No genetic threat (2)

The political parties (and even the Church to some extent) feed their slogans/rallying calls to that part of our populace which acts like an unthinking mass that is easily swayed by charismatic orators without the necessity of backing proof. The two parties' celebrations following the EU referendum are a recent reminder of the extent of this problem.

This has unfortunately produced a platform whereby extremists like Norman Lowell can prance. He is no doubt a somewhat charismatic orator but he clearly plays whatever game is likely to gain him support.

While he regularly calls our mother tongue - Maltese - il-lingwa tax-xadini (the language of monkeys), he has no problem with playing a totally false race card suggesting that the Maltese are a pure European population.

In your report last week, he is quoted as saying that we are the only homogenous European population left - i.e. not contaminated with African "black coal", as he says.

I will have to disappoint Mr Lowell. Firstly, he should be informed that all genetic evidence shows that the whole of modern humankind originated in Africa and descended from Africans.

In case Mr Lowell and others like him want to suggest that this may well be true but that European populations developed from African ones by means of some superior evolution, then I would again have to let down both him and also those of us who wish to cling to his theory.

Malta (as would be expected by our semitic tongue and also by elements of our kitchen and culture) is a population of mixed African and European derivation. This has been proved genetically also through the research, theses and different publications from the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the University of Malta, where I once worked.

The analysis of DNA mutations for a common local disease (Thalassaemia) show that Maltese mutations include those found in populations of southern Europe, the Middle East, including those of Jewish populations (another of Mr Lowell's pet hates) and Northern Africa. More recently we have also been mixed in with northern European (predominantly British) blood as other DNA analysis can attest.

So yes - we are homogenous. We are a homogenously cross-continental mixed population. We are all 'hybrids'. And we are better for it.  The more in-bred a population is, the unhealthier it is, in genetic terms.

Mr Lowell can definitely pull the odd unthinking person behind him. In this age of information, I trust that this will be the shrinking number of fearful isolationist people uninformed by the age of information and still prey to political brainwashing.