Myth

I realised the other day that I’ve been wasting my time being vexed by myths. This is probably the last time I am going to write about it, but it is nevertheless worth putting down my thoughts, p’haps to revisit later in view of new information.

The strongest myth of the modern age, I believe, is the myth of “race”. A quick glance at the wikipedia page on race [1] shows how even a (debatable) balanced attempt at classifying physical human features under simplified stereotypes requires tenuous creativity, in order to bias. ( Doesn’t that look like a great bear [2]? Look carefully! There, thats the head, the tail and body… no ? its got an unusually long tail. you can’t see ? c’mon, try harder! ). Scientifically, there is only one human race. Every healthy human being of reproductive age is capable of producing human offspring with the opposite sex. That which defines the human body has been scientifically studied for many year now. [3] And yet most of the press of the supposedly modern world can’t seem to let old habits die. I have had a growing suspicion of the propaganda value of the use of terms such as “white” and “black” and “middle eastern” and “asian” in articles on the bbc website. A recent article proved to me beyond doubt, that the bbc is becoming obsessed with a pitiful attempt at re-enforceing “racial” stereotypes [4] (“Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, they are white.”). If the tasmanian press were to go on the same vein and pull out all stops to talk about “Why immigration is no longer a taboo”… hang on, tasmanians ? What Tasmanians ?!!

H.G.Wells displays his firm knowledge of modern evolutionary biology when he candidly admitted: “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.” [5]

The most widely accepted scientific theory for genuine diversification of a species is by a mechanism called “speciation” (see the ample references under the wikipedia article [6] on the topic for further info ). The only way this can happen to the human species is by forming non interbreeding groups of people in critical numbers, for a critical period of time. At our current technological level, the only possilibities I can see are:

a) Emigration to distant planets leading to isolated human populations, which could “speciate” with respect to the others. This requires a bit of a stretch of the imagination, given the technical difficulties involved in transporting, alive, any significant numbers of human beings to distant, isolated planets.

b) Deliberate non-breeding between people groups based on arbitrary criteria. Given our natural sexual curiosity ( for a little taste of it in our current mood, see [7]), this is extremely difficult to achieve. Yet it is technically possible.

Sadly, the modern myth of “race” seems to be taking us to b). Homo sapiens seem to have culturally evolved to a point where they have stopped eating each other [8] and only eat other species anymore. Would the fitter of the new species perhaps deem it fit to finish off homo sapiens by eating them all, I wonder ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_human_beings%29

[2] http://www.souledout.org/nightsky/ursamajorandminor.html

[3] http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml

[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7353601.stm

[5] From Chapter 1, “The War of the worlds”. Online archive(Gutenberg project): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation

[7] http://www.gwu.edu/~e73afram/jc-cc-ks.html

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism