Any regular reader of this blog will have figured out by now that I am a big fan of science. But "race" is a subject that I think Science gets wrong. And when I say "science gets it wrong" I am not talking about the actual scientific study of the subject or of the results derived therefrom. Instead, I am talking about how scientists talk about "race" when they are engaging with the public. The Twiter version of their message is "there is no such thing as race". I get where they are coming from and why they say it but I think they do themselves, the general business of science, and the specific subject a disservice. So why do they do it?
First, let me talk about what their scientific justifications for their position. They usually make a couple of points. They note that, genetically speaking (and genetics is what underpins the whole discussion) we are 98% the same as Chimpanzees. That's true but it is also irrelevant. Then they say that the variation from individual to individual is so great that it swamps "so called" racial differences. That's also true and also irrelevant. So while they are saying what they are saying what are they not saying and why are they not saying it?
Let's go right at it. Does something called "race" exist in any kind of scientific sense? The answer is yes. There's a company called 23andMe. Send them some money, about a hundred bucks. They will send you a kit. You use the kit to swab the inside of your cheek. You send the swab back to them and wait a few weeks. Back will come ancestry information. That's code for "race". 23andMe's results are repeatable. And there are other companies that offer a similar service for a similar price. If you go through the same routine with them you will get roughly the same answer as the 23andMe one. What's going on is exactly what the general public has in mind when they think "race" in a science context. And what's going on with 23andMe is broadly known to the public. So when some spokesman says "there is no such thing as race" people throw their hands up and say "are you nuts?" That's not good for scientific credibility.
From a scientific point of view what we have here is a "the signal and the noise" problem. It is similar to the problem of trying to pick out a single conversation at a noisy cocktail party. Most of what you hear is not the conversation you are interested in. You have to filter out the large amount of background "noise" before you can pick out the conversation "signal". All this "same genes as chimpanzees" and "random variation from person to person" stuff is the noise. But science is very good at extracting a small signal from a large amount of noise. It's a problem scientists deal with on a daily basis. So, from a scientific perspective, the question is "can science pick the 'race' signal out of the 'genetic variation' noise"? The obvious answer is yes. 23andMe and those other companies do it profitably thousands of times per day. So can scientists. How?
Before modern times almost no one traveled more than 25 miles from their birth place during their entire life. People intermarried and had children with people who lived close to where they did. Mutations happen. The population of any one small area is small. This allows mutations to build up and spread around in this small population over time. If you could identify the mutations unique to a small community then you could identify descendants of that community by searching for those mutations. The same is true over larger areas if more time is allowed to pass. The larger the area the more time will generally be necessary for unique mutations to arise and spread around. Science (and companies like 23andMe) have had the ability to pick a single mutation out a person's genetic material for some time now.
The 23andMe people have built up a large database of these geographically specific mutations. They grind all this information down with a lot of computer power. There are about 3 billion "base pairs" and about 20,000 genes in the genetic material of one person. So it takes a lot of computer grinding but computers are now cheap. They concentrate on the unique mutation "signal" and put everything else in the "noise" bucket. What pops out is a geographical profile of where and to what extent your genetic information comes from. This is tech talk for your racial profile. Scientists know this. They developed all the technology that 23andMe uses. So why do they pretend that they don't?
The problem is more cultural than anything else. Why do people want to know a person's race and what do they want to do with it? In short, they want to be able to jump to unwarranted conclusions. That's bad. But what is worse is that they want to use those unwarranted conclusions to advance economic, social, and political goals. The "black" experience in the U.S. is typical of how this works in the real world. Let's start with the desired outcome and work backward.
The desired outcome is cheap labor to perform difficult, dangerous, unpleasant tasks. Working in cotton fields in the heat of summer definitely falls into this category. You can always find someone to do a job if you are willing to pay enough. But cotton is a commodity. You need low production costs to be able to sell it inexpensively at a profit. Labor is a large component of production costs so cheap labor is critical. What is cheaper than a slave? They are subjected to poor working and living conditions and are paid literally nothing. The whole system is architected to make their labor as cheap as possible. The slaves know this so they desperately want to escape their situation.
