How to argue with a racist | The Voltaire Lecture 2019 | Dr Adam Rutherford

Thank you very much Andrea, it is a great pleasure for me to introduce you to the speaker Voltaire of

2019

. He is a geneticist, author and speaker. He has written several books on the origins and future of life. He has also written a ladybug book on genetics. He's learned, he's written a brief history of everyone who ever lived, which is a wonderful book and it's shorter than you think, although it still has quite a bit of weight, and his name is Adam Rutherford. He is also the presenter of Inside Science, which is BBC Radio 4's flagship science programme.

I'm sure you know this and have heard Adams' voice on regular occasions. He has also hosted many television shows, including a series on Cell and Horizon, but tonight he is here to talk about the return of scientific racism. Adam. Thank you. Alice, thanks Andrew, it's always a pleasure to talk to you many humanists, so here it is yes, so in some ways I find this a little strange and unfortunate that I am in front of you and talking about a topic that I really should. I've been involved in genetics for 25 years and it's really only now that this

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on the books that people like me and others are starting to write and publish are becoming relevant when we thought these problems were long gone. , so I studied genetics at the UCL golf lab right next door when I was a student.

I was taught by Steve Jones, who many of you will know, and in the early introductory genetics

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s we learned about race, eugenics, blood groups, pigmentation, human migration, evolution, mixing all that kind of stuff, and of course, It's particularly personal, we learn those things at UCL, given that UCL was the birthplace and instrumental in the development of some of the most pernicious ideas of anyone. has ever had specific eugenics by Francis Galton, after whom that laboratory was named. Now, what I suppose is the most worrying thing about this is that science has advanced as the sciences want to and politics has changed, the political climate has actually changed and now we are talking about the same ideas, different details but very different principles. similar, so I come before you admitting that, in some ways, the scientific community and specifically the genetics community that in many ways I represent has failed to convey what we consider uncontroversial. ideas about pseudoscience and the history of race beyond the walls of the Academy the culture has changed the science has changed the disparity continues and perhaps even grows now there is some sense that there is a rising tide of racism Rakel vocal in the In the United Kingdom and in Europe and in the United States in general, we see a rise in populism.

It's hard to explain these things in even a vaguely scientific way. We know that since 2016 there has been an increase in the number of reported race crimes in the UK, that number has increased enormously, but that may simply reflect a willingness to report those crimes rather than an actual increase; We also know with some certainty that surveys on

racist

attitudes are somewhat flawed and the reason for this is that even in anonymity people are unwilling to reveal opinions that they fear are generally frowned upon now. It's been around since the 1980s and there are questions within that survey that give an indication of the degree of how

racist

attitudes are changing, at least in the UK, so you can't ask people.

Are you racist because you don't actually tend to get very strong answers to those who say you ask indirect questions and this is what the British Attitude Survey has been doing since the 1980s? One of the indirect questions is: how worried would you be if a close relative, a son or daughter, would marry a person of black or Asian origin in 2017, when around a fifth, just over a fifth, were asked More than a fifth of white Britons responded that they would mind if their son or daughter got married. a person of black or Asian origin obviously this is a racist view, but when you asked when that question was asked in the equivalent survey in 1983, which is the first time that question was asked, the answer was that more than 50% of White Britons would be worried if their son or daughter married a black or Asian person;

In that sense, according to that metric, we are a less racist country than twenty or thirty years ago; However, the same question was asked in 2017, but not before 2017, about the perspective of a Muslim spouse and the answer was more that two-fifths of people would be upset, so there has been a measurable change in these types of attitudes in the way the changing face of racist intolerance is perpetrated in this country at large. Oh, I think I agree that we like to think that racism and the expression of racist views have decreased in the UK and certainly the expression of racism in public life is considerably less than it was and less acceptable.

Take a quick look at our recent past. be familiar with this, this is an election pamphlet from 1964, 1964 general election, this is from yes, you have noticed, so this is a real pamphlet, if you can't read it, it says face the facts if you want a color for a neighbor votes Labor, if you're already burdened by one then vote history, so it was Smith Wicking in 1964, so it's a good 164, over 50 years ago, two weeks ago was the 40th anniversary of the murder of this man, Blair Peach, a new. Zeeland schoolteacher who was murdered by a police officer in Southwark at a Non-Anti-Nazi League rally that no one was ever charged that there has never been a formal investigation into the death of Blair Peach 40 years ago Blair Peach was the best friend of my father And so, a large part of my life, we think that these things have disappeared, but for the sake of political balance, we have seen that everyone knows that we have seen racism expressed in all political parties in recent years and I do not I'm just referring to Boris Johnson talking about Africans as fussy with their watermelon smiles;

By the way, it is a direct quote from Boris Johnson; We also know that antisemitism has effectively become the defining issue for the Labor Party of the 21st century. on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle now sport I am I know not everyone likes sport I am a big sports fan. Sports are owned in a way where many people are exposed to different cultures and have been for a long time. I'm going to talk about the sport in a little more detail in a few minutes for a long time, but I just want to remind you that just thirty years ago black players like the great John Barnes, here playing at Anfield for Liverpool, here he is kicking a banana out from the pitch that had been shown throwing at him Chelsea fans regularly every week chanted shoot their own players we now accept that this has largely disappeared this is not something acceptable in sport and particularly in football there have been active campaigns to expel football racism, yet in 2018 the great Raheem Sterling they play with at Arsenal is suffering the exact same abuse.

I suppose the mark of progress is that, while that was normalized in the 1980s with John Barnes, the people who threw that banana on Highbury pitch have been banned for life, so it's not acceptable for this guy of behavior continues, so the question is: has racism returned? Well here's the surprise for you, it never went away, maybe we thought it was gone. Structural racism is endemic in this country in our institutions. I guess maybe we are protected in our metropolitan bubbles and thought that at least racism had become less visible and less acceptable in public life now.

