"The main mistake is to think that races are very different": column by Stanislav Drobyshevsky

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Anthropologist and popularizer of the science of how races arose, why they change and under what conditions it is almost impossible to distinguish a European from a Papuan.

What is race

People in different parts of the planet are different from each other. Moreover, not only by skin color, but also by a host of other indicators. The differences can be divided into two categories: biological and social.

Social is the language, religion, way of life, songs and dances, a way to dress, to equip a home, and so on. The totality of all social factors is called ethnos. The most important determinant of ethnicity is self-determination: to which ethnos a person considers himself to belong, to which he belongs. (It is also important whether other representatives of the ethnos agree with this, but this is another question.)

The biological part is our genes and how they are implemented in a particular environment. Biological traits can be congenital or acquired. For example, a hole in an ear from an earring is a biological sign, but it does not depend on genes in any way: a newborn will never have a hole, no matter how many holes his parents may have. A small proportion of innate biological traits are racial.

It should be understood that not all innate biological traits are racial. Each person has one head, two arms and one spleen. These are genetic traits, but not racial, because populations do not differ in this regard.

Race is a set of racial characteristics and their variability in a given population. These features have developed historically in a certain territory and distinguish a specific group of people from their neighbors.

Racial genetic traits account for only thousandths of a percent of the entire genome. We differ from chimpanzees by only 2% of genes, and races from each other - much less.

How racial differences manifest

Genetics is manifested ambiguously, it is also influenced by the environment. Let's take the same skin color. There are genes that determine it, but there are also external conditions. A light-skinned person may tan, and a dark-skinned person may turn pale. However, how much you can turn pale and darken is also determined genetically. No matter how much I sunbathe, I will not be able to achieve the skin color of a person from Central Africa. And no matter how pale the inhabitant of central Africa may turn, he will not turn pale to my condition.

For most racial traits, the differences between even the most extreme options are miniscule. For example, in the size of the head and face, the largest differences between the races are 1–2 millimeters. Two brothers may be more different than either of them - from representatives of another race.

But there is a subtlety: a race is determined by a combination of characteristics not of a specific person, but of a population. When describing a race, we are not saying that it has such and such a skin color and head size. We say that the color of the skin is from such and such to such and such, with such an average value, and the size of the head is from such and such a minimum to such and such a maximum.

The main mistake is to think that races are very different. It's not like that at all.

What else is influenced by race, besides appearance

Outward signs are easy to define, but it is not very correct to study them as racial - they are very dependent on the environment. Ideally, one should look at the genome, but scientists don't yet know which parts of the genome determine the race.

Nevertheless, racial characteristics affect physiology as well. For example, skin color depends on the production of melanin, while related molecules of melanin are also involved in nervous activity. There are medicines that work for people of one race and do not work for people of another. Propensity to certain diseases and resistance to infections also differ between races.

The stumbling block is the question of the level of intelligence. In order for intellectual abilities to count as a racial trait, it must be proven that they are precisely dependent on genetics and clearly differ from different races.

Theoretically, natural selection for intelligence should have been present in our ancestors. But the problem is that it must be proven, and we do not yet have a single measure for the level of intelligence.

Of course, at the population level, there are definitely differences in intelligence. You can always find a group of people in which the average level of intelligence will be higher or lower than in the neighboring group. The question is how significant these differences will be.

In addition, it makes no sense to count the average level of intelligence in a group - it's like the average temperature in a hospital. There is a very large individual variation: in any group of people we will find a complete fool, something in between and a genius.

How was the division into races

Resettlement from Africa

The species Homo sapiens originated in Africa, and although they were certainly black, broad-nosed, curly and fat-lipped people, they cannot be called Negroid in their modern version.

About 55 thousand years ago, people began to migrate. On the way, they mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans and settled around the planet: they quickly reached Australia and the Americas.

People found themselves in completely new conditions: in the cold of Eurasia, North America and Greenland, in mountains, deserts and forests. Contacts between groups that settled on different continents have practically disappeared. And each of these populations underwent its own microevolution. This was racial formation.

However, the ancient people who lived by hunting and gathering did not form stable racial complexes. They lived in small groups and chose partners from those who live further away to avoid closely related interbreeding.

More or less stable races could develop only in isolation: on the Andaman Islands, Australia, South Africa. But basically it was racial instability - Upper Paleolithic polymorphism, as the great Soviet anthropologist Viktor Valerianovich Bunak called these processes.

