How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality

by Adam Rutherford

to the majority of us who are not classical scholars, the assumption of whiteness of the ancient Greeks stems from ancient statues that we see today as pure marble white, but which were brightly painted in their time. In contrast, most depictions of people on ancient pottery are monotone black, though no one assumes that this meant that Greeks were dark skinned.

When even higher resolution genetic mapping was applied to the people of Britain in 2015, families who had lived in Devon for multiple generations could be distinguished from the people of Cornwall, and when these precise differences were plotted on a map the boundary was the River Tamar, which for centuries has effectively been the county line. When the same technique was applied to the Iberian Peninsula in 2019, it showed vertical stripes of similarity, revealing that Spain’s history meant that people are fractionally but measurably more similar in a north–south axis than they are east to west. Are they functionally different? Of course not, it’s simply that we have become so good at identifying the genetic histories of populations that we can pick up these wispy, diaphanous traces of similarity and difference. We could eventually cluster all humans into 7 billion individuals, because every human genome is unique.

Humans suffer universally from a syndrome that Richard Dawkins called the ‘tyranny of the discontinuous mind’. We yearn to categorise things and fail to recognise continuity. We strain to put things into discrete boxes, and define things by what they are rather than what they do.

That historical monogenist view is now known to be correct in principle, but wrong in every detail. Homo sapiens is a creature whose origins are in Africa. There were dispersals out of Africa and into Eurasia in the last 210,000 years that petered out, and those people leave no genetic legacy in living humans, as far as we can tell.* The main emigration from the true motherland occurred around 70,000 years ago, and these people, maybe numbering only a few thousand, would form the population from which the rest of the world would primarily be drawn. This is evident in the bones of our ancestors, and in our living genomes. But let’s be clear on the messiness and timescales we are talking about here. Out of Africa was not an ‘event’ as we think of it, nor was it a migration in modern terms either. The rate of passage is over thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, and indeed we have genetic evidence of back migration within the last few thousand years too. So while a population was established in a previously uninhabited location, that is not to say the gate closed behind them. They were not setting out to conquer a promised land, just meandering over generations, on average, away from the continent of Africa.

So here is the baseline: all humans share almost all of their DNA, a fact that betrays our recent origins from Africa. The genetic differences between us, small though they are, account for much, but not all, of the physical variation we see or can assess. The diaspora from Africa around 70,000 years ago and continual migration and mixing since, means that we can see that there is structure within the genomes that underlies our basic biology. Very broadly, that structure corresponds with land masses, but within those groups there is huge variation, and at the edges and within these groups, there is continuity of variation. Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds. Genetics refuses to comply with these artificial and superficial categories. Skin colour, while being the most obvious difference between people, is a very bad proxy for the total amount of similarity or difference between individuals and between populations. Racial differences are skin deep.

There is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world. What this means is that there are many more points of genetic difference between Africans, than between Africans and anyone else in the world – two San people from different tribes in southern Africa will be more different from each other in their genes than a Briton, a Sri Lankan and a Māori. And there is more diversity in pigmentation in Africa than in the rest of the world too. Only in the last few years have researchers begun to study the genetics of African skin, which is somewhat ironic given that five centuries of racism have been almost entirely based on it.

Tupac rapped that the darker the flesh, the deeper the roots. That alas is not correct. The idea that we were ancestrally dark skinned before diversifying as we crept around the globe is now known to be incorrect. Not only were we diverse in our skin colour long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin colour before we were our own species.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin colour 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. Our view of reality, so profoundly limited, has been co-opted into a deliberate political lie. We say ‘black’ when what we mean is ‘recently descended from a continent that has more genetic diversity and pigmentation diversity than anywhere else on Earth’.

It is never clear what is being threatened when, for example, white supremacists express fear of the demise of Western culture. I don’t know what Western culture is, because it’s very clear to me that my culture is not the same as the culture of other people in my street, postcode, city, country or continent.

