I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King Jr.
There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race – scientifically, anthropologically.
Toni Morrison
In 1895, the German anthropologist and philologist Gustaf Kossinna developed a theory that ethnicity can be defined by the material culture excavated from a site (“culture history theory”). He wrote, “Sharply defined archaeological cultural areas correspond unquestionably with the areas of particular people or tribes.” In short, a set of archaeological artifacts, a “culture,” was the sign of a unified ethnicity. His ideas were connected to the claim that Germanic peoples constitute a national identity with a historic right to the lands they once occupied.
Kossinna’s theories provided a convenient excuse for later Nazi annexations of lands in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Kossinna himself argued that Poland should be a part of the German empire. For this reason, he has often been referred to as the evil mastermind who built the ideological foundations for Nazism.[1]
The Nazis, as we know, went on to develop a bogus racial hierarchy, with the Nordic Arian races on top and the rest below according to a “sliding” scale. The idea that the Arian race not only was superior to others, but also that Jews and communists were an imminent threat to the Arian race was part of the nefarious message of Joseph Goebbels’ effective propaganda machine, also made popular by the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Ultimately, this is what “fueled” the genocide of millions of Jews and members of other “inferior” races.[2]
This is a cautionary tale of how easy is to coopt theories to serve our prejudices, interests, and base instincts (see Ideas 10 and 12, forthcoming). Understandably, given the horrors of the Holocaust and the massacre of civilians by the Nazis, in the years following the war Kossinna’s theories were widely dismissed as pseudoscience, and there was also wide reluctance among academics and intellectuals to talk about race or racial differences.
This was particularly the case in the US, which fought the Nazi aggression. Even today, as exemplified by the heated debates in school boards regarding the supposed teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12, discussing the issue of race in the classroom is still considered taboo. Indeed, biology textbooks used in American high schools do not go near the sensitive question of whether genetics can explain why African Americans lead the way in the echelons of sporting success, why a disproportionate number of American scientists are white or Asian, or why Jews feature so highly among Nobel Prize winners.
Avoiding discussion of human differences leaves a vacuum that is being readily filled by pseudoscience. For example, Michael Woodley, a British researcher affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, one of Belgium’s leading universities, claims there has been an IQ decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa. He has also co-written a book about the global decline of intelligence, stating a relationship between ethnicity and cognitive abilities. Despite his academic credentials, the works of Woodley, whose expertise is in plant ecology, are considered highly controversial by the academic community.
In one of his published articles, he argues that humans can be scientifically divided into subspecies, a cornerstone of white supremacist ideology. One table in which he compared humans with several animal species, including jaguars and leopards, was used in a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who on May 14, 2022, shot 13 people, most of them Black, killing 10. Theories like the one Woodley asserted are not different from other pseudoscientific attempts to justify slavery, colonialism and Nazism that have been rejected by contemporary mainstream academics.[3]
Let’s also talk about the alt-right, which promotes far-right ideologies, including white nationalism and antisemitism. Considered a fringe movement for years, the alt-right gained considerable attention and relevance during Trump’s presidential campaign. Those who disagree with alt-right ideologies may assume that the alt-right is merely spewing ignorant nonsense. This is certainly true for some of the alt-right. What is perhaps a more difficult truth is that many of the alt-right do, in fact, understand biology and genetics to an impressive extent, even if this understanding is flawed and misapplied. For example, alt-right proponents have stated, correctly, that many people with European and Asian descent have inherited 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals ancestors, and those of African descent do not have Neanderthal heritage. Similarly, they are correct that Neanderthals had larger skulls than humans. Based on these facts, some within the alt-right have claimed that Europeans and Asians have superior intelligence because they have inherited larger brains from their Neanderthal ancestors.
However, this claim ignores that while there is evidence for the effect of Neanderthal DNA on certain traits, there is no evidence for its effect on intelligence. In fact, scientific research indicates that Neanderthals were not necessarily more intelligent simply because they had larger skulls; humans may have contributed to their extinction because they were more successful hunters. Just like the Nazis, the alt-right cherry-picks the ideas that align with their preconceived notions of racial hierarchies, ignoring the broader context of the field of human genetics.
Unfortunately, many people are being persuaded by these pseudoscientific arguments. In a 2018 survey of 721 students from affluent, majority-white high schools, conducted by Dr Brian Donovan, an education researcher at the nonprofit BSCS Science Learning, one in five agreed with statements like “Members of one racial group are more ambitious than members of another racial group because of genetics.” In a more recent study by a team of sociologists. a similar percentage of white American adults attribute the black-white income gap to genetic differences. It seems belief in genetic causes of racial inequality remains widespread in the US.[4]
So, is there any biological basis for race?
Let’s try and look at this objectively. There are some obvious physical differences among human populations around the globe. We can observe patterns of visual traits, such as skin color, cranial, facial features, or hair type. On this basis, anthropologists have traditionally separated humans into five “racial” categories, although with some variations: African, Asian, European, Native American and Oceanian. Historically, these visual traits have determined to a great extent how a particular individual interacted with, or was accepted by, a social group or culture; the individual could be either easily integrated, discriminated, or even slaved by the group based on appearance. Even today, as anyone who experiences discrimination firsthand, or just watches the news is reminded every day, a person can be treated one way or another depending solely on the color of their skin.
The discovery of DNA in the 1950s and the recent mapping of the human genome opened the door for a more rigorous, precise analysis of human differences, beyond visual traits. In fact, genome analysis is now within the reach of the general population, thanks to companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. They provide “ancestry” information to the 0.1% level. But what does this tell us about biological race? Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents.
For example, in a 2002 landmark study, the Stanford geneticist Marc Feldman and his colleagues showed that by studying enough places in the genome – they analyzed 177 variable positions – it is possible to group most people in a worldwide population into clusters that correlate strongly to the popular categories of the five races described above.[5]
However, the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe. In the same study scientists examined the question of human diversity by looking at the distribution across seven major geographical regions of 4,000 alleles (alleles are the different “flavors” of a gene, e.g., all humans have the same genes that code for hair: the different alleles are why hair comes in all types of colors and textures). In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that most of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world.
If there are indeed separate racial or ethnic groups, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group, but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Therefore, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is a multitude of variation within races.
Many other studies show that what people perceive as differences between “races” do not have in fact a genetic basis. For example, at the time of writing this book, there is health disparity between black and white Americans. Compared with their white counterparts, African Americans are generally at higher risk for heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. For many years, researchers speculated that this could be due to some mysterious genetic component. However, multiple studies have shown that health disparities are better explained by environmental effects such as racism and income inequality than the DNA they inherited from ancestors.[6]
To avoid the loaded term “race” to discuss genetic differences among populations, scientists use the term “ancestry” instead. Some have claimed that ancestry is just a synonym or a euphemism for race, which is not the case. Ancestry refers to a line of descent, which can incorporate ancestors from different ethnic groups. For example, the ancestry of a person can be German, Egyptian, or even Cajun. Avoiding the term race does not preclude the existence of subtle differences in traits across populations. There are well-documented instances of genetic differences that gave evolutionary advantages to some populations. One example is the ability to digest milk in adulthood, conferred by genetic changes that occurred as recently as 3,000 years ago. These mutations conferred a huge selective advantage on their owners, enabling them to leave almost 10 times as many descendants as people without them (see also Idea 16, forthcoming).
There are other instances showing that natural selection can favor mutations in the population, offering survival or reproductive advantages. For example, it is well known that sickle cell anemia, a serious hereditary blood disease, occurs far more often in African Americans than in any other population in the US. The disease may had been favored by natural selection, which may sound counterintuitive. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.
In the 1940s in Africa the British-Indian scientist J. B. S. Haldane noticed that patients who had sickle cell anemia were more likely to survive malaria. Haldane hypothesized that these disorders had become common in these regions because natural selection had acted to increase the prevalence of traits that protect individuals from malaria (which kills 1.2 million people every year). Just a few years later, Haldane's “malaria hypothesis” was confirmed by researcher A. C. Allison, who demonstrated that the geographical distribution of the sickle-cell mutation in the beta hemoglobin gene (HBB) was limited to Africa and correlated with malaria endemicity.
To have a better idea how this works it is useful to understand the terms homozygous and heterozygous. Heterozygous refers to having inherited different forms of a particular gene from each parent. A heterozygous genotype stands in contrast to a homozygous genotype, where an individual inherits identical forms of a particular gene from each parent. In plant and animal breeding, such organisms can be called homozygotes and heterozygotes. Harmful genetic by-products can arise when a gene confers an advantage on possessors of one copy (heterozygotes or carriers), which outweighs the disadvantage it encumbers on possessors of two copies (homozygotes).[7] In the case of the sickle cell gene, prevalent in malaria-ridden parts of Africa, it leads to malaria resistance in heterozygotes but to anemia in homozygotes.
What about cognitive differences?
Human variety is endlessly fascinating. Genetic differences have been found for the ability to breathe easily at high altitudes and susceptibility to diseases. Some of these differences are the result of changes in a particular gene; that is, these traits are monogenic. Most traits, however, are polygenic; that is, governed by multiple genes. For example, height has been estimated to be modulated by as much as 4% of human allelic variation. Polygenic traits are expected to evolve differently from monogenic ones, through slight but coordinated shifts in the frequencies of a large numbers of alleles, each with mostly small effect.[8]
This makes the study of traits governed by multiple mutations challenging. Like height, cognitive abilities – the brain-based skills needed in acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information and reasoning – involve multiple genes. Could it be that there are genetic differences in cognitive traits across populations? This is considered a taboo question that many researchers, for the reasons we have discussed, are keen to avoid, and is also inherently difficult to answer.
In a 2016 study, researcher Daniel Benjamin and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations each of which has significant evidence of being more common in people with more years of education than in people with fewer years, even after taking into account factors such as heterogeneity in the study population. The study showed that, in the European ancestry population in which they carried out the study, it should be possible to build a genetic predictor in which the probability of completing 12 years of education is 96% for the twentieth of people with the highest prediction, compared to 17% for the lowest.
Could it be then that genetic variations have a direct effect on academic abilities, a proxy for cognitive abilities? This is not clear cut. An extensive study of people in Iceland showed that the same variations also increase the age at which a woman has her first child, which makes it easier for them to complete their education. This means that genetic differences may have an impact in number of years of education and cognitive abilities only indirectly, as other factors come into play.[9]
There are other studies that have examined a more direct link between genetics and cognitive traits. One study of more than 70,000 people found mutations in more than 20 genes that were significantly predictive of performance on intelligent test.[10] While it may be difficult to “disentangle” nature from nurture (see Idea 13), it is becoming clear that there are average genetic differences in behavioral and cognitive traits across human populations. The differences might be significant given the fast pace at which natural selection can operate on some human populations.
The Iceland study found that older Icelanders are different from younger ones in having a higher genetically predicted number of years of education. According to the researchers, this reflects natural selection over the last century against people with more predicted education, likely because of selection for people who began having children at a younger age.
The study of the genetic basis of cognitive differences can be a land mine for researchers. Most of the studies that have tried to establish a direct link between intelligence and natural selection across populations have been a target of harsh denunciation and controversy. For instance, let’s look at the fact that, as a group, Jews are well represented among Nobel Prize winners. During the 20th century, Jews made up less than 3% of the US population but won 27% of the US Nobel science prizes. They account for more than half of world chess champions. Could it be that natural selection favored higher intelligence in Jewish populations? And are we allowed to ask that “loaded” question?
In a 2005 paper, researchers from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah, noted that “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data.” Ashkenazi Jews are those who originated in Central and Eastern Europe, and include the likes of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Carl Sagan, and members of the US Supreme Court Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The paper claims that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazi Jews in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Additionally, the authors argue that mutant alleles causing genetic disorders such as Tay-Sachs – common in people of Ashkenazi descent that results in the destruction of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord – confer higher intelligence when present in carrier (or heterozygote) form and provided a selective advantage in the historical period when Jews were restricted to intellectual occupations.[11]
The paper makes a controversial but, in principle, valid hypotheses. For example, the argument that certain genetic disorders provided a selective advantage to the Ashkenazi is like the argument that natural selection favored the sickle cell gene among those of African ancestry because it offered an important selective advantage: protection against malaria. The evidence they provide to support their claim may not be too convincing, but it is testable; that is, the hypothesis can be falsified.[12] (See discussion on falsifiability in Idea 12, forthcoming.)
