Professional Documents
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Nature's Gifts: Why We Are The Way We Are
Nature's Gifts: Why We Are The Way We Are
WILMOT JAMES
ISBN 978-1-86814-515-7
2. Reading Genes
21
3. Skin Colour
41
4. Blood
61
6. Ways of Learning
101
Notes
162
Bibliography
177
Index
188
Wilmot James
Cape Town
ix
UK T, U, V, W X
Y
Nature'sGifts frontmatter.indd 11
ASIA G
I, J, K M B
NORTH
N M B AMERICA
A, C, D
L2 L3, M F B
AFRICA M X?
L1
B A, C, D
AUSTRALIA
SOUTH
AMERICA
2010/07/13 9:17 AM
3
Skin Colour
Race classification
The release in 2010 of the documentary film Skin, the story
of Sandra Laing, the woman with ‘coloured’ features born to a
‘white’ Afrikaner couple in the 1960s, creates an opportunity
to examine more closely the interaction between genes and the
environment when it comes to pigmentation. These reflections
occur in the context of a post-apartheid South Africa.
I spent some time in the Cape Archives consulting material
on ‘group areas’, apartheid’s system of residential segregation. On
reading through some initial materials it became immediately
apparent that ‘group areas’ could not be understood in isolation
from sex and marriage across the ‘colour line’ and that I was
looking at an historical picture, at the centre of which stood a
government effort led by T E Dönges, apartheid’s first Minister
of the Interior, to apply a programme of population engineering
that built on and refined existing measures to segregate the
country’s population groups. What they tried to create was a
national ‘breeding programme’ for human beings.
In pursuit of this project, Dönges had to create laws to
classify the South African population. He did so by means of
the Population Registration Act of 1950, which divided the
population into four main groups along lines of appearance
and social recognition: Europeans (meaning whites), Asian,
‘coloureds’, and ‘natives’ (meaning blacks).
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Colour
The most recent hominid-chimpanzee ancestor probably lived
about 8- to 10-million years ago. Today’s chimps have a pink
skin covered with hair. Perhaps what became the Homo line
also started off with a pink skin. We had the biological ability
to change colour inter-generationally through natural and sex
53
54
Land about 55 000 to 60 000 years ago. Their skin colour probably
became as dark as that of today’s living Australian Aboriginal
population.33 Middle Eurasian populations developed lighter-
coloured skins and northern Europeans even more lightly
pigmented ones.
Keith Cheng and his collaborators’ gene SLC24A5 is
associated with the pale skin and gold hair found among
northern European populations. Jonathan Rees’s MCR1 gene is
associated with the red hair and pale freckled skin seen today
in unusual incidence among the Scottish and the Irish. The
movements into the Americas probably started about 20 000
years ago, when a landmass called Beringia connected present-
day Siberia and Alaska.
There were other waves of migrations which resulted in a
permanent pattern of settlement of a people who developed
dark to light-brown skins with a reddish tint, the Far East
Asian populations from whom they descended having an already
established light skin with a yellowish tint. Biochemically, both
are a result of a more dominant pheomelanin activity in melanin
production.34
Some of our more distinctive outward features, determined as
they are by the tiniest fraction of DNA, suggest that groups of
human beings reproduced in relative isolation from one another
for some time; long enough for variations in certain features, like
skin colour, to become more homogeneous. Gene-flow across
populations would have been minimal in those times. Scientists
today believe that the isolation was not so great that it allowed
for races or sub-species to emerge. Also, there is no evidence
that the world’s different populations were a consequence of
crossbreeding with other Homo lines.
Whenever the period of relative isolation began, it ended
about 10 000 years ago, when the first innovations in agriculture
were introduced and populations started to grow. Modern
agriculture and medicine unleashed the explosion in human
populations in the 16th to 17th centuries, initiating a period of
growth and, as a result of today’s travel technologies, a modern
55
Colour by sight
The final part of the story is about the way we see or apprehend
colour and its role in what Charles Darwin, in The Descent of
Man, called sex selection.36 ‘We think of our eyes as wise seers,’
Diane Ackerman wrote in her Natural History of the Senses, ‘but
all the eye does is gather light.’37 The brain interprets the light-
wave patterns as colour. How much variation in skin colour do
our eyes see? A lot. But not as much, I am sure, as those of an
eagle or owl or cheetah, though there are 32 words in Brazilian
Portuguese for variations in skin colour that the human eye
apprehends in Brazil’s colour-blind democracy!
In fact, we see much more homogeneity than there actually is.
It is possible that, in reality, the variation between human beings
spread across the globe in pre-modern times was much finer and
more nuanced than we may think. We were thinly spread and
had little contact with individuals who were strikingly different
to our eyes. Still, most of our ancestors probably thought their
skin colour was the only one. Travel narratives indicate that
towards the end of the 19th century there were many peoples
who had not yet encountered human beings with a strikingly
different colour from their own. When contact occurred it must
have been a surprise, perhaps even a shock.
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They continue:
58
59
60
H V
U5 C
U7 U6 B
U8 R F
Q
E
Z
K 3 Y
U1 D
T
U3 U2 X A
U9 G
U4
W M1 M2
I
N M
L3k
L3a L3x
L3b L3e
L3f L3i
L3c
L3 L3h
L4
L3d L3j L2d
L2e L2c
L6
L2b
L1c4
L1c6
L1c3 L2 L2a
L0a2
L5 L0a3
L0a1
L0k L0a4
L1c2
L1c1 L1 L0b
L1b
L0 L0f
L0d1
L0d3 L0d2
AFRICA
ASIA AND THE AMERICAS The letters and numbers represent particular
lines of descent grouped into categories
EURASIA
called haplotypes.
EUROPE