Family trees coalesce with startling speed. The last common ancestors of all people with longstanding European ancestries lived only 600 years ago – meaning that if we could draw a perfect complete family tree for all Europeans, at least one branch on each tree would pass through a single person who lived around 1400 CE. This person would appear on all our family trees, as would all of their ancestors. The fact that multiple positions are occupied by the same people indicates that the notion of a tree is again not the most accurate metaphor for describing genealogy: trees only ever branch, but family trees contain loops. Your own pedigree rises from you like a tree, but sooner or later two of those branches will collide in a person from whom you are descended twice. These people sit atop genealogical loops.

Much is made of establishing celebrity in your tangled thicket, and royalty even more so. In 2016, on the popular television programme Who Do You Think You Are?, British actor Danny Dyer discovered that he was twenty-two generations directly descended from the fourteenth-century British king Edward III. While few of us can establish this with genealogical records such as births, deaths and marriages, according to my calculations,* the chances of anyone with longstanding British ancestry being similarly descended from Edward III is effectively 100 per cent. It is true for Danny Dyer, and it is true for the majority of British people too. Go back a few centuries further and we reach a mathematical certainty referred to as the genetic isopoint. This is the time in history when the entire population is the ancestor of the entire contemporary population today. For the people of Europe, the isopoint occurs in the tenth century. In other words, if you were alive in the tenth century in Europe, and you have European descendants alive today, then you are the ancestor of all Europeans alive today (we estimate that up to 80 per cent of the population of tenth-century Europe has living descendants). Another way to think of it is like this: one branch of a family tree of two first cousins crosses in a shared grandparent; one branch of all European family trees cross through one individual in 1400 CE; at the isopoint, all branches of all family trees cross through all people for that po...

the global isopoint – the year in which the population of the Earth were the ancestors of everyone living today. This, astonishingly, comes out at around 3,400 years ago. Everyone alive today is descended from all of the global population in the fourteenth century BCE.

People have moved around the world throughout history and had sex wherever and whenever they could. Sometimes these are big moves in short times. More often people are largely static over a few generations, and that can feel like a geographical and cultural anchor. Nevertheless, every Nazi has Jewish ancestors. Every white supremacist has Middle Eastern ancestors. Every racist has African, Indian, Chinese, Native American, aboriginal Australian ancestors, as well as everyone else, and not just in the sense that humankind is an African species in deep prehistory, but at a minimum from classical times, and probably much more recently. Racial purity is a pure fantasy. For humans, there are no purebloods, only mongrels enriched by the blood of multitudes.

there is much more genetic diversity within Africa than in the rest of the world put together, which means that people within Africa are on average more different to each other than anyone else on Earth is to each other. This is a reflection of the Out of Africa population being small, and therefore not representative of the people whence they came. Only a small proportion of people left Africa to become the pool from whom the rest of the world would be drawn.

Geological history and the history of humans pays little mind to the transience of borders and governments. In Britain, we respect the rule of law, and our colonial past means that the evolution of citizenship is complicated by a history of empire. But if you are a British citizen, you are entitled to a British passport, which legally, technically and actually makes you British. This is a non-negotiable fact. The presentation of arguments based on who are ‘real Britons’, or the ‘indigenous people of Britain’ is an ahistorical, non-scientific smokescreen to hide racism.

There is another further confounding point when it comes to DNA. Basic biology tells us that we inherit half of our genome from our mothers and half from our fathers. This is a truth universally acknowledged for all humans through time:* a new whole genome is forged at the conception of a child. But the process of genetic shuffling that occurs in the formation of sperm and egg guarantees that each one of those two cells is unique and carries a unique half genome (therefore a unique half is lost in subsequent generations, should that sperm or egg be successful). Which means that not the same half gets transferred each generation. Over the generations, descendants begin to shed the DNA of their actual ancestors. The amount that vanishes is cumulatively huge: you carry DNA from only half of your ancestors eleven generations back. Genealogy and genetic genealogy are not perfectly matched, and progressively grow apart as we go back in time. It is therefore possible that you are genetically unrelated to people from whom you are actually descended as recently as the middle of the eighteenth century. This is a point that further undermines the appropriation of genetics as a means of asserting membership of a tribe, race or other identity.

