Instant Genius - Adam Rutherford: Can science ever be rid of racism?

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Adam Rutherford is a geneticist at the University College London, which has one of the most prestigious population, genetics and evolution departments in the world. However, the university was also the home of ideas such as eugenics and race science. Times have changed, and although our current understanding of genetics and biology should have consigned them to history, these insidious ideas are making their way back into the mainstream. In his new book, How to Argue with a Racist (£12.99, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Adam wants to show his readers that what we understand as race doesn’t really hold up with the genomic data, why professional sport is not a particularly good data set for studying race, and whether we can ever truly remove racism from science. He speaks to our editorial assistant Amy Barrett. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Marcel Danesi: Why do we want to believe lies? Gaia Vince: What part does culture play in our evolution? Robert Elliott Smith: Are algorithms inherently biased? Caroline Criado Perez: Does data discriminate against women? Angela Saini: Is racism creeping into science? John Higgs: Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. I think a lot of scientists are rightly focused on contemporary work. I think it's really important that we remember where this work comes from because, you know, Newton says we stand on the shoulders of giants,

which is absolutely true. We also stand on our peers' shoulders as well. But we've got to remember that some of those giants also were living in eras where social norms were different, where racism was the norm. And so it's important to remember that giants can also be awful people. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, this is Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus, and this week, scientific racism raises its ugly head. Adam Rutherford is a geneticist at the University College London, which is one of the most prestigious population genetics and evolution departments in the world. However, the university was also the home to idea. such as eugenics and race science. Times have changed,

and although our current understanding of genetics and biology should have consigned them to history, these insidious ideas are making their way back into the mainstream. In his new book, How to Ague with a Racist, Adam wants to share his readers that what we understand as race

doesn't really hold up with the genomic data, why professional sport is not a particularly goods data set for studying race, and whether we can ever truly remove racism from science. Our editorial assistant Amy Barrett kicks things off by asking him why he wanted to write the book. In many ways, so there's three angles of my career and life have collided,

which are that, I'm a geneticist, and so interested in human variation. I've been writing about that and studying that whole of my adult life. And human variation is the basis from which historical descriptions of race have come. The second thing is that I spent my entire career since I was 18 at UCL at University College London, which is in many ways the home of human genetics and still has one of the great population genetics and evolution departments in the world, which I'm still associated with. But that was also the home of some of the most pernicious ideas such as eugenics and a lot of race science from its foundation in the 19th century right throughout the 20th century.

And I was in the Goulton Laboratory, and Francis Goulton, who is Darwin's cousin, was the sort of founding father of both human genetics and statistical genetics, but also eugenics and some pretty awful ideas. So that's also been a sort of major part of my intellectual trajectory. I think the third thing is that I'm mixing. race. I come from my maternal lineage is Indian via indenture, which is a form of slavery, to Guyana. It's not been a major part of my personal life, but now at the point in the 21st century where conversations about race and genetics and nationalism or appear to be on the

I think that there is a reasonable case to be made that there is a marshalling, a co-opting of contemporary population genetics to re-establish or reinforce some of the more traditional ideas about race and race science that I think a lot of us had thought we had abandoned. So in many ways it was just, it was a sort of inevitability that this book was going to emerge from me and needs, and I think needs to be written, needs to be published right now more than ever. And you've talked about human variation. I wonder if you could just kind of define that for us and talk about what that means and how that relates to the term race. Yeah, well, I mean, this is an incredibly complex area and historically we've been pretty poor at trying to understand

human variation. And then the area of genomics began. And so people have been talking and discussing how people are different all around the world throughout antiquity and since humans have existed. There is no doubt that people around the world do look, do behave and are different from each other. The area of scientific racism, which really begins in the sort of 15th, 16th century, when European expansionism is occurring, the building of empires, that is when it becomes sort of formalized into attempts to pin down the differences between groups of people that Europeans were experiencing and encountering as they conquered other continents. And it's not really until the era of genetics that we begin to have a really sort of, you know,

fine-toothed molecular understanding of human variation. and it shows a slightly different picture to what we had assumed and whereas historically we could group people by superficial characteristics like skin color or some basic morphology what genetics shows is the picture is far, far more complex

and whilst many, many scientists over the years have used basic physiological and physical traits to put people into racial categories although no one has ever agreed on how many racial categories there actually are, genomics has shown that human variation doesn't adhere to any of them at all, and that migration and mixing of previously separate populations, or populations separated by reasonable lengths of time,

is the absolute norm. And so whilst superficial categories like skin color pigmentation, or we can say, well, that's a black person, when you're actually referring to, you know, 1.2 billion Africans and people who are the result of African diasporas, well, black is not really a cogent description of that number of people for multiple reasons. One being that we now know that the genomic diversity that underlies skin pigmentation is higher within Africa than it is for the rest of the world put together. So there's more genetic variation for pigmentation for the group. of people that are commonly referred to as black people.

