Instant Genius - Is racism creeping into science? – Angela Saini

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

After World War II, mainstream science denounced eugenics and the study of racial differences. Yet there remained a staunch group of scientists who continued to research race. For a few decades, these people remained on the fringes of research. Yet now, in the 21st Century, fuelled by a rise in the far right and extremist views, an increasing number of researchers are framing race as a biological construct rather than a social one. Yet even well-meaning scientists continue to use racial categories in genetics and medicine, betraying their belief that there are biological differences between us, and that race can explain differences in intelligence and disease susceptibility. In her new book, Superior, Angela Saini explores the concept of race. She interviews anthropologists, historians, social scientists and geneticists and finds that time after time, the science is retrofitted to accommodate race. Here, she talks to BBC Science Focus production editor Alice Lipscombe-Southwell. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Is body positivity the answer to body image issues? – Phillippa Diedrichs Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox What makes me 'me'? – Aoife McLysaght Should we be worried about sex robots? – Kate Devlin Inequality in science – Angela Saini Why aren't there more women in science? Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Image: Nazi officials use callipers to measure an ethnic German's nose. The Nazis developed a system of facial measurement that was supposedly a way of determining racial descent. The compiled results, based on biased samples, were used to back up the Nazi claim that Germans were a pure and superior "Aryan" race © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name, Radio.com to learn more. Race is a social construct, however hard that is to accept, this is what geneticists say. It has no place in biology. One, the differences between us are so marginal. And secondly, that the overlap is so enormous that this idea of discrete races, or even fuzzy races, if you want to call it that, just doesn't make any sense. 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 and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. After World War II, mainstream science denounced eugenics and the study of racial differences. Yet there remained a staunch group of scientists who continued to research race. For a few decades, these people remained on the fringes of research. Yet now, in the 21st century, fueled by a rise in the far right and extremist views,

an increasing number of researchers are framing race as a biological construct rather than a social one. Yet even well-meaning scientists continue to use racial categories in genetics and medicine, betraying their belief that there are biological differences between us and that race can explain differences in intelligence and disease susceptibility. In her new book, Superior, Angela Saini, explores the concept of race. She interviews anthropologists, historians, social scientists and

geneticists and finds that time after time the science is retrofitted to accommodate race. Here, she talks to BBC Science Focus production editor Alice Ellipscomb Southwell. So Angela, your book, Superior, The Return of Race Science, it looks at the reemergence of scientific research into racial differences. It's been out for a few weeks now. So what's been the reaction to it? It's been amazing. I think a lot of people pre-ordered it because Inferiority only came out two years ago, so it was high in their minds. And because of the title, it really felt like a follow-up in some ways. So a lot of people have read it, even though it's only been out. I think it's been less than two weeks, yeah, and the feedback's been incredible. It's just been

so lovely to finally get it out in the world and hear what people think. I mean, the downside is this, for the last four or five days, there is a large contingent of white supremacist, far-right people who've been reviewing it on their kind of right-wing blogs online. And that has been very difficult to deal with because these are the same people I criticize in the book. And so, of course, they take exception to what I've written. And in some cases, it's got very personal.

They've been quite racist towards me and others and my family, which has been quite tough. so I've had to deal with that but I'm hoping that there was a big flurry of that for a couple of days but I'm hoping it's gone now hopefully I'll die out and I'm sure you've got plenty of scientists

and people who are on your side yeah I mean the bulk of people not more people are on my side which is lovely it's difficult when you're doing a piece of journalism especially in science reporting you're actually criticising people or critiquing people's work on lots of different

levels. So while Superior does look at kind of the abuse of science by hardcore racists, which is why the far right have taken this up, I also critique mainstream scientists for the way they use race. So it's not as though there's one side versus another. This is really about a systemic structural issue to do with how we treat race in academia. And I think we all, every single one of us, including myself, have to look within us to ask ourselves how we use this concept. So why did you decide to write this book about race science in the first place? I knew a couple of years ago you wrote the one about how women were being wrongly represented in science research. Was after writing that you got inspired to look into the racial side of it?

