The Gene Wars

By Diana Muir Appelbaum, Paul S. Appelbaum

What can science teach us about the validity of nationalist claims?

Third, nationality is an “active identity.”⁵⁶Sovereign nations, of course, actively define, defend, and govern themselves, and even before gaining sovereignty, national movements routinely undertake such actions as creating a unique language (in the case of the Macedonians) or establishing a university (in the case of the Jews in Palestine prior to the declaration of statehood).

Fourth, “national identity… connects a group of people to a particular geographical place.”⁵⁷ The Roma, or Gypsy, people are an example of a strongly identified ethnic group that has nonetheless been unable to organize an effective national movement because it lacks a connection to a homeland.

Finally, national identity requires that the people who share it should have “a common public culture.”⁵⁸ The mundane markers of a common culture are language and religion, along with matters of style in dress, food, entertainment, and the like. Of these, language is the crucial factor; its role as conveyer of culture makes language as close to a sine qua non of national identity as there is. But there is also that amalgam of assumptions regarding such things as the role of government, the responsibilities of individuals, and the definition of concepts like honor and truth, all of which vary to a surprising degree from one nation to another, and all of which make up that very real but nonetheless hard-to-define entity that is a nation’s common public culture.

Noticeably missing from this list is any mention of genetic relatedness. Indeed, students of nationalism do not regard literal kinship as essential for the existence of a nation, although everyone is aware that almost all nations have myths of common origins. And like most myths, this one is functional; belief in a common descent is a powerful unifying force. And again, like most myths, this one contains an element of truth; nations usually do share a degree of common descent. However, very few if any nations define membership principally according to literal kinship. For example, no one would argue that the descendants of the several hundred thousand Poles who migrated to the Ruhr Valley at the end of the nineteenth century are anything but German, even those among them who have married only the descendants of other Polish immigrants. Nationality is a matter of culture, not genetics.⁵⁹

Now, even if claims to membership in a nation are made on the basis of culture, not genetics, some weight is given to ancestry, both in public opinion and by many national governments. Thus an individual born in Alexandria or Baku who has no knowledge of Greek can receive Greek citizenship by demonstrating that his parents were of Greek ethnicity, although he may not have an ancestor born on Greek soil for many centuries. Nevertheless, it is not solely genetic kinship in a literal sense that defines nations; it is something more multi-faceted and complex.

Of course, the mere fact that a people constitutes a nation that desires or has already established sovereignty over a territory does not settle the question of its right to rule that land. Several criteria are widely employed in assessing the relative validity of such alleged rights, criteria that make a moral argument beyond what we may call the Genghis Khan approach: “I conquered it; therefore I own it.” They include: Self-determination, efficiency, corrective justice, and several types of historical criteria. It is probable that no particular case meets all of the criteria, and no single criterion is a trump card guaranteeing sovereignty in all cases. Historical primacy plays an important role, but is by no means the predominant one; hence, we examine it last.

Claims to sovereignty made under the rubric of self-determination are based on the fact that a group constitutes a majority of the population in a given territory. This concept is widely accepted. Difficulties arise not so much over the principle of self-determination as over the challenges of drawing borders when two or more national groups live in intermingled settlements. For example, the impossibility of creating a border that would leave Muslims on one side and Hindus on the other when Britain ended its rule of India left millions of people on the “wrong” side in 1948. No effort was made to arrange an organized exchange of populations between the newly created states of India and Pakistan, resulting in widespread massacres, the creation of millions of refugees, and a Pakistani state that has been largely cleansed of its indigenous Hindu population.

The principle of national self-determination, moreover, assumes that national identity is a settled thing; in reality, national identity may be undecided and potentially fluid, within limits. Although it was never possible that the Slavic-speaking people of what is now the Republic of Macedonia would choose to identify themselves as Turkish or Austrian, they had no distinct national identity in the nineteenth century. Thus Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia plausibly competed for the right to absorb the territory that would become Macedonia, along with its people. An additional difficulty with the principle of self-determination arises when differential birth and emigration rates change the ethnic equation. In 1948, Arabs were the clear majority in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The fact that there is, today, a Jewish majority in this area makes it more difficult for Palestinian nationalists to advance an argument for the Arab right to sovereignty over the entire land. The Arab majority in Judea and Samaria, on the other hand, makes it similarly difficult for Israel to justify expansion in those areas.

Efficiency-based and use claims are also widespread, derived from the Lockean idea that ownership can be established by the productive use of territory, or, likewise, weakened by failure to settle and use available territory productively.⁶⁰ Efficiency-based arguments are most frequently appealed to in discussions of such settler nations as the United States and Australia, but the moral weight of efficiency-based claims is regularly acknowledged by the actual practice of governments worldwide. Think of the strenuous, expensive, and centuries-long Norwegian effort to create and maintain population centers north of the Arctic Circle. Oslo viewed the existence of Sami populations in the area as irrelevant to the goal of insuring that the North not slip from Norwegian control (and into the hands of expansionist Russia). Thus was remote Tromso provided with a bishop, a university, an economy, and a population, even though the region has few resources and would not be a viable settlement without massive government intervention.

Corrective justice is another strong argument on which to base a claim to sovereignty. Here, the argument is for restoring what has been wrongly taken away, usually by conquest. The argument for restoring sovereignty to the Korean nation after half a century of Japanese occupation was so strong that the case scarcely had to be made. Most cases, however, are more difficult. Indeed, both Palestinians and Israelis make corrective justice arguments for their rights to territory.

There is more than one variety of historical claims, but all of them require that the group “show that it is indeed, and has been continuously, the same cultural group as that which inhabited the relevant territories all those many years ago.”⁶¹ Evidence of prior sovereignty is probably the strongest historic argument that a national movement can make, a claim that strengthens with the length and recency of that rule. When the Slavic peoples of the Balkans moved toward the formation of modern nation states as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated, Bulgaria was able to claim descent from an important medieval kingdom. Macedonia, by contrast, had last been a sovereign entity at the time of Philip of Macedon, with whom Macedonian nationalists can demonstrate no cultural continuity. The Sami and Palestinians are in a similar predicament, with no prior history of national sovereignty, or even of rule as a unified province.

The existence of a deep historical connection between a land and nation is also compelling; the strongest form of this argument is that the land in question is the nation’s “cradle,” with rights deriving from the fact that “the events thought to have formed the historical identity of a national group took place in specific territories.”⁶² The claim of Jews to Israel or of the Arabs to Mecca and Medina epitomizes these arguments.

Thus, the determination of the legitimacy of a claim to sovereignty involves the complex balancing of variables that may seem incommensurate, but somehow must be weighed one against the other. The partisans of a national cause can hardly be blamed for casting about for yet one more argument that might prove dispositive. Genetics, with its appearance of scientific objectivity, holds obvious—albeit illusory—appeal. For nations with strong claims to territorial sovereignty, genetic data will be irrelevant; for nations with weak claims, such data will always be inadequate. Advocates who look to genetics for a decisive victory are certain to be disappointed.

Diana Muir Appelbaum is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England (University Press of New England, 2000), and is working on a book on nationalism. Paul S. Appelbaum is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law and director of the program in psychiatry, law, and ethics at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Notes

1. Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al.,“HLA Genes in Macedonians and the Sub-Saharan Origin of the Greeks,”Tissue Antigens 57:2(2001), pp. 118-127.

2. Nikola Spasikov, “Elendzija (Cheater)!” Macedonian News, at www.maknews.com/html/articles/spasikov/elendzija.htm; Nikola Spasikov, “Gatanka (Puzzle)!” Macedonian News (May 2005), at www.maknews.com/html/articles/spasikov/gatanka_puzzle.html. For a map of historical ethnic Macedonia, see www.historyofmacedonia.org/ConciseMacedonia/map.html.

3. Although we have limited this paper to discussing claims being made by Sami, Macedonian, and Palestinian nationalists, there are other groups making similar claims, including the Lebanese, who claim to be the heirs of the Phoenicians (see “Proving History Through Science: Phoenicians Reborn Through the DNA ‘Alphabet,’ the Y Chromosome,” on the website of the Virtual Center for Phoenician Studies (http://phoenicia.org/genetics.html); and the Assyrian Christians, who claim to be the heirs of ancient Assyria (see the website of the Assyrian Heritage DNA Project, www.familytreedna.com/(zghblo45rkaxxrfmazpi15ng)/public/AssyrianHeritageDNAProject/index.aspx).

4. Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford, 2002), p. 359.

5. Chaim Gans, “Historical Rights: The Evaluation of Nationalist Claims to Sovereignty,” Political Theory 29:1 (February 2001), p. 59.

6. Thus a Basque blog, Euskal Blog, can confidently reproduce a map of the Basque homeland, Euskal Herria, printed in National Geographic in November 1995 with a caption that began, “One nation in two countries, Euskal Herria, as three million Basques call their nation…” along with the news that, “Genetic studies show the Basques to be a people distinct from any other in Europe, rooted in the region of the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains before Indo-European tribes arrived. As a saying goes, ‘Before God was God and boulders were boulders, Basques were already Basques.’” See http://txikilike.blogspot.com/2002_01_01_txikilike_archive.html.

7. Tariq Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice: Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and Palestine,” Counterpunch, March 4, 2004.

8. A=adenine, C=cytosine, G=guanine, and T=thymine.

9. Michael Bamshad, Stephen Wooding, Benjamin A. Salisbury, and J. Claiborne Stephens, “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race,” Nature Reviews Genetics 5 (August 2004), pp. 598-609.

10. Endogamous mating was characteristic of the pre-modern world, where geographic barriers generally determined the group from which one could choose a mate. War and migration could produce major disruptions in endogamy, and even among pre-modern peoples, there was also some new genetic material introduced at the margins of the populations as a result of contacts stimulated by trade. See, for example, Noah A. Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science 298, December 20, 2002, pp. 2381-2385.

11. See, for example, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton, 1994). The statement above is a necessarily oversimplified description of the development of genetic differences across population groups. A number of additional factors determine the degree of divergence among populations. Many mutations that affect gene function are incompatible with life, or cause marked functional impairment; when they arise, these deleterious mutations are unlikely to be passed on to progeny, restricting change in the genome. On the other hand, positive effects on survival can accelerate dissemination of a mutation in a population; the relative protective effects of sickle cell and thalassemia genes on survival from malaria contribute to their widespread presence in malarial belts in Africa and parts of Europe. Hence, precision in determining the degree of relatedness of populations is increased if only areas of chromosomes that are not directly involved in coding for genes are examined. Other influences that can magnify differences across populations are the so-called founder and bottleneck effects. Founder effects relate to the restricted gene pool present in a small number of families that migrate to colonize new territories; their descendants will differ more markedly from the population of origin (and resemble each other more closely) than would be expected merely by the passage of time. The genetics of Ashkenazi Jews are thought to reflect a founder effect. Bottlenecks are related phenomena that occur when populations are markedly reduced in size, with a concomitant reduction in genetic diversity, only to begin to grow again afterward. Finally, geneticists talk about “genetic drift,” chance variation in the genetic makeup of populations that can accentuate differences among them over time.

13. In addition to the problems in generalizing conclusions from the limited number of genes (often a single one) that are used for these studies, interpretation of the data is often confounded by selective pressures. That is, since mutations in genes that code for proteins are likely to lead to deleterious or (less commonly) advantageous consequences, their spread through a population will be retarded or enhanced accordingly. Calculations of time since divergence, based on such data may be inaccurate, and differences between populations artificially reduced or exaggerated. To the extent that a highly beneficial mutation arises separately in two populations with little genetic relationship, examination of that gene alone will falsely suggest a close genetic relationship between otherwise distant groups.

14. Bamshad, Wooding, Salisbury, and Stephens, “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race.”

15. Other types of mutations that may lead to genetic diversity include insertions, deletions, or transpositions of genetic material in a chromosome. Like SNPs, any of these mutations can be a component of a haplotype.

16. Michael F. Hammer et al., “Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests,” Nature 385 (January 1997), p. 32; Mark G. Thomas et al., “Origins of Old Testament Priests,” Nature 394 (July 1998), pp. 138-140.

17. Doron M. Behar, et al., “The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event,” American Journal of Human Genetics 78:3 (March 2006), pp. 487-497. An added benefit of using the non-recombining portion of the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA for population studies is that so-called recombination events (crossing over of pieces of each pair of chromosomes), which occur in the rest of the genome and can complicate calculations of genetic distance, do not take place in these stretches of DNA. Differences in Y or mitochondrial DNA are almost solely due to random mutation, and hence provide more accurate estimates of the time when two population groups diverged.

18. Loring M. Danforth, The Macedonian Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-ton, 1995).

19. Aleksandar Donski, The Descendants of Alexander the Great of Macedon, ed. Michael Seraphinoff, trans. Marijan Galevski and Michael Seraphinoff (Shtip: Macedonian Literary Association, 2004); “Why the Macedonians Are Not Slavs,” www.historyofmacedonia.org/ConciseMacedonia/MacedoniansNotSlavs.html.

20. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “HLA Genes in Macedonians.”

21. Victor Roudometof, “Nationalism and Identity Politics in the Balkans: Greece and the Macedonian Question,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 14:2 (1996), pp. 253-301.

22. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “HLA Genes in Macedonians.”

23. Lyle Campbell, “Review of The Saami Languages: An Introduction,” Language 75:3 (September 1999), p. 645.

24. “The Honningsvag Declaration,” issued by the 18th Sami Conference, Honningsvag, Norway on October 7-9, 2004, refers to the Sami as “an indigenous people and as one nation.” See the website of the Sami Council at www.saamicouncil.net/files/20041215142715.doc, and the following Sami advocacy websites: http://boreale.konto.itv.se/seatnam.htm; www.sametinget.se/sametinget/view.cfm?oid=2000&sat=no; and http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/HistoryCulture/Sami/samisf.html.

25. Diana Muir, “Exhibition Notes: ‘Frost: Life and Cuture of the Sami Reindeer People of Norway,’” The New Criterion 24:8 (April 2006), p. 46.

26. Antonio Torroni et al., “MtDNA Analysis Reveals a Major Late Paleolithic Population Expansion from Southwestern to Northeastern Europe,” American Journal of Human Genetics 62:5 (1998), pp. 1137-1152; K. Tambets et al., “The Western and Eastern Roots of the Saami: The Story of Genetic ‘Outliers’ Told by Mitochondrial DNA and Y Chromosomes,” American Journal of Human Genetics 74 (2004), pp. 661-682; Muir, “Exhibition Notes”; www.sametinget.se/sametinget/view.cfm?oid=1429.

27. Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-1099, trans. Ethel Broido (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1992).

28. Rajah G. Mattar, “Arab Christians Are Arabs,” Baltimore Chronicle, August 30, 2005, and posted on the website of passia, the Palestine Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, at www.passia.org/meetings/rsunit/Articles/E-August-2005.htm.

29. Al Quds University Homepage, “Jerusalem, the Old City: An Introduction,” at www.alquds.edu/gen_info/index.php?page=jerusalem_history.

30. Joseph Massad, quoted in Andrew Whitehead, “History on the Line, ‘No Common Ground’: Joseph Massad and Benny Morris Discuss the Middle East,” History Workshop Journal 53:1 (2002), pp. 214-215.

31. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (London: Pan, 1976); D.M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (New York: Schocken, 1967); Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli Palestinian Struggle (London: Pluto, 2004), p. 28.

32. Whitehead, “History on the Line,” p. 215.

33. Michael F. Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations Share a Common Pool of Y-Chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97:12 (June 2000), pp. 6769-6774; Almut Nebel et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs Reveal Geographic Substructure and Substantial Overlap with Haplotypes of Jews,” Human Genetics 107:6 (November 2000), pp. 630-641.

34. Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations,” Human Immunology 62:9 (September 2001), pp. 889-900. The paper was later withdrawn from the scientific literature by the editor of the journal in which it was published—an unusual step, justified by its rather extraordinary historical claims, for example, “[T]he Palestinians are nowadays thought to come from the Egyptian garrisons that were abandoned to their own fate on the Canaan land by 1200 years B.C.E.…” and “[T]he origin of the long-lasting Jewish-Palestinian hostility is the fight for land in ancient times” are just two examples. Erica Klarreich, “Genetics Paper Erased from Journal over Political Content,” Nature 414 (November 2001), p. 382.

35. Whitehead, “History on the Line,” p. 215; Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice.”

36. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “HLA Genes in Macedonians.”

37. Neil Risch, Alberto Piazza, and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “Correspondence: Dropped Genetics Paper Lacked Scientific Merit,” Nature 415 (January 2002), p. 115. Although the letter was focused on the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the paper on Palestinian-Jewish similarities, the critique applies equally well to the Macedonian analyses; both papers were based on the same data set and used the same techniques.

38. Bamshad et al., “Deconstructing the Relationship Between Genetics and Race.”

39. Risch, Piazza, and Cavalli-Sforza, “Dropped Genetics Paper Lacked Scientific Merit.”

40. Alexander Petlichkovski et al., “High-Resolution Typing of hla-drb1 Locus in the Macedonian Population,” Tissue Antigens 64:4 (October 2004), pp. 486-491.

41. Zoe Rosser et al., “Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Europe Is Clinal and Influenced Primarily by Geography Rather than by Language,” American Journal of Human Genetics 67:6 (December 2000), pp. 1526-1543; Tatiana Zerjal et al., “Geographical, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences on Genetic Diversity: Y-Chromosomal Distribution in Northern European Populations,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 18:6 (June 2001), pp. 1077-1087; Mirja Raitio et al., “Y-Chromosomal SNPs in Finno-Ugric-Speaking Populations Analyzed by Minisequencing on Microarrays,” Genome Research 11:3 (March 2001), pp. 471-482.