And the second is there's more skin color variation in the group of people that we refer to as black people. So these common linguistic tropes that we use to define race that everyone really understands are not reinforced by biological diversity as understood by genomics. And so this is why we talk about race as being a social construct,

which is often used as a as a sort of dismissive term. You know, it's not a biological reality. It's just a social construct is what people say. Well, that's a silly thing to say, too, because social interactions and social constructs are how make up the vast majority of how humans interact. You know, money is a social construct.

Time is a social construct. But you don't get people saying, oh, well, you know, money's just a social construct, so I wouldn't worry about it. Tell that to your bank manager. So that's where we're at. But I think that we see more and more arguments emerging as genomics becomes more accessible from both actual races and well-meaning non-racies who are beginning to again use this sort of recapitulations of old ideas by using genomics. And I think that part of my motivation for writing this book is to show that they're not correct.

And why is it that we want to put people into these categories? I mean, there's obviously arguments that other organisms are put into categories, taxonomies. Why should, I mean, should we apply that then to humans? Or we've got to think about it in a different way? Well, I'm pretty opposed to taxonomic definitions across the whole of science in fact. Okay. And I argue that case in other books, but notably in a brief history of everyone who ever lived, which in many ways was the sort of genesis,

the starting point for how to argue with the races. There's a long chapter on race and eugenics in that book. But I find that taxonomic boundaries are not very, they're either essential or unhelpful. So for example, you know, the classic example where we can talk about confidently now is that Neanderthal, Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens,

since their discovery, since their classification, have been have been categorized as separate species, right? And yet we, via the standard definition, which is the two separate species can't have fertile offspring. And yet, you know, we now know via genomics, via DNA, that me and you and all Europeans carry up to 2% of Neanderthal DNA because our ancestors had sex with Neanderthals,

which mean that Neanderthals were also our ancestors, and they had fertile offspring because we are them. So that's a point where taxonomic boundaries are not useful. Are they different species? I don't know. If they were, then the species definition isn't very useful and is quite clearly doesn't describe what biology does. So that's a sort of background to that. But a lot of this begins, a lot of these types of problems begin with Linnaeus.

So Linnaeus being the founder of the taxonomic system we use today, who was part of the time of scientific racism. He tried to categorize the races of the world as they saw it at the time. And they were very clear racial delineations, which still persist to this day. blacks of Africa, Asians, Native Americans, or the indigenous people of the Americas, and Europeans. And while that seems like a reasonable thing to do, to try and categorize people from a sort of purely scientific view,

when you read the descriptions by, not just by Linnaeus, but of all the people who attempted to categorize humans according to racial stratifications out of this time, they are all hierarchical and see if you can guess who always comes out of. It's not a very difficult quiz this. So it's the reverse of what we should be doing in science,

which is where science can influence social policy or politics or people's opinions. The history of race sciences is political ideologies marshalling science in order to make their points. And that's a sort of unequivocal, heavily evidenced arguments that I think we may have forgotten. And you've mentioned, you know, UCL and Francis Galton, so much of what we use today in science has come from racists. So the weather maps, techniques we use in statistics. Can science ever be rid of racism? Well, that's a great question. And what one hopes the answer is absolutely yes.

I think it's perfectly reasonable and in fact necessary to know our own history and to be completely honest about it. Because genetics is a subject which sort of underwrites all biological sciences now. I would argue it's the most

fundamental biological science. You know, other biologists may disagree. But we've gone through this amazing revolution in the last few years because we now have full access to the genomes of pretty much every organism that is alive than many organisms that have been dead for up to hundreds of thousands of the years. The foundations of my field are very closely associated with racism and with race.