Well, actually, for me, race is a much, has been a feature of my thinking, journalistically for a really long time. The reason I got into journalism in the first place is because I got involved in anti-racist movements when I was at university and from there I started writing the student press. So if I hadn't done that, I think I just would have been an engineer because that's why I studied at university. So I've been thinking about these things for a very, very long time. And of course, as someone growing up as an ethnic minority, as I did in London in the 80s and 90s, especially in the area of London that I lived in, southeast London. Race and racism was a big part of my growing up.

And consequently, I've been thinking about this for now on 30 years, really carefully, not just the science of it, but the social and political dimensions of this. I'm very well read on these issues around the social science and the science of race, but also the literature around race and racism. because it's been a big part of my life for such a long time. It's only now that I felt that publishers and readers would be open to reading something like this

because of the political times that we live in. It really does feel as though racism, everyday racism is making a comeback. But more importantly, this kind of emergence of a new, or at least repackaged form of intellectual racism that really draws on so-called science, sometimes pseudoscience, to make the claim that not only do races biologically exist, but that there is a racial hierarchy.

Because after sort of the Second World War and eugenics and all the atrocities that happened then, it was almost quite a taboo subject, wasn't it? Scientists were like, we can't study this, this is horrific. But are you saying now it's coming back into science or has it always been there and just... Well, my argument is that it's always, been there. So even after the Second World War, when people realized that both that eugenics was

morally deplorable, and we have to remember it wasn't always, that wasn't always the mood amongst mainstream scientists. This was a very legitimate area of research and work in the early 20th century. There were eugenics departments all over the place in Europe and in the US. And London in particular was kind of the heart of the eugenics movement when it first launched. And very many progressives, as well as people on the right, brought into it. After the Second World War, things did change. People realized, I mean, when you could see the idea of eugenics play out to its logical conclusion, which is what we saw happen during the war, it became very difficult to maintain that this was a good idea.

Although people did, well into the 70s, there were still sterilizations happening in the US and Japan until fairly recently, within my lifetime. So it didn't die out completely. And neither did scientific racism. There were still people who were not on board with a kind of anti-racist global consensus. And I argue perhaps more controversially

that mainstream science itself did not also relinquish these ideas fully as it should have. It still used race and racial ideas somewhat repackaged and relabeled, but essentially the same kind of ideas that you can group populations and it was worthwhile looking for significant differences between them, not just physically, but more deeply. That idea, I feel, hasn't completely left us. It serves these kind of stories that we have about ourselves and who we are. And because of that, because of the politics, because of the nature of science, that it is slow to change. And we saw that with, I think, when I was writing inferior, you can see there already that science can be very slow to move on

when there are a number of very smart people who think that their prejudices are not prejudices. it's just they are just reflections of fact. It can be really difficult to progress and actually build new frameworks and completely relinquish the ones of the past. And I think that is a problem that science still has. Much of your book, it does talk about race as a social construct. So whereas some scientists might argue there is a genetic element to it, you say, no, it's a social element of it.

So can you explain that in a little more detail to people who might not be familiar with, that idea. It's really difficult to explain because it feels so tangible and real to us every day. So for example, we feel that because we can identify by sight where someone is likely to be from, that that must mean that race is real because if we can do just by looking at somebody, if we can know these things, then how can it not be real? But then ask yourself again, how often we ask ourselves, where is someone from? Why do we need to do that if it's so obvious? where people are or what their race is. These ideas that we use are so prevalent.

They're so kind of hardwired into us to recognise difference in a certain pattern in order to categorise by race from a very, very young age. And it's been this way for centuries, at least in the society that I live in. It becomes very difficult to think of it any other way. it must be real. How could it not be real when you look around and it feels so real? But we have to understand that we have been taught, our eyes have been trained, to look for certain subtle differences and then use that to categorise. We're not always very good at it, which reflects

the fuzziness of those differences and actually how fuzzy the underlying genetics are. But the fact that we've been trained does not make this more biologically real than it is. if you go to different countries, people will be trained to look for differences between, say, tribes or religious groups or certain people, they'll know not just by physical cues but by social and cultural cues. And so it becomes reaffirmed in your head that this must be something tangible and real. But race is a social construct, however hard that is to accept, this is what geneticists say. It has no place in biology. Mainstream science has decided it has no place in biology. for the pure fact that one, the differences between us are so marginal

and secondly that the overlap is so enormous that this idea of discrete races or even fuzzy races, if you want to call it that, just doesn't make any sense. For centuries, scientists, researchers have struggled to define how many races there are. If race was such a simple thing biologically, then surely we would know. You know, they have gone from three or four or five or six to hundreds to millions. It's very difficult because this is the nature of human variation, the bulk, the vast majority. And I mean more than 95% of the differences we see between individuals is not down to group difference.

