Facts

What this newsletter will not include is a discussion of Black Lives Matter or the protests currently happening across the world. I spent the week shutting up and listening, and increasing my understanding. I absolutely believe that Black Lives Matter, and all that statement implies. It is not my place to talk about the Black experience in America, but I can talk about science.

The Origin of Species

When western science was just getting going, mankind, like Adam, started naming the animals. The person we credit with giving us a lexicon of what shape these names should take is Carl Linnaeus, who you probably remember reading about in biology class. He suggested the system we still use, taking a sloppy and disorganized field of biological classification and streamlining it into simple, easy “binomial” categorization (which is why species names are in Latin and Greek and italicized and the first word is capitalized and the second one isn’t — thank Linnaeus).

The only way people had to define what was in what species was by observing and examining the characteristics of each plant or animal. Perhaps then it was easier to believe that humans with massive differences in appearance would be different from each other in other ways, too. There were entire continents of people with different colored skin! Surely, the differences between a white man and a black man had to be more than skin deep.

The discovery of genetics, and the encoding of the human genome, blew that completely apart.

Data has no bias. The purpose of science is partly to strip away bias from data, and to reveal the essential nature of the universe.

Science does not tell us what we want to hear.

Biological essentialism, the idea that there are significant genetic differences among the races, is an idea without merit.

Let me be absolutely clear: human beings are one species, and the differences between humans are vanishingly small. The differences we define as race are, in fact, only skin deep.

White supremacy is a deadly, stupid, senseless lie.

This is not idle opinion or woke liberal thinking. This is fact, readily available to anyone curious enough to investigate it, which white supremacists tend not to be (or they wouldn’t be white supremacists).

We uncovered some really cool things about ourselves when we started decoding our genes.

Our DNA doesn’t just have instructions on how to make a creature (you, or me, or a slime mold, as it were). It carries the history of every species that survived long enough to pass its genes on to us, the animals who came before us, stretching all the way back to the very first life on earth. It is what Carl Sagan called an “unbroken thread” and it goes back billions of years, all the way to the very first cells.

This gives us unprecedented insight into our own origins, and yet tells us absolutely nothing. There’s no instruction manual. It is data, that’s all. It is up to us to figure out the stories we tell. For many years, the story was that certain kinds of humans were lesser than others. They were less intelligent, or less athletic, or less capable. This is all demonstrably false, and each of us carries the evidence in every nucleus in our bodies.

By looking at the genes of humans in different areas, and measuring the differences in those genes, we come up with a pretty good idea for how old our species is. The answer is: we’re really young. Like, stupidly young. We’ve only been around for about 200,000 years, which is barely a blink geologically, and hardly a sneeze biologically speaking.

Here’s Where it Gets Really Crazy

You thought the other stuff was wild, hang on to your hats because I’m going to tell you about genetic diversity between individuals. This is where the DNA rubber meets the racial essentialism road. This is what drives white supremacists crazy, and it’s 100% provable.

Until very recently, humans had a tenuous grasp on survival. We suffered numerous bottlenecks, maybe as recently as a few thousand years ago. A bottleneck happens when the population is drastically reduced, by disease or climate change, or asteroid impact, or whatever. We went through a bunch of those. We kept almost dying and then breeding like crazy and then almost dying off again. Like bad pennies, humans keep coming back. How do we know that? It’s not like humans were reduced to a few thousand individuals and wrote books about it. No, the answer is in our genes, the unbroken thread.

Humans have about .1% difference, between individuals, no matter how distant their populations are from each other. A human from America and a human from Asia have roughly the same differences between them that two humans from Asia have. The differences get really blurry, and almost inconsequential. Genetically speaking, we’re so young and so plucky and so inbred (ew) that we literally cannot be very different from each other. It would be impossible. It seems otherwise because the human lifespan is so short. We started out in Africa and spread out from there at a furiously fast clip. Biologically speaking, it was yesterday.

Okay Jim, but how do we know that? Because we didn’t just decode our own genes, we decoded other species, too! We looked at chimpanzees, which share a lot of the same characteristics that we have. We’re not very different from chimps, but that difference accounts for a lot.

The genetic differences between chimpanzees that live across a river from each other is something like 1% or so. That’s enormous! That’s humungous! Compared to us, that is.

Not only does this realization contextualize the origins of chimps (big deal, who cares) but it shows us how closely related we really are, and it makes our recent history even more depressing and/or enraging.

I won’t even reach too far back for this one: just until a few decades ago, white people were segregating entire populations of people whose only difference amounted to the genetic equivalent of a rounding error. We put our brothers in chains and told them they deserved it because they dared to have slightly (and it really is slight) more melanin in their skin.

Racism is embarrassing and senseless and disgusting.

You are more likely to have more in common with a Nigerian bus driver than you are with a President with the same color skin as you. You have more in common with people you’ve never met than you do with the other guys in your genealogy club. We celebrate what country our relatives came from a few hundred years ago, ignorant and dismissive of the vast similarities we share with our African and Asian brothers and sisters.

While we can’t do anything about history, we do have control over our futures. We’ve accrued a lot of differences since that first migration out of the womb of Africa, but nearly all of them are in our minds, not in our genes. As my ancestors survived Ice Ages and settled into colder climates with less sunlight, our bodies changed a little. The change is so small and so recent that it takes very few generations to make everybody look alike again, and we won’t be any less diverse than we were when we started moving back together.

It’s one of the greatest crimes ever committed, and repeated, as whites used their slight technological advantage and the blind destruction of disease to steal from their victims, and then continue victimizing them so thoroughly that their children, us, are almost entirely ignorant of the damage caused. I am keeping my promise of never getting political in this newsletter because it is not a matter of opinion or point of view, but a sequence of hard truths we are morally obligated to examine and, if we can, prevent from ever happening again. This is the minimum we can do, and I worry even that is too much. It’s hard to convince the powerful to give up their power, because they’re terrified that those they subjugated will treat them way they were treated.

Let’s hope our family forgives us.

SOME NOTES AT THE END

• Some people think we still have a tenuous grasp on survival, and I’m inclined to agree. Until we’re sufficiently distributed around the solar system, all of our eggs are still in one fragile, blue basket, and we haven’t been very good about taking care of it.

• There probably were other species of human beings, but they’re not around anymore. They didn’t make it. Did humans wipe them out? Possibly. I like to think that we just adopted them into our families and the species that emerged is us. Luckily for me, the data supports this bias, as we keep discovering the DNA of other hominid species hanging out in the corners of our own genes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans