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Scientific Sense Podcast

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The knowledge weapon

A recent article in "Genetics, seems to confirm the ground breaking research of biologist, Spencer Wells, that Native Americans and Northern Europeans are closely related. The “nursery effect,” eloquently portrayed by Dr. Wells goes further than the limited conclusion of the current study. More importantly, it is time educators have taken up such information to ameliorate knowledge gaps in the next generation that eventually lead to ignorance and racism.

Two pieces of information; first that humans survived an unimaginable bottleneck close to forty thousand years ago that reduced them to a few thousand specimens, pushing them to the edge of extinction and second that only a few dozen humans made it from Siberia to Alaska over the bridge twenty thousand years ago, should substantially broaden the perspective of students across the world. The first fact implies that the seven billion people sharing the blue planet are so closely related that it will be genetically impossible to separate them within time scales spanning over a few 100 generations. And second, all of the original occupants of the Americas originated from a handful of individuals, before they were met by their cousins taking a different route.

As they mutilate and kill across the world, as they plot to wipe out countries and nuclear factories and as they posture and haggle over land and people, let’s hope that information spreads fast and the next generation will look forward to a brighter future and shun the nightmares created by ignorance.

1 comment:

  1. Even the Vikings recognized trade as better than fighting unless resources were limited. Let's hope we continue to focus on creating opportunity societies rather than the social democrat/green vision of limited resources that must be allocated according to some ideal or another.

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