Race to the bottom

The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them.  Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.

It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.

Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there."  The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system.  The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.

Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps.  Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.

What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural.  The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate.  (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)

Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution.  Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book.  And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:

Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous...  The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount.  Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent.  Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly.  Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two.  On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world.  Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.

Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world.  The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.

Appearance confounds.  We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese.  (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)

Bigotry, of course, is based in fear.  People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in.  There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on.  But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.

And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.

Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates.  If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means.  My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.

So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.

I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock.  Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen.  If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."

Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor:  "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

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All in the family

Racists have cast about for years for some sort of scientific basis for their horrible worldview.  Evidence that their race is the superior one in intelligence, physical strength, or vigor, or simply support for their contention that interracial marriages are bad in a biological sense.

Of course, the problem for people who turn to science is that science often provides answers whether you end up liking them or not.  And inquiries into a biological basis for race have shown that any real genetic variations between different ethnic groups are tenuous at best.  Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, one of the leading specialists in human population genetics, says:

Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear.  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones. 

From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus… the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection.

Now, let me make it clear that this doesn't mean that there are no differences between racial groups.  It's just that those differences are primarily social and cultural, not biological, which neatly kicks the legs out from underneath some of the racists' primary arguments.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's been known for years that lumping together all dark-skinned Africans as "black" is ignoring the fact that there's more genetic variability on the African continent than there is in the entire rest of the world put together.  The Zulu and the !Kung people of southern Africa, for example, are more distantly related to each other than a typical white American is...

... to a person from Japan.

And just last month, Iain Mathieson of Harvard University punched another hole in racist genetics when he released his research team's findings that the genes for white skin are only about 8,000 years old.

According to Mathieson et al.:

(M)odern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes.  And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin:  They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today... 

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin.  The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

The reason the two light-skin genes took hold in northern latitudes is thought to be vitamin D synthesis -- while having dark skin is an advantage in equatorial regions, from the standpoint of protection from ultraviolet skin damage, dark skin inhibits endogenous vitamin D production in areas with low incident sunlight.  So once the mutations occurred, they spread rapidly, but only in regions at high latitude.  This explains why even distantly-related equatorial groups have dark skin (such as the Bantu and the Australian Aborigines), and even distantly-related high-latitude group have light skin (such as the Swedes and the Inuit).

And apparently the gene for blue eyes is of equally recent vintage.  The earliest genetic evidence for the gene HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes, is in southern Sweden from about 7,700 years ago.  The gene's provenance might date back to 10,000 years ago, but certainly not much before that.

So all of us descend from dark-skinned, brown-eyed people.  Sorry, white supremacists.

Of course, given that there is good evidence that around 70,000 years ago, an eruption of the Toba Volcano in Indonesia caused climate shifts that killed nearly all of our ancestors -- best estimates are that there were only 10,000 humans left on Earth after the bottleneck occurred -- we're all cousins anyway.  After that event, those 10,000-odd survivors can be put into two groups; the ones who left no descendants at all, and the ones who are the ancestors of everyone on Earth.

It'd be nice if we could count on people using science to inform their behavior, but we don't have a very good track record in that regard, do we?  I mean, think about it; we're still pushing the fossil fuel industry as the world warms up and the climate destabilizes around us.  So unfortunately, even when we have direct and incontrovertible evidence that what we're doing isn't reasonable, we usually continue doing it.

And I guess the argument that the genes for white skin are 8,000 years old is going to gain no traction whatsoever with the people who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

But still, it'd be nice, wouldn't it?  Just as the first photographs of the Earth taken from the Moon changed a lot of folks' perspective on our place in the universe, it'd be wonderful if research like this could alter us from "those people... they're not like us" to "we're all one family, and we're all in this together."

Race, ethnicity, Einstein, and King Tut

Today we have two stories that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.

First, we have an article by Jo Marchant over at Medium entitled, "Tutankhamun's Blood," wherein we hear about the work done by Yehia Gad to sequence the young pharaoh's DNA -- and how it set off a war over what race/ethnic group gets to claim him.  First, there was concern that the test would show a connection between the Egyptian king and... *cue dramatic music* the Jews:

The editor of Archaeology magazine, Mark Rose, reported in 2002 that [proposed DNA testing] was cancelled “due to concern that the results might strengthen an association between the family of Tutankhamun and the Biblical Moses.” An Egyptologist with close links to the antiquities service, speaking to me on condition of anonymity, agreed: “There was a fear it would be said that the pharaohs were Jewish.”

Specifically, if the results showed that Tutankhamun shared DNA with Jewish groups, there was concern that this could be used by Israel to argue that Egypt was part of the Promised Land.

This might seem an outlandish notion, but given the context of the Middle Eastern history, it is understandable...  For many Egyptians, the idea that their most famous kings could share some common heritage with their enemies is a hard one to cope with.

Yet the possibility that Tutankhamun could share some DNA with ancient Jewish tribes is not far-fetched, says Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist and mummy specialist at the American University in Cairo. After all, the royal family might well have shared genes with others who originated in the same part of the world. “It is quite possible that you might find Semitic strains of DNA in the pharaohs,” she says. “Christians, Jews, Muslims—they all came from a similar gene pool originally.”

