{"id":"5efeed3d6cee070006cebf1c","slug":"superior-en","title":"Superior","audio_url":"https://hls.blinkist.io/bibs/5efeed3d6cee070006cebf1c/5efeed3d6cee070006cebf1e-T1593765639.m4a?Expires=1642798362&Signature=NQ2pMKYtGxb~~2Xz48kSm91yWeWBeST3Ea2ssxwljuPiSuDLAzcfPrwqZSHus0s5y0jxindWEbvOzCU3o1FalgUYcsUergJNYxKxwlucpT7y35OiT2kaasjkpBHHj9pgqlptn7mefgtXVgc-9Luj6kRYUjEpVMFFaSjDNpyHwZjfRNlkSOYNK4Ehp6dLEw010vb7UmgLr8pcHxzSJXgakF6T4CFKitt9yAy1yvqF3yH6Yz9p13C8pDSGd9QLhMVDJpBeEJN6T0AFEIBtxwWKVXDV5bX1Y-zs-ALV~609ixPykVQdd9PSIwXAMFnWqOBGA2hrKldknL2wyVZMg3rpmw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJXJM6BB7FFZXUB4A","chapters":[{"id":"5efeed3d6cee070006cebf1e","title":"The study of archaeology can easily play into racist beliefs.","text":"

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?

"},{"id":"5efeed3d6cee070006cebf1f","title":"Racism often disguises itself as science.","text":"

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.

However, Linnaeus didn’t just classify people based on their skin tones. His system quickly devolved into a hierarchy, with the ranking of different human “types” based on preexisting notions of superiority. For instance, Linnaeus described indigenous Americans not only as “red,” but also “subjugated,” as if this were a defining and intrinsic characteristic. In this way, throughout history, science has been used to justify racism and bias.

The key message here is: Racism often disguises itself as science.

It’s no secret that during the period of European colonization, people had strong beliefs about which races were superior and which were inferior. In order to justify and prove their theories, many people turned to biology. If some races were, in fact, biologically inferior, that would mean the colonizers had every right to subjugate them.

In the nineteenth century, for instance, an American medical doctor named Samuel Cartwright wrote on a condition he called “drapetomania.” This “disease” supposedly gave enslaved black people the desire to run away. Their nature was to be enslaved, he thought – therefore, their desire to escape must be a disease. This pseudoscience was used to justify black people’s continued oppression and enslavement.

As new scientific theories came to the forefront, racism adapted. It borrowed ideas from Darwin’s theory of evolution and gave rise to a new “science”: eugenics, or the idea that humans can be bred selectively to display particularly desirable traits like attractiveness or intelligence.

Far from always having been considered an abhorrent pseudoscience, eugenics spent a good deal of time in the mainstream spotlight. Beginning in London, it eventually wormed its way into several corners of the globe, including Nazi Germany, where Jewish people and other minorities were systematically rounded up and killed in the name of perpetuating a “pure” Aryan race. And in the United States, eugenics inspired laws allowing the involuntary sterilization of criminals, people with mental illnesses, and those of low socioeconomic status.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf20","title":"Race science has largely been discredited, but some still cling to it.","text":"

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.

Time and again, the former science of race was proven wrong. Yet it still lives on in the dark corners of the world.

The key message here is: Race science has largely been discredited, but some still cling to it.

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began to dismantle the old myths about race. In 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montagu argued that all humans were, in fact, mostly genetically identical. He was finally proven right in 1972, when a landmark paper by geneticist Richard Lewontin explained that there is actually more genetic diversity within groups than there is between them. A more recent study in 2002 confirmed Lewontin’s deductions.

According to genetics professor Mark Jobling, 85 percent of human genetic diversity would be retained even if a global catastrophe wiped out Earth’s entire population aside from the people of one particular country. This is because Homo sapiens is a relatively new species, so we’re all closely related, genetically speaking.

Moreover, populations look different from one another due to environmental adaptations combined with the founder effect, which meant our ancestors took certain characteristics with them as they migrated.

Even so, there were – and still are – those who couldn’t accept the idea that major biological differences between racial groups didn’t exist. After World War II, race scientists had to couch their research in new terms – for instance, the study of blood types and their geographical distribution, which became a hot topic in the 1960s. Not all scientists studying blood type were racists, but at least some of them were searching for a biological basis for race, hidden in the blood.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf21","title":"Race science lives on today as “race realism.”","text":"

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 questionable science in the Mankind Quarterly was all but disregarded by respected, mainstream journals and scientists. Yet those writing for the Mankind Quarterly – which is still being published today – and others like them have branded themselves “race realists” to make it seem like their side is the one supported by scientific facts.

The key message here is: Race science lives on today as “race realism.”

The Mankind Quarterly is generally only circulated in the dark corners of the internet. Yet contributors to the journal have still made their way into the mainstream.

One example is Jared Taylor, a known white supremacist whose organization, the American Renaissance Foundation, is a gathering place for racists, neo-Nazis, and eugenicists. At their conferences, they repeatedly refer to themselves as “race realists” to suggest that they aren’t racist – they’re just apolitical, unbiased truth-tellers.

Jared Taylor isn’t a known name only in white supremacist circles. Hillary Clinton actually called him out in a television ad during her 2016 presidential campaign as an example of the kinds of people who supported her rival, Donald Trump.

As Taylor’s example shows, white nationalists have felt increasingly emboldened to come out of the shadows in recent years. There is a growing subset of people who claim to rail against “political correctness,” and, in 2017, a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of one woman and the injury of several other individuals.

According to anthropologist Jonathan Marks, race science still exists because some people – largely people on the right side of the political spectrum – still fund research on race with the goal of establishing policies that reinforce inequality. They aim to make their policy recommendations sound reasonable by using science as the justification. And they conflate the words “race” and “culture,” because they know that most people don’t accept biological race – but they do accept the existence of cultural differences. Ultimately, “race realists” are trying to create barriers to social justice where, in fact, there are none.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf22","title":"The vocabulary of race science evolves.","text":"

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.

Members of Sailer’s mailing list were using the term biodiversity to reference supposed internal differences among human population groups. To them, human biodiversity was just a new way of talking about race science – and it wasn’t the only term that came to be used this way.

The key message here is: The vocabulary of race science evolves.

In 1991, the Human Genome Project was launched in an attempt to sequence the entire length of human DNA. Simultaneously, an Italian geneticist named Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza – an avowed liberal and antiracist – launched the Human Genome Diversity Project to identify genetic variation among human population groups.

Cavalli-Sforza didn’t believe there were firm genetic boundaries among human groups. Nevertheless, he was fascinated by the fact that, statistically, certain genes do occur more frequently in certain populations than in others. To figure out why, Cavalli-Sforza wanted to study people in geographically isolated populations – populations whose members hadn’t often mixed with outsiders.

Cavalli-Sforza’s stated goal in mapping out these genetic patterns was to counter racial myths, but the project still had a ring of nineteenth-century race science. The word “population” had replaced “race.” And “racial difference” had become “human variation.” The terms had changed, but people still wondered how, exactly, this project was going to inspire unity rather than encourage division.

To racists, it doesn’t matter what the differences between people are. And it doesn’t matter which terms are used to describe those differences. What matters is that there are differences. If we’re to modernize the conversation around race, we need to resist the urge to categorize and separate people in the first place, even in our language.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf23","title":"Race tells us a story about our identity – one that can become dangerous.","text":"

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 key message here is: Race tells us a story about our identity – one that can become dangerous.

Our modern ideas of race are deeply connected to physical appearance. But genetic studies of long-dead humans show that our ancestors looked quite different from the way we do today – and that they looked even more different from each other.

Nowadays, we think of Europeans as having the lightest skin, but Southern African San hunter-gatherers, for example, have the oldest genetic lineage in the world and also had light skin. That means not only that light skin existed in the genome before migrations to Europe, but that people with dark skin also occupied Europe.

Often, many of us have a hard time digesting the idea that our modern notions of our identities might not be backed up by historical fact. This can easily become dangerous when we try to adjust history to fit our current narrative.

In 2018, in India, Hindu politicians formed a committee whose goal was literally to rewrite history. School curricula have been changed to fit the narrative that the stories in ancient Hindu texts are fact rather than myth. Meanwhile, Indian archaeologists have been instructed to find evidence for the places, people, and events within these myths – things like demons and elephant gods. Geneticists, too, have been co-opted into this mission. And when the facts don’t fit the narrative, the scientists are regarded as intellectual threats.