It's down to individual difference. We have been trained to look for that tiny percentage and then use it to help categorize us into what. race people are. But that is a psychological process that we're undertaking. It's not a biological. It doesn't, it's not defined by anything biological. And culture and language, of course, makes these things feel more profound than they are, because that also is the source of great difference between groups. You know, between groups, that is the bulk of where difference comes from. It's language, it's culture, its behavior, habits, dress, that kind of thing. Because it's difficult, isn't it?

Because I obviously get a lot of journal articles coming through in my job. And it'll be this new piece of research saying, African-Americans are more likely to get certain diseases or, you know, people of Jewish backgrounds are more likely to get certain diseases. Yet, if there's no biological basis to this, then it's like, well, why is it saying that there is then? Well, I think part of it comes down to how we collect data. So in the US, for instance, we get a lot of these kind of studies. You tend not to get them elsewhere in the world.

I mean, studies out of Africa don't say black people are more prone to this. They don't compare groups in that way. The reason that these comparisons are done in the US is because, firstly, this data is collected. So medical researchers have this demographic data. So it kind of invites comparisons. But secondly, there are health gaps between black and white Americans. A black American is more likely to die of almost everything than a black. a white American, including infant mortality. The lifespan, the life expectancy of a black American

is a few years lower than that of a white American. And we have to ask ourselves why. This is what medical researchers do. Now, the obvious answer would be it's because of social conditions. Of course, because why would black Americans be so genetically disadvantaged as to dive everything, absolutely everything at higher rates than white Americans, when we know that black people and the rest of the world don't. And secondly, if it were genetic, let's just play a thought experiment here, if it were genetics, we know that black Americans are not some kind of homogeneous group genetically. Although the history of slavery means that many black Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa, most black Americans, very many, and we know this even now more

from DNA evidence, have some degree of European ancestry because of the history of slavery, because black women were raped by white slave owners, because since emancipation and since civil rights, there is a lot more intermixing between people. So we already know this group of people are not genetically so distinct from European stock people, white Americans, and also that white Americans aren't so distinct because their history is similarly one of mixing and interbreeding in the same way. So it is just perverse to assume that this group of people, which is so mixed ancestrally, and another group of people so mixed ancestrally, that somehow the genetics of being black or being white are so overwhelming that

they would lead one group to be so genetically disadvantaged as to die of everything at greater rates, even their babies to die of greater rates, what that kind of approach to medicine does is it lets society off the hook. It says to society, we don't have to improve the social conditions of black Americans because it is genetic. This difference is genetic. And that is the great fallacy we're dealing with here. You know, this idea that we should look to genetics first rather than social or environmental or cultural explanations for this terrible gap. In the UK, that kind of gap, that life expectancy gap, is seen between the richest people and the poorest people. It's not racialized in this country because the social conditions of people are a bit more mixed.

They don't run along racial lines. That's not true in the US. Social and economic status runs along racial lines because of the horrific racial history of the United States. And that can explain, I would say, the vast majority of the health difference. is here and that is what epidemiologists in the US are saying. This is what health researchers are saying. Stop looking to genetics so much. Look at it if you want. The reason that they keep coming up blank on these things or just finding tiny little correlations, not very reliable ones, is because that's not where the answers are. Well, you're right. It's going to be a rich and poor thing, isn't it? Because if you're poorer, you're going to have less access to good food,

you can have less access to the good health care and all of those things all add up, don't they? It just means that they really do. And we know that globally. We know that if you're poorer globally, your life expectancy is likely to be lower, that you are more likely to suffer from major diseases to die of the things that kill people.

