Superior summary

We like to think of science as involving an impartial search for objective truths about the world. But the people doing science – that is, scientists – are just regular human beings. And that means they, like all of us, are influenced by their preexisting biases.

For example, consider the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, famed for creating the popular system of categorizing living organisms. Linnaeus believed that, like flowers and animals, humans, too, could be divided into categories according to their physical appearance.

The atrocities of eugenics seem unthinkable now, part of a distant and shameful past. But race science didn’t just disappear in the wake of the Holocaust. The US state of Indiana only repealed its involuntary sterilization law in 1974. A similar law was repealed in Japan as recently as 1996.

Despite eugenics’ enduring legacies, most people did turn their backs on race science immediately after World War II. Suddenly, race scientists found their papers being rejected by mainstream scientific journals. Anthropologists began to reexamine and discredit the former science of race. And in 1949, a group of scientists and politicians formed the organization UNESCO to fight racism and emphasize unity among all humans. 

It was 1960, and race scientist Reginald Ruggles Gates was sick of his papers being rejected by mainstream science journals. So he thought, why not just publish them himself?

Gates decided to form a journal called the Mankind Quarterly, along with a former Nazi scientist and a British eugenicist. Although the Mankind Quarterly pretended to present genuine science, whatever “evidence” it gave was ultimately used to make political arguments.

Anthropologist Jonathan Marks was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998, when he received an interesting email in his inbox. The sender was Steve Sailer, a science journalist and writer for the conservative publication National Review. He was writing to invite Marks to an email list for scientists and other intellectuals where they could share information about human differences.

A few years prior, Marks had written a textbook on race, genes, and culture. It was called Human Biodiversity. To Marks, the term biodiversity signified the celebration of differences within the natural world, including cultural variation between human societies. But to Sailer and many of the other people on the email list, biodiversity meant something completely different – and much more ominous.

In 1903, archaeologists unearthed a skeleton they called the Cheddar Man in Cheddar Gorge, in Somerset, England. Upon the skeleton’s discovery, archaeologists immediately began guessing what he may have looked like. They determined that he was short, with curly hair, and that he’d enjoyed a good diet. Reconstructions portrayed him with white skin and rosy cheeks. 

But a shock wave ran through the English public in 2018, when scientists discovered that, actually, the Cheddar Man’s bones carried genetic signatures of dark skin pigmentation. This discovery wasn’t at all surprising to archaeologists, but it caused a major disturbance to many British people’s conception of their own identity.

The Bajau people are a Southeast Asian nomadic population who live most of their lives on boats. They gather food by free-diving, so they need to be able to hold their breath underwater for long periods. How do they do that? Well, studies have shown that the Bajau appear to have much larger spleens than most people, which allows them to regulate their blood-oxygen levels better.

The Bajau possess a clear biological characteristic that helps them survive in their particular environment. If that’s true, then who’s to say that some populations haven’t similarly evolved cognitive differences, like greater intelligence?

You’re probably already somewhat familiar with the Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel, whose experiments breeding pea plants kickstarted the science of genetics. But you might not know that Mendel’s work has had an enormous – and largely negative – impact on the study of race.

According to Mendel’s experiments, the environment in which a person – or a pea plant – grows up hardly matters at all. Instead, every organism is just a product of its genes. But there’s a dilemma here, because Mendel bred his peas in a perfect environment, choosing only the best specimens with which to carry out his work. Real life, of course, is far from perfect, and regular pea breeders could never create perfect Mendelian hybrids.