On Race and Human Variation

On Race and Human Variation

by Bill White

Race is an essentially spiritual, and not biological, term that has a loose correlation to the physical manifestations of man. While, biologically, men are divided into three races – the black, the yellow and the white – that correspond roughly to the L, M and N haplotypes in mitochondrial DNA, the important spiritual racial difference is between the Aryan and Jewish tendencies, each of which has a different divine origin and manifests itself in a different orientation towards civilization.[2] Rather than the product of evolution, the lesser categories of living beings are the product of degeneration, and animals represent a degenerate form of the divine essence that is manifest in the human race.[3] This perspective of race has little to do with the essentially progressive and biologically determinist viewpoints that dominate both sides of the “scientific” race debate, but has more essential truth and is more useful in guiding and describing human behavior than purely materialistic forms.[4]

The differentiated physical forms of man are likely the result of evolution from different subspecies of the genus homo, and possibly, in the case of Negroes, of near ancestry to the species australopithecus;[5] the differentiated spiritual nature of man is the result of a divine act that occurred approximately 32,000 years ago, when the divine race mated with the human and produced the Arya from the white physical type.[6] Since this time, humanity has been degenerating as the racial and caste differences between men have slowly dissolved, hurdling humanity forward to a time when it will be one, undifferentiated mass of “mud people”, wholly individualized and without organic or spiritual unities.[7] The “mixed” races that are used to challenge the idea of race are the product of this process of degeneration and de-evolution – but their existence no more denies the existence of “pure” races than the mixing of copper and tin to make bronze denies the existence of the elements.[8]

As Oswald Spengler noted in his Decline of the West, within racial entities are collective social organisms that give birth to cultures and civilizations.[9] In this context, the idea of “ethnicity” can be understood: Ethnic groups are groupings within the larger racial unities that participate in a common spiritual and material – and often political — life.[10]

In a purely biological sense, there are meaningful differences between human beings that loosely fall along the lines of the major haplotypes. While the text somewhat obscures what is known of human genetic differentiation, the peoples of the world can roughly be divided into the L, M and N haplotypes of mitochondrial DNA, which correspond to the black, yellow and white races.[11] The derivation of the M and N haplotypes from the L3 haplotype is almost purely speculative and based upon geological proximity and premises about human origins from a common root that are now known to be false; it is known that the L1, L2, and L4-L6 haplotypes share little common genetic material with the white and yellow races.[12] The genotypes that define these haplotypes find unique expression in the phenotype that further reinforce the idea that the three races of man are biologically distinct and of separate origin. Within the yellow race there is a general differentiation into the D haplotype, which defines the yellow race in the Americas, and the haplotypes of the Eurasian branches of that race, and within the white race there is a broad division between the haplotypes of the Turko-Mongolic peoples of Eurasia, and of the R haplotype, which contains the Indo-European peoples.[13] These subdivisions within the larger divisions of the races provide biological support for the spiritual differences that are evident in the differentiated abilities of groups to produce culture and advance in technics.

Thus race, in its most meaningful sense, denotes descent from spiritual and divine forbears and participation in the heritage that the divine passed down to man, the ability to participate in higher levels of spiritual existence and the ability to manifest those things in the physical world corresponds loosely to the major DNA haplotypes, which define three races of men that are then subdivided according to the common notions of race and ethnicity that are, ironically, ridiculed by the very science that proves their existence.
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[1] You’re not going to like my answer, but you asked.
[2] The correspondence between race and haploytype is touched on badly in Olsen, Mapping Human History, 128-129. Phylotree.org does a good job of explaining the relationship between haplotypes, without saying much as to their definition and geographic distribution. Haplogroup.com also provides supplemental information.

On the nature of the spiritual races:

“Every traditional civilization is characterized by the presence of beings [i.e., the Arya] who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody within the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above.” Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 7; and,

“We must consider another dimension of the Jewish soul: it is like somebody who, having failed to realize the values typical of the sacral and transcendent dimension in the course of the attempt to overcome the antithesis between spirit and ‘flesh’ … eventually rejoices whenever he discovers the illusion and irreality of these values and wherever the ascertains the failure of the yearning for redemption; this becomes for him some kind of alibi and self-justification… There are ancient Traditions according to which Typhon, a demon opposed to the solar God, was the father of the Hebrews; various Gnostic authors considered the Hebrew god as one of Typhon’s creatures. These are references to a demonic spirit characterized by constant restlessness, by an obscure contamination, and by a latent revolt of the inferior elements; when this substance returned to a free state and when it separated itself from the ‘Law’, that is, from the tradition that had formed it, all of these factors acted upon the Jewish substratum in a more dramatic and decisive way than in other people.” Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World 243; Also n.4
[3] “Animal species must be considered as the offshoots or as the ‘abortions’ of a primordial impulse…” Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 180; cited at length in n.4
[4] In this, I generally follow the views of Julius Evola, expressed in his Revolt Against the Modern World 178-183: “To uphold with Tradition that in the beginning there were no animal-like cavemen, but rather ‘more than human’ beings and that in ancient pre-history there was no ‘civilization’ but an ‘era of the gods’; this, to many people – who in one way or another believe in the gospel of Darwinism – amounts to pure and simple ‘mythology’. Since I have not invented this mythology myself, however, critics still have to explain its existence, that is, the fact that according to the most ancient testimonies and writings there is no memory that may lend support to ‘evolutionism’; what is found in them instead is the opposite, in other words, the recurrent idea of a better, brighter, an superhuman (‘divine’) past. These same testimonies also know very little about ‘animal origins’. … Even though the traditional teaching retains the memory of the existence of stocks that could even correspond to the animalistic and inferior types described in the theory of evolution (this was the substratum predating the civilizations created by the superior races), evolutionism mistakenly considers these animal-like stocks to be absolutely primordial, while they are so only relatively.

