Elaine Meinel Supkis
One of the greatest books ever written is Darwin's "The Descent of Man." I have read this giant work several times in my life for it pays to refresh the memory and touch base with the fountainhead of all critical thinking concerning evolution and our place at Nature's table. I am not a biologist or an anthropologist but I am a humanist who has raised and bred animals all my life.
Darwin's Descent of Man is online:
IT is not my intention here to describe the several so-called races of men; but I am about to enquire what is the value of the differences between them under a classificatory point of view, and how they have originated. In determining whether two or more allied forms ought to be ranked as species or varieties, naturalists are practically guided by the following considerations; namely, the amount of difference between them, and whether such differences relate to few or many points of structure, and whether they are of physiological importance; but more especially whether they are constant. Constancy of character is what is chiefly valued and sought for by naturalists. Whenever it can be shewn, or rendered probable, that the forms in question have remained distinct for a long period, this becomes an argument of much weight in favour of treating them as species. Even a slight degree of sterility between any two forms when first crossed, or in their offspring, is generally considered as a decisive test of their specific distinctness; and their continued persistence without blending within the same area, is usually accepted as sufficient evidence, either of some degree of mutual sterility, or in the case of animals of some mutual repugnance to pairing.
When I was a child we always got young chicks every couple of years to replace hens aging out of the flock. My parents let us pick out exotic birds in addition to the heavy duty egg layers. Back in the late 1950s in Tucson, we had some Black Giant hens. 
Photo courtesy of the McMurray catalogue. During the 19th century, farmers competed with each other to produce a wide variety of livestock with a tremendous number of characteristics. They took animals from all over the world and "refined" their characteristics and added on variations of characteristics. This is when Kennel Clubs and Cat Shows and Bird Fancier Shows were all founded.
The race horse pedigree is the oldest. Since all race horses descended from the small circle of champions founded in the 18th century, record keepers tracked every horse for all these years. We see the results of this inbreeding for speed this very week as the breed falls apart, horses that once lived for over 25 years now seldom hit 20 years if they are race horses no matter how pampered they are.
Back to the Black Giants: I also had a rooster who was an exotic breed from the Victorian era. Buff Conchin Bantam
These bantams came from China---many bantam breeds came out of China and Japan.
All these exotic syles of bird were created by humans deliberately controlling their sex lives. No bird was allowed to choose its mates, they were confined by artificial barriers from communing with other birds on their own. Manipulating sex partners meant breeders could choose characteristics with impunity.
When we kept the huge hulking Black Giants with the little bantam, he was delighted. From his point of view, these big hens were just fantastic. The tiny brain told him, "Pick the biggest hen, she will produce many chicks!" He adored the Black Giants and turned his beak up at lesser sized birds. In turn, the Giants had no mates at all except for him so they would patiently squat as low upon the ground as possible to mate with him.
A rule of thumb is, all chickens can mate with all other chickens and all have totally fertile offspring. Ditto with cattle or horses or dogs or cats. All domestic animals, when barriers to sexual mingling are removed, revert to mating based on size, swiftness, battle hardiness, territorial moxie and sneakiness. And all are fertile.
Some of our domestic animals are not very distant from their wild cousins. They, too, can breed successfully and be fertile. I once had an Asian wolf-type domestic dog from Mongolia. The coyotes in my mountains love to lure domestic dogs into traps and then mob them and eat them. Sometimes, I would hear someone's pet barking and barking and disappearing downstream, barking and then suddenly the screams of dionysian joy from the coyote pack and a final scream from the pet, and they would rip the pet apart.
Well, every time Duke escaped, he ran down to the river. The coyotes would be lurking there. Evidently, the head female, being wild, had a vision of the ideal mate and she took one look at Duke's large size and love triumphed. Not only did she not eat him for dinner, she mated with him. Unfortunately, now we have coydogs that are bigger and stronger than the original pack.
Humans interfered with the sex lives of their captive animals probably because of two forces: vanity and utility. We want things to look certain ways to amuse ourselves. The color of the animal being bred, the shape of the head and body, tails or no tails, speed or weight. The many colors of domestic animals who have no sense of color recognition as part of their sex lives thanks to our interventions destroying the urgency to choose, are no bar to breeding when humans exit the scene. Black cats will mate with striped cats and short dogs will mate with tall dogs.
This human interference for fun was also done to identify one's livestock. Namely, if one tribe had brown cows it would pay to cultivate spotted cows if one wanted to keep track of one's own herds.
This extended to humans themselves. The genetic variations on the African continent in the human populations is greater than the genetic varieties found at the fringes of the great human migrations such as the population that ended up isolated on Australia. Even so, when looking at all sorts of humans lined up according to appearance, even though all the variations within this single species is huge at the same time these humans are all very closely related and can bear each other's young without the slightest difficulty.
Click here for a map showing probable migration routes.
This suggests to me that the tribes migrating out of the continent practiced breeding designed to make themselves easily identifiable, visually. This is where the concept of "beauty" arose. Chimpanzees will mate with each other with very few barriers, the only one being not to mate with siblings. But all human tribes had to "outbreed" for political and geographical reasons so to keep things under control, I suppose various tribes insisted on characteristics which they considered their own "markers" be used and these various visual tags assisted them in choosing mates from outside the family circles.
Back to Darwin:
Now let us apply these generally-admitted principles to the races of man, viewing him in the same spirit as a naturalist would any other animal. In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by the long habit of observing ourselves. In India, as Elphinstone remarks, although a newly-arrived European cannot at first distinguish the various native races, yet they soon appear to him extremely dissimilar;* and the Hindoo cannot at first perceive any difference between the several European nations. Even the most distinct races of man are much more like each other in form than would at first be supposed; certain negro tribes must be excepted, whilst others, as Dr. Rohlfs writes to me, and as I have myself seen, have Caucasian features. This general similarity is well shewn by the French photographs in the Collection Anthropologique du Museum de Paris of the men belonging to various races, the greater number of which might pass for Europeans, as many persons to whom I have shewn them have remarked. Nevertheless, these men, if seen alive, would undoubtedly appear very distinct, so that we are clearly much influenced in our judgment by the mere colour of the skin and hair, by slight differences in the features, and by expression.