42. Lyle Campbell, “On the Linguistic Prehistory of Finno-Ugric,” in Raymond Kickey and Stanisaw Puppel, eds., Language History and Linguistic Modeling: A Festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on His 60th Birthday (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 829-861.

43. Torroni et al, “MtDNA Analysis Reveals a Major Late Paleolithic Population Expansion from Southwestern to Northeastern Europe.” Expansion of Neolithic technology carried by an Indo-European population into Europe is dated to around 6000 b.c.e. See Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes, ch. 5.

44. The most plausible interpretation of these data is that the ancestors of today’s Sami were predominantly the males of the later Finno-Ugric migration, who mated mostly with the women descended from the glacial refugee population. However, recent research on Sami genetics has found evidence of maternal mitochondrial DNA from the Finno-Ugric line as well, probably derived from a migration roughly 2,700 years ago. These data help to date the Finno-Ugric migration (and agree with independent linguistic data), and underscore the complexity of the genetics of even as isolated a population as the Sami, which, like almost all groups, reflects a mixture of lineage in both paternal and maternal lines. See Max Ingman and Ulf Gyllensten, “A Recent Genetic Link Between Sami and the Volga-Ural Region of Russia.” European Journal of Human Genetics, advance online publication, September 20, 2006.

45. Controversy continues to surround the origins of the Sami, underscoring the virtue of caution in making claims about their genetic heritage. See Tambets et al., “The Western and Eastern Roots of the Saami”; H. Ikegaya et al., “Genetic Diversity of JC Virus in the Saami and the Finns: Implications for Their Population History,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128:1 (September 2005), pp. 185-193.

46. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians.” Studies of Palestinians’ genetics have suggested non-random differences, for example, between highland and other groups. See Nebel et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.”

47. Nebel, et al., “High-Resolution Y Chromosome Haplotypes of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs.”

48. Almut Nebel et al., “The Y Chromosome Pool of Jews as Part of the Genetic Landscape of the Middle East,” American Journal of Human Genetics 69:5 (November 2001), p. 1095; Hammer et al., “Jewish and Middle Eastern Non-Jewish Populations.”

49. Ali, “To Be Intimidated Is to Be an Accomplice”; Saliba, “Rebutting a ‘Misguided Political Project.’”

50. Note that such comparisons require a priori assumptions about which groups in fact descended from the ancient inhabitants of the land. Demonstrating that Macedonians have a high degree of genetic relatedness to Cretans, as Arnaiz-Villena et al. claimed, is of little value in establishing historical primacy unless one begins with the belief that the Cretans themselves are not descendants of later interlopers. Assumptions about comparison groups in population genetics studies must be scrutinized as carefully as the data themselves. Arnaiz-Villena et al., “The Origin of Palestinians and Their Genetic Relatedness with Other Mediterranean Populations.”

51. Martin Richards et al., “Extensive Female-Mediated Gene Flow from Sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab Populations,” American Journal of Human Genetics 72:4 (April 2003), pp. 1058-1064.

52. Ellen Levy-Coffman, “A Mosaic of People: The Jewish Story and a Reassessment of the DNA Evidence,” Journal of Genetic Genealogy 1:1(Spring 2005), pp. 12-33.

53. David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford, 1995), p. 22.

54. http://notre.savoie.free.fr/acc_a.htm.

55. Miller, On Nationality, p. 23.

56. Miller, On Nationality, p. 24.

57. Miller, On Nationality, p. 24.

58. Miller, On Nationality, p. 25.

59. Nations confer automatic membership on the offspring of members, a practice that may appear to support the notion that nations are biologically based communities, until it is examined more closely. The Jewish nation, for example, defines every child born of a Jewish mother as Jewish. The mother, however, may be Jewish either because she was born to a Jewish mother or because she converted to Judaism. And anyone born Jewish can cease to be Jewish by the act of conversion. Thus, even in this instance, cultural identity trumps lineage.

60. Tamar Meisels, Territorial Rights (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2005), ch. 5.

61. Meisels, Territorial Rights, p. 31.

62. Gans, “Historical Rights,” p. 66; see also Chaim Gans’ essay in the current issue, pp. 80-111.

12. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus W. Feldman, “The Application of Molecular Genetic Approaches to the Study of Human Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics Supplement 33 (March 2003), pp. 266-275.

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