Race and genetics

Which species is more diverse, humans or chimps? Most of us would be tempted to answer 'humans'. Unless you're a primatologist or you work at a zoo, you would likely have trouble telling one chimp apart from another, not to mention distinguishing between West African and Central African chimpanzees. By contrast, we can easily spot differences among humans - if asked to guess whether someone was from China, Pakistan, or Kenya, few of us would have any trouble getting the answer correct. By the measure of genes though, humans are amazingly uniform. Humans are genetically less diverse than chimps, and both chimps and humans are much less diverse than a common species of fruit fly. Given our species' long history of racial conflict, our genetic uniformity may come as a surprise. Not too long ago people in polite company would debate whether different human races really all belonged to one species. Our DNA tells us that our genetic differences don't even come close to matching the variety found within a single, apparently monotonous fruit fly species. The bottom line is this: although fruit flies and gorillas may look largely the same to us, they beat us hands down in genetic diversity.

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There are three times as many people in the U.S. claiming to be Irish as there are actual people in Ireland. Italians, Irish and European Jews were all once considered 'non-white' by the standards of their day but that's hardly the case now - and certainly not the case with the descendants of those immigrants. A paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics, researchers analyzed the genomes of more than 160,000 African-Americans, Latin-Americans and European-Americans, providing insights into the subtle differences in genetic ancestry across the United States.

People can self-identify any way they want, but genetics tells a different story, and that is because of 500 years of mixing by settlers. It isn't just the Irish or Scandinavians that have a lot of common names but less genetic similarity. Black people may not genetically have all that much in common with black people in other parts of the U.S., much less Africa. Among self-identified African-Americans nationwide, those in Georgia and South Carolina have the highest average percentage of African ancestry in the US.

If you are in the Ku Klux Klan, you'd better not get a DNA test done. more than 6,000,000 Americans who self-identify as European descent might carry African ancestry, and as many as 5,000,000 self-described European-Americans might have a little bit of Native American ancestry.

"These findings suggest that many individuals with partial African- and Native-American ancestry have 'passed' into the white community, thereby undermining the use of cultural labels that separate individuals into discrete, non-overlapping groups." said Katarzyna Bryc of

a personal genomics company. 

In the most comprehensive genetic study of the Mexican population to date, researchers from  Mexico's National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), UC San Francisco and Stanford University, have identified tremendous genetic diversity. So much diversity there basically are no Mexicans.  The study documented nearly one million genetic variants among more than 1,000 individuals and unveiled genetic differences as extensive as the variations between some Europeans and Asians. 

Of course the genetic differences that do exist among humans are enough to generate much of the biological diversity we see around us - differences in skin, hair, and eye color, our voices, our physical stature, and our personalities. Obviously environment plays a big role in many traits, but as the differences between Samoans and Japanese illustrate, genetics can account for a great deal even when there is a large environmental influence. You might think that most of our genetic diversity would fall along racial lines. Race differences often seem to be the most obvious differences among different human groups, so it wouldn't be surprising if genetic differences fell along racial lines as well. With new data, we are developing a much more detailed picture of how races differ genetically.

'Race' though, is a very imprecise term. Geneticists prefer to speak about populations, not out of political correctness. We've all filled out some form or another asking whether we are Black, White, Hispanic, or 'none of the above.' It's obvious that this is much less informative than knowing whether someone's ancestry is African, Australian Aborigine, European, or East Asian. researchers like Richard Lewontin have argued that "As a biological rather than a social construct, 'race' has ceased to be seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species." Race may be too imprecise to be biologically meaningful, but there has to be some biological reality behind the obvious physical differences in different human populations, right? Yes, there are genetic differences between different human populations, but the big surprise is this: genetic differences between human populations are few compared to the differences within human populations. Most of the genetic variation among humans has nothing to do with differences in populations. The genetic differences between 'races' are minor compared to the differences between people in general.

Racial conflict has long been a part of human societies. Along with that conflict has come frequent speculation (most famously, but not exclusively among whites with European ancestry) that one race is inferior to another. Some have been worried that modern genetics would substantiate that belief, but our best genetic evidence to date shows those worries unfounded. Genetics does play a large role in the diversity we find among human beings. That diversity, in spite of some dramatic but superficial exceptions like skin color, is shared in common among all races. The debate over race and intelligence has a long and tarnished history, although that doesn't mean it's not a legitimate scientific question to address. However, the debate has taken place almost entirely outside modern genetics, falling instead within the realm of psychology (such as work done by Arthur Jensen). Some writers would have you believe that science is converging on a consensus that the 'IQ' gap between various races is genetic (and that liberal conspirators are trying to cover it up). That claim is false. Researchers have not identified a single genetic variant with an impact on intelligence that falls along population lines. In fact several studies have recently tested variants in genes that appear to be involved in controlling brain size. No correlation with intelligence was found. Yes, genetics does play a significant role in intelligence, and many other traits. But there is simply no genetic evidence for genetic differences in intelligence between human populations. A Cornell study of genome sequences in African-Americans, European-Americans and Chinese found no evidence of differences in genes that control brain development among the various geographical groups. 

 Prior to animal domestication, humans lost the ability to digest milk after infancy. But, as humans migrated and domesticated animals, Europeans and other populations developed a gene for tolerating lactose (and milk) throughout their lives. "It is important to emphasize that the research does not state that one group is more evolved or better adapted than another," said co-author Carlos Bustamante, a Cornell assistant professor of biological statistics and computational biology. "Rather as humans have populated the world, there has been strong selective pressure at the genetic level for fortuitous mutations that allow digestion of a new food source or tolerate infection by a pathogen that the population may not have faced in a previous environment."

Racism is not a natural phenomenon, but one that has been produced within each and every institution of our society. Racism is exacerbated through a capitalist production process that teaches us that some people have a God-given right to pursue their own economic and social interests with little regard for the right of every human being and other living organism to thrive in the world free of fear for their own survival and with dignity and freedom. Racism stems from a world that has lost its ability to recognize its social nature. While we must work to make people safe today, we must also consider the long-term goal of anti-racist struggle, which in our view is one and the same as class struggle, such that a new world society, one free from class and founded on, interdependence, social responsibility, equality and freedom can thrive.

A focus on race and race relations alone, severed from its relation to class, suggests that the problem is attitudinal, that what needs to change is for "Whites" to learn to accept, value and respect those who are different from themselves. Economic conditions under capitalism must always be obscured, lest people begin to understand that the so-called freedom of the market does not change the fact that capitalism rests on a social relation of domination and exploitation and that it requires continual immiseration through the extraction of surplus value that most heavily afflicts communities of color. A focus on race and race relations continues to popularize the myth that race exists (even though as we have just seen it is well known in the scientific community that race has no biological validity), which is what the capitalists want since it was "invented" to support capitalist production and continues to serve as one of the most powerful ideological tools to sustain it.