Now, if we forget that, then we are in danger of repeating those mistakes or repeating the marshalling of science into political ideologies. So I think it's really important that we understand our history. We understand the relationship between anthropology, early human genetics and race, and also eugenics, which is a different idea from racism, but obviously the people at the end of eugenics policies, the people receiving eugenics policies, well, racial minorities and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected. So eugenics and racism are not the same thing, but they're very closely related to each other. I think a lot of scientists are rightly focused on contemporary work. I think it's really important that we remember where this work comes from because, you know, Newton says we stand on the shoulders of giants,

which is absolutely true. We also stand on our peers' shoulders as well. But we've got to remember that some of those giants also were living in eras where social norms were different, where racism was norm, was the norm. And so it's important to remember that giants can also be awful people. I wonder what are the biggest scientific misconceptions or straight-out lies even that racists can use in their arguments? Yeah, well, there's a couple of distinctions I make within the book about who my targets are, because on the one hand, there's a resurgence of the far right, and we're seeing that in the UK, we see it in the US much more, and indeed all over the world. and neo-Nazis and white supremacists are absolutely obsessed with genetics because white supremacy

is dependent on a notion of white or northern European purity. Now, as a result of that, there is an absolute sort of fervent addiction to ancestry testing that neo-Nazis have embraced. and I spent a lot of time on neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums, just monitoring these types of conversations. And, yeah, I mean, they're completely obsessed with racial purity as determined by ancestry testing. So one of the really biggest misconceptions is that there is such a concept as racial purity.

I mean, apart from the fact that biology has rejected the idea of race as a meaningful scientific terminology anyway. The idea that there could be racial purity is just a historical, a scientific, it's an absolute nonsense. And indeed, if you understand and interprets those direct-to-consumer tests with any sort of level of sophistication,

then that is borne out by what they actually say. So that's sort of, one part of the argument is against actual neo-Nazis and white supremacists. And some say that, well, you know, that's a soft target because these people are wrong to their core, which I don't doubt. But there is a sense as well amongst the broader public that the same ideas that are important to white supremacists that you are descended from pure bloodlines

or from specific regional groups. And therefore, that gives you character in your personality or in your kin or in your family or in your tribe. Well, that is also incorrect. So I get a lot of contact from people saying that they've done one of these tests and they discover that they're descended from Vikings or that they don't have any Jewish in them or that they can trace their family back to a village and Ireland for a thousand years.

Well, none of those things are true and none of those things are even possible. So even though, you know, white people wanting to discover their descended from Vikings is fun and trivial and of no great importance, by the way, everyone in Europe is descended from Vikings. It is the same misunderstanding of genetics, genealogy and ancestry that fuels that trivial interest in having Viking heritage or Celtic heritage as neo-Nazis saying, I have white purity and therefore my people are superior to yours. So that's part of...

It's another reason why this book couldn't have been written at any other time. There's a sort of weird emergence of this whole industry of ancestry testing, but I don't think any genesis, any academic genesis, certainly my colleagues and I didn't spot this coming. And it resulted in the resurgence of...

Well, sort of old-fashioned views about genetic determinism and the deterministic nature of DNA and genes, which we don't really adhere to anymore. We think very hard about genetics being probabilistic rather than deterministic. I mean, you've been vocal for a while on sort of Twitter about those ancestry testing kits. Do you think there's any value in them at all?

I suppose so. There are certainly examples of, there are plenty of examples. There are plenty of examples, in fact, of ancestry revealing unknown close family relations, which is of value. DNA is very good at identifying very close family members. So plenty, plenty of examples of people who didn't know their parents or didn't know that they had other families or, you know, stories like children of relationships between GIs or soldiers in the Second World War who didn't know their father. ancestry testing, it has been amazing at identifying those sorts of relations. There are a few examples of people identifying predispositions towards certain diseases in their families, which can be reassuring if interpreted correctly.

But again, I think those examples are few and far between, which doesn't mean to say they're not important. but of course the first thing you should do if you're in that situation is seek professional help rather than use a commercial testing kit. So I don't know, they're toys, they're gimcrack,

they mostly tell you things that I could tell you by looking at you. Yeah. So I'd be hard-pressed to recommend them. And this notion of kind of the white purity within our genes, what can we say, you know, as people who are interested in science,

what hard evidence can we give to try and convince someone that actually that doesn't exist? Well, I mean, understanding something as complex as pigmentation genetics is a fascinating area of genetics and of genetic diversity. Most geneticists, most population geneticists don't really, aren't really focused on questions specifically relating to race

because that's the thing that we kind of parked a few decades ago as being, you know, sort of understood and not that interesting. But that doesn't mean that human genetics is not incredibly fruitful in terms of understanding migrations of people, the history of people, local adaptations, trying to understand the reasons why people do look different from each other. I'm not a blank slate about this. And I think it's a dangerous territory to get into to say, well, all people are equal, all people look the same. You know, they obviously don't. And this is why I'm trying to make more sophisticated arguments about

