But there was something else about that segment that struck me. Something about the tone of the show that struck me as terribly dissonant. Throughout the segment, the hosts and the scientists talked about this discovery as "thrilling"; that basically, Genghis Khan is probably the most successful biological father in human history. The show featured people who enthusiastically talked about wanting to know if they could trace their descent to Genghis Khan; and even a restaurant in England that had a drawing in which the winners could be tested for that characteristic Y-chromosome (it costs around $300 to do). There was something markedly celebratory about the whole thing, and this disturbed me.
Yes, scientifically speaking, I found the whole thing fascinating. But what was with all this hip! hip! hurrah!-ing of Genghis Khan's loins? Because, really, however you want to spin this, what we're saying here is that Genghis Khan managed to rape more women than any other man we know of. Rape. That's the word. And that's the word that was missing from this conversation.
This got me curious. I wondered if this avoidance of the reality of what this data meant was more wide-spread. Turns out that this celebratory tone is pretty much what's out there. A google search of 'Genghis Khan' and 'genes' popped up tons of reportage on Genghis Khan and his 16 million descendants -- about half a million hits, actually. And most of them were in same vein as the Radiolab segment. I next plugged in 'Genghis Khan', 'genes' and the added criterion of 'rape' and I got close to half the number of hits than the previous search. And this is when things got really disturbing.
Here were articles that acknowledged the "rape and pillage" of the Mongol hordes, that acknowledge that access to women was part of the "spoils of war". But the acknowledgement of these facts did not prevent these articles from lionizing Genghis Khan for his sexual conquests. Many of these articles were from popular mainstream news media. Like the Guardian article with the headline: We owe it all to Superstud Genshis Khan, which talks about how Genghis Khan "claimed" women during his "merciless conquest", but then follows it up with talk of Khan's " enthusiastic mating habits"; or this priceless headline from the The Daily Mail: Genghis Khan: The Daddy of all Lovers. Or this from The Times: Genghis Super-Y -- the gene for a true alpha male. National Geographic does not disappoint either: Genghis Khan a Prolific Lover, DNA Data Implies.
I found only a few science blogs that tackled this story with purely scientific interest and did not comment, either positively or negatively, about Genghis Khan's sexual appetite. And only a few that called Genghis Khan a rapist (but the comment threads to these posts made me want to curl up in a ball and disappear).
When we look at the vast majority of the stories out there, these are not conversations about the science of tracking the Y-chromosome, or articles that talk about rape as evolutionarily adaptive behaviour. These discussions talk about how amazing it is that one man is ancestor to so many millions; yes, it's rape at a grand scale, but come on! the dude was a "superstud", an "alpha-male", a "prolific lover"!
Forgive me if I'm not so thrilled.
[Of related interest: Chauvinism in reporting. ]
