America's 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system

We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all: the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson in The Guardian 


In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters: “To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed an entire month. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called “untouchables”, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read about and had sympathy for, but who had still been left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.

He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in the US, and knew of the bus boycott he had led. Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph. At one point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

King was floored. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, and had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. “For a moment,” he wrote, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.

And he said to himself: “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US.

Martin Luther King Jr visiting India in 1959. Photograph: Rangaswamy Satakopan/AP

What Martin Luther King Jr, recognised about his country that day had begun long before the ancestors of our ancestors had taken their first breaths. More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States – a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion what has been called the world’s oldest democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage.

It would twist the minds of men, as greed and self-reverence eclipsed human conscience and allowed the conquering men to take land and human bodies that they convinced themselves they had a right to. If they were to convert this wilderness and civilise it to their liking, they decided, they would need to conquer, enslave or remove the people already on it, and transport those they deemed lesser beings in order to tame and work the land to extract the wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines.

To justify their plans, they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between. There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people would descend from Europe, with rungs inside that designation – the English Protestants at the very top, as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in the bloody fight for North America. Everyone else would rank in descending order, on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom: African captives transported in order to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for 12 generations.

There developed a caste system, based upon what people looked like – an internalised ranking, unspoken, unnamed and unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously, to this day. Just as the studs and joists and beams that form the infrastructure of a building are not visible to those who live in it, so it is with caste. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through-line in the country’s operation.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of others, on the basis of ancestry and often of immutable traits – traits that would be neutral in the abstract, but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favouring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the US. Each version relied on stigmatising those deemed inferior in order to justify the dehumanisation necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom, and to rationalise the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from a sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, the flashlight cast down the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power: which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources: which caste is seen as worthy of them, and which are not; who gets to acquire and control them, and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence: who is accorded these, and who is not.

As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us, often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics, and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In the US, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy – the frontman – for caste.

Racial segregation at a bus station in North Carolina in 1940. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information – the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate, and we know without thinking the difference between third-person singular and third-person plural. We might mention “race”, referring to people as black or white or Latino or Asian or indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history, and the assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like – or rather, the race they have been assigned, or are perceived to belong to – is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public, showing how people are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether their neighbourhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or to have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity.

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture, and serve to reinforce each other. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place.

Caste is fixed and rigid. Race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the US. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception – whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critically and tragically, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.

Caste is not a term often applied to the US. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in the US have made use of the term for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and US senator Charles Sumner, as he fought against segregation in the north. “The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a fellow humanitarian: “Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none.”

We cannot fully understand the current upheavals, or almost any turning point in American history, without accounting for the human pyramid that is encrypted into us all. The caste system, and the attempts to defend, uphold or abolish the hierarchy, underlay the American civil war and the civil rights movement a century later, and pervade the politics of the 21st-century US. Just as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development, caste has been the operating system for economic, political and social interaction in the US since the time of its gestation.

In 1944, the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal and a team of the most talented researchers in the country produced a 2,800-page, two-volume work that is still considered perhaps the most comprehensive study of race in the US. It was titled An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s investigation into race led him to the realisation that the most accurate term to describe the workings of US society was not race, but caste – and that perhaps it was the only term that really addressed what seemed a stubbornly fixed ranking of human value.

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention – a social construct, not a biological one – and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the US, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of ‘the race problem in America’,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.”

There was little confusion among some of the leading white supremacists of the previous century as to the connections between India’s caste system and that of the American south, where the purest legal caste system in the US existed. “A record of the desperate efforts of the conquering upper classes in India to preserve the purity of their blood persists to until this very day in their carefully regulated system of castes,” wrote Madison Grant, a popular eugenicist, in his 1916 bestseller, The Passing of the Great Race. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose.”

In 1913, Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man born to the bottom of India’s caste system, born an untouchable in the central provinces, arrived in New York City from Bombay. He came to the US to study economics as a graduate student at Columbia, focused on the differences between race, caste and class. Living just blocks from Harlem, he would see first-hand the condition of his counterparts in the US. He completed his thesis just as the film The Birth of a Nation – the incendiary homage to the Confederate south – premiered in New York in 1915. He would study further in London and return to India to become the foremost leader of the untouchables, and a pre-eminent intellectual who would help draft a new Indian constitution. He would work to dispense with the demeaning term “untouchable”. He rejected the term Harijans, which had been applied to them by Gandhi, to their minds patronisingly. He renamed his people Dalits, meaning “broken people” – which, due to the caste system, they were.

