The Razor Blade in the Apple - Part II

The scientific consensus on race is a rhetorical minefield

A broad scientific consensus dictates that “races” are not a biological reality. And among those scientists who have actively worked to form this consensus, there are some who find any suggestion of ambiguity on this matter to really just be a furtive attempt to make room for all sorts of hideous racist claims.

They are not wrong. In 1994, Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein notoriously co-authored The Bell Curve, parsing supposedly unassailable statistics that showed correlations between IQ levels and personal, employment, and relationship outcomes; and which in one chapter posited that genetic differences between populations (supposed races) contributed to these alleged disparities. In 2020, Murray published a follow-up, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. It is more cautious about its assertions and more hedged in its language than The Bell Curve, but that is really just another way of saying 2020 was not 1994. We observe a different set of niceties these days. But just like back then, Murray is trying to dress up his racist claims in seemingly innocuous statements about human heredity and the diversity of the population. There’s no doubt that Richard Murray is sneaking X-Acto blades into Cosmic Crisps. But let us glance back at some other recent history of popular science writing to add nuance to our appraisal.

The confidence man

Consider the case of former New York Times science staff writer Nicholas Wade. In 2014, he published the book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, in which he claimed that recent advancements in our understanding of the formation of human populations—fueled by enormous improvements in our ability to gather DNA from the most ancient of human remains and map their genome—had demonstrated that human populations could be divided into coherent clusters that co-align with traditional geographically defined racial groups. Because the process of genome sequencing has become so shockingly speedy and efficient—far out-pacing Moore’s Law for the rate by which computer-processing power doubles—2014 is itself ancient history. We have learned so very much more in the intervening eight years. And yet, even then it was clear that the sections of Wade’s book that surveyed the advancements in the field of population genetics were, in and of themselves, accurate enough.

Review after review acknowledged that newer genetic data made clear that changes in the frequency of alleles—the various forms of genes found at the same spot on the chromosome among members of our species—could indeed be gathered into correlated groups that consistently suggest ancestry from specific geographic locations, particularly between the continents. In the New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr even hazarded to write,

“To put the conclusion more technically, the genomes of various human beings fall into several reasonably well-defined clusters when analyzed statistically, and these clusters generally correspond to continent of origin. In this statistical sense, races are real.”

In his Huffington Post review, Augustin Fuentes refused to make the same sort of concession as Orr. Speaking of a webinar sponsored by the American Anthropological Association that both he and Wade had participated in, Fuentes wrote,

“He would not provide a definition for what he meant by ‘race,’ or a specific number of races that we have (he goes back and forth between three, five and seven). Wade relies on a teeny slice of the overall available data on human genetics to support his case.”

Wade did seem to want to have things both ways. He noted that when a team of researchers led by Noah Rosenberg and Marcus Feldman compared the genomes of 1056 individuals from 52 populations and found that the individuals clustered into groups that correspond with the five continents, population geneticists David Serre and Svante Pääbo clarified that the Rosenberg-Feldman study was influenced by idiosyncrasies in its study design. The individuals chosen for the study were taken from predetermined groups

“(such as ‘Norwegians,’ ‘Yorubas,’ ‘Ashkenazi Jews’)” defined, as Serre and Pääbo wrote, “by cultural traits such as a shared language, shared religion, or shared myths of origins.”

Examining a set of individuals more uniformly distributed geographically reveals, Serre and Pääbo maintain, a more gradient distribution of allele frequencies. That is, the frequencies of alleles bleed into each other over geographical regions without distinct borders. In response, the Rosenberg-Feldman team conducted a further study, accommodating Serre and Pääbo’s objections:

“Expanding our earlier data set . . . , we systematically examine the influence of several study design variables . . . on the ‘clusteredness’ of individuals.”

The new study increased the sample size, looked at a greater number of locations along the chromosome, considered various numbers of clusters they conjectured might exist, questioned their assumptions about how allele frequencies correlated with each other across human populations, and made sure that the individuals they examined had a more homogeneous geographic distribution. Taking all of those factors into consideration, they still found that their geographic clusters were well-founded.

Feeling justified by the Rosenberg-Feldman conclusions, Wade insisted that “races” are incommensurate with “clines,” or genetic gradients. That makes it all the more inconsistent when, just as Fuentes pointed out, he later made room for there being possibly three, five, or seven races:

“Some readers may be troubled that the number of human races is not fixed but depends on the way race is assessed. But this should not be a surprise, given that races are not distinct entities but rather clusters of individuals with similar genetic variation.”

