A Troublesome Inheritance

When I first heard of Guns, Germs and Steel (GGS), by Jared Diamond, I was disinclined to read it, and still have not done so conscientiously. In reading A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicolas Wade I have a better inkling of why my intuition made me avoid the former of these two best-selling titles. Apart from the 'harsh' title GGS is far too deterministic, accounting for culture in terms of metal weapons, disease, geography and other external rather than human factors. Diamond, like the famous anthropologists Franz Boas and his student Ashley Montagu, deny the existence of race regarding it as a "social construct" with no basis in biology – a "fallacy," a "dangerous myth," "America's original sin." Montagu even labeled it "witchcraft." They evidently believe race (and the diversity it implies) is somehow unrelated to biological and evolutionary reality, having arisen as the result of humanity's conceptual misunderstanding of itself.

The message of Troublesome is fairly simple: "race" and its biological, genetic, ethnic and social manifestations is a real phenomenon that can and should be studied without implying that its students are "racists" who believe in the superiority of one race over another. To deny the existence of race because some people are racist is an ideological and unscientific approach popular in some academic circles, mostly because it is a touchy and potentially inflammatory subject like politics or religion. But these too are deeply influential cultural realities.

Eugenics is also a taboo subject. While its extremely objectionable manifestations (sterilisation of perceived inferiors etcetera) is despicable, not only is breeding (artificial selection) a deliberate application of eugenics in the plant and animal world, it is also exercised through our free, human choice when it comes to "selecting" partners, often within our own race or ethnicity. Like seems to attract like, with evolutionary implications for biology and our cultural institutions. So race is a biological reality. Wade holds that there is substantial consensus about the traditional threefold distinction of Asian, Indo-European and African (Mongoloid, Caucasian and Negroid), with Australian and Native American as two less populous but distinctive groups. Here Wade reminds us of the famous Dmitry Belyaev experiment with foxes, our mammalian brethren. By selecting foxes simply for their degree of tameness, within a few generations he bred in many juvenile anatomical features that had not been selected for. If it works for foxes, why not for we human mammals? If no one denies the physical variation in stature, skin, hair and eye color between ethnic groups (races) should we be surprised that there are different manifestations in the sphere of social behavior and culture, which also correlate with genetic variation?

Here Wade makes the compelling argument, backed up by diverse studies in the broad field of cultural anthropology, that the shift from tribal to city state, nation state and global polities has brought about inevitable change, which in a word has helped "tame" human nature, not least by forcing most individuals, in any given culture, to live and let live with a widening and more civilised community of neighbors beyond the narrow confines of family and tribe. Thus, the murder rate has gone down steadily in the transition from tribal to more regional and nationally-structured polities that have instituted religion, the rule of law and other collectively civilising influences. [For skeptics who doubt such progress, mere rumination on the subject of improving human nature implies a higher aspiration and reluctance to regress]. Skeptics should also note the well-established biological evidence for the ongoing evolutionary juvenilisation of the human species (known as paedomorphosis) leading to a physical gracilisation, or decrease in robustness, and increasing "domestication" or tameness. We are no longer robust Neanderthals, at least in 96% of our genetic makeup (Network 116). Thus, biology and culture remain inextricable interwoven.

There is, it appears, no single gene to ensure "tameness" or civilisation in individuals or cultures as a whole, but "gene frequencies" play an important, collective role. The MAO-A gene is "associated with aggression" and occurs in different frequencies, in different individuals, resulting in different levels of aggression and delinquency in different ethnic groups. So genes influence human behavior and cause it to "vary from one race to another." Vive la difference: but use it not for racist generalisations! Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) sites on the genome where at least 1% of the population has a non-standard DNA unit have helped define distinctive ethnic groups (races) that are generally consistent with the aforementioned threefold (plus 2) race distinctions. However, races are not sharply defined but rather are "clusters of individuals with genetic variation." Such individuals give the overall cultural group (cluster) certain propensities [rather as an individual might influence a group culturally]. To date the chicken and egg riddle of whether cultural propensities drive genetic variation or vice versa is unresolved, but almost certainly it is a complex two-way evolutionary dynamic. This exposition is appealing, at least to this reader, because it integrates the complex race debate holistically with biological and cultural evolution, and thus with history, including changing views on race and racism. Put another way, given that race and ethnicity is widely recognised, except by a few ideologically motivated, if well-meaning, naysayers, and is, moreover, responsible for much of what we call history, how could these cultural, biological (genetic) factors not be interwoven in a complex evolutionary dynamic with everything else in the biosphere, including tamed and untamed foxes, human delinquents and saints!?

Arguably we do not need to use the term "race" as a rigid label, if we recognise, as Wade does, that "human evolution has been recent, copious and regional" affecting all individuals and cultures differently, and complexly, but not randomly. Using the overarching paradigm of cultural evolution (tribal though global polities), we see shifts in the propensity for a domestication, taming and juvenilisation of human nature, though not without reversals and regressions. Perhaps, therefore, we could use the dreaded "r" word in a different context and speak of the "race for a less troubled civilisation."