Race: the scientific, political and religious versions

My wife, as some readers will have learned from other blog posts, is Chinese. One time I sat down with her to a dinner with her of noodles with chicken and Thai burapa peppers, the preparation of which created a big cloud that made me cough. After taking a few bites I started tearing, but kept eating, until I could no longer bear the sting. I then spent nearly an hour gulping down water, putting several consecutive ice cubes in my mouth, breathing sharply to soothe my tongue. I had long considered myself a patron of spicy food, in fact at ethnic restaurants I will often opt for the spiciest item on the menu. But that day I realized I had my limits. My wife, meanwhile, kept eating with no sign of discomfort. She told me that in her home province, Hunan, in South China, most people eat comparatively spicy food on a regular basis. Not everyone in Hunan can handle this food, but among the majority who can, they rely on it: their fiery foods help them sweat, which in turn cools them down during their brutal summers. In a similar matter, when we go out to dinner, we get to save some cash because my wife has a strong adverse reaction to alcohol. Like her parents, she has "Asian flush syndrome." According to Wikipedia, this disorder is almost exclusive to East Asia, particular Southern China.

These examples are among many known by historians, anthropologists, (etc) of regional genetic idiosyncrasies among the people. These regional genomes develop for many reasons, all of which are compatible with natural selection as it is understood by scientists today. Of course, at the risk of sounding preachy and condescending, they are not compatible with Nazism and eugenics. First of all, the task of identifying these regional genetic idiosyncrasies requires a far greater scientific ability than what existed before World War II. People's skin and eyes and facial features reveal some genes, but we have thousands of other protein-coding genes. Moreover, while regional gene pools all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and I don't think any is plainly superior. Furthermore, I think we're best off having an optimally diverse gene pool globally, then at least some of us will things that others don't.

 Ok, so it's arguable that in the long term, over the course of thousands of years, the mass-killing of humans via nature is making us better off. That argument is, if you will, teleological, and the reader might agree with it. I will explain why I, personally, don't. In addition, I want to make some other arguments. First of all, I want to make the more obvious argument that the scientifically-proven regional genomes are very different from the characteristics that "ethnic groups" tend to consider particular to them. In making this argument, I will recount human history from the years when we slowly became a separate species, to our migrations across the globe, to the beginning of civilization and eventually until today. In doing so, I also want to explain why most ethnic groups have little common history, and those that do can only trace their history back to an assemblage of people with heterogeneous histories and no common origin. I also want to explain the role of politics in this process. Lastly, as a comic relief, I decided to retell the same story as it appears in the Bible.

Our beginning is difficult to locate. It is unlike the Bible, perhaps most notably, in one particular regard. The Bible has it that two humans were implanted onto the earth, one of them male and the other female. Between them, these two people had three sons, two of whom survived into adulthood: Cain and Seth. Afterwards these sons went on to have their own children with their "wives." The Bible does not specify who their wives were, however there was only one woman alive at the time. For the following five or six generations the Bible only lists the male children by name, although it speaks of these men as having "sons and daughters." Whom these sons and daughters procreated was, I guess, their cousins when they had the chance.

By contrast, according to science, the process of "speciation" takes thousands of years. As with any new species - i.e. a group of organisms that can produce viable offspring amongst themselves, but not via a member of another species - by the time this species has come into being, there will have been thousands or millions of transitional beings. In the case of humans, we seem to have separated from homo erectus over the course of about 500,000 years, with a number of creatures coming and going along the way that may or may not be considered the same species.


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I would conjecture, though, that similar conditions were common at one time. However, most people carrying the genes lived short lives, or they were murdered, or they're still alive but they live short lives in poverty and isolation and most of us don't really think about them. I.e. they're Native American. And alcohol is believed to have been an enormous part of the problem all along - in both their gradual genocide and their disturbing state at present.  So it's not perfectly fair to accuse European colonists, and white Americans, of committing suicide (or, more precisely, several different genocides). Most of the killing was not done directly and deliberately by them.

