In contrast to Angela
Saini’s acclaimed but
dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race
Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How
to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality benefits
from Rutherford’s lively prose style. The British science writer likes to
illustrate his arguments with interesting examples, a stratagem that wouldn’t
seem too much to ask of an author, but which is increasingly difficult to find
these days as conventional wisdom (which Rutherford labors hard to embody)
becomes ever more anti-empirical.
Despite blustering on
his Twitter
bio, “Back off man, I’m a scientist,” Rutherford appears to have
largely transitioned from being a geneticist to being a science pundit in the
mode of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. But that’s not a dishonorable
career path.
And Rutherford is adept
at writing. For example, Rutherford’s book is quite a bit more interesting than
a snooze-worthy essay last year, “Race,
genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer,” that he coauthored with
three academics.
His coauthors were
then crushed humiliatingly
in Twitter debates by sports fans much more knowledgeable about the pervasive
racial patterns in sports than they are. But Rutherford, a rugby enthusiast, at
least knows a fair amount about athletics, so he puts up a more cunning fight
on this topic in his own book because he’s not being dragged down by his
colleagues’ ignorance.
In fact, I find
Rutherford’s writing rather like mine in form. Of course, the difference is
that I point out facts in order to increase knowledge, while Rutherford is
trying to decrease knowledge by denying realities.
Rutherford starts off
his chapter on sports, “Black Power,” by forthrightly admitting of Allan Wells’
gold medal in the 1980 Olympic 100-meter dash:
Not only was this the
last time a white man won the Olympic 100 meters, it was the last time that
white men competed in the final….
Many pages later he
delivers his big argument pooh-poohing this extraordinary racial gap in the
100-meter dash:
If people of West
African ancestry have a genetic advantage, why are there few West African
sprinters…?
But it turns out
there are quite a few very
fast West African sprinters, although no superstars yet of the magnitude of
Usain Bolt or Carl Lewis. Of the 143
men in history who have run 100 meters in under 10.00 seconds
flat, 134 have been of at least half sub-Saharan descent. Twelve have been
Nigerian-born (three running under the colors of richer countries,
including Francis
Obikwelu, the 2004 silver medalist for Portugal). That makes Nigeria
the No. 3 sprinting country in the world after the U.S. (57) and Jamaica (19).
There are also two Ghanaians and two from Ivory Coast who have broken the
ten-second barrier.
Besides the sixteen West
Africans, there have also been eight southern Africans (although one identifies
as a Cape
Coloured, a recent racial group that has emerged over the past few
centuries from the admixture of whites, blacks, Bushmen, and Malays).
So men born in
sub-Saharan Africa make up one-sixth of all those who have run 100 meters in
under ten seconds.
But why don’t they make up five-sixths? Because, as
Francis Galton noted, nurture matters as well as nature. Apparently, Africans
don’t flourish in highly African countries as well as they do in countries under
more white influence.
“Lately, there have been interesting
discoveries about the deep history of current populations, but few if any
shockers about today’s races.”
One of Rutherford’s
strategies is to toss out facts, then argue that their seeming randomness
undermines those evil racists’ simplistic ideas: Instead, it’s all very
complicated. Thus he sums up his section on race in team sports:
None of the numbers
makes a great deal of sense if biological race is your guiding principle, and
patterns in relation to ethnicity are terribly inconsistent both between sports
and within them.
Yet, a careful, informed
reader will notice how frequently his own factoids backfire on him. For
example:
In top flight American
football, the proportion of black players is around 70 percent, but like rugby,
that is a game where there are highly specialized positions with different
skills and physical attributes….
And the running velocity requirements versus technical
expertise demands of positions correlate closely with the race of the players.
For example, all the starting cornerbacks in the NFL are black, but none of
the placekickers are.
But in the Center position within the linemen, whites
outnumber blacks 4:1. Why? We don’t know, but it does not appear to have
anything to do with genetics.
Well, actually, it does. Centers, being in the center of
the line, need the least foot speed of any linemen. Centers also need good
brains because they are in charge of telling their fellow offensive linemen
what to do. Journalist Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down,
wrote a 2004 article in The Atlantic titled:
A Beautiful Mind: As the Philadelphia Eagles’
Hank Fraley demonstrates, the behemoth who snaps the ball must also be one of
the most mentally nimble players on the field
According to the late
sportswriter Paul D. Zimmerman, in 1984 centers had the second-highest average
IQ scores (108) on the Wonderlic
test that the NFL makes all draft prospects take. (The lowest
scores are for running backs.)
