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Racial Purity and Genetic Diversity
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RACIAL PURITY AND GENETIC DIVERSITY
Recently, there was a news report
strongly refuted by the government
The Article – Culture Ministry to Study ‘Racial Purity’ of Indians, in Morning Standard on 28th May is misleading, mischievous and contrary to facts. The proposal is not related to establishing genetic history and “trace the purity of races in India” as alluded in article. pic.twitter.com/NMjtxCxia3
— Ministry of Culture (@MinOfCultureGoI) May 31, 2022
(https://twitter.com/MinOfCultureGoI/status/1531561797630558208), about a proposal to study the “racial purity” of Indians. The principal investigator, who despite having a stellar record as an archaeologist has gotten himself tangled in politically motivated controversies, was quoted in the article as saying
“We want to see how mutation and mixing of genes in the Indian population has happened in the last 10,000 years. Genetic mutation depends on the intensity of contact among populations and the time that this process takes. We will then have a clear-cut idea of the genetic history. You may even say that this will be an effort to trace the purity of races in India.”
Aspects of the news report are confusing and concerning – it reports that the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI), the competent authority to conduct any DNA diversity studies, has declined to participate in this study. On the other hand, the government rebuttal states that the DNA study will in fact be conducted by the AnSI, and that ‘racial purity’ is not the objective at all. The question then arises: how is this “well-known archaeologist” involved in this study at all?
What is concerning is the focus on the phrase “racial purity”. It reminds one of the pseudoscience of eugenics promoted by Francis Galton and the ‘racial hygiene’ laws of the Nazis. Galton, a pioneering statistician, and incidentally cousin of Charles Darwin, was an active proponent of the science of eugenics, which he based on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
Eugenics proposes that genetically ‘superior’ people alone be allowed to breed, and that the rest be sterilized, by force if necessary. The ‘superior’ races were of course the Protestant Whites of Europe and North America. The ‘inferior’ races included the Jews, the Blacks, the Roma and the ‘Asiatics’. The list sometimes included Europeans who followed Catholicism, especially the Irish. Other people recommended for forced sterilization included repeat criminal offenders, mentally deficient people, people with genetic disorders, as well as transgender and homosexual people who were seen as socially deviant. Eugenics was the White aristocracy’s solution to increasing democracy, human rights and the erosion of the power of the Church.
Several American states adopted laws for the forced sterilization of repeat offenders and the ‘feeble-minded’. In a staggering judgement (by today’s standards) delivered on 2nd May 1927, the much-quoted US Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, authorized the forced sterilization of 18-year old Carrie Buck. Her doctors claimed that she had a mental age of nine, and that her mother, Emma Buck, had a mental age of 8. Carrie had borne a child after being raped; but doctors and the Virginia state authorities accused her of being promiscuous. Determining that neither she, nor her mother nor her daughter deserved the protection of the law because they were ‘feeble-minded’, Holmes wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”.
This cold-blooded statement was in pursuit of racial purity, and when a “well-known archaeologist” makes a similar-sounding statement, all rational society must shudder.
However, while the mania for eugenics slowly died out in the US, it was picked up with great fervour in a country that had suffered great losses in World War I, being forced by the Treaty of Versailles to pay onerous ‘war reparations’. Burdened with debt and an ineffective republican government, the people of ‘Weimar’ Germany yearned for a return to the old glory days, when Prussia was the master of Europe. One Adolf Hitler managed to make this secret yearning acceptable in the public sphere, and identified Jews as the cause of Germany’s suffering. As he rose to power, his Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (whose members were called the Nazis), became more and more obsessed with ideas developed by British colonialists in India. They identified an “Aryan” race, of pure White men and women, that was naturally superior to other races, especially Jews, Poles, Roma and others. The ills governing Germany were attributed to Aryans intermarrying with ‘lower’ races and diluting their racial hygiene.
On 15 September 1935 (one day after Hindi Divas), Nazi-ruled Germany passed the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor”, which prohibited White Germans from intermarrying with Jews and Roma. Later the laws were expanded to strip non-Whites of their citizenship and right to vote. But extremism cannot be satisfied with merely disenfranchising othered people, it needs to do more. On 20 January 1942, the Nazi Paty’s Wannsee Conference adopted the ‘Final Solution’, in which all Jews would be murdered. It was the principle of “na rahegi bans, na bajegi bansuri” – Germans would not sully their racial hygiene if there was no one to sully it with. But we cannot get away with just pinning responsibility on the Nazis; antisemitism and antiziganism (hatred of the Roma) have been long prevalent in Europe and North America. For example, Nicolas Sarkozy was accused of antiziganism due to his policy of evicting Roma in 2010; while antisemitism existed in European politics for centuries.
