There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a
Made-Up Label
It's been used to define and separate people for
millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded
in genetics. - DNA reveals what skin color obscures:
We all have African ancestors.
By Elizabeth Kolbert
June 04, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
In the first
half of the 19th century, one of America’s most
prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel
Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he
collected skulls.
He wasn’t choosy about his
suppliers. He accepted skulls scavenged from
battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his
most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d
been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately
hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With
each skull Morton performed the same procedure: He
stuffed it with pepper seeds—later he switched to
lead shot—which he then decanted to ascertain the
volume of the braincase.
Morton believed that people could be divided into
five races and that these represented separate acts
of creation. The races had distinct characters,
which corresponded to their place in a divinely
determined hierarchy. Morton’s “craniometry” showed,
he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians,” were the
most intelligent of the races. East Asians—Morton
used the term “Mongolian”—though “ingenious” and
“susceptible of cultivation,” were one step down.
Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native
Americans. Blacks, or “Ethiopians,” were at the
bottom. In the decades before the Civil War,
Morton’s ideas were quickly taken up by the
defenders of slavery.
Skulls from the collection of Samuel Morton, the
father of scientific racism, illustrate his
classification of people into five races—which
arose, he claimed, from separate acts of
creation. From left to right: a black woman and
a white man, both American; an indigenous man
from Mexico; a Chinese woman; and a Malaysian
man.
Photograph by Robert Clark - -
PHOTOGRAPHED AT PENN MUSEUM
“He had a lot of influence, particularly in the
South,” says Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist
at the University of Pennsylvania who is showing me
the skull collection, now housed at the
Penn Museum. We’re standing over the braincase
of a particularly large-headed Dutchman who helped
inflate Morton’s estimate of Caucasian capacities.
When Morton died, in 1851, the Charleston Medical
Journal in South Carolina praised him for
“giving to the negro his true position as an
inferior race.”
Today Morton is known as the father of scientific
racism. So many of the horrors of the past few
centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is
inferior to another that a tour of his collection is
a haunting experience. To an uncomfortable degree we
still live with Morton’s legacy: Racial distinctions
continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods,
and our sense of self.
This is the case even though what science
actually has to tell us about race is just the
opposite of what Morton contended.
The Surprising Way Saliva Brought These Six
Strangers Together
Results from National
Geographic’s Geno 2.0 DNA Ancestry Kit revealed that
these seemingly unrelated individuals have a shared
genetic profile. Read more
here.
Morton thought he’d identified immutable and
inherited differences among people, but at the time
he was working—shortly before Charles Darwin put
forth his theory of evolution and long before the
discovery of DNA—scientists had no idea how traits
were passed on. Researchers who have since looked at
people at the genetic level now say that the whole
category of race is misconceived. Indeed, when
scientists set out to assemble the first complete
human genome, which was a composite of several
individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from
people who self-identified as members of different
races. In June 2000, when the results were announced
at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer
of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race
has no genetic or scientific basis.”
Over the past few decades, genetic
research has revealed two deep truths about people.
The first is that all humans are closely
related—more closely related than all chimps, even
though there are many more humans around today.
Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with
the exception of identical twins, everyone has
slightly different versions of some of them. Studies
of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to
reconstruct a kind of family tree of human
populations. That has revealed the second deep
truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today
are Africans.
Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in
Africa—no one is sure of the exact time or place.
The most recent fossil find, from Morocco, suggests
that anatomically modern human features began
appearing as long as 300,000 years ago. For the next
200,000 years or so, we remained in Africa, but
already during that period, groups began to move to
different parts of the continent and become isolated
from one another—in effect founding new populations.
The
DNA profiles of these two are nearly 99
percent the same.
The genes of any two humans, of course, are
even more alike. But after our prehuman
ancestors shed most of their body hair, we
evolved highly visible differences in skin
color. Tiny tweaks to our DNA account for
them. Dark pigmentation would have helped
our ancestors cope with the intense African
sun; when humans migrated out of Africa into
low-sunlight regions, lighter skin became
advantageous.
