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Wen Jin's avatar

My God, you are not only very smart, but also a genuinely well-rounded, nice human being! I absolutely love to read your back-and forths with people who disagree with you. The only good part of having remote access to so many opinions and news (real or fake) and facts and shit is that from time to time you read about (and interact with) great people you will never meet in real life, and sometimes that is enough. I am having a shitty week ("back to school" in academia, when colleagues are quitting 2 days before classes, and you need to scramble for finding somebody else to teach their classes, is NEVER fun!), so this is bringing a bit of reassurance that we are still able to think reasonably and to be kind to each other. Thank you for being normal :-)

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Chris Fox's avatar

Beware comparisons of genetic commonality.

There is less divergence between a randomly-selected human and a randomly-selected chimpanzee than between two carefully-chosen humans. No conclusions can be drawn from that.

And while it's a shocking truth that African slaves were literally bred by their owners, I doubt it was over enough generations and in great enough numbers to significantly change their genetics very broadly. Such breeding was mostly done in part of Virginia and Maryland and the offspring sold in the south.

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