A statue of Bhimrao Ambedkar under a flyover in Amritsar, India. Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images

It is hard to know what effect his exposure to the American social order had on him personally. But over the years, he paid close attention, as did many Dalits, to the subordinate caste in the US. Indians had long been aware of the plight of enslaved Africans, and of their descendants in the US. Back in the 1870s, after the end of slavery and during the brief window of black advancement known as Reconstruction, an Indian social reformer named Jyotirao Phule found inspiration in the US abolitionists. He expressed hope “that my countrymen may take their example as their guide”.

Many decades later, in the summer of 1946, acting on news that black Americans were petitioning the United Nations for protection as minorities, Ambedkar reached out to the best-known African American intellectual of the day, WEB Du Bois. He told Du Bois that he had been a “student of the Negro problem” from across the oceans, and recognised their common fates.

“There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of the Negroes in America,” Ambedkar wrote to Du Bois, “that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary.”

Du Bois wrote back to Ambedkar to say that he was, indeed, familiar with him, and that he had “every sympathy with the Untouchables of India”. It had been Du Bois who seemed to have spoken for the marginalised in both countries as he identified the double consciousness of their existence. And it was Du Bois who, decades before, had invoked an Indian concept in channelling the “bitter cry” of his people in the US: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”

I began investigating the American caste system after nearly two decades of examining the history of the Jim Crow south, the legal caste system that grew out of enslavement and lasted into the early 70s, within the lifespans of many present-day Americans. I discovered that I was not writing about geography and relocation, but about the American caste system – an artificial hierarchy in which most everything that you could and could not do was based upon what you looked like, and which manifested itself north and south. I had been writing about a stigmatised people – 6 million of them – who were seeking freedom from the caste system in the south, only to discover that the hierarchy followed them wherever they went, much in the way that the shadow of caste (as I would soon discover) follows Indians in their own global diaspora.

The American caste system began in the years after the arrival of the first Africans to the Colony of Virginia in the summer of 1619, as the colony sought to refine the distinctions of who could be enslaved for life and who could not. Over time, colonial laws granted English and Irish indentured servants greater privileges than the Africans who worked alongside them, and the Europeans were fused into a new identity – that of being categorised as white, the polar opposite of black. The historian Kenneth M Stampp called this assigning of race a “caste system, which divided those whose appearance enabled them to claim pure Caucasian ancestry from those whose appearance indicated that some or all of their forebears were Negroes”. Members of the Caucasian caste, as he called it, “believed in ‘white supremacy’, and maintained a high degree of caste solidarity to secure it”.

While I was in the midst of my research, word of my inquiries spread to some Indian scholars of caste based in the US. They invited me to speak at an inaugural conference on caste and race at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the town where WEB Du Bois was born and where his papers are kept.

There, I told the audience that I had written a 600-page book about the Jim Crow era in the American south – the time of naked white supremacy – but that the word “racism” did not appear anywhere in the narrative. I told them that, after spending 15 years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I had realised that the term was insufficient. “Caste” was the more accurate term, and I set out to them the reasons why. They were both stunned and heartened. The plates of Indian food kindly set before me at the reception thereafter sat cold due to the press of questions and the sharing that went on into the night.

At a closing ceremony, the hosts presented to me a bronze-coloured bust of the patron saint of the low-born of India, Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Dalit leader who had written to Du Bois all those decades before.

It felt like an initiation into a caste to which I had somehow always belonged. Over and over, they shared stories of what they had endured, and I responded in personal recognition, as if even to anticipate some particular turn or outcome. To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people there, not from what they looked like, as one might in the US, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy – in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanour, behaviour and a visible expectation of centrality.

On the way home, I was snapped back into my own world when airport security flagged my suitcase for inspection. The TSA worker happened to be an African American who looked to be in his early 20s. He strapped on latex gloves to begin his work. He dug through my suitcase and excavated a small box, unwrapped the folds of paper and held in his palm the bust of Ambedkar that I had been given.

“This is what came up in the X-ray,” he said. It was heavy like a paperweight. He turned it upside down and inspected it from all sides, his gaze lingering at the bottom of it. He seemed concerned that something might be inside.

“I’ll have to swipe it,” he warned me. He came back after some time and declared it OK, and I could continue with it on my journey. He looked at the bespectacled face, with its receding hairline and steadfast expression, and seemed to wonder why I would be carrying what looked like a totem from another culture.

“So who is this?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said, “this is the Martin Luther King of India.”

“Pretty cool,” he said, satisfied now, and seeming a little proud.