In this environment of religious nationalism, all sorts of atrocities can be justified, including the persecution of religious minorities. In one of the worst cases, in 2018, two government ministers threw their support behind two Hindu men accused of kidnapping, gang-raping, and murdering a young Muslim girl.

This is a horrific example of what can happen when humans falsely believe themselves to be descended from greatness.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf24","title":"Environmental factors, rather than genetics, are the strongest determiners of IQ.","text":"

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?

The study of racial differences in IQ is one of the most divisive issues in psychology today. Both globally and within any given country, there do appear to be gaps in IQ test performance among different populations. But these “intelligence gaps” can be explained almost entirely by environmental factors.

The key message here is: Environmental factors, rather than genetics, are the strongest determiners of IQ.

In the twentieth century, scientists conducted a few studies that examined population-level differences in intelligence and whether or not these differences are heritable.

In 1979, for example, Thomas Bouchard studied twins who had been raised separately at birth. He estimated that 70 percent of the twins’ differences in IQ were genetically predetermined, and only 30 percent were down to environmental factors like the schools the children attended or their families’ affluence.

Racists have latched on to studies like Bouchard’s for decades as proof that some groups are naturally more intelligent than others. But recent science tells us that parents’ IQ scores only account for 15 percent of the variance in their children’s IQ scores. Plus, a person’s environment also has a massive impact on intelligence.

In the United States specifically, studies repeatedly show that black Americans are significantly less advantaged than white Americans, both economically and socially. In 1986, a study looked at black children who had been adopted into middle-class families. The ones who’d been adopted into white families had IQs 13 points higher than those adopted into black families. Clearly, social and economic advantages, which, in the United States, are predominantly conferred on whites, are enough to affect IQ.

Rather than race, it seems that socioeconomic status has a greater influence on IQ than anything else. This is particularly apparent in the United Kingdom. There, being white is by no means a disadvantage. Still, it’s working-class white boys who achieve the lowest IQ scores.

"},{"id":"5efeed3e6cee070006cebf25","title":"Genetic determinism still plays an exaggerated role in health care and biology.","text":"

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.

Although scientists now realize the flaws in Mendel’s experiments and deductions, many still retain a faint belief in genetic determinism – the idea that, essentially, we are our genes.

The key message here is: Genetic determinism still plays an exaggerated role in health care and biology.

All of the facts tell us that race has no basis in biology, yet people still cling to genetic determinism. This is particularly true when it comes to health care.

Take the mental disorder schizophrenia. In the United Kingdom, schizophrenia has been described as a “black disease,” since people of black Caribbean ancestry receive disproportionately more diagnoses of it than others. In 2014, a study of more than 37,000 cases of schizophrenia did reveal a few genetic regions that could increase a person’s risk of developing the disorder – but only by a quarter of one percent.

Other diseases, too, are misperceived as “belonging” to one race or another, when the real cause is environmental factors associated with that race.

One example is hypertension, a condition that, in the United States, is twice as common among black Americans as it is among everyone else. But that’s not because hypertension is a “black” disease – in fact, people living in Africa have the lowest rates of hypertension in the world. Instead, hypertension in black Americans is probably related to diet, or perhaps to the unique stresses of being black in the United States.

Nowadays, people are reluctant to give up the idea that health is biologically determined. It’s an alluring theory, since it would mean that society isn’t at fault for the condition of certain groups – it’s all just people’s genetics. But as a society, we need to diagnose and treat the real problem: racism, bias, and our insatiable need to categorize people.

"},{"id":"5efeed3f6cee070006cebf26","title":"Final summary","text":"

The key message in these blinks:

The science of race began in full force around the time of the Enlightenment and stayed within the mainstream until after World War II, when eugenics, in part, fueled the Holocaust. Despite all the proof that race science is largely based on shoddy evidence and ignores widely accepted theories, it has continued to live on in subtle ways. Race might give us an identity or help us feel connected to the place our ancestors came from – but it isn’t a biological category, and we’d do well to remember that.

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We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with Superior as the subject line and share your thoughts!

What to read next: Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King

As you’ve learned in these blinks, biological race is, by and large, a total myth. Yet race-related pseudoscience still has numerous proponents.

The twentieth century saw the first major challenges to race science. Many of these came from a renegade group of anthropologists, which included Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neal Hurston – yes, the same woman who wrote the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God! Find out how these and other researchers disproved the old theories of race and reshaped our understanding of it in our blinks to Gods of the Upper Air.

"}]}

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