This Is What The New York Times Doesn't Want You To See

 

Race and Science

The race controversy engendered by the recent Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” represents only one front in this administration’s general antagonism against science, and against specialized knowledge more broadly. Science is being catastrophically defunded, its facilities and offices in the government are being shuttered, and the field of higher education is in a general uproar. Truth and sanity are always welcome, but they generally represent what science is providing, not what science needs to have imposed upon it by decree.

Biological anthropology, the study of our species and its origin, has had two watershed discoveries. In the 19^th century, we learned that our species is descended from earlier, extinct species similar to living apes. In the 20^th century, we learned that race and human variation are quite different things. 

By “race”, we generally mean the idea that the human species is composed of a fairly small number of fairly distinct kinds of people, each with their own inherent properties. It certainly seemed that way in the 1700s and 1800s. Over the course of the 20th century, however,  anthropology began to ask the question, what would the human species look like if we removed the lenses of race from our own eyes? Would we still see it? And if not, what would we see?

The answer has emerged gradually over the last few decades. Groups of people are differentiated from one another primarily culturally, in terms of their language, belief systems, personal adornment, traditions, knowledge, tastes, family relations, and all of the other things that cultural anthropologists began to study intensively in the early part of the 20^th century.

Now if you decided, for whatever reason, to focus only on biological distinctions, ignoring the primary dimension of human variation, what would you see? Actually, you would see that you can't make that distinction so readily, because so much of human biology is in fact strongly influenced by culture, from the shape of your head to your likelihood of dying from tuberculosis. Human bodies indeed absorb a great deal of the cultural world.

But suppose, however perversely, that you decide to ignore both cultural differentiation and bodily differentiation, and decide to focus exclusively on the human gene pool. Would you see race there? And if not, then what would you see? And the big discovery of human population genetics towards the end of the 20th century was that you don't see race; rather, you see nearly all detectable genetic variations nearly everywhere. Human genetic variation is primarily polymorphic and cosmopolitan. However it is measured, upwards of 85% of the detectable human genetic variation is variation within groups rather than between groups. That doesn't mean that there are no geographical patterns, of course.

So if we ignore the cultural variation, the bodily variation, and the primary, polymorphic, pattern of genetic variation, and we decide to focus only on genetic variation from group to group, what patterns do we find? Is race finally there? No, we find gradual change across geographical gradients, a pattern that genetic anthropologists describe as clinal. We find that people are similar to those nearby, and different from those far away – although even then, only in an ideal, non-urbanized, precolonial world.  The genetics of New York City is something else entirely.

If we ignore the cultural, the physical, the polymorphic and clinal genetic variation, then what is left? Do we finally uncover the primordial human divisions? No, we find that there are all kinds of interesting local genetic patterns in the human gene pool, with different cultural identities being associated with different genetic histories and with different probabilistic genetic risks at present. But those different genetic risks don’t map on to race: Pennsylvania Amish have their risks (polydactyly); Ashkenazi Jews have their risks (Tay-Sachs Disease); Afrikaners have their risks (variegated porphyria); Northern Europeans have their risks (cystic fibrosis). Racializing these differences only confuses things. Sickle-cell anemia is found in Saudi Arabia and Greece, as well as in West Africa. Why? Because it is associated with malaria, not with being African.  And these remain risk factors for particular populations, still afflicting only a small minority within each population – just simply a larger minority than in other populations.

When you look at the human species scientifically, this is what you find. It isn’t race. Race comes from somewhere else.

What then, do we mean when we say race is a “social construction”? We mean that it is a product of history, not of biology. What we have come to understand as race is the outcome of centuries of political relations between powerful Europeans and the less powerful – the English versus the Irish, the Christians versus the Jews and Muslims, European colonists versus Native Americans, traders versus African slaves. What they have in common is the formation of symbolic boundaries that function to establish and maintain inequalities. Those cultural boundaries sometimes correlate with biological features, which affords them some camouflage as apparent products of nature rather than of human invention. That is why even scientists were confused about it for two hundred years.

The fact is, however, that the average difference in lifespan between Blacks and Whites in America is due to racism, not to sickle cell anemia.  The lie of race is that it misrepresents the actual biology of our species. The fact that race is also there to perpetuate injustice makes race less of a fact of nature, and more of a fact of biopolitics.       

 This administration isn't making human biology unpolitical, they are making it exactly as political as it always has been. In this case, their convictions about race are anachronistic and their scientific ideas are from an earlier century, which is why they need to be presented as an order, rather than as a discovery.  There is no unpolitical human biology.

I coined the phrase “Human Biodiversity”. Racists stole it.

The essay that follows was declined by the NY Times. However, a few days later (27 December 2019), they published a column by Bret Stephens on Jewish genius (or, Jewnius©) that actually cited the horrid 2005 paper on that subject by the late biological anthropologist Henry Harpending. Harpending was regarded by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a White Nationalist.

That is a very unusual status for an anthropologist. It raises an interesting issue, though, about Harpending’s legacy. I am in favor of his total erasure. I think his racism probably tainted everything he published, however nice he may have been in person, and I do not see what value there is in talking about him at all politely or respectfully, when his legacy is a black eye for the field of anthropology. Adam Rutherford has been crapping on him over on twitter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s page on Harpending also uses the phrase “human biodiversity” quite a bit.

---------------------------

I coined the phrase “Human Biodiversity”. Racists stole it.
Jonathan Marks

It is rare for a professor to birth a meme. We inhabit ivory towers, very few of us are in the public eye, and those that aspire to be so are often regarded disdainfully by our peers.

For me, it increasingly seems as though my lasting contribution will be to have coined the phrase “human biodiversity” in my 1994 book of that name. Unfortunately it has come to mean the opposite of what I meant, due to the distortions of internet racists. In fact, they have even abbreviated “human biodiversity” as a meme for the semi-literate, HBD.  Journalist Angela Saini describes the appropriation of the phrase in her recent book, “Superior: The Return of Race Science.”

I was proud of the coinage a quarter-century ago, because I intended it to encapsulate the major discovery of the science of biological anthropology over the course of the 20^th century. That century began with the scientific assumption that the human species came naturally divisible into a fairly small number of fairly discrete and homogeneous pseudo-taxonomic groups. We called them “races”. By century’s end, however, a great deal of empirical research had shown that our species does not in fact come structured that way. 

“Human biodiversity” was intended to label our newer understanding of the patterns by which people actually differ from one another, as an alternative to the earlier “race”.

“Race” and “human biodiversity” are quite simply different things, two sets of patterns that map very poorly onto one another – and it took the better part of the 20^th century to demonstrate it. The subtitle of my book was “Genes, Race, and History” – to suggest that genes demonstrated that the proper place for race in science lay in its history, along with phlogiston, pangenesis, and creationism.

Race exists, of course, but its reality is not primarily biological. The reality of race is in the domain of the symbolic. Race is most real in the sense that, as is well-known, Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his black slave, Sally Hemings. Yet according to the only extant descriptions of her, Sally Hemings had light skin and long, straight dark hair. Why? Because only one of her four grandparents was African. She was a slave because of her symbolic ancestry, not because of her biological ancestry or her appearance.

Race is thus now recognized to be very real, as a system of human classification, as lived experience in a society of inequality. While it sometimes correlates with biology, the proper study of race lies in the study of law, discrimination, sociology, and political economy; the primary exception being in how social prejudice can affect the body itself.

“Human biodiversity” was intended as an alternative way of talking about human variation without the overarching assumption that our species sorts out into fairly discrete, fairly homogeneous races – as was assumed by scientists a century ago. But in the late 1990s, racists began to coopt the phrase as a more genteel and sciencey way to simply say “race”. In other words, they began to synonymize what should be antonyms.

Today all sorts of ideas that were only recently outmoded and unthinkable have become thinkable and real. The advancement of knowledge is clearly unsteady at best. I doubt whether the racists who invoke the phrase actually consult my book and learn that they are misapplying it. They probably wouldn’t care anyway.

To have provided racists with a scientific-sounding cover for their odious ideas is not something to be particularly proud of, but I can’t take it back. All I can do is disavow it.

--------------

Postscript:: on 12/29, The New York Times published this apology.