Rutherford goes on:
In Major League
Baseball—a sport which requires sprinting and powerful throwing and
hitting—African Americans make up less than 10 percent of players.
Yet in baseball, the
same pattern of African-Americans being found at positions where foot speed is
necessary is found. Black Americans are about ten
times as likely to be outfielders as pitchers or catchers, two
highly technical positions that don’t demand any running on defense.
Back when baseball was
segregated before 1947, the Negro League had to supply its own pitchers and
catchers, so the Jackie Robinson Era featured outstandingly skilled black
pitchers and catchers such as Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella. But as black
youths have lost interest in baseball in favor of football and basketball,
blacks have declined faster as pitchers and catchers, two positions where
intensive coaching is crucial, than as outfielders, where natural skill is
relatively more important.
As my longtime readers
know, I can go on like this roughly forever pointing out subtle racial patterns
in sports. Therefore I’ll leave off at this point and return to the larger
questions raised by Rutherford’s book.
Rutherford’s
contradictory goals of standing loyally by his colleagues who subscribe to
today’s Race Does Not Exist dogma but simultaneously not letting himself get
easily dunked on by randos on Twitter lead him into immediate logical trouble
on page one of his new book. He and his friends had asserted last year:
Research in the 20th
century found that the crude categorizations used colloquially (black, white,
East Asian etc.) were not reflected in actual patterns of genetic variation….
The truth is closer to
the opposite: The immense advances in 21st-century genomics
have largely validated 20th-century colloquialisms like black, white, East
Asian, etc.
Note that we don’t have
a lot of new population groupings of living humans discovered only by the
latest DNA technology. It’s hard to notice dogs that don’t bark, so let me
belabor this point a bit. You don’t see Harvard geneticist David
Reich announcing that, say, unbeknownst to all previous
observers, it turns out that the closest living relations to Samoans are
actually Mohawks and Basques, while Tongans are most closely linked to Inuit,
Samaritans, and Khoisan.
Instead, what is found
over and over is that the old anthropologists going all the way back to
Linnaeus and Blumenbach in the 18th century tended to arrive at fairly
reasonable frameworks for how the human races’ ancestral diversity could be
conceptually organized. Lately, there have been interesting discoveries about
the deep history of current populations, but few if any shockers about today’s
races.
Why? Because what we can
see is the product of the genes we can’t see. So the arrival of genome
sequencing primarily just confirmed what sharp-eyed observers had already
noticed about who is related to whom.
Of course, there remain
in population genetics, as in all sciences, the inevitable lumper vs. splittercontroversies,
just as the Environmental Protection Agency’s biologists grapple with the
difficult question of whether wolves are
a separate species from dogs and coyotes for purposes of the Endangered Species
Act. And if wolves in general are a separate species, then are “red
wolves” their own distinct species or subspecies worthy of
protection or merely hybrids of wolves and coyotes?
But the EPA never has to
deal with any surprises in which DNA proves wolves are actually more related to
cats than to dogs. Analogously, Reich hasn’t found much about the world’s
current races that would have stunned L.L. Cavalli-Sforza in the 1990s or
Carleton Coon in the 1960s.
Likewise, the fact that
people often disagree on what to name various racial groups no more discredits
the concept of race than the fact that Americans can’t agree on whether to call
our biggest cat a cougar, a panther, a painter, a mountain lion, or a puma
means that the Endangered Species Act shouldn’t apply to it.
Moreover, we can’t
expect observers to conclusively agree upon how many races there are, just as
humans can’t agree upon how many different extended families they
personally belong to.
After all the number
crunching of DNA in this century, what woke science writers such as Rutherford
deride as “traditional and colloquial folk taxonomies
of race,” such as that blacks and East Asians are different racial groups, have
wound up being vindicated. In fact, How to Argue With a Racist demonstrates that
nobody can write a book that claims to debunk race without using these
extraordinarily useful racial terms. Hence, poor Rutherford has to announce on
his page one:
I will be using words
such as “black” and “East Asian” while simultaneously acknowledging that they
are poor scientific designations for the immense diversity within these
billions of people. It is an irony that we roughly know what these descriptors
mean colloquially while they are potentially incoherent in terms of scientific taxonomy.
