The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (3 page)

Darwin described the Fuegians as being ‘… stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow-creatures …’ Clearly not what most people conjure up when asked to describe ‘noble savages’. Yet Darwin was actually travelling with three Fuegians taken to London five years earlier by Captain FitzRoy. Colourfully named Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button and York Minster by their kidnappers, their real names were Yokcushlu, Orundellico and El’leparu. Taken by the sailors on the earlier voyage as a form of ransom after a small boat was stolen, the Fuegians were clearly out of their element in the world of Victorian Britain. Nevertheless, they had learned to speak rudimentary English and had even begun to take on some of the affectations of the British middle classes. Jemmy, for instance, repeatedly exclaimed ‘poor, poor fellow’ when Darwin was seasick – which he was with disheartening regularity. In spite of the alien nature of the Fuegians in their native land, Darwin clearly views them as being members of the same species, albeit with his Victorian class-influenced view of humanity. He even compares them favourably with the sailors on the
Beagle
when discussing superstitions, and blames their generally lower level of material culture on an egalitarian political system. Although he may have been rather naïve politically, he was ahead of his time scientifically.

Importantly, Darwin had come down on the side of nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate. Even the Fuegians, as horrendous as they were in their natural state, were members of the same species as the crew aboard the
Beagle
. In the closing chapter of his journal he takes a jab at the barbaric slave trade then widespread in the Americas with one of the most poignant statements ever made on the equality of humanity: ‘It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused, not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin …’

But if humans were all members of the same species, how was it possible to explain the dizzying diversity in human colours, shapes,
sizes and cultures around the world? Where had the species originated – and how had our ancestors journeyed to such remote parts as Capetown, Siberia and Tierra del Fuego? The answers to these questions would need to wait another 150 years, with a few detours through bones, blood and DNA.

How do we define a species? The accepted definition since the mid-twentieth century is that of an interbreeding (or potentially interbreeding, in the case of widely dispersed species) group of organisms. In other words, if it is possible to reproduce young together, you must be the same species. To Darwin, writing before the acceptance of this codified definition, there nonetheless seemed to be no question as to the commonality of humanity. His abolitionist call at the end of the
Voyage
was heart-felt, as slavery had recently been outlawed in Britain, and the debate still raged in the United States and elsewhere. But many others had taken quite a different view, arguing vehemently that humanity was clearly divided into distinct species or subspecies. This was first formalized in the early eighteenth century by a Swedish botanist, Carl von Linne (Latinized to Linnaeus), who took it upon himself to classify every living organism on the planet. Rather a daunting task, but Linnaeus managed to do a pretty good job. Among other innovations, he gave us the binomial system of nomenclature used by biologists to this day – the Latin
Genus species
we all know from school, as in
Homo sapiens
.

Linnaeus recognized that all humans were part of the same species, but he added additional subclassifications for what he saw as the races, or subspecies, of humanity. These included
afer
(African),
americanus
(Native American),
asiaticus
(east Asian), and
europaeus
(European), as well as a poorly defined, blatantly racist category he called
monstrosus
– which included Darwin’s Fuegians, among other groups. To Linnaeus, it seemed that the differences among humans were great enough to warrant this additional classification.

Darwin, ever the objective scientist, noted that our outward appearance has been over-emphasized in classifying humanity. In
The Descent
of Man
, written towards the end of his life, he notes that: ‘In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by long habit of observing ourselves.’ This is an important insight, and one that helps to explain much of the subsequent debate over human origins.

The American pro-slavery lobby embraced an extreme form of the Linnean view in the nineteenth century. The view that human races were actually separate, inherently unequal entities made it easier to justify the brutal oppression practised in the United States. The theory that human races are distinct entities, created separately, is known as polygeny – from the Greek for ‘many origins’. This theory clearly contradicted the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, inhabited by a single Adam and a single Eve, and thus raised the hackles of the church. Most biologists also objected to the polygenist view, noting the extensive hybridization among human races. To the polygenists these objections were easily overcome, as exemplified by Louis Agassiz, our Swiss catastrophist. According to Stephen Jay Gould, Agassiz believed that the ancients who wrote the Bible would not have been familiar with the different types of humanity, and thus they only wrote about a Mediterranean Adam. Agassiz thought that the Negroid Adam must have existed, as well as the Mongolid, and presumably the American.

While most biologists did not accept this view, it has been maintained to the present day in some anthropological literature. This is largely as a result of the great difficulty in explaining the physical diversity in humans, as well as certain patterns in the fossil record. Perhaps the best-known recent adherent of this view was the American anthropologist Carleton Coon, who published two hugely influential books in the 1960s,
The Origin of Races
and
The Living Races of Man
. In these books, Coon advanced the theory that there are five distinct human subspecies (Australoid, Capoid, Caucasoid, Congoid and Mongoloid), which evolved into their present forms
in situ
from ancestral hominids. Tellingly, Coon suggests that the different subspecies evolved at different times, with the African Congoids appearing early and remaining trapped in an evolutionary dead-end until the present. He asserts that the dominance of the Europeans is a natural consequence of their evolved genetic superiority, and even
provides solace for those who lie awake at night worrying about interracial mixing:

Racial intermixture can upset the genetic as well as the social equilibrium of a group, and so, newly introduced genes tend to disappear or be reduced to a minimum percentage unless they provide a selective advantage over their local counterparts. I am making these statements not for any political or social purpose but merely to show that, were it not for the mechanisms cited above, men would not be black, white, yellow or brown.