Here is the official UCLA website for history of our species. I recommend it highly.
As usual, Dawin puts it pretty plainly: because humans breed everything they control to have desired appearances and characteristics they also do this to themselves. The differences between the various European stocks are nearly invisible to breeders in other cultures who are socially trained to look for specific, different beauty tags. If a population has only black hair, for example, hair as a beauty tag is ignored while the slenderness of the fingers or the space between the eyes are closely examined. In European communities, hair color is a very strong marker and is often the first thing the eye examines when seeking beauty markers. Just like peahens look at the tails of peacocks for beauty markers while ignoring the size of the chest, for example, so Europeans look at the hair. In Asia where hair is nearly universally straight, there is no "eye" for curly hair, if it shows up, it is rejected as alien. Yet all straight haired people can mate with and produce fully functional young. Indeed, all humans can interbreed just like all our captive animals.
What is particularily interesting is that humans that traveled away from each other 50,000+ years ago like, say, the people who first colonized Australia, could effortlessly mate with and produce young with the first Europeans who arrived there suddenly only 200 years ago. In nature, when populations become very isolated for long periods of time, they evolve away from their host population and can't mate. So far, all homo sapiens are totally related to each other.
More recently, Brazilian researchers decided to test how well common racial classifications actually work. In Brazil (as in the United States!) people are generally confident that they can tell the difference between those with European ancestry and those with African ancestry.Flavia Parra and his coworkers at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil examined this idea by taking blood samples from people who live on an island off the coast of Africa, close to the area where most Brazilians of African descent originated (Africans came to Brazil through the colonial slave trade). Then, they also took samples from a group of Portuguese people, the European ethnicity that was the origin of most Brazilians of European descent. Last, they took blood samples from Brazilians who appeared to have European descent, Brazilians who appeared to have African descent, and Brazilians who appeared to have “mixed” descent (“blacks,” “whites,” and “intermediates,” respectively).
What do you think they found? First, there was enough genetic difference between the African and Portuguese samples to compute an index of African ancestry. When they applied this index to genetic differences between Brazilians, people commonly classified as “white” and people classified as “black” were indistinguishable from each other genetically. In other words, the way people classify each other by physical looks has little to do with the ways in which they actually vary genetically.
It seems that humans have managed to collect a variety of very insignificant genes which express themselves as physical attributes which can be used by the eyes to ID into distinct groups nearly identical genetically related organisms.
Readers of this blog know that I feel this drive to artificially enhance various characteristics which are useful for identifying family groups caused humans to kill off all near relatives that lacked various identifying markers. For example, one group of people that moved out of Africa 75,000 years ago after the great volcanic eruption in Indonesia weakened many other humanoid species, loved big noses. Noses are very easy to spot and make great identifiers.
Looking at pictures drawn by Japanese artists of European invaders and traders show they were shocked by and amused by the giant noses of the Europeans. Far from considering them beautiful, they thought they were silly and very unattractive. Ditto the funny eyes. Eyes that would move poets and painters in Europe were jokes to Asians.
After many years of interaction, the tables slowly or rather rapidly turned and the last 50 years, many Asians want wavy or curly hair, hair of many different colors and those funny noses and eyes and other markers of beauty created artificially by European tribes thousands of years ago.
Many populations use surgery and chemicals to make themselves look like various ideal sex objects while not using breeding for the ability to spot differences in order to breed artificial poplations that can ID each other from sight has so confused things that populations are becoming less and less location specific and if globalization of sexual contact continues, we will all look as similar as one chimp does to another.
Of course, this is why so many populations are stressed out and trying to preserve this artificial system from disappearing. This means cloistering themselves like the Jewish community in Israel, for example. In Africa, many tribes are literally butchering each other to prevent change from occuring. In Europe, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the savage termination of cross-population marriages was another expression of this force.
In America, the "great melting pot", white European populations had sex frequently with the African population until it became very difficult to tell who was who so the white population passed noxioius sex laws and used birth certificates like they were race horse breeders to track "tainted blood" since the usual facial/skin/hair markers failed.
Hitler did this in German and Europe using birth records to locate and murder Jews since simple physical markers were useless. Many a Jew murdered by these insane nuts were more "Nordic" looking than most of the Nazi party and Hitler in particular.
Many people try to twist data about genetic differences in order to proclaim superiority over other human populations. This causes all sorts of wars and distresses. Today, in Iraq, there is ethnic cleansing erupting thanks to the American invasion as various groups try to restart the breeding/discrimination machinery so they can ID each other visually, seeking even tiny alterations and exaggerating them.
This brutal process is, like all artificial breeding projects, killing many innocent people. Understanding why humans created "beauty" and how this construct operates is important for the survival of the species, "Homo Sapiens." Now that we can genetically engineer ourselves you can bet, the one creature on earth that lusts for and actively pursues tremendous artificial variations in nearly anything it gets its hands on, will use these new tools to alter itself beyond all recognition as the race to create unique and desirable subgroups rages out of control.
In other words, our own tools to control nature will be turned back upon ourselves and instead of using artifice to make ourselves beautiful, we will try to make ourselves genetically seperate until we can't breed. This won't be a good thing, by the way. Isolated populations deteriorate or get overwhelmed by invaders. Like when homo sapiens met neanderthals and they couldn't interbreed.
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