Ghost DNA

Joe Biden seems clearly to have won the election and, barring the unimaginable, will become our nation’s next president in January. But the election itself is worth considering in its own right, and particularly in terms of what it has to say about our riven nation. No matter who you personally supported, after all, not millions but scores of millions of Americans voted for the other guy. And if President-Elect Biden, with more than 76 million votes, is now the presidential candidate with the most popular votes in U.S. history, President Trump, with more than 71 million votes, is still the candidate with the second most popular votes in the history of the nation. (By way of comparison, President Obama won in 2008 with 69.5 million votes. Abraham Lincoln won with a mere 2.2 million votes in 1864, fewer than the number of people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.) So to focus solely on who won and to ignore the fact that both candidates cleared the 70 million vote barrier, something no one in the nation’s history had ever managed previously to accomplish, is really to focus on the simple part of the story and to ignore the complicated part. Yes, there are way more eligible voters now than there were in 1864. But that’s not really the point.

Both Democrats and Republicans took to referencing this election as a kind of battle for the nation’s soul. Neither side provided a clear definition of what that actually meant, however. And so, a few weeks ago, I wrote to you about a long poem by Walt Whitman in which the poet attempted clearly to say what he considered to constitute the parts of the soul of the American republic. His answers—individualism, mutual respect, friendship untied to social class or race or ethnicity, and a shared sense of national destiny—were stirring but also quaint: I doubt if many readers would have come up with those precise things, and particularly not the last one, if challenged to answer that same question. But if we reject Whitman’s answer as too rooted in nineteenth century romanticism to resonate much with Americans today, then that leaves us challenged to say what precisely we do feel is motivating the intense feelings on both sides of the ballot. Is it just the issues themselves that divide us? Or is there something else tugging at our national heartstrings and pulling us off in different directions?

As readers know, I generally grant Whitman the last word on more or less everything. But this time ’round, I found myself pondering how an entire nation can look at the same television screens and wonder, as one, how those people can feel that strongly about the candidate of their choice and his running mate. Nor did it seem to me that it was the differences of opinion about specific issues that was moving us forward to Election Day, but rather energy created by the intensity of the disrespect for the unchosen candidate and the angry, intemperate scorn directed at his supporters. It struck me almost as though there were unseen players in the room, a raft of ghostly presences just off camera influencing the demonstrators and the slogan-chanters, the disaffected and the jubilant, and also the rest of everybody sporting their pasted-on “I Voted” stickers. And that thought—that there were more people here than I could see on my screen—that thought led me off in the direction I’d like to write about this week.

When Joan and I were in Maine last summer, I read a series of truly intriguing articles about something called “ghost DNA.”

To understand the concept, you need to know that there was a time when different species and subspecies of human being wandered the earth. (This is not at all how things are today when the sole variety of human being is us, Homo sapiens.) Those different species interbred with each other too, as a result of which scientists have determined that modern Europeans—or at least the kind whose ancient ancestors lived in Europe and whose families have remained rooted to that continent ever since—that that kind of modern European has a few dollops of Neanderthal genetic heritage in their DNA, just as native Australians and Polynesians have some traces of the Denisovans, another type of ancient humanoid species. (For more on the Denisovans, click here.) And now Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, two computational biologists at the University of Southern California, have taken the idea one step further by analyzing the DNA of four different groups of West Africans (two from Nigeria and one each from Sierra Leone and Gambia), and concluding that they almost universally carry the genetic heritage—ranging from 2% to 19% of any specific individual’s genetic code—of an unknown group of archaic human species. And since nothing is known of this subspecies, the researchers used the term “ghost population” to describe this humanoid species that appears to have to have existed but who have left behind no trace of any sort other than their “ghost DNA.” (For more about Durvasula and Sankararaman’s work, click here and here. For their own essay on the topic, written in scientific jargon that will be difficult for most to decipher, click here.)

When considered carefully, this really is a remarkable idea—that human beings have two kinds of genetic ancestry: the kind they can identify (e.g., the Finnish ancestors of the Finns and the Samoan ancestors of the Samoans, etc.) and the ghostly, spectral kind that survives today only as genetic code that had to come from somewhere but about the origins of which nothing at all is known. And that led me to the idea that the reason we are so divided—to the point at which we seem unable to develop even something as inarguably essential as a unified national approach to the pandemic—that the reason we are so riven has to do with the ghost DNA bequeathed to us by people long gone from the scene and present now only as part of the national genome. But who are these people that are present and absent in our national psyche as we try to negotiate these strange straits in which we suddenly find ourselves?

There are lots of candidates.

There are the original native peoples of North America, decimated by disease and the victims of a kind of malign colonialism that was willing to allow them some tiny piece of the pie if they would be so kind as to abandon their own native culture, forget their native languages, convert to their oppressors’ religion, and not to mind having their land stolen out from under them. (For an eye-opening expose of just how highly developed the native civilizations of North America were before the European occupation began, I recommend Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Spoiler alert: the picture fed to everyone my age in elementary school of brave and adventurous Europeans coming to an almost empty continent inhabited solely by a handful of naked savages eager to sell their land for brightly colored beads and a few flasks of whiskey is completely false. Read Mann’s book and you’ll get the picture.)

Then, of course, there are the descendants of the 388,000 slaves taken from their native lands in Africa and sold on this side of the world starting back in 1525, a group that that had burgeoned to about 3.5 million when the Civil War began in 1861. The single greatest blot on our national escutcheon, the institution itself of chattel slavery was abolished in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. The fate of the emancipated—who were in most cases illiterate and untrained for work other than what they were used to doing on the plantations on which they lived—is its own horrific scandal. But what of the millions of slaves who didn’t live to see emancipation, who were dragged onto slavers’ ships in Africa after being purchased from people who didn’t own them, then sent across the sea to serve masters who felt they did own them because they had, after all, purchased them—what about the millions of souls who lived and died deprived of hope, of any rational sense of confidence in the future, of even the faint promise of a better future for their descendants in future generations? They too have left their imprint on the national genome. How could they not have?

And then there are the 20,000 Chinese immigrants who built the Transcontinental Railroad in the years following the Civil War, people who were exploited in every imaginable way, being paid salaries less than half of what white workers received and charged for their food in the labor camps that was provided free of charge to white workers.

All of these groups—the left-out and the left-behind, the downtrodden and the enslaved, the exploited and the oppressed—these long-gone groups are as invisible as the ones identified by Durvasula and Sankararaman but their presence in our national DNA is, I think, precisely what is dividing us so evenly into two sub-nations: those who feel threatened by the ghosts in our national genome and those who feel challenged by them, those who seek resolution and those who fear retribution, those whom history chastens and those whom history enrages.

The challenge facing the nation, therefore, is not to wrangle around endlessly about who won Georgia. It won’t change the outcome, anyway, so let it be figured out, certified, and moved past. The far greater challenge facing Americans is to encounter our own genome and to allow the ghosts we find there to make us into sensitive and caring citizens of a truly great republic. No more than that! But also no less.