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Nicholas Wade's Parasites

By evolgen on March 13, 2007.

The New York Times has published an article in their Science section on the evolution of human parasites, and it's not by Carl Zimmer. In the article, Nicholas Wade (another good science writer at the NYTimes) presents a few vignettes of human-parasite co-evolution, including a bacterium that causes tooth decay, the ulcer causing Heliobacter, and a tapeworm we share with pigs. I guess Carl called dibs on the pubic lice. Anyway, Wade made me smile when he presented the phylogeography of one human parasite:

The latest organism to be identified as a longtime member of the human biota club is Streptococcus mutans, the bacterium that causes tooth decay. From samples collected around the world, Dr. Page W. Caufield and colleagues at New York University have found that the bacterium can be assigned by its DNA to several distinct lineages. One is found in Africans, one in Asians and a third in Caucasians (the people of Europe, the Near East and India), his team reported in last month's Journal of Bacteriology.

Rather than use the term Caucasian and assume the readers know what he means, Wade briefly defines it. And he doesn't refer to them as "ethnic groups" either. But, while the grouping of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and Indians into a single macro-population may reflect a shared ancestry, naming them Caucasians still bothers me. Can we come up with a better term for this group of people?

Tags
biology
evolution
Population Genetics
Science News

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Mesoterranian?

By speedwell (not verified) on 13 Mar 2007 #permalink

What's wrong with "Indo-European"...

Nothing. That one works for me.

Yes, Indo-European works for me too, but it seems not to be favoured because it is used as a group label for origin of languages and it is not a one-to-one correspondence - not all Indo-European people speak an Indo-European-derived language, obviously.

Like I care - Indo-European has to be better than Caucasian, and it is more descriptive/specific and no more confusing than Eurasian, when that is commonly understood by the man in the street to mean someone of mixed European and Asian ancestry.