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

by Adam Rutherford

Irish, Welsh and Scots like to claim Celtic genetic genealogy, despite the fact that ‘Celtic’ isn’t a coherent ancestral population, and cultural similarities betray the fact that according to the latest genetic data, those three groupings are frequently more similar to mainland English people than they are to each other.

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.

Science should be pure and straightforward, but people are not. We come to these questions with centuries of history behind us, much of which is unknown to most of us, but has influenced us in some way.