Yehia Gad finally was allowed to do the DNA testing, under the direction of an Egyptian antiquities expert, the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, and the results turned out to be controversial, but for a different reason:

A Swiss genealogy company named IGENEA issued a press release based on a blurry screen-grab from the Discovery documentary. It claimed that the colored peaks on the computer screen proved that Tutankhamun belonged to an ancestral line, or haplogroup, called R1b1a2, that is rare in modern Egypt but common in western Europeans...  This immediately led to assertions by neo-Nazi groups that King Tutankhamun had been “white,” including YouTube videos with titles such as King Tutankhamun’s Aryan DNA Results, while others angrily condemned the entire claim as a racist hoax. It played, once again, into the long-running battle over the king’s racial origins. While some worried about a Jewish connection, the argument over whether the king was black or white has inflamed fanatics worldwide. Far-right groups have used blood group data to claim that the ancient Egyptians were in fact Nordic, while others have been desperate to define the pharaohs as black African. A 1970s show of Tutankhamun’s treasures triggered demonstrations arguing that his African heritage was being denied, while the blockbusting 2005 tour was hit by protests in Los Angeles, when demonstrators argued that the reconstruction of the king’s face built from CT scan data was not sufficiently “black.”

If that's not ridiculous enough, just yesterday we had a story from Haaretz about an apparently insane Iranian cleric who claims that Albert Einstein was actually a Shi'a Muslim:

The report cites a video by Ayatolla Mahadavi Kani, described as the head of the Assembly of Experts in the Islamic Republic of Iran, who says that there are documents proving the Jewish scientist embraced Shiite Islam and was an avid follower of Ja'far Al-Sadiq, an eighth-century Shi'i imam.

In the video, Kani quotes Einstein as saying that when he heard about the ascension of the prophet Mohammed, "a process which was faster than the speed of light," he realized "this is the very same relativity movement that Einstein had understood."

The ayatollah adds: "Einstein said, 'when I heard about the narratives of the prophet Mohamad and that of the Ahle-Beit [prophet's household] I realized they had understood these things way before us.'"

What I find wryly amusing about all of this he's-mine-no-he's-mine tug-of-war over famous historical figures is how it ignores the reality of what race and ethnic identification actually are.  There is some biological basis for race, which is how we can generate cladograms for ethnic groups like the one pictured below:

Note what is, for some people, the most surprising thing about this tree; two very dark-skinned individuals, one a Native Australian and the other a Bantu from Zimbabwe, are far more distantly related to each other than an Englishman is related to a guy from Japan -- even though both the Bantu and the Australian are routinely lumped together as "Black," and the Englishman and the Japanese consider themselves different races.

Professor Emeritus Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the acclaimed and much-cited population geneticist at Stanford, writes, "Human races are still extremely unstable entities in the bands of modern taxonomists…  As one goes down the scale of the taxonomic hierarchy toward the lower and lower partitions, the boundaries between clusters become even less clear…  There is great genetic variation in all populations, even in small ones.  From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus…the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits and whose origin dates from recent evolution mostly under the effect of climate and perhaps sexual selection."

That's not to say that there's nothing to race at all.  Self-perception, privilege, culture, religion, and language are all strongly connected to, and influenced by, race and ethnicity.  But the genetic connection is tenuous at best, which is why I always find it funny when someone tells me that (s)he is "1/32 Native American," and then decides to adopt a Native name, wear Native-style jewelry and clothing, and so on.  By the time your ancestry has that small a proportion from any ethnic group, you are hardly Native American in any cultural sense, so doing all that sort of stuff -- and yes, I know more than one person who does -- is little more than an affectation.

But it's also not to say that I'm not proud of my roots.  My family is predominantly French and Scottish, with some Dutch, German, English, Irish, and Native American thrown in for good measure (and the latter, I'm afraid, isn't much more than 1/32 of my heritage).  Ethnically, I'm a southern Louisianian, and if you don't think that's an ethnic and cultural group, you should spend some time in Lafayette, Louisiana.  But I am, at the same time, fully aware of how fluid a concept ethnic identification is.  I've lost most of my Cajun accent in the three decades I've lived in YankeeLand, and my children -- who share about the same proportion of Cajun blood I do, since their mother was also half south-Louisiana-French by ancestry -- were raised in upstate New York and therefore aren't ethnically Cajun at all.

And all of this is why the wrangling over whether King Tut was "actually" European (or Black, or Semitic, or whatever) and whether Albert Einstein was "actually" a Muslim, is ridiculous.  We are all mixtures of genetics and culture; and each of those brings along with it physical and cultural baggage.  It's wonderful when someone embraces his or her ethnicity for the positive features (the perspective on the world, the music, the language, the food) and jettisons the negative aspects (the divisive us-vs.-them mentality, the notions of superiority and inferiority, the assumption of privilege).  An understanding of what ethnicity and race are, and are not, is a critical step in growing into a world where we value each other's shared humanity more than we worry about what labels we choose to place on ourselves.