CARY WOLINSKY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
(CHIMPANZEE); -
Robin
- Hammond (baby)
Ancient
flows of dark and light
Many genes
affect how melanin colors human skin. The genes
predate humanity; some occur in mice and fish.
Variations in four of them—mutations that flip a
gene from darkening to lightening or vice
versa—explain much of the skin-color diversity
in Africa. As our ancestors spread across the
Earth, different mutations proved beneficial at
different latitudes and were passed on.
In humans, as in all species,
genetic changes are the result of random
mutations—tiny tweaks to DNA, the code of life.
Mutations occur at a more or less constant rate,
so the longer a group persists, handing down its
genes generation after generation, the more
tweaks these genes will accumulate. Meanwhile,
the longer two groups are separated, the more
distinctive tweaks they will acquire.
By analyzing the genes of
present-day Africans, researchers have concluded
that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern
Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of
the human family tree. The Pygmies of central
Africa also have a very long history as a
distinct group. What this means is that the
deepest splits in the human family aren’t
between what are usually thought of as different
races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native
Americans. They’re between African populations
such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent
tens of thousands of years separated from one
another even before humans left Africa.
All non-Africans today,
the genetics tells us, are descended from a few
thousand humans who left Africa maybe 60,000
years ago. These migrants were most closely
related to groups that today live in East
Africa, including the Hadza of Tanzania. Because
they were just a small subset of Africa’s
population, the migrants took with them only a
fraction of its genetic diversity.
Somewhere along the way, perhaps
in the Middle East, the travelers met and had
sex with another human species, the
Neanderthals; farther east they encountered yet
another, the Denisovans. It’s believed that both
species evolved in Eurasia from a hominin that
had migrated out of Africa much earlier. Some
scientists also believe the exodus 60,000 years
ago was actually the second wave of modern
humans to leave Africa. If so, judging from our
genomes today, the second wave swamped the
first.
In what was, relatively
speaking, a great rush, the offspring of all
these migrants dispersed around the world. By
50,000 years ago they had reached Australia. By
45,000 years ago they’d settled in Siberia, and
by 15,000 years ago they’d reached South
America. As they moved into different parts of
the world, they formed new groups that became
geographically isolated from one another and, in
the process, acquired their own distinctive set
of genetic mutations.
Most of these tweaks were
neither helpful nor harmful. But occasionally a
mutation arose that turned out to be
advantageous in a new setting. Under the
pressure of natural selection, it spread quickly
through the local population. At high altitudes,
for instance, oxygen levels are low, so for
people moving into the Ethiopian highlands,
Tibet, or the Andean Altiplano, there was a
premium on mutations that helped them cope with
the rarefied air. Similarly, Inuit people, who
adopted a marine-based diet high in fatty acids,
have genetic tweaks that helped them adapt to
it.
Sometimes it’s clear that
natural selection has favored a mutation, but
it’s not clear why. Such is the case with a
variant of a gene called EDAR (pronounced
ee-dar). Most people of East Asian and Native
American ancestry possess at least one copy of
the variant, known as 370A, and many
possess two. But it’s rare among people of
African and European descent.
At the University of
Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine,
geneticist Yana Kamberov has equipped mice with
the East Asian variant of EDAR in hopes
of understanding what it does. “They’re cute,
aren’t they?” she says, opening the cage to show
me. The mice look ordinary, with sleek brown
coats and shiny black eyes. But examined under a
microscope, they are different from their
equally cute cousins in subtle yet significant
ways. Their hair strands are thicker; their
sweat glands are more numerous; and the fat pads
around their mammary glands are smaller.
Kamberov’s mice help explain why
some East Asians and Native Americans have
thicker hair and more sweat glands. (EDAR’s
effect on human breasts is unclear.) But they
don’t provide an evolutionary reason. Perhaps,
Kamberov speculates, the ancestors of
contemporary East Asians at some point
encountered climate conditions that made more
sweat glands useful. Or maybe thicker hair
helped them ward off parasites. Or it could be
that 370A produced other benefits she’s
yet to discover and the changes she has
identified were, in effect, just tagalongs.
