The Invisible History of the Human Race

Title: The Invisible History of the Human Race – How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Future
Author: Christine Kenneally
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 2014)
ISBN: 9780143127925
Pages: 355

The first point of reference in the case of narrating the history of an object is the written record mentioning it. Royal proclamations, edicts on rocks and other non-perishable surfaces, literary sources and oral traditions certify to the existence or origin of a thing. If we go a little bit more into the past – before the beginning of language – other material objects substitute the place of written records, such as potsherds, tools, funerary paraphernalia and architecture. By evaluating these specimens, experts can recount many facts about the society who made it. Going further backward brings up fossils, pieces of bone and skull and footprints on a congealed lava flow that provide testimony to endless lifeforms which had once walked on the earth. When man examined all these ideas emanating from outside his body, he turned to the inside by intuition and saw that the book of life was written and lay unread inside each of his cells’ nuclei in the form of DNA. We know that DNA is the marker of heredity, but what is perhaps not widely appreciated is that the DNA carries the story of all ancestral lifeforms which had gone before us. True to the postulates of evolution, the human genome still carries the traces of not only our ancestor human beings but also the genes of other species from which we split and evolved in a different direction. This book provides an interesting overview of this extraordinary field of study which promises a great deal to shed light on our genetic past as well as to make our future life a bit more comfortable by addressing health issues specific to the genome. This book handles aspects of inheritance evaluated in studies from psychology, economics, history and genetics, anecdotes and data from business, science and the lives of many fascinating individuals. Christine Kenneally is an award-winning journalist who has written for many prominent newspapers and magazines. She is the author of two books and lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The book opens with observations on the study of genealogy and the surprisingly stiff opposition to it from some quarters. Genealogy can be traced to the Bible. Romans painted portraits of their forebears on the walls of atriums. Modern western genealogy began with the rise of aristocracy. This may be the reason why socialists oppose any move by a commoner to know more about his ancestors. The author assuages these concerns with the observation that it is only an attempt to build one’s own identity and help others view them, may be in the hope that the person may be a long-lost distant relative. The criticism on this hinges on the premise that the more people turned to their genealogy especially to elevate their status, the more out of step they become with the spirit of an egalitarian republic (this was raised by scholars in the US). They asserted that this attempt to research one’s past was developed of snobbishness and vanity and hence unworthy of honourable attention. Birth and heredity are inevitably tied to racist undertones in a white, western country. The infamous ‘one-drop rule’ determined the race of mixed couples at least in the first hundred years of the American republic. It said: “the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew” (p.60). This racist concept has an exact reflection in India’s caste system where the offspring of two different castes belonged to the lower of the parents’ castes. The author has not observed this Indian connection. In fact, she has not effectively studied Indian society in any detail.

Kenneally examines the birth and development of the scientific basis of heredity in genes and DNA. Darwin’s theory of evolution was a revolutionary concept in 1859 when it was introduced but he did not know of genes. He postulated ‘gemmules’ that were passed from parent to offspring to stamp the hereditary traits on the latter. This was a flawed concept, but the idea of something resembling a gene was essential to explain how traits that were not apparent in parents might appear in a child. Even though the structure of DNA as a double helix was discovered in 1953, it was only in the late-1990s that a study of the genome could become meaningful. Computing power at the command of academia and pioneering industrialists exploded manifold in this period. The author observes that most of our genome is not coding DNA which expresses proteins that are vital for the wellbeing of that organism. Non-coding or junk DNA may influence our genes in significant ways. Even if they don’t, we may learn how to read the book of our history in it. Ancestry is marked by mutations in a being which is passed as such to its progeny. If the mutation is on a coding gene, it may adversely affect a vital protein and endangers its reproductive prospects. That’s why non-coding – sometimes remarked ‘junk’ – part of the DNA becomes crucial for studies about ancestry.

We are inured to accept Nazis catalogued as extreme racists who devised brutal pogroms to cleanse the society of people undesirable to them. This book provides several examples of these devious ways but what startles the readers is the information that the US also followed some of these projects with vigour though to a less sinister degree. Forced sterilizations were practised in the US as part of eugenics. The first man was sterilized in 1907 who was characterized as belonging to a group of ‘shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of antisocial whites’. Between 1907 and 1970, at least 60,000 were judged inadequate and forcibly sterilized by their state administrations to prevent those genes entering the next generation. Ideas about ‘racial hygiene’ were popular even before the Nazis came to power. The interest in genealogy culminated under the Nazi regime and the right to live became virtually dependent on one’s family charts. There were registers maintained by civil government noting down Jewish blood in the family. Hitler’s T4 program was merciless. Parents were encouraged to send their disabled children to special centres for treatment where they were killed by starving or lethal injection. 200,000 people died in these institutions and falsified death certificates were issued to their relatives.

