And it is hard to read Malcolm X’s account of “conking” his hair to straighten it in the 1940s and 1950s without cringing.

Controversies about race and appearance just won’t go away, as with the pulling of country music star Jason Aldean‘s “Try that in a Small Town,” which if it wasn’t explicitly racist at the least seemed to authorize violence by small town people (mostly white) against urban populations (heavily minorities).

In a recent article, however, Tina Lasisi, James W. Smallcombe, W. Larry Kenney, and George Havenith argued that Afro-textured hair was the evolutionary innovation that not only allowed upright human beings to survive heavy ultraviolet rays in tropical and sub-tropical Africa but allowed the human brain to double in size.

Scientists have found that the prefrontal cortex and the temporal and parietal regions of the brain in humans are unusually large compared with other primates, and that these regions are associated with higher cognition and the higher emotions.

It was the enlargement of these regions of the brain that made homo sapiens so different from the other apes, and if that development was permitted by Afro-textured hair, then we owe pretty much all we are in the way of civilization and science to it.

So the argument of Tina Lasisi and colleagues is that brain is sensitive to heat and as a complex organ has to find ways of cooling down when exposed to direct sunlight. The problem was exacerbated seven million years ago when some primates, such as Sahelanthropus tchadensis began standing up straight so that the sun beat down directly on their heads. The other primates don’t have Afro-textured hair, so it was a later adaptation.

Lasisi et al. write,

“We find evidence for a significant reduction in solar radiation influx to the scalp in the presence of hair. Maximal evaporative heat loss potential from the scalp is reduced by the presence of hair, but the amount of sweat required on the scalp to balance the incoming solar heat (i.e., zero heat gain) is reduced in the presence of hair. Particularly, we find that hair that is more tightly curled offers increased protection against heat gain from solar radiation.”

The poor bald people living at the equator take the full heat of the sun’s ray’s right on their noggins and have to sweat profusely to cool off their brains. People with Afro-textured hair are protected from the penetration of those sun rays down to their scalp, so their brains don’t get as hot and they don’t have to sweat as profusely. They observe, “Tightly curled human hair form does not lay flat on the scalp and therefore increases the distance between the surface of the hair and the surface of the scalp.” They just don’t get as much radiative heating on their scalp.

Remember that the problem of sun rays directly on top of the head was exacerbated by standing upright and that it made it more difficult to have a bigger brain, since that required more sweating and more water intake more often, militating against people being able to hunt or garden for long periods of time away from streams and lakes. Since predators are not as active in the midday heat, any evolutionary advance in humans that allowed them to hunt when it was sunny and hot out would have been an advantage.

We don’t know when Afro-textured hair first emerged. I should think geneticists might be able to clock it if they tried. Lasisi and colleagues admit two possibilities. One is that hominids’ brains increased in size, presenting a problem to which Afro-textured hair and its cooling effect came as a response. The other possibility is that the hair type emerged first, and that allowed the evolution of bigger brains.

Either way, this is a highly exciting and suggestive study. If its findings are further borne out, it shows that instead of being dismissive of Afro-textured hair, we should view it as a key breakthrough that led to human advancement and higher thought, as a gift of our ancient mother Eve.

In fact I have long wondered why people don’t go on pilgrimage to the Origins Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. People go wild chasing their genealogy back a couple thousand years, but that was where it all started, 150,000 years or so ago. We’re all Africans, and black skin and Afro-textured hair was the default in modern humans until some moved out of Africa and had to adapt to low UV-ray environments where being too cold and getting too little sun and suffering from vitamin d deprivation made it advantageous to become pale with a long nose and straight hair.

Far-right white supremacist ideology is on the rise in Europe, North America and Australia. It appeals to a racist notion whereby many white supremacists see themselves as members of a “pure” race that is at risk of dilution and contamination.

Science does not support the idea of pure races with ancient origins. In the past few years, genetic sequencing of ancient and modern humans and related species has given us a flood of new information about how human populations have evolved.