I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that that kind of dynamic would also be playing out in a multiracial society like the US. Yeah, because isn't it true that with, is it hypertension, where black Americans have higher risk of hypertension, but then black people living in Africa don't. So it's not because they're black they've got it. It's because they're probably got a poorer diet

or they're not getting the help they need when they need it. Yeah, hypertension is the example I look at in the book because it is one of the most heavily racialized diseases, not just in the US but also in the UK. In fact, in the UK, nice guidelines. So this is the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence. specify that if you are under 55 and you're black, you may be given a different drug than if you're white for hypertension. That kind of racialized medicine, just as epidemiologists have shown, and I go into this in detail in the book,

is actually not race here is not a very good proxy for whether someone is likely to respond better to a drug or whether they're likely to have this condition in the first place. what are good correlators are things like level of education. Level of education in the US is a much better indicator of whether someone's going to have high, high hypertension than race. Diet, high salt intake is the big underlying cause of hypertension, high blood pressure. It's a reason my mum has hypertension because she just puts so much salt in her cooking. I mean, it just beggars belief that we kind of, in America, people have come up with such kind of,

elaborate explanations to justify why biologically black Americans would have hypertension when we know that in Africa you see the lowest rates of hypertension. You know, there's this slavery hypertension hypothesis that something happened on the slave ships to make black Americans different from black Africans. And it's just bizarre. I recommend actually the work of Dorothy Roberts here, who's a scholar in the US, who wrote a wonderful book, Fatal Invention, that looks at it, in great detail. And in fact, I would say that the best scholarship when it comes to race and

science is from scholars of color in the US. I mean, the work is brilliant. I cite very many of them in the book. There's Londra Nelson. There's Evelyn Hammonds. There's, like I said, Dorothy Roberts. Also, writers, scholars of Jewish descent, like Jonathan Marks, the anthropologist, they understand these issues. They see these scientific issues in context because they have, experience of it because they're not just looking at the science, they're looking at the social and historical context of these problems. So just thinking now, when you said before that there's very little difference between us all and it's just that sort of tiny, tiny percentage, yet you've got these genetic test kits

you can buy, which all seem really good fun. You think you buy, spend a hundred pound or whatever, get your genetic test kit and it'll say, oh, your ancestry is so mixed, you know, you could have your ancestors from Russia or, you know, South America or something. But is it just looking at that tiny percentage that they're doing or they're using something else to analyse and establish that, do you think? They're working quite odd ways. I mean, one of the other arguments I make in the book is that you hear a lot of geneticists

complaining about ancestry testing and saying how unscientific it is. I mean, it's a genre in itself in science communication, the kind of unscientificness of ancestry testing. But ancestry testing itself emerged out of. of population genetics. So they use very similar frameworks. They may not use them as responsibly or as well, but the kind of thing that they do is the same. And in fact, there are some population geneticists who sit on the boards of ancestry testing companies. We have to ask ourselves why that is. These are very big billion dollar companies making a lot of money out of this assumption that race

is real, ultimately. That's what they're doing. What they're not doing is finding racial genes. There are no such thing. There is no black gene. There is no white gene. You cannot scan my genome. And from that, tell me where my family are from. What ancestry tests do is they rely on living people,

contributing their DNA to these studies. And as we know, people you are more closely related to, you will have more genetically in common. I have a lot in common with my sisters and with my parents. and the further away that relationship gets, so the less closely related you are to someone, it gets weaker and weaker. And we know that historically,

people have tended to live near their families and communities near their families. That makes also sense. Not all of us, obviously my parents migrated here. I don't live near my extended community. But because of that, there will be this kind of genetic relationship that falls away with distance. It gets fuzzier and fuzzier the further away you go.

And what these tests do is they look at the very margins of the genome where we see human variation act out in terms of population groups and ask what is the likelihood that you have ancestry here based on commonality with living people whose genomes we have tested in this area. So not looking at the past, not finding some kind of racial gene, but just saying who do you have more in common with because in the near or distant past, you may be distantly related to them. That's what it's doing.

