Have you ever wondered why, when the police recover DNA evidence from a crime scene, they can't analyze it to determine that the perpetrator is of a certain race? That would certainly narrow the search. However, from all that I've read about DNA analysis, scientists have not found any distinctive markers for race. Surely some distinctive factors must be in there, but to date, they have not been found. I think the reason is because, when you really get down to it, the shape of someone's eyes or the amount of pigment in someone's skin is so insignificant that it really doesn't matter, either genetically or in the real world.

There has been so much inter-breeding between the races over the centuries as to blur the very meaning of the concept of race to pointlessness. Like me, my brother Clark married a Filipina. They had one daughter, who is 1/2 Filipina and 1/2 white. Their daughter married a white man and had two children, a girl and a boy. Both of the children are 1/4th Asian (or perhaps more accurately, Pacific Islander). The daughter looks very much like her mother with a beautiful brown skin and Filipina features. The son looks exactly like his father, down to the blond hair and blue eyes. He has no Filipino features whatsoever.

Trying to engineer a virus to target people of a specific race would require far greater knowledge of genetics than we have today. This puts to lie the notion of some people that AIDS was invented to target blacks, homosexuals, or some other group.

I've never been all that interested in geneology, but some distant cousin of mine traced my family's history in the US back to 1657. I do know that one of my great grandmothers (or was it great-great grandmothers) was full blooded Cherokee. I'd be somewhat surprised if that didn't happen more than once in the nearly 350 years my ancestors have been in America. What race am I, and why in the world should it matter in the least? When some form asks me to indicate my race, I mark "Other" and fill in "Human" in the blank. No other race matters, at least not to me.