recognizing that there are differences between people and between populations, but that they don't correlate with race, with traditional or colloquial descriptions of race. That's the really important key point. So, yeah, skin color is an interesting one that is being actively researched right now. There's another phenomenon which is closely associated with the sort of emerging, well, trying to work out where we've gone wrong in science in the past, which is that there's a understandable, but heavily European bias to what work we've done. And so our understanding of pigmentation genetics has mostly been focused on people who have light skin are from Europe. Now, you know, there are many, many reasons for that. Some of them are

cultural, some of them are social, some of them to do with where the work has been done, and some of them are historical. But it's only really in the last few years and anyone thought to look at the genetics of pigmentation in Africa. And as soon as they did, this is the work of people like Brenner Hen and Sarah Tishkoff and Nina Jablonski and others, as soon as people did start looking. It turns out that all of the stuff that we thought about, genetics and pigmentation, was either wrong or needed to be, you know, radically overhauled in terms of its sophistication. And so that's an interesting, sort of deep structural racism issue that exists not just within genetics, but within all science. So we spend a lot of time talking about skin color and genetics in

the field of genetics without actually looking at the genetics in detail, of black people, of the 1.2 billion Africans who have pigmentation, which historically has been used to demarcate them as different from Europeans. So that's where the work needs to be done, and people are beginning to do it. And you talk in the book about sport

and how some facts that have come out of sporting events and our sporting history have fueled the prejudice and have fueled racism. Can you just kind of tell me the main points in that in that part yeah yeah so i'm a big sports fan and um and sport historically is it is a demonstration of the greatest that people can do as a result of hard work and biology you know sport is not a level level playing field there are basic biological advantages in different sports and it's hugely popular as well so even if you're not into sport billions of

people really are. And for many people, it is the sort of defining interest of their lives. Now, because international sports is something that many of us love watching and, if you're lucky enough, participating in, that historically has been one of the ways that you get exposed to the people of different countries, of different nationalities and their different ancestries. and within the confines of of sporting elite sporting success we see regional differences in successes and

this is a sort of angle which I think is it's sort of the opposite of the white supremacists of going after white supremacists this is an area in which people who are not racists who are actively not racist but are in a effect as being, because they are exposed to racial differences in sporting successes for various competitions, end up with racialized views of biology, which are in effect a form of racism.

And so part of my motivation is to try and help people, equip people, to understand why these are not scientifically valid categorizations. So, for example, the two that I go into in detail are the 100 meters sprint in the Olympics and long distance running. Because the stats from the surface look really compelling. There hasn't been a white man in the finals of 100 meters since 1980. And the Kenyans and Ethiopians have won every single major long and middle distance and marathon race for years. I think it's every single London marathon since 2010.

from memory. So if you're into track and field athletics and you're looking at these results and you're thinking, well, there's got to be something in this, right? You know, black men are better at sprinting. East Africans are better at long distance running. And the way I've just phrased it, well, you know, it's sort of unequivocally true

if that is your data set. The problem is that, well, there are many, many problems within that dataset, one of which is that the data set itself is absolutely miniscule. So 58 men have competed in the 100 metres final since 1980, which is just a terrible sample size. I mean, any statistician or scientists would say,

yeah, well, I can't really do much with that at all. The second thing is that these are elite athletes at the very, very top of human capability, and therefore they are not representative of the populations from which they might have been derived. These people are not like you and me, I'm sorry to say. Speak for yourself. I'm presuming.

I don't know. You're really really talented long distance running. Yeah, okay. And so you say, well, okay, the majority of those runners in 100-met sprints are from, ancestrally from West Africa because they are Americans or Canadians or Canadians or Jamaicans who were who were enslaved during transatlantic slavery. And maybe you might want to suggest, well, maybe they've been bred by artificial selection during the slave era in order to be more physically strong and therefore better at athletic sports. Well, I mean,

that seems like a, that seems like a reasonable starting place for a discussion. And indeed, Michael Johnson, who's my favorite athlete of all time, did say that. And, and, and and has stated on the record that he thinks that as a result of slavery, black people have been, black people in America have biological advantages that we see as success in sport. There's a couple of problems with this. The first is just time. There is just not enough time for this, have to, for this characteristic to have been selected for and be a general sort of population-wide trait. I'm talking about explosive energy that would give you 100 metres success. The second is we don't see. any evidence of positive selection for any characteristic in the human genome when we look at African-American DNA. The biggest studies like 29,000 African-Americans, and there isn't any signal of selection for any characteristic, which doesn't mean that African-Americans are the same as Africans.