He then wrapped Ambedkar back up as if he were King himself, and set him back gently into the suitcase.

The troubling flaws in forensic science

by Linda Geddes in BBC Future

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” So said the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Armed with his finely honed skills of backwards reasoning, his trademark ability to solve unsolvable crimes often hinged on his revealing evidence too small to be noticed.

Holmes was an inspiration for the very founders of modern day forensic science. As the decades passed and the tools in their armoury grew, so too did the sheen of invincibility that surrounded their discipline. But there was a crucial chink in their methods that had been overlooked: subjectivity.

While the likes of Holmes’s successors in detective fiction may lead us to believe that forensic evidence is based on precise deduction, all too often it relies on a scientist’s personal opinion, rather than hard fact.

Science on trial

Consider the following case. In December 2009, Donald Gates walked out of his Arizona prison with $75 and a bus ticket to Ohio. After serving 28 years for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, he was a free man. Now the spotlight began to shift to the forensic technique that put him there: microscopic hair analysis.

Human hair is one of the most common types of evidence found at crime scenes. During the 80s and 90s, forensic analysts in the US and elsewhere often looked to the physical differences between hairs to determine whether those found at a crime scene matched hairs from a suspect – like Donald Gates.

When he stood trial in 1982, an FBI analyst called Michael Malone testified that hairs found on the body of the murder victim – a Georgetown University student called Catherine Schilling – were consistent with Donald Gates’ hairs. He added that the probability they came from anyone else was one in 10,000.

“That’s very compelling evidence, particularly when it comes from a witness wearing a white laboratory coat,” says Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York-based non-profit organisation that uses DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions.

The FBI is now reviewing several thousand cases as DNA testing sheds new light on the truth (Credit: Getty Images)

However, hair analysis is not purely objective; I might think two hairs look identical, but you might disagree. Even if we agree that two hairs match, no-one has ever figured out how many other hairs might be similarly indistinguishable from one another. “When a person says that the probability is one-in-10,000, that’s simply a made-up number,” says Neufeld. “There’s no data to support it.”

Donald Gates was finally exonerated when DNA testing revealed that the hairs didn’t belong to him after all. Two similar exonerations followed soon afterwards. As a result of these cases, the FBI is now reviewing several thousand cases in which its scientists may have offered similarly misleading testimony. Last month, it announced that of the 268 cases it has reviewed so far that went to trial, 96% them involved scientifically invalid testimony or other errors by FBI agents. Among those convicted, 33 received death sentences, and nine have already been executed.

The FBI’s review won’t necessarily overturn the convictions, but it does mean that they need to be reconsidered carefully. Lawyers scrutinising these cases must work out what other evidence was presented in court; if they hinged on flawed hair testimony, retrials and exonerations may follow. In cases where the original physical evidence still exists, that DNA testing may shed new light on the truth.

Damning report

Even trusted lines of evidence, such as fingerprint analysis, are not water-tight. Research has shown that the same fingerprint expert can reach a different conclusion about the same fingerprints depending on the context they’re given about a case.

Based in part on these findings, in 2009 the National Academy of Sciences in the US published a report on the state of forensic science. Commissioned in response to a string of laboratory scandals and miscarriages of justice, its conclusions were damning. “Testimony based on faulty forensic science analyses may have contributed to the wrongful conviction of innocent people,” it said. “In a number of disciplines, forensic science professionals have yet to establish either the validity of their approach or the accuracy of their conclusions.”

The report was a wake-up call, not just for forensic scientists in the US, but around the world. “What it exposed were significant scientific deficiencies across many of the different methods that we use, both to examine and interpret different types of evidence,” says Nic Daeid, a professor of forensic science at the University of Dundee in Scotland. 

Of all lines of forensic evidence, DNA analysis was considered to be the most objective. Resting on complex chemical analysis, it seems stringently scientific – a gold-standard for how forensic science should be done. Yet perhaps juries should not be too quick to trust the DNA analyses they see in court.

Even trusted lines of evidence, such as fingerprint analysis, are not water-tight (Credit: Thinkstock)

In 2010, while working as a reporter for New Scientist magazine, I teamed up with Itiel Dror from University College London, and Greg Hampikian from Boise State University in Idaho, to put this idea of DNA’s objectivity to the test.

We took DNA evidence from a real-life case – a gang-rape in Georgia, US – and presented it to 17 experienced analysts working in the same accredited government lab in the US.