The evidence reveals a history of ongoing genetic mingling, due to interbreeding between different populations and even species. Humans from different groups had children together, and even with Neanderthals and members of other now-extinct hominin species.

This mingling occurred constantly in the long process of human migration across the globe. Europeans inhabit one region of a large genetic continuum and are no more or less “pure” than any other population.

From Africa to the world

The genetic history of humanity begins in what we now know as Africa. The exact location (or locations) of the first anatomically modern humans is debated, but there is a consensus they lived south of the Sahara desert between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.

A group or groups of these early humans migrated out of Africa and into the Middle East, as we now know it, some time between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago. Next, some went east into Asia while others headed west into Europe.

At some point, the wandering humans met and bred with Neanderthals. These now-extinct hominins had left Africa many thousands of years earlier.

Modern Asians and Europeans still carry genetic signatures of Neanderthals, while sub-Saharan Africans do not.

The humans that migrated east into Asia also met and bred with other extinct species of hominins, including at least two major injections of genes from a group we call Denisovans.

Early modern humans almost certainly bred with other ancient hominins as well, because interspecies breeding was likely common. The remains of a girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father have recently been discovered. Another recent study has shown some Neanderthals too carried traces of human DNA.

Genetic diversity leads to greater fitness

Genetic diversity, as measured by a metric called heterozygosity, decreases with geographic distance from Africa. Higher heterozygosity is generally associated with greater genetic fitness for survival.

From this perspective it could be argued that, when the humans who walked away from Africa lost genetic diversity through living in small groups, they also lost genetic fitness. By the same argument, interbreeding between populations increases fitness.

In fact, Europeans probably benefited from picking up some Neanderthal DNA: these genes are thought to have diversified their immune systems and may have contributed to their lighter pigmentation.

Humans who migrated west into Europe continued to meet and breed with other human populations.

Another wave of humans from what we call Anatolia (roughly modern-day Turkey) followed the initial spread of humans into Europe. The Yamnaya population from what we now know as the Russian steppe migrated west into Europe between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. In fact, little genetic trace remains of the first human inhabitants of Europe, as they were continually supplanted by others.

Even the Roman civilisation, considered to be one of the historical foundations of European identity, was home to great genetic variety. A recent study looked at the genomes of 127 people from 29 sites across the past 10,000 years. It found an initial wave of hunter-gatherers had been supplanted by an Anatolian population, and during the age of Imperial Rome (27 BC to 300 AD) there were significant introductions of genes from what is now Iran and the eastern Mediterranean.

Even Vikings were diverse

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed northern Europeans are considered by many white supremacists as the ideal of racial purity. They are epitomised historically by the Vikings.

However, the reality was different. A recent study of 442 human genomes from archaeological sites across Europe and Greenland found substantial ancestry from elsewhere in Europe entering Scandinavia during the Viking Age. In fact, Vikings were more likely to have dark hair than modern Scandinavians.

In short, the idea of a pure white race has no basis in genetics. Lightly pigmented skin, hair and eyes are simply an adaptation to northern European climates (and represent an inferior adaptation in equatorial regions). These features exist in a background of countless other genetic influences borrowed from many populations, old and new.

Dennis McNevin, Professor of Forensic Genetics, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Channel 4 News: Adam Rutherford – The genetics of skin colour

Virginia Pastor Landon Spradlin dismissed scientists’ warnings on coronavirus as “hysteria.” He even drove 900 miles to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Sadly, Pastor Spradlin contracted the virus and is no longer with us. I feel really sorry for his family and congregation, since by all accounts he was a wonderful person. He was however a wonderful person with insufficient respect for science. His is the tragic story of the coming tens of thousands or, God forbid, hundreds of thousands of deaths among Americans who somehow think they are above the laws of biology. (Whether it is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands dead depends on whether Americans trust the science and behave as if they do. Going to church is a very bad idea for a while, as is any gathering).

