The White Man's Burden

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden 

The editorial cartoon "'The White Man's Burden' (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling)" shows John Bull (Great Britain) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) delivering people of the world to civilization. (Victor Gillam, Judge magazine, 1 April 1899)

 

Original publication of "The White Man's Burden" in McClure's Magazine, February 1899

"The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899), by Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902), which exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country. Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (22 June 1897), the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.

In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonization of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898). As a pro-imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire, yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire; nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man’s burden" to justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilization that is ideologically related to the continental-expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.

History

The White Man's Burden: civilizing the unwilling savage.  (Detroit Journal, 1898)

"The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" was first published in The Times (London) on 4 February 1899, and in The New York Sun on 5 February 1899. On 7 February 1899, during senatorial debate to decide if the U.S. should retain control of the Philippine Islands and the ten million Filipinos conquered from the Spanish Empire, Senator Benjamin Tillman read aloud the first, the fourth, and the fifth stanzas of Kipling's seven-stanza poem as arguments against ratification of the Treaty of Paris and in favor of the US formally renouncing claim of authority over the Philippine Islands. To that effect, Senator Tillman addressed the matter to President William McKinley:

As though coming at the most opportune time possible, you might say just before the treaty reached the Senate, or about the time it was sent to us, there appeared in one of our magazines a poem by Rudyard Kipling, the greatest poet of England at this time. This poem, unique, and in some places too deep for me, is a prophecy. I do not imagine that in the history of human events any poet has ever felt inspired so clearly to portray our danger and our duty. It is called "The White Man’s Burden." With the permission of Senators I will read a stanza, and I beg Senators to listen to it, for it is well worth their attention. This man has lived in the Indies. In fact, he is a citizen of the world, and has been all over it, and knows whereof he speaks.

He quotes, inter alia, stanzas 1, 4, and 5 of "The White Man's Burden", noting:

Those [Filipino] peoples are not suited to our institutions. They are not ready for liberty as we understand it. They do not want it. Why are we bent on forcing upon them a civilization not suited to them and which only means in their view degradation and a loss of self-respect, which is worse than the loss of life itself?

Senator Tillman's eloquence was unpersuasive, and the U.S. Congress ratified the Treaty of Paris on 11 February 1899, formally ending the Spanish–American War. After paying a post-war indemnification of twenty million dollars to the Kingdom of Spain, on 11 April 1899 the US established geopolitical hegemony upon islands and peoples in two oceans and in two hemispheres: the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Pacific Ocean, and Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic Ocean.

Text

Rudyard Kipling in Calcutta, India. (1892)

 

Life magazine cover depicting the water torture of a Filipino PoW, by U.S. Army soldiers in the Philippine Islands. (1902)

 

"The White (?) Man's Burden" shows the colonial exploitation of labour by various Western nations. (William Henry Walker, Life magazine, 16 March 1899)

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden—
    In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
    And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
    An hundred times made plain.
To seek another's profit,
    And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden—
    The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
    And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
    The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
    Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden—
    No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
    The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
    The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
    And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White Man's burden—
    And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
    The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
    (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
    Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Ye dare not stoop to less
Nor call too loud on Freedom
    To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
    By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
    Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

Interpretation

The American writer Mark Twain replied to the imperialism Kipling espoused in "The White Man's Burden" with the satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), about the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion (1899) in China.

The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" (1899) proposes that the white race is morally obliged to civilize the non-white peoples of planet Earth and to encourage their progress (economic, social, and cultural) through colonialism:

The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit—economic or strategic or otherwise—of Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized).

Kipling positively represents imperialism as the moral burden of the white race, who are divinely destined to "civilize" the brutish, non-white Other who inhabits the barbarous parts of the world; to wit, the seventh and eighth lines of the first stanza misrepresent the Filipinos as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child." Despite the chauvinistic nationalism that supported Western imperialism in the 19th century, public moral opposition to Kipling's racist misrepresentation of the colonial exploitation of labor in "The White Man's Burden" produced the satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901) by Mark Twain, which catalogues the Western military atrocities of revenge committed against the Chinese people for their anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) against abusive Western businessmen and Christian missionaries.

Politically, Kipling proffered the poem to then-Governor of New York Theodore Roosevelt, who was a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and a hero of the Spanish–American War, to help him persuade anti-imperialist Americans to accept the territorial annexation of the Philippine Islands by the United States. In September 1898, Kipling's literary reputation in the U.S. had allowed his promotion of American empire to Roosevelt:

Now, go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on, permanently, to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pick-axe into the foundations of a rotten house, and she is morally bound to build the house over, again, from the foundations, or have it fall about her ears.

Roosevelt sent the poem to U.S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a firm believer in Western imperialism himself, for his review, and they agreed that it made "good sense from the expansion standpoint."

