this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Funnily enough, I just watched this very informative video on why the lactase-producing gene is actually not necessary at all for you to eat and digest dairy. If your gut biome can digest lactose, you are completely fine ;)

Also, it feels intuitive to think that there are these genetic differences between Europeans and Asians etc. But this is much more complex than you would think. Humans are much more diverse genetically, especially people from Africa. If you test whole populations of people you can maybe see some generic trends, but this does not help predict anything on an individual level. There is way too much variation possible for you to reliably predict a person's genome. And as hinted above, the genetic variation is much higher on the African continent, where populations are genetically more similar to populations outside of Africa then to other populations in Africa. That's why there is zero biological basis to racism btw, it is a social construct in its entirety!

Analogous to this is the difference between sexes. The variation within one sex is much higher than between sexes. And also, there is so much fuzziness in how we classify sexes with a plethora of edge cases. That's why there isn't any biological basis to sexism either, it is just a social construct.

So saying anything about the bloodline of your child really is meaningless. Unless we're speaking of individual genetic differences passed down from your ancestors. Then you could calculate certain probabilities based on larger population data how likely it is that your child may have some genetic diseases etc. But even then you wouldn't know if it firstly actually had a certain genetic mutation and secondly if this mutation will be expressed throughout your child's life. So this is also not really predictive...