I am not a racial historian. I am a scientist. a geneticist I write about the history of biology. The genetics that we know and that we have just discussed is a topic with a dark past, no doubt, but we are very open about it. We teach the origins of eugenics at UCL on the introductory genetics course, which is uniquely the most popular undergraduate course across UCL. Many of you should be aware that there is a formal investigation underway into UCL and its racist history. I'm peripherally involved, girl, and I know a lot of people in the audience who are also more actively involved.

On that now, some of you will have been at the humanist conference in Newcastle last year where I spoke and talked about some issues around race and eugenics, so if anyone went, it was someone who was in Newcastle, yes, some of you . They were so I don't know if you remember, but I had 67 slides and I finished 11 of them before I ran out of time. I warned you the same thing could happen tonight. I'll be back on Saturday night at a conference in Leicester because I think it's June 24th. I'll be right in Ewing for that talk.

Maybe I'll move on to the next slide, so Alice will be there too. No attempt to justify racism has always been rooted in science or, more specifically, I suppose. Racism that has been rooted in misunderstood, misinformed, or simply misleading science never went away, but what I am arguing here and in my upcoming book is that as we find ourselves at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, racism is visibly making a comeback. and it is emboldened and strengthened by new genetics, so here are some of the things that I think are topics worth considering.

The thing is that at this moment we have a changing political climate and it is very obvious that we have had enormous growth and maturation of this science. of genetics 25 years ago when I started studying it I was one of 14 university students, now there are 700 university students studying that course, it is a huge industry Jetix now there has been massive popular interest that coincides with genetics as well and then there is This Another fascinating factor was the unforeseen enormity of the market for personal genetic testing for children, primarily to determine their ancestry, and those are some of the things I'm going to talk about tonight and in more detail over the next few months or So, as As a result of these changes of this evolution of our scientific culture, I have perceived a new popular discourse that is really altered in recent years, but I have seen the revival of ideas, essentialist biological thoughts, ideas that we thought had disappeared, the ideas of monogenex, genetic determinism and a deeply misplaced sense of biological nationalism, which is why this conference is officially called the Voltaire conference, it is a call, it is called the return of scientific racism.

I'm not sure that's the case. Completely accurate because scientific racism is a term used to describe the biology's attempts at human variation in accordance with the already established racist imprint of Sybil and, primarily, the white supremacy imposed by European thought leaders during the Age of Enlightenment, the era of society. He called the era of empire the Scientific Revolution, the era of expansion, all these terms are not recognized, so this was an era of plunder and exploitation. Key ideas about how we think about race developed over the last few centuries and continue to resonate in the present now our job is to find how to counter these views both in popular culture and within science.

I have written a lot about race and genetics and in the past there is a twenty thousand word chapter in my latest book that is available in the lobby, the next book is specifically about race and genetics and the ideas that I am starting to talk about here , so I can exclusively reveal the title, not that you've been expecting it, but I'm coming. change the title of this lecture and reveal the title of my new book, which is how to

argue

with a racist, okay, actually I want to do other housework too, yeah, you know, it's a bleak business writing about race and science.

Racism is not without rays of loving light and alerted me to a lovely gift from my friend Mark Thomas, the UCL geneticist, who last week sent me a biography written on the prominent racist and white supremacist website called V. Dared to go to one of the biggest white supremacist websites and they did a 1500 word bio of me, which was a little creepy. It was a semi-accurate biography full of attempted insults such as not being able to get into Oxford or Cambridge. Rutherford went to UCL. I mean, that's it. Technically true, I couldn't actually apply to Oxford or Cambridge.

I saw that yes, this is kind of a major obstacle, but Alice, Alice's very generous introduction at that time. In fact, I would like to be introduced from now on with this quote from this biography from a white supremacist website. comes in three parts there is one particular science writer and broadcaster. I don't, I don't know why they do that. I am a scientific writer and broadcaster whom our rulers allow again and again to add all the authority to the fallacious criticisms of the concept. of race andcondemn key areas of scientific research as dangerous. His insidious influence on the scientific illiteracy that constitutes such a large portion of the West, including its elite, is substantial and there is a lot to unravel in that single sentence, but then there is the kicker.

His name is dr. Adam, yes, I enjoyed it anyway, so, continuing with business, there are some terminology issues I should alert you to as well. I'm going to refer to racial categories as people use them, so popular descriptions of people and colloquial descriptions of race despite the fact that these are not categories that have much useful support from contemporary genetics this is a point. important this is a really important point sorry because for a long time I have done this and I am sure many of you have When faced with arguments about scientific racism or racism in general we find ourselves saying that the phrase race does not exist.

Well, I don't think it's good enough. I don't think this is a useful argument at all. It is useful to say that sometimes it is noted that race is just a social construct, which I think is equally reasonable and it is not useful to say that social constructs are the primary form of interaction. human. However, I think it is terribly counterproductive to say that race doesn't exist. well-intentioned it is because you are asking people to deny their own experience race certainly exists it exists because we perceive it and racism exists because we enact it structural racism is endemic in the UK in the world in our institutions and we affirm that race does not exist is a mistake, although well-intentioned, but it is a mistake, nevertheless, the question that is really at stake here is whether colloquial descriptions of race are rooted in biology that has a significant meaning in perceived racial differences , so these are the three areas I'm going to talk about tonight for the next two or three hours, judging by my schedule so far, some of the history, the origins of our current racial groups, the way we talk about the race.

I'm going to talk about the concepts of racial purity. and I'm going to talk a little bit about sports not only because I'm interested in sports and I recognize that a lot of people aren't interested in sports but, like I said, sports is often the most accessible form that people have historically been to. exposed. to people all over the world, okay, so let's start with the origin of the race, obviously this is a very, very superficial analysis of one of the largest chunks of historical research that exists. I'm not going to talk about a particular topic. which is intelligence and race because it is a topic that requires several lectures on its own, but I will talk about some of those topics in less than the next few minutes of the lecture, so the history of race as a social and popular topic .

