Why would the New York Times editorial staff place this long...

[whistle]

...article in their editorial section? Could it be the controversial and inflammatory nature of the content?

<snip>

March 14, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese - all living on the Andaman Islands - and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."

The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But the Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."

It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

<more>
<link> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/14leroi.html?th

[roguevalley]

1. I don't think its Victorian. There are people who have unique

histories and cultures that if they are impacted, die out. We have entire native languages up here in Alaska, entire languages and their cultures that reside in the bodies of one or two really old people. When those people die, the entire existence of a people go with them.

I hope they survived for a multitude of reasons but also because the loss of their culture and language diminishes us all.

[whistle]

2. I don't doubt that, but is that because of genetic make-up or...

...cultural conditioning, nature or nurture? I would think it's cultural.

[bloom]

4. I think different groups of people

adapted enough to their environments that they are different physically at the very least. Small groups within a race.

There is a nutritional book that says people from certain northern coastal areas need more fish oil, for instance - because of centuries of adaptation. And that it can affect these people psychologically if they don't get it.

Seems like people are afraid to think about the possibilities. Afraid of value judgments and such. It's kind of like the male/female brain controversy. There are so many assumptions and so much cultural bias - that some people don't even want to know. The studies will end up saying that people are different but equal. I think some people are afraid that other people will use it to make a case for the opposite. I.E. - the math controversy.



From the article - I think the terms stocks sounds derogatory - a little too much like livestock or something. I noticed it being used in a copy of a 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't really expect it to be used today.

[Catamount]

3. Interesting post, do you know if any of the islanders survived?

[whistle]

5. The last paragraphs of the article suggest they have...

...survived the Tsunami threat, but concludes that they may not maintain their genetic distinction in future generations. And that I believe is what constitutes racial purity thinking, does it not?

<snip>
There is a final reason race matters. It gives us reason - if there were not reason enough already - to value and protect some of the world's most obscure and marginalized people. When the Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.

The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans.

Happily, most of the Andamans' Negritos seem to have survived December's tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening. Even so, Negrito populations, wherever they are, are so small, isolated and impoverished that it seems certain that they will eventually disappear.

Yet even after they have gone, the genetic variants that defined the Negritos will remain, albeit scattered, in the people who inhabit the littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually slight frames of some Filipinos. But the unique combination of genes that makes the Negritos so distinctive, and that took tens of thousands of years to evolve, will have disappeared. A human race will have gone extinct, and the human species will be the poorer for it.

<end>

[Bridget Burke]

6. Specific human varieties can exist in isolated areas.

But--in the big, wide world--"Race" is more a social construct than a biological matter.

I haven't bothered to log in to the NYT, but "looked at the right way" isn't a scientifically meaningful term.

[CJCRANE]

8. Agreed...

From what I've read, my take on it is that "race" is a result of the fact that historically most people didn't move around a lot so tended to breed with those similar to themselves. Now with mass tourism and migration more people are mixing, to the point where many people do not have a "race".

[bemildred]

7. If this is an argument for preservation human of genetic diversity,

one must applaud it. If it is an argument that human
genetic diversity and the existence of variant human
populations means that "race" in the old sense was not
bullshit, then one must condemn it.

[CJCRANE]

9. There's six billion of us

so I don't think we need to worry about preserving genetic diversity. These people deserve to be helped simply because they're fellow human beings. The fact that they have a unique heritage and culture is just a bonus.

Added on edit: not that I'm disagreeing with your general point bemildred, I understand what you mean.