Science is our sword and our shield, and a president who valued science would have swung into action in January to begin ordering large numbers of test kits, masks and ventilators. Trump did not bother to make those orders until mid-March, two months into the crisis, as Alissa Watkins at Vox reports.

In contrast, Germany has kept its cases and fatalities relatively low by widespread testing and then tracing back the contacts of those found positive. Germans trust in science, and 81% of them say that the climate crisis is a “very serious problem.”

Likewise, South Korea scaled its testing, while the US fell way behind, as Pro Public explained. Some 92 percent of South Koreans believe that climate change is a serious or very serious problem.

Anti-science attitudes in the United States are unusually widespread and powerful for an industrial democracy. Those attitudes, moreover, have a special home in the Republican Party, which has become the greatest single danger to Americans’ health and well-being, far more dangerous than any foreign terrorist organization.

Only 40% of Americans have “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community. Only 39% strongly trust climate scientists to provide full and accurate information about the causes of climate change.

Among Republicans, only 15% of the strongly conservative have strong trust in climate scientists, and only a third of self-described moderate Republicans do.

Put differently, 85% of conservative Republicans think climate scientists are either flaky or inveterate liars. If you haven’t noticed, conservative Republicans control most branches of our government except the House of Representatives, and control most state houses.

Perhaps as a result of the widespread dismissal of science, only 64 percent of Americans think climate change is a serious problem, while 36 percent think it is minor or not a problem at all. And 71 percent think human beings can do nothing about the climate crisis, or can only slow it but not stop it. (They’re wrong– we have a “carbon budget” created by the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide up to a certain level. It is only if we exceed that absorptive capacity that we are well and truly screwed; we’re on course to exceed it, because we won’t listen to the frantic screams of the climate scientists).

Pew found that among Democrats, trust in science on climate issues went by education. More educated Democrats trusted science more. Less educated ones, less. But among Republicans, it didn’t matter how well educated they were. They don’t trust climate science as a matter of ideology.

Nearly a third of Americans believe that creatures, including human beings, have been stable in their form since the beginning. While the other two thirds recognize evolution (it isn’t a belief, it is a fact), only 35% know that evolution is a matter of random variation and natural selection, insisting that it is “guided” by a supreme being. While science cannot disprove that a supreme being set up evolution to work as it does, there is nothing teleological about it– and animals can lose complex features over time if it is advantageous to them to do so in their environment. The ancestors of penguins used to be able to fly.

Republicans are invested in business and religion, and science is often inconvenient for both if they are pursued in a fundamentalist way. On the other hand, neither is intrinsically incompatible with science, and both would actually benefit if they took the science on board, early and often.

When people let their ideologies overrule reason, they are digging their own graves.

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Bonus Video:

Washington Post: “This Louisiana church is defying the coronavirus lockdown: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself'”

The connection often made between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth,” said Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist.

Cutting-edge DNA analysis of the oldest complete skeleton found in Britain has revealed that the first modern humans living on the territory had “dark to black skin.”

Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who collaborated on the groundbreaking project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”

The DNA analysis was conducted on a complete fossil dubbed, Cheddar Man. Unearthed over a century ago in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, Cheddar Man is believed to have lived in what is now called Britain some 10,000 years ago.

Cheddar Man’s origin and appearance garnered growing speculation among scientists because his presence in Britain came shortly after the first people in the country traversed the English Channel from mainland Europe at the end of the last ice age, according to The Guardian.

The connection often made between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth,” said Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at the University College London who also worked on the fossil analysis project. He emphasized that the modern-day racial reality of Britain (and the European continent) is not set in stone.

“It has always changed and will change,” he emphasized.

Just last month, researchers concluded, after having discovered human remains in Israel, that people trekked out of Africa almost 200,000 years ago, twice as early as originally thought.

“What Misliya (the name given to the remains by researchers) tells us is that modern humans left Africa not 100,000 years ago, but 200,000 years ago,” Prof. Israel Hershkovitz, who led the work at Tel Aviv University, said, according to The Guardian. “This is a revolution in the way we understand the evolution of our own species.”

