At the turn of the millennium, excitement about the dizzying possibilities of genetics was still rife. People wondered whether gene therapy could some day cure cancer. Researchers imagined they would find genes for ­everything from being tall to being gay, whether we might even build designer babies by tinkering with our DNA. And two scientists working for the National Cancer Institute in the United States wrote a fairy tale.

Their protagonist is a well-meaning geneticist who one day begins to wonder why some people use chopsticks to eat their food and others don’t. Of course, the hero does what all good experimentalists do: he rounds up several hundred students from his local university and asks them how often they each use chopsticks. Then he sensibly cross-references that data with their DNA and begins his hunt for a gene that shows some link between the two. Lo and behold, he finds it!

“One of the markers, which is located right in the middle of a region previously linked to several behavioural traits, showed a huge correlation to chopstick use,” the tale goes. He has discovered what he decides to call the “successful use of ­selected hand instruments” gene, neatly abbreviated to SUSHI. The magic spell has been cast: the experiment is ­successfully replicated, the scientist’s paper is published, and he lives happily ever after.


This might have been the end were it not for one fatal yet obvious flaw. It takes him as long as two years to hit upon the uncomfortable realisation that his research contains a mistake. The SUSHI gene he thinks he has found just happens to occur in higher frequencies in Asian populations. So it wasn’t the gene that made people better at using chopsticks; it was that people who used chopsticks for cultural reasons tended to share this one gene a little more often. He has fallen headlong into the trap of assuming that a link between the use of chopsticks and the gene is causal, when in fact it isn’t. The spell is lifted and the magic is gone.

Like all good fairy tales, there was a moral to this story.

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Although not everyone could see it.

In 2005, the hype around genetics had begun to fizzle out, to be slowly replaced with a healthier scepticism. Scientists began to wonder whether our bodies might not be quite as straightforward as they had thought. And then along came a young geneticist at the University of Chicago in the United States with an extraordinary claim.


Bruce Lahn’s work was a shot in the arm for those who had always hoped that genes could explain everything – for the biological determinists who believed that we were anything but blank slates, that much of what we are is decided on the day we are conceived. His claim was so bold, it implied that maybe even the course of history could be decided by something as tiny as one gene.

Lahn had emigrated from China to study at Harvard University, and soon gained a reputation as a cocky maverick who didn’t follow instructions, who did things his own way. A while after arriving in the US, he changed his name to Bruce Lahn from Lan Tian, in homage to the legendary actor and martial arts expert Bruce Lee. The science journalist Michael Balter describes in a profile how, when invited to go on a two-day hike with his colleagues, Lahn turned up with nothing but a jar of pickled eggs. “He was kinda the whizz-kid, he was kinda the darling,” Balter recalls.

The whizz-kid moved up the academic ladder at lightning speed. In 1999 he was named in MIT Technology Review’s first Innovators Under 35 list. Then, in 2005, he published a pair of studies in the prestigious journal Science, drawing a connection between a couple of genes and changes in human brain size. He and colleagues stated that as recently as 5,800 years ago (a mere heartbeat in evolutionary time), one genetic variant that was linked to the brain, among other things, had emerged and swept through populations as a result of evolution by natural selection. Their implication was that it bestowed some kind of survival advantage on our species, making our brains bigger and smarter. At the same time, he noted that this particular variant happened to be more common among people living in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of east Asia, but was curiously rare in the rest of Africa and in South America. Lahn speculated that perhaps “the human brain is still undergoing rapid adaptive evolution” – although not for everyone in the same way.

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His work caused a sensation. What set pulses racing above all was his observation that the timing of the spread of this gene variant seemed to coincide with the rise of what is credited as one of the world’s earliest civilisations in Mesopotamia, with the emergence of highly sophisticated human cultures and written language. Lahn seemed to imply that the brains of different population groups might have evolved in different directions for the past five millennia, and that the groups with this special genetic difference may in consequence have become more sophisticated than others. In brief, people in Europe, the Middle East and Asia had benefited from a cognitive boost, while Africans had languished – perhaps were still languishing – without it.


Racists ate it up and asked for second helpings. After all, here was hard scientific evidence that seemed to corroborate what they had always claimed: that some races were intellectually inferior to others. Their failure to prosper economically was rooted not in history, but in nature. “There will be plenty more results where these came from,” predicted the right-wing commentator John Derbyshire in the American conservative magazine National Review. Lahn also attracted support from the late Henry Harpending, a geneticist at the University of Utah and co-author of a controversial book arguing that biology could explain why Europeans conquered the Americas, and also that European Jews had evolved to be smarter on average than everyone else.