The definition we all broadly understand has its roots, as we say, in the attempts of Europeans to classify the people of the world, for as European expansion began to turn into empire building, these classifications are now based almost exclusively in skin color, in pigmentation, in history. is such that there are many classical references to pigmentation and skin color in antiquity in Greek and Roman literature in general, although they are less important as an ethnocentric basis than religion, language, geography and the like, so that there are many references to skin color. In the Iliad, Homer speaks of Ethiopians as if, in fact, the Ethiopian word translated from Greek is burnt skin or burnt face, often those definitions are due not only to the pigmentation but also to the temperament of the people. people, but largely in general and to the unpleasant Haynes.

It is the real expert on this who gave the lecture to Voltaire. I think two or three years ago it was said that skin color was secondary to other ethnocentric categories. Now the first real hints of the biological races that we recognize today really come from Vasila, the great Islamic scientist. who writes specifically about skin color in relation to the Islamic slave trade and

argue

s that people exposed to extreme climates remember this in relation to the Middle East were better suited for slavery due to regionally determined differences in temperament. Both examples he gives are pale skinned.

The Europeans were ignorant and lacked discernment. Dark-skinned Africans were fickle and foolish. Therefore, they adapted to slavery during the years of the Islamic slave trade, which lasted more than 900 years and estimated more than five million people enslaved. Now, this is sort of a harbinger of the latest in colloquial definitions of race that we will see in the Eurocentric world in our world now many of the men of science are getting involved in the classification of humans as Europeans begin to meet more people of the world during colonial expansion here are six of them that I am going to talk about today is Linnaeus like Voltaire this is Kant Blumenbach Thomas Huxley and my intellectual hero Charles Darwin there are two broad pigmentations about that there are two broad arguments that these people put together during the 17th to the 19th centuries and it's their monogender versus polygender, so fundamentally the monogender were people who argued that all humans have a singular origin and the degradation theory is that the people of the world that we see with different pigmentations evolved from a single point of origin.

While Poly Genus argued that the differences between people we see around the world today evolved into those positions at some point in history, both positions now come from established positions of biblical creationism, so they both claim that Adam and Eve are the first humans. is simply a monogenism that postulates that all are degenerations of all people in generations removed from Adam and Eve, while polygenism claims that some races descend from Adam's leaves, but others do not and have separate evolutionary origins, particularly the people of Africa, by definition, our racist views and all systems of racial taxonomy during this era inherently depend on the classification of these characteristics and in all cases white Europeans are of a superior race.

Now again, another word and note about the language I'm using here because I think this is important too. It is often said that we should not apply contemporary morality to historical figures. I think it's fair to say that we are all less racist than people in the past, probably with a man and a woman. However, it is perfectly reasonable and useful. To describe, although not necessarily condemn, people from the past as racist, there are objective statements, but in addition, this line is often used to close the investigation into our past and therefore to understand the roots of our presence, the People I'm talking about don't. they all share the same views that some people clearly have if you look at the context in which they write, if you look at the things they talk about, some people are clearly more or less racist than others in history and it's important We can make those distinctions instead of just saying "hey, everyone was more racist in the past and therefore we shouldn't judge them based on contemporary morality." An example could be this good.

I don't know if you know that I'm demonstrably less racist than James. Watson, I doubt anyone will be talking about my work two hundred years from now, but they'll still be talking about it, but if a historian two centuries from now looks at the work, what I've written about race, and what James Watson has written about race, then they would unequivocally come to the conclusion that I am less racist and James Watson now seems to me that that is a reasonable thing to do when we are talking about the people we are talking about from whom contemporary customs and views on race are derived.

So the first one I want to talk about is Linnaeus. Now Linnaeus is a man who, of course, came up with a taxonomic system that we still use in biology to this day. The more I learn about næss in the last 25 years. The more I think it's a pernicious influence on the topics that we love so much, but that's not what I'm talking about today, included in his taxonomy, it doesn't include humans and he's really the first person to do it seriously. include humans in a taxonomic classification system, the system we use today, the binomial system where you have a genus and a species, we are Homo sapiens Homo genus sapiens for species now, when describing humans, you introduced four subspecies , we might sometimes refer to them as and These are color coded based primarily on pigmentation, but you can also see them listed here and explained here, but they also include judgments about temperament and behavior and this is included in the system.

Oh naturally, Linnaeus is a classic book that describes the classification, so you are pianist so white blue eyes gentle sharp inventive and governed by laws we have red americanus so these are the native Americans or the indigenous people of the Americas straight black hair and thick stubborn jealous and regulated by customs Asia atticus yellow rigid black hair haughty greedy and ruled by opinions and then africanus or a black coat curly hair flat nose up medium lips shameless women cray cunning lazy lustful and ruled by Caprice needless to say these They are not particularly scientific descriptions, however, incredibly influential in maintaining the categorization and taxonomy of humans for Over the next several hundred years, in the fourth edition of the I Natura system, he added a fifth category which was that of monstrosities and these They were mythical or deranged beings, the Patagonian giants, the wild wolf children, the Alpine dwarfs and the orchid monkey Hottentots.

Maliwal cat Hottentots are men of the Kois an who. have been recorded to have one of their testicles removed on the grounds that they believed for a very short period of time that twins who were cursed identical twins would not have identical twins if they only had one ball, so this is Linnaeus, yes he explains it. I mean, we laugh about this, it bothers me a little that people took this seriously because that's absurd now that Linnaeus was a monogyna. Let's talk briefly about possibly the most well-known and popular Polly genre of the time, which was Francoise Marie Voltaire himself. man after whom this conference is named now, in a few minutes, if all goes well, Alice and Andrew will present me with that medal and I will receive the Voltaire medal, for which I am very, very grateful because Voltaire is really one of our great thinkers of the Enlightenment, so, with some irony, I accept this honor in a lecture in which I am about to describe Voltaire as a hideous racist, a grotesque purveyor of insidious and poorly researched opinions cloaked in the authority of celebrity.

