Biopolitics

by Stefano Vaj

  Although almost all those who reach puberty have, already in primitive human societies, and even more so in modern society, the opportunity to mate and procreate, some individuals are not just able to access a greater number of partners, but partners of better quality, and are in addition often able to provide better conditions for the offspring conceived with the latter, which in turn will increase their chances of survival and of reproductive success. We have also seen how in the modern world the genetic traits of these individuals may well not correspond to characteristics needed for survival in different conditions, or even be hardly desirable or acceptable to most of our contemporaries; and how, even taken all together, they may not necessarily reflect a spectrum of genetic variance sufficient to maintain the flexibility or diversity of our species. But what is here in discussion is to what extent the racial divergence of populations is the result of a “directional” selection; or whether a genetic trait is influenced by selection; and furthermore (and this is a problem that is even harder to solve) why in different populations different variants end up being dominant.

  Our current state of knowledge in this field is absolutely rudimentary; not the least, in connection to what specifically concerns the human races, because of the climate of suspicion and the lack of funding that today clearly surrounds research in such areas.

  We know however that, insofar as the races of domestic animals are concerned, the answer is much simpler: certain traits are deliberately selected by the breeder, based on the genetic material, ultimately of a wild origin, which the germ lines present in the species make available to him.

  Now, even if the first formation of human races indubitably goes back to the time of hominisation, and therefore much further than the birth of “Spenglerian cultures,” it is legitimate to suppose that at least from the time of the Neolithic revolution the human races as we know them (or have known them until now) are also the result of a gigantic experiment of human self-domestication, in its turn objectively aiming for precisely the directional selection of culturally determined features.

  The “rediscovery” by Plato of myths and norms in this sense, that he himself regarded as ancestral and already beclouded in his day, eloquently witnesses to the primordial nature of this order of ideas in the Indo-European context[174]; but before that Hesiod or the Indian Mahabharata, or the foundation myths of the time before the dispersion and the wall of writing, which Dumézil has shed light on, do well reflect the definite transition, that occurred thousands of years ago, from “natural” mechanisms to a conscious and historical stage – until arriving at our time to precisely the transition to a self-aware stage, a stage of superior consciousness.

  Still, directional selection alone can neither explain the origin of the racial differentiations, nor exhaust the description of its relevant mechanisms, in which genetic drift plays an equally important part. Such phenomena have been studied, in the case of humans, above all with respect to highly isolated peoples that have remained largely outside of the Neolithic revolution until the beginning of the modern age. Some authors have studied certain Amazonian peoples[175], others groups of Australian aborigines[176]. If the example of the genetic mark left on a much larger scale in Asia by the Mongolian domination and by Gengis Khan himself is well known, amazingly, in one of the examined villages, it was verified that today one quarter of the entire population alive today goes back to just two individuals, presumably dominant males or former tribal chiefs.[177]

  It is true that in such populations, while women are uniformly exposed to the probability of pregnancy and seldom fail to reproduce, men are marked by a considerably higher variance when it comes to reproductive success. This however is not enough to explain the phenomenon, by the way well described also with regard to animal and vegetal populations, where conditions of sufficient segregation subsist.

  In particular, this very scenario has been observed with regard to …self-segregated religious groups in the United States;[178] although people who belong to them presumably practice a rigorous monogamy, there are inevitable variations in the number of sons per family, and in the percentage among these who remain bachelors. With the passing of time, the cumulative effect of the variations leads to the diversification of genetic frequencies, that is, to an incipient racial diversification.

  In contrast to selection, which is a directional and deterministic process, we are here in the presence of a stochastic, random process: not only does the entire humankind descend from a population that only ten thousand years ago was two order of magnitudes smaller, but innumerable genetic lines that were present in it have in the meantime gone extinct, and continue to go extinct with each generation. “Random genetic drift,” “random flow,” “the founder effect” and “non-Darwinian evolution” are only some of the many names attributed to these processes.

  Dobzhansky remarks:

  Race differences induced by natural selection have biologically a very different meaning from those induced by random genetic drift. Natural selection makes the populations differentially adapted to different environments. In other words, race differences which arose by selection are, or at some time were, adjusted to life in some kind of different circumstances. This is not necessarily the case with differences due to drift. At least initially, the populations may be adaptively equivalent. To be sure, the selection may act on the originally neutral differences and make them parts of adaptively integrated hereditary endowments. Selection and drift may in the course of evolution be interrelated.[179]

  Besides, anyone who doubts that the relevant questions are “ideologically indifferent” need only refer back to the time of the debate in question. The importance given to the stochastic factor (and therefore, in a not entirely metaphorical sense, to “destiny”) has followed an interesting cycle. The prestige attributed to natural selection as the agent of diversification of the races, and more generally of evolution, hit the bottom in the first half of the 20th century, when genetics began to grasp its fundamental concepts, so much so that even Haldane or Wright, the founders of the so-called synthetic theory of evolution, ended up recognising between 1926 and 1932 the fundamental importance of random genetic drift, sometimes even defined as “the Sewall Wright principle.”