As Victorian imperial poetry, "The White Man's Burden" thematically corresponded to Kipling's belief that the British Empire was the Englishman's "Divine Burden to reign God's Empire on Earth" and celebrates British colonialism as a mission of civilization that eventually would benefit the colonized natives. Since the late nineteenth century, "The White Man's Burden" has served the arguments and counterarguments of supporters and opponents of imperialism and white supremacy.

Responses

The civilizing mission of colonialism included teaching colonized people about soap, water, and personal hygiene. (1890s advertisement)

In addition to Twain's "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), a factual satire of the civilizing mission proposed, justified, and defended in "The White Man's Burden" (1899), Kipling's jingoism in the poem provoked numerous poetic parodies in the early 20th century that expressed anti-imperialist moral outrage by critically addressing the white supremacist racism of colonial empires. Among the literary responses to Kipling's work are "The Brown Man's Burden" (February 1899) by the British politician Henry Labouchère, "The Black Man's Burden: A Response to Kipling" (April 1899) by the clergyman H. T. Johnson, and the poem "Take Up the Black Man's Burden" by the American educator J. Dallas Bowser.

In the U.S., a Black Man's Burden Association demonstrated to Americans how the colonial mistreatment of Filipino brown people in their Philippine homeland was a cultural extension of the institutional racism of the Jim Crow laws (1863–1965) for the legal mistreatment of black Americans in their U.S. homeland. The very positive popular response to Kipling's jingoism for an American Empire to annex the Philippines as a colony impelled the growth of the American Anti-Imperialist League to oppose making colonial subjects of the Filipinos.

In The Poor Man’s Burden (1899), Dr. Howard S. Taylor addressed the negative psycho-social effects of the imperialist ethos upon the working-class people in an empire; in "The Real White Man's Burden" (1902), the reformer Ernest Crosby addressed the moral degradation (coarsening of affect) consequent to the practice of imperialism; and in "The Black Man's Burden" (1903), the British journalist E. D. Morel reported the Belgian imperial atrocities in the Congo Free State, which was an African personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.

In a historical survey of The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa, from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (1920), E. D. Morel's critique of metropole-colony power relations identifies an established cultural hegemony that determines the weight of the black man's burden and the weight of the white man's burden in their building a colonial empire. The philosophic perspective of "The Black Man's Burden (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling)" (1920), by the social critic Hubert Harrison, described the moral degradation inflicted on both the black people who were colonized and the white people who colonized them.

Since the late 20th-century, with the growth of concepts such as decolonization and the developing world, the phrase "the white man's burden" is often used by critics of foreign expansionism and interventionism to illustrate the perceived false good-intentions of Western neo-colonialism for the non-white world and show how the process of "civilizing" indigenous populations is actually part of colonial domination.

Carbon-based life

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_life 

The Lewis structure of a carbon atom, showing its four valence electrons

Carbon is a primary component of all known life on Earth, representing approximately 45–50% of all dry biomass. Carbon compounds occur naturally in great abundance on Earth. Complex biological molecules consist of carbon atoms bonded with other elements, especially oxygen and hydrogen and frequently also nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur (collectively known as CHNOPS).

Because it is lightweight and relatively small in size, carbon molecules are easy for enzymes to manipulate. It is frequently assumed in astrobiology that if life exists elsewhere in the Universe, it will also be carbon-based. Critics refer to this assumption as carbon chauvinism.

Characteristics

Carbon is capable of forming a vast number of compounds, more than any other element, with almost ten million compounds described to date, and yet that number is but a fraction of the number of theoretically possible compounds under standard conditions. The enormous diversity of carbon-containing compounds, known as organic compounds, has led to a distinction between them and compounds that do not contain carbon, known as inorganic compounds. The branch of chemistry that studies organic compounds is known as organic chemistry.

Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon's widespread abundance, its ability to form stable bonds with numerous other elements, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth enables it to serve as a common element of all known living organisms. In a 2018 study, carbon was found to compose approximately 550 billion tons of all life on Earth. It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.

The most important characteristics of carbon as a basis for the chemistry of life are that each carbon atom is capable of forming up to four valence bonds with other atoms simultaneously, and that the energy required to make or break a bond with a carbon atom is at an appropriate level for building large and complex molecules which may be both stable and reactive. Carbon atoms bond readily to other carbon atoms; this allows the building of arbitrarily long macromolecules and polymers in a process known as catenation. "What we normally think of as 'life' is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorus", per Stephen Hawking in a 2008 lecture, "carbon [...] has the richest chemistry."

Norman Horowitz, was the head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s bioscience section for the first U.S. mission, Viking Lander of 1976, to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars. He considered that the great versatility of the carbon atom makes it the element most likely to provide solutions, even exotic solutions, to the problems of survival on other planets. However, the results of this mission indicated that Mars was presently extremely hostile to carbon-based life. He also considered that, in general, there was only a remote possibility that non-carbon life forms would be able to evolve with genetic information systems capable of self-replication and adaptation.