Now if we enslave people who look like us they can escape easily, disguise their identity, and get away with impersonating a free person. (Making a cotton field escape proof would be expensive and the whole point of slavery is to keep things cheap.) With the technology available 200 years ago this made a really effective slave system hard to pull off. But what if instead of focusing on individuals you selected an easily identifiable population group and designated all of them as slaves? That's what was done with dark skinned people of African descent who were imported into a society run by "whites", people with light skin. Generally speaking, the rule was "white - free; black - slave). This was a simple to enforce rule.
There was such a thing as freed black people but it was common for them to be re-enslaved by unscrupulous people. The obvious physical difference that skin color represented made the system easy and cheap to implement and maintain. But how do you justify enslaving people based on their skin color? It turns out that in some situations a light skin color is advantageous and a dark one disadvantageous. But in other situations the reverse is true. So the fundamental differentiator, skin color, is not enough by itself. What do you do? You jump to unwarranted conclusions, the next step in the chain.
If the population you wish to enslave is of low intelligence, is "lazy and shiftless", is violent and inherently immoral then it is far easier to make the case that "those people deserve to be enslaved". And the people you need to convince are obviously not part of the group you want to enslave. So that's what was done. But from the current scientific perspective the conclusions are completely unwarranted.
Modern science is still mystified by the genetic basis of intelligence. It is obvious that there is a genetic component to intelligence but science has yet to find it. Characteristics like laziness are even more problematic. Here there is not even any kind of consensus on how to identify the congenitally lazy or even if such a thing exists. We are all lazy sometimes and energetic other times. I know that if I was enslaved I would quickly become as lazy as I could get away with. It would not be driven by genetics. It would simply be the sensible thing to do. And so it goes for other "moral shortcomings" attributed to the enslaved by the enslavers.
So why is science so reluctant to speak out? Well, there is an additional problem. Science's hands are not clean on the subject. Roughly a hundred years ago there was a "scientific" movement called eugenics. This was considered good science at the time. Proponents published learned papers in all the best scientific journals "proving" that black people were of low intelligence, had bad moral character, etc. "There is scientific justification for according black people an inferior position in society", the argument went. All of the research has since been discredited. Scientists try to learn from the mistakes of the past so they are now bending over backward to avoid repeating the "eugenics" mistake.
What's really going on is that a lot of scientists just want to steer clear of the whole area in any kind of public situation. The science is in an unsettled state, can't tell us much with authority, and in the recent past science screwed up in this area. So for all those reasons avoiding the subject as best as is possible seems at first to be a good idea. But I don't think it is. People take in the Twitter summary of the whole thing and decide since science is obviously wrong about this they are justified in believing it is wrong on other issues (evolution, global warming), I believe science needs to go where the facts lead. So where do they lead?
It is important to emphasize that scientific understanding of this area is evolving rapidly. A little over a decade ago the first complete genome of a human was decoded. We now have complete genomes for thousands of people and doing a full genetic sequence is getting cheaper at an astonishing pace. At the time of this first genetic sequence more than 90% of the sequenced DNA was characterized as "junk", DNA that apparently served no purpose at all. We now know that a lot of that "junk" actually serves useful and even critical purposes. But we are just at the beginning of figuring out what those purposes are.
For a time people thought that a "gay" gene would be discovered. There does not seem to be a single "gay" gene. And scientists thought that many "genetic" diseases would be nailed down to a single "bad" gene. That idea has also pretty much evaporated. And so it goes. The idea that if we can read the genetic sequence out we will know all now looks badly mistaken. Everything is much more complicated than we used to think and everything is intertwined with everything else in complex and poorly understood ways. Just as a single example, we now know there is a whole complex mechanism for turning genes on and off. This means that the mere presence of a certain version of a certain gene is not the end of the story. Presently we know the mechanism exist but we know very little beyond that. Science is at just the beginning of understanding area after area after area of what used to be lumped together as genetics.
Fundamentally, what science can tell us about race does not deliver the result people who think race should be important desire. It most specifically does not deliver a reason to enslave a "race" or even relegate them to a lower social position. The current scientific "state of the art" on race mostly consists of being able to determine where our ancestors lived. And even this information often shatters people's preconceived notions of their ancestry. It is common to find out that we don't have relatives where we thought we did and that we do have relatives where we thought we didn't. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson have had to wrestle with the fact that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemmings, a slave, for instance.
Still I think it is counterproductive for scientists speaking to the general public to say things like "there is no such thing as race". The statement "race isn't what you think it is" is of roughly the same length and is far more accurate.
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