Personal history related to ancestry is sometimes closely guarded by societies, most often to shield the present from unpalatable associations echoing from the past. These efforts make history invisible to some. The perpetrators of the Holocaust, the early descendants of the convicts who helped establish Australia and the victims of the Irish famine of mid-nineteenth century originally suppressed information passing down to their children. Several of the author’s ancestors were convicts, which were exposed only as the outcome of her own genealogical research and to which her parents were ignorant of. Kenneally points out that after the 1960s rights movement, more transparency arrived and people became more relaxed to accept that one or two of their great-great-great grandfathers were not as decent as to make a great-great-great grandchild proud. Kenneally also finds a link between genetics and anti-Semitism in Germany by observing that Jews were attacked and killed more in those towns which had a history of pogroms during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. She do not hint that the people living in those towns in the Nazi period were direct descendants of the medieval society, but this finding sticks out like a pseudo-scientific hypothesis. This book points out the long-term damage inflicted by slave trade on some African nations. The countries that lost more people to slavery were also the poorest countries today. They were, however, among the best developed economies and best-organized states during the slave trade with central governments, national currencies and established trade networks. Many slaves were betrayed by people to whom they were close. Some evidence is presented to conclude that this engendered distrust among people which persists even today. Without some form of general trust, economic activity cannot flourish. The idea that mistrust and silence on a shameful aspect could be passed down for centuries is profound and requires more corroborative evidence.

The book includes some passages which support a biological basis for human races. Since this topic is very controversial, the author wriggles out of an embarrassing position of openly admitting it. Eugenics extolled the racial differences and postulated the superiority of the white race. This was discredited after the Nazi regime’s collapse, but science then took a swing to the other extreme that there is no genetic basis for race. Studies by Lewontin in the 1970s concluded that genetic differences are between individuals only – they may be in a race or across races. This ruled out any genetic basis for race. The Human Genome Project reiterated this by declaring that two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world. This underwent a transformation in 2007 when the resolution of genetic analysis improved to evaluate thousands of nucleotide pairs than the earlier hundreds. It is now convincingly displayed that a person’s racial roots can be found by analysing his genome. The book includes a good coverage of DNA testing services now widely available and the uses they can provide to people susceptible to genetic diseases, some of which are capable of decimating a person’s quality of life. Huntington’s disease is a deadly malady, but can be easily predicted if you know where to look in the genome. Pre-natal tests can establish if the foetus carries the disease and can then be terminated. Some communities, such as the Ashkenazi Jews, are inherently endogamous which cause genetic diseases in offspring when the population size is small. In Israel, genetic screening and counselling in the pre-marital and pre-natal stages are a normal part of the culture.

The book can be comfortably read by any class of readers. It drifts slightly out of focus in the initial stages when readers get confused that the author is pointing solely to the ethical aspects of charting family genealogy. It makes precocious conclusions on cultural inheritance of psychology. The author argues that women were freer in plough-based societies (farming communities) than those employed shifting cultivation. This is a long shot with doubtful accuracy. Another assertion is that people tend to cooperate more and divorce rates are less in rice-growing societies. This is because rice is more demanding in the case of irrigation requirements which needs better coordination between people. Another claim is that distant historical events may influence the character of a modern family and the choices of families can illuminate history. In another section, she mentions that carbon dioxide levels dropped by 0.1 ppm because of economic stagnation in the wake of Mongols’ killing raids which exterminated 40 million people in the thirteenth century that caused reforestation on a large scale (p.180). No evidence for this bold assertion is cited. Genetic peculiarities thrown by DNA testing provides some amusing results such as Chengiz Khan’s DNA being found in living people. On the other hand, it is also disclosed that if you go eighty or hundred generations back, there would be very few DNA lines in common with our ancestors so that we can be termed biologically unrelated to many of our blood-relatives. The book strictly follows political correctness in its observations, conclusions and generalizations.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star