44. The Attitude of a Linguist. The Fundamental Similarity of Human Beings

44. The Attitude of a Linguist. The Fundamental Similarity of Human Beings

With the discovery of DNA, we now understand what the Taoists knew intuitively: all is one. Human beings are remarkably uniform and have a common origin. As Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in River Out of Eden, our genes have been handed down to us by those of our ancestors who survived long enough to produce children. Many of our characteristics, such as blood type and susceptibility to certain diseases, cut across the lines of more superficial differences like skin colour or body shape. While we may look different from each other today, every person alive has a common male ancestor who lived around50,000 years ago. To quote again from Spencer Wells in The Journey of Man, A Genetic Odyssey, “ Physical traits that distinguish modern human geographic groups only appear in the fossil record within the past30,000 years. Most older fossils of Africans, Asians and Europeans are very similar to each other.”

Our genes are so common that they can cohabit with the genes of other human beings of any nation or race to create members of a next generation. Genetic differences between individuals are greater than the genetic differences between ethnic groups. And any one of us can speak any language.

I have been told that there are people who have paid money to have an operation on their tongues in order to be able to better pronounce a foreign language. Whether this is true or not I cannot say, but the fact that such a story is told is an indication of the persistence of the association of language with ancestry. If you were adopted at birth by someone of a different race, you would naturally learn to speak their language without needing a tongue operation.