Key molecules

The most notable classes of biological macromolecules used in the fundamental processes of living organisms include:

• Proteins, which are the building blocks from which the structures of living organisms are constructed (this includes almost all enzymes, which catalyse organic chemical reactions)
• Nucleic acids, which carry genetic information
• Carbohydrates, which store energy in a form that can be used by living cells
• Lipids, which also store energy, but in a more concentrated form, and which may be stored for extended periods in the bodies of animals

Other candidates

There are not many other elements that appear to be promising candidates for supporting biological systems and processes as fundamentally as carbon does, for example, processes such as metabolism. The most frequently suggested alternative is silicon. Silicon shares a group in the periodic table with carbon, can also form four valence bonds, and also bonds to itself readily, though generally in the form of crystal lattices rather than long chains. Despite these similarities, silicon is considerably more electropositive than carbon, and silicon compounds do not readily recombine into different permutations in a manner that would plausibly support lifelike processes.

Fiction

Speculations about the chemical structure and properties of hypothetical non-carbon-based life have been a recurring theme in science fiction. Silicon is often used as a substitute for carbon in fictional lifeforms because of its chemical similarities. In cinematic and literary science fiction, when man-made machines cross from non-living to living, this new form is often presented as an example of non-carbon-based life. Since the advent of the microprocessor in the late 1960s, such machines are often classed as "silicon-based life". Other examples of fictional "silicon-based life" can be seen in the episode "The Devil in the Dark" from Star Trek: The Original Series, in which a living rock creature's biochemistry is based on silicon, and in The X-Files episode "Firewalker", in which a silicon-based organism is discovered in a volcano.

In the film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" (1984), a character argues, "Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect."

Anthropocentrism

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism (/ˌænθroʊpoʊˈsɛntrɪzəm/; from Ancient Greek: ἄνθρωπος, ánthrōpos, "human being"; and Ancient Greek: κέντρον, kéntron, "center") is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. From an anthropocentric perspective, humankind is seen as separate from nature and superior to it, and other entities (animals, plants, minerals, etc) are viewed as resources for humans to use.

Anthropocentrism interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and experiences. It is considered to be profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures and conscious acts. It is a major concept in the field of environmental ethics and environmental philosophy, where it is often considered to be the root cause of problems created by human action within the ecosphere. However, many proponents of anthropocentrism state that this is not necessarily the case: they argue that a sound long-term view acknowledges that the global environment must be made continually suitable for humans and that the real issue is shallow anthropocentrism.

Environmental philosophy

Anthropocentrism, also known as homocentricism or human supremacism, has been posited by some environmentalists, in such books as Confessions of an Eco-Warrior by Dave Foreman and Green Rage by Christopher Manes, as the underlying (if unstated) reason why humanity dominates and sees the need to "develop" most of the Earth. Anthropocentrism is believed by some to be the central problematic concept in environmental philosophy, where it is used to draw attention claims of a systematic bias in traditional Western attitudes to the non-human world. Val Plumwood has argued that anthropocentrism plays an analogous role in green theory to androcentrism in feminist theory and ethnocentrism in anti-racist theory. Plumwood calls human-centredness "anthrocentrism" to emphasise this parallel.

One of the first extended philosophical essays addressing environmental ethics, John Passmore's Man's Responsibility for Nature has been criticised by defenders of deep ecology because of its anthropocentrism, often claimed to be constitutive of traditional Western moral thought. Indeed, defenders of anthropocentrism concerned with the ecological crisis contend that the maintenance of a healthy, sustainable environment is necessary for human well-being as opposed to for its own sake. According to William Grey, the problem with a "shallow" viewpoint is not that it is human-centred: "What's wrong with shallow views is not their concern about the well-being of humans, but that they do not really consider enough in what that well-being consists. According to this view, we need to develop an enriched, fortified anthropocentric notion of human interest to replace the dominant short-term, sectional and self-regarding conception." In turn, Plumwood in Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason argued that Grey's anthropocentrism is inadequate.

Many devoted environmentalists encompass a somewhat anthropocentric-based philosophical view supporting the fact that they will argue in favor of saving the environment for the sake of human populations. Grey writes: "We should be concerned to promote a rich, diverse, and vibrant biosphere. Human flourishing may certainly be included as a legitimate part of such a flourishing." Such a concern for human flourishing amidst the flourishing of life as a whole, however, is said to be indistinguishable from that of deep ecology and biocentrism, which has been proposed as both an antithesis of anthropocentrism. and as a generalised form of anthropocentrism.

Jewish and Christian traditions

In the 1985 CBC series "A Planet For the Taking", Dr. David Suzuki explored the Old Testament roots of anthropocentrism and how it shaped human views of non-human animals. Some Christian proponents of anthropocentrism base their belief on the Bible, such as the verse 1:26 in the Book of Genesis:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

The use of the word "dominion" in the Genesis has been used to justify an anthropocentric worldview, but recently some have found it controversial, viewing it as possibly a mistranslation from the Hebrew. However an argument can be made that the Bible actually places all the importance on God as creator, and humans as merely another part of creation.

Human rights

Anthropocentrism is the grounding for some naturalistic concepts of human rights. Defenders of anthropocentrism argue that it is the necessary fundamental premise to defend universal human rights, since what matters morally is simply being human. For example, noted philosopher Mortimer J. Adler wrote, "Those who oppose injurious discrimination on the moral ground that all human beings, being equal in their humanity, should be treated equally in all those respects that concern their common humanity, would have no solid basis in fact to support their normative principle." Adler is stating here that denying what is now called human exceptionalism could lead to tyranny, writing that if humans ever came to believe that they do not possess a unique moral status, the intellectual foundation of their liberties collapses: "Why, then, should not groups of superior men be able to justify their enslavement, exploitation, or even genocide of inferior human groups on factual and moral grounds akin to those we now rely on to justify our treatment of the animals we harness as beasts of burden, that we butcher for food and clothing, or that we destroy as disease-bearing pests or as dangerous predators?".

Author and anthropocentrism defender Wesley J. Smith from the Discovery Institute has written that human exceptionalism is what gives rise to human duties to each other, the natural world, and to treat animals humanely. Writing in A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy, a critique of animal rights ideology, "Because we are unquestionably a unique species—the only species capable of even contemplating ethical issues and assuming responsibilities—we uniquely are capable of apprehending the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, proper and improper conduct toward animals. Or to put it more succinctly, if being human isn't what requires us to treat animals humanely, what in the world does?".

Animal rights

Anthropocentrism has been criticised by animal rights and welfare advocates, who contend that the belief that humans are more important than other animals is false and that like humans, non-human animals have intrinsic value. One of the earliest of these critics was the zoologist and philosopher J. Howard Moore, who in The Universal Kinship (1906) argued that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) "sealed the doom of anthropocentricism [sic]" and that:

The supposed psychical gulf between human and non-human beings has no more existence, outside the flamboyant imagination of man, than has the once-supposed physical gulf. It is pure fiction. The supposition is a relic of the rapidly dwindling vanity of anthropocentricism [sic], and is perpetuated from age to age by human selfishness and conceit. It has no foundation either in science or in common-sense. Man strives to lessen his guilt by the laudation of himself and the disparagement and degradation of his victims.

Philosophers such as Peter Singer and David Pearce have argued against anthropocentric ethics, instead advocating for antispeciesist or sentientist ethics, which rather than giving more value to humans based on their species membership, assert that "other things being equal, equally strong interests should count equally." This utilitarian principle is based on the dictum "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one" attributed to Jeremy Bentham by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1876).

Cognitive psychology

In cognitive psychology, the term anthropocentric thinking has been defined as "the tendency to reason about unfamiliar biological species or processes by analogy to humans." Reasoning by analogy is an attractive thinking strategy, and it can be tempting to apply one's own experience of being human to other biological systems. For example, because death is commonly felt to be undesirable, it may be tempting to form the misconception that death at a cellular level or elsewhere in nature is similarly undesirable (whereas in reality programmed cell death is an essential physiological phenomenon, and ecosystems also rely on death). Conversely, anthropocentric thinking can also lead people to underattribute human characteristics to other organisms. For instance, it may be tempting to wrongly assume that an animal that is very different from humans, such as an insect, will not share particular biological characteristics, such as reproduction or blood circulation.

Anthropocentric thinking has predominantly been studied in young children (mostly up to the age of 10) by developmental psychologists interested in its relevance to biology education. Children as young as 6 have been found to attribute human characteristics to species unfamiliar to them (in Japan), such as rabbits, grasshoppers or tulips. Although relatively little is known about its persistence at a later age, evidence exists that this pattern of human exceptionalist thinking can continue through young adulthood at least, even among students who have been increasingly educated in biology.

The notion that anthropocentric thinking is an innate human characteristic has been challenged by study of American children raised in urban environments, among whom it appears to emerge between the ages of 3 and 5 years as an acquired perspective. Children's recourse to anthropocentric thinking seems to vary with their experience of nature, and cultural assumptions about the place of humans in the natural world. For example, whereas young children who kept goldfish were found to think of frogs as being more goldfish-like, other children tended to think of frogs in terms of humans. More generally, children raised in rural environments appear to use anthropocentric thinking less than their urban counterparts because of their greater familiarity with different species of animals and plants. Studies involving children from some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas have found little use of anthropocentric thinking. Study of children among the Wichí people in South America showed a tendency to think of living organisms in terms of their perceived taxonomic similarities, ecological considerations, and animistic traditions, resulting in a much less anthropocentric view of the natural world than is experienced by many children in Western societies.

In popular culture

In fiction from all eras and societies, there is fiction treating as normal the actions of humans to ride, eat, milk, and otherwise treat animals as separate species. There are occasional exceptions, such as talking animals, but they are generally treated as exceptions, as aberrations to the rule distinguishing people from animals.

In science fiction, humanocentrism is the idea that humans, as both beings and as a species, are the superior sentients. Essentially the equivalent of racial supremacy on a galactic scale, it entails intolerant discrimination against sentient non-humans, much like race supremacists discriminate against those not of their race. A prime example of this concept is utilized as a story element for the Mass Effect series. After humanity's first contact results in a brief war, many humans in the series develop suspicious or even hostile attitudes towards the game's various alien races. By the time of the first game, which takes place several decades after the war, many humans still retain such sentiments in addition to forming 'pro-human' organizations.

This idea is countered by anti-humanism. At times, this ideal also includes fear of and superiority over strong AIs and cyborgs, downplaying the ideas of integration, cybernetic revolts, machine rule and Tilden's Laws of Robotics.

Mark Twain mocked the belief in human supremacy in Letters from the Earth (written c. 1909, published 1962).

The Planet of the Apes franchise focuses on the analogy of apes becoming the dominant species in society and the fall of humans (see also human extinction). In the 1968 film, Taylor, a human states "take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!". In the 2001 film, this is contrasted with Attar (a gorilla)'s quote "take your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!". This links in with allusions that in becoming the dominant species apes are becoming more like humans (anthropomorphism). In the film Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Virgil, an orangutan states "ape has never killed ape, let alone an ape child. Aldo has killed an ape child. The branch did not break. It was cut with a sword." in reference to planned murder; a stereotypical human concept. Additionally, in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar states "I always think...ape better than human. I see now...how much like them we are".

In George Orwell's novel Animal Farm, this theme of anthropocentrism is also present. Whereas originally the animals planned for liberation from humans and animal equality, as evident from the "seven commandments" such as "whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.", "Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend", "All animals are equal."; the pigs would later abridge the commandments with statements such as "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." and "Four legs good, two legs better."

The 2012 documentary The Superior Human? systematically analyzes anthropocentrism and concludes that value is fundamentally an opinion, and since life forms naturally value their own traits, most humans are misled to believe that they are actually more valuable than other species. This natural bias, according to the film, combined with a received sense of comfort and an excuse for exploitation of non-humans cause anthropocentrism to remain in society.

Supremacism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacism

Supremacism is the belief that a certain group of people is superior to all others. The supposed superior people can be defined by age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, language, social class, ideology, nation, or culture, or belong to any other part of a particular population.

Sexual

Some feminist theorists have argued that in patriarchy, a standard of male supremacism is enforced through a variety of cultural, political, and interpersonal strategies. Since the 19th century there have been a number of feminist movements opposed to male supremacism, usually aimed at achieving equal legal rights and protections for women in all cultural, political and interpersonal relations.

Racial

Further information: White supremacy, Arab supremacy, Black supremacy, Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, Han nationalism, Indocentrism, Nazi racial theories, Racism, Institutional racism, Scientific racism, and Racial segregation

Centuries of European colonialism in the Americas, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and Asia were justified by white supremacist attitudes. During the 19th century, the phrase "The White Man's Burden", referring to the thought that whites have the obligation to make the societies of the other peoples more 'civilized', was widely used to justify imperialist policy as a noble enterprise. Thomas Carlyle, known for his historical account of the French Revolution, The French Revolution: A History, which inspired Charles Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, argued that European supremacist policies were justified on the grounds that they provided the greatest benefit to "inferior" native peoples. However, even at the time of its publication in 1849, Carlyle's main work on the subject, the Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, was received poorly by his contemporaries.

Before the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Confederate States of America was founded with a constitution that contained clauses which restricted the government's ability to limit or interfere with the institution of "negro" slavery. In the Cornerstone Speech, Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens declared that one of the Confederacy's foundational tenets was white supremacy over black slaves. Following the war, a secret society, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed in the South. Its purpose was to "restore" white supremacy after the Reconstruction period, even though there still was white, Protestant supremacy in the United States, at the time. The group preached supremacy over all other races, as well as supremacy over Jews, Catholics, and other minorities.

According to William Nichols, religious antisemitism can be distinguished from modern antisemitism which is based on racial or ethnic grounds. "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion ... a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." However, with racial antisemitism, "Now the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism ... . From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews... Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear."

One of the first typologies which was used to classify various human races was invented by Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), a theoretician of eugenics, who published in 1899 L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899 – "The Aryan and his social role"). In this book, he classifies humanity into various, hierarchized races, spanning from the "Aryan white race, dolichocephalic", to the "brachycephalic", "mediocre and inert" race, best represented by Southern European, Catholic peasants". Between these, Vacher de Lapouge identified the "Homo europaeus" (Teutonic, Protestant, etc.), the "Homo alpinus" (Auvergnat, Turkish, etc.), and finally the "Homo mediterraneus" (Neapolitan, Andalus, etc.) Jews were brachycephalic like the Aryans, according to Lapouge; but exactly for this reason he considered them dangerous; they were the only group, he thought, which was threatening to displace the Aryan aristocracy. Vacher de Lapouge became one of the leading inspirations of Nazi antisemitism and Nazi racist ideology.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center condemn writings about "Jewish Supremacism" by Holocaust-denier, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, and conspiracy theorist David Duke as antisemitic – in particular, his book Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. Kevin B. MacDonald, known for his theory of Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy", has also been accused by the ADL and his own university psychology department of being "antisemitic" and white supremacist in his writings on the subject.

