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Name: Superior
Rating: 4.2 (55 reviews)
Author: Angela Saini

Angela Saini

The Return of Race Science

4.2 (55 ratings)

28 mins

Topics

Anthropology Class

Table of Contents

Superior
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Investigate the history of race science and debunk the myths surrounding it.

When you enter a large museum like the Met in New York or the British Museum in London, which section do you head to first?

If you’re like the author, you probably go straight for the area where you can find your ancestors represented – so, for her, the Indian galleries. If you’re Chinese, perhaps you dash to see the artifacts from the Tang dynasty. And if you’re Greek, you might hurry to gaze at the Athenian marble statues.

For many, museums are places we go to find ourselves, to feel connected to wherever we or our ancestors came from. But why, exactly, are we always looking for our origins? And why do our origins seem so intimately connected to our race?

The most accurate and up-to-date science tells us that race is no more than a social construct; it’s language and culture, not biology. But that hasn’t stopped us – or scientists – from trying to find a biological basis for it over the years. Follow along as these blinks trace the history of race science – all while debunking the myths that have kept it alive.

A quick warning: blink 6 contains a graphic description of sexual violence and murder. Please take care.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how Carl Linnaeus classified human beings;
what’s really behind IQ gaps; and
how Hindu politicians are rewriting history.

The study of archaeology can easily play into racist beliefs.

Forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens weren’t the only human-like creatures roaming the planet. There were also the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and Homo erectus. But only we, Homo sapiens, ultimately survived. That means there must be something special about us – right?

We’d like to believe so. Even scientists often can’t resist referring to Homo sapiens as “better,” “faster,” or “superior” compared to other human-like species – despite the blurry boundary separating us.

The belief that Homo sapiens is a superior species set the stage for a more sinister thesis: that within Homo sapiens there are superior and inferior races. Are some races more “human” than others? Throughout history, countless people, from ancient Egyptians to sixteenth-century European colonizers, have believed the answer is yes. And archaeologists have plumbed humanity’s origins for proof.

The key message here is: The study of archaeology can easily play into racist beliefs.

In the West and in Africa, the most widely accepted origin theory for Homo sapiens is the out of Africa hypothesis. It states that all humans can trace their ancestry back to Africa, and that some people began migrating to other parts of the world around 100,000 years ago.

Of course, not all academics agree with this theory. In China, for instance, the multiregional hypothesis is commonly accepted by both scientists and the public. People who back this theory don’t think all humans originally migrated from Africa – instead, they believe they descended from ancestors who evolved in different parts of the world.

All of this theorizing could be taken as an innocent investigation into humanity’s past – but it isn’t.

During the Enlightenment, white Europeans set the first standard for what it meant to be a member of Homo sapiens. Philosophers reinforced the idea that humans were the superior species, and the earliest archaeologists focused their studies primarily on European fossils. As Europeans colonized the world, they came across indigenous populations that didn’t exactly match European standards for humanity. And the colonizers used this to justify the brutal subjugation of those populations.

Theories like the multiregional hypothesis hearken back to Enlightenment science; they easily play into the idea that some “types” of humans are superior to others. But we’ll probably never determine the exact origin story of humanity. Together, we as a society have decided that everyone is human and deserving of individual rights – so why isn’t that enough?

Racism often disguises itself as science.

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.

Race science has largely been discredited, but some still cling to it.

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.

Race science lives on today as “race realism.”

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.

The vocabulary of race science evolves.

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.

Race tells us a story about our identity – one that can become dangerous.

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.

Environmental factors, rather than genetics, are the strongest determiners of IQ.

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?

Genetic determinism still plays an exaggerated role in health care and biology.

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.

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What is Superior about?

Superior (2019) tracks the history of race science, from its origins in the Enlightenment to its hidden – but growing – presence in the twenty-first century. The uncomfortable truth is that science is not always apolitical, and the theory of biological race lives on in subtle ways, despite the mounting evidence against it. Groups of people might look, sound, and do things differently – but genetically, we’re very much the same.

Best quote from Superior

Race is a story we tell ourselves. –Richard Cooper

—Angela Saini

Who should read Superior?

Students of human biology, genetics, and anthropology
Anyone searching for the truth about the science of race
People of color and those considered minorities

About the Author

Angela Saini is an award-winning British journalist and BBC radio presenter. In 2009 she was named the European Young Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers, and in 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Gold Award. She has written two other critically acclaimed books – Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, the latter of which was named the Physics World Book of the Year in 2017.

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