"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.
Has genetics “completely dismantled” the concept of race? Not at all. Rather, some academics have dismantled their own straw-man version of race, according to which races are “discrete groups” or “natural kinds” – something few serious scientists ever believed. Darwin certainly didn’t believe it. Neither did Ernst Mayr or Theodosius Dobzhansky. Even Johann Blumenbach, who classified humans into five “varieties” at the end of the 18th century, noted that “one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.” The idea that until modern genetics came along, everyone believed that races were “discrete groups” with unique “essences” is total fiction.
Because human genetic variation has a nested structure, there is no “right answer” as to how many races exist. But this is hardly unique to humans; it applies to numerous animals. Scientists disagree about the number of sub-species in wolves, brown bears, giraffes, chimpanzees, lions, leopards and killer whales – to name just a few. Such disagreements are known as lumper–splitter debates: those arguing for fewer categories are the lumpers, while those arguing for more are the splitters.2 Sometimes, scientists even disagree about whether two animals belong to the same species. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean the concept of species has been dismantled.
Further evidence against Rutherford’s made-up claim can be found in the writings of those distinguished scientists who refuse to toe the line on the non-existence of race. Richard Dawkins has stated, “Social construct”? Forget it. Race is biologically real”. Likewise, Steven Pinker has stated, “Every geneticist knows that the “Race doesn’t exist” dogma is a convenient PC 1/4-truth.” And in answer to the question, “Are there human races?” Jerry Coyne has stated, “Yes. As we all know, there are morphologically different groups of people who live in different areas.” How does Rutherford deal with these kinds of statements? It’s not clear. When Noah asked him whether Dawkins is a “scientific racist”, he declined to answer.3
Rutherford: Genetics is the true metric of human similarity and differences, and when you look across the genomes of everyone on earth, you do see differences between people. People are not the same. And lots of those differences are geographically spaced. They’re local adaptations to where your ancestors evolved in relation to the sea or inland or diseases or a few other things. But what genetics showed is that the way that genetic differences cluster together does not meaningfully correspond with the way that we have decided that the races of humans are: that is, broadly, black people, meaning of recent African descent, East Asian people, meaning of East Asian descent, the people of the Americas and white Europeans. So we see those clusters because we’re a very visual species, and use those visual cues to characterise people. And culture for the last three or four hundred years has said: this is what science tells us; this is what our eyes tell us; so therefore races are biologically real. But genetics came along and said: our eyes are deceiving us because the true metric does not correspond with what we’ve decided race actually is.
Rutherford concedes that genetic differences between humans are “geographically spaced”. In fact, he has previously written that “geographical landmasses broadly align with the folk taxonomies of race”. And in his book How to Argue with a Racist, he wrote that the “structure [within our genomes] corresponds with land masses”. In other words, he believes that genetic structure “corresponds” to landmasses, and that landmasses “align” with folk taxonomies of race. So how can he claim, “The way that genetic differences cluster together does not meaningfully correspond with the way that we have decided that the races of humans are”? The man needs to get his story straight.
Genetics did not come along and show that our eyes are deceiving us. When genetic data are sampled from diverse populations and then subjected to cluster analysis, the resulting classification always picks out major geographic divisions – regardless of the value of K (the number of pre-specified clusters). Consulting the 2016 paper by David Reich and colleagues, we see that: K = 2 separates Africans from non-Africans; K = 4 separates Africans, West Eurasians, Australasians, and other non-Africans; and that K = 6 separates Africans, Amerindians, South Asians, West Eurasians, Australasians, and East Asians.4 Likewise, when cluster analysis is applied to genetic data from the United States, the resulting classification invariably demarcates the major self-identified racial groups, namely: blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics.5
Our eyes would be deceiving us if it turned out that, say, Swedes were more closely related to Papuans than to Norwegians, or that Chinese were more closely related to Bantus than to Koreans. But this is plainly not what genetics shows. Sure, some laypeople mistakenly assume that Aboriginal Australians are closely related to Africans because both groups have dark skin. But this kind of error is the exception rather than the rule. Even albinos, who lack skin pigmentation, are easily recognisable as white, "black” or East Asian.
Rutherford: The concept of race, we refer to it as a social construct, which means that it is a set of characterisations, categories, that we have decided by consensus, and by usage, are real. It’s not biologically meaningful. So when your typical garden-variety scientific racist talks about a race, I don’t really know what they’re talking about. Are black people a race? Well, as a social construction, yeah. But actually, we know from genetics that there is more genetic diversity, i.e., more genetic differences, between people on the African continent than there are between people on the African continent and the rest of the world, right.
When someone says, “Donald Trump is a white guy”, Rutherford doesn’t really know what they’re talking about? Come on, this is getting ridiculous. Practically all biological categories have fuzzy boundaries, including the category of species. This doesn’t mean we throw out perfectly useful terms and demand that people reel off a list of qualifications every time they utter a statement. Rutherford knows exactly what “Donald Trump is a white guy” means. Indeed, he goes on to refer to “African Americans”, and “white Europeans”, which are just politically correct synonyms for “blacks” and “whites”. And “blacks” is arguably more accurate than “African American”, since some African Americans like Elon Musk are white.
As for the claim that there’s more genetic diversity among Africans than there is between Africans and non-Africans, this is true but largely irrelevant. The reason there’s more genetic diversity among Africans is simply that there were population bottlenecks/founder effects during the “Out of Africa” migrations, which reduced genetic diversity among the ancestors of non-Africans. Indeed, the genetic diversity that Rutherford’s referring to is a largely a function of ancestral population size; it is not an index of population structure. Of course, there is population structure among Africans. But the high genetic diversity among Africans is present within each African subpopulation.
