RACE RELATIONS PART 2 ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS

All men are brothers. People have been saying this In one form or another for thousands of years.

Even when almost nothing was known scientifically about the human body, wise men claimed that all human beings were alike no matter what their nation or lan­guage or color might be.

And today, scientists have proved that the wise men were right.

We know, for instance, that dif­ferent species of animals cannot mate and produce children. Yet all over the world, people of every conceivable color - light-colored Europeans, medium-colored Asiatics, and dark-colored Africans - have married and raised families. And this has been happening since man first appeared. So, whatever their color, all men must belong to the same species.

Another proof of this is the fact that the cells of our bodies are alike. Doctors can transfer skin or bone or eyes from one person to another. An African pygmy can give a blood transfusion to a light­colored English.man and vice versa, if their blood belongs to the same group. (There are several different blood groups - A. B, AB and 0 are the major ones - but all of these groups can be found in all people, regardless of color.)

So all mankind belongs to one species. This means, probably, that we all have a common ances­ tor. Far in the dim past, perhaps a million years ago or more, a com­plicated series of gene changes, or mutations, in a prehuman species produced the first human being. No one knows when or where this happened or how long it took, but today the descendants of that first human have multiplied and spread out to every corner of the earth.

Yet" although we belong to the same species, we still have many differences. Some we are born with, and some we learn. Learned differences are called "acquired traits" because we

acquire, or learn, them from the society we live in as we grow up. They include such things as lan­guage and customs. Acquired traits can be changed quite quickly if we move from one society to another. When India was part of the British Empire. Many Indians learned to talk and think like Englishmen. And many Englishmen. who were born and raised in India learned the lan­guages and customs of Indians.

"Inherited traits" - the differences we are born with - cannot be changed so easily. They include everything from our sex to the shape of our noses and the color of our skin. And of all the differ­ences between human beings, color Is the easiest to see. When we see somebody at a distance, it

is almost impossible to tell what language he speaks or what his religion is. But there is no doubt about the color of his skin.

We already know how skin color is passed on from one set of par­ents to their children. But how did the parents get their color? How did the different groups of human beings get their color? And why does the color vary from one group to another?