I give this lecture under his name as a way of being honest about our intellectual heroes, of which Voltaire is one in some ways, so that we are aware that he too had dark and unpleasant opinions then and now, so it is a genus Polly and believes that the different races, as determined in Linnaeus' categorization, have separate origins and are, in fact, separate species. This is a quote from one of his letters. Our sages have declared that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a beautiful image of the divine creator. a flat, black nose with little or almost no intelligence, there will undoubtedly come a time when these animals will know how to cultivate the land, beautify their houses and gardens and know the path of the stars, everything takes time, I still have half an hour more.

Go away if you want me to stop after that, I mean, this is still Voltaire's lecture, but yeah, a nice guy seems fair to refer to him as a racist when you see quotes like this and it's not a moral judgment of the past that's accurate. judgment from a racist point of view but one of the most influential thinkers of the 18th century now this guy Johann Friedrich Blumenbach is now interesting now he is also a creationist in a mana genre but instead of relying on pigmentation, Blumenbach relied primarily on measurements cranials, so he's really one of the first people to apply some kind of metric that doesn't try to understand human variation.

He measured sixty skulls taken from around the world and also devised a five-level taxonomy system that is largely similar to what Linnaeus came up with: do the numbers add up today in terms of cranial metrics? Well, that's a question for Alice and she can, and it's certainly not mine, but we have to remember that we have to think about the context in which this is happening, so there are a lot of men, most of whom have never left their halls, many of whom, the creators of the scientific racism I'm talking about, never really went to Africa or Asia, most of these descriptions are Based on letters sent by people in the colonies or by people who were brought as slaves or in a circus act, andI want to briefly tell you the story of the Hottentot Venus, so a woman named Sarah Baartman, this is a dark story, so prepare yourselves.

Sarah Baartman was a poisonous woman, her original name has been lost to history, but she was brought to London from Cape Town, where she was paraded on the Piccadilly stage, sometimes on a leash, she was known as the Hottentot Venus. This is a flyer for her show, the biggest phenomenon. from the interior of Africa now, after four years of doing this in London and touring the United Kingdom, she was sold to a French animal trainer and where she was exhibited in Paris at the Palais Royale and there she lived effectively as a slave and as scientists, including Georges Cuvier. who was another prominent scientist of the time in France inspected it regularly.

I was particularly interested in a feature that is not uncommon in Koi an and it is called stay up Gibeah and that is large fat deposits on the buttocks of the breast and the anatomy of their lips and this is a caricature of her at that time now Bartman she died at age 26 in 1815 possibly from syphilis possibly contracted from being raped by her captors Cuvier George Cuvier performed the autopsy although he was very specific in saying he performed the autopsy so as not to establish the cause of death, so the literal body objectification sorry, but Bartman spoke four different languages ​​and she becomes a key part of the establishment of cuvee A and the development of his ideas of human classification, his body assumed to be typical and fixed for him. category of Ethiopian, which is a far cry from koi salmon, so keep these stories in mind, this is the era and in which we are discussing these issues, our behavior was considered part of the scientific discourse and the ideas that arise from this type of experiments and these types of behaviors still resonate in the present today.

It would be uncharacteristic of me to talk about anything and not mention my intellectual hero Darwin. Darwin spoke about the human races in his second best book, The Descent of Man, from 1871. Darwin was the one who expressed many Victorian opinions, particularly about women which are not acceptable today, but in general he was liberal-minded, considerably less racist and many of his contemporaries, including his cousin Francis Galton, were an active abolitionist, he was strongly influenced by his taxidermy shooter in Enver when he was a student. John Edmundston, a freed slave now Darwin, noted in the ancestry of man that no one had agreed on the number of races that actually exist, which is a good indication that this might not be such a grand plan and that it might There are better explanations that would be helpful. to understand human evolution this is one of those, so basically it just says that there is a great diversity possible between the capabilities of whether there should be just one two two three four five five six seven eight eleven fifteen sixteen twenty to sixty or sixty-three races. now these are these are some of the great scientists of the time who have tried to classify humans into a number of discrete races from 1 to 63.

He goes on to say that the diversity of judgments does not prove that races should not be classified, but it does shows that they graduate from each other and it is almost impossible to discover clear distinguishing characteristics between them. Darwin's greatest defender was Thomas Huxley, a contemporary of his Huxley had a passion in 1870, a year before the ancestry of man and rested in eleven now there. This is the map This is Huxley's racial map. He included some terms we are familiar with but also introduced some new ones and, in particular, he was very struck by the idea of ​​the Caucasian as a distinct race and instead divided the peoples of Europe and North Africa into the Middle The East was divided into two groups that were closely related: xantho croix, which are northern Europeans with pale skin, and Milano Croix, so they are more dark-skinned but are people from North Africa and the Middle East, the which is why I brought this up and this is again another dark story and this is not on Huxley's shoulders he has no influence on this other than describing what happens next which is he talks about Milano croix being involved historically in an evolutionary sense with two tribes, one of which they referred to as the ham.

That's how the mites are a made up Victorian ancestral group, the sons of Noah lament that Ham is the son of Noah, so people descended from the sons of Ham now, okay, yeah, so the sons of Ham, the hams were according to In the Talmud and the Old Testament there is a phrase there that describes him as cursed with blackness now, if we fast forward a few years to 1916, in Rwanda violently colonized by the Belgians, they took power from the Germans and one of their first acts was to separate the two main tribes, the Tutsis and the Hutus, they were biracial so the Belgians had a much better relationship with the Tutsis and Belgian officials claimed that the Tutsis had larger brains and lighter skin color as a result. of his European ancestry and ham identification.

Now remember that the Hammonds is a made up categorization, but Huxley describes 50 years before this, but as a result of this, he was superior to the Hutu and other ethnic groups in Rwanda, but the Tutsi settled later in the 20th century as the monarchy now during this period in the 1930s racial identification cards were introduced by the Belgian government. Here is an example of one from the 1990s and you can see that the first entry on this ID card is to establish what ethnicity one is Hutu Tutsi or two other smaller ones. groups, what happens well, you know what happens in the 20th century in Rwanda, there is an insurgency after the Belgians abandoned in the 1950s the Hutu against the Tutsi monarchy and there is hostility and an ongoing civil war that culminates in 1994, the genocide that occurs in 1994, so within our entire life was for the most part instigated by the Hutu government, hundreds of thousands of people were murdered over a period of one hundred days and rape was enacted on an industrial scale as weapon.

This is the first time that the United Nations recognizes rape as a weapon of war. Decades of conflict, murder, and genocide were based on claims of racial distinction and purity, all based on 19th century pseudoscience and all encouraged by anthropological, anthropometric, and phrenological ships and colonizers. All of these claims are known to be false and stem from centuries. of European scientific racism was passed down to groups that were encouraged to be rivals, so there are very real world ramifications for this type of pseudoscience and some of the worst acts perpetrated by humans against other humans. Well, let's jump to the 20th century or else, I'm never going to finish we admit genetics into the scientific arsenal that we invented the ability to look at differences, look at biological differences and at the molecular level, we can trace the ancestry of the molecules of the genes and people and human evolution, and that's what happens in the The second half of the 20th century was the kind of science that defined biology and also meant that we could have a much better and more precise molecular metric in populations , so we have genes and DNA instead of the crude metrics like craniometry or skin color now.

Many of you know the great geneticist Richard Lewontin, who really instigated the modern era of thinking about race and genetics with his 1972 article, titled "The Distribution of Human Diversity," in which he used a particular locus in one . gene for a blood type gene to show that there were more differences within a classic racial group than between them now this finding remains true to this day and many of you will be aware of it and it is often used in discussions with racists It's also problematic because the uniqueness of this means that at the time, in the 2000s, we had access to our complete genomes in the post-human genome project era, where we could look at literally hundreds or hundreds of thousands of markers. individuals in our genome and try to work. how they separate how they categorize by racial taxonomy and there was a 2003 article by a mathematician named Anthony Edwards who rightly criticized Lowe Anton's original article which is called the Lowenstein fallacy and points out that with many markers with many genetic markers you can actually predict the country of origin or geographic region a person is most likely to be associated with now both things are true they are talking about slightly different concepts the most variation is within a population which is still correct if you look hard enough at positions In a genome you can see broad geographic similarities, the reason I mention these two is because there is a lot of overconfidence in both the original Anton argument and the Anson fallacy in terms of them becoming fetishized as a species. of entrenched interracial and anti positions. races, so I think they are still valid, but less useful than in the past in terms of arguments.

One of the classic articles appeared in 2002, without Rosenberg and his team, who analyzed more than a thousand people from 52 geographic regions. regions and analyzed more than 350 single nucleotide polymorphisms through individual spelling changes in DNA and with this technique a technique is used that involves asking you to connect a load of data to the computer's genetic sequence that has been computerized and you ask the computer to form groups and you set the number of groups you want to see, for example, in the top row it says here are our thousand people in 52 regions and it says: let's set the groups to number two and what you see is that people usually group into two groups which are Africa and Central Africa, Europe, Middle East and East Asia, so they separate into two groups, when you ask them to group into three, you get Africa separate from Europe, when you ask it to split into four and five again and finally you get when you get to K equals five you get a model that looks a lot like Blumenbach and Linnaeus's original five definitions of racial grouping, so Africa, Europe , Asia and the Americas, then you ask the question, well, what happened here is that genetics has recapitulated some ideas. that we removed everything that we expected to have removed in the 19th century, well, more or less, but not really, this is a process that accurately describes the genetic diversity between populations, but if you look for groups, what you find are groups that also Lo What you notice very clearly is that there are no marked gradations between these groups, there are no shooting limits, there are clear relationships between each group, which shows that their arms make clear distinctions between the races and if you ask the groups, if you put the number of groups. up to six something interesting happens, which is that you get a category six of humans according to this analysis, is that the collage has a population of approximately 4,000 people who live in the Hindu Kush and not even the most ardent racists would describe them as a separate species , so, as Darwin had suggested, there are long, clear gradients between these groups and there is no unambiguous way of saying where one group ends and another begins;

There are no defined boundaries between them and this is fundamentally because human variation will not succumb to one. An artificial taxonomy was imposed when three, five or 63 different breeds are tested, what human variation does is reflect the history of the population. Now these results have been continually refined, tested and proven and remain correct as more genomes are analyzed. One of the things that has happened just in the last two or three years is that there has been a massive reevaluation of the genetic basis of pigmentation, with pigmentation being the original and the basis of most of the racial classification that has occurred since the 17th century onwards and this has occurred mainly because we analyzed more genomes. and it's easier to sequence genomes, but also because someone had the brilliant idea of ​​looking at the genomes of Africans, something that hadn't really happened until the last five or six years.

Now I've shown you a lot of dead old white guys and that's it for this talk, so I just want to briefly mention three women who have pioneered this research, Nina Jablonski, Sarah Tishkoff and Brenner, and what they have shown, among others, As we look more closely at the genes of Africans in Africa, specifically on pigmentation, this picture is much more complicated than anyone had anticipated. There is a lot of research on this and I can't summarize it in one slide, but what we do see is that there is more variation in pigmentation within Africa than in Africa.

