Biopolitics Page 8
Even Julius Evola, to whom, among the authors of Italian Fascist racism, one can most confidently attribute the ambiguous idea of a Truth or a Tradition metaphysically grounded and independent of an identity and collective subjectivity, ends up concluding: “[Our mentality] does not raise the question of what is true and good, but asks for which race a given conception can be true and a given norm valid and “good.” The same can be said of juridical forms, of aesthetic criteria, even of the ideals of the knowledge of nature. A “truth,” a value or criterion, which for a given race can be valid and healthy, may not be such for another, and will lead, when adopted by the latter, to degeneration and distortion.”[151]
Besides, Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, the German author who more than any other has inspired Evola on these matters, wrote: “It is nonsensical and unscientific to want to look upon the Mediterranean race with the eyes of the Nordic race and assess it according to the Nordic scale of values, in the same manner as it would be nonsensical and unscientific to do the reverse. Maybe God knows the hierarchical order of the races. We don’t. […] The objective value of a race could be known only to a man who is himself beyond all races.”[152]
Besides, it is significant that, while all the proto-Fascist and Fascist movements raise, to different degrees, the question of the ethnical composition and the biological substrate of the community of reference, they all refer to it differently, in a manner defined both historically and locally with respect to the community of reference (“Nordification,” “the Italic race,” “the Turanik race,” etc.), even though their reaffirmation and reference have in common a fundamental (Indo-)European identity; so much so that what we find hereis a “love of difference” pushed to nationalistic and regionalistic dimensions, together with, as would seem logical, the goal to increase the differences, and not to deny them while waiting (and hoping) to stamp them out once and for all!
Irrespective of all that, the existence of human races is, it would seem, a rather obvious fact to common experience, and can be denied only on the grounds of ideological prejudice. Such an intuition is shared by everybody, as Jacquard admits, even in rigorously biological terms.
What does it mean to classify? The technique that allows it has been developed by mathematicians, and consists in calculating a “distance”: two individuals are more similar on the whole the smaller the distance between them. The formulae that make possible such calculations are many: to the same set of data we can make different sets of distances correspond between individuals, depending on whether we use “Euclidean” distance, “Manhattan” distance or “the distance of the quadratic chi.” Suppose that after having chosen defined criteria of classification and a formula to calculate distances, it is possible to determine all the distances between every individual and each of the others (for four billion individuals the number of distances taken two by two is of the order of eight billion billion). The “classes” we are seeking to define will be meaningful if the distances between the individuals of the same class are, at least on average, clearly inferior to those between individuals in different classes. The simplest method, which no doubt is closest to intuitive reasoning, is that of construing a “tree”: first of all, the two elements closest to each other are brought together so as to form a class consisting of these two elements, then one brings together the closest classes; the number of classes is thus reduced little by little, until there only remains one class that includes the whole set.
Jacquard continues:
How should we use such a tree to define the races? We must still make a choice: that of the number of races, necessarily comprised between 1 (the race is then one with the species) and n (as many races as there are individuals, which would make our efforts all but senseless). If we want to distinguish x races, we have to cut the tree at a certain height. The height at which we cut the tree has a specific significance: it represents the loss of information that one has to accept in order to substitute the initial data, that concerns the individuals, with the global data that concerns the classes defined as “races.”
Such a loss is dependent upon the number of classes that one decides to deal with. In order not to lose any information at all one would need to cut at height zero, that is, make no regrouping; if one regroups the set into a single category one loses on the contrary the totality of the information. “This is not to deny that the result of the classification could ever have a value, but to keep in mind its relativity,” Jacquard concludes.
Once again, it should be noted that keeping in mind the [obvious] “relativity” of the result that has been obtained does not in the least remove the validity of this result. And not only that.
Dobzhansky reminds us:
Immanuel Kant, who was a naturalist before he became the prince of philosophers, wrote in 1775 the following remarkably perceptive lines: “Negroes and whites are not different species of humans (they belong presumably to one stock), but they are different races, for each perpetuates itself in every area, and they generate between them children that are necessarily hybrid, or blending (mulattoes). On the other hand blonds and brunets are not different races of whites, for a blond man can also get from a brunette woman altogether blond children, even though each of these deviations maintains itself throughout protracted generations under any and all transplantations.” Kant understood the distinction between individual (intrapopulational) and group (interpopulational) variabilities more clearly than do some modern authors. In our modern terminology, the situation can be described as follows. Excepting only monozygotic twins[153] and other multiple births, any two individuals differ in several, probably many, genes. Parents and children, siblings, more remote relatives, and people not known to be related, differ, on the average, in more and more genes. A person’s genotype is unique, unprecedented, and nonrecurrent. As shown in the first chapter of this book, the proximate source of individual genetic variability is Mendelian segregation in sexually reproducing and outbreeding populations. An individual is heterozygous for many (probably thousands or tens of thousands) of his genes. No two sex cells that he produces are likely to contain the same identical sets of genes; the sex cells of his mate are equally diversified; the zygotes (children) which they bring forth will be, on the average, heterozygous for and different in as many genes as their parents were.[154]
Dobzhansky continues:
With group variability, the units of study are no longer individuals, but biologically and genetically connected arrays of individuals—populations. […] A person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Continued for some 33 generations, the number of ancestors turns out greater than the total world population. Of course, this is impossible. Notwithstanding the universality of incest taboos, all our ancestors were more or less distant relatives. Though this cannot be documented, all humans are relatives. If one could construct a complete pedigree of all mankind, it would be a complex network on which every individual is multiply related to every other. Mankind is a complex Mendelian population, a reproductive community all members of which are connected by ties of mating and parentage. A Mendelian population has a common gene pool. The genes of every individual are derived from, and unless he dies childless some of them return to, this pool.