And that's why there are always probabilities attached. I know that my parents are from Punjab in India, that their parents lived in Punjab in India, and likely their parents did as well. And yet, when my ancestry test came back and I have to say this is not something I would choose to have done, I only had it done because very recently, because I was making a documentary and the producers wanted to check something and you get all the results when you get these tests done. And it told me I was something like 96% South Asian, which again is a huge vast area. That's how fuzzy this is.

And again, only 96%. I know culturally and historically, this is where my roots are. Why is it only able to say 96%? Because again, this is about statistics and probability. That's how fuzzy race is. That's how fuzzy even ancestry is. We know now from ancient DNA evidence that the history of the human species is not one of people being rooted in one place for tens of thousands of years, but of constant movement and migration and intermixing right throughout the entire history of the human species.

And that, if you want an origin story, is our origin story. And yet still there's in some parts of the world, aren't there? I think it's China where they're still teaching children that it's not the out of Africa story that actually people from China came from a different route. They didn't come from, was it homo erectus or something that went over there at another time? Yeah, I mean, this is really where superior lands in the end. Like I said, I've spent many decades thinking about this. And what I didn't want to do is write a kind of,

us versus them book you know here are the racists and here are the rest of us this is how we should fight the racists this is how to argue with them because this is not how race works race is something that we all have some commitment to we all think about we all identify with something and we all have stereotypes

about ourselves and about others and a lot of these stereotypes historically are rooted in these origin stories where are you from? And the reason we care about where we're from and where others are from is because there are stereotypes attached to it. There is meaning attached to it,

political meaning attached to it. We feel that we can tell something about someone when we know where they're from. And also, if we know where we're from, that that gives us some meaning to our lives because there is a set of political and social and cultural ideas attached to that place. And origin stories are important for us as human.

They form part of our culture. Every culture in the world has them. They're not easily broken in an age of modern science and DNA and genetics, which is kind of in some ways undercutting these origin stories by reminding us that we are not, in fact, rooted to a place for millions of years as someone would tell us in the past, that we are actually far more mixed than we think, that actually our biology cannot tell us that a certain group of people are somehow homogeneous in some way, culturally or socially.

You know, it's only the social elements that make you believe that people are united in that sense, which is not an insignificant thing, it's still important. In that kind of world, our ancient origin stories, our myths clash with these genetic ideas. and sometimes, sadly, what happens is that political forces try to wedge the science into the origin stories. So this is why in China you get this idea that the Chinese people did not evolve from the same group of people, modern humans who migrated out of Africa, but that they evolved separately. In India, we have the same. Hindu nationalists are pushing this version of the past in which Hindu.

Indus have been in India for millions of years, so orders of magnitude longer than the, than modern humans have been around. And in Russia as well, there's this idea that they are not descended, that they did not descend from the same group of people who evolved in Africa, modern humans who evolved in Africa. We know that the story is an out of Africa story. We know that now. But many people don't want to admit that because their origin story gets attacked in

some way and they have to live with not just the meaning that they attach to their place, but the meanings that are attached to other places. And that's very difficult for people to cope with. This is a difficult question. I think it's reckless and meaningless for scientists to say, oh, all these stupid people with their religions and their silly origin stories. This is human culture. It means something to us.

It matters to people. It's meaningful and it's important and I would never want to take that away from anybody. But what we also have to be wary of is political forces, particularly ethnic nationalists, religious nationalists, co-opting science, abusing science in order to affirm these origin myths. These origin myths can stand alone if we want them to. They don't need science. In fact, the science does not serve them. But that's okay, because we have other myths in society.

We have religion in society. If you don't believe in something, you can still respect that a person will believe in something, even if it's not scientifically proven or it's not scientifically accurate. That's okay. We need that, I think, to some extent. But we should not invoke biology when it comes to identity. We should not evoke biology when it comes to our origin myths because that is what the Nazis did. And it's devastating.