Via TeleSur

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Cheddar Man: DNA shows early Briton had dark skin – BBC News

The announcement that Prince Harry is set to marry American actress Meghan Markle provoked a flurry of articles about the British royal family becoming multicultural. The Washington Post actually has a headline about Britain’s “black queen.” (The peculiar American ‘one drop rule’ makes anyone with any recent African heritage African, to the surprise of societies like Brazil which have a spectrum of categories on race. Ms. Markle herself said, “”My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American … I have come to embrace say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident, mixed-race woman.”

I think journalists should respect her self-definition.

Ms. Markle is African-American from her mother’s side and Dutch, English, German, Irish, and Scottish on her father’s side. Except that most African-Americans are also Scottish, English, Dutch, etc. because of their ancestry from their former slavemasters, who routinely used to have children with their slaves (who could not refuse) and then sell the children down the river. Those are the people to whom Confederate statues were erected from the late 19th century.

Because the royal family of Britain is invested in the popular imagination with the ultimate “whiteness,” it is a lightning rod for thinking about race and its boundaries. Hence the controversies about Princess Diana’s Pakistani and Egyptian boyfriends. It seems pretty obvious that she deliberately explored multicultural romantic relationships in part as a rebellion against a Buckingham palace that had tried to micro-manage her life when she was married to Prince Charles.

But “whiteness” is an illusion. Because the crowned heads of Europe intermarried over centuries and because Spanish nobility was in the mix, and because in turn Spaniards and other southwestern Europeans are up to 20% North African in heritage as well as having substantial genetic endowments from Jews and various other Muslim peoples, not to mention Phoenicians and sub-saharan Africans– actually all European royal families have been mixed-race for a very long time. In fact, genealogists allege that Prince Harry is descended from the Prophet Muhammad (see below).

What I actually wish is that we could get rid of the ridiculous residual category of “white,” which was used by working class Catholics in a desperate bid to distinguish themselves from Latinos and African-Americans. But really. Why are Italian-Americans from Sicily “white” in America, but people from Latin America whose ancestors lived in Catalonia are “brown”? In the medieval era, for a while, both Catalonia and Sicily were in the same country, ruled by the crown of Aragon!

The popular press in America is confused about such issues because many writers do not realize that there is no such thing as race in the 19th century biological sense. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and by the time you get back to 1400 you have a million ancestors. For someone who hails from Europe, how likely is it that none of them were Arabs and Berbers from southern Spain who had been forced to convert and then married Catholics? Europe’s population in 1400 was only 78 million or so and they’re descended from a million of them. And Arabs in southern Spain were in turn intermarried with Berbers and Africans. After 50 generations (a generation is 24 years), most of the world’s genes get shared around. Everyone in the Mediterranean basin shares common ancestors from only a few thousand years ago, including Tunisians and Egyptians and Spanish and Italians.

Of course race is not completely an illusion. There are broad geographical races with some outward, phenotypical characteristics that mostly have to do with navigating between dangerous ultraviolet rays and the need for vitamin D. Other features have to do with climate (in cold places a longer nose insulates the brain from frigid air; in warm humid places that isn’t necessary). But mostly what Americans typically think of as “race” is actually culture.

So the British royal family is probably even more all mixed up than the rest of us, but we’re all mixed up. And a good thing, too–genetic diversity in a bloodline makes it healthier.

I made this point a decade ago:

Burke’s Peerage: Queen Elizabeth II Descended from the Prophet Muhammad
By Juan Cole | Feb. 28, 2008 |

. . . I know that it is hard for people invested in a hard East/ West dichotomy to imagine that the icon of Western civilization, the British royal family, has Arab Muslim antecedents (along with a host of other nationalities of course.) But it does.

The Greater Mediterranean got all mixed up over millennia. Most Sicilians (i.e. most Italian-Americans) also have Arab Muslim ancestors. It works the other way around, too. It is obvious that a lot of Egyptians, Lebanese and Jordanians have descent from the Christian European Crusaders.