Cornel West, an African-American philosopher, writes that black supremacist religious views arose in America as part of black Muslim theology in response to white supremacism.

In Africa, black Southern Sudanese allege that they are subjected to a racist form of Arab supremacy, which they equate with the historic white supremacism of South African apartheid. The alleged genocide and ethnic cleansing in the ongoing War in Darfur has been described as an example of Arab racism. For example, in their analysis of the sources of the conflict, Julie Flint and Alex de Waal say that Colonel Gaddafi, the leader of Libya, sponsored "Arab supremacism" across the Sahara during the 1970s. Gaddafi supported the "Islamic Legion" and the Sudanese opposition "National Front, including the Muslim Brothers and the Ansar, the Umma Party's military wing." Gaddafi tried to use such forces to annex Chad from 1979-81. Gaddafi supported the Sudanese government's war in the South during the early 1980s, and in return he was allowed to use the Darfur region as a "back door to Chad". As a result, the first signs of an "Arab racist political platform" appeared in Darfur in the early 1980s.

In Asia, ancient Indians considered all foreigners barbarians. The Muslim scholar Al-Biruni wrote that the Indians called foreigners impure. A few centuries later, Dubois observes that "Hindus look upon Europeans as barbarians totally ignorant of all principles of honour and good breeding... In the eyes of a Hindu, a Pariah (outcaste) and a European are on the same level." The Chinese viewed the Europeans as repulsive, ghost-like creatures, and even as devils. Chinese writers also referred to the Europeans as barbarians.

Nazi Germany

From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany, under the rule of Adolf Hitler, promoted the idea of a superior, Aryan Herrenvolk, or master race. The state's propaganda advocated the belief that Germanic peoples, whom they called "Aryans", were a master race or a Herrenvolk whose members were superior to the Jews, Slavs, and Romani people, so-called "gypsies". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial intermixing, which he believed had destroyed the purity of the Nordic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a large and strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan and Jewish cultures.

Religious

Christian

Academics Carol Lansing and Edward D. English argue that Christian supremacism was a motivation for the Crusades in the Holy Land, as well as crusades against Muslims and pagans throughout Europe. The blood libel is a widespread European conspiracy theory which led to centuries of pogroms and massacres of European Jewish minorities because it alleged that Jews required the pure blood of a Christian child in order to make matzah for Passover; Thomas of Cantimpré writes of the blood curse which the Jews put upon themselves and all of their generations at the court of Pontius Pilate where Jesus was handed a death sentence: "A very learned Jew, who in our day has been converted to the (Christian) faith, informs us that one enjoying the reputation of a prophet among them, toward the close of his life, made the following prediction: 'Be assured that relief from this secret ailment, to which you are exposed, can only be obtained through Christian blood ("solo sanguine Christiano")." The Atlantic slave trade has also been partially attributed to Christian supremacism. The Ku Klux Klan has been described as a white supremacist Christian organization, as are many other white supremacist groups, such as the Posse Comitatus and the Christian Identity and Positive Christianity movements.

Islamic

Academics Khaled Abou El Fadl, Ian Lague, and Joshua Cone note that, while the Qur'an and other Islamic documents express tolerant, protective beliefs, which have been misused, misquoted, and misinterpreted by both Islamic extremists and Islamophobes, there have also been instances of Muslim or Islamic supremacism. Examples of how supremacists have interpreted Islam include the Muslim participation in the African slave trade, the early-20th-century pan-Islamism promoted by Abdul Hamid II, the jizya and rules of marriage in Muslim countries being imposed on non-Muslims, the majority Muslim interpretations of the rules of pluralism in Malaysia, and "defensive" supremacism practiced by some Muslim immigrants in Europe. According to scholar Bernard Lewis, Classical Islamic jurisprudence imposes an open-ended duty on Muslims to expand Muslim rule and Islamic law to all non-Muslims throughout the world.

Despite being comparatively more tolerant in the past than Christian Europe, North Africa has witnessed numerous incidents of massacres and ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians, especially in Morocco, Libya and Algeria where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos. Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted during the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. At certain times in Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death. While there were antisemitic incidents before the 20th century, antisemitism increased dramatically as a result of the Arab–Israeli conflict. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Palestinian exodus, the creation of the state of Israel and Israeli victories during the wars of 1956 and 1967 were a severe humiliation to Israel's opponents—primarily Egypt, Syria and Iraq. However, by the mid-1970s the vast majority of Jews had left Muslim-majority countries, moving primarily to Israel, France and the United States. The reasons for the exodus are varied and disputed.