“On the other hand it is significant that the populations that still live in the alleged original, primitive, and ‘innocent’ state provide little comfort to the evolutionist hypothesis. These stocks, instead of evolving, tends to become extinguished, thereby demonstrating themselves to be the degenerate residues of cycles the vital potential of which has long since been exhausted; in other words, they are heterogeneous elements and remnants left behind by the mainstream of humanity. …

“Evolutionists believe that they are ‘positively’ sticking to the facts. They ignore that the facts per se are silent … It has happened, though, that someone, though fully informed of all the data that are adduced to prove the theory of evolution, has shown these data to support the opposite thesis. … I am referring to the thesis according to which man is not alone in being far from a product of the ‘evolution’ of animal species, but many animal species must be considered as the offshoots or as the ‘abortions’ of a primordial impulse; only in the racially superior human species does this primordial impulse find its direct and adequate manifestation. There are also ancient myths about the struggle between divine races and monstrous entities or animal-like demons that allegedly took place before the advent of the human race … These myths may refer to the struggle of the primordial human principle against its intrinsic animal potentialities, which were eventually isolated and left behind, so to speak, in the form of certain animal stocks. …”

[5] Though our texts oppose the multi-regional hypothesis and the works of Carleton Coon in particular, the discovery of Neanderthal DNA within European and Asian haplotypes forces a reappraisal of his work, to which my views generally adhere. See Carleton Coon, The Origin of Races, in passim. His discussion of the origin of the Asian, European and Negro races begins p 428.

[6] The extinction of the Neanderthal race approximately 30,000 BC is generally believed, within the Traditionalist worldview, to mark the time of origin of the white race, which was its successor. Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 180. While the last ice age only ended approximately 12,000 years ago, and had been ongoing since approximately 110,000 BC, the beginning of the Kali Yuga – the materialization of divine beings and the descent of humanity – generally dates from the destruction of the Aryan homeland by ice, as described in both the Nordic and Indo-Iranian traditions; see Zend Avesta 1.1-16, discussion in Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, i.1-31; Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas.

[7] On the destructive nature of individuation, see Julius Evola, Men Among The Ruins, 136 also “The increasing growth in world population has the same meaning as the swarming of worms on a decomposing organism or as the spreading of cancerous cells; cancer is an uncontrolled hypertrophy of a plasma that devours the normal, differentiated structures of an organism [including, in the case of the human organism, racial differentiation] after subtracting itself from the organism’s regulating laws. This is the scenario facing the modern world: the regression and the decline of fecundating forces and the forces that bear forms parallels the unlimited proliferation of matters, of what is formless, of the masses.” Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 167.

[8] This argument is evident. Our text indicates that skin color varies across three or four places on the genome, but race in the biological sense is much more than skin color – it is a number of traits linked to skin color in the type of group that science has named the “haplotype”. That one haplotype can be said to differentiate from another is sufficient evidence that there are characteristics that define them. The existence of defining characteristics implies the existence of an ideal, following the logic of Plato’s Republic and the idea of the daemon in the Classical tradition, among others. Plato, Republic.
[9] “The high Culture, on the contrary, is the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history.” Spengler, Decline of the West, ii, 36

[10] Spengler’s idea of cultures is really an idea of ethnicities – different expressions of the race conglomerate to form specific cultures and civilizations. And, in the end, all of Spengler’s “cultures” are really expressions of the Indo-European or Aryan racial soul – the Sumerian-Egyptian-Indus cultures being an early offshoot from the “Asian homeland,” and Chinese Han civilization being a separate branch of the same. Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, in passim; The process of Aryan diffusion is described in William McNeil, The Rise of The West, 217-219, for instance; HWF Saggs, The Might That Was Assyria, 16, notes, obliquely, the Indo-European related racial origin of Sumerian civilization.

[11] Our Human Variation textbook does not state this explicitly, which is unfortunate, but it can be clearly gleaned from reading on the subject. The previously cited phylotree.org and haplogroup.com provide a good introduction.

[12] Olsen’s discussion of the work of Wallace and Wilson, Mapping Human History, 200 – 203 and the criticisms found in Molnar, Human Variation, 82-83, make both the methodology and its reliability clear.
[13] The R haplotype is found throughout Asia as well as Europe, but in countries that are known or reasonably believed to have been settled by the Indo-European peoples or their immediate predecessors.