How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (and Don't) Say About Human Difference

by Adam Rutherford

Genetic ancestry tests may be fun but, in my opinion, mostly offer nothing much more than a gaudy bauble. You are not your genes, and you are not your ancestors. Most of your ancestry is lost, and can never be recovered. We can be clear on this with absolute certainty: You are descended from multitudes, from all around the world, from people you think you know, and from more you know nothing about. You will have no meaningful genetic link to many of them. These are the facts of biology.

Although it is only in the last forty years that Black men have achieved total dominance in the hundred meters, underlying racist sentiments about the physicality of Black athletes are much older. In 1936, James Cleveland Owens (better known as Jesse on account of his Alabama pronunciation of his initials) carved out one of the greatest athletic achievements of all time by winning Olympic gold in the hundred meters, two hundred meters, four-by-one-hundred-meter relay, and the long jump.

That a Black woman is a true great is partially a reflection of the lowering of prejudice and raising of opportunity in the modern era. By being one of the greatest tennis players of all time, just as Usain Bolt is the fastest runner ever recorded, they are already wonderfully freakish outliers and poor representatives of normal humans. Are they outliers genetically?

The point is this: Elite sprinters in the Olympics are not a dataset on which a statistician could draw any satisfactory conclusion. Yet it is precisely the data on which an extremely popular stereotype is based. The idea of Black athleticism in sprinting is drawn from a hugely skewed and fatally flawed sample, one that, owing to the relative absence of West African sprinters, doesn’t even support its own hypothesis.

None of the numbers makes a great deal of sense if biological race is your guiding principle, and patterns in relation to ethnicity are terribly inconsistent both between sports and within them. And while there is uneven distribution of the R allele in different populations, this does not match the makeup of elite athletes in different sports.

There is a real danger here of fetishizing two genes out of twenty thousand, in a way that steers us back toward an essentialist view of racialized sport. Many studies have shown that the versions of ACTN3 and ACE we see in African American and African athletes are far from unique, and a 2014 study concluded that they “do not seem to fully explain the success of these athletes. It seems unlikely that Africa is producing unique genotypes that cannot be found in other parts of the world.”

They found that a biological basis of race was a common theme in describing sporting success. In comparing references to success by Black and White athletes, they found that innate physical ability was typical in descriptions of Black athletes and intellectual prowess or industriousness was the most frequently referenced criterion for success in Whites. The fixation on individual genes in the analysis of athletic success says inherent biology, not effort, is the mediator of success. Our cultural biases clearly say “Black brawn and White brains.”

Some have attempted to justify the absence of Black people in swimming by asserting that they have denser bones, and therefore are not as buoyant. For this there is no evidence, and yes, it is as ludicrous as it sounds, but it is such a persistent idea that it has been said to me by Black friends. A year before Jimmy Snyder offered his biological essentialist explanation of sprinters’ success in 1988, another sports presenter, the former baseball player Al Campanis, asserted on the popular US program Nightline that Black people’s lack of representation in swimming was “because they don’t have the buoyancy.” Like Snyder, Campanis was sacked the next day.

The real-world consequence of this structural and cultural racism is that the death rate from drowning in African American children aged five to fourteen is three times higher than for White children. Racism is literally lethal.

With such limited data, these positions are quite untenable. As well as entertainment, sport is a celebration of the extremes of human capabilities. To reduce it to mere unearned biology is racism, whether conscious or not. In return for their pursuit of greatness, we owe elite athletes more deserving praise than auspicious ancestry.

Admittedly, that’s not a very sophisticated analysis, but there are many serious detractors of IQ, and those criticisms come in many forms, with varying degrees of sturdiness. Common arguments against IQ include the notion that the tests are culturally biased, or that they lack appreciation of practical intelligence or creativity.

IQ testing in the US in the first half of the twentieth century was applied as part of the assessment for state eugenics policies, which resulted in the forced sterilization of more than sixty thousand people.

Intelligence is highly heritable. That is a seemingly simple sentence to say, but in those four words is some of the hardest and most misunderstood science that we have yet attempted. Broadly it means that a significant proportion of the difference we see between people is accounted for by DNA.

Estimates vary depending on the study, but the proportion of cognitive abilities that can be attributed to genetics rather than other things is somewhere between 40 percent and 60 percent. That means that roughly half the differences we see are due to differences in DNA. These are not particularly new findings, nor are they very controversial: The slate is not blank—it is partially written at conception with the DNA of our forbears.

We often use books as analogies to understand genetics—letters, words, sentences, coherent meaning, these are all things that are conceptually shared in both biology and literature. But the truth is that at this level of complexity in human genetics, no analogy can convey the richness of the data, nor the number crunching required to take it apart forensically.

So when we see different IQ scores in different populations, and we know that the heritability of intelligence is high (more than 50 percent), that doesn’t mean necessarily that the different DNA variants account for the differences between the populations. It would be perfectly possible for two populations with different sets of genetic differences to get the same IQ scores.

