Such comparisons of blood groups are no doubt very interesting to the human geneticist, but I ask myself to what significant conclusion they can lead. For the classifications just mentioned are only valid for the present! How can they tell us whether blood groups have not changed down the millennia or what they will be in the future?
Moreover I can see this method providing new motives for racial conflict. Once a Yankee used to say: ‘He’s only a nigger!’, a negro: ‘He’s only an Indian!’ In future people will say just as pigheadedly: ‘He’s only a blood group A Rhesus factor + (positive)!’ And if it should turn out that one particular genetic combination is superior to another, we shall be in the midst of a new scientific racial polemic.
But whether they use external or genetic characteristics, racial comparisons will not answer either of my questions: to which race did the first man belong, and why are the qualities of the three major races so fundamentally different.
The negroids (very clearly recognisable among the inhabitants of Jamaica) have dark skins, protruding lips, (predominantly) curly hair and broad noses. (They share few characteristics with the Caucasians.) Within the major negroid race there are 18 subgroups with very different characteristics. So far the Mongoloids have had to be subdivided 20 times. The reason is clear and simple: in the course of the history of evolution deviations from the pattern of the major race were caused by mutations—alterations of hereditary factors. But I am not concerned with comparisons within the major races, but only with solving the problem of how the first major races originated.
The starting point for consideration of the subject is the common possession by all races of the same anatomical physical structure and the fact that all races can mate. All members of all races have the same protein structure in their cells. In this connection we once again find an affinity with our simian ancestors—chimpanzees have the same protein structure as we have!
How can that be?
Since Charles Darwin (1809-1892), it is accepted that the species developed by natural selection and that ape and man developed separately from a single product of nature as from a point x in time. In an evolutionary process that lasted millions of years. It may be so. In other words, million-fold mutations over millions of years have made us the crown of creation. Sounds good.
But we must invoke the aid of miracles if people are supposed to believe that hundreds of essential differences were formed during the non-stop series of mutations, whereas the protein structure of chimpanzees and men survived the ennobling process unchanged.
The 146 macromolecules in the protein of haemoglobin (the colouring matter of the red corpuscles) actually are identical in chimpanzees and men down to a single amino acid building stone. Given so many similarities, we must forgive the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (1707-1778) for calling the chimpanzee homo troglodytes, i.e. caveman.
This identical protein structure in man and chimpanzee proves that man cannot have originated solely through natural mutation and evolution. Why not?
If we compare the protein structure of two frogs, we find variations 50 times greater than those between chimpanzee and man—yet one frog looks the spitting image of another. Conclusion: as frog and frogs are more closely related than man and chimpanzee, the protein structures of the frogs ought to be virtually the same and those of man and chimpanzee totally different. The opposite has been proved.
When Professor Alan C. Wilson and his colleague Mary Claire King, both biochemists in the University of California, saw the astonishing results of their protein investigations, they were convinced that there must be a hitherto undiscovered and far more effective evolutionary driving force23 than anything known so far.
What can this force have been? Professor Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania, has already said loud and clear that a factor which produced mental abilities during the formation of human groups must have been overlooked by the theoreticians of evolution. That is my opinion, too, but how can we explain the phenomenon that man and chimpanzee are (are supposed to be) more closely related than the popeyed frogs whose protein structures are so different? And this although—according to Darwin and his followers—the period of evolution from chimpanzee to man is supposed to embrace more millions of years and more millions of mutations than the relatively short leap of the frog through world history allowed.
My answer:
There was an artificial mutation from ape to man. We did not separate from monkeys so many millions of years ago as is claimed—the family break-up took place only a few tens of thousands of years ago. That is why the protein structures of men and chimpanzees remained the same. If millions of years and many thousandfold successful mutations lay between the primitive hominid, a man-like ape, and homo sapiens, then—any geneticist would confirm this—the protein structures of both beings would have taken a very different form. Corollary, as this is not so, as they are absolutely identical, our ancestor, the first homo sapiens, can only have separated from the ape tribe ‘recently’, a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Men cannot breed with apes, because intelligent man undoubtedly forms a species absolutely different from any species of ape. How could the human species have developed in such an incredibly positive way within ‘minutes’, reckoned on the time-scale of universal history? How did ape—or man?—suddenly lose his fur? How did he suddenly think of ‘civilising’ himself, of creating cultures? Who gave him the idea of hunting animals, whose companion he had only recently been? Where did he suddenly get the illuminating idea of making fire to cook his soup on?
Yes, and with whom did the first man mate, when he, a solitary being mutated from the ape tribe, had no suitable sexual partners? He could not mate with his monkey ancestors, for they had a different chromosome count.
Ridiculous nonsense, I hear the anthropologists say. All those things did not happen ‘so suddenly’; they took millions of years of gradual evolution. The ‘suddenness’ of homo sapiens’s becoming intelligent is an invention of mine with absolutely nothing to justify it. That objection does not hold up, since it is fully established that man and chimpanzee both have the same extremely complicated protein structures.
Where must we look for the eagerly sought but so far undiscovered evolutionary driving force (Wilson)? What is the factor—missed by the theoreticians of evolution—which gave the first human groups mental abilities (Eiseley)?
All these questions are answered as soon as we have the courage to think the apparently unthinkable.
Extraterrestrials separated homo sapiens from the ape tribe and made him intelligent by artificial mutation. In their own image. The evolutionary driving force is to be found in this deliberate manipulation. It worked perfectly, as we shall see.
I base the following speculative ideas on their successful intervention.
Which race did the first men belong to?
Undoubtedly the structure of the human body derived from a species of ape. So the first men ought to have been black, of negroid race, like their ape relatives. If that was so, why didn’t the first ‘owners of the earth’ spread out over the whole planet? And where did the Mongoloids and Caucasoids, the ‘yellows’ and ‘whites’, come from?
Were the extraterrestrials able to opt between different races from the beginning? Did they endow different human groups with different abilities to survive in different climatic and geographical conditions? Was the pigmentation of dark skin genetically programmed so that the race could settle in hot zones? Vice versa, what advantages would white skin have had? Would it have been confined to more temperate zones?
Today it is assumed that primitive men had dark skins. Then the colour of men’s skins changed and assumed different shades depending on the time spent in different parts of the world and the amount of ultraviolet rays encountered. Even if people want to make the vitamin D produced by ultraviolet rays responsible for this, it seems to me rather a feeble theory, for Eskimos, who live in icy wastes with little sun, are
dark-skinned and surely you are not going to tell me that they get their colouring from fish blubber. Again why are the Mongoloids yellow? And should not black people acquire light-coloured skins to enable them to survive in regions with little sun?
It is possible that the extraterrestrials, with their highly advanced and superior intelligence, deliberately produced different basic races, because they knew from their reconnaissance of our blue planet the different environmental influences to which their creatures would be exposed. In mutating hominids ‘in their own image’ and making them intelligent, they laid trails for future generations—hints as to their former presence.
As I also attribute high ethical responsibility to a high intelligence, the genetic introduction of differently coloured skins (and other characteristics) may have been meant to have a powerful educative effect. Look around you. No matter what the colour of your skin, you belong to the same species, so live in peace with one another!
Did the crew of the first prehistoric spaceship already belong to extraterrestrial races?
Did they lie with the daughters of earth and produce children, as the great legends of human history tell us? Did this sexual traffic, which was against the orders of the ‘gods’, originate different races following the model, the genetic pattern, of the extraterrestrials?
Were there, I ask myself, visits at various points in time by spaceships which had no contact with each other? Did an original group separate homo sapiens from the ape tribe and so leave a black race behind? Did another cosmic expedition take place thousands of years later with a white or yellow crew? Was the black race a failure and did the extraterrestrials change the genetic code by gene surgery and then programme a white or a yellow race?
Racial theorists will file my reflections away in the archives. They are satisfied with the current accepted explanations, but what do they really know?
One example will illustrate how worthless our previous knowledge is:
A black family emigrates from its home in the tropical zone of the earth and settles in a cooler region. Pigments change down the generations, dark skins become light, perhaps so light, the negroids become white. Dark skin, say the racial specialists, no longer being necessary as a protection against the sun. OK, but in his new environment the black man would also have to lose his curly hair, his prominent dark eyes and protruding lips, otherwise he could never become a white man.
But it’s all quite simple, someone will tell me. The black breeds with a white and there you are . . .
Just a minute! I am talking of the time when there was only one race! For in the beginning, and there I am in complete agreement with the racial theorists, there was only the black race, which took its colour from the apes.
But the change from black to white could not have been made with one mutation; it would have needed endless chains of mutations.
How does a new species appear, when only one is in existence? How could a washproof black become a white without inter-breeding between two races?
Present-day ‘intermediate races’, Arabs, Eskimos and South Sea Islanders, for example, originated by racial interbreeding. I admit that.
But this possibility did not exist in the very beginning. Science says that only one race existed then and it is supposed to have changed into another race on its own! Or into several races!
We are in agreement on this point: it is science that says that in the beginning there was only one race, the black one. Neither a white nor a half-breed was available for interbreeding. Zero. There were only blacks. I have got that into my head.
The white race, I conclude, cannot have been produced down the generations by blacks inter-breeding with whites. According to that theory, we should only exist if the blacks had mated exclusively with whites for x thousands of years. The possibility exists, but where do we get the whites from?
The Arabs tell a revealing story about the origin of their race:
‘One fine day the good Lord took a lump of clay and fashioned the first man out of it. He puts his handiwork into the kiln to make it firm and lasting. Rain came down and put the fire out prematurely, and when the good Lord opened the kiln his creation looked white and unappetising. So as not to waste anything, he took out his work, blew life into it and let the white man go forth, in spite of his poor quality. Once again the Lord pulled clay out of the trough to make the second man. He fired the kiln, waited until it was very hot and put his second attempt in. He joined the other gods at a gay dance and forgot his handiwork. When he finally took him out, his second man was black and rather unattractive, but he breathed his life-giving breath into him, too, and sent him forth, because he was not too pleased with him. Then the good Lord decided to create his masterpiece, a man more handsome than either the black or the white. Once again he pushed the well-shaped clay into the kiln, into the comfortable heat and waited for the right moment to put the fire out. When his man had acquired an appetising brown colour, he took him out and brought him to life with his breath, and as he seemed such a good specimen, he made a pact of friendship with him. That is how the brown man, the Arab, originated.’
This legend makes it easy to guess that the Arabs look on themselves as the chosen race. This arrogance is not confined to the Arabs; it is an attitude unfortunately still shared by members of other races.
There’s no better way of burning your tongue than speaking about the white-hot theme of race, not to mention burning your fingers if you write about it. There are many reasons why that is so. Apparently it is not only external appearances which make it impossible for the glowing iron to be cooled off in peace and rational calm. What goes on in the heads and ‘hearts’ of members of another race? The different psyches with their mutually incompatible attitudes make understanding so difficult. The European shakes his head hopelessly when he sees coloured people on television accompanying a dead man to his last rest with loud tomtoms—a situation in which ‘one’ should behave quietly, ceremonially and sadly. We know from tales by the great eastern story-tellers that they accept with stoic calm blows of fate which would make us reel. Racial characteristics are only external appearances, in the truest sense of the world. The real barriers lie deeper. To penetrate them, we must first concern ourselves with the measurable, recognisable, organic peculiarities. Only then will the deeper ‘soundings’ be possible that will free us from our ultimate prejudices (and superiority complexes).
Race researchers are still snaking their way through a slalom of flags with question marks on them. I should like to know if the there are races with specific qualities which make them capable of special achievements eo ipso. Nearly all negroes are musical; they have rhythm in their blood. Why? Is it only their skin which makes Tibetan sherpas less sensitive than white men to the sun’s rays at high altitudes? Why does a black man stand burning sun better than a Mongoloid? Why does no hair grow on the chests of genuine male South Sea Islanders? Why does the hair of the descendants of the Mayas, who live in present-day Central America, never go grey, even in advanced old age? Why do blacks never have blue eyes? Are there races which are obviously endowed with higher intelligence than others?
A list of such questions could easily fill an urban telephone directory.
I quite understand that I am playing with dynamite if I ask whether the extraterrestrials ‘allotted’ specific tasks to the basic races from the very beginning, i.e. programmed them with special abilities.
I am not a racialist. I do not ascribe advantages or disadvantages to any race on earth. Yet my thirst for knowledge enables me to ignore the taboo on asking racial questions simply because it is untimely and dangerous. In my opinion, black, yellow and white race researchers should combine to dig deeply into the question; why are we like we are?
Once this basic question is accepted, we cannot and should not avoid the explosive sequel: is there a chosen race?
If we take the Bible as the breviary of western wisdom, i.e. if we follow the text of the Old Testament, the Jews consider themselves t
he ‘chosen people’. Should we not ask: chosen by whom for what purpose? Were they singled out for a special task? Is their thousand-year-old claim to be the chosen people one of the reasons for the frightful recurrent persecutions of the Jewish people? Do other peoples feel wary of this claim, do other races think they must defend themselves because of it? Why? The Jews have never done them any harm.
When I take a look at the history of the natural sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries, I see that more than half of all scientific achievements and discoveries were made by members of the Jewish people. Jews have always held leading positions among astronomers, biochemists, mathematicians, botanists, physicists, doctors, zoologists and biologists.24 From 1901 to 1975 there were 66 (!) Jewish Nobel Prize winners.
So are the ‘chosen people’ also a ‘chosen race’? Certainly not, for the Jews are not a ‘race’ at all. The great majority of them belong biologically—like their Arab neighbours—to a subgroup of orientaloids of the European race! Hence we do not speak of the Jewish race, but of the Jewish people. Thus the outstanding achievements of Jewish scientists cannot be connected with racial aspects.
Signs of the Gods? Page 6
