Book Reviewed - Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini

Politically correct but scientifically unsound

This book drew a lot of attention recently in which the author suggests that the use of race in biological/medical research is due to widespread racism. For example, in Chapter 1, she argues that Out of Africa theory is invented by Europeans, and Nazis wanted to prove superiority of Aryan race. This is false; Hitler made alliances with Muslims from the Middle east against Jews. The Third Reich was anti-Semitic. If Hitler was really a racist, he would have invaded Africa. In fact, many SS officers who went to live in Egypt after the war became Muslims and followed Islamic practices.

The author is also in error when she reminds readers that races correspond to “arbitrary” divisions of population variation that are “politically and economically useful,” The fact is that there are heritable characteristics that allow us to divide into a set of races in such a way that all the members share traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race. These traits and tendencies are viewed as race. Natural barriers such as oceans (e.g. the Atlantic), deserts (e.g. the Sahara) and mountain ranges (e.g. the Himalayas) impeded gene flow between different populations for substantial periods of time. When there is limited gene flow between populations that have come under different selection pressures, we would expect them to gradually diverge from one another over via the processes of genetic drift and natural selection. Races therefore correspond to human populations that have been living in relative isolation from one another, under different regimes of selection. This means that racial categories identify real phenotypic differences and reflect real genetic variation. Natural philosophers began to classify humans into different races because they looked different from one another. These differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. But the most controversial area of “race science” is research into population differences in cognitive ability.

Chimpanzees share the distinction of being our closest living relative which share about 99% of our genes. A unique collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences; geneticists, historians, archaeologists and linguists found a common ground about the origins of modern human beings including the common origins of languages from an ancient language called Indo-European language. Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations. Modern human beings arose some 200,000 years ago, and for 190,000 years, they we were all dark-skinned, reflecting the origins from Africa. Caucasians are the product of a work of evolution across Europe, while scientist have discovered three genes that produce light skin – they have played a part in the lightening of Europeans’ skin color and the color of the eye over the past 8,000 years. The process of skin lightening, known as “depigmentation,” occurred due to a series of mutations in one particular gene called SCL24A5.

Equating hereditarian claims with racism is illogical and irresponsible. Many of the ideas that Saini classifies as “scientific racism” are empirical claims. Besides, race is not a social construct, but nationalism and regionalism are certainly social constructs. She uses false arguments to fit her theory. This is a blatant abuse of scientific data to write a politically correct fable. Her conclusions are inaccurate. I would recommend staying away from this apologue.