In the rest of the world combined, there is also more diversity in pigmentation genes in Africa than in the rest of the world combined, and genes associated with particular pigmentations, such as light skin or dark skin, predate Homo sapiens. over hundreds of thousands of years, indicating that the complexity and diversity of pigmentation in humans is much moreolder than anyone had anticipated now, the reason for this is that, well, humans move when we draw, when we draw pictures of human evolution, we draw them on broad maps like these. I refer to dad's army maps and these are absolutely true: we are an African species in origin, the monkey genus will write, although he is wrong in every detail, we now know that we are our species that initially evolved in Africa, possibly a species of Gestalt species.

In Africa we are the oldest, so Mr. pinzer from Morocco about 300,000 years ago most specimens are from the Rift Valley in East Africa. We know that about 70 to 80 thousand years ago a population or a relatively small population of Homo sapiens emigrated from Africa and it is from that population that the rest of the world was populated with now that is all correct and this map is correct, but what It doesn't show the details, what we are looking at here is a geological time scale, the arrows are correct in showing the big picture. trends in human migration, but they don't actually show what really happens, that is, wherever humans move, they have sex and mixing occurs, which means that the concept of racial purity and the concepts of a population isolated for any period of time they will simply fall apart. about any analysis and this is what we see when looking at modern genetic diversity in the 21st century, so let me talk about racial purity because this is another topic, this is the second topic and I think it is of great importance in trying to understand where we are with genetics and race today, so one of the most common preconceived or misconceptions about humans and humans and their ancestry is this idea of ​​genealogical or racial purity, like I said, we are a monogenic species , in principle we have come from Africa, but the fact of the matter is that there is some kind of mathematical problem that is completely obvious when you point out that low while low completely undermines any concept of genealogical racial purity and it is a simple fact that is that All people have two parents and all people throughout history have had two parents with the possible exception of Jesus.

Now what that means is that in your family tree the number of ancestors you have doubles each generation back, so you have two. parents, four grandparents, say Gregor and Branson, etc., what that means is that for each individual in this room, if we go back to about the 10th century, then the number of ancestors we have, say 40 generations, will be 2 to the power of 40, which is that number, is about a thousand times more people than have ever existed, so obviously it's a problem that each individual has more ancestors than all the people who have ever existed, but the resolution of this is quite simple, the truth is that you have that many positions in your family tree but after a few generations those positions start to be occupied by the same people several times, I'm not talking about inbreeding in the good sense, I'm from Suffolk so I can talk about having been breathing with it with a certain degree of authority, but if you continue with this pattern, then this is actually becoming more accurate.

See what a family tree looks like. It's after a few generations, the branches start to intersect and cross through individuals multiple times and the mass that comes off of this is a concept called the Genetic ISO Point, which is if you go back far enough, all the lines of all the ancestors they cross all people. at a particular moment in time, so another way of writing this is a pretty complicated concept to understand, but another way of saying this is in genetic ice, designating the population alive at that moment is the ancestor of all alive today if they have descendants who are alive today yes, very good now, when the ISO point is calculated for the population of Europe, this was done by Joseph Chang in 2001 and then it was verified by genetics in recent years, the number comes out as the 10th century, so what? that means it is in Europe, if you are alive in the 10th century and you have descendants who are alive today, then you are the ancestor of everyone living in Europe today, so all the branches of all the family trees cross to all the people at this time, the genetic ice. designates for the whole world comes out as the 14th century BC.

C. about three thousand five hundred years ago, so what that means is that all the people alive in the 14th century BC. C. who have descendants who are alive today are the ancestors of all living humans. Today there is a remarkably modern convergence that has occurred in our evolution. The concept of racial purity or separation of populations during any distinct time period falls apart with that kind of mass. How many of you have done genetic ancestry testing? They paid 100 quid and spit nur into a tube at several of you, so 23 means the most popular. I don't think any of us in genetics really anticipated how popular they would become, we estimate 27 million have been sold in Over the last 10 years I've been quite critical of these tests in general, in my work they don't really show that they tell you about your ancestry because that's not really something you can do with science.

What they do is they tell you where on Earth there are people who have similar DNA to yours and we infer ancestry from mathematics. Now this is mine. It shows quite clearly that most of my DNA is associated with one of the two places in northern Europe where my father was. I was born in Yorkshire and India, my mother was born in India, so this is not surprising at all and I am very happy that I paid 120 points right there, but it is not like that, but the ISO point concert view also indicates that yes, the Most of my ancestors are likely Indian or Northwestern European, but we also know that if we go back to the 10th century my ancestors are all European and if we go back to the 14th century then my ancestors are all human. and that's the same for everyone, but that's not really a line that you can sell in a commercial product.

I get emails every week from white people telling me they're descended from the Vikings, if you're white you're descended from the Vikings, I mean it's there if you want. give me a hundred and twenty pounds in a jar of your spit and fill your boots now this is quite trivial and it's quite silly and it was a I think it was a surprise to us that this level of triviality became so popular and it's so Popular, it's trivial and Silly, it feeds into a kind of genetic essentialism that we hoped would have gone away, but you know, whatever it is, you pay that money to have a guy in a white coat tell you to send it from Viking too.

Yes, it is a nice Christmas gift. I suppose you have semi-scientific knowledge, but at the other end of the scale we have the exact same issues that white supremacists and neo-Nazis discuss. White supremacist neo-Nazis are absolutely obsessed with genetic ancestry to prove their racial purity and therefore superiority, so I spend a lot of time on white supremacist websites so you don't have to. Stormfront is the main one that's been around since 1993, so it's as old as the Internet, it's as old as the Human Genome. Project that a large proportion of the conversations that occur daily about storm fronts are about ancestry and racial purity testing kits;

It's amazing the level of discussion that occurs within these hellholes, they are truly the most depraved areas of the world. Internet I have ever come across, but there is an obsession with population genetics, there are discussions of academic articles on population genetics that rarely transcend the walls of the UCL and Oxbridge coffee rooms, but are always They argue incorrectly, but they are discussed in order. To demonstrate racial superiority or racial purity and be criticized as such on these white supremacist websites, there is another interesting phenomenon that has been documented that I started seeing a couple of years ago, but it was documented by social scientist Aaron Panofsky, who It is and he looks. over 3,000 comments on Stormfront, which is what people have done when neo-Nazis and white supremacists have taken a genetic ancestry test and discovered they have recent non-Aryan genetics.

