Black or white, who is superior? In the new age, we are all daft!

This month Nobel laureate Francis Watson, who is arguably the most accomplished scientist alive, was forced to sell his Nobel Prize because, he said, the scientific establishment shunned him as they perceived him as racist.

The whole issue was resolved when Russian billionaire and Arsenal owner Alisher Usmanov bought the Nobel Prize and sent it back to the DNA discoverer.

The cause of the furore was that Watson had, in an interview, claimed that black people were not as intelligent as white people, and that was the reason Africa was an ungovernable mess. The statement was widely condemned and Dr Watson lost his job as chancellor of a science lab.

The question, in light of recent discoveries in science, is whether you can make an inquiry into intelligence across races without being considered racist.

DARWIN THEORIES

This, of course, is very dangerous territory to venture into. The Nazi’s theories of Aryan superiority and racial purity that led to the gas chambers were underpinned by misinterpretation of Darwin’s theories on evolution.

Different members of hateful societies have exaggerated differences between the races to conduct genocides, but that does not mean the differences do not exist.

The message that there are no differences between races is important — particularly — to combat prejudice and idiocy. The almost unchallenged dogma of our time is that all humans are the same, and that race is only skin-deep.

But this isn’t necessarily true. As we plumb the depths of the human genome, we find differences in evolution across races inhabiting different regions.

For example, the reason Tibetans are able to live on the roof of the world is that they have genes from Denisovians, an extinct species of human beings.

We also know that Caucasians have a lot more Neanderthal genes than Africans. This is because the migrating humans heading towards Europe from Africa encountered Neanderthals who lived in Europe, while those who didn’t never met — and thus never mated — with our extinct cousins.

EVOLUTION
Lactose tolerance is not distributed equally across the world, and neither is that for alcohol. Sickle cell is prevalent among Africans as a response to malaria while you will have to search far and wide for Africans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease because it primarily affects northern Europeans and a sub-section of Libyans.

Evolution in human beings did not end when we became the dominant species in the genus Homo. We are yet, for example, to unearth all the differences wrought by the fact that agriculture took hold in the Mediterranean before the Savannah.

The diets were different, for starters, and the skills required to survive in either environment also varied. It isn’t wrong to speculate that certain people growing up in a different environment would be better at certain skills.

It isn’t a coincidence, also, that the three most popular religions in the world sprang out in a geographically tiny area that was all within a day’s drive, and that also happened to have the highest number of cereals and domesticable animals.

It shouldn’t be a shocking claim that people who grew up for millennia under a caste system (Hindu is the oldest extant religion) with its accept-your-lot ethos would be more tolerant of social inequality than, say, the descendants of pastoralists.

TESTABLE PROPOSITIONS

In a society where everyone is pigeon-holed and stays there, those who stick out are hammered in and it is likely that those who conform will have more children.

It may be true that people who were for millennia hunter-gatherers will be less conscious of the destruction they wrought on the environment than those who were forced to huddle into cities for safety.

City dwellers end up having a different relationship with disease than pastoralists. They are more likely to have grown up under tyrants than those who were free to roam with their animals across endless spaces.

Hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, have a more tenuous relationship with that of their activities on the environment than, say, farmers.

All these statements are testable propositions that cannot be immediately dismissed as prejudice. We are very much products of our environments, which shape us as much as we now try to shape them.

If our bodies show such subtle diversity in capability and performance in response to the varied environments, isn’t it expected that our minds will do the same? The mind is, after all, a product of chemical phenomena and there is no reason to believe that any of it survives the death of the brain.

GENETIC DIVERGENCE
It, therefore, is not controversial to say, as Dr Watson did in 2007, that intellectual differences between geographically separated peoples might arise over time as a result of genetic divergence.

So when someone says that some races are more intelligent or better at something than others, it is a testable proposition and not necessarily one born of racism.

Race isn’t just a social construct; it is slightly more than pigmentation. It no longer has ring-fenced boundaries and genes have seeped through. Brazil, with its resplendence of beautiful humanity, and in particular gorgeous women, is an advertisement for why we should, with haste and vigour, mix the races.

There well could be differences in capability of performing some mental tasks across the races, but it wouldn’t matter in the end. Whichever race is more intelligent is no longer most important. The challenges facing humanity require a group effort with a broad range of experiences and abilities.

POOLING TOGETHER
All the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and it is therefore unlikely that one very intelligent person will make much of a difference unless he is supported by other equally intelligent persons working towards the same goal.

The days of single half-mad men shouting eureka and rolling out ready-made inventions to a grateful world are gone. Who has more neurons and synapses in their skulls is not much of a concern.

Invention is a collegium effort, performance a collaborative goal. The greatest breakthroughs take teams of many dedicated workers aiming for the same goal.

Ultimately, it will not matter who are the smartest, but who can pool together the most resources and talent in an environment that is conducive for creation. Currently, it is China that is winning that future.