Indeed, Wade neglected to note clearly that in the latter Rosenberg-Feldman study, the researchers were careful to accede to Serre and Pääbo’s critiques. They felt their improved methods rendered it rational to speak of geographical clusters, but they admitted that there was significant overlap, with many individuals belonging to multiple groups. By bowdlerizing the parts of the Rosenberg-Feldman study that did not support his thesis, Wade misrepresented its true conclusion. In his review of Wade’s book in the journal Nature, Nathaniel Comfort made the most salient argument about this question of whether “races” exist. Everyone—including Wade, cagily—admits that human genetic variation is gradient, but it is a matter of personal inclination how we interpret that variation:

“Whether and how one parses that variation depends on one's training, inclination and acculturation. So: race is real”

—meaning those phenotypes are expressions of haplotypes (groups of genes within an organism that were inherited together from a single parent) distributed with different frequency in different parts of the world—

“but that does not mean that race is 'really' genetic.”

Trying to prove that “races” (defined as statistical clusters of human populations corresponding to continents of origin) are real was not all that Wade was up to. In fact, the entire first section of his book was intended to build a solid basis on which to ground his further conjectures about the mental capacities and behavioral tendencies of members of the various “races.” He tried to show that the differences between the races had developed through evolutionary processes that have been “recent, copious and regional.” The word “recent” was conveniently in keeping with the novel story that population geneticists of ancient humans have been telling us: that the variations we see in populations are recent in origin and that the lion’s share of human genetic diversity took shape in population expansions and collapses tens of thousands of years prior to the geographic distributions we have long imagined were endemic. “Recent” was covering for the other two adjectives—“copious” and “regional”—which were meant to do all of the covert work of infiltrating readers brains and giving them a sense that there must be something to the groups we label “races”; that we have lately begun to gather a causal explanation of their origins.

Wade’s real aim was to establish a genetically deterministic explanation for differences in the levels of wealth and prosperity, education, and political stability across cultures. His thesis was basically the same as that of Murray and Hernnstein in The Bell Curve, equally as tendentious and incendiary, and he offered just as little evidence to support it. In response to its publication, a group of 143 researchers and academics, including nearly all of those whose work he had cited throughout his book—among them Marcus Feldman, Noah Rosenburg, David Serre, and Svante Pääbo—signed a letter addressed to the New York Times, unequivocally condemning the book as a dangerous, retrograde work meant to misinform the public and foster racist ideas

The urbane rube

In March of 2005, Armand Marie Leroi, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology at Imperial College London, published an article in the New York Times, titled “A Family Tree in Every Gene.” In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami that ravaged communities in the surrounding coasts of the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, Leroi noted that the tribes of the Andaman Islands—the Jarawa, Great Andamanese, Onge, and Sentinelese—were under serious threat because their natural resources had been depleted. Leroi observed that these people are unique in their shared language family, cultural practices, and indeed genetic makeup, and he used their imperiled status as a jumping-off point for a discussion of whether “race” among humans is a biologically coherent concept. Citing a supplement to the journal Nature Genetics, published the previous fall, which served as a forum for a discussion of human genetic diversity in light of the fact that health agencies in the United States regularly make use of racial categories like “Caucasian,” “Asian,” and “African” to ensure better public health, Leroi asserted that the consensus that “race” is a social construct was losing sway:

“Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.”

In contrast to Leroi’s summary of the supplement’s outcome, one of its sponsors, Aristides Patrinos, then the Director for Biological and Environmental Research at the US Department of Energy, offered a very skeptical adjudication of race, pointing to the inadequacy of the concept to deal with demands we place on it:

“[T]he most immediately obvious characteristic of 'race' is that describing most of us as Caucasian, Asian or African is far too simple. Despite attempts by the US Census Bureau to expand its definitions, the term 'race' does not describe most of us with the subtlety and complexity required to capture and appreciate our genetic diversity.”

And in their forward to the supplement, the editors seconded this judgment:

“Similarly, we think it is not useful for society to spend time in an inflammatory debate on whether data from human genome variation can confirm or refute pre-genetic concepts of ‘races’.”

