Truth or “truth”

I have been interviewed on TV, as have a number of people I know, and when you’ve been through that experience you realize something very odd: No matter what you say, the story usually comes out the way the folks who interviewed you already wanted it to – before they’d ever talked to you. In other words, they were only interviewing to find a sound bite in support of the story they were already planning to tell. That’s just the way things work.

And here’s the odd thing about it: I don’t think there is any attempt to deceive. Rather, I think what we are seeing is a symptom of the fact that the very structure of mass media is based upon self-fulfilling prophecy. You don’t get people to watch news by telling them things that they know to be wrong. Even if the things they know to be wrong are actually right.

Mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks can only sustain a relationship with millions of citizens by speaking to the conventional truths that culturally bind those citizens together – even if those “truths” are falsehoods. And as Bill Maher discovered in 2001, you cannot even say something that is obviously true, if people are not ready to hear that truth.

I was reminded of this recently when I was describing to a friend something I was told years ago by my brother, who does cutting-edge research in computational DNA analysis. OK, bear with me here…

Everybody knows that there are various races in the U.S., right? Let’s see … there are caucasians, asians, africans, etc., and subgroups within those, like Latinos, Swedes, Chinese, and so forth. Everything you hear in the news reinforces the categorization of people by “race”. People even get into strange quasi-religious discussions about these things, such as this one: “Since Barack Obama’s father was actually born in Kenya, Obama wasn’t descended from slaves. So is it proper to call him an African American?” After a while this might all start to sound like a debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Yet there’s a glimmer of understanding hidden under the feet of those dancing angels. People having such discussions seem to understand, on a subliminal level, that the fundamental issue on the table is not biology or genetics – but rather cultural heritage. “African American” is often used as a shorthand reference for: “A group of people whose forebears were enslaved by another group of people, which caused a big mess that we are all still working out.” Which is why the label of “African American” on someone with Obama’s particular cultural background can sound slightly odd.

Consider this: The poor and undereducated children of Irish or German immigrants used to be seen as distinct racial types in this country. But now, some generations later, their descendents are no longer seen in racial terms – they are simply educated and sometimes affluent Americans whose forebears were Irish or German immigrants. Many younger Americans today have no awareness that Irish or German Americans were ever thought of in “racial” terms – an evolution that would have seemed amazing to the Americans of five generations ago. Whatever their false beliefs about “race”, people do sometimes understand on a deeper level that the real issue is culture and its clashes, not biology.

Which gets back to what my brother told me all those years ago. He was relating a scientific fact that is well understood by people who work in his field, but that never gets reported in the popular media. It goes like this: Choose two men at random from Sweden. They will probably both be tall, have blonde hair, fair skin, and various other “ethnically identifiable” features. Now pick a man at random in Kenya. He will of course look quite different from the first two men.

But here’s the interesting part: Look at the three billion or so base pairs of the DNA sequence within each of these three men, and ask the following two questions:

1. How many base pairs are different between the first two men?
2. How many base pairs are different between the first man and the third man, due to systematic differences between men in Sweden and men in Kenya?

It turns out that the first number (DNA differences between individual men in Sweden) is twelve times as large as the second number (systematic DNA differences between men in Sweden and men in Kenya).

In other words, for almost any practical purpose, what we call “race” is a myth, in the sense that genetic differences between you and any other individual in your own ethnic group completely dwarf any systematic difference between you and a person from another ethnic group.

And this is not so mysterious when you trace back the history of our species (this has actually been done, by tracking the rate of random mutation in the sequence of the male Y chromosome, which is not subject to sexual recombination). Some sixty thousand years ago there was a “pinch” in human population – down to maybe a few hundred individuals in Africa. About forty five thousand years ago the first humans made it to asia.

Since then there just hasn’t been much time for the species to diversify much – only a few thousand generations. Most of the diversity that can now be seen in genetic markers – what we sometimes refer to as “race” – is associated with highly superficial characteristics that mainly correlate with adaptations to weather, such as the loss of skin melanin in groups that migrated away from tropical climes (which we now associate with “white” people), or eye folds to protect against cold weather (which we now associate with “asian” people).

All of which basically means that talk about “racial differences” – so confidently bandied about in all of our civic discussions – is based on a myth. The substantial differences between us are cultural. And if we wish to deal with those cultural differences effectively, it might be useful for people to know this.

But you’re not going to see any of this in a newspaper or on TV, because, sadly, this is a case where the truth clashes with the “truth”.