p3tunia

You can pay to be a guinea pig for a for-profit company running an extremely poorly controlled study, lucky you!

Keep in mind that the genes that make up our physical appearance are only an infinitesimal percentage of all the genes we have. Our genes contain the entire set of instructions to build a functional human. When people say "race" they are usually talking about things like skin color, hair color, hair texture, eye color, and certain facial features. While many different genes determine these features, they are vastly outnumbered by the genes that do literally everything else required to make humans grow, live, and reproduce. That's a lot of information.

From a human ancestry perspective - way back, all humans lived in Africa and there was quite a bit of genetic diversity. A small number of them left Africa and spread throughout the rest of the world. Those small groups ended up more inbred/less genetically diverse, and their populations grew from that small pool. Today, there is still more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined. But many people would put all black Africans in one racial group.

Another way to look at it: A black person whose family has been in the U.S. for 4 generations is more likely to be genetically similar to a white person whose family has also been here that long than to a black person in Africa who did not have any ancestors in the U.S. But we would classify both black people as the same race, unlike the two people from the U.S.

This is what people mean when they say that race is socially constructed, not biologically constructed. Here is an oldish but somewhat useful NY times article on the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/22/science/do-races-differ-not-really-genes-show.html

Honestly impressed that you're being so open about this. I used to be really uncomfortable with the idea of furries. Learned more about the community/lifestyle and now it phases me much less, despite the fact that it's still something I have no interest in whatsoever. It's interesting how so many people who consider themselves to be very open minded have hatred/aversion to furries.

Here are the things that changed my attitude about it (if anyone else is interested in trying to be more understanding or at least tolerant:

• The biggest thing was hearing people explain the difference between furries and zoophilia/beastiality. I still don't get the furry thing at all but I believe that it's very different from the latter.

• I ended up near a furry convention and almost crashed it for funsies/out of morbid curiosity. When I looked at the schedule for the conference it was way more of a community event than I realized. On the internet we have been taught it's mostly/purely a sexual thing, and looking at this con schedule made me realize it's clearly so much more and isn't sexual at all for some people. It's about finding a community with other weirdos, which I gotta respect.

• This incident sucked any remaining "coolness" out of making fun of/being disgusted by furries for me. Kinda the final blow to the cognitive dissonance I was using that let my brain think furries weren't "normal people". Basically, someone tried to poison a bunch of furries with chlorine gas. It's despicable. Really made me realize how harmful the "furries are gross" internet hate can be.

Happy to help.