User talk:Harlanpaine

Royal and Dunston paper
Hi Haranpaine, and thank you for your contributions. The Royal and Dunston paper is indeed interesting, but we cannot have individual viewpoints represented so prominently in the introduction. To see why: You write
 * It has been argued that knowledge acquired through research on human genome variation increasingly challenges the applicability of the term 'race' to human population groups (Nat Genet. 2004 Nov;36(11 Suppl):S5-7).

But I could express the opposite viewpoint just as validly:
 * It has been argued that knowledge acquired through research on the human genome increasingly supports the biological validity of traditional, self-identified racial categories (Tang H, Quertermous T, Rodriguez B, Kardia SL, Zhu X, Brown A, Pankow JS, Province MA, Hunt SC, Boerwinkle E, Schork NJ, Risch NJ (2005). Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity, and confounding in case-control association studies. Am J Hum Genet 76, 268-75. [13])

But neither your nor my (hypothetical) contributions are a fair representation of what is known about race. There certainly is no consensus about the issue. Placing a single paper into the introduction gives too much emphasis to its conclusion.

That being said, I am open to giving the third paragraph in the introduction another look. It might want to be updated with some viewpoints based on human genome research. In fact, that would be terrific. But first, we need to expand these things in the body text (though I suspect it is already there—it's really quite a good article), afterwards we can massage the introduction. Meet us at the talk page of Race and we can give it a shot. And welcome to Wikipedia! Arbor 07:33, 20 September 2005 (UTC)