Jewish

Ilan Pappé, an expatriate Israeli historian, writes that the First Aliyah to Israel "established a society based on Jewish supremacy". Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab studies, holds that "Jewish supremacism" has always been a "dominating principle" in religious and secular Zionism. Zionism was established with the political goal of creating a sovereign Jewish state where Jews could be the majority, rather than the minority which they were in all nations of the world at that time. Theodor Herzl, the ideological father of Zionism, considered antisemitism to be an eternal feature of all societies in which Jews lived as minorities, and as a result, he believed that only a separation could allow Jews to escape eternal persecution. "Let them give us sovereignty over a piece of the Earth's surface, just sufficient for the needs of our people, then we will do the rest!"

Since the 1990s, Orthodox Jewish rabbis from Israel, most notably those affiliated to Chabad-Lubavitch and religious Zionist organizations, including The Temple Institute, have set up a modern Noahide movement to proselytize among non-Jews (usually referred to as "Gentiles" or goyim). These Noahide organizations, led by religious Zionist and Orthodox rabbis, are aimed at non-Jews in order to proselytize among them and commit them to follow the Noahide laws. However, these religious Zionist and Orthodox rabbis that guide the modern Noahide movement, who are often affiliated with the Third Temple movement, expound a racist and supremacist ideology which consists in the belief that the Jewish people are God's chosen nation and racially superior to non-Jews, and mentor Noahides because they believe that the Messianic era will begin with the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to re-institute the Jewish priesthood along with the practice of ritual sacrifices, and the establishment of a Jewish theocracy in Israel, supported by communities of Noahides.

David Novak, professor of Jewish theology and ethics at the University of Toronto, has denounced the modern Noahide movement by stating that "If Jews are telling Gentiles what to do, it’s a form of imperialism".

Genetic distance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Genetic distance map by Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994) 

Genetic distance is a measure of the genetic divergence between species or between populations within a species, whether the distance measures time from common ancestor or degree of differentiation. Populations with many similar alleles have small genetic distances. This indicates that they are closely related and have a recent common ancestor.

Genetic distance is useful for reconstructing the history of populations, such as the multiple human expansions out of Africa. It is also used for understanding the origin of biodiversity. For example, the genetic distances between different breeds of domesticated animals are often investigated in order to determine which breeds should be protected to maintain genetic diversity.

Biological foundation

In the genome of an organism, each gene is located at a specific place called the locus for that gene. Allelic variations at these loci cause phenotypic variation within species (e.g. hair colour, eye colour). However, most alleles do not have an observable impact on the phenotype. Within a population new alleles generated by mutation either die out or spread throughout the population. When a population is split into different isolated populations (by either geographical or ecological factors), mutations that occur after the split will be present only in the isolated population. Random fluctuation of allele frequencies also produces genetic differentiation between populations. This process is known as genetic drift. By examining the differences between allele frequencies between the populations and computing genetic distance, we can estimate how long ago the two populations were separated.

Measures

Although it is simple to define genetic distance as a measure of genetic divergence, there are several different statistical measures that have been proposed. This has happened because different authors considered different evolutionary models. The most commonly used are Nei's genetic distance, Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards measure, and Reynolds, Weir and Cockerham's genetic distance, listed below.

In all the formulae in this section, ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ represent two different populations for which ${\displaystyle L}$ loci have been studied. Let ${\displaystyle X_{u}}$ represent the ${\displaystyle u}$^th allele frequency at the ${\displaystyle l}$^th locus.

Nei's standard genetic distance

In 1972, Masatoshi Nei published what came to be known as Nei's standard genetic distance. This distance has the nice property that if the rate of genetic change (amino acid substitution) is constant per year or generation then Nei's standard genetic distance (D) increases in proportion to divergence time. This measure assumes that genetic differences are caused by mutation and genetic drift.

${\displaystyle D=-\ln {\frac {\sum \limits _{\ell }\sum \limits _{u}X_{u}Y_{u}}{\sqrt {\left(\sum \limits _{u}X_{u}^{2}\right)\left(\sum \limits _{u}Y_{u}^{2}\right)}}}}$

This distance can also be expressed in terms of the arithmetic mean of gene identity. Let ${\displaystyle j_{X}}$ be the probability for the two members of population ${\displaystyle X}$ having the same allele at a particular locus and ${\displaystyle j_{Y}}$ be the corresponding probability in population ${\displaystyle Y}$. Also, let ${\displaystyle j_{XY}}$ be the probability for a member of ${\displaystyle X}$ and a member of ${\displaystyle Y}$ having the same allele. Now let ${\displaystyle J_{X}}$, ${\displaystyle J_{Y}}$ and ${\displaystyle J_{XY}}$ represent the arithmetic mean of ${\displaystyle j_{X}}$, ${\displaystyle j_{Y}}$ and ${\displaystyle j_{XY}}$ over all loci, respectively. In other words,

${\displaystyle J_{X}=\sum _{u}{\frac {{X_{u}}^{2}}{L}}}$

${\displaystyle J_{Y}=\sum _{u}{\frac {{Y_{u}}^{2}}{L}}}$

${\displaystyle J_{XY}=\sum _{\ell }\sum _{u}{\frac {X_{u}Y_{u}}{L}}}$

where ${\displaystyle L}$ is the total number of loci examined.

