Letters to the Editor
vrakjj
Published Letters: 51 Editor's Choice: 5
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fitness and success
[Read the article: Who are you?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>But there is a point in which it is strange that the fittest specimins are being selected out of our >species- it's as if we've hit a limit in genetic evolution of some sort.
Success by society's definition is not the same as sucess by evolution's defnition.
If "successful" people are getting fewer children into the next generation than less "successful" people,then they are LESS fit by definition. Hence, there isn't any contradiction. Now, it may be that natural selection is favoring less intelligent people (to the extent that "success" and intelligence are correlated) and that this will eventually be detrimental to the species. Natural selection primarily operates at the level of individual organisms and below (i.e. individual genes). It doesn't "care" about the good of the species.
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race and genetics
[Read the article: Who are you?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]>What is perhaps most dishartening about the article and the book; however, is the reference to the >impact of "race"-- a concept that has no basis in biology. For a clear and concise critique of race as >a scientific concept see:
It is true that there no clear deliniations between races. However, nearly any knowledgeable person can correctly classify, on sight alone, most people at least by the continent that their ancestry derives from. More knowledgeable people can do better than that. For example, I suspect that many people would be quite accurate at distinguishing Southern Italians from Scotts. It is irrelevant whether they can tell people from southern and northern France apart.
There are important genetic differences between these groupings. That these differences lie on a continuum does not change the fact that there are average differences between major groupings. For example, there are numerous examples of documented differences between racial groups in the frequencies of genes that confer risk to disease. Pick a random person off of the street. Give him a large sample of people and tell him pick out the white people and the black people. If you take the groupings that he chose, you will find, for example, that the CCR5-delta32 mutation that confers resistance to HIV is at frequency in the range 10-20% in the white people and absent in the black people. You will find that the S allele that causes sickle cell and also confers resistance to malaria will be at a frequency of something like 5-10% in the black people and something like 0.1% in the white people. These are well known examples, but there are many more. So, how can it be said that race has no biological basis?
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Air Afrique was terrible!
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I flew Air Afrique quite a few times in the late 90's and it was uniformly awful, even by African standards. There were problems with tickets or reservations almost every time. My first experience with Air Afrique was a flight from Douala to Dakar. I'd had my mother book the ticket because it was much easier to do in the U.S. than Cameroon. She paid in dollars of course. When we went to pick up the tickets the day before the flight we were told that the dollar had slipped some relative to the CFA (the local currency) and we had to make up the difference. Only after our rage exploded into shouting did they back off (In Air Afrique's defense this was most likely local corruption and not company policy). Their flights were always heavily overbooked and if you got bumped they did not consider it their responsibility to get you on another flight. You were on your own to figure something out. One time I was flying New York to Douala with a one night layover in Abidjan. The New York to Abidjan leg went fine and I enjoyed my night in Abidjan (which is/was a hopping city). However, they told me I was bumped when I returned to the airport the next morning. I asked when they would get me out and they said that I would have to go the Air Afrique office in Abidjan and buy a new ticket. Given that all their flights were habitually overbooked, it could have taken weeks to get out. Now, it may be that a bribe was required at this point, but I was too pissed off to try. It eventually came out that they had first class seats available, but that I would have to pay $700 for the upgrade. This seemed ridiculous, but I needed to get to Douala that day and so ended up paying it - figuring that I could sort it out when I returned to the U.S. Well, I fought with Air Afrique for the better part of a year but never got my money back. So, I was rather gleeful to hear of Air Afrique's demise (although I am sure that it has made finding flights within West Africa much harder).