第1章
The Science of Separating Us: How Race Became Our Most Dangerous Myth
In the heart of London's British Museum, surrounded by artifacts from around the world, lies a story more complex than the grand narrative of civilization the museum presents. Angela Saini's "Superior" has become a cultural touchstone in our era of resurgent nationalism, praised by publications from Nature to The Guardian for its unflinching examination of how science has been weaponized to justify racial hierarchies. The book takes readers on a global journey from Aboriginal Australian rock art to modern genetic laboratories, revealing how the concept of race-though biologically meaningless-continues to shape our world. As white supremacist movements gain new footholds and genetic ancestry testing becomes a multibillion-dollar industry, Saini's exploration of how science has been twisted to support prejudice couldn't be more timely. What makes this work particularly powerful is that it comes not from an activist but from a science journalist with impeccable credentials, methodically dismantling the foundations of scientific racism with precision and clarity.
第2章
The Ancient Handprints: Human Origins Beyond Race
Deep in the Australian outback, hundreds of miles from Perth, lies Mulka's Cave-a dark shelter beneath a boulder covered with hundreds of ancient handprints in reds, yellows, and oranges. These stenciled hands, created by Aboriginal Australians tens of thousands of years ago, represent one of humanity's oldest continuous artistic traditions. While European cave paintings like those at Lascaux receive more attention, human presence in Australia extends back at least 60,000 years-far longer than in Europe.
These handprints aren't mere decorations but part of complex symbolic systems embedded in profound cultural knowledge. Benjamin Smith, a rock-art expert, explains that Western philosophical traditions cannot fully contain indigenous systems of thought where everything is intertwined-people, land, and inanimate objects bound in relationships built over countless generations.
The question of what makes us uniquely human remains contentious. Archaeologists struggle to pinpoint exactly when Homo sapiens emerged, with fossils sharing our features dating between 300,000-100,000 years ago. Evidence shows we once shared Earth with other human species like Neanderthals and Denisovans. What separated "us" from "them" appears to be our capacity for symbolic thinking and complex art-yet scientific debate around human origins remains heated.
While mainstream science supports the "out of Africa" hypothesis, some scientists still question whether different populations evolved separately into modern humans. This multiregional evolution theory, proposed by anthropologists Alan Thorne and Milford Wolpoff, suggested that early human ancestors spread out of Africa and independently evolved into modern humans in different regions. Though largely rejected by the scientific community, the theory persists in some circles, particularly in China where both public opinion and leading academics often believe Chinese ancestry extends beyond the African migration.
The discovery that Europeans have Neanderthal ancestry (up to 4%) led to a remarkable image rehabilitation of these ancient humans. Originally portrayed as brutish and unintelligent, Neanderthals were suddenly described as sophisticated and "cognitively indistinguishable" from modern humans. This transformation reveals a troubling pattern-when nineteenth-century scientists compared Aboriginal Australians to Neanderthals, it was to dehumanize them. Now that Europeans share DNA with Neanderthals, suddenly these ancient humans are welcomed as "people like us."
Recent research suggests modern humans emerged from multiple, isolated Pan-African populations that occasionally mixed, rather than from a single population. As Eleanor Scerri argues, "There's never a time that we were not changing." This evolving understanding raises profound questions about what defines humanity and how we conceptualize race.
第3章
Human Zoos: When Science Made People into Specimens
In Paris's Bois de Vincennes woodland lie the dilapidated remains of the 1907 Colonial Exposition, where humans were once displayed in "villages" for European visitors. These human zoos, which attracted millions of visitors, weren't just entertainment but served as convenient research sites for European scientists. Anthropologists and anatomists measured head size, height, weight, and skin color of the captive subjects, documenting their findings in scientific papers that established parameters for modern race science.
Race as we understand it today is a relatively recent concept. Before the Enlightenment, physical differences were considered permeable and geographical-people in hotter regions had darker skin that would lighten if they moved somewhere colder. The notion of race as fixed and hereditary emerged gradually through Enlightenment science.
Carl Linnaeus, in his 1758 work Systema Naturae, categorized humans into four groups corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa-red, white, yellow, and black. Other scholars created their own classification systems, often without ever seeing the people they described. These categories quickly became hierarchical, conflating physical appearance with character and political circumstance with biological fact.