This was not a statement to be taken lightly, considering that the writer was the president of the American Association of Physical Anthropology (the largest and most influential anthropological organization in the world), a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, curator of ethnology at the University Museum and a regular guest on a popular American television programme.

It is interesting that Coon went to such an effort to distance himself from political motivations. He did this because physical anthropology was just emerging from a dark period when it had, in fact, been self-consciously political. As outlined by one of its main proponents, Aleš Hrdlička, in the inaugural issue of the
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
in 1917, physical anthropology should serve humanity as well as study it – it was not simply a ‘pure’ science. Hrdlička noted its utility in formulating eugenics programmes, as well as in determining immigration policy. While he may have been trying to impress funding agencies with the applicability of what many considered to be a rather esoteric science, it was clear that some people were listening quite closely – and were soon to act on the advice of some pragmatic and politically savvy anthropologists.

Anthropology had developed in the nineteenth century as ‘that science which has for its object the study of mankind as a whole, in its parts, and in relation with the rest of nature’.

More than anyone else, the Frenchman Paul Broca – who penned this description – can be credited with creating the modern discipline of physical anthropology. Broca was an expert on craniometry, the measurement of minute differences in skull morphology that were thought by some to indicate innate potential, and he developed a detailed classification of humanity based on these subtle variations. Broca’s methods, disseminated in a highly influential textbook, served to galvanize the scientific community. Soon everyone wanted to measure skulls.

In England, an amateur scientist named Francis Galton was an early convert of Broca’s. Galton had inherited enough money to fund a variety of research subjects, including statistics and biology. Soon he too began to measure anything and everything on the human body in an effort to categorize human diversity scientifically. This could have been dismissed as no more than an eccentric’s dabblings had his fascination with human classification not mixed with a misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to produce a potent brew.

As we saw earlier, Darwin was not a ‘hard’ racist. He was as prone to trivial biases as the next person, but from his few statements on the subject, we can infer that he believed humanity to be largely equivalent in terms of its biological potential. This was not true for many of his adherents. It was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, for instance, who actually coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, and he used it to justify the social divisions inherent in late-nineteenth-century Britain in a series of widely read books and essays. If divisions within society could be explained by science, then surely differences between cultures had a similar cause. Combined with the Victorian obsession with classification, this leap from ‘might makes right’ to a belief that these cultural differences must be definable using scientific methods encouraged the growth of the eugenics movement.

The movement began innocently enough. Eugenics actually means ‘good birth’ (who could oppose that?) and, to a certain extent, it had always existed. The collection of ancient Jewish laws known as the Talmud, for instance, urged men to sell all their possessions in order to afford to marry the daughter of a scholar, so that their children would be more intelligent (scholars’ daughters clearly weren’t cheap
dates). It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, however, that eugenics really took off. The reasons are complex and have to do with Victorian ideas of self-improvement, interest in new scientific fields such as genetics and the wealth of emerging data from physical anthropology. Once it got going, though, there was no stopping it.

The Eugenics Education Society was founded Britain in 1907, in Galton’s honour. Its stated objective was to improve the gene pool of humanity through the selective breeding of ‘fit’ individuals. Its influence spread rapidly to the United States, where the culture was particularly predisposed to theories that promised self-improvement through the application of scientific knowledge. Soon ‘Fitter Families’ contests were a common feature of American state fairs, with families vying for the kudos and medals that came with being chosen as the fittest. Eugenics also caught on throughout Europe, where a somewhat darker strain emerged in the form of German racial hygiene.

While eugenics began as a movement dedicated to social enlightenment, its aims were soon perverted, and by the 1910s and 20s it was being used in the United States as scientific justification for the forced sterilization of people believed to be mentally subnormal. It was also behind the mean-spirited implementation of racist immigration tests and quotas (in the 1920s desperately poor eastern European immigrants, most of whom were illiterate, were expected to arrive at Ellis Island in New York knowing how to read). The systematic extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other supposedly inferior groups by the Nazis in the 1940s had its scientific justification in the application of eugenic principles. Physical anthropology had jumped to the head of the queue in its race to prove ‘useful’.

It is no wonder then that Coon, writing after the horrible truth about the Nazi atrocities had come to light, made such an effort to distance himself from political ends. Even in the segregationist climate of America in the early 1960s he would have inflamed old wounds that were only beginning to heal if he had recommended political action based on the findings of physical anthropology. Instead, he presented the fact of human racial differences as an objective, scientific observation of the world – warts and all. Don’t blame the messenger, he seemed to be saying, if you don’t like the message. But the claim
that his conclusions were based on an objective appraisal of the evidence at hand was flawed, since no one had actually tested his genetic hypotheses. What
did
our genes have to say about human racial differences?

The study of human diversity was, until the twentieth century, limited to variation that could be observed with the naked eye. The subject of countless studies by Broca, Galton and the biometricians in Europe and America, this era marked a ‘collection’ phase of physical anthropology – the early stages of a new field of scientific enquiry, when there is no unifying theory with which to analyse the data accumulated. There was only one problem with the growing mass of data on human morphological variation – there was no simple correspondence between the newly rediscovered laws of heredity and the characters being measured. While there is certainly a genetic component to human morphology, it is clear that dozens – probably hundreds – of separate genes control this variability. Even today, the underlying genetic causes have yet to be deciphered. Thinking of Broca’s craniometric studies, if a particular bump on the skull is found in two unrelated individuals, does it necessarily represent the same genetic change? Are the bumps really the same characteristic, and thus representative of a true genetic relationship, or do they simply resemble each other superficially – by chance? It was impossible to know.