In the slipstream of protests over the death of George Floyd many things can be asked. The first: if we all tend to racism (or rather classism, since we make any group inferior by choosing a certain random trait, such as height, beauty, accent, etc.)
The second and easiest to answer is whether there really are biological differences between people beyond what is obvious: The color of the skin. The truth is that all the differences that we can find between whites and blacks, for example, are cultural differences, but not genetic ones.
skin pigmentation
Basically, the genes that confer pigmentation to the skin are very few, and they do not determine a specific genome. Focusing on skin color is like getting stuck on the color of your eyes or the shape of your nose. Phenotypic traits (the cake aspect) that have little or nothing to do with the genome (the ingredients and the recipe to make the cake).
In fact, if we are to look at genetic diversity, there is more among Africans themselves than between Africans and EuropeansFor example, as I explain in That wasn't in my genetics book.:
There are fewer genetic similarities between a Namibian and a Nigerian than between both of them and a blue-eyed Swede, despite the fact that the skin of the Namibian and the Nigerian is black. Even a particular version of the alpha-actinin-3 gene, which is associated with fast-twitch muscle fiber, while present in black runners who have achieved extraordinary marks, has also been found in other people, not just black people. Perhaps there are environmental/genetic pressures that influence this statistical rarity, but we are not yet able to clearly identify them, nor do we know if we are dealing with a simple correlation rather than causation.
Considering the black race is as imprecise as considering individuals who process oxygen better at high altitudeWell, in this group there are some black Africans, also some Tibetans..., but the majority of black Africans and Tibetans do not have that capacity. Furthermore, although the skin tone of the inhabitants of central Africa and the Andaman Islands are similar, they were acquired through different historical and biological means.
Searching for significant genetic differences between ethnicities and geographical areas is quite fruitless, because we are much more mixed than we think, as I already reminded us. Charles Darwin in his book The origin of the man, from 1871: "I doubt that a single character can be cited that is distinctive of a race and is constant."
Everything is mixed up, like a set of cards that never stops being shuffled by the dealer, and the similarities or differences that we establish based on appearances or very specific features are essentially spurious. Not to mention that we are all deeply related, because we all We are descendants of approximately 14,000 sub-Saharans.
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The news
Skin color does not matter (at least not as we believe) and that is why racism makes no sense
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.