It was a sad day for the Kentucky Derby when they had to put down the second place horse, Eight Belles, on the track after the filly broke both front ankles after the race. Some people are stunned, others are angry. We can argue about whether horse racing is a good or bad sport, whether it abuses animals, whether it is elitist, etc., but Eight Belles’ story is not about racing, its about bad breeding.

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The state of Florida has just fallen off the flat, 6,000 year old earth they think we all live on (which, by the way we don’t). Florida’s House and Senate just passed legislation pushing religion into the science curriculum. Despite the claim of “academic freedom”, all Florida has done is to show that A) their state government, at least, is run by idiots; and B) they have condemned their students to receiving substandard science education.

Got kids in Florida? You may want to move.

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In the science section of the BBC International news website there is a seemingly innocuous little story entitled “Crusaders ‘left genetic legacy’” [BBC news March 27, 2008]. A group of researchers for the Genographic Project are attempting to study human migrations using genetic footprints. In the article the researchers studied the male Y chromosome which changes only slowly over time. Since the changes are slow to occur, they often lead to rather distinct versions of the chromosome appearing — these are called haplogroups. The haplogroups are stable enough to track over successive generations. Most individuals migrate relatively infrequently over the generations such that certain haplogroups become common in a given area. The idea then is if these haplogroups show up somewhere else, some type of migration (forced or voluntary) occurred to bring the haplogroup to a new area.

The reported study looked at 926 men currently living in Lebanon. What the researchers found surprised them. There were clearly two haplogroups present (not very surprising if you consider where Lebanon is located within the Middle East) but the haplogroups seemed to be grouped according to religion. Christian Lebanese men tended to have a haplogroup derived from European areas that had historically sent men on crusade to the Holy Land. Muslim Lebanese men tended to have a haplogroup derived from the Arabian Peninsula, from the groups that sent men to the Holy Land to repel European crusaders. This is, actually, pretty interesting, as the author of the study points out:

“The goal of the study was to put some science to the history of this country - which is very rich,” said Pierre Zalloua, a co-author on the paper, from the Lebanese American University in Beirut.

He added: “To have these great civilisations - with the Islamic expansion and the migration from Europe - coming to Lebanon, leaving not only their genes but also some of their culture and way of life, it can only make us feel richer.”

However, the question I would ask is whether we need to know it? There is already quite enough tension between different groups in the Middle East — pointing out genetic differences (which, ultimately, don’t really mean anything in this case) could potentially only make things worse. Whose to say someone won’t get it into their head to use this genetica information as a sorting mechanism to get rid of those with the “wrong” heritage.

The idea of such migration studies is, in part, to try and show that we all, somewhere along the line, migrated from someplace else, thus attempting to erase notions that we are all different. If everyone migrated from someplace else, how can you really treat people as “other”? We should all just act like one big human family. This is actually a worthy goal, but somehow genetically tagging individuals seems a little dangerous.

Genes don’t make you religious, or specifically Christian or specifically Muslim. Genes don’t really, by themselves, even account for why some people are smart, pretty, big, or whatever. But there are already ethical arguments over what to do about genes that might give you cancer, or heart disease, or diabetes. Can you be excluded from jobs because you might get sick? Can you be denied health coverage because you might be expensive?

Tagging someone as to where they come from only seems to be one more tool for those wishing to exclude, rather than include.