All human behavior is a heady mix of genes and culture, of biology and history. Not enough is known about genetics or cognitive abilities to make definitive statements about evolutionary selection for genes that enhance the most sophisticated and elegant expressions of humankind.

Adaptationism is an error because in many cases it results in untestable hypotheses, but ones that are appealing because they sound superficially convincing—Blacks are good sprinters because of selection during slavery; Jews are intellectually gifted because their history of persecution enriched genes associated with brains.

Genetics, race, intelligence: Marrying these three concepts fails to deliver satisfactory answers. Nor do they overlap in an informative way: Genetic variation in people does not tally with the folk descriptions of race; populations, countries, and continents do vary enormously in average IQ scores, but a genetic explanation struggles to account for the differences; intelligence is heritable, but we have a poor understanding of the genetics that underlies cognitive performance.

How these abilities cluster within and between populations is not easily explained by fundamental biology, by genetics. Instead, when digging into the data as best as we can, we find the answers not in DNA but in culture.

The dominance of skin color as a racial classifier is based on historical pseudoscience primarily invented during the years of European empire building and colonial expansion.

We see broad geographical clustering of people and populations on the basis of sampled genetic markers, but the borders are fuzzy and continuous.

Concepts of racial purity are ahistorical and pseudoscientific. People move and reproduce with great vigor, and admixture between different and previously separate populations is the norm. That is why humans are so successful.

Genetic differences between populations do not account for differences in academic, intellectual, musical, or sporting per...

People fixated on finding biological bases for racial differences appear more interested in the racism than the science. Arguments in online social media seem to involve people for whom demonstrations of genetic or behavioral differences being evidence for racial categories are the absorbing passion of their lives; these are people who are invigorated by animosity. This is a difficult landscape to navigate, because the vast majority of scientists abandoned the scientific validity of race many years ago, and as a result, very few people in genetics study questions specifically of race. Only the fixated remain, as if they have some secret knowledge that we have been suppressing for reasons of ideology.

In physics, the structure of most of the cosmos is unknown, and when dark matter is found in the next few years, our universe will quake. But of the millions of questions that remain about the biological nature of humans, race is not one that is particularly outstanding. Yet because of the social implications of politics, people, history, and power, it remains a defining topic of our age.

But nobody’s perfect. It is also important to recognize though that while the data should be neutral in principle, it almost never is. As long as humans design experiments, log data, and perform analyses, science is subject to being clotted with prejudice either explicit or unknown to the scientist themselves.

The sweet irony is that the whole science of human genetics was founded by racists in a time of racism, and singularly has become the field that has demonstrated the scientific falsity of race. As a result, the foundations of racism cannot be drawn from science.

As we delve deeper into the data held in our DNA, we have an increasingly keen sense of the complexity of the relationship between the biological modes of inheritance and the input of the environment in which they play out. But the weight of evidence clearly says that real human variation does not correspond with traditional and colloquial descriptions of race.

But scientists are only a cog in the framework of structural racism that permeates our society. The small number of fringe researchers who continue to pursue a biological basis of race and the marginalized extremists in the form of White nationalists are foes worth confronting, because their voices can have the effect of normalizing racist attitudes among the wider public.

It is easier to fixate on one particular phenotype, such as skin color, or one individual gene, such as ACTN3, or one metric, such as IQ, and hang all your prejudices—conscious or otherwise—on them, rather than scrutinize the deeper reality. It is easier to apply “common sense” arguments, such as that slavery bred natural athletes, than recognize that life histories, evolution, and genetics are profoundly tricky to unpick. And it is certainly damnably easier to use new genetic techniques to see patterns in data that superficially reinforce stereotypes rather than apply fiendishly difficult statistics to show that they are not meaningful. All of these wretched traps are rooted in science, and demonstrate bad scientific practice, but they are views commonly held by people who are fixated on finding biological evidence to support their ideas about race.

It behooves us all to confront racism wherever we find it, especially when it is covert or normalized in stereotypes and myth, and science is a weapon in that contest. The academic and political activist Angela Davis said that “in a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

Hypothetically, if there were genetic differences between populations that we have not found yet, and these do correspond with the folk definitions of race, the fact that we have not found them means they are tiny at best.

Imagined differences between individuals and between populations have been used to justify the cruelest acts in our short history. Learned prejudices fuel bigotry, which will inevitably continue. What is important for science is that we recognize and study the reality of biological diversity in order to understand it, and consequently to undermine its bastardization.

Race is real because we perceive it. Racism is real because we enact it. Neither race nor racism has foundations in science. It is our duty to contest the warping of scientific research, especially if it is being used to justify prejudice. If you are a racist, then you are asking for a fight. But science is my ally, not yours, and your fight is not just with me, but with reality.