Safe Spaces

What is or how do we define the word "belong"? Belong is defined as to be in the relation of a member, adherent, inhabitant, etc. It also means to have the proper qualifications, especially the social qualifications to be a member of a group (dictionary.com). Etymologically it means "to go along with, properly relate to". I think through evolution by natural selection we were hard-wired with the need to belong. Our species lived in small groups and communities in which they cooperated and worked together in order to survive and pass-on their genes. We are a social species and being an outcast was detrimental to survival. For example, on the African plains if someone in the group was forced out they were an easy meal for predators, it probably wasn't uncommon to see the remains of an outcast shortly after their removal, and so the need to belong was reinforced. We want to fit in and be part of a group. As a result, when African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LGTBQ people ask for a safe space they are innately saying I don't feel like I belong here by their fellow students and the institution's actions, policies, and refusal to acknowledge that they do belong. To give you an analogy, imagine a Germany public university putting up statues of Adolf Hitler or buildings named after Nazi war generals, or Nazi war heroes statues after World War II. Yet there are public institutions especially in the South who do such things praising the Confederate State of America's (CSA) treason against the United States of America; for example, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have a statue dedicated to Confederate State of America soldier (i.e. Silent Sam), until recently they had a building named after a former North Carolina leader of the Ku Klux Klan William Saunders, it was Saunders Hall (built in 1922) and 93 years later they changed the name to Carolina Hall. Why did it take protest for the university to change the name? Moreover, you have so-called groups like Students for Fair Admissions or Project on Fair Representation trying to use so-called model minority group (i.e. Asians) as a front for suing Harvard, UNC - Chapel Hill possibly other PWI's (predominantly white institutions) and the Abgail Fisher and Edward Blum of the world who feel black, brown, or non-white students are not qualified to be admitted to PWI universities; they are indirectly and directly saying to so-called minorities you don't belong here and you wonder why they are asking for a safe space. In other words, so-called minorities groups are saying dear fellow students and institution I want to "belong" but your actions say that I don't, for if it did then I wouldn't have to protest. It's just like people saying Black Lives Matter, if they did they wouldn't have to say so. Think about it...

King Tut Unwrapped and need for Critical Thinking

Last week I watched the Discovery Channel King Tut Unwrapped. In the documentary, allegedly the truth about King Tut is finally revealed; however, I think it open up more questions than it answered. One important question is what is King Tut's Y-DNA and mt-DNA Haplogroups? First I think it is important to discuss what's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y-chromosome and Mitochondrial in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker? "Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y-chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation. Unchanged, that is unless a mutation-a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change-occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years. In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. What this means is that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others. When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.
A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path our ancestors took as they moved in and out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't know.
Likewise for Mitochondrial DNA, the string of 569 letters is your mitochondrial sequence, with the letters A, C, T, and G representing the four nucleotides-the chemical building blocks of life-that make up your DNA. Here's how it works. Like I describe for the Y-DNA every once in a while a mutation-a random, natural (and usually harmless) change-occurs in the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA. Think of it as a spelling mistake: one of the "letters" in your sequence may change from a C to a T, or from an A to a G.
After one of these mutations occurs in a particular woman, she then passes it on to her daughters, and her daughters' daughters, and so on. (Mothers also pass on their mitochondrial DNA to their sons, but the sons in turn do not pass it on.)
Geneticists use these markers from people all over the world to construct one giant mitochondrial family tree. As I can imagine, the tree is very complex, but scientists can now determine both the age and geographic spread of each branch to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of our ancestors. By looking at the mutations that we carry, geneticist can trace our lineage, ancestor by ancestor, to reveal the path they traveled as they moved out of Africa." (1)
As a result, I did a search on Google "King Tut's DNA results". I found the actual results were published in the JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) that Dr. Hawass used in the Discovery Channel's documentary and King Tut's Haplogroups information is absent, perhaps because there weren't enough data to conclude this information. However, I did another Google search "King Tut's DNA results haplogroup". I found the absent of haplogroup in the published report did not stop people from trying to speculate. Consequently, we now have an unproven speculation circulating on the World Wide Web that King Tut's haplogroup is R1b. I found the source of this speculation to be someone on RootsWeb (link: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/GENEALOGY-DNA/2010-02/1266472989) who claimed by looking at the screen shots of the video, they were able to decipher the Y-STR markers and therefore determine King Tut's Y-DNA Haplogroup. I watched the same video and no marker numbers are evident. From this now there is a great debate that King Tut and his ancestors where R1b on Rootweb and other places on the internet (some which have become racially tinged). Nowhere was the Y-STR markers published except for 2 Y-STR here's a link to the Article: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/303/7/638?home. The end result from this discussion someone published the so-called y-STR markers on Family Tree DNA's y-search.org under the ID ER7RQ. I think this should be a lesson in critical thinking; if you do not have enough data don't make it up. This led to another question; what was the motivation of the person who allegedly was able to determine King Tut's haplogroup? Quoting directly from the person who started this fiasco: "Additionally, if you look at the CODIS markers for Tutankhamen which they provide in the published study and run them in OmniPop, it indicates similarity with Europeans." In other words, did he want to know if King Tut was European? Why should King Tut's ethnicity matter? What I find fascinating is the science, that we can abstract DNA from a 3,000 year old mummy and verify his genealogy! Think about it....

Source:
Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/index.html