  Many authors, particularly in continental Europe, would recognise the role of genetic drift as a useful hypothesis in the explanation of differences between organisms to which it was hard to attribute any particular value in terms of survival (or, in more modern terms, in terms of reproductive success), a category to which a number of racial differences encountered in the human species most certainly belongs.

  The reaction was virulent in the fifties and sixties. Although the theoretical role of genetic drift could not be denied, its importance was declared unclear for natural populations and therefore also for the evolution of the races and of the species. Such preference was owed to the perceived “soothing” and “progressive” nature of selection and adaptation (which would ultimately make racial differences just a consequence, albeit indirect and genetically fixed, of the “environment”) as opposed to an identity viewed as emerging as such out of the tangle between randomness and choice – and therefore precisely out of destiny.

  This debate concerns in particular racial traits, but, as is obvious, has a more general bearing on natural history. In any case, already at the end of the sixties the importance of genetic drift could no longer be denied, not least because of the observation that the majority of micro-mutations had no effect on the adaptation of the organism, and therefore their spreading and affirmation must necessarily be linked to the random drift of the genetic pool of the population[180]; so that today the role of genetic drift is unanimously recognised, in particular by molecular biologists and by those who study population genetics.

  Besides, in this respect, in Darwin himself one finds surprising annotations that would today be considered “non-Darwinian,” like when he writes in the Origin of the Species: “Variations neither useful nor injur
ious would not be affected by natural selection, and would be left a fluctuating element, as perhaps we see in the species called polymorphic.”[181]

  In fact, if, as it is true for all populations of sexed living beings, the presence of selectively neutral traits is subject to fluctuations, such traits are inevitably subjected to a possible genetic drift, that is, to the fact that some variations will get lost in some populations, will settle for good in others, and will remain fluctuating in others still, given a sufficiently large number of generations. Such a number, more exactly defined as the average number of generations comprised between the origin and the fixation of an adaptively neutral mutant gene, as illustrated by Kimura,[182] is approximately 4N(e), with N(e) the number of reproductively-active population members.

  This is important because, even when the combined incidence of “natural” selective factors is taken into account, the numbers in question require, in order to reach the degree of differentiation one encounters among the human races[183], that the populations of the “founders” has been repeatedly reduced to relatively few units in the course of history, and/or that the population effectively taking part in the gene pool of successive generations has in the long run remained numerically low.

  In other words, the existing races have to stem from very small and well-delimited groups, and/or from groups in which the reproductive differential of the various members is highly differentiated. This obviously points to genetic segregation (endogamy)[184] and oriented selection, which we have already seen is implied in the cultural differentiation of the racial groups. What does all this mean?

  Today the human species, like other sexed animal and vegetal species, is divided into principal races (subspecies), secondary races and local populations. The subdivision in question is in addition strictly connected, in very complex ways, to other differentiations, which are typically human (that is, “cultural”), such as the linguistic, political, religious etc., that interact with the former in defining the concrete and diversified communities that make up humanity. Such a situation might be “approved” or “disapproved,” but it constitutes incontrovertibly the legacy of which we are the heirs.

  Someone who maintains that its retention and development is desirable – or even, who simply does not foolishly accept to ignore the price to pay for overturning and renouncing this heritage, for instance in terms of the genetic wealth and diversity of the species, and of its chance of long term survival – cannot avoid confronting the conditions on the basis of which such subdivisions have managed to assert and maintain themselves in the past.

  It is easy for instance to observe that, if geographical separation has always played a relative part in the segregation (and, as a consequence, of the differentiations) of human populations, its role today is progressively and inevitably fading.

  In addition to spatial mobility, cultural entropy, by removing relative barriers, for instance linguistic ones, is not only the object of a deliberate ideological project – which, besides openly promotes a genetic melting pot as well, notwithstanding the contradictory contention that ethno-racial differences would be “irrelevant” – but also a direct consequence of the globalisation of communications, and, once more, of the obliteration of distances.

