Does the racial worldview find support in the contemporary scientific evidence?

Science is characterized by its empirical nature of accumulating facts on the basis of falsification, but its greatness is dependent on its ability to interact with the dynamics of societal evolution. Our understanding of the human species is shaped by the way science is presented to us. Unfortunately, the scientific community does not always acknowledge the implications of the fact that their research is built on legitimizing the racial worldview. Thus, if we are constantly engaging with data collected by researchers who choose to remain in their scientific vacuums, ignoring the vast effects of social determinants as well as the roles human beings play in shaping the diversity of the human species, we are left with seeing one another through the prism of false notions without any scientific basis to them. Contemporary scientific evidence encompasses a profound understanding of geography and its effects on the distribution of variation, the interplay of forces of natural selection in the ever-changing environment, intricate patterns of migration, and lineage data. Nevertheless, to understand why the modern account of human genetic diversity does not leave room for the propagation of the racial worldview, it is important to look at how racial realism has been using scientific evidence to its advantage.

The racial worldview, as a tool for asserting social, political, and economic dominance, justifies the dehumanization of non-white populations, implying that phenotypic traits can be attributed to meaningful biological differences, which, in turn, could classify humans into biologically discrete and permanently unequal groups.1 Superficial generalizations prevent us from understanding how populations that appear different on a surface level, can be very similar genetically. The reason why we may look so different from one another is connected to the fact that humans have always been in motion as they strived to discover previously unchartered territories, simultaneously adapting advantageous morphological traits depending on the environments they found themselves in. The multidirectional nature of the human migration patterns is readily reflected in the continuous gene flow that gave rise to

1 Smedley, A., & Smedley, B. (2012). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (4th ed.). Routledge.

the gradual distribution of alleles across the globe. These patterns of human genetic variation are mainly clinal, meaning there is a strong positive linear relationship between genetic differentiation and geographic distance between populations. The clinal distribution of variation is represented in the “isolation by distance” model, which points to the fact that increasing geographic distance from East Africa explains approximately 85% of the decrease in genetic variation within populations, laying the foundation for African origins of modern humans.2 However, socialization of physiological traits perpetuates the notion that variation is clustered, and discontinued. An example of how the racial worldview politicizes phenotypic traits can be seen in the white nationalist belief that the presence or lack thereof lactase persistence is a sign of biological fitness and the racial superiority of Europeans. If the racialization of lactase persistence held, then we would expect the trait to be distributed evenly throughout the region with no evidence of clinal variation and no presence elsewhere in the world. However, in reality, lactase persistence is not exclusive to the European region and can be traced in both West Africa and the Middle East. It is simply a mutation that was set in motion by the similar cultural systems of those regions, namely the long-established history of husbandry and domestication of cattle.3 The populations in these regions independently acquired the same mutation through the forces of convergent evolution, resulting in the positive selection for lactase consumption. Even if there are disparities in the types of mutations that humans accumulated as they migrated out of Africa, these differences still do not overwhelm the East African genetic substructure that has remained within the continuously evolving populations and eventually been shared due to the principles of human interactions. This profound genetic interlacement between populations has allowed for the persistence of admixture as individuals inherited integrated and interspersed chromosomes from multiple ancestries.4 This continuous pattern of recombination effectively discredits the ideological claim that humans are pure.

The strength of contemporary genetics over the racial worldview is also rooted in the way phylogenetic trees depict evolutionary relationships between human populations. Mapping the world’s

2 Handley, Lori J. Lawson, et al. Going the Distance: Human Population Genetics in a Clinal World. 25 July 2007.

3 Lecture material, “Does contemporary genetics support the racial worldview?”, Lecture 9, Slides: 3-5, Dr. Terence Keel 4 Lecture material, “Admixture: How important is it for understanding human diversity?” Week 6: Lecture 11, Slides: 3 -8, Dr. Terence Keel

non-African and African populations side by side allows us to see how genetic diversity stems from a shared common ancestor, and how non-African populations are a sub-clade nested within African diversity, despite geographic dispersal.5 Human genetic similarity can be further illustrated by considering the presence of mtDNA and Y-chromosomal DNA: two forms of stable and non-recombinant genetic information that are useful for reconstructing human lineages. Regardless of their predictability, both mtDNA and Y-chromosomal DNA are subject to mutations that have occurred around the world and passed on during multiple concurrent migrations, giving rise to a variety of haplogroups. The lack of a well-rounded representation of diverse haplogroups in scientific data is often used as evidence for the existence of discrete genetic groups. In reality, “exclusive” haplogroups arise due to the Founder’s effect which allows for the persistence of modal forms of haplotypes over the less prominent ones, “reducing” the genetic variation.6 These inconclusive representations of haplogroups omit other co-existing haplotypes in the region, racializing the dataset. Oftentimes, in their bid for finding proof of homogeneity and monogenism, racial enthusiasts overemphasize dominant haplogroups, simplifying the complexities of overlapping lineages. Geneticists, then, formulate their research questions from the incomplete genetic information at their disposal, inevitably disseminating eugenic ideas of unique genetic heritage. Unsupervised admixture programs, like STRUCTURE, fall into a similar trap as they do not control the range of sample populations that researchers use, allowing them to amplify differences through arbitrary scaling. Sampling strategies that neglect human populations in many parts of the world and ignore the presence of geographic barriers can make variation appear clustered, overshadowing vast genetic similarities. Additionally, the racial worldview offers a representation of human evolution and the structure of human genetic diversity that is built on comparing population groups in Africa and primates with the hope of finding biological proof that the “inferiority” of African populations and their “lack of capacity for civilization and intelligence” correlates with the geographic location of their development. However, the gradational changes of allele frequencies worldwide further exemplify the fact that none of the existing populations are more or less superior than the other because they were all equally successful in traversing geographic boundaries. Moreover, if drawing analogies between humans and primates would have constituted a legitimate scientific method, then one would expect for the fixation index, which is widely used to calculate population differences, to be staggeringly high between human population groups and correspond to the high genetic difference among primate populations. Howbeit, the amount of difference between human populations is below the threshold of 0.25 and, thus, too low to be considered a meaningful genetic differentiation.

In the interest of advancing a paradigm shift, it is essential to re-evaluate the existing scientific premises that rest upon epitomizing race and assigning value to our minute differences. Our efforts to map human diversity should not be tied to geneticizing race, and instead be focused on emphasizing the significance of complex environmental influences on human biology. Our research objectives should be aimed at producing knowledge that recognizes the impacts of social and historical processes on genetic variation and focused on deconstructing our common, but largely misled understanding of race.

Works Cited

Smedley, A., & Smedley, B. (2012). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (4th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494789

Lecture material, “Does contemporary genetics support the racial worldview?”, Lecture 9, Slides: 3-5, Dr. Terence Keel

Handley, Lori J. Lawson, et al. Going the Distance: Human Population Genetics in a Clinal World. 25 July 2007, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952507002326.

Lecture material, “Admixture: How important is it for understanding human diversity?” Week 6: Lecture 11, Slides: 3-8, Dr. Terence Keel

Tishkoff, Sarah A et al. “The genetic structure and history of Africans and African Americans.” Science (New York, N.Y.) vol. 324,5930 (2009): 1035-44. doi:10.1126/science.1172257, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2947357

Lecture material, “The Race Controversy in Population Genetics & Genomics Today,” Week 6: Lecture 12, Slides: 17-19, Dr. Terence Keel