"Scientific racism": A point-by-point rebuttal to Adam Rutherford

There is overwhelming empirical evidence of a taboo against hereditarianism. Naturally, Rutherford ignores all of it.

Written by Noah Carl and Bo Winegard.

There is a widespread feeling that the word “race” indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races." Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology.
—Ernst Mayr, 2002¹

In a Guardian podcast covering the paper’s recent exposé on “race science”, Adam Rutherford was wheeled out to debunk the nefarious ideology of “scientific racism”. For those not in the know, “scientific racism” is the intentionally pejorative term that people like Rutherford use to besmirch those who hold perfectly reasonable views like race realism and hereditarianism. As we noted in our response to the exposé, referring to “scientific racism” is a wholly bad-faith tactic; it would be like us characterising Rutherford’s beliefs as “scientific communism”. In any case, you won’t be surprised to learn that we don’t find his garbled arguments remotely persuasive. What follows is a point-by-point rebuttal.

Rutherford: The basis of the racisms that we endure today were born out of 17th and 18th century early scientists, the people at the roots of the modern conception of biology, who designed classification systems for all sorts of living organisms, but specifically for humans, that included not just classification but hierarchical classification. And the hierarchical nature of this was imposed as a sort of scientific truth, which said that these are physical differences, but they’re also hierarchically different in terms of behaviour and cognitive abilities. And in every single case of scientific classification of humans from that point until the 20th century, white Europeans are superior to all other races, all other types, of humans.

While it’s true that some proponents of slavery and colonialism justified their beliefs by appealing to “scientific” racial hierarchies, and that some scientists devised racial hierarchies in order to rationalise slavery and colonialism, this doesn’t mean that the “racisms we endure today” were “born out of 17th and 18th century early scientists”. Racism has existed for as long as people from different geographical regions came into contact with each other. It was not invented by evil Europeans in the 18th century. Humans are intensely tribal, and given how physically distinct people from different geographical regions look, it is hardly surprising that our tribalistic propensities have sometimes manifested in racism. (This doesn’t justify racism, of course.) When loutish football fans throw a banana at a black player, it isn’t because they are well-versed in the writings of Ernst Haeckel.

Rutherford: I mean it is literal white supremacy. Part of the reason for this was as a justification for European expansion, for the expanding colonies, but also for the subjugation of people in those colonies. Because if you can say: “Well, we’ve been to Africa and we met a bunch of people who are less intelligent than us, then it is our right, as a superior class of people, to take them over and run their countries. They’re not capable of running their own countries.” So race was invented to serve racism. And then over the next few centuries, it sort of coalesces and develops and matures, and into the 20th century, genetics is the field which demonstrates that it is fundamentally flawed. We completely dismantle the concept of racial hierarchies and in fact the concept of race.

As we already noted, it’s true that some scientists devised racial hierarchies in order to rationalise slavery and colonialism. However, others took to classifying human differences for the mundane reason that such differences actually exist. Charles Darwin devotes an entire chapter of The Descent of Man to the “races of man” in which he notes that their “mental characteristics” are “very distinct”. Yet he was a liberal and an abolitionist to boot. Was Darwin simply trying to justify a deep-seated belief in the racial superiority of Europeans? It seems far more likely that he was genuinely interested in human variation. After all, evidence suggests that the “mental characteristics” of different populations are at least somewhat distinct.