Science is something that is sometimes overlooked when discussing the idea of race as we get swept up in identity politics. Since the Human Genome Project made it possible to examine human ancestry in much more detail and the ways that humans migrated out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago to all parts of the world, it has shown the idea of race to be much more of a social construct that a biological one. ‘Race’ cannot be biologically defined due to genetic variation among human individuals and populations. The concept of the ‘five races’ (African, European, Native American and Oceanian) is now outdated as it was shown there is far greater genetic variation within these ‘races’ than between them. I think this is quite a unifying discovering as scientists have proven we are much more scientifically similar than many would have thought despite having a long and painful history of people acquiring a racial superiority mindset. Science, yet again, comes through to prove the ignorance and ludicrous ideologies of groups such as white supremacists.
Affordable at-home ancestry test kits are now widely available, such as 23andMe, that allow people to find out more about their heritage and the migration patterns of their ancestors. However, these companies are capitalising on the simplified genetic idea of the ‘five races’, dividing a person into these categories based on less than 0.1% ancestral composition when in reality the lines between race are much more blurred than these companies would have us believe. It has been said that companies like 23andMe could be dangerous in dividing people more based on race.
In a Stanford study over 92% of alleles (gene forrms) were found in two or more regions and almost 50% of the alleles analysed were present in all seven major geographical regions. This fundamental similarity of all people around the world has been support by many other studies because if separate racial groups actually existed you would expect to find trademark alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in others.
While there is no evidence that ‘races’ have distinct, unifying genetic identities, its undeniable to different cultures that have grown out of different regions of the world. Racial categorisations are now slowly being replaced by cultural distinction as a means of explaining human differences. ‘Race’ can be seen as invoking the superiority of some human groups over others, whereas culture is assumed by many anti-racist scholars all over the world to imply a positive celebration of difference while allowing for the possibility for progress among groups. This is especially important as our societies become more and more multicultural. This is not to ignore the continuing impact of racism upon socio-economic inequality but to show how we can more towards a celebration of culture and acceptance of everyone living in our society.
Political and social agendas have long divided us. For example, before genetic testing, paleoanthropologists viewed Neanderthals as too dull and clumsy to use efficient tools and branded them as ‘dumb brutes’. It was later discover that many people with European and Asian descent have inherited 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals whereas those of African descent don’t have any Neanderthal heritage. Far-right groups then changed the narrative, twisting scientific advancement to claim that Europeans and Asians have superior intelligence as they’ve inherited larger brains from their Neanderthal ancestors. This is an example of how people can unjustifiably use science to twist a political and social agenda.
However, I believe we have to fight racism with informed scientific understanding and factual basis instead treating it as solely political and social issue. As science has rapidly advanced, its insights can be used to unite us instead of divide us as a species, and we can use our DNA to understand what it means to be human.
