“It Doesn’t Matter if You’re Black or White”?
THE ROOT.COM recently re-published a 2005 Washington Post report of a study in which scientists said that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology’s most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity’s greatest sources of strife.
The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa when all people were brown-skinned. That person’s offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world’s races.
Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of “the race gene.” Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin colour is only part of what race is — and is not.
“It’s a major finding in a very sensitive area,” said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. “Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep.”
Study leader Keith Cheng said he was at first uncomfortable talking about the new work, fearing that the finding of such a clear genetic difference between people of African and European ancestries might reawaken discredited assertions of other purported inborn differences between races — the most long-standing and inflammatory of those being intelligence.
“I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different,” Cheng said.
In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin colour. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome — the complete instructions for making a human being.
Some scientists said they suspect that white skin’s rapid rise to genetic dominance may also be the product of “sexual selection,” a phenomenon of evolutionary biology in which almost any new and showy trait in a healthy individual can become highly prized by those seeking mates, perhaps because it provides evidence of genetic innovativeness.
Recent revelations that all people are more than 99.9 percent genetically identical has proved that race has almost no biological validity. Yet geneticists’ claims that race is a phoney construct have not rung true to many non-scientists — and understandably so, said Vivian Ota Wang of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda.
“You may tell people that race isn’t real and doesn’t matter, but they can’t catch a cab,” Ota Wang said. “So unless we take that into account it makes us sound crazy.”
Read the rest of this article @ The Root
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