He adds:
Mankind is not a panmictic population, in which every individual would have an equal probability of mating with every individual of the opposite sex and of the appropriate age. [Even today] the chance is greater that a boy born in Canada will marry a Canadian girl rather than a girl from China or Uganda. In common with many sexually reproducing animal and plant species, mankind is differentiated geographically into subordinate Mendelian populations; intermarriage within these subordinate populations is more frequent than between them. There are also specifically human agencies which cause further discontinuities in the intermarriage patterns, such as economic, social class, linguistic, religious, and other subdivisions. Mankind, the biological species, is the inclusive Mendelian pop
ulation. Within it is a hierarchy of subordinate Mendelian populations, geographically or socially partially isolated from each other. Only the smallest subdivisions, inhabitants of some villages, groups of equal social status in small towns, may be regarded as approximately panmictic.
The races correspond in this sense to the abstraction of the identifying characteristics of secondary Mendelian populations inside the same species.[155]
Now, a certain degree of reproductive segregation represents a fundamental element for the preservation – if not per se sufficient for the creation – of such populations[156]. The study of the genetic differentiations of intra-specific populations remains in any case extremely complex. In particular three fundamental models have been offered.
The first, which is mathematically the most malleable one, is the one of the “island”; the two others are the model of the gradual isolation as a function of distance on a uniformly inhabited area, and the model of the “stepping stone.” The island model presupposes that the species be made up of discrete colonies among which panmixia prevails, but that get a fraction m immigrants from the rest of the species. The isolation of the islands can vary in time and space, with m oscillating between zero (complete isolation) and one (no isolation). If the “immigrants” originate – as is often verified in practice – from nearby colonies instead of from anywhere else in the rest of the species, then we have the model of the stepping-stone. In the case of humankind, all three models may be applicable depending on the circumstances, as well as mixed ones.[157]
The classical studies in the field of human populations remain those of Cavalli-Sforza[158] who, among other things, has come to study the “matrimonial migrations” among cities and villages in the Parma diocese, in the same way as Harrison has analysed the available data of Oxfordshire communities.[159]
Both authors have observed that, in the available data, the probability of marriage is a negative exponential function of the mutual distance of the village, and is also a function of the size of the village itself: the larger the population of a village, the greater its number of potential mates. Another important factor of matrimonial and sexual mobility, and consequently of the genetic flux among Mendelian populations, in addition to geographical distance, is the relative ease of displacement. In the communities studied by Cavalli-Sforza, for instance, it has been possible to match the greater mobility, and also the higher population density, that one finds in the plain with the genetic differentiation of the inhabitants of the various villages.
In 1969, Neel and his collaborators studied the frequency of 25 different genes in 39 villages of the Yanomama tribe of the upper Orinoco river in Venezuela.[160] For many genes they recorded very notable differences depending on the village being considered. Cavalla-Sforza credited such heterogeneity to genetic drift, differences resulting from natural selection being implausible for populations inhabiting a basically identical territory. According to Neel “these differences mainly reflect the way in which new villages came about” and tells us therefore essentially the history of the region.
The above are examples of micro-geographical differentiations among secondary populations of the human species. Of course, as Dobzhansky observes the macro-geographical differentiations are more quantitatively distinct than qualitatively:
Human populations live under a variety of physical and cultural environments. Although man has always been a wanderer, and his traveling ability has increased enormously owing to the progress of his technology, some populations are separated by distances so great that the gene exchange between them is limited. Populations that inhabit different continents and parts of the same continent often differ in many genes; as a consequence, they differ in many morphological and physiological characteristics. In other words, mankind is an aggregate of racially distinct populations.
Population genetics brings its own specific contribution to the identification and definition of the above racial identities, which adds to rather than replaces the model discussed above. Mendelian populations can be described in terms of the occurrence of distinct characteristics, and ideally of variant alleles of genes[161]. Effectively, when the frequency of gene alleles or of distinct phenotypic characteristics is plotted on a graph, one regularly sees gradients or slopes of increasing or decreasing frequency from a central point, like genetic isobars.
