Superior by Angela Saini

Author:Angela Saini
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Beacon Press

David Reich isn’t a racist. But neither does he adopt the staunch antiracist position of the old-school population geneticists, such as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who bravely debated the scientific racists of their time, who wore their politics on their sleeves. Reich respects Cavalli-Sforza, even writing about how much he has been an inspiration to him. But he confesses that he sees himself as apolitical.

The genetics of human variation are complicated and subtle, he tells me. And his own position on race is a similarly subtle one. Despite his research revealing the extent of interconnectedness between humans, the great uniting trellis of ancient migration, Reich still suspects there’s something worth investigating about group difference. And he leaves open the possibility that this difference correlates with existing racial categories—categories that many academics would say were socially constructed, and not based in biology at all, except for in very unreliable ways, such as along crude skin-color lines. “There are real ancestry differences across populations that correlate to the social constructions we have,” he tells me firmly. “We have to deal with that.”

He admits that some categories make no biological sense, such as the way “Latino” is used in the United States to refer to anyone from South America. “‘Latinos’ is a crazy category that encompasses groups with different ancestry mixes ranging from Puerto Ricans, who have very little Native American ancestry, mostly African, a little European; to Mexicans, who have very little African ancestry and [are] mostly Native American, European. . . . It’s a crazy category.” At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.”

He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something.

They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices.

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