One notorious example of scientific dehumanization was Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus," displayed in London in 1810. Europeans were fascinated by her physical features, particularly her buttocks and genitalia. After her death in 1815, French naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her body, removing her brain and genitals for scientific study. Her remains were displayed at the Musee de l'Homme in Paris until 1982 and only returned to South Africa for burial in 2002.
Modern race science emerged directly from colonial political ideologies. By classifying and homogenizing people, European powers found it easier to control them. These racial theories conveniently justified both colonialism and slavery-Europeans weren't simply motivated by economic greed but were "helping" supposedly inferior peoples.
Charles Darwin's 1871 work "The Descent of Man" should have settled the race debate by demonstrating our common ancestry. Coming from an abolitionist family, Darwin opposed the idea of separate racial origins. Yet he still struggled with notions of equality, suggesting gradations between "the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages."
Rather than eliminating racism, evolutionary theory was co-opted to repackage it in scientific language. Thomas Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," argued whites were "bigger brained" while German zoologist Ernst Haeckel portrayed black Africans as evolutionary "missing links" between apes and Europeans.
The true purpose of race science wasn't understanding physical differences but justifying social inequalities-why some were enslaved while others free, some prosperous while others poor. Scientists claimed objectivity while seeking biological explanations for socioeconomic and political questions.
第4章
The Eugenic Dream: When Science Sought Human Perfection
In 1997, Hubert Markl, president of Germany's prestigious Max Planck Society, initiated an investigation into the organization's predecessor, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, during the Nazi era. The investigation revealed devastating findings: scientists had willingly cooperated with the Nazi regime, marrying academic interests with political expediency.
Otmar von Verschuer exemplified this complicity-a respected academic whose twin studies received international funding while he simultaneously served as a Nazi race expert. His former student Josef Mengele sent him samples from murdered concentration camp victims, including children's organs and twins' eyes.
The Holocaust's scientific rationale wasn't uniquely German. The well of ideas from which Hitler drew his "racial hygiene" plans had been supplied by race scientists worldwide for over a century, supported by respected intellectuals, aristocrats, and political leaders.
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, established the world's first Eugenics Record Office in 1904 at London's 50 Gower Street to measure human differences and determine which people Britain should produce more of. Before science, Galton was an explorer funded by his father's fortune from the slave trade and gun manufacturing. His African expedition reinforced rather than challenged his racist assumptions, combining with his passion for data measurement to form his eugenics theories.
Eugenics reduced humans to parts of a whole, either dragging down or elevating their race, yet appealed across the political spectrum. Before World War II, many progressives embraced it as socially forward-thinking. Among intellectuals, eugenics wasn't just mainstream; it was fashionable.
The movement's central concern was that the poor were outbreeding the rich, supposedly because they were congenitally unfit. Winston Churchill served as vice president at the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912, alongside prominent political and academic figures.
While eugenics never gained firm government footing in Britain, America embraced it wholeheartedly. Indiana passed the world's first involuntary sterilization law in 1907, with thirty other states following. The American Eugenics Record Office opened at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910 with Rockefeller and Carnegie funding.
As eugenics evolved, its scope expanded beyond targeting the "feeble-minded" and disabled. Karl Pearson, Galton's successor, argued that racial mixing threatened British welfare. Eugen Fischer designed tools to determine "relative whiteness" of mixed-race people in Namibia-literally determining life or death during Germany's Namibian genocide. Fischer's work later informed Nazi racial laws.
Madison Grant's pseudo-intellectual racism found powerful supporters, including Theodore Roosevelt. His work influenced the Ku Klux Klan and inspired the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe and effectively barred Asians. Adolf Hitler wrote to Grant that his book was "my bible."
Despite World War II's horrors, race scientists didn't simply disappear. Many, like Otmar von Verschuer, simply rebranded their work as "genetics" and avoided political associations. The Eugenics Record Office in London survived through the war, and eugenics policies continued globally-Indiana repealed sterilization laws only in 1974, California prisons sterilized women inmates as recently as 2010, and Japan's Eugenic Protection Law remained until 1996.
第5章
The Scientific Resistance: How Race Science Survived Rejection
Reginald Ruggles Gates, a once-respected plant geneticist and eugenicist born in 1882, exemplified how World War II marked a turning point for race scientists. Previously successful despite believing races were different human species, Gates found himself increasingly rejected post-war. His papers faced journal rejections as the scientific establishment, shaken by Nazi atrocities, distanced itself from racial theories.