Genetics frequently works like this: A tiny
tweak can have many disparate effects. Only one
may be useful—and it may outlive the conditions
that made it so, the way families hand down old
photos long past the point when anyone remembers
who’s in them.
“Unless you have a time machine,
you’re not going to know,” Kamberov sighs.
THERE’S MORE DIVERSITY
IN AFRICA THAN ON ALL THE
OTHER CONTINENTS COMBINED.
That’s because modern humans
originated in Africa and
have lived there the
longest. They’ve had time to
evolve enormous genetic
diversity—which extends to
skin color. Researchers who
study it sometimes use
Africa’s linguistic
diversity—it has more than
2,000 languages (see map
below)—as a guide.
Photographer Robin Hammond
followed their lead,
visiting five representative
language communities. His
portraits span the color
spectrum from Neilton
Vaalbooi (top left in photo
grid above), a Khoe-San boy
from South Africa, to
Akatorot Yelle (bottom
right), a Turkana girl from
Kenya. “There is no
homogeneous African race,”
says geneticist Sarah
Tishkoff of the University
of Pennsylvania. “It doesn’t
exist.” The prehistoric
humans who left Africa some
60,000 years ago—giving rise
over time to the other
peoples of the
world—reflected only a
fraction of Africa’s
diversity.
DNA is often compared to a
text, with the letters standing for chemical
bases—A for adenine, C for
cytosine, G for guanine, and T for
thymine. The human genome consists of three
billion base pairs—page after page of A’s,
C’s, G’s, and T’s—divided
into roughly 20,000 genes. The tweak that gives
East Asians thicker hair is a single base change
in a single gene, from a T to a C.
Similarly, the mutation that’s
most responsible for giving Europeans lighter
skin is a single tweak in a gene known as
SLC24A5, which consists of roughly 20,000
base pairs. In one position, where most
sub-Saharan Africans have a G, Europeans
have an A. About a decade ago a
pathologist and geneticist named Keith Cheng, at
Penn State College of Medicine, discovered the
mutation by studying zebrafish that had been
bred to have lighter stripes. The fish, it
turned out, possessed a mutation in a pigment
gene analogous to the one that is mutated in
Europeans.
Studying DNA extracted from
ancient bones, paleogeneticists have found that
the G-to-A substitution was
introduced into western Europe relatively
recently—about 8,000 years ago—by people
migrating from the Middle East, who also brought
a newfangled technology: farming. That means the
people already in Europe—hunter-gatherers who
created the spectacular cave paintings at
Lascaux, for example—probably were not white but
brown. The ancient DNA suggests that many of
those dark-skinned Europeans also had blue eyes,
a combination rarely seen today.
“What the genetics shows is that
mixture and displacement have happened again and
again and that our pictures of past ‘racial
structures’ are almost always wrong,” says David
Reich, a Harvard University paleogeneticist
whose new book on the subject is called
Who We Are and How We Got Here. There
are no fixed traits associated with specific
geographic locations, Reich says, because as
often as isolation has created differences among
populations, migration and mixing have blurred
or erased them.
Across the world today, skin
color is highly variable. Much of the difference
correlates with latitude. Near the Equator lots
of sunlight makes dark skin a useful shield
against ultraviolet radiation; toward the poles,
where the problem is too little sun, paler skin
promotes the production of vitamin D. Several
genes work together to determine skin tone, and
different groups may possess any number of
combinations of different tweaks. Among
Africans, some people, such as the Mursi of
Ethiopia, have skin that’s almost ebony, while
others, such as the Khoe-San, have skin the
color of copper. Many dark-skinned East
Africans, researchers were surprised to learn,
possess the light-skinned variant of SLC24A5.
(It seems to have been introduced to Africa,
just as it was to Europe, from the Middle East.)
East Asians, for their part, generally have
light skin but possess the dark-skinned version
of the gene. Cheng has been using zebrafish to
try to figure out why. “It’s not simple,” he
says.
