24706 'Conservation reads
The Conversation 20 November 2015 - Race: a myth
created by ‘white’ supremacists
Subspecies and race
I
am a Ph.D.-trained taxonomist and have acted professionally locally and
internationally for 35 years. Taxonomy
is the biological science of classification.
Scientifically, the term subspecies
is equivalent to race. Subspecies are
the least inclusive entities that warrant a name. They are geographically distinct, anatomically and genetically
homogenous, populations who interbreed and produce fertile
offspring with other subspecies.
‘Scientific’
racism
The
use of race in human ‘taxonomy’ has a long, disgraceful history. To promote their ‘superiority’, highly
respected philosophers, sociologists, biologists, historians, and politicians
used race to divide and denigrate, people from different ‘nations’ (the Irish,
British, French, German, Chinese, Japanese) or continents (Europe, sub-Saharan Africa,
Asia, the Americas). The eminent philosopher
Immanuel Kant, the first “scientific racist”, maintained that dark-skinned
people from Africa are: vain and stupid; only capable of trifling feelings; resistant
to any form of education other than learning how to be enslaved; and lacking in
“drive to activity” and “mental capacities to be self-motivated and
successful.” With regard to history, they show no talents or produced anything
of praiseworthy quality in art or science. Light-skinned Homo sapiens europaeus is active, acute, and adventurous. Sub-Saharan Homo sapiens afer is crafty, lazy, and careless. Scientific racism played a pivotal role in ‘justifying’
chattel slavery and colonialization of areas occupied by “inferior” races.
‘Scientific’
racism reached its pinnacle in eugenics, a social philosophy advocating the improvement of humanity by promoting reproduction between people with desired
traits and reducing reproduction between (or sterilizing) people with less-desired
traits. People unfit to reproduce
included members of disfavoured racial groups.
Eugenics played an integral part in the race-related laws of Nazi Germany
and apartheid
South Africa.
Creation(s)
There
are two views on the origin(s) of human races.
Polygenism maintains that races were created independently by God or derived
from different ape/monkey/baboon-like ancestors. This view was referenced by some prominent
South Africans in the media in response to the announcement of the discovery of
Homo neladi. It persists in Creation ‘Science’ and in anthropologist Carleton Coon’s book The
Origin of Races (1962). The other view is monogenism:
that all modern humans have a single, common origin, perhaps even a single
mating pair, Adam and Eve. In his The Descent of Man,
Charles Darwin
ended the polygenism vs monogenism debate in favour of mongenism.
Human ‘taxonomists’ have proposed a range of human races with little
agreement as to how many and their geographical provenance. Based on skull anatomy, Johann Blumenbach divided the humans into five races: Caucasians (Europe and western Asia), Mongoloids (eastern Asia), Malays (south-eastern Asia), Negros (sub-Saharan Africa) and Americans
(North and South America), but emphasized that "one
variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark
out the limits between them".
Skull anatomy was also used to support racism by Samuel Morton, who claimed that inter-racial intellectual
variation is reflected by the interior volume of the skull. These
groupings remain used today in anthropology and forensics. Additional studies including other aspects of skin colour, facial type, texture
and colour of hair recognize as many as 12 human races.
Genetic
evidence
A range
of genetic studies have examined ‘racial’ variation. A pioneer in this regard was one of my early mentors,
Richard Lewontin. His research on protein
structure suggested that 90% percent of modern human genetic diversity
is due to differences between individuals WITHIN
populations, and that the tiny balance is due to variation BETWEEN populations. This view was confirmed by studies based
on DNA structure. Indeed, the DNA amongst all human populations is 99.5% similar. Populations of the geographically much more restricted
chimpanzee (our nearest living evolutionary ‘relative’), exhibit more than four
times the variation found between human populations. Furthermore, the geographical
distribution of many human anatomical traits reflects that of genetic variation.
For example, about 90% of the variation
in human head shape occurs WITHIN continental groups, and 10% BETWEEN groups,
with a greater variability of head shape among individuals within Africa. To summarize, when humans from around
the globe are studied from genetic and/or anatomical perspectives, the pattern discovered
is not geographically discrete clusters. The norm is gradual, geographically
uncorrelated, variation in traits and genes, even within peoples traditionally thought
to be racially homogeneous. Therefore, there is no evidence of evolutionarily
significant subspecific/racial variation.
The exception to the common geographically gradual anatomical among
humans is skin colour. Approximately 10% of the variance in skin colour
occurs within groups, and about 90% between groups. People from near the equator have darker,
more melanin-rich, skin than those who live at higher latitudes, indicating
that it has been under strong selective pressure. Darker skin is strongly selected
for in equatorial regions because it is a natural sunscreen that limits harmful
effects of high ultraviolet rays. One of
these is the stripping away of folic acid, a nutrient essential to the
development of healthy foetuses. Recent genetic studies
indicate that skin colour may change radically due to natural selection in 100
generations (about 2 500 years).
Genetic
‘racism’
Contrary
to the message above, some studies based on DNA allele frequencies claim that
there is a geographical structuring of human populations which has been used,
e.g. by newsman Nicholas Wade in A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,
to justify the validity of races. Wade then asserts that natural selection between ‘races’
has led to differences in I.Q. test results, efficacy of political institutions
and levels of economic development. These
studies are flawed for three reasons.
First, taxonomic studies should be based on CHARACTERS, features that
are invariant within populations, rather than TRAITS (e.g. eye colour and gene alleles) that
vary within populations and even families.
Second, the DNA samples used in were “cherry picked” geographically to
maximize inter-population differentiation.
Third, the evolutionary racial ‘trees’ were generated by a statistical technique
(cluster analysis) designed to produce tree-like patterns of “average”, not
absolute, differences between sampled items.
This technique formed the basis of an approach to the construction of
evolutionary trees called “phenetics” which has long been discredited and thus
generally abandoned by evolutionary biologists.
Evolutionary
origins
DNA- and anatomy-based findings support the Out of Africa theory that modern
humans originated in Africa. This theory states that archaic African Homo (erectus) immigrated into Eurasia 200
000 to 100 000 years ago. About 60 000
years ago, after it also had evolved in Africa, a second form of humanity,
modern H. sapiens, also emigrated out
of Africa, replacing populations of Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis already
in the north. Some studies
support that the second emigration resulted in limited interbreeding between H. sapiens and neanderthalensis, with 1 to 4% of the genes currently within the non-African H. sapiens coming from neanderthalensis.
‘White’ people are therefore evolutionary ‘refugees’
from Africa who, after settling in Eurasia, lost much of their epidermal
melanin in an evolutionary heartbeat.
To close, during the turbulent
1980s, my 9 year-old daughter attended a racially mixed school. Knowing this, when a family friend asked her how
many of her classmates were blacks, my daughter’s reply was: “What is a black?”
I guess that makes my child a poor human taxonomist.
Emeritus Prof. Tim Crowe
– Newlands – tel. 021-674-3835 – e-mail timothy.crowe@uct.ac.za
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