Wednesday 11 February 2004

Pic of the day: Scientific American, December 2003. (The white blob is an artifact of the flash.) "Does race exist?" they ask. I wish their answer were not only right, but louder and clearer.

Does race exist?

In humans, the answer is really "no", at least if we're talking biology. There is some genetic diversity, although the genetic variation in our whole species is less than within one single family clan of chimpanzees. (OK, that needs some qualification. Of course the human species has many more different genes than a tribe of chimps! But all these variants are very similar to one another, as if they recently diverged from one common ancestor. In contrast, some of the genes in a chimpanzee tribe may have been separate for a million years.) As one biologist pointed out: When we find this little genetic variation in another mammal species, we are worried and call it inbreeding.

The race concept used in Europe and its former colonies is kinda random. It is roughly based on geography, which isn't too bad when we're talking about areas that have been isolated for thousands of years. The Australian Aborigines fit right in there, but for instance the Africans don't. In fact, there seems to be more genetic variation between different ethnic groups in Africa than between them and other "races". This would be less surprising if we sorted people by anything else than skin color. The tallest Africans are approximately twice as tall as the shortest. And even the skin color varies from light milk chocolate to virtually black. There are also black-skinned people native to other parts of the world (although not in the Americas), and some of these are really hard to distinguish from some Africans. A few years ago I read a theory that the truly black Africans had arrived by boat from the East. I have later tried to find out more about this theory, but it doesn't seem to have much support. Then again, any theory about "race" is politically infected from birth.

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There are reasons for that political taboo. Here in Europe we tend to think about Hitler and Nazism. As some Christians say: Darwin made the theory, Nietzsche drew the conclusions and Hitler put them into practice. That's a bit too simple, though. The theory of evolution is if anything more broadly accepted these days than in the first half of the 20th century; racism is not. Would we have kept such a safe distance to racism if we had not seen the ugly results of making it into official policy? I once found a book that was written before the second World War. It argued that there existed at least two different races here in Norway, not even counting the aboriginal Sami people in northern Norway. One of the Norwegian races had blond hair and long skulls, the other had brown hair and short skulls. Yes, so far had the race concept been stretched. After the war, we mercifully heard nothing more about that!

In the USA they had other problems with race. For decades black African slaves were treated as little more than animals; and then for generations after that, their descendants were discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens. To some extent, I hear, this still happens sometimes even though it is no longer official policy. And in the Republic of South Africa racial segregation and discrimination against the blacks and "colored" was part of the country's Constitution until less than a generation ago.

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The modern brand of scientific racism claims that black Africans can be good athletes, but not intellectuals. Their muscles are stronger and faster than those of whites, but with the brains it's the other way around. This is based on statistics that show that Africans on average do worse on IQ tests, while other statistics show that there are more black athletes than you would expect from the size of the populations.

Intriguingly, there are also statistics that show that Asians (and that's "far east" Asians, not those of the "middle east") do better on IQ tests than people of European descent. You don't hear much about leading jobs being reserved for them, though. And when we look closer, we see that a Japanese pupil on average spends as much time on homework in a day as his American counterpart does in a week. Hmm. Perhaps it's not all in the genes after all? Perhaps social conditioning still plays a role...

Anyway, average people are really rare. So even if black children on average are less academically gifted (or inclined), this does not mean that all black children have lower grades than any white children. No, you cannot even say that in any one class the white children will perform better than the black. Nor do we sort children by blood type and encourage those with one blood type to choose another career than those with another blood type. No, we let them study what they feel inclined to study, and encourage them to develop their personal strengths. Why should we not do the same regarding skin color? Just because it is easily visible?

There is no reason to collect "racial" information. Not just because it is sometimes just plain wrong, but because it is either misleading or redundant. For instance, it may be true that African-Americans are more prone to hypertension than European-Americans. But this is called a "family history of hypertension". There are some white families (not few either, I'm sad to say) which also have a tendency toward hypertension. And there are some black families that don't. And so on with other medical conditions and ethnic groups. Treating people based on their skin color rather than their actual genes and environment is Just Plain Wrong. Or at the very least too cheap for a civilized society.

There is only one human race. There were surely others in the past, and there may be more in the future. But right now, our priority is to make sure there is a future for humans. And racial profiling / stereotyping does not help.