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.
...
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 ...
No comments:
Post a Comment