And yet many of the contributors did indeed acknowledge the Rosenberg-Feldman study and the fact that the STRUCTURE algorithm it used identified groups corresponding to continents of origin. Leroi could have cited at least two contributing articles that (perhaps) tentatively supported his perspective. But I think it’s fair to say that Leroi was overselling his case. He might have better cited some support elsewhere.

In any case, the publication of his article engendered a severe response. In June of 2006, the Social Science Research Council convened a web forum, Is Race “Real”?, ostensibly to foster dialogue, but in fact creating a platform for scholars to expend 13 articles condemning Leroi’s op-ed as an attempt to once again give the sheen of scientifically verifiable reality to a socially pernicious concept. Prof. Evelyn Hammonds, for example, carried out an exquisite specimen of rhetorical apophasis by listing all the lines of attack critics could make against Leroi’s text but declaring that she would forebear using them:

“There will be those who point to the explicit genetic determinism implicit in his argument, for example. Some geneticists will take a similar tack, reasonably pointing out the way Leroi has overstated what the data of the best genetic studies actually show about the relationship between race and genetics. Human genetic variation is essentially a continuous phenomenon, reflecting the various histories and migration patterns of groups of human beings. . . . They will surely note that while genetic data can be used to distinguish and allocate individuals into groups, whether or not those groups meaningfully correspond to races as defined in the United States remains an open question.”

By “races as defined in the United States” I take Prof. Hammonds to mean the census definitions, which in 2010 asked people to self-report using terms that are a mixed bag of categories, including “White” and “Black,” along with specific ethnicities like “Filipino,” as well as terms that are somehow in-between, like “Hispanic.” (Despite efforts to offer clearer categories in the 2020 count, the Census Bureau opted to use the same categories used in 2010. It did, however, offer respondents the opportunity to write in clarifications underneath their responses, resulting in

“a much more nuanced—and accurate—portrait of how Americans see themselves”

and revealing that the diversity of the United States had increased tremendously in the preceding ten years.) Indeed, the data we have gathered by comparing the genomes of living and ancestral populations can locate groups that correspond (sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely) to all of those census categories. We might, however, just be allowing possibly specious categories to self-fulfill—if we decide, for example, “White” is the set of all people with ancestry predominantly originating in Europe. And if we increase the number of groups we want to distinguish, we can also find groups that don’t correspond to those census categories at all.

It bears noting what Leroi explicitly avoided arguing. At no point in his article did he try to slip in clandestine advocacy for ranking the intellectual acuity of genetically distinct human groups. In an interview I conducted with him in 2018, Leroi responded to the denunciation he received with incredulity. “I think,” he said,

“the reason for the vehemence of the response was precisely that the tone of the article was . . . so reasonable.”

He maintained that his message was not merely innocuous but forward-thinking:

“It clearly did not have any sort of racist agenda. There was no talk in it whatsoever of the superiority of one group of people over another due to their genes or anything like that. There was no talk of I.Q.—any of that sort of nonsense. It was couched entirely in terms of diversity.”

Diversity is nearly universally acknowledged as a good thing, Leroi noted; and his grounding of this assertion made clear to me how closely aligned “diversity” is with “the Good” as defined by so-called ethical Consequentialists (theorists who believe that acts should be judged based on the state of affairs they engender rather than on the basis of some law or maxim that should be followed). The flourishing of diversity is taken to be intrinsically valuable; and conversely the eradication of diversity is something like a sin. We desire and want to foster diversity, Leroi contended:

“We all love lots of different kinds of music. And when we hear that a language has gone extinct, a language which has been around for thousands of years, we mourn it a little bit. When we perceive a culture as being obliterated by the forces of global commercialism, . . . we regret it somewhat. And here I was simply pointing out that . . . there’s another kind of diversity. It’s the diversity that comes from the history of the human species; that comes in the way in which we all look different in different parts of the world. And I suggested that . . . if the Andaman Islanders have indeed succumbed to the tsunami, that would be unfortunate. Because from a diversity point of view they are actually really rather special. They are an exceptionally remote . . . and genetically distinct group.”

Hammonds wasn’t having any of this argument. She believed Leroi should have known that the term “race” is more fraught than he let on:

“In Leroi’s story, his ‘true’ science has vanquished those liberal, but gullible, scientists and other critics who have jettisoned a useful scientific concept in order to affirm a liberal political position. In his cautionary tale, he recuperates race as nothing more than a useful heuristic—a useful shorthand—for obvious phenotypic and genetic diversity.”