  The increasing uniformisation of the human environment on a planetary scale (from diet to air-conditioning to lifestyles to the alteration of selective pressure in a uniform and, as we have seen, potentially dysgenic way) also tends to remove the effects of “directional” selection and converges with the generalised mixing actively promoted by current “immigrationism”.[185]

  On the other hand, as Gregory Stock remarks,

  We are the result of an intricate interplay of genes and environment, and the two are interdependent. Our genetic tendencies can shape our environment by steering our choices, and environmental influences can switch genes on or off. This means that as society ever more successfully eliminates extreme variations in the environment – say, by providing basic nutrition and education to all – genes will become more, not less, important influences in shaping us.[186]

  In these circumstances, not only is it clear that the diversity and richness of the species in terms of variance between its various populations would be “naturally” destined, be it only asymptotically, to disappear; but it becomes evident also that new races could never emerge again (apart from the hypothesis of the dispersion of our species across different planets), if not in post-atomic scenarios, not even over geological time scales.[187]

  The question is no longer whether it is true that “all people are different and always will be,” or that “all people are equal, or at least they should become equal.”

  The point is that today the survival and development of diversity are the object of a solely human responsibility, and can only be “artificial,” the result of a deliberate choice of a fundamentally political, emotional and aesthetic nature.

  A genuine opposition to globalisation means not only radically leaving behind the egalitarian and humanist mental framework, but also the illusion that it is possible from purely reactionary positions to delay the process under way by more than a few generations.

  Cavalli-Sforza, whose work is absolutely outstanding from a scientific point of view, but whose personal choices and values, despite the accusations he has at times been subjected to, perfectly conform to the prevailing ideological mainstream, concludes Genes, Peoples and Languages[188] as follows:

  Man’s genetic future is indeed of very little interest [our italics], because it is probable that there will be no major changes, and anyhow fewer than have taken place until now.[189] […] The force that most changes our biology is natural selection, which acts through differences in mortality and fertility among individuals. Medicine has almost abolished mortality prior to reproductive age, and fertility must decrease to very low values if it is to prevail over the demographic explosion that is threatening. If all families had two children and no mortality prior to reproduction, natural selection would completely disappear. Genetic drift – another cause of evolution – is almost completely frozen at the current level of population density. Mutations can be regarded, at the present time, as dangerous, insofar as they cause potentially harmful damage to DNA, and it is therefore probably that they will be limited and avoided as much as is possible. At this stage man’s biological transformation is arrested. This of course is true unless man will have the folly to voluntarily change himself [our italics]. Luckily the possibilities offered by genetic engineering are still almost non-existent.[190] Otherwise there might always be some crackpots who will want to create better races. In a future still more remote shall we want special control mechanisms, such as those in place regarding nuclear explosions, to ensure that we spare our descendants the nightmare of Huxley’s Brave New World?[191] Luckily [another echo of the author’s faith in “luck,” this secular version of Providence, and in the possibility to avoid everything that he manifestly finds morally “unbearable”] it would be very difficult to hide for long a human hatchery destined to breed a different humanity for the new world.

  And further:

  There is however one great genetic change that is about to take place inside the human species, because of the migrations that imply an on-going and complex mixing. At the end of this process, and if – as seems probable – this one will continue, humanity will become less varied in a very precise sense: the differences between the groups will diminish. There will be less ground for racism, which will be an advantage. This process will in any case alter the average type of the population. At least today, the many ethnic groups have very different reproductive rates. Europeans are demographically stationary, or almost, while in many non-industrialised countries, the populations are increasing at a speed previously unseen on Earth. Hence, the relative frequency of the europoid type will diminish.[192]

  To such conclusions it is easy to object that it is precisely in the Brave New World of a project of “normalised” humanity, t
aking place on a planetary scale, that we are today immersed in up to our ears; and that the human and political control of the biological destiny of the species and of its populations, once it can directly manipulate the genome and germ lines, could certainly speed up the process, but could also (and in some ideal contexts certainly would) act in the very opposite direction.

  However, to such normalisation, and in particular to the extinction (save for a modest reabsorption) of some of the ethnic components of present-day humanity, in particular…our own, it is simply impossibile to oppose a mere “defence” of the traditional factors that produced them.

  The genie is out of the bottle. Transportation technology does exist, as does the uniformisation of the environment; the natural barriers have lost their significance, not only thanks to the globally prevailing universalist stance, but to the global extension of audiovisual communications, with a subsequent trend towards planetary monoglottism; similarly it is hard to imagine the disappearance of the fruits of modern medicine or the availability of safe and reliable methods of contraception.

  It should also be stressed that all this is not just the direct result of the adventure of the “second man” now being accomplished, but within its framework a specific product of the very European spirit. Spengler writes: