Hi, you're listening to Science Verses, the show where we pit fact against fad. I'm Wendy Zukman and on today's show Science Verses Race Whites, Blacks, Jews, Chinese from a scientific perspective to the races exist. Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough and we could discover. It was in breakthrough and come in a sense to see the scientists across the world.
Race is the idea that groups of people are inherently different from each other because they have a different ancestry. In this episode, we're going to look deep into the DNA of humans to see if there really are any biological differences between Classical racial groups. But first, a history lesson. Where did the idea of race even come from?
And this is important because the races we know about today aren't natural. They were completely constructed by a handful of European scientists a couple of hundred years ago. Our modern ideas of race started with a Swedish guy called Carl Linnaeus. He lived in the 18th century and he loved to classify things.
First he grouped plants into particular categories and then he grouped animals, which of course meant classifying primates and eventually classifying you and me. Now while Carl was doing all of these classifying Europeans were going exploring into Africa, Asia and the Americas and they were finding people that looked very different to them. I guess what they were trying to do in part was to understand this massive humanity if you like these new people that they're encountering. That's Darren Kurnow, an associate professor of human evolution at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
He says that classifying Carl Linnaeus was the first to formally slice our species and he chose four proposed races. Linnaeus gave them different names but he essentially recognised Europeans as a race, Mongoloids or East Asians as a race, Americans, and he put a native American here and Africans so they were four major groups. And just so you know where the science was at at this point, Carl also talked about the potential of sub-races which included homo ferris, a four-footed mute hairy wild man and wolf boys. Yeah that was a potential sub-race too.
A few decades later a German physician called Johannes Friedrich Blumenbach added another category to this picture called Malays and critically he made a hierarchy. So he put Caucasians at the top followed by the Americans followed by Mongoloids or East Asians followed by Africans and followed by Malays. And what was that hierarchy based on? Well really notions of beauty and heart but also personality or temperament if you like and at least in Blumenbach's case he studied skulls.
So that was around 200 years ago but many of these ideas about race like that our ancestry has an impact on our personality are still around today. Even if we don't save them in public. And sometimes even if we do save them in public my background is Jewish and I get told I'm good with money or if people don't like me then I get told I'm stingy. I'm also apparently funny but with that particular kind of Jewish humor.
What did I get called Jackie Chan a lot as a child? This is comedian Michael Hinn. My parents are from Wahlgert in New South Wales and Kings Grove in Sydney. Their parents are from Lightning Ridge in New South Wales and Thursday Island in Queensland.
And if you go back enough generations eventually several of my ancestors are from China. Yeah because you look Chinese. Thank you Wendy. Going to a lot of comedy rooms.
Michael hears a lot about the races. Asian people can't drive. They look the same. Asian dudes have tiny penises.
I don't know I mean I can keep going with this kind of stuff. You're good at maths. You get your L's and R's confused. You can't hear our boat dogs.
You love chopsticks. You're really good at that aren't you? I'm going to eat a fork. You're quite good.
Like a radio host Lewis Hobber who is... I'm a 50 Shades of White. We're so white it's crazy. Being at the top of the hierarchy for two centuries has been quite handy.
When I asked him what stereotypes he gets given. Yeah I just like sort of craft beer loving, bike riding, green voting. So there's all these stereotypes about the different races. But then there's modern science.
My name is Alan Templeton and my research is in evolutionary genetics both humans and non-humans. Alan is a professor at Washington University in Missouri and he says that if you want to know if races exist from a genetic perspective you have to treat humans like other animals. So what I've done is I've taken these same concepts that we apply to the non-human world and apply them to humans and ask are there races? In the non-human animal world races are called subspecies and if you're looking for subspecies you need two things.
One is a distinct geographical area that this group comes from and two you need that group to be genetically different from those in other areas. So first problem. There's no distinct geographical regions around the world where you could grab someone from and say you're this race. He's evolutionary biologist Darren Kurnau again.
You could say well we can take that person from Kenya and we can compare them to that person from the Scottish Highlands but I would say yes but what about all the people and all the populations in between that fall on this continuum how do we classify them? Which is why when you ask people to name the races you get jumbled pretty quickly. Let's start with our radio host Blueis Hoa. Just in terms of like skin colour?
Okay black, white, Asian, like Chinese is it a race? Yeah because of Latin. Or cultural or I would have gone I would have gone with countries mostly or would I? Is there much?
So it's a music? So Arabs and Jews together? Yeah they're controversial. Yeah all like groups of countries.
No would I? Since we don't know what the races are let's just stick with Carl Linnaeus's 200 year old ideas. Are there sharp genetic differences between his four groups? Europeans, Mongoloids, American and African.
No and to make the point we'll focus on the groups Caucasians and Africans or blacks and whites. Let's do a genetic analysis of people based on skin colour. If race did exist then you would expect all people with dark skin to have very similar DNA which would be very different from people with lighter skin. But that's not what we find.
Alan Templeton's work shows that genetic differences on the whole aren't based on skin colour. They're based on how far away people lived from each other. So for example the people that live in Melanesia. And Melanesia?
It includes Fiji and Vanuatu. And the people that live in Sub-Saharan Africa have the darkest skins yet because they're on other sides of the world. Their DNA is more different than many other populations. So a European would actually be closer to an African than a Melanesian to an African on the average.
Conclusion When you look at the human gene pool you can't see distinct races. In fact you can hardly see any difference in the human genome at all. So it's actually hard to find any species on the face of the Earth that has so little genetic differences between its populations as humans. The human genome is so remarkably similar particularly when you compare it to other animals because we're a really young species.
We only left Africa some 70 to 50,000 years ago. Now 50,000 years is a very short time in evolutionary time, geological time. And the sort of differences in genetic and physical differences that have built up in that time are really quite trivial. Then when you consider very specific groups like Jewish people or Han Chinese have really only been around for a few thousand years.
It's very unlikely to be enough time to evolve a suite of complex genetic changes that would mean, I don't know, I'm good with money. Now another reason that our genome is so similar is because we're a really horny and mobile species. Here's geneticist Alan Templeton again. We do have this tendency that wherever we go we tend to interbreed with local populations and it really has homogenized the human gene pool.
Of course there are genetic differences between people. The tallest humans are over 2.5 meters tall and the shortest are under 60 centimeters. But these differences aren't based on the notions of rights developed by Carl and Naius or any of his compatriots. Next question.
If race doesn't exist from a genetic perspective and our genome is so similar, then wider groups of people look so different. Well according to Alan Templeton, the differences that we tend to see between groups are adaptations to the harsh physical environment. So for example, skin color is a local adaptation to the intensity of ultraviolet radiation, such that high levels of ultraviolet radiation favor dark skins and low levels favor light skins. And if skin color is just a reflection of UV radiation, then it doesn't make sense why we could make bigger assumptions about a person's skills, like their intelligence, based on their skin.
Despite this, Michael Hing, who we heard from earlier and has Chinese ancestry, gets told, You're good at maths. But there's actually no evidence at all to support this idea that there are population differences in intelligence. Every study that I know of that has been done has really found that there doesn't seem to be any correlation at all. So when it comes to race on a biological level, does it exist?
It's not a big problem. Nope. When we look at human DNA, we can't see races. And these days, most scientists chalk up any differences that we think we see between groups, down to culture and the environment.
And here's an example of how racial stereotypes and culture can feed back on each other. So guess what? Michael Hing, he plays the piano. I'm not happy about it, but I am quite good at playing the piano.
But here's why. My mum said to me, Michael, you need something else, you need something special because of the white man's world out there, and you've got to be better than them. She envisioned this world where I would be going for a job interview and I'd be like, well, there's two candidates and they're saying we'll give it to the white guy because we like him better. But if you play the piano, they'd be like, well, you can entertain his christmas party, whatever I say.
And that's not Michael Hing playing the piano at the ABC Christmas party? It's really not. It's not. It's not.
But I have a feeling I just didn't convince you that race doesn't exist. We are so keen to carve our populations into groups. Why? According to Darren, it's because breaking things up into little components is how we make sense of the world.
We like to place people in the boxes. Sometimes those boxes take on a life of their own and become stereotypes. And stereotypes can often lead of all its from reality and particularly biological reality. So when it comes to science versus race, that's science one, race, nil.
Although since I've got us into this mess, I really have a take to give them the point. So that's it for science versus you can listen to us on SoundCloud, the ABC Radio app or your favourite podcast app. And you can subscribe on iTunes. If you could leave us a review there, that would be great.
A big thanks to my co-producer Caitlyn Sorey and next week, the female brain. How different are the brains of the sexes? Fife will be very strongly that there are six differences. Well, I hate it if you're unemotional and autistic when you're a boy.
And if you're emotional and empathic, you're a girl. And I think that's where the distinction gets a bit silly or non-wung bits of it gets really silly. I'm Wendy Zogemem. Back to you next time.