It is an irony indeed.
In fact, Occam’s Razor would suggest that the reason common terms for major
races are so essential to Rutherford in writing his book is because they
actually exist.
And buried in a long
paragraph on page 55, Rutherford gets around to grudgingly admitting, en passant, that what the most
sophisticated race realists believe is true is…well, true:
The genetic differences
between us, small though they are, account for much, but not all, of the
physical variation we can see or assess. The diaspora from Africa around 70,000
years ago and continual migration and mixing since, means that we can see that
there is structure within the genomes that underlies our basic biology. Very
broadly, that structure corresponds with land masses, but within those groups
there is huge variation, and at the edges and within these groups, there is
continuity of variation.
In other words, the
great land masses of Earth, usually referred to as continents, tend to be home
to physically and genetically distinguishable ancestral groups. And our eyes,
our genealogical histories, and our DNA scans can further distinguish smaller
racial groups within each continental-scale race. For example, Blackfoot
Indians near the Canadian border tend to be quite tall, while Guatemalan
Indians tend to be quite short.
Modern DNA tests, much like your lying eyes, can often
locate with some degree of precision where within a continent your ancestors
long lived.
But, just as a glass is
both part full and part empty simultaneously, observers will also inevitably
disagree over whether to call the findings of physical anthropology and
population genetics precise or fuzzy.
Why? Because both are
true.
Moreover, as Rutherford
rightly notes, on the land borders of the great expanses, continental-scale
races tend to bleed into each other. For example, the indigenous people of
Western Eurasia are of the Caucasian race, while the natives of Eastern Eurasia
are of the Mongolian race, but in the middle are visibly hybrid populations
like the oppressed Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Similarly, while black sub-Saharans and
olive-skinned Caucasians native to North Africa are quite distinctive, each
oasis across the Sahara tends to have a varying admixture of the two great
races depending upon its latitude.
I would add, however,
that some geographic barriers to gene flow were extremely formidable until
fairly recent times. For instance, although we know that Vikings briefly
sojourned in Canada about a thousand years ago, we’ve yet to find definitive
genetic evidence that anybody alive today is descended from a man and woman who were
born on opposite sides of the Atlantic before the 15th-century Age of
Exploration.
It’s not impossible
that, say, ancient Phoenician sailors in the Atlantic were blown by storms to
the Americas where they found wives and left us living descendants. But nobody
has found anything proving that. The closest thing to this is the puzzling
recent find that
a few tribes in the Amazon have a tiny percentage of their DNA reminiscent of
remote Andaman Islanders in the Indian Ocean on the far side of the world.
Due to the 53-mile-wide
Bering Strait, the Pacific Ocean was less impermeable than the Atlantic before
Columbus, but the number of population exchanges between the Old World and New
World was extremely limited.
In contrast, the
tropical Indian Ocean was much less daunting to human migration and trade. In
prehistoric times, Southeast Asians made it all the way to Madagascar off
the coast of Africa.
But even in this vast
region, disease and altitude limited how much one group could blend into the
next. For example, the Himalayas create a quite sharp racial divide between
East Asians and South Asians. East Asians, such as the famous Sherpa mountain
climbers, actually live on both sides of Mt. Everest. But Tibetans in Nepal
stopped penetrating deeply into South Asia because they dislike altitudes below
about a mile of elevation. They are more susceptible to hot-weather diseases
than are South Asians, who in turn are not adapted by evolution like the
Tibetans are to thriving at high altitudes.
But after making the reluctant admissions quoted above,
Rutherford feels compelled to end his paragraph with trumpet blasts of double-dumbed-down
fealty to political correctness:
Of all the attempts over
the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds. Genetics
refuses to comply with these artificial and superficial categories…. Racial
differences are skin deep.
Rutherford’s absolutism
is obviously scientifically inappropriate for talking about human relatedness.
In reality, when it comes to determining who is more related to whom—after all,
the essence of race is who your relatives tend to be—it’s all relative.
In summary, Rutherford’s
book shows that no matter how skilled an arguer you might be, it’s hard to win an argument in the long run when you’re
wrong.
