by Stefano Vaj
It would moreover be easy to object that the opposite remains true, that is, that the light pigmentation of the Europoids represents a rather unique feature, with possibly the slight exception of the Ainu people of northern Japan – whose proto Indo-European parentage has anyhow been speculated about.
Yet here too this scholar chooses, for rhetoric ends, imaginary targets in order to make moral proclamations. No anthropologist has ever imagined that a Melanesian and a Zulu belong to the same racial group because they are both equally black, no more than even the most illiterate militant sucker of the Ku Klux Klan has ever considered an albino Negro as a member, on the “merit” of this affliction, of his own racial group.
It is everyday experience, on the other hand, that confirms how easy it is to guess at least what major racial group someone belongs to on the basis of a mere black-and-white photo with an unknown time of exposure, or even on basis of an identikit, even though in these conditions it is impossible to say with certainty how dark is the skin of the person portrayed; what does instead play a part, in such a guess, is the unconscious influence of a number of quantitative parameters, which perhaps are all part of the range of internal variability of the single races that exhibit the traits in question, but the convergence of which leaves no doubt in the majority of the cases, not even in an observer of minor perspicacity – and not even in well-drilled “expert system” running on an electronic processor.
For this reason it seems utterly implausible to conclude, like Jacquard, that “the accumulation of ever more accurate data, and their treatment with ever more complex procedures, only contribute to making the classification of the different populations that compose our species increasingly hard.” If anything, this classification becomes on the contrary more refined, informed and insightful.
But the French geneticist goes on:
Therefore the very clear geographical vision of our childhood, the Whites, the Blacks, the Yellows, is now muddled: it no longer gives us any directions. Would scientific research perhaps have gone astray? In reality, the role of science is not that of providing infallible answers to all our queries. There are some questions that should not be answered [our italics]; to give even a partial or imprecise answer to an absurd question is to turn into the accomplice of a sham, to be guilty of taking advantage of others’ trust. If the classification of mankind into more or less homogenous groups, that one can call “races,” had any real biological meaning, then the role of biology would be to establish as best it could such a classification; but this classification makes no sense. It is true that my friend Lampa, a Bedick citizen of eastern Senegal, is very black and that I am roughly speaking white, but some of his blood groups could be closer to mine that those of my next door neighbor, Monsieur Dupont. The result emphasised by Lewontin[163] means that the biological distance that separates me from Monsieur Dupont is, on average, inferior by just a fifth from the distance that separates me from Lampa […] Does this minute difference deserve all the attention that we have been giving it for centuries?
Such a conclusion made for effect – which omits to consider that Jacquard for that matter also shares like all humans 98% of his own genome with that of chimpanzees,[164] and might for just this trivial reason be excluded from the circle of his closest friend – is a blatant example of the psychological phenomenon of repression mentioned several times already: if something is intolerable, it does not exist; and if it does exist it is appropriate, incumbent, to pretend that it does not.
On the contrary, it so happens that the existence of races, that is, of the relative segregation and “typification” of the variances between the human populations, as well as of almost all other animal and vegetal species, is exactly what provides the genetic underpinnings for the emergence, preservation and selection of this diversity – that is, abundance, flexibility, polymorphism of stable group features – which even the title of Jacquard’s pamphlet praises with involuntary irony and which, not wrongly, is given a crucial importance as to the adaptability of a species and its chance for long term survival.
7. Drift, adaptation, differentiation
We largely owe it to the already-mentioned Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza that we have recently come to know, for the first time with passable accuracy, the story of the last hundred thousand years of human races, thanks to an impressive research,[165] the impact of which is still hard to appreciate and comparable only to the historical work of Georges Dumézil on the five or ten millennia of Indo-European identity.
From where stem such differences?
A century ago Darwin felt “baffled in all our attempts to account for the differences between the races of man.” In particular, natural selection can hardly be invoked, because “we are at once met by the objection that beneficial variations alone can be thus preserved; and as far as we are enabled to judge (although always liable to error on this head) not one of the external differences between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him.” He put more faith in sexual selection: “For my own part I conclude that of all the causes which have led to the differences in external appearance between the races of man, and to a certain extent between man and the lower animals, sexual selection has been by far the most efficient.”[166]
Such a point of view is of course outdated, in particular because it mixes up intraspecific and interspecific selection (where sexual selection cannot by definition play any part), but above all because it makes an artificial distinction between natural selection in the strictest sense (understood as the individual’s capacity to survive) and sexual selection (that is, the capacity to attract a fecund partner, and the best possible partner), which sociobiology reduces to a single factor, that is the capacity of a gene to efficiently replicate itself, individual survival or sex appeal being only some of the presuppositions with this “goal” in sight.