When people speak about race,
usually they seem to be referring to skin color
and, at the same time, to something more than
skin color. This is the legacy of people such as
Morton, who developed the “science” of race to
suit his own prejudices and got the actual
science totally wrong. Science today tells us
that the visible differences between peoples are
accidents of history. They reflect how our
ancestors dealt with sun exposure, and not much
else.
“We often have this idea that if
I know your skin color, I know X, Y, and Z about
you,” says Heather Norton, a molecular
anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati
who studies pigmentation. “So I think it can be
very powerful to explain to people that all
these changes we see, it’s just because I have
an A in my genome and she has a G.”
Even today Neanderthals are in most of
us.
In Düsseldorf, Germany, a sculpture from the
nearby
Neanderthal Museum draws curiosity and
recognition from passersby. Some of the
first humans to leave Africa met and had sex
with Neanderthals. As a result, all
non-Africans today carry a small amount of
Neanderthal DNA. Those genes may boost their
immune systems and vitamin D levels but also
their risk of schizophrenia—and excessive
belly fat.
RECONSTRUCTION BY KENNIS & KENNIS.
PHOTOGRAPHED WITH ASSISTANCE FROM
NEANDERTHAL MUSEUM, GERMANY
About an hour away from
Morton’s collection, at West Chester University,
Anita Foeman directs the
DNA Discussion Project. On a bright fall
morning, she’s addressing the latest
participants in the project—a dozen students of
varying hues, each peering at a laptop screen. A
few weeks earlier the students had filled out
questionnaires about their ancestry. What did
they believe their background to be? The
students had then submitted saliva samples for
genetic testing. Now, via their computers, they
are getting back their results. Their faces
register their reactions.
One young woman, whose family
has lived in India as far back as anyone can
recall, is shocked to discover some of her
ancestry is Irish. Another young woman, who has
grown up believing one of her grandparents was
Native American, is disappointed to learn this
isn’t so. A third describes herself as
“confused.” “I was expecting a lot more Middle
Eastern,” she says.
Foeman, a professor of
communications, is accustomed to such responses.
She started the DNA Discussion Project in 2006
because she was interested in stories, both the
kind that families tell and the kind that genes
tell. From early on in the project, it was clear
these were often not the same. A young man who
identified as biracial was angry to discover his
background was, in fact, almost entirely
European. Several students who had been raised
in Christian households were surprised to learn
some of their ancestors were Jewish.
“All these stories that have
been suppressed pop out in the genes,” Foeman
says. Even Foeman, who identifies as
African-American, was caught off guard by her
results. They showed that some of her ancestors
were from Ghana, others from Scandinavia.
“I grew up in the 1960s, when
light skin was really a big deal,” she explains.
“So I think of myself as being pretty brown
skinned. I was surprised that a quarter of my
background was European.”
“It really brought home this
idea that we make race up,” she says.
Of course, just because race is
“made up” doesn’t make it any less powerful. To
a disturbing extent, race still determines
people’s perceptions, their opportunities, and
their experiences. It is enshrined in the U.S.
census, which last time it was taken, in 2010,
asked Americans to choose their race from a list
that reflects the history of the concept;
choices included “White,” “Black,” “American
Indian,” “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,”
and “Samoan.” Racial distinctions were written
into the Jim Crow laws of the
post-Reconstruction South and are now written
into statutes like the Civil Rights Act, which
prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or
color. To the victims of racism, it’s small
consolation to say that the category has no
scientific basis.
Genetic sequencing, which has
allowed researchers to trace the path of human
migration and now allows individuals to trace
their own ancestry, has introduced new ways of
thinking about human diversity. Or at least so
Foeman hopes. The DNA Discussion Project gives
participants insight into their own background,
which is generally a lot more complicated than
they’d been led to believe. And this, in turn,
opens up a conversation about the long, tangled,
and often brutal history that all of us
ultimately share.
“That race is a human construction doesn’t mean
that we don’t fall into different groups or
there’s no variation,” Foeman says. “But if we
made racial categories up, maybe we can make new
categories that function better.”
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