Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SUPERIOR – The Return of Race Science”, by Angela Saini (Harper/Collins, 4^th Estate, $NZ36:99)

In Superior – The Return of Race Science, Angela Saini, a British citizen of Indian parentage, has produced an urgent and timely polemic. Oxford-educated, Saini has a clear and simple thesis. In the age of Donald Trump and the rise of race-based populism in many parts of the world, there has been a covert return to “race science” – the flawed and essentially unscientific attempt to “prove”, by genetic studies, that different sections of the human family have different abilities, different types of cognition and (especially) different levels of intelligence. Therefore, the argument runs, there can never be real equality between peoples because some parts of the human race are “superior” and some “inferior”.

This quest is fuelled by the desire to feel that one’s own clan is more important than any other: “Every society that happens to be dominant comes to think of itself as the best, deep down.” (Prologue, p.6) Countering this, Saini argues that all attempts to produce such a genetic hierarchy are a chimera. Nobody has ever proven scientifically that there is, with regard to innate ability and intelligence, a hierarchy of groups in the human family. But “Race is the counter-argument. Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as in outward appearance.” (Prologue, p.7) For Saini, “race” is a social construct, based on the observation of skin colour, customs and traditions. It is not a biological category.

This argument is so simple and forthright that I will now shamelessly take up most of this notice by simply summarising, chapter by chapter, what Saini says.

After her prologue she details how (Chapter 1) we human beings all, irrefutably, have our origins in the Great African Rift, hundreds of thousands of years ago. We are all the same species with the same origin, and this is the conclusion of mainstream science even if there are still a few outliers who believe that different human groups originated separately. Indeed recently there has been an attempt to modify the truth of our common origins by claiming, in the system of thought known as “multi-regionalism”, that after our common origin, different groups of human beings separated and evolved in different ways, producing “superior” and “inferior” groups.  But after this opening, Saini segues abruptly into tales of the most inhumane denials of our common humanity. There was, for example, in the 19^th and early 20^th century, the refusal of British settlers in Australia to accept that Aborigines were fully human and hence a programme that amounted to genocide.

She notes a contradiction in 18^th century Enlightenment thinking even before the “science” of race emerged: “While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many, including French philosopher Voltaire and Scottish philosopher David Hume, saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites.” (Chap. 1, p.25) She notes, too, that archaeological studies in the 19^th century buttressed these attitudes: “English biologist Thomas Huxley, a champion of the work of Charles Darwin, described the skulls of Australians as being ‘wonderfully near’ those of the ‘degraded type of Neanderthal.’ ” (Chap.2, p.29)

She then sets out (Chapter 2) to show how “race science” emerged.  Before anyone knew about genetics, the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus was, in the 1750s, attempting to set out his systematisation of nature. He decided there were four categories of human being “respectively corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and each easy to spot by colours: red, white, yellow and black.” (Chap.2, p.47) Although there was no scientific underpinning for this categorisation – apart from superficial observation of skin-colour – Linnaeus’ categories became the template into which later European scientists attempted to force their evidence.

In this period, in Europe, human zoos abounded in which non-Europeans were displayed in enclosures as if they were a different species. It was the existence of slavery on an industrial scale that really drove the will to believe that non-Europeans were innately inferior to Europeans. To admit the equality of peoples would be to undercut the whole rationale of slavery – so some means had to be found to “prove” the inferiority of others, especially Africans. Not that all proponents of racial hierarchies were necessarily conscious of this motive, or even approving of slavery. Saini notes: “Darwin, even though he made such a bold and original contribution to the idea of racial unity, also seemed to be unembarrassed by his belief in the evolutionary hierarchy. Men were above women, and white races were above others.” (Chap. 2, p.56) Likewise, “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Huxley went further down this path, seeing the emancipation of slaves as a morally good thing, but never believing that equal rights among races were biologically reasonable. (Chap. 2, p.57) By this stage, ideologically-driven non-scientist amateurs, such as the French aristocrat Gobineau, began to propose theories of white supremacy.

Enter (Chapter 3) Mendel’s perfectly legitimate science of genetics and heredity. This was rapidly misused to buttress claims of human inequality. And so began the bogus “science” of eugenics – the idea that some peoples were worthy of survival, some were not, and selective breeding should weed out the unworthy. Enter Francis Galton, the relative of Darwin who invented the phrase “survival of the fittest” and applied it to current society – “social Darwinism” in other words. Galton and his followers wanted to “breed out” flaws in their own human group, restrict reproduction among the poorer and less-educated classes of their own society, and restrict immigration by people from other human groups. The pioneers or birth control and family planning were fully on board with this essentially racist plan.

Take, for example, Marie Stopes, Britain’s first major advocate of birth control: “To support her first clinic, Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. Philosopher Bertrand Russell, too, suggested that the state might improve the health of the population by fining the ‘wrong’ type of people for giving birth.” (Chap.3, p.75) Take also the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany (renamed the Max Planck Institute after the Second World War). From the late 19^th century to 1945, this body of eminent German scientists took for granted a “eugenic” approach to the science of genetics, and hence laid the groundwork for much Nazi ideology. Take, too, the tightening of American immigration laws in the early 20^th century, to exclude Chinese, but also to exclude “inferior” European peoples such as Russian Jews, Greeks and Italians. For it is one of the ironies of race-based eugenics that once you start categorising human beings by race, your catergorisation will never end. If Europeans were superior to all other peoples then, apparently, some European groups were also superior to other European groups. So began the mythology of the Nordic or Germanic superman, the blue-eyed “blonde beast”, so superior to those olive-coloured, brown-eyed Latins. In 1916, this nonsense was propounded in a poisonous book The Passing of a Great Race by the American non-scientist Madison Grant. A young Adolf Hitler called Grant’s book his “bible”.

Some people will argue, correctly, that such modes of thinking were “not real science” – but it has to be understood that, “real science” or not,  a eugenic approach to genetics was mainstream thinking among biologists and geneticists right up to the 1950s.

This pattern of thinking was wonderful for people who now wanted to justify their right to rule over other peoples in the vast British and French and Dutch and German and other empires. It was also wonderful for people who didn’t want to extend social welfare to the poor in their own society. After all, if the poor are innately inferior to the rich, then there is no point in giving them assistance, is there? Better to apply the Malthusian idea of telling them to stop breeding.

There was a widespred refusal to admit that apparent inequalities between human groups were really the product of such things as diet, wealth and poverty, education, traditions – in other words cultural rather than biological factors. From the mid-19^th century to the mid-20^th century was the heyday of eugenics. Again and again scientists attempted to find some definitive genetic “proof” that different races had different abilities or levels of intelligence. Again and again they failed, because no such proof exists. But still the efforts persisted, so powerful was that template of different races.

After the Holocaust, and after the most brutal demonstration of where theories of the inequality of races could lead, eugenics lost much of its hold. But as Angela Saini explains: “the shift didn’t happen abruptly. The Eugenics Record Office on Gower Street in London survived all the way through the war. There is still a Galton Professor of Genetics at University College London, funded by money Francis Galton left behind. What was the Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute in 1989. In 2016, the institute established the Artemis Trust, which according to its own promotional leaflet, handed to me at a conference, distributes grants of up to 15,000 pounds, partly with the aim of assisting in the provision of fertility control, and particularly to those from ‘poorer communities’.” (Chap.3, p.83) Under pretence of being philanthropists, let’s stop those smelly poor people from breeding.

Post-1945 (Chapter 4), overt eugenics faded, and new United Nations organizations such as UNESCO stated specifically that all human beings were of the same origin. Race was now more commonly seen as a matter for sociologists to study rather than biologists or geneticists. Even so, some of the old eugenic scientists persisted with their arguments. One of the most notorious examples Saini gives is the highly-honoured Professor Reginald Ruggles Gates, who thought the new consensus was a betrayal of “real” science and who was one of the people who set up, and contributed to, the periodical Mankind Quarterly. It was financed by a trust-fund created by an American anti-integrationist at the time when Civil Rights for African-Americans were being discussed. To the raspberries of most scientific journals, it continued to claim that genetics supported the idea of the inferiority and superiority of separate races.

Moving from this, Saini discusses (Chapter 5) existing networks of far-right thinkers, in academe and elsewhere, who continue to support such ideas, overtly or covertly, and who regard themselves as “race realists”. Inevitably she discusses the notorious 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein (neither of them a biologist or geneticist). From a selective battery of very flawed IQ tests, the book argued that African-Americans succeed academically at lower rates than other ethnic groups because they are biologically of lesser intelligence. We may like to think that few “real” scientists accepted this argument – and indeed few did. The book was roundly debunked in many scientific journals. But, as Saini notes, there are some real and highly-esteemed scientists, such as one of the first decoders of DNA, James Watson, who hold profoundly racist views. And such view proliferate in an age of mass immigration, both in Europe and in America.

She further argues (Chap.6) that some apparently benign scientific endeavours were seen by many as introducing a resurgence of eugenics by stealth. Her major exhibit is is the Human Genome Diversity Project. It was devised by people who wanted to show that there was more diversity within human groups (e.g. Chinese) than there was between human groups (e.g. between Chinese and Peruvians). But the project was not received well by indigenous peoples who had previously been subjected to “tests” by eugenicists trying to show their innate inferiority. There was some resistance to giving data to the project… and some rebarbative scientists did indeed use emerging data to reinforce views of biological human inequality.

As immigration has become a larger issue in recent years, there has also been an anxious attempt to assert persisting national identities. Saini examines (Chapter 6) the furore caused in Britain by the unearthing (in 2003) of “Cheddar Man”, dating from tens of thousands of years ago and apparently Britain’s oldest surviving human skeleton. Genetic tests suggested that “Cheddar Man” probably had dark – even black – skin. At once there was an uproar from the likes of the Daily Mail, implying that crafty scientists were robbing Britain of its white heritage. This ignores the obvious fact that, after our common origin in Africa’s Great Rift, successive human migrations over millennia meant the frequent mixing and re-mixing of different groups. It is indeed quite possible that, tens of thousands of years ago, many inhabitants of what is now Britain had dark skins. But this challenges the common myth, held in many countries, that ancient migration created fixed and immutable human “types”.

And so we come (Chapter 7) to “origin stories” – the stories we tell to explain where our own particular people came from. Once, such tales were found in mythology. Now, there are often attempts to cloak them in pseudo-science, always relying on a strict selection of available data to “prove” a certain conclusion. Saini cites the “Solutrean” hypothesis. This is the theory, based on very little archaeological evidence indeed, that there was once a dominant white race in the Americas which was progressively driven out, in very ancient times, by hordes of non-white invaders. What is the true aim of such a theory (which is, naturally, rejected by the overwhleming majoity of archaeologists)? It is to justify the fact that white Europeans who came to America settled there by conquering, and often slaughtering, existing Native American populations. If we can say white people were here first, we can say we have a natural right to this land, right? An obvious comparison can be made with Nazis who cherry-picked very little archaeological evidence to teach that “Aryans” (who apparently made pottery with swastika designs on them) were the first real settlers of northern Europe.

Such claims sometimes appeal to genes – to “race science”. Saini is quite clear about this – it is an international phenomenon, not confined to Europeans. She notes that in both China and Russia, there are institutions dedicated to “proving” that Chinese (or Russians) have unique genetic features, separating them from the rest of the human race and hence proving their superiority. Similarly, in India, with the rise of Hindu supremacism in recent general elections, there is a strong drive to suggest that Indians had quite different biological origins from the rest of humanity. This goes hand-in-hand with the push to rebrand only Hindu history is real Indian history. Alas, unscientific ideas posing as science are now a global thing.

Inevitably, then, Saini has to consider (Chapter 9) the matter of “caste” in India as an essentially racist issue; and also the matter of IQ tests and how much they have been a major tool for eugenicists and other racists. IQ tests have frequently been used to suggest innate disparities in intelligence between different ethnic groups. But geneticists themselves have come to understand that, while there are genetic differences in intelligence within ethnic groups (between a genius and an “intellectually-challenged” person, for example), heredity has little to do with levels of intelligence in the general population. Even when they are not culturally loaded, IQ tests simply measure the background, culture and level of education of individuals. In other words, IQ tests tells us about culture, not genes.

Giving at length a similar common category error, Saini (Chapter 9) shows how some statisticians came up with the idea that African-Americans were innately more prone to hypertension than other groups in Amerca. On this assumption, drugs for hypertension were marketed specifically to black communities. It was found that while African-Americans did indeed suffer from higher frequency of hypertension, so did some specific European groups, such as Finns. The common factor wasn’t genes but diet – more particularly, the higher consumption of salt-filled foods by both Finns and African-Americans. It was not innate and it was not a matrer of genes, but a matter of diet. Similar claims have been made about the frequence of stress and of schizophrenia in certain ethnic groups. Always they can be traced more certainly to social factors, such as poverty and adjustment to new environments, than to biological factors.

In her last chapter and in her afterword, therefore, Saini sums up by condemning “biological determinists” and again reasserting the falsity of “race science” in attempting to find a genetic basis for human inequality.

If you have made it thus far in my verbose summary of this book, you will realise that I endorse Saini’s arguments and consider this book an excellent riposte to one form of racism.

However, I will conclude with two minor reservations.

(i.) Does ‘race’ exist or does it not? I agree with Saini’s argument that the category of ‘race’ is popularly defined by superficial things such as skin colour, eye shape, quality of hair (straight or crinkly etc.) and body shape. But there is absolutely no real scientific evidence to differentiate human groups in terms of intelligence, competence and brain-power in general. If there are such differences, they are due to social factors and not to biology. Having said all this, however, can one totally dispose of the term ‘race’, as Saini seems to do? I am not endorsing ideas of inferiority or superiority, but even the superficial differences are realities, and ‘race’ still seems a reasonable shorthand for them.

(ii.) Although she is on the side of the angels, I think Saini underplays the malign but enduring attraction of eugenics [under other names] to some people. True, she does describe eugenics thus: “Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. It also assumes that almost all that we are is decided before we are born.” (Chap.3, p.71) But she mentions only in passing Marie Stopes and the connection between eugenics and racism, and the founders, on both sides of the Atlantic, of family planning and Planned Parenthood. Stopes was an ardent eugenicist, in the 1930s offering Hitler advice on how to dispose of  “unwanted” human beings such as the mentally “unfit” and the chronically ill. (Incidentally, although Saini mentions the eugenicist Professor Reginald Ruggles Gates, she fails to note that he was Stopes’ first husband.)  In America, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, had similar ideas, and proposed compulsory sterilisation. I am fully aware that one much-circulated photo of Sanger addressing a Ku Klux Klan meeting is a fake – but nevertheless, Sanger’s deeply racist ideas are well-documented. And then, unmentioned by Saini, there is the much-esteemed biologist Julian Huxley (brother of the novelist Aldous; grandson of Darwin’s “bulldog” Thomas). I give shelf-space to Julian Huxley’s Essays of a Humanist and to his two-volume autobiography Memories. Julian Huxley was the first director of UNESCO, which officially repudiated “race science”, but I find his works bristling with the same old eugenics garbage. His Galton Lecture of 1962, “Eugenics in Evolutionary Perspective” asserts  that “it is theoretically inconceivable that such marked physical differences as still persist between the main racial groups should not be accompanied by genetic differences in temperament and mental capacities, possibly of considerable extent.” In the same essay he is still promoting the sterilisation [albeit voluntary] of the poor who are over-breeding. As for his Memories, he devotes a page to telling us what fine and saintly people Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, whom he knew personally, were in promoting the cause of birth control.

Fewer of them and more of us – yep, the old eugenics daydream still has legs.