A significant shift in racial thinking emerged in 1949 when UNESCO gathered scientists, anthropologists, and policymakers to redefine race. Led by anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who declared "the word race is itself racist," the group emphasized human unity and rejected racial categorization as arbitrary and superficial.
UNESCO's 1950 statement declared "scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one," attempting to eradicate what it called a "fundamentally antirational system of thought." This position gained scientific validation in 1972 when geneticist Richard Lewontin demonstrated that about 85 percent of all genetic diversity exists within populations rather than between supposed races.
Mark Jobling, a genetics professor at Leicester University, explains that if only Peruvians survived a global catastrophe, they would preserve 85 percent of human genetic diversity, reflecting our status as a young, closely related species. The greatest genetic diversity exists in Africa, with migrating groups carrying less diversity due to the "founder effect."
Despite the changing public mood around race, many researchers couldn't abandon decades of work. Some respected scientists at prestigious universities like Oxford and Cambridge wanted the UNESCO statement revised with more scientific precision, believing it overstepped what biology could claim in favor of liberal politics.
Under pressure from such scientists, UNESCO published a revised 1951 statement with subtly tempered language. For instance, instead of stating scientists had "reached general agreement" about humanity being one species, it now said scientists were merely "generally agreed"-acknowledging that not every expert accepted even this basic fact.
Though the parameters of research changed, racial categories remained alive in people's minds and everyday experiences. Scientists began referring to "populations" or "ethnic groups" instead of races, but often unconsciously forced racial thinking into their work.
In his final years, when scientific journals rejected his work, Gates and like-minded researchers-including former Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer and British eugenicist Roger Pearson-established "The Mankind Quarterly" in 1960. Their aim was to challenge what they saw as a politically correct conspiracy around race and restore "scientific objectivity."
The journal was secretly funded by Wickliffe Draper, a multimillionaire textile heir and dedicated segregationist. In 1937, Draper had established the Pioneer Fund to promote eugenics and racial purity. Mainstream scientists immediately saw through it. Anthropologist Geoffrey Harrison wrote a scathing review, concluding: "Few of the contributions have any merit whatsoever, and many are no more than incompetent attempts to rationalise irrational opinions."
Yet the journal persisted and still exists today, now edited by German biochemist Gerhard Meisenberg. Despite having no background in genetics or psychology, he confidently asserts that racial differences in school performance are "perhaps mostly caused by genes"-a claim without scientific evidence.
第6章
The New Networks: Race Science in the Internet Age
In 1985, history professor Barry Mehler began investigating the shadowy networks of academic racists, focusing on the Mankind Quarterly founders and Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund. What he discovered was alarming: far from disappearing after World War II, scientific racism had survived through sophisticated international networks of intellectuals. These networks maintained their own journals, publishing houses, and mutual citation systems that kept their ideology alive despite mainstream rejection.
For those on the far right, maintaining their networks allows them to wait for political winds to change, providing fresh entry points into mainstream institutions. Keith Hurt notes that the Reagan administration's "careless" casting of a wide net for personnel allowed figures connected to these networks to gain positions of influence-a pattern he sees repeating today.
This resurgence manifested in secretive conferences at University College London organized by Mankind Quarterly editors since 2014, attracting academics and public figures including briefly-appointed UK government official Toby Young. Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve (which cited numerous Mankind Quarterly contributors), has enjoyed an "unfortunate resurgence" with campus speaking engagements despite protests.
Jared Taylor, a Yale-educated Mankind Quarterly contributor, has become a key white supremacist intellectual through his American Renaissance magazine and foundation. Taylor's "race realism" conferences attract academics like CUNY philosophy professor Michael Levin, who received over $120,000 from the Pioneer Fund and argues for racial discrimination based on supposed intelligence differences.
The internet has amplified these voices, with figures like Milo Yiannopoulos claiming "behind every racist joke is a scientific fact." Their rhetoric positions themselves as brave truth-tellers against "politically correct" science.
In 1998, Steve Sailer, a little-known science journalist, formed a mailing list about human variation, co-opting the term "Human Biodiversity"-a phrase anthropologist Jonathan Marks had coined to celebrate biological and social variation across humanity. The list quickly attracted prominent intellectuals including Steven Pinker, Francis Fukuyama, Paul Krugman, and controversially, Bell Curve author Charles Murray.
Sailer rose to true prominence during the 2016 US presidential election, where his strategy of focusing on immigration to unite white working-class voters proved unexpectedly successful for Donald Trump. Having subverted diversity language, Sailer did the same with identity politics-arguing that if ethnic minorities could assert their rights, so could white voters who felt threatened by immigration and globalization.
Jonathan Marks was shocked by their success: "If you had told me twenty years later that they would be part of a political mainstream wave, I would have said you are absolutely crazy... But I think they were a lot cleverer than us professors."
第7章
Genetic Ancestry: The New Frontier of Race Science
While political race theorists operated on the fringes, mainstream academia was having its own transformative debate about human difference. In 1991, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza proposed using the same technology as the Human Genome Project to map genetic variation across different ethnic groups worldwide. His Human Genome Diversity Project would collect genetic data from 400-500 different small populations, especially remote indigenous ones they called "isolates."
The scientists were caught off guard by resistance from indigenous communities. As Henry Greely from Stanford observed: "They were the good guys... They understood the rights-enhancing, equality-enhancing potential of genomics." Yet they remained tone-deaf, using clinical terms like "isolates of historical interest" to describe living cultures.
Despite their antiracist intentions, the project contained a fundamental paradox: if human genetic variation was trivial, why spend millions studying it? By deliberately targeting isolated populations rather than sampling systematically across the globe, they inadvertently reinforced the notion that certain groups were special and distinct.
Though the Human Genome Diversity Project never fully launched, its concept survived through other initiatives. Perhaps its most consequential offspring was the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project in 2005. Led by Spencer Wells, Cavalli-Sforza's former student, it offered consumer DNA testing kits that allowed the public to explore their genetic ancestry while building a research database.
This market exploded after Oprah Winfrey's televised DNA test revealed her African ancestry connections, with companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA eventually selling billions of dollars worth of tests. Wells explains the industry flourishes because of Americans' sense of rootlessness and desire to connect with their origins.
However, the tests reinforce the problematic notion that our differences are fundamentally genetic and that racial categories have biological meaning. In reality, these tests merely estimate potential ancestral connections based on limited comparative data. They don't reveal your actual past but show connections to present-day people who've taken similar tests.
Recent genetic discoveries challenge traditional notions of national identity. Stonehenge, the quintessential British monument, was built by Neolithic farmers who were mostly replaced by Beaker folk within a few hundred years. Similarly, Cheddar Man and his relatives were replaced by Anatolian farmers, with only about 10% of modern British ancestry tracing back to his genetic group.
This genetic history undermines the concept of race and fixed ethnic identity. The mathematics of ancestry reveals that going back just fifteen generations could theoretically give you 32,768 ancestors, and anyone from thousands of years ago who had descendants is likely an ancestor to virtually everyone alive today.
第8章
The Persistence of Biological Determinism
Bruce Lahn's controversial 2005 studies claimed to find genetic variants linked to brain size that were more common in European and Asian populations than African ones. He suggested these variants emerged around 5,800 years ago, coinciding with early civilization in Mesopotamia, implying some populations evolved cognitive advantages. Though initially sensational, Lahn's work quickly unraveled when researchers couldn't replicate his findings.
The belief that "everything is in the genes" stems from Gregor Mendel's 19th-century pea plant experiments, which became the foundation of genetics. This Mendelian view-that heredity determines destiny-quickly became politically powerful, fueling eugenics. However, Oxford professor Raphael Weldon identified a fundamental problem: Mendel had carefully bred his peas to show perfect patterns, filtering out natural variation. Weldon argued that genetic effects depend heavily on context and environment, making inheritance far more complex than Mendel's simplified model suggested.
Research by sociologists Carson Byrd and Victor Ray reveals how genetic determinism perpetuates racism in modern America. Their analysis shows white Americans tend to view racial differences through a biologically deterministic lens-attributing Black Americans' challenges to innate genetic factors while seeing their own circumstances as socially determined. Even white liberals who support affirmative action often do so from a problematic belief that Black Americans need help because they're genetically disadvantaged.
Nineteenth-century racial ideas gain unwarranted credibility when rewritten in modern genetic language. Anthropologist Stephan Palmie argues that much genomic research simply restates outdated racial assumptions using allele frequencies. Bruce Lahn's discredited work suggesting human history was determined by a single gene variant illustrates how easily flawed science can seem legitimate when dressed in technical jargon.
Racial stereotypes evolve with changing economic fortunes. Asian Americans, once considered biologically inferior and targeted by exclusionary laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, are now labeled a "model minority" as Asian economies prosper. As psychologist Eric Turkheimer notes, similar shifts happened with southern Europeans: "A hundred years ago, people were quite convinced that Greek people had low IQs... Did somebody do a big scientific study and check those Greek genes? No... Greek people overcame the disadvantages they faced a hundred years ago, and now they're fine and nobody thinks about it anymore."
第9章
The Dangerous Myth of Racialized Medicine
The historical notion that schizophrenia was a "Jewish disease" demonstrates how mental illness diagnoses have been racialized differently across time and place. In 1930s Poland, statistics claiming Jews had twice the schizophrenia rates of Poles were used to label this as an inherent "racial characteristic" rather than considering social factors.
A 1725 engraving showing an Englishman licking an African slave's chin sparked the "slavery hypertension hypothesis"-the theory that black Americans retain more salt due to a genetic bottleneck during the slave trade. This theory attempts to explain why black Americans suffer higher hypertension rates than white Americans. Richard Cooper, a public health researcher who studied blood pressure across populations, found hypertension is actually lowest in rural Africa and highest in Finland, Germany and Russia. Studies show education level and socioeconomic factors better predict hypertension than African ancestry.
Medical researchers often misapply statistical methods when studying racial differences. Jay Kaufman notes that researchers pick variables to adjust for without explaining their choices, and often measure complex factors like socioeconomic status poorly. The logic of statistical adjustment assumes race is a simple, measurable quantity like age or weight, when in reality racial discrimination has incalculably deep effects that can't be easily isolated.
The pharmaceutical industry exploits racial categories for profit. When NitroMed's combination heart failure drug BiDil faced FDA rejection and a running-out patent, they took an unprecedented approach: conducting clinical trials on black patients only. This strategy represented a cynical attempt to get their pill approved as quickly and cheaply as possible by leveraging racial categories. Despite BiDil's developer Jay Cohn admitting the drug works for everyone regardless of race, it became marketed as "the world's first black pill," gaining thirteen years of patent protection and commanding six times the price of its component drugs.
When examining the actual statistics behind racialized medicine, the flaws become evident. For conditions like sickle cell anemia, screening only black infants would miss many cases since the total number of white Americans with the trait is substantial despite lower prevalence rates. For hypertension medications like ACE-inhibitors, research by Kaufman and Cooper revealed that assigning treatment by race is "about as useful as flipping a coin"-48% of white patients fail to respond as hoped, while 41% of black patients would benefit from drugs they're routinely denied.
Anthropologist Duana Fullwiley's research revealed a startling contradiction: scientists routinely using racial categories to find genetic differences couldn't actually define what race was. Their work rested on the hope that these undefined categories would eventually become meaningful through research. Yet despite billions spent on genome-wide association studies, genetic evidence rarely supports claims of innate racial health differences.
第10章
The Future of Race in a Divided World
The sudden rise of nationalism and racism worldwide connects to the intellectual underpinnings that give them power. Historian Barry Mehler's Holocaust-surviving relatives were "prepared for things to cease to be normal very quickly"-a sentiment that resonates as we witness the "cancerous surge in nationalism" across Europe and America.
Saini warns against the seductive power of belonging that nationalism offers-a false comfort that deliberately makes no appeal to shared humanity. She identifies "race realists" as intellectuals who exploit this moment to promote the idea that human difference runs deep, giving some populations advantages over others. Yet she maintains their project is intellectually doomed, as forcing a biological understanding of race inevitably fails.
The real problem isn't just ignorance but that some people don't want racial inequality to end, and will keep reaching for new theories when old ones fail-all to maintain their sense of superiority.
As we confront our uncertain future, we must recognize that race is not a biological reality but a social construct with profound consequences. The science is clear: we are one human species with more genetic variation within populations than between them. Our differences are superficial, our commonalities profound. The challenge before us is not scientific but moral-will we embrace our shared humanity, or continue to invent hierarchies that divide us?
