I grew up in the northernmost regions of Wisconsin on the
shore of Lake Superior. I also grew up a relatively long time ago. There were
no wealthy people around – you were either a working-class family with a
regular pay check or a working-class family with an irregular paycheck. It all
depended on the work. My father was a
railroad fireman (he shoveled coal in steam engines) and later an engineer on
diesel locomotives. Even though he was
in his forties work was very irregular due to the seniority system used by
railroads. The oldest people got their
selection of jobs and there were more people than jobs. Many people at the top
refused to retire creating a lot of anger and controversy by younger people
wanting to work more hours.
The entire population of my home town was from European ancestry – everyone was white. Irish and Scandinavian derived families clustered on the west side of town and eastern European, German and Polish families on the east side of town. We lived on the east side about 7 blocks from the lake.
The town was located between two reservations
inhabited by the Red Cliff and Bad River Tribes of the Lake Superior Chippewa.
It was rare to encounter anyone of Native American ancestry unless you played
sports and competed against some of those teams or until you were in middle
school or high school. I used to fish on the Bad River Reservation with my
grandfather and we got to known some of the men who ran a local boat landing.
Racism was overt and it was everywhere. That may sound odd given my description of
the place, but it would not take much to set people off. An image on television like Muhammad Ali
talking in his usual provocative manner or Willy Mays showboating in center
field was all that it took. Racial epithets followed at a rate and intensity
that was quite unbelievable. There were
a few cooler heads. My grandmother was
one. All that she could do was to insist
that people not talk like that in her presence.
As a boy – it was a mystery to me that the rest room facilities on
trains were segregated – even though we were practically in Canada and there
were no black people around. I asked my father why the porter had to have a separate bathroom and he could not give me an
answer. At the time I had never seen a porter.
The time frame of my youth coincided with the American Civil
Rights Movement (1954-1968) but there was no discussion of it in schools,
churches, or the public discourse. The
only place where it came up at all was in my 8th grade biology
course. On a day back in 1965 – I learned the best lesson I ever learned in
high school and possibly in my life.
I was a definite nerd back then and extremely interested in
science – especially biology. It was the
only class that seemed to be interesting.
That was probably fueled by being a neurotic kid and always wondering if
I had an undiagnosed disease or not. My
imagined symptoms at the time seemed limitless and I would find myself in the
library researching rabies and various cancers primarily. It seemed that cancer was always a dinner
table topic for my parents. A relative
with exploratory surgery and the ultimate ending: “They just sewed him back up
– there was nothing more they could do.”
There was not a lot available to an 8th grader with those
interests so I ended up picking up a lot of biology on the side. That could be
useful or not depending on who the teacher was – so I kept most of it to
myself.
I can still recall the excitement of learning that our
biology course had been changed to Modern Biology and there was a new
textbook (1). Our teacher told us the course would be more relevant and it
could also form the basis for a college trajectory. All I can remember
about it today is frog dissections, the genetics of taste testing and tongue
rolling, and the idea that race was a social construct that had nothing to do
with biology.
That’s right – the social construct bomb was dropped in the
middle of the Great White North in 1965 and it did not make a sound.
There was no emphasis about it. There
were no lessons seeking to connect it to the culture at the time and the Civil
Rights Movement. There was no
controversy at school board meetings. It was right there in the book. A biological definition of races and a
description that the isolated groups that were called races would probably
intermix at some point and the artificial, color-based designations would just
disappear. We would all be one big happy
Homo sapiens family. That information was as rational as it was profound
when I read it the first time and witnessed how the idea was repeatedly
violated over the next 50 years. I had
seen it violated so many times I went back and found the original biology text
that I read in the 8th grade.
Some of the key quotes from that text are on the following
graphic. The basic idea is that the
species originated and subpopulations migrated over thousands of years and were
geographically isolated. During that isolation mutations occurred in those
populations that led to some alterations in physical appearance but the genome
wide similarities were still much greater than any between population differences.
One standard species definition is the ability to interbreed between
populations and that was sustained. Even
though populations were named by different physical characteristics they were
biologically identical. In the modern era, the longstanding physical barriers
to population mixing are no longer present and we should expect a more
homogeneous population over time.
