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

by Adam Rutherford

All it took was the officer’s own silence and weight.

We know that some early humans migrated into Asia and Europe within the last quarter of a million years, but their dominion outside of Africa was temporary, and they probably leave no descendants today. Around seventy thousand years ago another group of people drifted away from Africa, and the process of setting down new roots all over this planet began.

In contrast, the governments of the US, Sweden, Nazi Germany, and other countries had active eugenics policies that resulted in the forced sterilizations and deaths of millions.

The earliest references to Ethiopia are in The Iliad and The Odyssey—the word itself is a compression of aitho and ops: “burnt” and “face.”

It is far easier to sell the case for occupation and enslavement if you are persuaded that the indigenous people are different, have different origins, and are qualitatively inferior to colonists.

Every one of these ideas though must be considered in the cultural context and time in which it was authored. All are by European men being exposed to the peoples of the world as a result of expanded trade routes, colonialization, and empire building, and in many cases the conquering and enslavement of the people they encountered. The invention of race occurs in an era of exploration, exploitation, and plunder, an era when the othering of people from colonies extended to actual human zoos.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it’s a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.

“Go back to where you come from,” someone told me on Twitter last year, and I did indeed drive up the highway to Ipswich to visit my folks for the weekend.

The American Nazi Party asserts that they are not White supremacists, merely separatists. They also specifically want to ban modern art and rap music. So it goes.

In science we look to Occam’s razor (or scientific parsimony) to understand phenomena, the concept that the best hypothesis is the one that requires the fewest assumptions.

Our brains are large for our body size, but that ratio is much greater in ants and shrews.

Alice is sixteen, and is four times older than Ben; how old will Alice be when Ben is half her age?

you have the potential to be a Formula 1 champion. It is easier to measure something than to understand what it is you are measuring.

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.

Migrations from the Middle East and into central Europe seem to play a significant role in the development of Ashkenazi as a distinct cultural group within Judaism, especially into southern Germany, Italy, and France; in some of those places during medieval times, there was compulsory wearing of the yellow badge to identify Jews. Expulsions from those countries and Britain also contributed to the pushing of Ashkenazi Jews east, into Poland and Prussia. These centers of Jewish populations were relatively stable and would form the basis for the majority of the six million Jews systematically murdered during the Holocaust.

There may well be evolutionary and psychological reasons for these prejudices, such as to protect ourselves and kin from invaders who want to kill us and take our stuff.