Well, I will confess that I sometimes find this quite funny and what Aaron Pulaski says. What we did was account for the types of responses to try to categorize the types of responses when white supremacists discover that they are of recent non-Aryan or non-Northern European ancestry and they fall into a number of categories, the most common of which are They are Try another company to get a different result. The second is 23 and I is run by Jews. Try another company for a different result. The third is 23 meters run by Jews who plant false information to sow racial discord.

Try another company for a different result. I don't know why they do that, why would they do that? There is one where I found a particularly peculiar look in the mirror, so these are paraphrasing just two for brevity, look in the mirror if you don't see a Jew you're fine, a slight undermines the purpose of taking the test in the first place. place if all you need is a mirror and then another one that appears quite frequently and that's killing yourself now they say, "I know this is kind of funny, but it's terribly worrying because many Many of these organizations have effective small-scale industries to spread memes and identifying snippets of real Abel and academic articles so that they contain racialized messages and are distributed on Facebook or Twitter much faster than the academic article that eight people will read from which they were derived, so their game is much better than ours.

In the spread of these types of ideas, as I said, there are people absolutely obsessed with genetics. Here is another example that you may have encountered in recent years, I think last year. I talked about work that again marks Thomas, who is here tonight, and that others have done, and that is the establishment of a particular genotype that allows Europeans to process milk after weaning, so the persistence of lactase is the idea and we know that it emerged about seven or eight thousand years ago. Somewhere in Europe, after dairy farming became a cultural activity, most people on Earth cannot process milk after weaning, where most white people can.

Neo-Nazis now film themselves drinking gallons of milk to demonstrate their racial purity. This is a video taken from this is from YouTube and as you can see, that is master race Richard Spencer, who is a white supremacist or I don't know what the terminology is. I don't really care, to be honest, he's a white supremacist and kind of the founding leader of the old rights movement includes a glass of milk like a lot of white supremacists do in their profiles you see the violent bio he gives himself I'm very tolerant I'm lactose tolerant Presumably these guys don't know that the Koi and the Tutsis of the Middle East and the camel herders and many other communities around the world, herders and dairy farmers also acquired this ability, but I guess we don't look in the neo-nazis genetic precision.

I'm already out of time, let me play sports quickly, so not everyone likes sports. I care a lot about sports, but I think it's fair to say that sports are hugely important in establishing racial bias. It is the primary mechanism by which people have historically viewed cultures around the world. Now sport is inherently unfair. It's not controversial, but. It's not obvious to say, it means we knew that we have arbitrary rules and biological differences within people give them natural advantages or disadvantages. It is obviously true for all people. They are better at basketball than short people.

Short people are better as horsemen than heavy people now. Why do we think this is a question that I'm a little obsessed with? Why do we think about racial categorization when we think about sport when what we know is elite sport that characteristics of people who are biological, psychological and social monsters, and I, were exposed to? I mean, generously, that's what we want from Professor Sport, we want to see outliers performing at the extremes of human ability, we think 100 meters and I know what you're thinking right now: there hasn't been a white man in the 100 meter final at the Olympics since Allen Wells in 1980, so I tried to analyze some of the data by just looking at this specific race and this is the data set: There are 25 gold medalists in the 100 meter final since 1896, when the first hundred meters Olympic Games, how do we pass this data?

How do you want to split this data correctly? Well, there are many ways to do it, so you could say that this proportion of them are us. or the Canadian right and within that group how many 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 are African American and the rest are white, so that doesn't work. These are the gold medalists ofrecent African ancestry. This is Allen Wells, the last white man. In that race in 1980 there were 5 white men in that race, but remember that was the year the Moscow Olympics, so the United States had boycotted them, so since then there have been 58 men, including that race , 58 men have run in the hundred meters. sprint at the Olympics, so it's not just the medalists, but all of them, 5 of them with white, all of them in that particular race, which was also the last time someone won the gold medal with a time of more 10 seconds now when we start looking at these numbers, in a way they don't, what they don't do is add up to a cohesive argument that suggests something very clear that people tend to think, which is that black people, particularly African American black people, They have a biological advantage. which is inherent to them being black Americans in 100 meter sprints, we know that there is a genetic basis for having an advantage in particular types of sports and there are genes that have been characterized as being expressed related to muscle. fibers that have to do with having explosive energy that are different and separate from the genes associated with endurance running that we also see with high frequency in successful long distance runners, particularly in Ethiopians and Kenyans, but the fact is that this is a terrible sample. size to base any kind of judgment on biological difference when it comes to race these people are genetic outliers they are extremely unusual the way we can break this data down into this small data set of 58 people from 1980 or 25 men over the last century and reaching any conclusion about the existence of a racial profile that gives them an advantage does not make sense now, it does not mean that it does not exist, it is simply impossible to establish it from this set of data and yet this It is the data set that most people rely on.

Those interested in the sport will say that black people are better at sprinting or that East Africans are better at long-distance running. We could choose another sport. Why could we take a dozen sports and look at the distribution among the number of people by race? background and almost any argument can be made to support that type of categorization, swimming is another example, so in sprint swimming, in short distance swimming, these are the only two recent Africans, African Americans or Africans of any distinction, who have ever been in the 50 or In 100 meter freestyle events in swimming, when I talked about this in the past, many people have suggested and this is, for example, a common idea that black people have higher density bone and we know that African Americans suffer lower levels of osteoporosis.