The role of the producing economy

About 10 thousand years ago, in some parts of the planet, people began to raise sheep, goats, cows, pigs and grow wheat, rye, lentils, soybeans - whatever they had.

The populations that switched to agriculture increased dramatically in numbers. Growing food is time consuming, but unlike hunting and gathering, it guarantees food: you can store grain in a storage pit and eat it all winter.

The increased groups of people began to settle again. The first to do this were the inhabitants of the Middle East - the territories of present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq. They moved towards North Africa, North India and Europe. Along the way, these ancestors of the Caucasians drove out the aborigines - hunters and gatherers - and partially mixed with them. In different areas, this percentage of displacement and mixing was not the same. For example, farmers expelled 90% of local hunters and gatherers from southern Europe. So the modern population of this region is the descendants of those very settlers from the Middle East.

In the North, cows and pigs did not survive, grain grew poorly, because the breeds and varieties were not yet adapted to the cold climate. So the migration of farmers in this direction proceeded slowly - as the varieties and breeds adapted to the harsh conditions appeared. 90% of the modern population of Scandinavia are descendants of hunters and gatherers from Central Europe, who moved to the North under the pressure of farmers.

Similar stories happened in Asia and Africa. But in some places, global settlement could not occur for geographic reasons. For example, in America, agriculture has arisen twice or even more: in Central, South America and, perhaps, even in North. There are geographical barriers between these centers of economic development, and although populations in different parts of America have reached a high level of development, they could not settle far. Therefore, the North American and South American populations were not racially unified as they were in Eurasia and Africa, and the American Indian race is very heterogeneous.

Cross-breeding

Cross-breeding is getting offspring from mixing different ethnic groups and races. This effect of race formation has existed at all times, since the era of the Australopithecus. But the closer to modernity, the more people move and the more important the crossbreeding becomes. Its effect depends on the number and proportions of the crossing populations. For example, in North America the ratio was 2 to 98, where 2 were Indians and 98 were Caucasians. That is, cross-breeding practically did not affect the population: there were too few Indians and they were quickly exterminated. And in central South America, the arriving Europeans actively married the indigenous women. Therefore, the mixture of Portuguese and Indians was in a ratio of almost 50 to 50, and this is how modern Latin Americans turned out.

Cross-breeding is currently creating new races right before our eyes. Genetics is a tricky science in which everything is not very linear. Therefore, when different groups are mixed, their racial characteristics are not averaged out - as a result, something new is obtained, sometimes even surpassing the parental variants in expression. As a rule, in the first generations of mestizos, there is a strong diversity. And after a while the result may "settle down" - and so a new race will turn out.

Why races change

Every race changes. If modern Caucasians are compared with those that were in the XIV century, then there will be differences between them. Many signs have time to change for a variety of reasons.

1. Adaptation

Some traits change because they are useful or harmful in a given setting. The same skin color is not equally beneficial in different conditions. In sunny climates close to the equator, there is a lot of ultraviolet radiation, which in large quantities can damage DNA and cause mutations. The incidence of skin cancer among fair-skinned people in tropical countries is thousands of times higher than among dark-skinned people, so a dark color turns out to be beneficial. Melanin protects the deep layers of the skin from ultraviolet radiation, and no mutations occur.

However, in northern conditions, a dark skin color can be harmful, because we need a certain amount of ultraviolet radiation for the body to release vitamin D. This means that in northern countries it is more profitable to have light skin. But, for example, Eskimos live where six months is night, and six months is day. In addition, they are constantly in warm clothes. Then it is generally not clear which skin color is more profitable. In such conditions, it can be anything, and vitamin D can be obtained from food: for example, from fish or venison. (By the way, in the tropics, vitamin D is obtained from larvae and tree beetles.)

There are not very many such adaptive traits in humans. For example, a wide nose, thick lips, a long mouth cavity, a narrow long skull - these are signs typical of the inhabitants of the tropics, with them the body cools more easily. In the north, it is the other way around: a narrow nose, short jaws, thin lips and a chunky build so as not to lose heat and get warm quickly.

2. Sexual selection

This is a selection based on external parameters that partners and partners like or dislike. One of the few such signs that can also be attributed to racial ones is the growth of a beard and mustache. There are races in which he is strong (Ainu, Caucasians), weak (Mongoloids) and average (Negroids). This suggests that the female ancestors of the Ainu and Caucasians liked bearded men, but the female ancestors of the Japanese and Chinese did not.

3. Effects of founder and bottleneck

The founder effect occurs when a small group separates from a large one and moves into new territory. In such a situation, the specific traits of an individual become very significant: the individual characteristics of those who moved - the founders - are passed on to their descendants.