However, there were problems with Lahn’s findings. Even if his gene variants did show up with different frequencies in certain populations, it did not necessarily mean that they provided those who had them with a cognitive advantage. The variants were known to be linked to organs other than the brain, so if natural selection was taking place, maybe this was nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe the genes conferred some advantage that wasn’t related to the brain. The hypothesis needed more evidence.

Soon after the papers were published, the controversial Canadian psychologist John Philippe Rushton ran IQ tests on hundreds of people to see if the gene variants really did make a difference to intelligence or to brain size in those who possessed them. Try as he might, he couldn’t find any evidence that they did. They neither increased head circumference nor general mental ability.

Before long, critics piled in from across the board, undermining every one of Lahn’s scientific and historical assertions. For a start, the variant he described as emerging 5,800 years ago could actually have appeared within a time range as wide as 500 to 14,100 years ago, so it may not have coincided with any major historical events. Respected geneticist Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania, who had been a co-author of his papers, distanced herself from Lahn’s suggestion that it might be linked to advances in human culture.

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There were doubts too that Lahn’s gene variants had seen any recent selection pressure at all. Tishkoff tells me that scientists today universally recognise intelligence as a highly complex trait, not only influenced by many genes but also likely to have evolved during the far longer portion of human history, ending around ten thousand years ago, when we were all mainly hunter-gatherers. “There have been common selection pressures for intelligence,” she explains. “People don’t survive if they’re not smart and able to communicate. There’s no reason to think that there would be differential selection in different populations.

“That doesn’t mean somebody won’t find something some day. Maybe it’s possible, but I don’t think there’s any evidence right now that supports those claims.”

In the end, Lahn had no choice but to abandon this line of research. “It was pretty damaging, because a lot of illustrious researchers either couldn’t replicate his original findings or did not come to the same conclusions,” explains Balter, who interviewed Lahn, his critics and his supporters at the time. Science, the journal that published his papers, came under attack for including the more speculative portions of his work in the first place.

To be fair to him, Lahn was partly a victim of how science works these days. The big discoveries have been made, so researchers often have little choice but to drill down into small, specific areas within biology. To make a name, they need themselves and the world to believe that this little thing they’re studying is significant. According to Martin Yuille, a molecular biologist at the University of Manchester, in the UK, “If you’re going to do an experiment, you have to be reductionist. You have to look for one of the factors that is associated with a phenomenon, and you’re tempted inevitably to try to think of that factor as being a cause, even though you know it is actually an association. So you’re kind of driven to it.

“It is all too easy to exaggerate the role of the one variant of a gene that you might identify as associated with a trait… But you need to be modest.”

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In this case, the world had seen the chopsticks fairy tale play out for real. In hindsight, it seems obvious that just because a genetic change in the brain may be more common in certain geographical populations than in others, that’s no basis for claiming that it could be responsible for the fortunes of entire regions. It’s an idea that has underpinned racist thought for centuries. It assumes groups fall into ranks based on immutable genetic features. It has the scent of the multi-­regional hypothesis, implying that nature has taken different tracks, that some of us are more “highly evolved” than others. By any measure, the intellectual leap that Lahn took was an irresponsible one. But then some people had thought he was cocky, that he did things his own way.

When I contact Lahn, now a professor of genetics at the University of Chicago, it has been more than a decade since his controversial papers were published. In 2009, undeterred by his failure, he wrote a piece in another top-flight journal, Nature, calling for the scientific community to be morally prepared for the possibility that they might find differences between populations, and to therefore embrace “group diversity” in the way that societies already cherish cultural diversity. He argued that “biological egalitarianism” won’t be viable for much longer, implying that not all population groups are actually equal. He tells me that he’s still “open to the possibility that there may be genetic differences in ­intelligence between modern populations, just like there may be genetic differences in other biological traits between modern populations such as bodily measures, pigmentation, disease susceptibility and dietary adaptation”.

His hypothesis hasn’t changed, even though he has no more evidence to support it. Yet Lahn sticks firmly to the line that he is guided by science, wherever this may take him. “Before there is data, these are just possibilities,” he says. “My nose follows the scientific method and data, not politics. I am willing to let the chips of data fall where they may, as any self-respecting scientist should.”

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The New York-based sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman has written: “Genetics isn’t just a science; it is a way of thinking” in which “the seed contains all it could be. It is pure potential.”

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For University of Virginia psychology professor Eric Turkheimer, the assumption that propels race research today in all its various forms is this deterministic pathology. “There are people out there who think in a serious way that they’re going to link up gene effects, the things you see in brain scans, the things you see on IQ tests,” he tells me. They are looking for that elusive mechanism, that magic formula allowing them to take the genomes of people from Europe, or Africa, or China, or India, or anywhere else, and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that one population group really is smarter than another. It’s all there in our bodies just waiting to be discovered.

“It’s a racist hypothesis,” he adds.

In 2015, sociologists W Carson Byrd, at the University of Louisville, and Victor Ray, at the University of Tennessee, investigated the belief of white Americans in genetic determinism. Having studied responses to the General Social Survey, which is carried out every two years to provide a snapshot of public attitudes, Byrd tells me they found that “whites see racial difference in more biologically deterministic terms for blacks”. Yet they tend to view their own behaviour as more socially determined. If a black person, for instance, happens to be less smart, the interpretation is that they were born this way, whereas a white person’s smartness or lack thereof is seen more as a product of outside factors such as schooling and hard work. “So they give people a bit more leeway if they’re white,” he explains.

It was also interesting to Byrd that even though the General Social Survey found that white conservatives were a little more biologically deterministic than white liberals, people with this view on both sides of the political spectrum shared the belief that policy measures such as affirmative action were needed to improve the lot of black Americans. There’s a slippery slope here, he warns. “The slipperiness is that they believe that because it’s genetic, they can’t help themselves, that it’s innate, that they’re going to be in a worse social position because of their race.” In other words, they want society to help black people, not because they believe we’re all equal underneath, but because they believe we’re not.

“Before it was something in the ‘blood’ and now it’s in our genes,” Byrd tells me. What has remained the same over the centuries is the racial stereotyping of black Americans. Rather than being seen as social or structural in origin, which it is, black disadvantage is conveniently rendered in the new scientific language of the day, which today is genetics. “A lot of people have become enamoured with the science… the mystique of things that could be embedded within our genes.”

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Stephan Palmié, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, has argued that even now “much genomic research proceeds from assumptions it culls from ostensibly ‘scientific’ constructions of the past… and eventually restates them in the form of tabulations of [gene] frequencies”. Nineteenth-century ideas about race that have gone out of fashion take on an almost magical quality when they’re freshly rewritten in the language of modern genetics. Today there is technical jargon, charts and numbers. Suddenly the old ideas seem shinier and more plausible than they did a moment ago. Suggest to anyone that the entire course of human history might have been decided by a single gene and they’ll probably laugh. But that’s exactly what Bruce Lahn did suggest in the pages of one of the most important journals in the world. For a moment, it felt possible because it was new science.

The belief that races have natural genetic propensities runs deep. One modern stereotype, for instance, is that of superior Asian cognitive ability. Race researchers, including Richard Lynn and the late John Philippe Rushton, have looked at academic test results in the United States and speculated that the smartest people in the world must be the Chinese, Japanese and other east Asians. When intelligence researcher James Flynn investigated the claim for work he published in 1991, he found that in fact they had the same average IQ as white Americans. Nevertheless, Asian Americans tended to score significantly higher on SAT college admission tests. They were also more likely to end up in professional, managerial and technical jobs. The edge they had was therefore a cultural one – more supportive parents or a stronger work ethic, maybe – endowed by their upbringing. They simply tended on average to work harder.

To anyone who has grown up as a member of an ethnic minority anywhere, especially those of us economic migrants who were told that we would have to work twice as hard to achieve the same as white people, this will come as small surprise. Among middle-class Indians living in the UK (the group my parents belong to) the weight of cultural pressure has generally been on children to become doctors, pharmacists, lawyers and accountants.

These are professions that tend to be well respected and well paid, with no shortage of job opportunities and straightforward entry once you have the right qualifications. They are reliable routes into middle-class society. Medicine carries such immense prestige bias among immigrants and their children that, according to the most recent data gathered by the British Medical Association, around a quarter of all British doctors are Asian or British Asian. This is not because Indians make better medics, of course, but because culture acts as a silent funnel. In the same way, women get channelled into caring professions such as nursing because this is what society expects. Culture moulds people, even subconsciously, for certain lives and careers.

We forget that these stereotypes can change over time. Asian Americans are today considered a model minority. Yet more than a century ago, European race scientists saw Asians as biologically inferior, somewhere between themselves and what they referred to as the lowest races. In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to ban Chinese immigrant labourers, because they were seen as undesirable citizens. Now that Japan has been highly prosperous for decades, and India, China and South Korea are fast on the rise with their own wealthy elites, the stereotypes have shifted the other way. As people and nations prosper, the racial prejudices move target. Just as they always have.

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Sebastian Nevols

Eric Turkheimer says: “Think about what happened to all the old racial stereotypes. A hundred years ago, people were quite convinced that Greek people had low IQs. You know, people from southern Europe? Whatever happened to that? Did somebody do a big scientific study and check those Greek genes? No, nobody ever did that. It’s just that time went on, Greek people overcame the disadvantages they faced, and now they’re fine and nobody thinks about it any more. And that’s the way these things proceed. All we can do is wait for the world to change and what seemed like hardwired differences melt away and human flexibility just overwhelms it.”

But the waiting is hard. And as we wait, it remains all too easy for researchers to allow their assumptions about the world to muddy the lens through which they study it, and for the research that they then produce to impact on or to reinforce racial stereotypes.

In 2011, Satoshi Kanazawa, of the Department of Management at the London School of Economics – who writes widely on evolutionary psychology – speculated that black women are considered physically less attractive than women of other races. “What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women?” he blogged for Psychology Today, racking his brain. “Black women are on average much heavier than nonblack women… However, this is not the reason black women are less physically attractive than nonblack women. Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI [body mass index]. Nor can the race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women,” he continued, in the manner of a drunk uncle.

At a stroke, Kanazawa took it as a scientific given that black women are both less attractive, which is obviously a value judgement, and innately less intelligent, which is unproven. Presenting these two offensive statements ­unchallenged, he landed on the speculative conclusion that their unattractiveness, as he had now established it, might have something to do with their different “levels of ­testosterone” compared with women of other races – again unproven. Kanazawa, whose published work has since looked at ­intelligence and homosexuality among other things, had his online post promptly pulled down under the weight of public and academic outrage. The London School of Economics banned him from publishing any more non-peer-reviewed articles or blog posts for a year.

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But how did it get published at all? When Kanazawa invoked race as a factor to explain why he perceived some women to be more attractive than others, he was performing a sleight of hand. He was diverting attention away from the ­underlying question of where his assumptions came from, or why he was asking this particular question. In so doing he shone the spotlight straight on to his racist conclusion. As soon as we, the audience, accepted his assumptions, they quickly ­transformed into a scientific question. For him, it was as legitimate as asking why apples fall down and not up, or why the sky is blue. Diverted, the publisher of his work failed to notice that his hypothesis was dripping with prejudice – it had no rigour to it at all.

American sociologist Karen Fields has compared use of the idea of race, like this, to witchcraft – it’s the phenomenon that she calls “racecraft”. Race is commonly described by scientists, politicians and race scholars as a social construct, as having no basis in biology. It’s as biologically real as witches on broomsticks. And yet, writes Fields, she sees the same “circular reasoning, prevalence of confirming rituals, barriers to disconfirming factual evidence, self-fulfilling prophecies” as folk belief and superstition. It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says because race feels as real to us as magic feels real to those who believe in it. It has been made real by overuse.

When Bruce Lahn, just four years after he was forced to retreat from his flawed research on intelligence genes, asked the scientific community to embrace “group diversity”, exactly what was he asking them to embrace? As he admitted to me himself, we don’t yet have the data to tell us what the differences between populations are beyond the superficial, and even these superficial variations show enormous overlap. The chips haven’t yet fallen. His plea is not for us to accept the science we have, but to accept in advance something we don’t yet know. He is assuming that data will eventually confirm what he suspects, that there are cognitive differences between groups – and telling us to take his word for it. But how scientific is that? How close is it to being simply belief?

“I do science as if the truth mattered and your feelings about it didn’t,” Kanazawa stated on his personal web page, lacking ostensible remorse for his paper on black women. In 2018, he and a colleague at Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, published a paper in the Journal of Biosocial Science, produced by Cambridge University Press, asking why societies with “higher average cognitive ability” have lower income inequality. Again, he started with the unproven assumption that populations have different cognitive abilities. Again, the editors failed to notice.

Among the very few researchers to have written on links between race, intelligence and the wealth of nations are Gerhard Meisenberg, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, all intimately associated with Mankind Quarterly – a journal founded after WW2 to publish controversial ideas about race, and funded by a wealthy American textile heir who was opposed to desegregation. Together, they have claimed that Africans have an average IQ of about 70. When Dutch psychologist Jelte Wicherts investigated this figure, he found they could have arrived at it only by ­deliberately excluding the vast majority of data that actually shows African IQs to be higher. “Lynn and Meisenberg’s ­unsystematic methods are questionable and their results untrustworthy,” he concluded. Even so, Kanazawa cites heavily from their work in his own.

