Anomaly and Norm

The Adaptability of Life Between Anatomy and Biology

Anomaly and Normality: the “Diverse” as a Social Issue

In the human societies, since the beginning of the species, it has always been important to recognize the “normal” from the “diverse”. In pre-historical times, when societies were organized in clans and tribes, the recognition of members of opposing groups could make the difference between life and death. For this reason our brain has elaborated an extraordinary capacity of recognizing familiar faces, and to instinctively distrust what is not recognized as familiar.

Nowadays, these systems of mental security aren’t necessary anymore, but the distrust on the “diverse” remains, having both social and biological origins. It is interesting to see that the concept of “diverse” we have now is connected exclusively to social principles and not anymore to natural ones. As evidence of this, it has been discovered that the African populations are the ones that are more genetically different from one another: specifically, the major genetical difference is found between the Kung San population, settled in Namibia, and the Hadzabe, in Tanzania. The genetic difference between these two groups is bigger than the one with any other human group (Europeans, Asians, Native Americans and Scandinavians, South-Americans and Aborigines, etc).

Our principle of “normality” depends exclusively on what society makes us think is “normal”. In Italy, for example, we are used to consider normal men with the beard, while this somatic trait is completely absent in the native South American and Polinesian populations: this difference created so much dismay in the indigenous populations that came in contact with the europeans for the first time to the point of making them think that they were alien creatures, “monsters”, anomalies. For human beings, the concepts of normality and anomaly have deviated from the biological and genetical principles, and are now dictated by social conventions.