When I hear news about studies investigating the ‘racial purity’ of Indians, especially in the light of rapidly rising caste-based, region-based and religion-based animus and the covert support it receives from the state, I cannot be anything but disturbed. India is one of the most diverse countries in the world, and an honest genetic study will find more, rather than less, diversity in the country. It will find that communities that pride themselves on their genetic purity are in fact not so, and ‘inferior’ tribal communities whose morals are ‘looser’ may in fact be purer. This study is about bigotry and patriarchy – not science.
What is more unfortunate, is the complete ignorance shown by the supposed principal investigator of the study. He makes this amazingly ignorant statement,
“Genetic mutation depends on the intensity of contact among populations and the time that this process takes.”
This flies in the face of physics, chemistry and biology. Mutations in DNA (the basis of our genes) happen due to many reasons. Carcinogenic chemicals when ingested into the body (through air, water or food), can break DNA sequences and cause misalignments. Ultraviolet light can do something similar. These two are the cause of many forms of cancer.
Many mutations often happen due to the body’s own DNA replication mechanisms. DNA replication is carried out by a class of enzymes known as DNA polymerases. They have varying error rates. Bacterial polymerases often have the lowest rates, as low as 1 mistake per billion nucleotides. On the other hands, some human polymerases (and we have many) make as many as 1 mistake per thousand nucleotides. DNA ligases, which repair damaged DNA, can also make a few mistakes.
Mutations (i.e. changes in the genetic code) happen due to substitution of DNA base pairs, deletions or additions of base pairs, inversions of short or long sequences, or even migration of DNA sequences from one part of the chromosome to another. Another source of mutations is ‘jumping genes’, which are bits of DNA that can remove themselves from one place and insert themselves in another. DNA may also go a change during the process of mitosis and meiosis, when cells replicate their genetic material and then divide into two. But this is somewhat rare.
What does not cause mutation is human crowding or human interbreeding. The density of a population has no effect on the mutation rate. The rate stays more or less constant. A dense population happens when a group finds itself in a relatively abundant region, and can thus make more babies and raise more children to adulthood. The genetic diversity in such a population, will actually be less than general humanity. A sparse population may have more genetic diversity as the mutations pile up over many, many generations.
Immigration into a population will increase its diversity, but makes no effect on its mutation rate. There is no evidence to demonstrate this empirically (ie. In terms of data gathered), nor do we have any physical, chemical or biological mechanism to show that prolonged exposure to a Muslim (including mating with them) will somehow change a Hindu’s DNA (or vice versa). These speculations are best left to Marvel Comics and other poorly imagined science fiction. In fact, in the spirit of debunking the poor scientific knowledge exhibited by the “well-known archaeologist”, being bitten by a radioactive spider will not convert one into Spiderman.
The other statement made by the gentleman is
“We want to see how mutation and mixing of genes in the Indian population has happened in the last 10,000 years.”
Any person with school-level understanding of genetics can point out that the “well-known archaeologist” is confusing alleles with genes. What is mischievous is the conflation of mutations (seen to be bad, especially in the context of genetic disorders) and the mixing of alleles, or to put it in scientific terms, genetic recombination. The implication that the latter is equivalent to the former is the starting of the journey towards eugenics.
Genetic diversity is our secret weapon to combat pandemics, climate change and other emergencies. Interbreeding and genetic recombination are good for our health as it weeds out those alleles that leaves us vulnerable to genetic disorders or infection by pathogens. They would otherwise survive in the population due to inbreeding. Racial or genetic purity on the other hand is a recipe for disaster. Diversity in our immune systems, for example, allows more of us to beat a viral or bacterial infection. Governments should therefore support more inter-caste, inter-regional and inter-religious marriages against the screams of self-styled and bigoted and patriarchal community leaders.
Finally, a pressing concern is about the privacy of the data the study proposes to gather. If whole genomes are to be sequenced, how will the authors make sure that the privacy of individuals will be protected? Health insurance companies and private hospital chains, which have not shaken off a reputation for being opaque and predatory, will only be too glad of getting such information, which can be parsed for any signs of genetic disorders. It helps them deny care and increase costs.
A good society would scotch such talk about ‘racial purity’, and it is heartening that the government has done. It has not answered certain questions about why this study is being conducted now, and why this “well-known archaeologist” is involved when he has demonstrated ignorance in public, and a lack of academic integrity in prior statements. It has also not addressed concerns of patient privacy and misuse of genetic information. It is not easy to rest in comfort knowing the political subtext of this study.
About the Author
Raamesh Gowri Raghavan has 7 years of experience in scientific research, especially with PCR and biochemistry skills, followed by 11 years of experience in digital marketing, adept at conceptualisation, strategizing, copywriting and execution of marketing campaigns, working well solo or in a team. He has helped bring several brands to market in memorable and award-winning ways. He is also a teacher-researcher in the field of archaeology, linguistics and epigraphy with 4 years of experience.
