A question of genetics...

[Valentine]

I've been reading through a bunch of Dream Pod 9 sourcebooks/rulebooks from their Heavy Gear line that I picked up with the thoughts of browsing for Star Hero ideas.

It mentions an future "short" ice age on earth sending humanity into shelters to weather it. This event is used for many plot reasons but the one I was curious about regards the racial genetics of the survivors over a time frame of some 2-4000 years becoming so mixed that race ceased to be an easy method of identity or prejudice. I know that this game falls in the anime genre and so they are obviously giving a nod to how people are often drawn in them having many racial features mixed together.

Is this idea plausible in that time frame? I always figured some racial traits were more dominant than others and would remain apparent in a "forced breeding" situation. I remember one sample character that was singled out because she actually still showed highly asian features making here stand out among the population.

Anyone else familiar with this game and backstory or genetics and how they are portrayed?

[Erkenfresh]

Unfortunately, I have no idea what you're talking about. However, I'll take it as an invitation to post anyway.

Let's assume there's no way to avert or prevent the ice age because that would be boring to this discussion.

So, yeah, imagine there was a new ice age and everyone had to find shelter for a few hundred years. I can think of two scenarios. One is a slow onset with plenty of warning. The second would happen overnight.

With the advanced warning, we may see it coming a few decades in advance. This would be plenty of time to engineer and build massive self-sufficient shelters. It seems likely in this time that the shelters would be large enough to support thousands of people.

If the onset is very fast, it's likely that people are going to form much smaller shelters.

I think the idea of seeing races become highly mixed would be due to smaller groups of people being trapped together at the beginning of the ice age. With a limited selection of mates, it's less likely to be picky about their race when selecting one. But, this also assumes that there's a mix within the small community.

I don't have any demographic data at my disposal but let's take Lexington, KY as an example since I live here. It's probably 80% White, 10% African-American, 5% Latino, 5% Asian or so. I suppose the question here is, would the small shelters be mainly of the same race or not? That's a tough one to answer but let's assume if we all ran to the nearest shelter of 100 or so people there would be a mix. I think this would give a very good chance that a few thousand years later, the inhabitants would also be mixed. Given the mixture above, the law of averages would state the inhabitants would be roughly the same mixture. Not as distinct races but each person would be partially all of them to the same ratio.

I think the answer relies on two unknowns. How far in advance would we know of the impending ice age? Second, would the smaller shelters have a mix of races or would we tend to have more "all-white" and "all-latino" shelters, etc.?

[Markdoc]

2-4000 years? Yep, that's easily long enough for racial characteristics to essentially have blended out. In real life, I am not sure that they *would*, unless the shelters were quite small (ie: limited populations in the thousands rather than hundreds of thousands).

Remember, "race" is a pretty meaningless term when it comes to genetics. It's not like there's "chinese genes" and "european" genes or "latino" genes: all "racial" characteristics are actually due a blending of genes and there's no hard and fast combination that makes you a particular race, so it takes relatively little to change that balance.

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Out of curiosity, what would be "default" human look like?

By that, I mean, if you blended the "races" together, what would you get?

My guess was light brown/tan skin, brown eyes, straight dark hair.

What is the over-all dominant genes, anyway?

[McCoy]

The answer to all questions, "it depends."

Short answer, when minorities are not persicuted where they feel the need to "stick together," they readily assimilate into the majority. Works the same for memes and genes. A century ago in America, "Irish" was a persicuted minority. Now the subject seldomly comes up outside St. Patrick's Day. I expect in another century the same will be true for African Americans.

[Markdoc]

Out of curiosity, what would be "default" human look like?

By that, I mean, if you blended the "races" together, what would you get?

My guess was light brown/tan skin, brown eyes, straight dark hair.

What is the over-all dominant genes, anyway?

Actually, that's been done, sort of. In Nature, about 8 years ago they reported on group that used computer modelling to see what a heavily blended human would look like, by taking thousands of faces from different ethnic groups and point-mapping and texture-mapping the faces over one another.

One interesting aspect was that they asked people from different ethnicities to rate the different faces for attractiveness. People tended to rate their own ethnicity slightly higher than other, unaltered ethnicities, but all groups rated the highly blended faces as very attractive: in fcat the more blended, generally the more attractive. At least part of the reason is simply due to blending - it tends to make the faces more symmetrical as individual varaitions are averaged out, and humans of most ethnicities (perhaps all - tend to rate symmetrical faces as more attractive).

The outcome was, as you say, dark-haired, light brown skin and a fairly fine-boned face. But as I noted, it really wouldn't work like that: what you'd really get would be a range of skin colours, with no clear seperations between groups, tending towards that middle.

As to dominant genes, there are none with regard to race (race is not really a meaningful concept in genetics for this reason: you can't inherit a "race"). As noted, physical appearance is very much a blending. Two people from central Africa are unlikely to have a blond blue-eyed baby (can happen, though) - but when you get crossing between someone from central Africa and someone from (say) Scandinavia, possible outcomes range from children who could easily pass as being from just one their parent's ethnicities to a blending anywhere in between.

To take one example, there are currently thought to be somewhere between 5-8 genes that control skin pigmentation. What you get is an outcome of that mixing. However, genes *don't* mix (although they can influence each other's expression). It's mostly on/off or present/absent. So (to make a crude analogy) a black/white mating does not automatically produce brown children - it can produce a mix which varies anywhere along the scale, from very light to very dark. It is possible, depending on the precise combination, to end up with children either lighter or darker than their parents. But since the genes don't mix, a second generation carries that *same* possibility for blending - two children of mixed heritage could produce children in turn who resembled their grandparent more than their parents. Thus, there is tendency towards the middle, but there will also be people who fall at either extreme even after a prolonged period of interbreeding.

Note for geneticists - OK, I admit I am simplifying - if you want to discuss relative allele balance, codominance and penetrance be my guest - I'm trying to outline the basic concepts here. Likewise I've used gene instead of allele and I haven't discussed polymorphisms at all, for the same reason. The rest of you, move along, nothing to see in this paragraph :D

This is why you have African-americans who could pass as locals in many parts of Africa despite a heavy degree of cross-breeding with Caucasians, stretching back over 4-5 generations. People assume it's because their ancestors continued to marry within the African-american community, but as soon as you start tracing family trees, it becomes apparent that's not the case. Despite what people like to think, physical appearance is not a terribly reliable guide to ancestry.

Appearance is also more plastic than people think - you know me: I'm dark brown-haired and green-eyed. But there's plenty of photographic evidence that for the first two years of my life I was blond (not light-haired, but like white-blond, aryan wet-dream blond) and blue-eyed. For some reason, the pigmentation genes that are now active were not initially active (not uncommon, incidentally). My brother's kids (both he and his wife are dark-haired, as were all of our parents and grandparents) are all either blond or red-haired and stayed that way into adulthood. In other words, the blond/red-head gene combination was present in all of us, even though through for at least three generations there was nothing but dark-haired adults in all four family lines. It wasn't until generation 3 that those genes showed up briefly (in me and my younger brother) and in generation 4 that the combination giving rise to those hair colours emerged as adult colouring.

The same applies to skin colour and facial shape.



cheers, Mark

[Supreme Serpent]

The answer to all questions, "it depends."

Short answer, when minorities are not persicuted where they feel the need to "stick together," they readily assimilate into the majority. Works the same for memes and genes. A century ago in America, "Irish" was a persicuted minority. Now the subject seldomly comes up outside St. Patrick's Day. I expect in another century the same will be true for African Americans.

Off topic a bit, but related to this post. Awhile back, I soured on South Park and haven't been back to watch it much. Friday night, I turned to Comedy Central and saw most of the episode where they turn Cartman into a "Ginger", ie red-headed freckled kid (he had been taunting them earlier in the show apparently). Frickin hilarious, brilliant episode.

[John Desmarais]

Out of curiosity, what would be "default" human look like?

By that, I mean, if you blended the "races" together, what would you get?


Mario Van Peebles & Irene Cara.

[BobGreenwade]

Mario Van Peebles & Irene Cara.
Tiger Woods, Tia Carrere, Halle Barry, MaCherie Doerfler (author)....

[Valentine]

As to dominant genes, there are none with regard to race (race is not really a meaningful concept in genetics for this reason: you can't inherit a "race"). As noted, physical appearance is very much a blending. Two people from central Africa are unlikely to have a blond blue-eyed baby (can happen, though) - but when you get crossing between someone from central Africa and someone from (say) Scandinavia, possible outcomes range from children who could easily pass as being from just one their parent's ethnicities to a blending anywhere in between.
Yoinks....:eg:.....I have a feeling this would lead to some accusations involving mailmen, milkmen, UPS man, etc.

I remember having to study one course in genetics in high school biology. That's why I ran the other direction and got an engineering degree. Well that and the lab where we had to prick our fingers to look at blood samples under a microscope. Cutting up frogs and starfish, no problem. Stabbing my innocent finger, I don't think so :idjit:.

My avatar is obviously repressed trauma from this event.

[Dauntless]

You know, this topic is kinda interesting to me on a personal level.

I'm a mutt and a half. By tracing back 6 generations, I have the following ethnic makeup (in order of most to least):

Irish(14), Filipino(8), German(8), Indonesian(8), Polish(8, who believe it or not might have mongol blood), Turkish (8, not sure if Persian or Kurdish though), Spanish(4, who might have moorish blood), Scottish(2), Chinese(1) and East Indian(1). The number in parenthesis are the number of my ancestors out of 64 of that ethnicity (2^6 = 64).

I generally just say I'm Irish/Filipino though, since filipinos are by themselves a pretty mixed up lot. The funny thing is that if you ask ten people what they think I am, I'll get probably get 5 different answers. The most common is probably Hawaiian or Polynesian, but I've gotten Arabic, Hispanic, Native American Indian, Italian, and good ole American boy. My grandfather used to joke and call my brother and I "the general assembly", and that one day everybody else would look like us.

As others have mentioned, there's no gene(s) for race. However, ethnic types have evolved the way they have because of their relative isolation, and thus tend to display traits (phenotypes) which became strengthened over the millenia.

[Valentine]

You know, this topic is kinda interesting to me on a personal level.

I'm a mutt and a half.

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the Bill Murray movie Stripes where he is giving a pep talk to his unit on the eve of their graduation from boot camp.

"We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts....So we're all dogfaces, we're all very, very different. But, there is one thing that we all have in common: we were all stupid-enough to enlist in the army."

[bigdamnhero]

It mentions an future "short" ice age on earth sending humanity into shelters to weather it. This event is used for many plot reasons but the one I was curious about regards the racial genetics of the survivors over a time frame of some 2-4000 years becoming so mixed that race ceased to be an easy method of identity or prejudice. I know that this game falls in the anime genre and so they are obviously giving a nod to how people are often drawn in them having many racial features mixed together.
Are we talking a few big, interconnected shelters? Of lots of small, isolated shelters? If the later, I would expect significantly less interbreeding between groups in most parts of the world.

[SteelDoom]

back to OP's post, I think we'd still have races. While some shelters would have some mixing the bulk of humanity still live in their own ethnit areas. As a scenario if you wanted to mix bloodlines deliberatly. You could have a global lottery on who gets to go to the orbitting satelite to wait out the holocaust. If they made say three satelites and randomly chosen from a global population then I think you'd get blending.