As far as I know, there have been no peer-reviewed studies trying to replicate or test the results, the normal process in science. In fact, critics considered the study flawed not because of its contents but because of its authors. One of them, Henry Harpending, who died in 2016, had a long track record of advancing racist anti-Black views in other contexts. The other author, Gregory Cochran, has also generated controversy by claiming that homosexuality is a disease.[13]
Given the fraught history of Jews, genes, and IQ, it is not hard to understand why the controversy engendered by this kind of studies is so intense. Witness how quickly ideas about Jewish intelligence transform into antisemitic conspiracies such as the ridiculous claim that wildfires are not caused by climate change but by “Jewish space lasers,” advanced by the US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green and her fellow QAnon conspiracists (see Idea 11).
There is also the question of lower intelligence. The notion that there are groups with “high” intelligence unavoidably leads to the belief that there are groups with “low” intelligence. Time and again arguments about Jewish achievement also seem to morph into efforts to paint others as inferior.
As many academics have feared, white supremacists have cherry-picked research to promote their nefarious race ideologies. For those reasons, we need to get the facts right and develop arguments to counteract their pseudoscience. There are several effective arguments and ideas that can be used to this effect:
1. As we saw, there is no evidence that the groups we call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races. As is usually the case, the person that claims that someone is “low IQ” just because he or she belongs to a different race is more likely the “dumb” one.
2. We are not talking about individual IQ scores, but averages. For instance, the average IQ of the Ashkenazi population has been estimated at 108 to 115, one-half to one standard deviation above the mean. This does not mean that all Ashkenazi Jews have a high IQ (see Box 5).
3. Most of today’s populations are not exclusive descendants of the populations that lived in the same locations thousands of years ago. We now know that the present-day structure of populations does not reflect the one that existed in ancient times. Instead, the current populations of the world are mixtures of highly divergent populations that no longer exist in unmixed form. For example, the first farmers of the Levant (Israel and Jordan) and Zagros Mountains (Iran) were strongly genetically differentiated, and each descended from local hunter-gatherers. By the time of the Bronze Age, about 5,000 years ago, these two populations had mixed with each other and with the hunter-gatherers of Europe to drastically reduce genetic differentiation. These farmers then spread to many other areas, including Europe and Southeast Asia.[14]
4. If anything, the mixing of the races has accelerated, especially in the US. While it has been only 20 years since the US Census Bureau first allowed Americans to choose more than one race on their census form, between 2000 and 2010 the number of white and black biracial Americans more than doubled, and the population of adults with a white and Asian background increased by 87%. The number of mixed-race Americans is increasing three times as fast as the population of the United States as a whole. If this trend continues, the term “minority” will be obsolete.[15]
5. Intelligence, as measured by standardized IQ tests, is more fluid than most people think. Consider the so-called Flynn Effect. This is named for psychologist James Flynn, who did much to document and promote awareness to the fact that IQ tests scores steadily increased in many parts of the world over the 20th century. For example, a 2009 study found that British children's average scores rose by 14 IQ points from 1942 to 2008 (about one standard deviation). Similar gains have been observed in many other countries in which IQ testing has long been widely used, including other European countries, Japan, and South Korea.[16] It is not clear what has prompted these steady increases in IQ scores. It is unlikely that this has been caused purely by natural selection given the short period span involved and the fact that the Flynn effect has occurred in many different environments and peoples. Some experts in the field of intelligence research have suggested four key causes: better health, better nutrition, more and better education, and rising standards of living. If any of these hypotheses is true, it means that environmental (non-genetic) factors play a key role in IQ differences.
Box 5: Let’s Talk Statistics
As statisticians have long known, small average differences can have big impacts on (high and low) outliers. For example, if we have two populations of the same size, and the average of Population B exceeds the average of Population A by 15 IQ points (one standard deviation), then among people with an IQ of 115 or higher the Bs will outnumber the As by a ratio of 3 to 1, but among people with an IQ of 140 or higher the B’s will outnumber the As by a ratio of 12 to 1, and for an IQ of 170 or higher by 80 to 1. Even if Population B were a fraction of the size of Population A to begin with, it would contribute a substantial proportion of the people who had the highest scores. This is shown in the figure below:
What all these shows is that rather than fixating on “racial” differences in IQ, we should instead focus on how to provide people with the means to thrive in our cognitively demanding society. Indeed, as we shall see (Idea 11), our collective inability to cope with complexity is one of the main drivers behind people’s belief in conspiracies.