It's not just scientifically. wrong, it's also politically dangerous. And do you think that's why we're perhaps seeing a slight rise in this scientific racism now? Because maybe 10 years ago, maybe the world was a more liberal place. And we're now seeing a rise in maybe the far right people who've got more racist ideas than perhaps 10 years ago it would have seen. I don't think it's science's fault, obviously, that we're seeing a rise in the far right. What the far right does and what is.

it has always done to some extent, is look to scientific ideas to affirm the prejudices that people hold, even if that means abusing and manipulating data, making false theories, you know, concocting ideas that have no basis in reality in order to give their prejudice some veneer of respectability. And people everywhere do that, sadly. and now we are seeing, as I argue in Superior, a resurgence of that, this manipulation. And in fact, journals particularly nature, have run a number of editorials over the last couple of years, warning scientists about this extremist element trying to abuse their results.

We see it. We see it happening. I mean, there are a number of scientists I've spoken to who know that when they publish results online, for example, looking at ancient DNA or migration, that there are, right wingers out there mining that data for anything they can use and abuse and that's been happening for a while

so we have to be wary of that scientists have to be kind of firm on that I don't think they have been firm enough and I know I understand that we do not have all the data yet and it's difficult somehow to sometimes to

say the things that society needs to hear in order to combat this when you're a scientist because you don't want to overstep what the science actually says. But there does need to be some kind of political decisiveness within the scientific establishment on this. And we are getting that. There are people who are putting out statements. Anthropologists in particular, I think, are doing a really good job on this. But we need to be mindful. And I think scientists also need to read the body of social science on this, because that's one thing that has disappointed me is that I read so much genetic research talking about race, not citing scholars of colour, not looking at the

social science, work of social science here, which is so fruitful and so useful to, you know, I still hear scientists saying that we don't have, you know, there isn't enough work being done on race. Actually, there's an enormous body of work on race within the social sciences. There has been for years and years, looking at the effects of racism and discrimination on the body, on health, on psychology, on how people treat each other. Look to that. It's right there, right in front of you. So how did science very first start getting tangled up with race? Was it back when you had all a Victorian scientist going off and exploring these worlds and seeing things? Well, I think it's inevitable that whatever the social structure or political structure

of the time will be reflected in the science. And this is, something I looked at when I wrote inferior. One of the reasons that women were excluded from the sciences for so long is because during the Enlightenment, women were assumed to be intellectually inferior, and so it didn't make any sense to have them be doing science when they couldn't do it, or that was the assumption. And just think about how long that persisted. It took the Royal Society until 1945 to admit women.

That's how slowly these ideas changed, that women would get the vote in 1918, but still not be admitted to the World Society until 1945. And the same goes with race. During the European Enlightenment, at the kind of dawn of modern Western science, it was assumed that certain groups of people were better than others, that European civilization marked the pinnacle of human capacity and endeavor

and that we had reached the top of the human tree. This was it. history was over and the West had won. And of course, science reflected that. It built not only a gender hierarchy into its assumptions about human difference, but also a racial hierarchy. And it placed the white man at the top. That's what it did. And everybody else was slotted underneath. And these ideas were used to justify slavery and colonialism and genocide. Not to say that these things wouldn't have happened anyway, they would have, and they were already happening. But they gave them, science gives things a gloss and a justification like no other because it feels objective.

If it's scientific, it feels objective. And that's why science can be so difficult and so dangerous when it comes to politics. And that's the sad thing, isn't it? Because, you know, I love science and you want science to be there to help us understand the world. And yet when you see it's being misinterpreted or used wrongly, then it's just heartbreaking because... Yeah. But we have to remember

this was the science of its time. We might think of it as pseudoscience now. It wasn't considered pseudoscience then. It was just considered science. And we also have to accept that there is work being done now, which is considered science, which later will be considered pseudoscience.

