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[Adi Hastings]

Absurd it may be, and in fact, if pressed most geneticists would deny this 
proposition. However, at least within certain fashions of speaking among the 
geneticist community, there seems to be an alarming tendency to link genetic 
markers with linguistic ones. We just finished conducting a job search here at 
Iowa for an anthropological geneticist (a joint position w/ Biology here), and 
I was frankly surprised and alarmed to hear job talks which referred  
linguistic and genetic phenotypic groupings without distinction.

Adi Hastings
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Iowa

Quoting Alexander King <a.king at abdn.ac.uk>:

> Any connection between genes and phonological features of a language 
> is patently absurd. Boas deconstructed any serious link between 
> biology and language in 1911 in his introduction to HAIL. His logic 
> holds just as well if we replace his term "biology" with "genotypes". 
> Indeed, it is even stronger, considering contemporary understandings 
> of the term "biology" are much more expansive than he was using it a 
> century ago. More recent investigations of the overlap between 
> genetic populations and linguistic communities continues to report 
> that even in the case of considerable overlap of these two groups, 
> there remains substantial variation within the group. The main 
> problem is that the timescales of genetic evololution and linguistic 
> change are vastly different.
>