However, race is a different kind of categorisation. There is no scientific basis for the concept of race. It makes neither biological nor cultural sense. Whether at the crude level of black or white, or using groupings such as African Caribbean, European, Southern or East Asian – or, for that matter, old pseudoscientific terms such as Caucasian and Mongoloid – race is an arbitrary notion which lends itself to use by racists. Let’s say it one more time. There is no biological concept of race.
Some may think that making this claim is political correctness – that I am ignoring obvious racial differences because I’m a wishy-washy liberal. But science has a clear message. There is far more genetic difference within a racial group of your choice than there is between that imagined group and another one. A major study of 1,056 individuals from 52 populations in 2002 found that 93 to 95 per cent of genetic variation was within a population. Yes, there are small genetic differences that apply to regions of origin – but they are far, far smaller than any differences that we just ignore by using race labels.
What then, for example, about the very obvious difference between black and white skin? Of course, some people have darker skins than others, but having a difference in pigmentation doesn’t make you part of a separate biological entity. Everyone – absolutely everyone – is a mutant. Each of us is genetically different from the rest of humanity. Even identical twins, who are genetic clones, making their embryos nominally genetically identical, develop biological differences from the word go. So, the mere fact that some people have darker skin pigmentation is nothing to get excited about. When I was younger, my hair was bright red. I had a distinct pigmentation difference (caused by a mutation) from the majority of humanity.‡‡ But no one suggested I was a different race from others around me because of this.
Every other ‘racial difference’ is also biologically trivial. Apart from small visual differences, the majority of our associations with race are based on culture and on socioeconomic factors – but race is far too crude a label to be useful culturally, and irrelevant from a socioeconomic view-point. The ‘race’ label is just an excuse for xenophobia. Remember what we’ve already seen – you only have to go back a few tens of generations and everyone with surviving descendants is a common ancestor. Turn this on its head and it becomes clear that you are not just related to all those old royals – you are also related to everyone else alive on Earth, whatever race you label them as.
It’s entirely natural to be suspicious of groups who are even trivially different from the group we identify as ‘us’. Historically, this was a good survival trait. But not everything that is natural is good. It’s entirely natural for most children to die before they reach adulthood. As a species we are only part way through the process of growing up. We all still have a reflexive uncertainty of the ‘other’. But keeping the imaginary label of race is not helping with our development.
We’ve seen, then, that the family tree only gives a very limited view of what makes you you. It gives some hints of one aspect of your defining features, your genetic background, but it’s probably the least impressive way to do so. So, let’s take a totally different viewpoint and travel much further back in time to find how the most fundamental components that make you up came into being. We are all collections of atoms. But what are they, where did they come from, and how did they get into you?
*Pedigree is a much more fun word than ‘genealogy’. The term comes from the French pé de grue, meaning crane’s foot. This probably arose from the use of three curved lines in family trees to denote succession, which looked a little like a bird’s claws on the page.
† See the ‘Further reading’ section at the back for a link to the classic That Was the Week that Was sketch on the three British classes.
‡You may, of course, not know who all these people were, but it is inevitable that they existed.
§With the possible exception of climate change.
¶In principle a radical mutation could result in a member of a new species being born, but the chances of such a major mutation being survivable and able to be passed on to future generations is very small.
||A mutation is a change in the code stored in the DNA, which can be caused by an error in the mechanism used to copy the DNA or by external intervention, such as being zapped by a cosmic ray. All of us have mutated DNA – we aren’t talking about something out of X-Men here.
**As an example of a tangle, my grandfather’s stepmother, who had children with my great grandfather was also my grandfather’s cousin (give or take a ‘removed’). For that matter, the older models used wouldn’t allow for the possibility that a man or woman could have children with more than one partner.
††I am grouping religion (or lack of it) in with culture here, as the two are usually very tightly intertwined.
‡‡The colour of hair and the colour of the skin are caused by variants of the same pigment, melanin.
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STARDUST MEMORIES
We have established that you only have to go back a few tens of generations to establish where you came from in a genealogical sense. But we’ve much further to go – billions of years – to see where you came from physically. At the basic physical level, you are made up of just four types of particle, with the help of a few forces: the specific particles in your body have been around for the majority of the lifetime of the universe. In one sense this feels very reductionist. You might rightly argue that you are far more than a collection of particles: through emergence and interaction, the whole can, indeed, be far more than the sum of its parts. However, it would be silly to deny that those parts exist and that they are fundamentally the objects that make you up.
BUILDING BLOCKS OF EVERYTHING
So, in tracking down what makes you you, it’s essential to get a better feeling for those components. The particles in question aren’t quite the ones that you may have come across if you only studied science to high school level (or some time ago). The familiar one will be the electron. Like the other three, this is what’s described as a ‘fundamental’ particle, meaning that, to the best of our knowledge, these particles don’t have subcomponents. They aren’t made of anything simpler. Flows of electrons are what’s usually involved when there’s an electrical current, and it’s the quantity and distribution of electrons around the outside of an atom that determine how it will behave chemically.
Electrons are small. Really small. Some would say impossibly small. Their mass is around 9.1 × 10–31 kilograms.* It takes around a million, trillion, trillion of them to make up a kilogram. Ask a physicist how big an electron is and, if the physicist is honest, he or she might grimace. The official answer is that an electron is a point particle, meaning it has no size at all. If this is true, it causes some serious problems for theory, as some values grow as the radius of an object gets smaller, giving infinite values for an object with zero diameter. (Think of the density, for example, of an object with mass but no volume.) Equally, though, if an electron really did have a very small but measurable radius, that too throws up problems for different aspects of theory. Either way, electrons are pretty weird little entities.