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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.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:15AM (7 children)
LARGELY TRIVIAL. Yep.
"Enough so that we would likely consider birds sharing only similar coloring differences to be of different species"
NOPE.
"though you can have absurd differences in say canis domesticus and still be the same species even though canis lupus are considered a separate one."
Please see my other posts on this thread. This is a good subspecies case. The DNA is oompatible but the behaviour is not at all.
"That's without even considering that most of us carry 1-5% DNA from one or two entirely separate species around with us."
Pääbo's line, again please see my other posts in this thread. I do not believe that's true, nor do I believe that if it were true it would matter much.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:57AM (6 children)
The neanderthal thing at least is all but proven fact. There is DNA found in them that is not found in homo sapiens before they came up out of Africa and is still not found at all in the humans who remained in sub-saharan Africa unless they got some imported ancestry. It's technically possible that we mutated the exact same mutations they did but you'd need to consult a geneticist and a mathematician to find out how astronomical the odds against acquiring up to 150 million or so identical mutations are.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 17 2019, @12:34PM (5 children)
Not only is it entirely possible for the same mutation to occur more than once, there's another possibility you're leaving out entirely - the gene may have been present in Africa at that time and was only lost later.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday February 17 2019, @03:09PM (4 children)
No, it's not proof. It's simply got the odds overwhelmingly in its favor.
One mutation, yes. One hundred and fifty million identical mutations, a bit less so. The latter is also a possibility but several orders of magnitude less likely as genes tended to spread as widely as the male carrying them could figure out how to spread them back in the day. Hell, they still do in the US to this day in some subcultures.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 17 2019, @11:41PM (3 children)
Remember mutations happen all the time, and disappear again. It's the useful ones that are selected for. Neanderthals likely adapted to the cooler darker climate by developing lighter skin for instance - and there aren't a whole lot of different ways to do that. So we'd expect to see similar mutations in those genes, because selection would preserve and spread them preferentially. This is why you can't really trace deep ancestry using the whole genome - only the Y DNA and MTDNA can be presumed to reflect that accurately when many generations of distance are involved. The rest? You get 23andme type nonsense analyzing the rest that way.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @12:45AM (2 children)
And why would none of the mutations show up in humans who never left sub saharan Africa? We're not talking just skin color here and southern Africa is hardly the same climate as the middle bits. It's just far more likely that human males would fuck anything female shaped than that even one coincidental mutation occurred.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday February 18 2019, @02:18AM (1 child)
All I can add is that the disagreement is at the level of a subjective judgement of what we think is most probable. We agree it's not proven.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 18 2019, @03:34AM
Yup. I don't have issue with you not holding the same assessment as me and neither of us are claiming proof, so there's no need for pistols at dawn or anything.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.