New VDARE column: Race Does Exist, says NYT

"Race Does Exist - New York Times" - My new VDARE column is up. An excerpt:

A common argument of the Race Does Not Exist crowd that Leroi didn't deal with is that, yeah, sure, people differ, but the variations change evenly across the face of the earth, so you can never define the boundaries of separate racial groups.

For example, Science Daily reports on a new population genetics study that says:

"… geographic distance from East Africa along ancient colonization routes is an excellent predictor for the genetic diversity of present human populations, with those farther from Ethiopia being characterized by lower genetic variability."

The Science Daily article ends with the Race-Does-Not-Exist-Pledge that is seemingly obligatory for geneticists who study race (and who don't want their funding cut off by the enforcers of political correctness):

"The loss of genetic diversity along colonization routes is smooth, with no obvious genetic discontinuity, thus suggesting that humans cannot be accurately classified in discrete ethnic groups or races on a genetic basis."

Two fallacies are readily apparent in this statement. First, the whole argument is a little silly. You could walk from, say, Calais on the English Channel to Pusan in South Korea without dying of thirst. At either end of your vast journey, however, the people look quite different. In between you might run into, say, Boris Yeltsin, a blond man with features slightly reminiscent of East Asia, and other people of varying degrees of European and East Asian admixture. But, in the big picture, so what? Frenchmen and Koreans are still different and nobody would mistake one for the other.

Second, the geneticists' statement applies only "along colonization routes," and most possible directions were not major colonization routes. If you walk in the majority of directions, you will eventually fall into the ocean and drown. This reinforces the "obvious genetic discontinuity" that we see with our lying eyes.

For example, one ancient path out of Africa probably crossed the narrow mouth of the Red Sea from Northeastern Africa to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and people have been going back and forth between those edges of Africa and Asia ever since. That's why some Ethiopians, such as the late emperor Haile Selassie, look quite Arabic, and some Arabs, such as the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, look quite African.

In contrast, up through 1492, there was a relatively massive genetic discontinuity between West Africa and South America, which are only 1,600 miles apart at their closest points. Why? Because the out-of-Africa colonization routes went the other way around the world. The Atlantic Ocean got in the way of walking directly from Africa to South America.

With water covering 7/10ths of the earth's surface, the out-of-Africa dispersal pathways were, in reality, few and far between.

Even on dry land, there are vast regions where paths were few and arduous. For instance, between the peoples of West Africa and of the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) there was only a small amount of mating until historic times, because the Sahara got in the way. If you tried to walk from Senegal to the Pillars of Hercules, you would likely die of thirst. The eastern end of the Sahara, though, is more porous because of the Nile and some wetter highlands.

Likewise, the Himalayas form a sharp border even today between Caucasians and East Asians...

I'll try to be methodical about this question of topographical barriers. Let's split the world up into seven effective continents: Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, Europe, East Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. (Other breakdowns are possible; but the results will all be about the same).

Here is a table showing seven major continents and my guess as to how easy the potential direct colonization routes between each of them were during early human prehistory: A "2" means easy, "1" means difficult but used, and 0 means there was virtually no direct contact between the two continents before historic times. As you can see, it's a sparse matrix:

	W Asia	Europe	E Asia	Australia	N Am	S Am
Sub-Saharan Africa	1	0	0	0	0	0
West Asia		2	1	0	0	0
Europe			1	0	0	0
East Asia				1	1	0
Australia					0	0
North America						2

Of the 21 possible connections between continents, there were 14 where there was virtually no contact until the last millennium. Here is an image you've never seen before: a map of the many intercontinental roads not taken by prehistoric man:

Consequently there are relatively big genetic distances between Australians and Sub-Saharan Africans because the Indian Ocean was in the way. Similarly, Australians aren't closely related to Europeans because Asia, coming between them, was full of tribes that objected to outsiders marching through their lands. [More...]

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com