Amerika

Consider that humans live in a world of pretense, defined by categories that we then use to rationalize what we want as part of the good categories, and what we fear as part of the bad. We are basically talking monkeys with neuroses and most of what we discuss in public is deflection, distraction, and partial truth.

Occasionally the real world peeks through. Perhaps one of the most stunning glimpses recently was the knowledge that Bonobos have racial groups or sub-species, like cultivars or landraces in plants:

Using genetic tests, the researchers confirmed previous evidence suggesting that there are three distinct groups of bonobos, originating in central, western, and far-western regions of the bonobo range. By quantifying the differences between these groups, the research team found that they can be as different from one another as the most closely-related chimpanzee subspecies.

The researchers estimated that the central group diverged from the other two groups 145,000 years ago, with the two western groups diverging 60,000 years ago, with little mixing between the groups ever since.

Translating from their politically-cautious framework, Bonobos have different races, and each race is as different from the others as Bonobos are from Chimpanzees. Even more, each race arose in a different region and has avoided mixing with the other two.

Humanity similarly has four racial groups — African, Asian, Australid, and Caucasian — and these arose in entirely different ecosystems, are as genetically distinct from each other as humans are from nearby simian ancestors, and tend to avoid breeding with each other except when self-destruction propaganda emerges.

These subspecies exist as a necessary part of natural selection so that the species can adapt to different environments. Over time, they become different genetic frameworks, or thousands of genes — each coding for a single trait — that cooperate to form the abilities of each subspecies.

When you mix subspecies, nature rolls the dice on each individual gene, so the framework is not preserved. Over time, the hybrid reverts to a mean without any of the specific abilities the subspecies involved possessed. You get a generic and less capable organism instead.

As it turns out, even being around other subspecies can cause organisms to adapt not to their environment as a whole, but to the other organisms around them. This requires looking into how nature chooses which traits will prevail through transposons and other methods of weighting the dice:

“People tend to think of transposons as akin to viruses where they hijack our cells for the sole purpose of propagating themselves,” says the study’s senior co-author Dr. Miguel Ramalho-Santos, Senior Investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), part of Sinai Health, and Professor at the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.

The researchers focused on the transposable elements known as LINE-1, for long interspersed nuclear element-1. Unlike our own genes, which compose less than 2% of our genome, the LINE-1 elements comprise a staggering 20% of the genetic material in our cells.

Being around diversity makes you adapt to that diversity, and change to be more like it. If you mix different subspecies, even if they breed within their own groups, over time an averaging occurs. This means that to combine subspecies is to destroy them.

Darwinism explains part of the method of life itself; the other parts involve a universe that constantly strives to create life and after it has done so, to differentiate it in order to provide the basis for natural selection to refine adaptation of specific populations. This is how we get the diversity of life on Earth.

Life began with everyday chemical reactions that made the emergence of organisms inevitable:

Chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago conducted an experiment in 1953 demonstrating that complex organic compounds—meaning carbon-based molecules—could be synthesized from simpler organic and inorganic ones. Using water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen gases and electric sparks, these chemists formed amino acids.

Scientists believe the earliest forms of life, called protocells, spontaneously emerged from organic molecules present on the early Earth. These primitive, cell-like structures were likely made of two fundamental components: a matrix material that provided a structural framework and a genetic material that carried instructions for protocells to function.

Inspired by these results, my colleague Alamgir Karim wondered if rainwater, which is a natural source of ion-free water, could have done the same thing in the prebiotic world. With another colleague, Anusha Vonteddu, I found that rainwater indeed stabilizes protocells against fusion.

From these simple origins the tree of life branched into plants, animals, and fungi. Those then branched further and subspecies cropped up to adapt to the different demands of their environments, preserving those frameworks through limited inbreeding.

Since creatures tend mate with those like them, over time these frameworks became solidified as the central aspect of those populations, not in a categorical sense where one trait defines the category and is imputed to all members, but as a flexible range of similar attributes held in common.

Not surprisingly, we see similar breeding in humans today, since terms like “kindness, understanding, intelligence, confidence, and creativity” are understood culturally and therefore mean people generally seek someone of similar culture and genetics:

“We found that for four out of nine traits—kindness and understanding, intelligence, confidence and creativity, there was a match between what participants said they valued and who they found attractive.”

Cultural understanding works similarly to geographic isolation. People choose those who are like them — in social class, race, culture, religion, and ethnicity as well as personality — and this forms a population which then breaks away to find a place of its own where it then adapts to the local environment.

Human history can be chronicled as a series of breakaways by modern human groups which then bred with localized hominid variants like Denisovans and Homo Erectus, producing distinct subspecies.

We can see geographic isolation at work in subspeciation within seal species:

Researchers conducted a genetic study of seals in the lake and compared them to seals not only in Bristol Bay, but across almost the entire Pacific Ocean range of the species, from Japan to California.

Results of the study, published in the journal Biology Letters, reveal that the seals in Iliamna Lake are notably different at multiple genetic markers from the seals downstream. Findings indicate that they are likely evolutionarily, reproductively and demographically discrete from other seal populations in the Pacific and could be a unique endemic form of harbor seal.

Even more, our own genetic history shows us that humans branched from commonality to specificity, producing distinctive frameworks for each population:

We identified 30 structurally distinct haplotypes at nucleotide resolution among 98 present-day humans, revealing that the coding sequences of AMY1 copies are evolving under negative selection. Genomic analyses of these haplotypes in archaic hominins and ancient human genomes suggest that a common three-copy haplotype, dating as far back as 800 KYA, has seeded rapidly evolving rearrangements through recurrent non-allelic homologous recombination. Additionally, haplotypes with more than three AMY1 copies have significantly increased in frequency among European farmers over the past 4,000 years, potentially as an adaptive response to increased starch digestion.

Bonobos, once lauded as the “peaceful ape,” have shown us that none will escape the process of nature. Every group must at some point separate internally, form branches, and then venture forth to adapt as specific subspecies. Race is real and reflects genetic frameworks that are only preserved through racial isolation.

Tags: biology, bonobos, DNA, ethnicity, genetics, race, subspecies