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  Is there such a thing as ‘race’?

  (History, Cambridge)

  Biologists have no problem being racist when it comes to classifying plants and animals. A race, a biologist will tell you, is a geographically distinct group within a species that shows its own hereditary traits, such as the maneless lions of Kenya’s Tsavo national park. It’s with humans that the issue becomes fraught with controversy.

  In recent years, many scientists, perhaps all too deeply aware of how damaging science’s exploration of race issues has been in the past, have insisted that there is biologically no such thing as race with the human species, and genetic research is backing this up. Human genome researcher Craig Venter and evolutionary biologists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould are among many scientists who have argued that there is no identifiable genetic basis to race. Genetic differences within what are ordinarily regarded as racial groups turn out to be far, far greater than those between them. Gould believed that the time human beings have been around (a mere 170,000 years at most) is far too short for genetically different racial groups to have evolved.

  In fact, nearly every genetic marker studied for signs of significant racial differences fails to reveal any. Even the small things that one might expect to show differences between the races, such as blood type and susceptibility to particular diseases, do not bear closer inspection. Blood types are pretty much evenly spread within different ethnic groups and particular susceptibilities to disease turn out to be mostly geographic rather than genetic.

  A race, biologists insist, must be genetically distinct. Yet the human ‘races’ are indistinct, with physical types blending so indistinguishably that one would have to say that everyone, ultimately, is ‘mixed race’ – especially since mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), the tiny genetic time capsule inherited through the female line unchanged through countless generations, shows female ancestry can come from any racial group. Race, then, according to many scientists, is not a physical reality but a cultural and social construct, no more scientific than nationality. A very few scientists disagree, however, arguing that there are genetic differences, even if small, and those small differences are enough to mark out different races – even if they are only ‘fuzzy sets’ that blend imperceptibly into each other. This all matters a great deal, of course, and is not simply an arcane scientific question, because bigots make the most of any scientific evidence that there are genetic differences between ethnic groups to justify their racial attitudes.

  Yet whatever science says, most of us, on a day-to-day basis, assume that race is a reality. It’s a concept recognised both by the law and by the government in trying to ensure equal opportunities, and it’s information requested in numerous official applications and documents. And most us of have no problem specifying our own racial type (white Caucasian, black African, Asian, Aboriginal, mixed and so on). From a young age, most of us also can quickly identify the race of others instantly by sight alone – even if mistakes are common. Regardless of what genetics shows, the physical signs of race are generally so marked that they remain instantly identifiable whatever the context. A black African or a white Caucasian is still identifiable as such even if brought up in a completely different racial context, which is why it’s not enough to say that race is a ‘social and cultural construct’. However defined, it is a reality.

  If your race is in the majority in the place where you live, you might easily forget issues of race, or even that race exists (in whatever form), but if you are in a minority you are constantly reminded of the differences. Sometimes, these are something to celebrate. But sometimes they can bring great suffering.

  What matters more, perhaps, than the reality of such ethnic differences is our attitude towards them. No one likes being labelled, and race is one of the most powerful and dangerous of all labels.

  Is nature natural?

  (Geography, Oxford)

  Three simple words in this question – yet what a web they create. Today, the word ‘nature’ is used readily as a blanket term for the ‘natural’ world around us without necessarily defining exactly what is meant. Or it might describe something’s essential qualities, their inner or true nature. That’s the sense the Ancient Greeks would have understood, and the Roman origins of the word natura meant ‘birth’ – and described qualities that things were born with. Some things, the Greeks believed, are inborn – formed by nature – and some are added by man. Aristotle summed it up neatly: ‘Art completes what nature cannot finish.’

  Art and nature were seen as complementary opposites, and until a few hundred years ago that’s how most people saw it. The seventeenth-century author Thomas Browne thus would have had a simple answer to the question ‘Is nature natural?’ Browne wrote in Religio Medici (1643): ‘Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.’ Most of his contemporaries would have concurred.

  Over the next two centuries ideas shifted, however. When the Victorian poet Philip James Bailey wrote, ‘Art is man’s nature; Nature is God’s art’, it might seem to be saying the same thing as Browne, but Browne would not have understood what he meant, nor its punning style. To Browne and his time, nature was simply all the physical world – created by God, not by man – and those who tried to understand how it works were described as ‘natural philosophers’. But to the Victorians there was nature, which meant little more than ‘characteristics’, and there was Nature, with a capital ‘N’ – the big outdoors which keen Victorian naturalists went out and studied in the countryside, and romantic poets waxed lyrical about.

  Nature had become separated from the sphere of man’s activities and interests, and was no longer the complementary opposite of art. Natural philosophers became ‘scientists’ and those professionals who studied plants and animals were botanists and zoologists. Naturalists were merely amateurs who made a hobby of observing birds and butterflies, wildflowers and mosses and so on. More and more, Nature became what it is today – something we enjoy in lavish TV documentaries and on trips to the countryside, or in school activities, but are never really part of. In fact, Nature is something that doesn’t come naturally, any more than an interest in computers or cooking. In this sense, Nature has become unnatural.

  But there is a whole other side to this question – just how much the natural environment is actually natural. Nearly every inch of the landscape of the English countryside, for instance, is the product of thousands of years of human toil, and the wild plants and creatures of the fields are those that have adapted to this man-made landscape – birds such as the skylark and corn bunting, linnet and grey partridge; rodents such as field mice; and meadow flowers such as cowslips and trefoil, scabious and daisy. And as modern intensive farming practices further alter the landscape, many of these ancient farmland species have in turn come under threat, like their natural forebears in the past. Wild cowslips have almost had their day; now it’s the age of nettles.

  And what is true in England is true globally. Human activity has significantly altered the natural environment all over the world, not just by creating farmland from what was once virgin forest or plain, but by polluting the atmosphere and water and much more besides. Countless species of wildlife have been endangered in what seems like a massive cull as their habitat has been altered or destroyed altogether.

  Yet though many species will die out, others will thrive. Nature will not die out but just alter its course. On the whole, human activity tends to reduce diversity but allows a few successful species to flourish, often to pest proportions. And of course even the crops and livestock that humans fill the landscape with are actually the descendants of native plants and animals. So however much it’s altered by human activity, nature, or rather the natural environment, can always be described as natural.
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br />   Of course, we humans are actually a product of nature ourselves. So even the most extreme man-made environments, from a Shanghai shopping mall to a nuclear bunker, could be described as natural. If, however, your definition of natural is ‘unaltered by humans’, then there is virtually no corner of the planet which could be described as natural …

  In recent years, the word ‘natural’ has acquired the aura of angels. Everything from GM foods to women pregnant at 65 has been labelled ‘unnatural’ by their opponents, as if that is enough to damn them forever, while advertisers can put a positive spin on just about anything by describing it as ‘natural’ (presumably untainted by the ‘dangerous’ input of scientists and manufacturers). In one of those jawclenching ironies, an orange tart labelled as full of ‘natural orange flavour’ has almost certainly never been near an orange, natural or unnatural. Food retailers can legally label food as ‘naturally flavoured’ if the cocktail of chemicals it contains creates a taste that just vaguely resembles the real thing.

  Yet just why is natural so easily seen as good and unnatural bad? After all, diseases such as malaria and cholera are natural. In fact, death is quite natural, too. I’d guess it’s in part a hangover from the ancient belief that things in their proper, natural form were, in their way, perfect, and, in Christian times, reflections of God’s creation. Unnatural things were distortions of these perfect forms created by the devil. When people talked about ‘unnatural acts’ they were talking about something a lot nastier than making ‘natural strawberry flavour’ drinks from chemicals.

  Yet that ancient prejudice has been revived and reinforced beyond measure in the modern world by the distrust provoked by big manufacturing companies and agribusinesses, scientists and food technologists. This distrust is founded on genuine real disasters, from eugenics to thalidomide and from Hiroshima to Chernobyl. ‘Natural’ by contrast seems to be safe, tried-and-tested over millions of years. It’s free from dangerous artifice, human hubris and the taint of big money. In this sense, nature is always natural.

  There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

  There is society, where none intrudes,

  By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

  I love not man the less, but Nature more.

  Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18)

  Is the environment a bigger crisis than poverty/AIDS etc?

  (Land Economy, Cambridge)

  Of course, this partly depends on who you are. If you’re someone whose family is afflicted by AIDS then clearly that’s the biggest crisis. If you’re one of the billions of people around the world living in extreme poverty, then that is the biggest crisis. If you’re someone whose traditional way of life has been ruined by the destruction of rainforest, then that’s the biggest crisis.

  But looking at these problems on a global scale, the most massive immediate problem is clearly poverty. The number of people – more than a third of the world’s population – suffering miserable lives or worse as a result of poverty around the world is huge and unacceptable. 4.4 billion people live in developing countries. Three-fifths lack basic sanitation. Almost one third have no access to clean water. A quarter do not have adequate housing. A fifth have no access to modern health services. A fifth of children do not make it to the end of primary school. A fifth are continually ill because they do not have adequate protein and energy from their food supplies. And each year, for every single child alive and well in the UK, a child dies in the developing world through the effects of poverty. There is no crisis that comes even close to this in scale, urgency or tragedy. It’s a calamity for humanity, and demands immediate attention.

  The damage to the environment is potentially catastrophic. If, for instance, global warming is even half as bad as some of the worst scenarios predict, it could be devastating. Many of the world’s great cities could be drowned by rising seawater as ice caps melt and the oceans warm and swell. Many productive areas of farmland could be turned to desert by drought. And the extra energy in the atmosphere could generate storms that wreak havoc around the world. In future, environmental damage could do untold, irreparable harm to life on earth that lasts for many generations, if not forever. So in the long term, the threat of destroying our planet must be considered a bigger problem than poverty. However, poor people need help now. For them, the threats to the planet in a few decades’ time make no difference; most of them will not be alive to see it unless their problems are addressed now.

  Of course, it’s absurd rating crises like this. They are the most serious issues facing humanity and all demand attention. What’s more, they are not separate problems to be packaged up and dealt with one by one. They are intimately related in both cause and effect, and they need to be dealt with together. AIDS, for instance, often goes hand-in-hand with poor living conditions and a lack of education, both of which are also closely linked to poverty. And poverty, of course, is often a direct result of environmental problems, and the poorest of the poor are likely to be the worst hit by the effects of climate change – such as impoverished inhabitants in low-lying Bangladesh as sea levels rise, and the peoples of the Sahel as the desert expands. But the interconnectedness goes much deeper, and it’s almost inconceivable that we could ‘solve’ one without addressing the others.

  On a very superficial level, the main threats to the environment are a direct result of intensive economic development around the world, but especially in the developed countries. Massive energy consumption and massive demand for resources (mineral, water, food and land) put huge pressure on the environment. Poverty is essentially the counter side of the concentration of energy and resources into the world’s economic hotspots. Economists and development experts have many ideas how it could and should be done, but it seems likely that both world poverty and environmental damage could be alleviated by damping down the furnace of consumption in the economic hotspots and working to spread a more even, sustainable level of development around the world.

  Why do the words ‘God’ and ‘I’ have capital letters?

  (Oriental Studies, Cambridge)

  This is presented as if it’s a difficult or controversial question, maybe about the status of religion. After all, some of us were told at school that God is capitalised out of respect for the Almighty. But it’s just a diversion. The answer is quite simple: in English, proper names are always given an initial capital letter, and God is a proper name, just as Gordon and Barack are. The word ‘God’ should still be capitalised even if you have no respect, providing you are referring to the being known as God – in other words, when the being’s proper name is God.

  So even an atheist should capitalise God, although he has no more belief in God than he does in Puff the Magic Dragon. You might split hairs if you were a particularly tricky kind of atheist and try to say that because you don’t believe he exists he can’t have a proper name, but you’d be wrong because possession of a proper name is not a proof or even acceptance of something’s existence, any more than Superman’s is.

  But the word ‘god’ should not have a capital, of course, if it’s used descriptively rather than as a proper name – when you’re referring to just any god, or one of the gods, or a real goddess. The word ‘I’ is the only personal pronoun to be capitalised, and it may simply be that the single letter ‘i’ would look insufficient in lower case.

  The grey area would seem to arise, perhaps, when you use personal pronouns for God, but you would use capitals when referring to His Majesty, or His Holiness, so it may be right to insist on capitalising Him when referring to God, regardless of respect, because Him could be used as a title, not a personal pronoun. I think, though, that most people accept a lower case ‘him’ is the norm nowadays.

  The distinction between capitals and non-capitals or, in printing terminology, upper and lower case, emerged only in the Middle Ages in European languages. (The letters are called upper case and lower case because in the days o
f movable type, the capital (majuscule) letters literally came from the upper case or tray of letters and the small (minuscule) letters from the lower case.) In classical texts, all letters were capitals. The rules for usage vary with each language, and have varied through history. All European languages begin sentences and lines in verse with capitals (although a few modern poets have deliberately subverted the rule), but within sentences and lines usage varies. In German, every proper noun is given a capital, and that was once true of English. Now only specific names and things such as adjectives derived from nouns (e.g. Newtonian physics) have capitals.

  Is it more important to focus on poverty at home or poverty abroad?

  (Land Economy, Cambridge)

  Very few people would deny that poverty is an issue that demands attention. No politician could credibly stand up in parliament, for instance, and assert that it isn’t important – however vacillating he or she might be in actually doing anything about it. It’s one of the major issues facing the world today.

  The scale of devastation wreaked by poverty around the world is truly appalling. There are over a billion people – a fifth of the world’s population – living in what the World Bank calls ‘extreme poverty’ and a further 1.6 billion living in what they call ‘moderate poverty’, the vast majority of these in sub-Saharan Africa and in India. The definition of ‘extreme poverty’ is living on less than a dollar day – and that means perpetual malnourishment, no proper home and an exposure to disease and deprivation that at best causes misery, and at worst death. And there is little moderation in ‘moderate poverty’, which means struggling to exist on less than $2 a day. Today’s newspapers could print the headline ‘Yesterday, 25,000 children died from extreme poverty around the world’, and they could print the same every day of the year, year in year out, and it would still be true. But of course most die invisibly, far away from the attention of the world’s media, with only a few of the worst crises making the news.