But what is of interest here is the fact that Darwin’s doubts and uncertainty in this respect did not change much until very recently. As Dobzhanski remarks:
Until less than a generation ago, the leading anthropologists assumed that race differences are mostly adaptively neutral, and consequently made little effort to discover their selective values. Radical changes in human environments brought about by cultural developments made the problem particularly difficult to approach;[167] a genetic trait may have played an adaptive role a million years ago which was quite different from its role ten thousand years ago, and that again may have been different from what it is at present. Finally, by a curious twist of reasoning, the doctrine of human equality seemed to exclude the possibility of differential genetic adaptedness,
a concept that comes dangerously close to suggesting the possible suitability of human beings and of races for different roles and lifestyles, as suggested on the contrary in a well-known passage by Aristotle.[168]
The adaptive importance itself of so manifest a characteristic as skin pigmentation is open to discussion. The idea according to which a genome that yields a dark pigmentation protects against sunburn and skin cancer – exactly as the physiological mechanism that regulates the production of melanin, and therefore of “sun-tan” in individuals – is very ancient, and is made plausible, in addition to common sense, by the fact that dark-skinned races invariably inhabit (or at least inhabited) the tropical and equatorial zones of the planet.
Less clear is the usefulness of a minor endowment of melanin in individuals less exposed to solar radiation, but it has been pointed out more recently how a greater intake of sunlight, where this is hypothetically scarce, allows for a better synthesis of Vitamin D, the anti-rickets vitamin.
It is true on the other hand that dark skin is responsible for an increased uptake of the heat channeled by sunlight precisely where such an effect would be less desirable; and furthermore, the rule of the geographical distribution of brown pigmentation is not without its exceptions: the Indians in equatorial South America are not particularly dark and some natives of north-east Siberia are almost as bro
wn as those in North Africa. There are however a number of possible explanations of the “exceptions” in question, either based on the supposition that people with quite light skin in very hot countries (and perhaps those with rather dark complexion in very cold countries) are relatively recent immigrants, or based on more thorough assessments of the factors of their respective environments, that for instance take into account that the inhabitants of South America remain more often in the shade of the jungle than out in the open, or that the inhabitants of the polar regions enjoy UV radiation that has been increased by the reflection of the snow and by the extreme length of the summer days, so much so that “white men” in these conditions today typically use sunscreens.
Others have also stressed the possible mimetic importance of skin colour in the rain forest; and actually, among the different races of wild animal species (for example the Siberian tiger compared to the tiger of Sumatra) this is the clearest and most frequently adopted explanation of the different pigmentations encountered.
In any event, hypotheses on the adaptive value of pigmentation amongst human races are not mutually exclusive, and their very number makes such value highly plausible.
Similarly, a considerable amount of careful research has been devoted to the physiology of human populations adapted to life in certain particularly challenging environments, such as for instance the Indios in the Andean altitudes (cold, low levels of oxygen) and the Eskimos.[169] Others have compared the effect of physical effort on young white and black males in conditions of extreme heat and humidity.[170]
All research has observed statistically significant differences in the expected areas, irrespective of adaptations acquired or not in the course of an individual’s lifetime.
More anecdotally it is the black world champion of 100 meters sprint Ben Johnson that remarked, in reply to a question during a television interview on the absolute dominance of athletes of African origin in his Olympic specialty, that for at least thirty generations in Africa one’s sprint had a much greater relevance for individual survival and success (from hunting to tribal warfare to flight from predators) than what has been the case for races living in other places.
Analogous considerations can be made for a trait such as the so-called “intelligence quotient,” that has given rise to so much polemics and that we today know with certainty to have a strong genetic component, so much so that distribution curves show clear differences based on race.[171]
The objection that the tests would not be culturally and racially neutral, and biased by the prejudice of “Western” and “white” scholars, conversely implies that what the tests measure is exactly…the characteristics selected in the same environment that the tests reflect, and characteristics which would most certainly have had a different adaptive importance or none at all in a different context – in which racially and selectively salient traits could instead have been, let’s suppose, the statistical resistance to malaria, or the ecstatic empathy with other members of the group in the course of shamanic rituals, or indeed sprint velocity.
What is more, this example takes us immediately back to the fact already discussed that human environments are by definition, from the Neolithic revolution and the emergence of the “second man” onwards, culturally modified and determined environments, of which the adaptive value in the sociobiological sense and the traits moulded by culturally selective pressures are inextricably mixed.
This is relevant also for the demystification of the “nature/nurture” opposition, which usually implies the suspicion that one has deemed natural, or at least genetically programmed, traits what would in reality be due to the influence of the culture in which one has grown up (if not of one’s “education,” or one’s “social environment”).