Flash forward to 2024. I just read a paper (2) that should be read by everyone and combined with my personal experience is the impetus for this post. The additional impetus is the recent election in the US and a political cultural movements that are overtly racist, anti-racist, and anti-anti-racist. There are some common interests. As a clear example, the overtly racist and anti-anti-racist movements coalesce around the central idea that the white race will be “replaced” by non-white races and this will result in significant loss of political advantage. That theory is called the Great Replacement Theory and it plays out at several levels not the least of which is the claim that one party seeks to use it to their advantage to get more voters and they will do this by illegal immigration. Never mind the fact that non-citizens cannot vote. And never mind the fact that the current political landscape is a small blip in geological time.
The paper is written by two evolutionary and theoretical biologists. Expectedly it contains an abundance of modern
theory about human genetics, evolution, and most importantly modes of
transmission between individuals in populations. The most interesting focus for
biologists and physicians is that there are ways to transmit behaviors between
generations that are outside genetic transmission and that there are potential
interactions between these modes and individual genetics. The authors use an example of dairy farming
and the persistence of lactase alleles.
Dairy farming can select for those alleles in the population but
cultural adaption like the use of milk fermentation can also be successful in
the absence of lactase persistence. The
main drivers of non-genetic inheritance are depicted in the graphic at the top
of this post from the authors’ paper.
In the body of the paper, they discuss cultural evolution
(CE) and gene culture coevolution (GCC) models.
The lactase allele in the context of dairy farming is an example of
GCC. They discuss common errors made in suggesting that race is biologically based and introduce how cultural factors
explain some of the differences attributed to genetics. Intellectual differences are cited as one early
example that was attributed to genetics – but modern genetic studies and combining
cultural factors shows that there are no clear genetic differences between comparison
populations and that all of the differences in educational achievement can be
attributed to cultural factors like cultural role models, parental
expectations, resources, social roles, and environmental niche. Negative factors like racial discrimination
and adverse life experiences can also play a role. This paper is a reminder to carefully look
for other sources of variance in large in genome wide association studies (GWAS) and
whether cultural factors were studied.
My speculation is that the commonest cultural factor in play these days
is childhood trauma because the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) checklist
is available and considered a measure. This paper would suggest that is only part of the story.
So here it is nearly 60 years after I read that race has no
biological basis and that it is a social construct - it is still being used to
divide citizens, suppress the vote, ration resources, stereotype people, direct
violence at people, and actively discriminate against them. I don’t know if reading this paper will be helpful
at all so I provided the slides comparing my 8th grade biology text
and a current state of the art paper in abbreviated form.
I did not touch on the rhetoric involved and that is long,
detailed, and discussed in other places on this blog. Very briefly – philosophers and other
rhetoricians have taken an anti-science stand in the past because they believed
that science was given too much power.
That came about as philosophical musings gave way to more predictable scientific
explanations. The problem is that science is an evolving process rather than a
book of clearcut answers with some areas less evolved than others. Eugenics and even more recent claims that
race and associated cultural characteristics and endpoints are genetically
based could be considered part of that process.
But many of these arguments still persist and like other areas of
science have been politicized. The
authors here present all the reasons those arguments about race as a biological
property are wrong.
It was known in 1963 and it’s even more well known today.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
Supplementary 1: In terms of cultural factors and educational attainment I was reminded of one from my background - the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). Back when I took it there was a general knowledge section that was supposed to show that the applicant had a knowledge base outside of science. It was heavily weighted to the arts and humanities. It was eventually eliminated because it was shown to favor students in large cities where there was access to art galleries and museums. The closest museum was 200 miles away. My family rarely left town. When they did it was usually to pick up my father from a train station about 30 miles away.
Supplementary 2: It is interesting to consider the political rhetoric of the last election as it applies to the concept of race as a social construct. It was common to see minority groups that in some cases were extremely small being scapegoated for political purposes. Some of it had to do with long standing racism and some of it had to do with cultural factors. The whole point of this blog post is how can any of that be acceptable if we are all members of the same race with trivial differences in appearance and behavior?
References:
2: Lala KN, Feldman MW. Genes, culture, and scientific
racism. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Nov 26;121(48):e2322874121. doi:
10.1073/pnas.2322874121. Epub 2024 Nov 18. PMID: 39556747.
3: Creanza N, Kolodny
O, Feldman MW. Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it
matters. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Jul 25;114(30):7782-7789. doi:
10.1073/pnas.1620732114. Epub 2017 Jul 24. PMID: 28739941; PMCID: PMC5544263.
Graphics Credit:
From reference 2 Copyright © 2024 the Author(s). Published
by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons
Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
