guardian | Genetics has a blighted past with regards to race. Even today, important figures from its history – notably James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix – express unsupportable racist views.
The irony is that while Galton spawned a field with the intention of
revealing essential racial differences between the peoples of the Earth,
his legacy – human genetics – has shown he was wrong. Most modern
geneticists are much less like Galton and more like Darwin. A dreadful book published last year by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade
espoused views about racial differences seemingly backed by genetics.
As with Watson, the reaction from geneticists was uniformly dismissive,
that he had failed to understand the field, and misrepresented their
work.
We now know that the way we talk about race has no scientific
validity. There is no genetic basis that corresponds with any particular
group of people, no essentialist DNA for black people or white people
or anyone. This is not a hippy ideal, it’s a fact. There are genetic
characteristics that associate with certain populations, but none of
these is exclusive, nor correspond uniquely with any one group that
might fit a racial epithet. Regional adaptations are real, but these
tend to express difference within so-called races, not between them.
Sickle-cell anaemia affects people of all skin colours because it has
evolved where malaria is common. Tibetans are genetically adapted to
high altitude, rendering Chinese residents of Beijing more similar to
Europeans than their superficially similar neighbours. Tay-Sachs disease, once thought to be a “Jewish disease”, is as common in French Canadians and Cajuns. And so it goes on.
We harvest thousands of human genomes every week. Last month, the UK launched the 100,000 Genomes project
to identify genetic bases for many diseases, but within that booty we
will also find more of the secret history of our species, our DNA mixed
and remixed through endless sex and continuous migration. We are too
horny and mobile to have stuck to our own kind for very long.
Race doesn’t exist, racism does. But we can now confine it to
opinions and not pretend that there might be any scientific validity in
bigotry.
