Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

knowledge is not just an honest account of what we know, but has to be seen as something manipulated by those who happen to hold power when it is written.

Fairly soon after it was found to be modern-day Europeans who have the closer association to Neanderthals – not, as it turned out, Aboriginal Australians – the image of the Neanderthal underwent a dramatic makeover. When their remains were first discovered in 1856, the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel had suggested naming them ‘Homo stupidus’. But in the twenty-first century, these same Neanderthals, the dictionary definition of simple-minded, loutish, uncivilised thugs, have become oddly rehabilitated.

Each nation utilised the idea of race in its own ways, marrying it with science if it could be of use. Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics.

This conceptual loophole in population genetics – the fact that we’re all different as individuals but that there is also some apparent order to this diversity – is what has since been seized upon by people with racist agendas. Gannett calls it ‘statistical racism’.