As a Mexican I find the comment section nitpicking every word of the article as racist very funny. Americans have really thin skin. Political correctness is indeed drowning the exchange of ideas!
I've often wondered why Mexican people look so different from people in the US. Wikipedia makes me believe that Mexicans are generally a mix of European and native ancestry. But why does Mexico have so much more of that than the US? Especially considering we stole much of our land from them...<p>Why does the average person in Texas (excluding Mexico->US immigrants) look so different from the average person a few hundred miles south, but yet looks similiar to someone a few hundred (or thousand) miles north?
Why the surprise? Mexico is part of a land bridge between two continents. Both have been invaded multiple times by distant populations. It's next to the Caribbean, a host of islands which are known to accelerate genetic changes. With all these peoples coming and going I'd be shocked if it wasn't so diverse.
Well, it's not surprising given the racial makeup of the Iberian peninsula over history. (Celts, Romans, Vandals, North Africans) and then sending them to America to mix with native Indian populations and imported Africans.
I remember a little while ago my dad went to an academic lunch with Dr. Craig Venter in Chiapas (MX), he was talking about sampling DNA from the Americas to register genes that could potentially help medical research and are endemic to the region.
My understanding is that all native american populations are from a relatively small and homogenous population that walked into Alaska 16000 years ago.<p>Which means that they're much less genetically diverse than the rest of the world.<p>This is hard to reconcile with the claims in this article.
> <i>Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan.</i><p>Is not this a case? People immigrated to america from many continents.
conjecture: the population of Los Angeles County, if measured using the same approach employed by this study, would show more genetic diversity than the population of Mexico