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.

Two or three centuries is not a very long time in evolutionary terms, and arguably not enough time for these genes to become fixed in a mixed population as a result of deliberate selection. Indeed, one 2014 study of the DNA of 29,141 living African Americans showed categorically no signs of selection across the whole genome for any trait, in the time since their ancestors were taken from their African homelands. Breeding programmes by slave owners did occur, but not uniformly or consistently. Furthermore, there were different types of slaves in America, what Malcolm X termed ‘field negros’ and ‘house niggers’ for whom physical strength would have not necessarily been a selective advantage. Furthermore, the economics of slavery were not a uniform industry to be served by one type of human chattel. Tobacco cultivation dominated much of agriculture in the south, but eventually gave way to cotton farming in many areas, which was far less labour intensive, and highly skilled. Powerful workers would not necessarily have been quintessentially important. I am unaware of any breeding programmes specifically for speed.

As we are invariably discovering in modern genetics, genes have many effects, and rarely can single attributes be ascribed to them.

Just as ACTN3 is not a speed gene, ACE is not an endurance gene. These simplistic reductions of biochemistry betray not just the complexities of their roles in the body, but how much or little we know about those functions. ‘Necessary but not sufficient’ is a phrase that geneticists like to use a lot.

There is no reason to suppose that the variants of both ACE and ACTN3 that form part of the foundations of elite athletic ability are unique to Africa or recent African descent. Are fast twitch muscles cells more common in sprinters? Yes. Are they more common in West African people? Possibly. Are they more common in African Americans? Maybe a bit. Are they unique to African people? No. Does the RR allele of ACTN3 or the II allele of ACE make you run faster? No: in elite athletes, they appear to be necessary but not sufficient for athletic success. The difference in regionally mediated success is culture. The utter dominance of Finnish long-distance runners in the first half of the twentieth century ended because the culture of running dissolved. The current dominance of Kenyans and Ethiopians in long-distance running, and descendants of the enslaved in the Americas in sprinting, is because they have cultures and icons of total supremacy.

innate levels of intelligence are highly heritable. Tabula rasa – the idea that we are born with a blank slate on which our abilities and personalities are drawn – is not correct. And we’ve known this for decades. 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 per cent and 60 per cent. That means that roughly half of 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 incompletely written at conception with the DNA of your forebears.

The great revelation of the Human Genome Project was that we don’t have very many protein-coding genes; fewer than a water flea, a roundworm or a banana. The count for human genes comes in at around 20,000 (depending on how you define them). This meant that the traditional model held by many geneticists of ‘one gene for one trait’ fell apart at the seams. Instead, for the last fifteen years or so we’ve been building a new model of how genetics works in us, and part of that revelation is that single genes frequently do many things in the body at different times. Genes work in networks and cascades and hierarchies. And so for traits that can be summarised in a simple metric – height, eye or skin colour – what we find via GWAS is that a handful, dozens or even hundreds of genes play a small but cumulative role.

IQ is a single number, but intelligence is not a single thing, and the genetic component to intelligence is most emphatically not a single gene. The most recent studies identify scores of genetic variants that correlate en masse with better results in cognitive tests. These differences are in genes that we all have, and the cumulative variance appears to be the thing that correlates with performances in tests. The number of genes involved is likely to go up as the resolution of the genome gets sharper and the sample sizes get bigger. I would be unsurprised if the number of genetic variants that associate with cognitive abilities hits the high hundreds if not thousands.

It might seem odd that a geneticist should want to downplay the significance of genes, but the fact is that we are social beings who have offloaded so much of our behaviour from our bodily hardware to our cultural software, and nowhere is this more apparent than in our intelligence. There is no secret truth waiting to be revealed, no grand conspiracy of silence from geneticists. People are born different, with different innate capabilities and potential. 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, the answers lie not in DNA, but in culture.