This is connected to just pointing out that having ancestors named Hussein is more common among Europeans and Americans than is usually realized. Elizabeth II can’t be descended from the Prophet Muhammad without also being descended from his grandson, the original Husayn / Hussein, since that is the line of descent of the Sayyids.

‘United Press International
October 10, 1986
MOSLEMS IN BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Mixed in with Queen Elizabeth’s blue blood is the blood of the Moslem prophet Mohammed, according to Burke’s Peerage, the geneological guide to royalty. The relation came out when Harold B. Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s, wrote Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to ask for better security for the royal family. ”The royal family’s direct descent from the prophet Mohammed cannot be relied upon to protect the royal family forever from Moslem terrorists,” he said. Probably realizing the connection would be a surprise to many, he added, ”It is little known by the British people that the blood of Mohammed flows in the veins of the queen. However, all Moslem religious leaders are proud of this fact.”

Brooks-Baker said the British royal family is descended from Mohammed through the Arab kings of Seville, who once ruled Spain. By marriage, their blood passed to the European kings of Portugal and Castille, and through them to England’s 15th century King Edward IV. ‘

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Related video:

The Guardian: “Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s first TV interview in full”

In the US there have been many attempts to expunge evolution from the school curriculm or demand that creationism – the idea that all life was uniquely created by God – is given equal treatment in science textbooks. While all these have failed, the government in Turkey has now banned evolution from its national curriculum.

US creationists want both views to be presented, to let children decide what to believe. Bids to reject this are wrongly characterised as attempts to shut down debate or free speech – to promote a scientific, atheistic, secular, ideology over a more moral, ethical, commonsense religious worldview.

Turkey’s decision goes much further. This isn’t about claiming equal treatment, it’s an outright ban. The government justifies it by claiming evolution is “difficult to understand” and “controversial”. Any controversy however is one manufactured by ultra-religious communities seeking to undermine science. Many concepts in science are more difficult than evolution, yet they still get taught.

Creationist arguments

Evolution, creationists argue, is just a theory – it’s not proven and so up for debate. Evolutionary trees (especially for humans) are regularly re-drawn after new fossil discoveries, showing how poor the theory is. After all, if the theory was correct, this wouldn’t keep changing. Often, creationists will pose a challenge for science to prove how life started, knowing that there is not yet a firm, accepted theory. Finally, there’s the king of all arguments: if we all evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

These arguments are packed with factual inaccuracies and logical fallacies. Evolution doesn’t need an explanation of how life started. It simply describes how life develops and diversifies. Humans did not evolve from monkeys – we‘re great apes. Modern apes, including humans, evolved from now extinct pre-existing ape species. We’re related to, not descended from, modern apes.

Key creationist misconceptions

Creationists fail to understand that evolution itself is not a theory. Evolution happens. Life develops and diversifies, new species come into existence. We can see intermediate life forms right now, such as fish that are transitioning to living on land and land mammals that recently transitioned into aquatic life. The “theory of evolution” explains how evolution takes place. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first described the mechanism that drives the change – natural selection – in 1858.

Creationists also fail to understand the difference between a theory and a law in science. This is something that even science graduates suffer from, as I’ve noted in my own research. Theories explain scientific concepts. They are evidenced and accepted by the scientific community. Theories are the pinnacle of scientific explanation, not just a hunch or a guess. Laws however have a different role, they describe natural phenomena. For example, Newton’s laws of gravity do not explain how gravity happens, they describe the effects gravity has on objects. There are laws and theories for gravity. In biology however, there are few laws, so there is no law of evolution. Theories do not, given sufficient proof, become laws. They are not hierarchical.

A third issue is the lack of understanding of the nature of science. Science aims not to find some objective truth, but to elicit an explanation of natural phenomena. All scientific explanations are provisional. When new evidence is found that contradicts what we think we know, we change our explanations, sometimes rejecting theories that were once thought to be correct. Science is always working to try and falsify ideas. The more those ideas pass our tests, the more robust they are and the greater our confidence is that they are correct. Evolution has been tested for nearly 160 years. It’s never been falsified. Science only deals with natural phenomena, it doesn’t deal with or seek to explain the supernatural.