Some data suggests that African Americans have stronger bones, although this is actually based on actuarial fracture data, so the suggestion is, and this has been expressed on television, in comments, and in articles, that Americans Blacks lack buoyancy and that's why I don't now see black swimmers at the elite level. I mean, I think it's an absurd argument. If we're talking about marginal differences, then there must be more significant marginal differences than and they actually swim in the US. In 2014 I did a survey where they tried to establish the largest correlations between the lack of African swimmers in the US in general, not At an elite level, the numbers are very clear: 70 percent of African Americans do not know how to swim, so the correlations were established in reverse order, as this is an absence number 5 of African American role models that exist. only two that have achieved elite level access to the pool, so in 1964 segregation was officially ended, so segregated pools were eliminated in order to that, but most pools were later built in areas predominantly white and access to swimming pools was extremely limited for economically black African Americans. reasons, mainly in US schools, this is an extracurricular activity, so there is a financial cost associated with it and secondly, having parents or friends who don't swim is another really significant factor in the number of African Americans who don't swim, but number one is that I find it incredibly funny in a very dark way.

The biggest correlation with not being able to swim is not being taught how to swim, you know, so don't think about buoyancy. The argument that if you're not going to teach people to swim, there's also a serious point behind it because this structural and cultural racism has real world consequences, which is the drowning deaths of African American children aged 5 and 5 years. 14 is three times higher than for white children racism structural racism is literally lethal in this case now there is another point to this also over time RI there is another point to this that I think is worth mentioning and that is the holidays Personalization of black bodies specifically about intellect and again this has its roots in the racial taxonomy z' of the deep past from the 17th to 19th century, but it definitely persists in the culture to this day and that is most notable in sports, for What was a 2016 study of hundreds of media reports on elite sporting successes by sociologist Matthew Huey and Evan Goss, they analyzed sports reports in the press over an 11-year period in this 21st century, what they found is that a biological basis for race was a common theme when describing sporting success, but when comparing references to the success of white and black athletes, innate physical ability was typical in more than 70% of the descriptions of black and white athletes. intellectual prowess or industriousness was the most frequently referenced criterion of success in whites, so this is a fixation on individual genes or physical abilities or built-in innate physiologies that says inherent biology, not effort , is the mediator of success for black people specifically, this is built into our culture, it is a bias that says very clearly that black Brauns and white bodies already know.

Who is it? James Cleveland Owens, better known as Jesse Owens. I think he handed over one of the greatest athletes to a racist regime in 1936 by winning the 200 hundreds, the four percent and the long jump, and this is him collecting his gold medal alongside loose young men giving the Nazi salutes are better that it was 1936 it was in Berlin he did this in front of Hitler yes, what a powerful image it is somewhat undermined by his coach, a man called Dean Cromwell, who attributed that success, that amazing achievement, not to hard work, effort or skill , but to some evolutionary racist, this is what his quote was: the black man excels in the events he performs because he is closer to the primitive than the white man, it was not long ago that his ability to run and jump was a matter of life or death for him in the jungle, I'm done, it's question time now, so I mean, the sporting thing is that we want, we want to see excellence in sport, we want to see physical excellence. and psychological freaks and you know, athletes represent the nation and we think they represent us, but they don't represent us at all because they are extremely unusual people trying to unravel the genetics, physiology and cultural basis of their strangeness. incredibly difficult, it's like baking a cake because we don't really have a good understanding of the genetics of sporting achievement, although there is a huge Phet association of two particular genes involved in muscle mass and endurance running, but nevertheless, with everything Con that in tow we would still impose deep cultural prejudices, most of which were only partially conscious with incredibly limited data and I think reducing it to mere undeserved biology, although that is racist, whether conscious or not, we owe it to great athletes in their search.

For your greatness, we owe you more praise than ancestry as I'm going to end now, but let me wrap this up quickly so we can answer the questions and say, well, look, does this really matter? Well, I don't know racism. is not wrong because it is based on scientifically misleading ideas racism is wrong because it is an affront to human dignity people's rights and the respect owed to individuals for being human are not based on biology or should be, it would make any difference as we, as scientists, honest brokers, showed that there was a significant biological basis for intelligence or for sporting success that exactly matched popular descriptions of the race, if we could do those things that I think are very unlikely but we don't know, I think.

They are very unlikely. Would that mean we treat someone differently? The bottom line is that racism has been based on pseudoscientific foundations for several centuries and the prejudices that rest on those crutches echo in the present and deny them. is to deny our own history racism is an expression of power and racial taxonomy z' only exists with the intention of creating hierarchies of people that allow subjugation now new and old science to some extent has done nothing more than undermine traditional definitions and focused on race, if you are racist, then you are my enemy, but you cannot use science to justify that intolerance because science is my ally and not yours now, scientists, scientists, we are not particularly used to being political and we present Typically, we are trained to present data. as neutral and apolitical, I don't think that's true, science has always been political, as proven by the history of race, scientific data is never neutral unless it's collected by humans, we have to be aware of our own history and centuries of racial prejudice. on which our culture is built and we must speak clearly I am speaking to the scientists in the audience and the audience here our enemies have no such reservations they have no qualms about spreading their message and perhaps we should take the fight to their doorstep and I leave them with a quote from Angela Davis In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, you have to be anti-racist.

Thank you very much, it's been quite a few decades now, this autumn, lecturing has been an important part of what UK humanists do bringing debate and discourse to a wider audience talking about humanist ideas talking about ideas that are important in the science and society and Voltaire himself, I hope you will accept this medal because, although he may have had some very dark opinions, he also said so, his biographer tells us that he may not agree with what you say but he would defend his right to the death. to say it and in that spirit of speech I would like you to accept and in that spirit I would like to accept