Re: Question for caste people: Do you mind Scheduled Castes and Tribes
I dislike writing on Soul treads but I would like you to answer this:
Why if castes are western propaganda the indian population have so many specific genetic diseases related to castes?
And I'm speaking of scientific method not social analisis.
Genetics Proves Indian Population Mixture | HMS
Same happens for example with Amish and Diaspora Jews.
Increase in genetic diseases in a small minority of the population could be a result of incest that is still practiced by some people. Does it happen? Yes. What percentage of the population does that? A small minority. What does the western media do? They hype that up and present only that to the western populations. The western governments, and the media controlled by the western governments, are busy peddling these
beyond-second-standard-deviation (rhetoric) populations as a reflection of India. Hence, propaganda, it undoubtedly is.
I think one should visit India and see it for themselves. One will have to try very hard to vaguely spot caste based discrimination.
On the other hand, marriage is a very personal matter. Indians are like Americans. Most whites marry whites, and most blacks marry blacks. Should I conclude that genetic diseases in a minority of Americans proves something about the US as a whole? No.
There are statistical methods to find some kind of correlation, and one has to have a high score, on a large population, with less degrees of freedom, to come to a definitive conclusion.
Here is a quote (all quotes are not in order as in the article, but in order of the arguments in this post):
"An important consequence of these results is that the high incidence of genetic and population-specific diseases that is characteristic of present-day India is likely to have increased only in the last few thousand years when groups in India started following strict endogamous marriage," said co–first author Kumarasamy Thangaraj, of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India.**
The researchers are playing it safe by using the blanket of likelihood. Probability is different from certainty. Google MCMC methods if you are interested in the difference.
Here is a quote:
In 2009, Reich and colleagues published a paper based on an analysis of 25 different Indian population groups. The paper described how all populations in India show evidence of a genetic mixture of two ancestral groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI), who are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent.
I have not read this specific research paper, but have read others, and ANI and ASI have been presented with evidences that have a lot of loopholes. I won't comment on the article by Reich
et al., but on the article you have presented.
Here is a quote:
But once established, the caste system became genetically effective, the researchers observed. Mixture across groups became very rare.
Caste preferred marriage is not a cause for genetic diseases. This is because
a person's family lineage is defined by his clan, or gotra, and not by caste. This research article nowhere mentions that. The research itself is based on poorly understood premises (well, it is from Harvard, no surprises there).
Here is a quote:
The researchers took advantage of the fact that the genomes of Indian people are a mosaic of chromosomal segments of ANI and ASI descent.
The researchers are relying on the theory of ANI and ASI as a "fact," when this very claim itself is disputed.