Rutherford: Being African American, 40 million African Americans, who mostly are descended from four or five countries on the west coast of Africa, as a result of trans-Atlantic slavery. Over the course of that forced mixing, from their different location origins and then subsequent mixing all over the country of America, including lots of, we call it introgression, but basically it means sex from other people, meaning white Europeans, the African American genome is a thing that is very different from your typical African genome. And the African genome itself is much more biologically diverse than anyone else’s genome on the planet. So when you say “black people as a race”, it is a biologically meaningless thing to say.
As we already noted, the claim about African genetic diversity is true but irrelevant. Rutherford’s other claim is essentially that black people can’t be considered a race because many Americans have mixed ancestry (e.g., one white grandparent and three black grandparents). Of course, the very notion of mixed ancestry presupposes that there are “ancestral populations” or races from which the mixed ancestry derives. But, yes, race is somewhat “socially constructed” in that a person with a given amount of African ancestry might be considered “black” in one context and “mulatto” in another. However, this no more undermines the concept of race than the existence of different age groups undermines the concept of getting older. Here’s what the scientist Neil Risch told an interviewer back in 2005:
Rutherford: It’s not a taboo because it’s a subject we’re desperate to talk about but we’re “not allowed to” because of the mysterious forces or self-censorship. It’s because no one gives a fuck about this stuff because it was disproved thirty or forty years ago. I’m a lecturer at UCL just round the corner and I teach genetics and society, and I teach the history of eugenics, and the history of scientific racism. We’re not not talking about it because its taboo. We are talking about it because it’s a historical subject. It has no relevance to most aspects of human genetics today.
This may be Rutherford’s most preposterous claim of all. There’s no taboo against race realism and hereditarianism? Then why do he and his comrades insist on using the intentionally pejorative term “scientific racism”? Why did they feel the need to go undercover and “expose” us as part of the “far right”? Why publish yet another lazy hit piece if “no one gives a fuck about this stuff”? Incidentally, the assertion that “it was disproved thirty or forty years ago” is rather amusing as it’s a perfect illustration of something Steve Sailer likes to say about hereditarianism: “most pundits assume it has already been utterly disproven… but they just can’t quite remember the name of the guy who did it.”
As a matter of fact, there is overwhelming empirical evidence of a taboo against hereditarianism. Naturally, Rutherford ignores all of it. Noah and Michael Woodley have identified numerous cases in which intelligence researchers were sanctioned for work they did or statements they made about group differences in IQ. They’ve also assembled quotations from various academics testifying to the existence of the taboo. For example, a 2013 article in the journal Nature assigned the subject of ‘intelligence’ the taboo level “HIGH”, and the subject of ‘race’ the taboo level “VERY HIGH”.
Bryan Pesta and colleagues recently asked a sample of Americans to rate the “tabooness” of 33 contentious scientific topics, and found that the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap was the single most taboo topic. Likewise, Cory Clark and colleagues asked a sample of academics to say, for each of 10 contentious scientific statements, how much “scholars should be discouraged from testing the veracity of this statement”. They found that the level of discouragement was greatest for the statement, “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores”.
Nearly all the points we have made in this article have been made before, including by us. Why are we going over them again? The undercover investigation of Aporia and the Human Diversity Foundation, a blatant violation of journalistic ethics, represents a new low for opponents of “race science” (i.e., science). Not satisfied with having made the relevant research impossible to do in academia, they are now attempting to prevent it being done outside of academia too. It’s therefore more important than ever to correct falsehoods and misrepresentations of our work.
Noah Carl and Bo Winegard are the Editors of Aporia.
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Nathan Cofnas illustrates this point well by drawing an analogy to language. He writes:
There are no objective or unambiguous criteria that say where one language begins and another one ends. Languages combine to form creoles, they borrow words and grammar from each other, and diverge in more or less subtle ways. Exactly how far into the hills of Appalachia do you need to go before hillbilly twang becomes its own dialect? Is Austrian German the same language as German? South Koreans use thousands of loan words from English. Do they speak the same language as North Koreans? The way we answer these questions is influenced by politics, culture, context, and personal preferences. Yet the concepts of “language” and “dialect” are still meaningful, and they refer to patterns of differences that exist in the real world. To say that Mandarin and English are different languages is a perfectly legitimate statement.
The classification that emerges when K = 5 is often highly similar to the one Blumenbach proposed at the end of the 18th century.
“Hispanics” is a population of mixed ancestry, while “Asians” refers to both South Asians and East Asians, who fall into different continental clusters.
I already came up with the language analogy in discussions with people who insist that there is no biological variation.
Black men have higher rates of prostate cancer than white men.
Extra money should be spent on screening black men.
Why should black men die so that Adam Rutherford can feel proud of not being a racist?
To me the real issue here is “denialism”, and the ensuing required effort to maintain such against observable reality. In short, we won’t accept the differences in IQ (and certain behavioral characteristics) among the races, so we heretofore explained those differences in environmental ways. Those “theories” were shown one after another to fail explain inherent differences until at last such efforts have simply been abandoned in favor of DEI. Standards are lowered across the board and in most all institutions to meet DEI demands.
DEI is not only the latest “thing”, but perhaps the most pernicious of them all. It serves to simply ignore differences and promote mediocrity over meritocracy. In a society of generally declining IQ, with a public school system on life support attempting to “educate” our newly diverse population, how much more can society absorb before the “Critical Fraction” reaches its limit? Not much I think.