In fact, while the creation of cultures properly constitutes the nature of human beings, it is reasonable to imagine that these same identifying features of a given macroculture are the result not just of “chance,” but of a collective psychism that is (also) the expression of a specific ethnobiological identity. So much so that the characteristics of a given people – save for the case of individuals brought up outside their own community of origin – are doubly determined as to their individual phenotype, in both what pertains to the genetic luggage that the individual shares with the rest of the group, and what pertains to the direct shaping, as well as genetically selective, pressures of a “cultural” environment which in its turn is the expression of this people and lineage, and of no other.
A confirmation that this is the case is offered by a human characteristic that is sufficiently “discrete” (that is, with sharp leaps between the haves and have-nots) like language, which is undisputedly and thoroughly a cultural characteristic.
Indeed, we know from Noam Chomsky and from modern linguistics how the ability to speak is genetically programmed in the human species, thanks to the innate availability of a “universal grammar” that must be activated at the latest between the age of three or four years through learning a series of parameters (or “switches”) that in their turn define the structure of one particular language among all the others.
In addition we know empirically that all humans, removed from their community of origin, can be brought up to speak any existing language as their mother tongue.
How then does it come that it is a specific people, and no other, that has developed a given language? Or, in other words, why are languages not all the same?
The inevitable conclusion appears to be that there exists a link between the traits that identify a given people with respect to all the others and the specific characteristics (which are here by definition not the result of genetic, but rather purely cultural, heritage) identifying the linguistic family to which the same people has given birth[172] – via the usual mechanisms, in this case only pseudo-biological, of segregation, drift and selection.
This is equally true for what Darwin defines as “sexual selection,” that is, the selective process arising from preferences for potential reproductive partners. While sociobiology has demonstrated that such preferences are in their turn dictated by the “expectations” of the genes of the partner as to the reproductive success of their common progeny, these same preferences are strongly determined amongst humans by conformity to social, aesthetic and moral ideals that are culturally determined; a conformity which in its turn yields an essentially higher probability of reproductive success of their progeny inside the community concerned.
All this has little to do, either in the human or in other sexed living species, with an adaptation or “improvement” in the sense in which Darwin interpreted it.
Konrad Lorenz already observed how sexual selection can favour the emergence of physical and behavioural traits that generate a well defined prejudice with regard to the individual’s chances of survival.[173]
Moreover, the distinct visual, olfactory, auditory, behavioural traits of the members of a group can may lead to a phenomenon of “reinforcement” that can readily seed a distinct race – if not in the end a different species. The genetically determined preference for some traits in possible sexual partners tends in fact to reinforce the segregation of the group in which it manifests, and at the same time to reinforce the frequency and intensity of these traits in this same group, where in their turn such preferences will become a reproductive advantage, in an either vicious or virtuous circle.
In the human species all this takes on particular shades because, as we have seen, already at the stage of the “second man” our species culturally shapes its environment with respect to factors in turn shaping its biological identity.
In the case of the “third man,” the problem is rendered even more complex because, as we saw in connection to the “dysgenic peril,” the traits that the (artificial) environment selects, or ceases to select, do not necessarily correspond to those desirable in the abstract, be it only from a human, and not just “Darwinian,” point of view.
The same mechanisms relative to sexual sel
ection moreover become distorted in the case of our species in a very peculiar way. The traditional elements of clothing, perfume, cosmetics, of the utilisation of symbolic ornaments, do in fact increasingly merge with the results that can be obtained using medical treatments, mesotherapy and plastic surgery of all kinds, not excluding transplants, that obviously alter the “reading of the phenotype” by the possible partner, including with respect to the most blatant ethnic markers, starting with the eye-shape that Japanese women had surgically altered at the end of World War II in order to conform to the somatic character (and presumably to the canons of beauty) of the victor, until today when it is possible to alter even one’s natural skin pigmentation, as desired and realised by, among others, personalities like Michael Jackson.
In any case, already in the seventies Dobzhansky was remarking how in modern views “natural selection” and “sexual selection” are no longer distinct in the same way as they were for Darwin.
The selection coefficient, that is, the difference between the Darwinian fitness of various genotypes, in fact measures only the rate of transmission of certain components of these genotypes from generation to generation, while the fact that the differential genetic transmission is due, in some cases, to a greater mating success, while in others, it is provoked by mortality or differential fertility, or even by an accelerated development, or by any other factor, remains relatively unimportant. The genetic variants favoured by the resultants of all these factors will increase their frequency inside the population, while the frequency of those that are disadvantaged will decrease. A reduced success in mating may thus be compensated for by a greater vitality or fertility – or vice versa.