Huge Irony, and the same old game

The murderous rampage by this sick young man Dylann Roof in Charleston, SC has left me deeply disturbed; and of course I’m not alone. After the initial horror and heartbreak, two things strike me: huge irony, and the same old game.

Dylann Roof was inspired he says by the Council of Conservative Citizens. Being ignorant of this group I Googled them. Very interesting. First I was struck by how many prominent politicians have been associated with the Council, including one of the many (if you get my drift) now running for President. Two parts of the Council’s platform struck me: ‘conservative Christian values’, and ‘the superiority of the European race’.

The first of these brings me to the huge irony because ever since Roof’s murderous assault in a church we have witnessed the most extraordinary expressions of forgiveness by family members of those slaughtered and many others as they gathered together in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston. Many have expressed forgiveness and a refusal to go down the road of hatred and revenge because they say that this is what their Christian religion teaches them. What I find ironic is that when the forebears of these good folk were brought here against their will they were not Christian; and only later did their descendants acquire the religion of their ‘owners’, and now it appears practice it a little better than some of the descendants of the ‘owners’. These racists say that they find in this same bible clauses that give them reason to declare people of color inferior.  Hold on a minute: Jesus of Nazareth was not a European; he was a West Asian, most probably with dark wavy hair and certainly dark brown eyes and a healthy 'tan'. His encounter with Europeans was not healthy in that it was Europeans in the form of Romans who executed him.

As for the ‘same old game’ part of my title, I’m referring to the constant linkage of European racial superiority and the need to link that with the denial of the proven facts of human evolution. European superiority is a lie and can only be perpetuated by more lying.  I’d like to think that if Dylann hadn’t dropped out of high school he might have learned a bit of basic biological truth; but then I’m probably kidding myself. I’m a subscriber to the Reports of the National Center for Science Education. There, amongst other things, I receive updates on court cases and struggles in state legislatures where concerned parents, more enlightened legislators or scientific organizations struggle to either overturn laws brought in to deliberately impede the proper teaching of biology, or in some cases to be sure that individual teachers do not impose their ‘creationist’ views on students in public schools. Not too surprisingly, the vast majority of these cases occur in the former slave states where, 90 years after the Skopes trial in Tennessee, the facts of evolution are all too often still not properly taught.  And yes, that’s why that damnable confederate flag still flies in too many places. Racism and the denial of evolutionary truth are intimately linked, and are of course carry-overs from the evil days of slavery.

Which brings me to my biologist’s perspective. Just as we associate a polar bear with the arctic, a tiger with Asia and a kangaroo with Australia, so a human is an animal that came into being (evolved) in Africa about 200,000 years ago.  For a while we were few – life must have been tough – and at one point we nearly died out as a species. But eventually we flourished and then a few small bands left out of the north east corner of the continent –  maybe some local dispute or hunger or just plain curiosity drove them. The few who did leave – probably no more than a few hundred - developed into all the humans that eventually came to occupy the rest of the world.  All Europeans for example are descended from just eight women. And we’re paler than most other people quite simply because our ancestors needed not to block out so much of the sun’s rays in order to make sufficient vitamin D.  Pregnant women deficient in Vitamin D can lose the baby. In those unprecedented northern latitudes this gave an advantage to paler skinned mothers who then had more offspring.

We biologists use the term ‘race’ for genetic variants within a species, but there is not sufficient genetic variation between any group of humans to justify the use of the term race to differentiate between human groups, we are all that close genetically. How do we know all this?  It is the accumulated work over the last hundred years of tens of thousands of anthropologists, archeologists, geneticists, chemists etc. challenged and refined over and over, so that I am certain with every fiber of my body that this is the truth. And I find this truth thrilling, and wonderful to know that if I walk down a street in any big city in the world all the varied looking people around me are in fact my cousins; and therefore dear Dylann we can and should love one another.  And simply enjoy our little variations.