Re:An interesting idea. (Score 1)

What's missing from this and other comments is a clear understanding that current nation-states and international boundaries are not congruent with real (to the extent that any are) ethnic, racial, nationality, or other group identities. Simply ask a Frenchman about the French nationality, and you'll get a long list of the different ethnic identities that exist in that country. A Gascon is different from a Norman is different from a Provencal is different from a . . . . We can see this phenomena more and more in our newspapers, as countries get in the headlines because of their instability, and we discover that what we thought of as national intities are actually amalgoms of different cultures, languages, and genetic backgrounds. Look at Georgia vs. Abkazia, Ukraine/Romania vs. Moldava, the hodge-podge of what was once Yugoslavia, etc. We even have the laughable policy of calling a new country the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (pronounced FYROM), because we can't call it simply Macedonia, because Macedonia is a state in Greece, populated by people ethnically allied with the population of this new country, and Greece doesn't want anybody mentioning this inconvenient fact. The previous post talks about England and the Puritans. Please. There is a reason it's called the United Kingdom, and that is because it, too, is an amalgam of different ethnicities and nationalities (The once-separate Kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Wales). And, of course, this says nothing about the mixed-up ethnic heritage that created the English language and identity (such as it is) out of Picts, Brits, Scots, Angels, Danes, Saxons, Welsh, and Normans (who were originally Norwegian vikings who settled in Gallic territory in mainland Europe). I've no doubt left out several major groups. Anyway, the point is that looking at a modern political map is the last way we want to point out genetic or group differences. The actualy scientists are going about this the right way, by looking for groups who for one reason or another were not allowed to marry out of their in-group, and so were genetically isolated from the general population for a significant period of time. Mixing tends to wash out genetic changes and drift to the norm. What everyone is getting right, of course, is the idea that the may, indeed, be differences between groups, but that these difference should not justify limiting the opportunities or treatment of individuals. Indeed, one of the real problems with the world is that in so many places -- the Sudan, Iraq, China, I can't list them all -- people are treated as no more than examples of their group. And the authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan who are seeking to institutionalize this attitude are doing major damage to the future of those countries. The real problem, of course, is the common inability to handle complex ideas, such as the idea that genetic differences are real, individuality is also real, deal with it. More than enough said.