There are people today falling into the same traps, making the same mistakes because of bias, whether that is racial bias or sex bias, sometimes unconsciously, and they don't have to be white to be doing this. We all do it. We all have bias and we all fall into this trap who are making errors in the way that they're doing their work and the approaches that they take. And we have to revisit, we have to understand the historical context of the work that we do

and really interrogate thoroughly. It's very easy to look at the past and condemn people with the benefit of how. hindsight. It's very difficult to look within ourselves today and ask if we might be doing the same thing. That's one thing, isn't it? When you look at the Neanderthals, for example, and when we first started finding Neanderthal remains, you know, people were thinking how the Neanderthals lived to say, oh, they were like cavemen, they were savages and all of this. And then in recent years, when it said actually, you know, there was a lot of intermixing, you know, especially people of European descent, they've got some Neanderthal DNA in their sudden it's like, oh, maybe they weren't

so savage after all. I mean, we do, this is. This is. kind of, people who tell me that science isn't political, I just laugh because of course science has always been political, especially when it comes to human beings. We don't even need to go back very far to know that that's the case. And to assume that now humans are so much better, that all humans are so free of bias that they can't possibly make the same mistakes that Darwin did. It's just ridiculous to me. It's just ridiculous. I feel I mean, at the moment, there are of course with Superior because I call out people, and I'm not doing it, you know, off the top of my head. I'm drawing from a very big, large, long work of social science in order to be able to do this.

When I say to population geneticists, perhaps you need to think again, and they get riled up because they don't want to feel that they are committing racism. And what I have to remind people is we all have bias. The second that you think that you don't, that's when you're most susceptible to making mistakes because you're not correcting for the bias that you have. You're not taking it into account. And the Neanderth story, I think, is a perfect example of that. Once upon a time, Neanderthals were thought to be

at a lower stage of evolution than humans. I could lower down the evolutionary tree and so were certain racial groups like Aboriginal Australians. This is the story with which I open the book. And when Neanderthal remains were first identified in the Neander Valley in the 1800s, middle of the 19th century,

they were immediately compared to the skulls of Aboriginal Australians, real living people. And Thomas Huxley, who was a big champion of Darwin, biologist, thought that there was a wonderful kind of similarity between these skulls. And that was feeding in to an existing horrific set of social ideas about the subhuman nature of Aboriginal Australians.

This was around the time of the White Australia policy, this kind of systematic attempt to essentially ethnically cleanse the country to turn it white through. murder through interbreeding until there was nothing left. You know, children were treated like animals by this policy. Millions had their lives absolutely wrecked by, either by murder or by abuse. And this kind of Neanderthal association fed into all of that, that here is a group of people who are doomed to go extinct just like the Neanderthal did, and we're just speeding

them along. And you zoom forward to the present day and now we know that Neanderthals is actually Europeans who have this, the greatest connection to Neanderthals. Europeans have up to four percent or something of Neanderthal ancestry, although those estimates vary. And you see the Neanderthal suddenly rehabilitated and now they're described as clever and smart and sensitive. And perhaps they died out not because they were a weaker, feebler, more rubbish. type of human, but actually just by some kind of accident of fate. And isn't this sad thing? And they were humans just like us. Humans just like us. You know, it was only 100 years ago that actual living humans were treated as subhuman. And now because these Neanderthals are

European, we think, in our heads, in our imagination, they are humans just like us. I mean, how perverse. Now that Superior has been out a couple of weeks. and it's really interesting to see the conversations being had online and the debate. And I really hope, I mean, what I really hope for is that a broad range of people read it. It's not just for scientists. It's for anybody who's interested in the science of human origins and what race means to them. And this is everybody, I think. We all have some ideas about race and we all need to be educated and understand kind of what the scientific language.

landscape around this looks at the moment. And it's been really heartening for me to see some population geneticists actually say, yeah, there are things that we need to look at. There is inappropriate language that we use sometimes. There are inappropriate frameworks, perhaps, that we use sometimes. We do need to look more carefully at it. And I hope that conversation moves forward. As I try to outline in Superior is that, firstly, race is not just a genetic question.

It is a social and cultural question. And I've read a lot of books on the genetics of race that don't even look at that. And I think that's so remiss. It just doesn't make any sense to think about it as just a genetic. Somehow just by looking at the genetics, we can prove racist wrong. It's just bizarre. Racists don't believe what they believe because the genetics has convinced them of it. It's because society convinced them of it.

That was Angela Saini talking about racism in science. Her new book, Superior, is a bit of. available now. For more science and technology, the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. In the June 2019 issue, we go on the hunt for Paines-On-Off switch, discover the clever creatures using tools to eat food, and ask, is there really life on Mars? 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,

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