The view that human diversity is dull seems to me excessively Olympian. After all, if population geneticists have ignored human variety, they have for decades lavished their (seemingly inexhaustible) energies studying variety in the colours of garden-snail shells and the number of bristles that decorate the backs of fruit flies – problems that are intellectually much like those presented by human variation.
The claim that human genetics is morally dangerous is a more serious one. One can certainly, given the history of racial science, see where such a claim originates. Nevertheless it is misplaced. Reasonable people know that the differences among humans are so slight that they cannot be used to undermine any conceivable commitment to social justice. ‘Human equality,’ to borrow a slogan of Stephen Jay Gould’s, ‘is a contingent fact of human history.’ What is true, however, is that as long as the cause of human variety remains unknown – as long as the 7 per cent of genetic variance that distinguishes people from different parts of the world remains obscure – there will always be those who will use that obscurity to promote theories with socially unjust consequences. Injustice can sometimes be the consequence of new knowledge, but more often – far more often – it slips in through the cracks of our ignorance.
Perhaps the most compelling reason that we should once again turn our attention fully to the study of human physical diversity is that it is disappearing. In South-East Asia the negritos, those enigmatic pygmy-like people, are in decline. They are hunter-gatherers. Overrun by Austronesian-speaking farmers in the Neolithic, they mostly persist on remote islands. Now, modernity threatens. On Lesser Andaman, the remaining Onge live in reservations. On Greater Andaman, a few hundred Jarawas survive by virtue of having fended off the curious with bows and arrows (in the last fifty years they have killed or injured more than a hundred people), but they too have now emerged from the forest, attracted by baubles offered by Indian officials. It is feared that they will soon succumb to tuberculosis, measles and culture shock as their predecessors have.
They are only the latest casualties of Austronesian and European (not to mention Chinese, Bantu and Harappan) expansion. In 1520 Ferdinand Magellan, arriving at the straits that today bear his name, reported the existence of a race of giants that lived in the interior of Tierra del Fuego. He called them the Pataghoni, after a giant in a Spanish tale of chivalry. Subsequent travellers embroidered the account; by 1767 these giants, a wild and brutal people, had grown to about three metres (ten feet) tall. Today, the giants of Tierra del Fuego are as forgotten and fantastical as Pliny’s Arimaspeans. And yet the Pataghoni existed. They called themselves the Selk’nam or Ona, and they had an average adult-male height of 178; centimetres (five feet ten inches) – giant, then, but only to sixteenth-century Spanish sailors. But if their stature was not that remarkable, their skulls certainly are. They have a strength and thickness, a robustness, which other human skulls don’t, and this is true of their skeletons as a whole. Some photographs of the Selk’nam exist. They depict a handsome and physically powerful people who wore cloaks made from the pelts of the guanacos that they hunted on foot using bows as tall as themselves. Argentine sheep ranchers killed the Selk’nam off in a genocidal slaughter, and the last one died some time around 1920.
There is one more thing I should like to know about. And it is a phenomenon more general and nearly as contentious as race. It is beauty. Beauty is that which we see (or hear or touch or smell) that gives us pleasure, and as such its forms are, or at least seem to be, infinitely various. Here I am concerned with physical beauty alone.
‘Beauty,’ says the philosopher Elaine Scarry, ‘prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees something beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce it.’ Plato, she points out, had the same idea. In The symposium, Socrates tells how he was instructed in the arts of love by Diotima, a woman of Mantinea, and how they spoke of the nature of love and beauty. ‘I will put it more plainly,’ says Diotima. ‘The object of love, Socrates, is not what you think, beauty.’ ‘What is it then?’ ‘Its object is to procreate and bring forth beauty.’ ‘Really?’ ‘It is so, I assure you.’
Darwin could not have put it better himself. Much of his The descent of man and selection in relation to sex is devoted to investigating the presence, perception and purpose of beauty. ‘The most refined beauty,’ he wrote, ‘may serve as a charm for the female, and for no other purpose.’ He was thinking of the tail feathers of the male Argus pheasant with its geometrical arrays of ocelli. But the psychologies of pheasants and Fijians are really much the same. For Darwin, the love of beauty is a very general evolutionary force, second only to natural selection itself in power. Creatures choosing beauty for generation upon generation have given the natural world much of its exuberance. Sexual selection has given the Madagascar chameleon its horns; it has given the swordtail fish its sword and Birds of Paradise and Argus pheasants their tails; it has given the human species its variety.
One of the fascinating things about Darwin’s account of beauty is that without reference to philosophers or artists he stakes out a position on the great issues of aesthetics. He wants to know whether or not beauty is universal or particular, whether it is common or rare, and whether or not it has meaning. To all of these questions Darwin has an unequivocal answer. Physical beauty, he asserts, is not universal, but rather particular. Different people in different parts of the world each have their own standard of beauty. And it is rare. To be beautiful is to be a little different from everyone else around us. It is also meaningless. Our brains, for whatever reason, perceive some things as beautiful, and do so regardless of the other qualities that those things may have. Beauty does not signify anything. It exists for its own sake.
Darwin’s views on beauty are characteristically, effortlessly, original. The descent of man contains nothing, for example, about the classical ideal of beauty – the ideal that, from Archaic kouros to Antinous’ scowl, was replicated across the Mediterranean for centuries as if there were a formula for it; which there was, one that by the Renaissance had become a theory of human beauty in which proportions were divine, a theory that in the eighteenth century turned into the standard by which all humanity was judged. It was this ideal that caused Winckelmann to assert that the ancient Greeks were the most beautiful of all people (though he thought modern Neapolitans comely as well); that caused Camper to place the head of a Greek statue at one end of his continuum of facial angles; Buffon to identify a ‘beauty zone’ between 20 and 35 degrees north that stretched from the Ganges to Morocco and took in the Persians, Turks, Circassians, Greeks and Europeans; and Bougainville, when he arrived in Tahiti in 1768, to eulogise its inhabitants in terms of a classical idyll painted by Watteau. Darwin avoids all this. He does not tell us what he thinks is beautiful; instead he attempts to find out what other people think. He collects travellers’ reports. American Indians, he is told, believe that female beauty consists of a broad, flat face, small eyes, high cheekbones, a low forehead, a broad chin, a hook nose and breasts hanging down to the belt. Manchu Chinese prefer women with enormous ears. In Cochin China, beauties have round heads; in Siam, they have divergent nostrils; Hottentots like their women so immensely steatopygous that, having sat down, they cannot stand up again.