This gleeful PC professor is actually implying that it is whites who are committing racial genocide due to immigration and escapades abroad where they pick up a non-European lover. European Americans United respects true human biodiversity and rejects the bland and miserable future described in this piece. — Ed.
Now that the race is over, the least interesting thing about thepresident-elect, Barack Obama, may seem to be his skin colour. The same istrue of Lewis Hamilton, Tiger Woods and even Boris Johnson. What reallycounts for us (and for them) now will be Iraq policy, how to sneak past acompetitor or sink a hole in one, or how to make the transition from buffoonto statesman.
Even so, each of these multiracial heroes illustrates a deeper andlonger-lasting truth about ourselves – that men (and women) are on the move,and are having lots of sex on the way. Kenya and Kansas; Grenada and GreatBritain; English royals and Turkish politicians – Obama, Hamilton andJohnson all emerge from liaisons unthinkable until recently. In TigerWoods’s term, the world is becoming Cablin-asian (a word he invented todescribe his Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian ancestry).
History has always been made in bed, but the beds are closer together. As aresult, the human race is in the midst of a great averaging; and the future,more than likely, is brown.
Almost everywhere, the biological frontiers are becoming porous. An era ofuniformity is at hand as hordes of people move in search of work or sunshineand, in the end, sex. In Britain, the proportion of the population bornabroad has doubled in the past 50 years and is now 10%.
Intermarriage has been around for a long time. There have been Africans inBritain since the Romans, and by the 18th century these islands held 10,000black people. Since then, the proportion of Britons who claim recent full orpartial descent from Africa has gone up by 20 times and continues to climb.In 1991 more than 10% of citizens in one electoral ward in 10 were from anethnic minority. Ten years later the figure was one in eight; and by 2011the figure will rise to one in five.
All geneticists are firm believers in the healing power of lust; in theability of desire to overcome social and geographic barriers. In 2001 aboutone British marriage in 50 – a quarter of a million in total, with many morecouples cohabiting – was between partners from different ethnic groups.Hundreds of thousands of children have one parent from Britain and one fromthe Caribbean, and almost as many are the progeny of white and Asianparents. Such relationships are not, as often believed, to be found justamong the poor, for more than half of these couples live in the suburbs andare richer and more educated than average.
So, assimilation is well under way in modern Britain, which is among the mostsexually open nations in the world. Today, mate choice is made as much bylevel of education as by skin colour. Many other countries too, whether theylike it or not, have opened up their gene pools.
For years, hurdles in the mind kept genes at home, as did the simpledifficulties of travel. Some clues to the reason for the shift in our habitsare obvious. How far was your birthplace from that of your partner, and howfar apart were your mother and father, and your grandmothers andgrandfathers, born? In almost every case, the distance has increased overthe generations and continues to do so (my wife and I first saw the light3,000 miles apart; my mother and father, about three).
The world’s sedentary habits are manifest in its surnames – each one a windowinto sexual history – as much as its genes. Until not long ago, a pedigreeof names fitted well with national boundaries. The Camerons were more orless confined to Scot-land, and the Obamas to Kenya. Now names are on themove. In 1881 the Joneses were more or less confined to Wales, where in somevillages they formed a majority. By 1998 my family had smeared itself acrossthe Welsh borders, to northwest England and as far south as London.
No longer must a Jones marry a relative – as so many once did – for lack ofchoice. Instead they now come into contact with a diverse set of potentialpartners. The proportion of shared names in the marriage records of atypical English village has gone down by about 2% a year since the mid1970s.
One chromosome – the Y, carried by men alone – is transmitted in much the sameway as surnames are: from father to son and to grandson. The Y also givessome hints about sexual habits of the past. In the United States about afifth of all the genes in the African-American community are of Europeanorigin. But in that community almost a third of the genes on the Ychromosome originate from Europe: proof that there were many more cases ofwhite men having sex with black women (often, no doubt, without the consentof the female involved) than the other way round.
Famously, President Thomas Jefferson had several children with his blackslave Sally Hemings – and the evidence lies in the male chromosome of theirdescendants. That pattern of powerful men taking advantage of their positionis also obvious across the whole of South America, with its enormously mixedpopulations, where once again many more genes were brought by European malesthan by European females.
Check www.tjheritage.org andwww.angelfire.com/va/TJTruth for the true findings of theJefferson-Hemings DNA Study. NO findings that Thomas Jefferson fatheredany slave child as claimed by the reporting researcher.
Herbert Barger Family Historian Asst on DNA test., Ft. Washington, Maryland, USA
In Britain the story is rather different. Many white Britons can trace a blackancestor from the small African population that lived in England severalcenturies ago. About half the men of a certain Yorkshire kindred, with thesurname Revis, share a Y-chromosome type otherwise found only in westAfrica. In the modern world too that pattern persists. BritishAfro-Caribbean males are half again as likely to marry a white female thanare black women to find a white husband (while for Chinese people in amixed-group marriage, those preferences are reversed).
Such long-distance matings are new. Most Sunday Times readers will see ontheir way to work tomorrow more people than the average member of the humanspecies would until recently have seen in a lifetime. For 99% of our past,we were hunters and gatherers – rare and not particularly successfulprimates that gathered berries, hunted wild animals and flirted withextinction. At the DNA level we are far less different, one from another,than are chimpanzees – a strong hint that for most of history we lived intiny, isolated groups, married the boy – or girl – next door and lostdiversity as a result. If the few hunter-gatherer tribes still left a fewdecades ago were any guide, any attempt to join another group, let aloneexchange genes with it, was likely to be met by death.
The great social change began – as most do – with economics; with theexplosion in numbers that started as a result of farming. As the populationboomed, people began to move, and biology soon reared its inevitable head,with the results we can see around us.
Obama has talked at length about the economy, about Main Street versus WallStreet and those with power versus those without. As politicians always do,he promises his country a better future – and he may succeed. To biologists,though, he is living proof that the future is almost here: a future thatwill look more or less like him.
Steve Jones is professor of genetics at University College London