I will refer the reader to a particular book on this subject. The reader probably knows which book: it's syphilis, which may or may not have originated in the Americas. But it seems to have reached Europeans in conjunction with the explorers, and the Europeans were clearly not well exposed, since it would be a defining feature of the following 500 years for them (more on that in forthcoming posts).

Granted, the European population was not monolithic. In 1881 a British ophthalmologist would discover an eerie red dot in one of his patent's eyes and an American neurologist who would attribute this symptom to a brain disease that infects infants and usually kills them in early childhood. The disease would be named after these two gentlemen: physical benefits of sunlight. Likewise, people from colder climates need to be very careful about excessive exposure to the sun, because it can make them look like a character from Jersey Shore. Similarly, people from warmer regions tend to have lankier body types, which increase their body's surface area, allowing them to release heat more easily, while Caucasians have sturdier builds that retain heat. Anyone who has witnessed a marathon, whether in New York, London or Tokyo, will notice that the first to finish are almost exclusively African, usually Kenyan. Likewise, it is known that African Americans, through their athletic prowess, have monopolized the NBA.

And life in a tropical climate has perks, albeit with drawbacks. Tropical diseases are different, in many ways, from the epidemics that have swept through Europe and Asia. My wife, who spent her high school years at a  boarding school in Singapore, has told me about some of the nasty bugs that harass the people there. She spoke of big mosquitoes that sound "like helicopters" and bite people through their clothing, in addition to big, shiny ants that are trained in self-defense and would invade her dormitory in droves if any crumbs were on the ground ... Bear Grylls once spoke of an American soldier in Vietnam whose bladder was invaded by an aggressive leach that entered through his penis. And these bugs carry diseases that infect people when they get the chance, but meanwhile remaining on the bug indefinitely. By contrast, the "propagated" diseases in temperate climates will spread from person to person, spreading vast distances in a short period of time, but retreating after doing so.

To be continued ...

American fatness: a very personal problem with a very impersonal solution

Many Americans are fat (I used to be one of them), and many are very, very fat. According to a study in 2009 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the "obesity epidemic" is costing us as much as $147 billion in healthcare costs every year; that's about $500 per person every year, in addition to the costs from lost productivity. So what has allowed this to happen? There are many things. For one thing, some minority groups in the US do not usually stigmatize fatness as much as white Americans do. Sure, there are plenty of blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans who do stigmatize fatness, but we don't see white women paying thousands of dollars for buttock implants, which are very popular in South America.

Another reason is that Americans have a higher fertility than almost any other high-income country, and that usually means fatter women (and often fatter men, since it affects them psychologically). Another reason is that middle-class American families usually live in suburbs, which zoning laws which have made unfit for walking. Most places where people need go are either beyond walking distance, or they require crossing highways which cannot safely be crossed on foot, or they simply require a very monotonous, lonely walk. Likewise, for kids, their friends' houses are often inaccessible on foot, leaving us with the very lame concept of "play dates," which usually involve much less exercise than several kids rendezvousing after school and doing whatever comes to mind. 

Another cause, some people would claim, is that Americans are working more hours, and as a result have less time to eat, and therefore do so in a careless manner. Another reason, of course, is that most American "food" is among the great evils of our time. Cows are fed corn rather than grass. Chickens have no room to move their legs, much less their wings. There are any number of additives in our food that are only legal because of fierce, dauntless lobbyists. Corn growers, who also have plenty of lobbyists, know that they cannot turn a profit unless corn syrup is extracted and inserted - very cheaply - into foods and beverages that certainly do not need it (a similar situation existed in the years before the Whiskey Rebellion). Many of these corn farmers practice crop rotation, and an excellent additional crop is soy beans, since soybean oil is also a very cheap and very unnecessary supplement to much of our food. And many Americans eat fruits and vegetables ... but that could mean anything.

