Setting notions of race on their ear

Are people with wet earwax better athletes than people with dry earwax? You have to wonder, since almost all of the players in Sunday's Super Bowl have wet earwax.

The run-up to the big game is being covered from a zillion angles, but no one has touched the players' earwax. Whatever happened to journalism that probes deeply?

OK, I'm not being serious. No one would think earwax could affect athletic ability, or intelligence, or anything significant about a person. We assign that kind of importance to traits less consequential than earwax, such as skin color. But that's because we place a lot of weight on differences we can see.

People have long known about the differences in earwax that correspond with race, or more accurately, with ancestral population groups, but genetic research has shed more light on the topic.

Genetics is doing that with lots of aspects of human makeup.

Did you happen to catch the PBS program "African American Lives?" It's another project from Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. It traces the family history of eight famous African Americans and of Gates himself using historical research and the latest genetic techniques.

The first two parts aired Wednesday. Genetics plays its biggest role in the final two parts, which air Feb. 8 and make the link to Africa.

Some of the findings surprised his guests. Mae Jemison, the first black woman to travel in space, is about 13 percent Asian. Historians say some plantation owners imported Asian workers to replace slaves after emancipation. The experiments didn't work well, but did introduce some new genetic material.

Jemison thought she had Native American roots somewhere in her family tree.

Most of Gates' guests thought they had Native American blood. Many black folks a generation ago were eager to be something other than plain Negroes, to be just a notch higher in the hierarchy.

Oprah, another of the guests, did have Indian ancestors, according to the tests. She had no white ancestors, which is surprising.

Quincy Jones was around 40 percent white and Gates was 50 percent white with other markers matching people in North Africa. Indeed, researchers had to do extra tests to find any sub-Saharan African link in his genes.

So now they know, and knowing has cultural and emotional meaning for them, but it doesn't change who they are.

Gates joked that he should step down from his job as head of the African-American studies department. It's OK, bro, you still have wet earwax.

Japanese researchers this week reported their discovery of the small DNA change that turns off the gene for wet earwax, which every person had originally.

Africans and Europeans mostly (97 percent) have wet wax and Asians mostly have the dry kind, as do many Native Americans. Functionally one kind is as good as the other, and though you and I may have an aesthetic preference, neither of us is likely to judge another by his earwax.

Last month some other scientists discovered the way another difference works, but they were concerned about reaction to their announcement because it had to do with skin color.

What they found is that Africans have the original gene, which made all people brown until relatively recently when humans began to migrate out of Africa. At some point, a single individual was born with a mutation in the gene, which caused his or her skin to be much lighter.

The mutation disrupts the process by which melanin is deposited in skin cells. Europeans have this mutation. A second change happened in Asia, where a different process reduced melanin in the skin.

Researchers were careful to downplay the racial aspects of the finding. The European mutation, they said, changes one letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion. But they admitted nothing they could say would stop people from clinging to various racial theories.

Keith Cheng, the study leader, was quoted in the Washington Post saying, "I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different."

Being black, white, Indian, Asian are matters of very little genetic material. They matter because of the judgments we make about each other, judgments that are only skin deep.

Why, even wet earwax does not guarantee a superior character.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

His column runs Thursdays and Sundays and is found at www.seattletimes.com/jerrylarge.