“There Is One Race, the Human Race”: A False and Destructive Idea

by David Sims

WE ARE not all the same race. There are several different human races. There have been published scientific, peer-reviewed studies that have established that the race of a person can be determined from genetic information alone with 99.86% reliability. Here’s a link [
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372 ] to the most commonly cited such study:

Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies

Authors: Hua Tang, Tom Quertermous, Beatriz Rodriguez, Sharon L. R. Kardia, Xiaofeng Zhu, Andrew Brown, James S. Pankow, Michael A. Province, Steven C. Hunt, Eric Boerwinkle, Nicholas J. Schork, Neil J. Risch

Published in February 2005 in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The idea that race might be a “social construct” began as an hypothesis introduced by Richard Lewontin, a Jewish Harvard geneticist, in 1972. He claimed that the genetic differences between races were so slight that no one working only with genetic data would categorize people as Asians, Whites, Blacks, Mestizos, etc. Lewontin said that racial classification “is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.”

Leftists were quick to pick up on Lewontin’s words and create a number of slogans from them, including “Race is a social construct” and “There’s only one race, the human race.”

The Lewontin Hypothesis almost immediately became a required belief among the Politically Correct. And that was very unfortunate for them, because less than 30 years later it would become possible for geneticists and forensic scientists to conduct a statistical analysis of genetic markers in order to see whether their clusters correlated with the commonly identified racial groups. They did.

By 2005, it was well documented that Lewontin had been wrong. Practically every analysis of genetic markers demonstrated the biological reality of racial identities. It had long been possible for physical anthropologists to sort skeletal remains by race with very good accuracy, using only the shapes of skull, jaw, teeth, and bones as guides. By the first years of the 21st century, it had become possible for forensic experts to do the same thing with DNA, which enabled more accurate identifications of fathers in paternity disputes and in showing police when they have arrested the right suspect, or, sometimes, when they’d nabbed the wrong fellow.

Although it’s true that all the races of humans share over 99% of their DNA in common, that isn’t a convincing argument for racial equality because most of that genetic code has to do with determining us as animals rather than as plants, as chordates, as vertebrates, as warm-blooded, as giving birth to live offspring and not merely to fertilized eggs, as primates rather than (e.g.) felines, as hominids rather than monkeys, as humans rather than apes. That’s what most of our DNA does.

We’re very nearly the same genetically as the apes. And you’d have to look closely, and know what to look for, in order to distinguish any mammalian species from any other mammalian species by their DNA alone.

So that small fraction of DNA that distinguishes one race of humanity from another is enough to cause very significant biological differences.

And, really, the idea of racial equality ought to have been suspect in any thinking person’s mind from the beginning. Nature produced the visible racial differences, which we usually notice on inspection, and which we mostly agree are trivial in themselves. But then the liberals declared that those “cosmetic” racial differences were the only differences between the races, and that simply doesn’t follow logically.

It would be a very strange thing indeed if Nature, which created all of the heritable traits in organisms, had been aware of modern “liberal” sensibilities since the dawn of time, and had taken great care — with humans alone, mind you — to permit the evolution of only those racial differences having no social significance of which liberals might disapprove.

Nature doesn’t respect our opinions that way, of course. And it didn’t carry out the evolution of mankind with any such restraints.

Allow me to make a simple analogy. Races may be compared with metal canisters filled with gas. The net effect of a race’s collective behavior is like the temperature of the canisters. You can measure their temperatures in order to find out whether they are inside a safe-handling range. If you forego testing the temperature, or if you are informed about the temperature but choose to disregard any “too hot to handle” warnings, then you risk being burned. However, temperature does not predict the speed of any particular molecule in the canister. It only tells you what the average speed is.

Likewise, statistics on HIV infection rates, per capita crime rates, IQ scores, and similarly important subjects, broken down by race, might tell us that a certain race is, in general, a bunch of nasty savages, even though we realize that there are bound to be a few exceptions. The existence of those exceptions does not justify or require our going over to those other races and associating ourselves in such a way that we will be burned.

Negative environmental factors can inhibit a person’s development of skills, talents, and abilities below his genetic potential for development. However, no amount of positive environmental influence can raise anyone’s development of skills, talents, or abilities above his genetic potential for development. For example, poor nutrition in childhood can stunt your growth, but not even the most excellent nutrition in childhood (or thereafter) can turn you into a giant when you don’t have the genes to be a giant. The same is true for intelligence. Environmental factors, if bad, can reduce your IQ by several points from what it might have been, but no matter how good the environmental factors are, they can’t make a genius out of you if you don’t have the genes to be a genius.

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