The bottleneck effect has the same effect, only it occurs during cataclysms. There was a large group of people, then something bad happened to them: famine, epidemic, war. Most of them died, and those who by chance survived carried their signs further.

The majority of the world's population at all times lived in small groups and moved in the same way. Therefore, these effects - the founder and the bottleneck - have always significantly influenced our evolution.

How many races are there in the world

It depends on what counts as races. The division into large races takes place at school: these are Caucasians, Mongoloids, Negroids, Americanoids and Australoids. There are small races, which nevertheless differ significantly from the rest, and there can be up to 200 of them. These include, for example, the Kuril race (Ainu) and the South African Bushmen.

There is also a difficulty in studying the material. For example, in Indonesia there are several hundred islands, and each island may have its own race, but they have hardly been studied. If we had explored all of Indonesia, Central and South America, Central Africa, then we would have found n-th number of races, about which nothing is known now, because anthropologists simply did not get to them.

The main problem with counting races is that they have no clear boundaries. There is a wonderful story on this topic, which is described by Miklouho-Maclay. A certain Italian, inspired by the example of a Russian ethnographer and anthropologist, decided to move to an island in Melanesia, to the Papuans. Local residents immediately robbed him, beat him and wanted to kill him. In the end, he survived, because he was rescued and sheltered by a kind old man. The Italian lived on this island for several years and, of course, became a little wild.

Once a European ship arrived at the island. The Papuans gladly went to him on boats and began to trade. The sailors from the ship noticed that one person in the boat behaves differently from the others: he does not sell anything and only looks pitifully. It turned out that this is the same Italian who was simply afraid to speak out so as not to anger the Papuans. The sailors eventually lifted him aboard and rescued him.

The trick of this story is that the Europeans in appearance could not distinguish an Italian from the Papuans, when he was sitting naked in the same boat as they were.

There are essentially no boundaries between races, there are a lot of intermediate populations. Where to draw the line and how many of them can there be, say, between Caucasians and Mongoloids? You can single out one, or three or 25. How many borders we come up with, so many of them will be, because you can go from village to village and observe changes.

What Science Says About Race Mixing

Everything that we talked about before does not refer to modern times, but to eras when people mainly lived in small groups. Now 70% of the people on the planet inhabit big cities. And one of the main problems of race is the existence of modern metapopulations. The fact is that the population of a large city cannot be called a population. Someone comes, someone leaves, someone seems to live here, but they will not marry - because they came to work, and they already have a family in their home country. Therefore, it is completely incomprehensible how to analyze the racial composition of modern cities.

This movement towards a new way of life has been going on for the last couple of centuries. What racial consequences it will have is unclear. There is a theory that all people will mix to homogeneity and become the same. I don't believe in this, because the conditions on the planet are different, transport is still not ideal, and besides, there is social isolation: religious, political, linguistic.

In order for everyone to mix evenly, you need the same climate, the ability to get to anywhere on Earth at any time, and complete mutual understanding.

I believe that new variants of races will arise. Some will appear, some will dissolve in others. It is all the more sad that now this is little studied, although many modern research methods have appeared, including genetics. But in the West, racialism is prohibited for reasons of political correctness, and Russian scientists do not have the financial ability to ride around the world. But we are trying.

How races disappear

There is a wonderful island of Tasmania, it is located a little south of Australia. Ancient people got there about 20,000 years ago. For nearly 18,000 years, the island was isolated even from Australia, which itself was isolated from the rest of the world. And in Tasmania the Tasmanian race arose.

In the 19th century, the British arrived on the island. In those days, they used the new open land in two ways: to exile prisoners there or to raise sheep. Tasmania, in principle, was great for both, but still more for sheep. And for some 30 years, the British almost completely exterminated the Tasmanians, the race disappeared. A pure example of genocide.

There is another option, when one race dissolves into another. For example, the Ainu lived well on the Kuril Islands, until the Japanese came from the south, from the territory of Korea, and began to displace them. By the 18th-19th centuries, nothing remained of the Ainu in most of Japan, although it is believed that they influenced the culture: in Japanese toponyms there are borrowings from the Ainu language.

Partly the Ainu disappeared into the Russians, partly into the Japanese. Although there are still Ainu settlements, there is no chance of preserving the ethnic group. He is gradually disappearing, and the only thing that keeps him afloat is the racial prejudices of the Japanese, who are not very willing to mix with the Ainu.