In the original case, two analysts from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that the man who was ultimately convicted of the crime, Kerry Robinson, "could not be excluded" from the crime scene sample, based on his DNA profile. But when the evidence was shown to our 17 analysts, they reached very different conclusions; just one analyst agreed that Robinson "cannot be excluded". Four analysts said the evidence was inconclusive and 12 said he could be excluded.

Yet just because forensic science is subjective, this doesn’t mean it should be disregarded; it can still yield vital clues that can help to catch and convict murderers, rapists, and other criminals. “Subjectivity isn’t a bad word,” says Dror. “It doesn’t mean that the evidence isn’t reliable, but it is open to bias and contextual influences.”

Blind judgement
What’s needed are additional safeguards to shield forensic examiners against irrelevant information that might skew their judgement. A first step is to ensure they aren’t given irrelevant information, such as knowing that witnesses have placed the suspect at the crime scene, or that he has previous convictions for similar crimes. Another safeguard is to reveal the relevant information sequentially – and only when it is needed. “We need to give them the information that they need to do their job when they need it, but not extra information that’s irrelevant to what they’re doing and which could influence their perception and judgement,” says Dror.

In the US at least, this is starting to happen: a national commission on forensic science has been established, with the goal of strengthening the field – and this includes looking at human factors like cognitive bias. But similar strategies are needed elsewhere if forensic science is to rebuild its tattered reputation.

When it comes to deduction and proof, there is still much we can learn from Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero. As Sherlock Holmes also once said: "Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

Cheating: It's in our blood

Nicholas Hogg in Cricinfo

We are built to cheat. Our DNA demands that we take the opportunities that increase our chance of survival. In Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is the bone-wielding apes who viciously club the unarmed apes. No lingering guilt about what is fair inhibits their bloody victory. But these are primates fighting over territory in a tooth-and-claw scrabble without values to impinge their survival instincts, distant cousins of refined cricketers imbued with a sense of moral duty to a sport that has long been elevated above other recreation as a bastion of fair play.

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However, it is the codified rules, empirical rather than moral, that ultimately define a sport. In football you cannot touch the ball with your hands, in rugby football you can. Bereft of guidelines a sporting contest debases back to the savannah. Medieval, unruly versions of the beautiful game involved neighbouring villages fighting to move a ball from one field to another. These riotous matches, with surging mobs hacking, wrestling and lurching back and forth across muddied fields - much like a Five Nations clash from the 1980s - were banned in 1314 by an Edward II Royal Decree that declared "hustling over large balls" as an act "from which many evils may arrive."

Cricket, conversely, has often been taught in an effort to instil morality and sportsmanship. The phrase "It's just not cricket" has been popularised to describe underhand behaviour in wider society. The MCC, the owner of the Laws of Cricket since the 18th century, included a Preamble on this "Spirit of Cricket" in its updated 2000 code: "Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game. Any action which is seen to abuse this Spirit causes injury to the game itself."

Occasionally players do contravene this near-mystical ethic of cricketing spirit. In 1981, six runs were needed from the last ball of the third World Series Cup final between Australia and New Zealand, and Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl underarm. New Zealand's No. 10 Brian McKechnie blocked the grubber and then hurled his bat away in disgust. Outrage followed, and the Australian Cricket Board acknowledged that Chappell's action "was within the laws of the game" but as the MCC would formally state, "that it was totally contrary to the spirit in which cricket has been, and should be, played".

The unwritten code of fair play had been broken, and a week later the law was changed to ban underarm bowling. Like religion, the Spirit of Cricket is a concept universally understood but not universally practised.

In the first Ashes Test at Trent bridge, Stuart Broad edged Ashton Agar to first slip and stood his ground when he knew full well he was out. Sensing that he might escape justice, his face was that of a boy wiping away the crumbs of a stolen cookie - never has he looked more like the nefarious Malfoy from Harry Potter than when he realised his stay of execution.

It is the same player, whether on the village green or Test match arena, stuttering "I really wasn't sure if I'd hit it" who demonstrates an ancient skill - not only to others but also to oneself.

"In a competition for mates, a well-developed capacity for self-deception is an advantage," writes philosopher John Gray in Straw Dogs. "The same is true in politics, and many other contexts."

Including, one would argue, when at the crease.

"If they believe the lie," says Victor Gombos, a psychologist at California State University, "it's easier to be convincing." That golden duck turned into a century is sweeter still if the guilty man can free himself of the crime.

The walk-or-not-to-walk conundrum is a direct test of moral fortitude against genetics - a measure of character extended to home umpires in club games when they, as well as the appealing fielders, are well aware that the ball held aloft in the keeper's glove did indeed feather their team-mate's bat - and a prime example of how lying, whether to oneself or to others, is a pre-programmed ability.

Cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance

"Almost all children lie," notes the director of the Institute of Child Study at Toronto University, Dr Kang Lee. In 2010, after studying 1200 children Lee claimed that lying "is a sign they have reached a new developmental milestone" and evidence of a fast-developing brain. He was quick to negate the link between juvenile deception and graduation into adult fraudsters - and, we presume, dishonest cricketers.

Whether Broad not walking constitutes a lie is debatable. No one asked him if he had hit the ball. And, as many great batsmen have done before him, he is entitled to wait on the umpire's decision. But a cheat? If so, he is certainly not the first, or the last.

In a 2013 survey conducted for the MCC and the Cricket Foundation, one in 20 children questioned admitted they were proud to have achieved victory dishonestly. With 22 players involved in a cricket match, that correlates to at least one dedicated cheater per game. This will to sporting power, to win at all costs, was highlighted in Dr Robert Goldman's 1984 survey that claimed over 50% of athletes would take an undetectable drug that assured them five years of glory.

Darwinism teaches that a quest for truth is often contrary to our survival. The truth is that Broad edged the ball to first slip, and the deception prolonged his life. Here, the "victory" gene, as I shall briefly rename Dawkins "selfish" original, is in conflict with what is considered fair play. Morality is built on the shifting sands of time, place and culture, and in natural selection the human mind pursues evolutionary success, not values.

Therefore as we evolve, the rules, and how they are applied, must adapt too. Sporting laws that fail to keep players in check will die off like dodos. Cricket changes because we are inventive mammals with the capacity for creativity - cheating.

The DRS will improve. Hot Spot and Snicko will see and hear with Orwellian focus. The Ministry of Truth will reign over every high-definition microsecond of every televised game, and on-field umpires - such as Tony Hill on the third morning at Chester-le-Street, when the big-screen replays confirmed his error and the players were halfway off the pitch before he raised his finger to an empty wicket - will be no more than conduits for decisions made by circuit boards.

And cheating will advance too. Silicone tape and Murray Mints. Sunscreen made of beeswax. Each mutation of advantage will result in a tweak of governance. While the coming youth play warped forms of our beloved game, and we casually forget this is a sport born on grassy meadows with curving bats and gates of sticks instead of stumps - an evolving game - our fading generation will hark back to a time when cricket was cricket, and a batsman could stand his ground whether he had hit the ball or not.

The sequencing and analysis of the first Malayali personal genome

The new Malayali world of DNA

T. NANDAKUMAR

A Kochi-based laboratory has completed the full sequencing and analysis of the first Malayali personal genome, revealing the genetic diversity of the linguistic group and signalling a revolution in disease diagnosis and treatment.

The study by SciGenom Laboratories established that the Malayali is genetically similar to the Caucasians more than any other race on earth.

A detailed report on the analysis has been published after peer review by BMC Genomics, an international medical journal that identifies and pools research contributions in genomics. Investigators at SciGenom Labs had joined hands with Stephan C. Suschter's laboratory at Pennstate, USA, and others to analyse the genome sequencing data.

The report carries elaborate comparison of Malayali genome against other published genomes from other parts of the world. The study revealed that the gene sequence of the Malayali varies from Chinese and African genomes but stands closer to the Caucasian, a term denoting the white race.

Genetic diversity

According to the report, the availability of this genome and the variants identified is a first step in understanding the genetic diversity in the Indian subcontinent, a crucial factor in identifying clinically relevant changes. These changes, along with further studies on additional genomes from this region, should provide a comprehensive assessment of the disease burden in the Indian population, it concluded.

Dr. George Thomas, Director, SciGenom Labs, said this was the first complete sequencing of a South Asian Indian female (SAIF) genome. “The real challenge with regard to the data obtained from genome sequencing is its analysis for arriving at sound conclusions. The analysis enables listing out those genetic deformities and hidden diseases in an individual which would come out in future,” he said.

“So diseases such as cancer, diabetes, liver diseases, and Alzheimer’s would become predictable and there could be preventive treatment and personalised drugs. This is the field occupied by bioinformatics and India needs to develop a good number of experts in this field,” he said.

The sequencing and genotype data has been deposited at the European Genome-Phenome Archive, hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The SAIF variant information could be viewed at http://gbrowse.scigenom.com. and the full report published by BMC Genomics was available at http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/13/440, a press note issued by SciGenom Laboratories said.