Besides, more than IQ, it seems that a more important factor in achieving success in life is what the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “growth mindset”. She found that when students believed they can get smarter, and understood that effort makes them stronger, they put in extra time and effort, and that led to higher achievement. In contrast, those students that believed that they were not “smart enough” seemed devastated by even the smallest setback. [17]
To summarize: Differences but only one human race
Following the election of Barack Obama as president, there was hope that the US had become a post-racial society, free of racial prejudice and discrimination. However, the events of the last few years indicate the contrary: race remains an incendiary issue. In the 21st century, I would like to argue, discussions about race are distinct from those of the past in that they possess an entirely new dimension: that of genetics and DNA. As we saw, research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents— but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe.
As we also saw, the observation that most of the alleles in our genome are shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races. All the evidence, some of which I reviewed here, has shown that humans are fundamentally more similar than different from each other.
Unfortunately, scientific findings are actively misinterpreted and misused to further racist agendas of extreme political groups. Those who oppose the alt-right, and other racist entities, must arm themselves with the same weapons: education, namely scientific and genetic literacy.
I hope that the scientific information reviewed here can “arm” you to counter any of these extremists, wherever they might appear. I encourage you to deepen your understanding by consulting the sources quoted here, and to keep abreast of the literature as the knowledge pool keeps expanding through the efforts of hundreds of scientists. As we look forward to the new millennium, it becomes ever more important to understand what our DNA says about what it means to be human.
[1]Veit, Ulrich (2012). "Kossinna, Gustaf". In Silberman, Neil Asher (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Archaeology (2 ed.). Oxford University Press. [2]The extent to which “regular” German citizens participated willingly in the massacre of Jews and Slavs is a matter of debate. In his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the American writer Daniel Goldhagen argues that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were "willing executioners" in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent "eliminationist antisemitism" in German political culture. The book was well received in Germany and the USA but stoked controversy and debate, with some authors contending that the book is “profoundly flawed”. [3]“A Racist Researcher, Exposed by a Mass Shooting,” by Monika Pronczuk and Koba Ryckewaert, The New York Times, Jun 9, 2022. Also, Saini, A. (2019). Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press. [4]Both studies are described in “Can Biology Class Reduce Racism?”, by Amy Harmon, The Washington Post, Dec 7,2019. [5] Rosenberg, N. A. et al. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations”, Science 298 (2002): 2381-85. [6]See, e.g., “Genes Don't Cause Racial-Health Disparities, Society Does,” by Jason Silverstein, The Atlantic, Apr 13, 2015. [7]Hedrick, Philip W. (2012). What is the evidence for heterozygote advantage selection? Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 27 (12): 698–704. [8]In recent years, several methods have sought to detect selection on polygenic traits, including height. For instance, a 2012 analysis led by geneticist Joel Hirschhorn showed that natural selection is responsible for the shorter average height in southern Europeans compared to northern Europeans. Turchin, M. C. et al. (2012). Evidence of widespread selection on standing variation in Europe at height-associated SNPs. Nature Genetics, 44: 1015-19. [9]A. Komg et al.. (2017), Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment, Proceeding of the National Academy of Science of the USA 114: E727-32. [10]Sniekers S. et al, (2017), Genome-wide association meta-analysis of 78,308 individuals identifies new loci and genes influencing human intelligence, Nature Genetics: 1107-12. [11]Cochran G., Hardy J. & Harpending H. (2006). Natural history of Ashkenazi intelligence. Journal of Biosocial Science, 2006 Sep: 38(4): 659-93. [12]The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, proposes the following test: “compare the IQs in a large sample of sibling pairs, one of whom is a carrier of a disease gene, the other a non-carrier. If the carriers are not smarter, the hypothesis is wrong. The study could easily be done in Israel, with its centralized records of health care, education, and military service.” “Groups and Genes,” by Steven Pinker, The New Republic, Jun 26 2006. [13]See, “Henry Harpending.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 8 Jan 2022; Hopper, Judith (February 1998). “A New Germ Theory (Part Two)”. The Atlantic Monthly. pp. 41–53. Also, “The controversy over Bret Stephens’ Jewish genius column, explained: Inquiries into Jewish genes always seem to lead someplace ugly,” by Matthew Yglesia, Vox, Dec 30, 2019, [14]Lazirdis, I. et al. (2016) Genome insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East, Nature 536, 419-24. [15]“Pew: Multiracial population changing the face of the U.S.” by Frederick Kunkle, The Washington Post, Jun 11, 2015. [16]See, e.g., Flynn Effect, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect. [17] Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books.
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