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It’s a problem that continues outside ivory towers and marginal journals. In 2013, a public policy researcher at a powerful conservative thinktank, the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had written a doctoral thesis while at Harvard University claiming that the average IQ of immigrants in the United States was lower than that of white Americans. Jason Richwine expressed the possibility that “Hispanics” might never “reach IQ parity with whites”, ignoring that nobody considers “Hispanics” a single genetic population group since they have such diverse ancestries. Most Argentinians, for instance, are of European ancestry, just like white Americans. Having created the illusion that Hispanics are a distinct biological race, Richwine made it real. He had performed a sleight of hand.

From this, he followed up with the suggestion that immigration policy should focus on attracting more intelligent people. Upon joining the thinktank, he also happened to co-write a study which claimed that legalising the status of illegal immigrants, most of whom are Mexican and Central American, would result in an economic loss of trillions of dollars.

By the summer of 2018, as the result of a crackdown on illegal immigrants at the southern US border by the Trump ­administration, thousands of young children would be inhumanely separated from their parents by border patrol officers, many held in metal cages in a warehouse in Texas. News reports described them sleeping under foil sheets, wailing in distress. When the children were finally returned to their families, parents feared the long-term psychological repercussions of their traumatic detainment. In January the same year, during a closed meeting on new immigration proposals held in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump had reportedly asked lawmakers: “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?”



He was referring to people from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. He is believed to have added that the US should be welcoming more immigrants from countries such as Norway.

The notion that there are essential differences between population groups, that genetically “shit” people come from “shithole countries”, may be an old one. But the science of inheritance helped propel these racially charged assumptions into modern intellectual thought. It is the concept of genetic determinism that has made some succumb to the illusion that every one of us has a racial destiny.

In reality, as science has advanced, it has only become clearer that human biology doesn’t work this way. “We cannot sidestep the fundamental problem that biological systems are systems, they are collections of organisations of matter that interact with each other and each of their environments,’ explains the molecular biologist Martin Yuille.

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Evelynn Hammonds, historian of science at Harvard University, agrees that society has too long had a tendency to jump to the biological, to believe that our differences must be innate, because how else do we explain them? “When Jesse Owens won the medals in the 1936 Olympics, some people argued that he was not a full-blooded Negro, that he was actually mixed, and so they measured his whole body. That was 1936. They measured his whole body and made arguments like this: the thighbone is within the normal range of what the normal Negroid thigh bone should be,” she says. “That’s always the hot button question at the end of the day. These people are different from each other, they’re fundamentally different from each other, in disease, in athletic capacity and fundamentally in intelligence. That’s the narrative. It acts as a kind of animating force under the surface.”

We can’t help it. We keep looking back to race because of its familiarity. For so long, it has been the backdrop to our lives, the running narrative. We automatically translate the information our eyes and ears receive into the language of race, forgetting where that language came from. “I think that scientists, they are trapped by the categories they use. They will either have to jettison it or find different ways of talking about this,” says Hammonds. “They’ll have to come to terms with that it has a social meaning.” This doesn’t mean that racial categories shouldn’t be used in medicine or in science more generally. But it does mean that those who use them should fully understand their significance, be able to define them, and know their history. They should at least know what race means.

For research published in 2007, anthropologist Duana Fullwiley, then at the Harvard School of Public Health, spent six months watching medical researchers in laboratories in California. Their job was to find genetic differences in how people responded to drugs. It was a fairly young, diverse, international team, not at all stuffy or old-fashioned. And she noticed all the scientists were routinely using racial categories not only to select their subjects, but to confidently pick out statistical differences between these racial groups. So, as Fullwiley observed, she asked each scientist she interviewed one simple question: “How would you define race?”

Not one of them could answer her question confidently or clearly. The interviews were punctuated by long, awkward pauses and shy, embarrassed laughs. When pushed, some admitted that the concept of race made little sense, that the hard and fixed census categories actually didn’t mean very much. One said: “You can only judge race to a certain degree of confidence.” Another hesitated before admitting that she needed to “think more about it”.

Fullwiley concluded that most of the researchers “were unsure of the meanings of the race categories that they used, yet they continue to assert that there is a biological basis to them, which they will soon corroborate”. Race was their bread and butter – the entire premise upon which they were doing their research – but they were unable to tell Fullwiley what it was. Their work instead seemed to rest upon a hope that if they just persisted, they would eventually come to find scientific meaning in these categories. What they couldn’t yet define would then be defined.

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They appeared to believe that with enough data, with enough human guinea pigs, with enough science, they could take race – this imaginary, arbitrary set of categories invented by the powerful to control the weak – and somehow make it real.

This is an edited extract from Angela Saini’s new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, published on May 30 (4th Estate)

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