Explaining Life Through Evolution by Prosanta Chakrabarty

Author:Prosanta Chakrabarty [Chakrabarty, Prosanta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789354924323
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2021-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Our Genealogy and Ancestry

Why should you care about where you belong on the Tree of Life? Because not only does it tell you where you came from, but also who you are. As humans, we tend to see the differences between us, no matter how small, but we are all more similar than many are willing to believe. As more and more people take ancestry tests, sending their spit and money to 23andMe and other genealogy testing centres, we need to be educated on what the results actually mean scientifically, and we all have to decide together what it means socially. Many of us are coming to learn that science describes gender, race, sex and sexuality as attributes on a spectrum, but for much of our modern existence we’ve forced them into a few arbitrary, usually binary, categories. We wanted to chop up a rainbow into separate pieces instead of celebrating the fact that all our diversity comes from the same little drops of water and sunlight, each with just a little different shine. Like all species, we are defined by our differences because there are so many similarities between us. To the cosmos, we are all still just ‘star stuff’ to quote Carl Sagan; all us life forms are made up of hydrogen formed during the Big Bang and molecules like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen forged from the hearts of stars.1 It’s what we do with that stuff that makes us special.

The more you learn about evolution and about ‘where you are from’, the more you will see our similarities. Twins can check off different boxes for race based on how they look and perhaps based on how people see them. Genetically there are just a few genes that determine eye colour and skin pigment—is that what determines your ‘race’? What does it mean when one sibling has dark skin and is treated as ‘Black’ and the other fair skin and is treated as ‘white’, as sometimes happens among mixed-race children?2 I love the poem ‘Genetics’ in Jacqueline Woodson’s book Brown Girl Dreaming,3 which talks about how strangers didn’t believe her ‘pale as dust’ brother was actually related to her darker-skinned family until they all smiled, revealing the same gap between their two front teeth. Do DNA test results show your ‘race’ or family history as easily as those shared gap-tooth smiles? Not always. You can have a native American ancestor that doesn’t show up at all in your DNA test but does in your sister’s results. You might be African American but have some significant portion of Neanderthal DNA that is usually only seen at that level in people of European descent. There are hard truths in your DNA, there are mysteries and there are miracles. Your genome is Pandora’s Box, Aladdin’s Lamp, and Alice’s Looking-Glass; understanding what your genome tells you and can’t tell you (i.e., its limits) is part of understanding your origins.

We should also separate ‘ancestry’—the people who are your actual relatives and ancestors that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.