Dobzhansky further observes:
The allele 1B of the OBA blood group system reaches frequencies between 25 and 30 % in central Asia and northern India. Its frequencies decline westward to 15 to 20 % in European Russia, 5 to 10 % in Western Europe, and even lower in parts of Spain and France. The frequencies also decline south eastward, practically to zero among Australian Aborigines, north eastward to below 10 %among the Eskimos, and to zero in unmixed Amerindians. The centre of light skin and eye pigmentation is north Western Europe; the pigmentation becomes darker eastward and especially southward, reaching maximum in sub-Saharan Africa, southern India, and Melanesia. Rohrer’s index (body weight divided by the height cubed) reaches highest values among the Eskimos, and is lowest in southern Asia, Australia, and Africa.
Such data deserve deeper analysis, which, as has been said, adds something significant to the typological analysis. If the overall resultant of all the possible genetic gradients or variations in the distribution of the phenotypic characteristics were uniform, the generic frequencies would increase or decrease in a regular fashion by so many percentage units per so many miles travelled in a given direction. With uniform gradients the limits of the races could only be arbitrary; and the races would only be “ideal” models. On the contrary, gradients are often very steep in some directions or zones, and smoother or nil in others.
Dobzhansky concludes:
Consider two gene alleles, A1 and A2, in a species with a distribution area 2,100 miles across. Suppose that for 1,000 miles the frequency of A1 declines from 100 to 90 %; for the next 100 miles from 90 to 10 %; and for the remaining 1,000 miles from 10 to 0 %. It is then reasonable and convenient to divide the species into two races, characterised by the predominance of A1 and A2 respectively, and to draw the geographic boundary between the races where the cline is steep.
A trait of this type, which not by chance has assumed in history a peculiarly symbolic value, is that of skin colour. As Darwin already observed: “Of all the differences among the human races the colour of the skin is the most conspicuous and one of the most noted.” Even if the underlying mechanism might in reality be more complicated, such characters behave exactly as if they were controlled by four copies of genes with cumulative effects.
Now, it is true that, as André Langaney remarks,[162] one can without discontinuity go from lighter people (the northern Europoids) to darker people, for instance the Sara in the Chad, choosing the intermediaries from only two other peoples: the North Africans and the Bushmen; but there is simply no way that a native of Sub-Saharan Africa (except for albinos) would be born with the light pigmentation of a European, nor that an ethnic European would be born with the dark pigmentation of an African or a Melanesian, whatever may be the range of individual variations present inside the respective populations with respect for other traits.
Moreover, even though all the variations of skin pigmentation depend basically on the amount of melanin produced, it is extremely doubtful that the intra-racial variations (the variations of colour within the same genetic population) be ruled by the same genes as those governing the inter-racial variations (that is the stable variations that exist between one race and another).
There appear to be many other similar characteristics, albeit less obvious. One of the alleles of the Rh system (cDe) often goes beyond the frequency of 50% in African populations, but occurs so rarely amongst other populations that it is consistent with the probability that the very few carriers are of recent African descent. Dozhansky adds: “ An allele of the Diego locus seems to be lacking among Europeans and is frequent among Amerindians, although not reaching 100-percent frequencies
among the latter. An allele of the Duffy system has frequencies above 90% among Negroes in western Africa, but is also found with low frequencies among Europeans.”
Of course it is perfectly true that most of the single characteristics are distributed in an irregular and diversified mode across the races, and that the genetic determinism of such characteristics are still for the most part little known, to begin with those that regulate the relations between the dimensions of the head (that determine the “dolicocephaly” and the “brachicephaly” of 19th century anthropologists). Other traits, despite their rigorous dependence on genetic heritage, are not very stable, such as height; in fact it is well known that in the 20th century the average height has risen very rapidly in the industrialised nations, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and totally irrespective of the medium height of the race the respective populations belong to.
Similarly, Jacquard stresses that
dark-skinned people are found above all in Melanesia, that is in the south west part of the Pacific, in the Indian Peninsula and in sub-Saharan Africa. Regardless the common proximity of these regions to the equator, and the question of whether one can build an argument based on the adaptive value of such a characteristic (which besides has been recently put forward as dubious), it has been noticed how these three populations can in no way be seen as constituting a “race”; apart from the colour of their skin everything sets them apart: the analysis of their blood systems, for instance, reveals how it would be impossible to consider them as three branches sprouting from the same group; their “phylogenetic tree” could not be represented as three ramifications from one and the same trunk. Were this the case, the hypothetical ancestral population would include, in addition to the dark skin colour, other traits that we would encounter in all these three population sets. This observation shows how a classification based only on the colour of the skin is void of biological meaning; this is most irritating for anyone who maintains the possibility of a definition of race based solely on this criterion.