Race has all sorts of negative connotations in a liberal society. That's because it conflicts with liberal first principles. Liberals believe that to be human we have to be self-created, rather than shaped by something unchosen like race.
Some liberals have even started to deny, against all common sense, that such a thing as race even exists. I recently wrote a short item on an American scientist who asserted this very thing.
In my comments on this scientist I predicted that science itself would eventually prove the existence of race. Yesterday, another small step toward this scientific progress was made public.
A senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Melbourne, Dr Chee Ng, studied differences in the effects of an antidepressant drug, Zoloft, on Asians and Europeans. He found that the Asian patients responded to the drugs at lower doses than Europeans.
According to newspaper reports "Dr Ng said the difference was probably explained by genetic factors affecting how the body metabolised and responded to drugs." Another clinical adviser, Ian Hickie, was reported as saying that "Genetics was the key either in the way the body metabolises medication through the liver and into the bloodstream or the effect of the medicine on the brain."
These finding come just months after a heart drug was approved for use for a specific race (Africans), because of their lower levels of nitric oxide.
As this kind of research accumulates the race-deniers, even of the scientific persuasion, are going to appear increasingly out of place.
I think race deniers are ignorant conservative people who should shut up before making absurd claims like creationists.
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