And lastly, it can only be a factor that American standardized test scores are not great, especially our science scores, although comparisons with other countries will be different depending where you look. OK, so there are plenty of countries whose test scores are not as high but are certainly fitter than us. But if we are going to solve the "obesity epidemic," then I think this might just be the most important step. Everyone has some idea of which foods are healthy and which aren't, but wouldn't it be great to know which of these notions are true? Or better yet, wouldn't it be great to know why some foods are or aren't healthy? It's one thing to want to lose weight, or to maintain one's current; it's another to make a strong commitment; and it's another thing to know how precisely what to do in order to succeed. I can give a strong example from my days as an English teacher at a college in a remote part of China. Where I worked, Danfeng, science plays an enormous role in society ... or maybe only in high schools, as we know because students recite and memorize entire paragraphs from their textbooks. But I spent plenty of time in both the pharmacies and the hospital, and I was not impressed; nor was I impressed with the scientific savvy of the people I dealt with. One student at the college was fiercely determined to lose weight, so she went on the All-Watermelon Diet for 3 days. From what I heard she quit because she found herself vomiting profusely - our bodies won't respond well if we only give them sugar. And I would speculate that afterwards, her body retained most, if not all, of the sugar. Personally, I know from experience that vomiting rids our bodies of water and fiber, but very little sugar and fat, unless we do it many, many times over.

But I think China is on its way to current standards of enlightenment. I mean, if Shanghai were its own country, then it would be out-performing every other country in math, science and reading. In would guess that when the rest of the country reaches that level of education, people will be more sensible. Fatness is very strongly stigmatized in East Asia, and the people there are many degrees thinner than they are here, and much thinner yet than in Arkansas. I doubt it's a coincidence that this region has all the highest test scores; alright, so there's some competition from low-population countries, but these countries are also much slimmer than the US. So I think we've spotted a trend, and I think the reason for it is very clear. I think we'd all be better off if we knew what the difference is between simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates, or saturated and unsaturated fat, or different kinds of proteins; or if we knew precisely what a vitamin is, and what certain minerals do, and what we should do to avoid developing too much insulin. Or, better yet, what if we could also learn to interpret the stimuli in our bodies, so that we know precisely what nutrients we need at what time. When we experience cravings, we are not having the strength of our will tested by Satan and His personnel; these cravings are an evolved response to the absence of a nutrient. An understanding of science can help us identify precisely what nutrient, so that we fulfill our body's request, instead of just guessing. When I was in high school, I never heard a girl admit to eating breakfast. Without exception, they either lied that they don't eat breakfast, or they lied that they don't eat breakfast. But either way, if they were telling the truth, then this habit would be profoundly inefficient, and would certainly cause them to eat more than they would otherwise. And even among adults, the discourse on food and on losing and gaining weight seems to be inextricably moral in tone, with talk about resisting temptations, indulging when not due, deserving to lose or gain weight, seeking redemption after indulgences; I think these concepts are quite familiar to most of us, even if not from firsthand experience. But I think we're better off relying on science rather than moral judgments, and I think that those whose scientific knowledge is not sufficient should acquire more scientific knowledge, since it hardly requires much scientific knowledge to be competent in these matters. So for this aspect of the problem, the solution not only requires no judgments of people's personal character, but it is also very easy to carry out.

And I'm not the first person to debunk the idea of health foods, but many people are still being fooled by it. The concept of health foods is simply women lying to themselves that their cravings are less harmful than men's. Men are larger and more muscular, and therefore they are attracted to more substantial foods with plenty of protein. By contrast, women are smaller and have much less muscle, however unlike men, women need body fat to protect unborn children, so they have evolved to crave fattening foods. They are attracted to what we call "health foods" because these foods contain outrageous amounts of sugar. And things work out in the end because science women are generally more science-challenged than men, so while women are more likely to read nutrition labels, they are less likely to understand the scientific meaning of the numbers, so they are more susceptible to the absurd, commercially-driven claims about what's healthy and what isn't.