Nei's standard distance can then be written as

${\displaystyle D=-\ln {\frac {J_{XY}}{\sqrt {J_{X}J_{Y}}}}}$

Cavalli-Sforza chord distance

In 1967 Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and A. W. F. Edwards published this measure. It assumes that genetic differences arise due to genetic drift only. One major advantage of this measure is that the populations are represented in a hypersphere, the scale of which is one unit per gene substitution. The chord distance in the hyperdimensional sphere is given by

${\displaystyle D_{\text{CH}}={\frac {2}{\pi }}{\sqrt {2\left(1-\sum _{\ell }\sum _{u}{\sqrt {X_{u}Y_{u}}}\right)}}}$

Some authors drop the factor ${\displaystyle {\frac {2}{\pi }}}$ to simplify the formula at the cost of losing the property that the scale is one unit per gene substitution.

Reynolds, Weir, and Cockerham's genetic distance

In 1983, this measure was published by John Reynolds, Bruce Weir and C. Clark Cockerham. This measure assumes that genetic differentiation occurs only by genetic drift without mutations. It estimates the coancestry coefficient ${\displaystyle \Theta }$ which provides a measure of the genetic divergence by:

${\displaystyle \Theta _{w}={\sqrt {\frac {\sum \limits _{\ell }\sum \limits _{u}(X_{u}-Y_{u})^{2}}{2\sum \limits _{\ell }\left(1-\sum \limits _{u}X_{u}Y_{u}\right)}}}}$

Other measures

Many other measures of genetic distance have been proposed with varying success.

Nei's D_A distance 1983

This distance assumes that genetic differences arise due to mutation and genetic drift, but this distance measure is known to give more reliable population trees than other distances particularly for microsatellite DNA data.

${\displaystyle D_{A}=1-\sum _{\ell }\sum _{u}{\sqrt {X_{u}Y_{u}}}/{L}}$

Euclidean distance

Euclidean genetic distance between 51 worldwide human populations, calculated using 289,160 SNPs. Dark red is the most similar pair and dark blue is the most distant pair.

${\displaystyle D_{EU}={\sqrt {\sum _{u}(X_{u}-Y_{u})^{2}}}}$

Goldstein distance 1995

It was specifically developed for microsatellite markers and is based on the stepwise-mutation model (SMM). ${\displaystyle \mu _{X}}$ and ${\displaystyle \mu _{Y}}$ are the means of the allele sizes in population X and Y.

${\displaystyle (\delta \mu )^{2}=\sum _{\ell }{\frac {(\mu _{X}-\mu _{Y})^{2}}{L}}}$

Nei's minimum genetic distance 1973

This measure assumes that genetic differences arise due to mutation and genetic drift.

${\displaystyle D_{m}={\frac {J_{X}+J_{Y}}{2}}-J_{XY}}$

Roger's distance 1972

${\displaystyle D_{R}={\frac {1}{L}}{\sqrt {\frac {\sum \limits _{u}(X_{u}-Y_{u})^{2}}{2}}}}$

Fixation index

A commonly used measure of genetic distance is the fixation index (F_ST) which varies between 0 and 1. A value of 0 indicates that two populations are genetically identical (minimal or no genetic diversity between the two populations) whereas a value of 1 indicates that two populations are genetically different (maximum genetic diversity between the two populations). No mutation is assumed. Large populations between which there is much migration, for example, tend to be little differentiated whereas small populations between which there is little migration tend to be greatly differentiated. F_ST is a convenient measure of this differentiation, and as a result F_ST and related statistics are among the most widely used descriptive statistics in population and evolutionary genetics. But F_ST is more than a descriptive statistic and measure of genetic differentiation. F_ST is directly related to the Variance in allele frequency among populations and conversely to the degree of resemblance among individuals within populations. If F_ST is small, it means that allele frequencies within each population are very similar; if it is large, it means that allele frequencies are very different.

Software

• PHYLIP uses GENDIST
  • Nei's standard genetic distance 1972
  • Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards 1967
  • Reynolds, Weir, and Cockerham's 1983
• TFPGA
  • Nei's standard genetic distance (original and unbiased)
  • Nei's minimum genetic distance (original and unbiased)
  • Wright's (1978) modification of Roger's (1972) distance
  • Reynolds, Weir, and Cockerham's 1983
• GDA
• POPGENE
• POPTREE2 Takezaki, Nei, and Tamura (2010, 2014)
  • Commonly used genetic distances and gene diversity analysis
• DISPAN
  • Nei's standard genetic distance 1972
  • Nei's D_A distance between populations 1983