Why the ban is dangerous

Banning good science undermines all science, especially considering evolution’s place underpinning modern biology, with plenty of evidence to support it. For mainstream scientists, the fact that evolution happens is neither seriously questioned nor controversial. Any controversy in discussions of evolution resides in the role natural selection has in driving diversity and change, or the pace of that change.

This ban on teaching evolution in Turkish schools opens up the possibility that alternative, unscientific ideas may enter science teaching, from those who believe in a flat earth to deniers of gravity.

How do we deal with the apparent schism between religious belief and scientific evidence?

My research and approach has been to distinguish between religion, a belief system, and science, which works on the acceptance of evidence. Beliefs, including but not limited to religious beliefs, are often held irrationally, without evidence, and are resistant to change. Science is rational, based on evidence and is open to change when faced with new evidence. In science, we accept the evidence, rather than “choose to believe”.

Turkey’s move to ban the teaching of evolution contradicts scientific thinking, and tries to turn the scientific method into a belief system – as if it were a religion. It seeks to introduce supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, and to assert that some form of truth or explanation for nature exists beyond nature. The ban is unscientific, undemocratic and should be resisted.

James Williams, Lecturer in Science Education, Sussex School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit News: “Turkey Will No Longer Teach Evolution In High Schools”

Twitter accounts are being used as a tool of resistance to fight censorship and bring reliable scientific information to the public.

Employees from more than a dozen U.S. government agencies have established a network of unofficial “rogue” Twitter feeds in defiance of what they see as attempts by President Donald Trump to muzzle federal climate change research and other science.

Badlands National Park in South Dakota, July 16, 2014. | Photo: Badlands National Park

Seizing on Trump’s favorite mode of discourse, scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and other bureaus have privately launched Twitter accounts – borrowing names and logos of their agencies – to protest restrictions they view as censorship and provide unfettered platforms for information the new administration has curtailed.

“Can’t wait for President Trump to call us FAKE NEWS,” one anonymous National Park Service employee posted on the newly opened Twitter account @AltNatParkService. “You can take our official twitter, but you’ll never take our free time!”

The swift proliferation of such tweets by government rank-and-file followed internal directives several agencies involved in environmental issues have received since Trump’s inauguration requiring them to curb their dissemination of information to the public.

Last week, Interior Department staff were told to stop posting on Twitter after an employee re-tweeted posts about relatively low attendance at Trump’s swearing-in, and about how material on climate change and civil rights had disappeared from the official White House website.

Employees at the EPA and the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Health and Human Services have since confirmed seeing notices from the new administration either instructing them to remove web pages or limit how they communicate to the public, including through social media.

The restrictions have reinforced concerns that Trump, a climate change skeptic, is out to squelch federally backed research showing that emissions from fossil fuel combustion and other human activities are contributing to global warming.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit News: “National Parks And NASA Go Rogue On Twitter”

A group of white students at Texas State University stormed out of anthropology class Friday after the professor explained all humans were descended from Africa.

The walkout caused heated debate with the remaining students chanting “Black lives matter” and criticizing the racist attitude of their classmates.

According to the students, Professor R. Jon McGee opened his class with a discussion on race, which then developed into an overview of the Black Lives Matter movement and the conclusion modern humans evolved in Africa.

Justine Lundy, a student present, told International Business Times that the discussion was met with derision by many, with a fellow student sarcastically replying “sure.”

This incident comes amid a wave of police killings against unarmed Black men. According to a Washington Post study, in 2015 alone around 965 people were fatally shot by U.S. police—with Black and Latino people disproportionately the victims.

Via TeleSur

P.S. Snopes disputes some of these details but it does not seem to me it disproved the story. – JC

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

UCSD: “CARTA: Origins of Genus Homo – Steven Churchill: Southern Africa and the Origin of Homo”