They're not. They've just had a different evolutionary history and trajectory since transatlantic slavery occurred. But we don't see any selection. So you've got the problem of the sample sites. You've got the problem of, it's not a solid argument for selection. They, coupled with, we don't see evidence of selection during that time. But then the sort of fourth or fifth or whatever I'm up to, most striking argument is if this were true, and if success in certain sports wasn't primarily determined by cultural factors, then you would expect to see those same people,

So in this case, African Americans who are good at explosive energy sports, you'd expect to see them in all sports where that was a biological type, which would be, which would predispose you towards success. And yet, if you take short-distance sprint swimming, tell me, Amy, how many black people have competed in the finals of the 50-meter freestyle in the Olympics in the same period that there have been. no white men in the running 100 metres. I can't imagine there's a case. One. There's one. Yeah, Cullen got the bronze in 2012 in the London Olympics. So none of these numbers make sense.

You know, you see a higher proportion of black athletes in American football, disproportionately high, but lower in American football. Sorry, lower in baseball. You see African Americans dominate for the... of our 30 years, about 75% of African Americans in NBA in the top, top league of basketball. That's been very consistent over that period of time. What's the unique feature? What is the most common feature that's shared by all basketball players?

It is a fundamentally biological thing, but it's not race. It's height being tall is really useful. We don't see any particular demographics that show that African Americans are taller, on average, than European descended Americans. So again, these are not innate characteristics which predisposed sporting success. They're ones that have been culturally selected. You do not see successful African-American cyclists,

which in sprint cycling, that would be exactly the same characteristics as you'd expect in sprinting. So these are just, terrible data sets on which to base any sort of innate biological categorization that relates historically grace. There's another factor involved here, which is much more social and cultural sociology,

which is there's long-standing prejudices which focus on the physicality of African or African-American people, which which underplay intellectual or industriousness success and overplay innate physical characteristics and that is what we see

in the reporting of stories of of athletes succeeding at elite levels so one survey which looked at looked at how references in the media to sporting successes at elite level for various sports. And the vast majority, when referring to black sporting success, referred to their innate physical abilities.

And the vast majority in reference to white elite success referred to their brains or their industriousness. Now, these are long, long-standing tropes. But all of them fit into a picture where a lot of people who are not racists watch the Olympics and go, yeah, you know, Yusain Bolt has won again, and he's the fastest man who's ever drawn breath,

which is probably true. And this is because it's in his genes, because it's in his ancestry. Now, one of those statements is partially correct and the other one is not. So I want to equip people to be able to go, when someone says, well, you know black people are better at sprinting, you can say, yeah, no. And I do think, you know, those are the kind of people that you say, you wouldn't call them perhaps a racist, but they do hold racist views. And you can see them as maybe being swayed by the arguments you've got in your book. But what I really want to know is, do you think someone who is racist can be ever convinced otherwise? Or is it a pointless endeavor to argue with a racist?

Well, the max in my quote is from Jonathan Swift, and I will mangle his version of it, which is much more eloquent, but a modern version that I paraphrase, which is that you can't reason a person out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. So I think you're probably right. And if you're dealing with hardcore racist, it's quite hard to persuade people who are so clearly ideologically driven towards a certain form of prejudice. In that sense, the book is for people who are willing to engage and understand the arguments better so that they are equipped to deal with the type of nonsense that actual racists come out with. One of the things over the last few years and also a motivation for writing the book is that a lot of actually younger people, often have said to me, I really need this book for at Christmas time or at Thanksgiving. It's their American because it's when families sit down and often, you know, they get into

arguments and they're sitting with their, sometimes with their dad. And sport comes up and this type of conversation starts. And I've certainly had these conversations within, you know, my own family with people who are definitely not racist, but fine, but, but, you know, their experience has driven them down a particular path, which is effectively a racist view. And a lot of people have said to me, I need, I don't know these arguments well enough to be able to contend when my dad says stuff like, well, you know, Jews are more intelligent than other people, which is another trope that I try to deal with in the book. And to have science as your, as your weapon, to have it in your,

armory so that you can say, well, I think, you know, for the racist, those sorts of observations are the end of that conversation. I've seen all the Olympics the last 30 years and a white man hasn't been in the race. Therefore, black people are better at sprinting than white people. Now, that, that observation should be the beginning of scientific inquiry, not the end. That should be the point where you're thinking, well, what is the explanation for this? Because there clearly is something going on here. And that effectively is what the arguments in the book are about. That was Adam Rutherford, whose new book How to Ague with a Racist, is out now. Next week, Material Scientist Mark Mia Dovnik discusses alternatives to plastic. So be sure to subscribe to

the podcast if you haven't already. And in the new issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we unravel the mysteries of consciousness. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital.

precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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