin" and dismissed the application. This is an important milestone in the legal and cultural development of the ocean-bound nation which is still attempting to balance the melting pot of cultures and people who have migrated to the country from all over the world. This ruling may be a key threshold for defining what the word 'race' actually means in the legal and social and cultural context and how laws will be interpreted in the future.


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:29AM (3 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:29AM (#802264) Journal
    "So you think neanderthals, denisovans, etc. are just human and paleontologist just want to separate them into different groups?"

    No.

    Did you even read before commenting?

    They are human but they are not modern human, they were a genuine *other* human race. Pääbo believes we interbred, a significant number of times. I don't believe we ever did that, not a significant number of times, quite possibly not ever.

    The rest of your comment was obviously an attempt to be funny - and it failed.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:57AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:57AM (#802271)

    Okay. I didn't fully understand what you were trying to say.

    I read more about Pääbo he seems to like a lot of attention.

    You may be right, the seeming genetic closeness could be from a common ancestor and not from interbreeding, especially since the mitochondrial DNA doesn't change as much as the genes in the nucleus.
    And really all the genes would be expected to be similar due to a common ancestor.

    Sorry for pissing you off.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:32AM (1 child)

      by Arik (4543) on Sunday February 17 2019, @01:32AM (#802281) Journal
      Hah! No need to be sorry! Being pissed off is not so bad, and if I got through to you, if you understand me, then the pleasure of that is an order of magnitude greater than the irritation I might have felt at your first response.

      "I read more about Pääbo he seems to like a lot of attention."

      I don't know much about him personally. If you came across something particularly juicy please post it.

      But in general, when I studied anthropology, that was what I wanted to find. Proof of neanderthalis and sapiens interbreeding. That would have been sexy.

      I only spent a few years on that before personal issues took me out of the field, I've done at least some work to keep up. People say how dare you question a world-renown expert? Well I studied the field, I'm not entirely ignorant of it, and I'm not the only person to be skeptical. His own coworkers are a bit skeptical and one in particular attached some extremely intelligent caveats to her name in some of the papers they appear as co-authors on. Go read them, I'm not saying he isn't worth reading, far from it!

      But I just haven't found any solid link between H.S.S and H.S.N yet. The most dispositive results, to my mind, appear to indicate a genuine reproductive incompatibility. Something similar to the way grey wolves and dogs can't really mate.

      I've read a couple of his papers, I've read innumerable summaries of others, I've yet to see any mention of any genuine proof of interbreeding. A lot of data we wouldn't have thanks to his grants(!), a lot of overlap in the genomes - but we expect overlap in the genomes. Neanderthals had only left Africa a few tens of millenium earlier - they were very, very close cousins to H.S.S. either way.

      So in terms of interbreeding, it's really just "Pääbo says this." Based on his authority as *the* expert on what he does. Isn't argument by authority a fallacy?

      Conclusive results would be definitively Neanderthalis and non H.S.S. Y chromosome or MTDNA showing up in a modern population. Maybe it's been found, but I sure haven't seen it. Without that, it does boil down to a guesstimate. No one can ever prove that a single neanderthal, or more likely let's say 3 or 4, to include at least 1 or 2 denisovans, somehow managed to interbreed with H.S.S. and produce fertile offspring whose offspring survive to this day. But extraordinary claims require evidence. I just don't see *any* unequivocal evidence that this is the case.

      Now look, I'm not a world-renown expert on ancient DNA, and he is. But that's just how I see it. I think he's leaned into his hypothesis a bit too heavily. I think he's a great fund-raiser for scientific endeavors but not such a great scientist.

      That's just my opinion, I could always be wrong.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:22AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 17 2019, @02:22AM (#802305)

        Nothing really juicy about Pääbo.

        It's just all the articles written about him, interviews, awards, etc.
        I'm not saying he's not smart, maybe you're right and it's all for grants.
        It just seems like a scientist should ideally let the evidence speak for itself and do less interpreting and try to focus on the science not publicity.

        It would be have been interesting if all those other species hadn't went extinct.

        Well that's about it,
        Have a good night.