Leroi’s protests of innocence to the contrary, Hammonds argued, he was actually projecting his own political obtuseness onto his imagined enemies. And in that way he was marking

“his allegiance to other conservative voices who in this politically divisive moment in American politics and life characterize those with whom they disagree as the ones who have politicized the debate.”

Hammonds didn't think it was worthwhile judging Leroi’s contention that “races” are real on the merits (although in doing so she alluded to some pretty good points for challenging it). Instead she compared Leroi’s article to The Bell Curve and contended that the problem was not (at least not in the first order) the equation of race with intelligence, but rather the naturalizing power of biology per se.

“The Bell Curve was a serious book that generated several hundred thousand readers within months of its publication and hundreds of critiques afterwards. However, I would suggest that none of the hundreds of critiques had as much appeal as the book and none of the critiques is remembered as much as the main argument of the book that ‘the ills of welfare, poverty, and an underclass are less matters of justice than biology.’ . . . It is the power of biology as a naturalizing discourse that has to be challenged.”

What is the nature of Prof. Hammonds’s fear? Is it well-founded or more like the fear of the razor blade in the apple? To help tackle that question, I’d like to consider one more case study.

The superstar

Another of the authors who co-signed that letter condemning Nicholas Wade’s book was David Reich. Perhaps no other name on the list was as damning. David Reich, Svante Pääbo, and Eske Willerslev of Cambridge are the public faces of the paleogenetic revolution I described above. All of them feature regularly in high-profile science journalism. And among them, David Reich’s name looms largest. His Reich Lab at Harvard has the apparatus of that University’s endowment at its disposal, and with it they have industrialized, systematized, and streamlined the process of extracting DNA from countless ancient remains and sequencing their genomes. Reich speaks eloquently and passionately about the work, and his enthusiasm is infectious. In March of 2018, Reich published a book documenting the story of paleogenetic research, Who We Are and How We Got Here. It was largely a critical success, but right out of the gate it faced headwinds.

To coincide with the book’s release, Reich wrote a column in the New York Times adapted from material from one of the chapters. The upshot was that, while people are right to fear the misappropriation of genetics to justify racist beliefs, geneticists could no longer go along in good faith with the consensus that genetic differences between populations were unreal. Indeed, Reich contended, there might turn out to be some differences that make us uncomfortable but that we will have to accept.

Reich granted that “race” is a social construct; nevertheless, he maintained that scholars have made use of that and adjacent social constructs to carry out valid science. He recounted, for example, research he performed beginning in 2003 in which he ventured to document

“what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago—before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years.”

That is, he narrowed his focus to genetic changes that were “recent, copious, and regional.” This was not done merely for curiosity’s sake. He wanted to see whether he could pinpoint factors that have been added into the genetic mix of the Americas over the past few centuries and might account for the fact that prostate cancer occurs much more frequently among men who identify themselves as African-Americans than among those who self-identify as European-Americans.

Studying a sizable group of self-identified African-American men with pancreatic cancer, Reich and his team were able to locate a section of the individual genomes in this group that consisted of almost three percent more West African ancestry on average than the general population. And what is more, in that region of the genome there were seven genetic risk factors for prostate cancer. Reich explicitly admitted that his research relied on socially constructed concepts like “African American” and “European American,” but defended the research as possibly life-saving. In his book, he recounts the resistance he faced when presenting these results at a conference in 2008. He was accused of “flirting with racism” because he labeled the two sets of alleles that were present at the section of the genome in question as “African” and “European.” Another scholar suggested that he instead label those African-American men with one set of alleles—those he had labeled “African”—“cluster a” and those with the other set of alleles—those he had labeled “European”—“cluster b.” Reich’s response is his most direct defense of the traditional concept of “race” as opposed to simply genetic variation. Removing the “African” and “European” labels from those alleles would be dishonest. It would amount to a sort of procrustean mutilation of the model of human history he was using. “Every feature of the data I looked at,” wrote Reich,

“suggested that this model was a scientifically meaningful one, providing accurate estimates of where in the genome people harbor segments of DNA from ancestors who lived in West Africa or in Europe in the last twenty generations, prior to the mixture caused by colonialism and the slave trade.”

Reich then pivoted to the plaintive assertion that the intellectual exchange between geneticists, sociologists, anthropologists, and race theorists had calcified into the “orthodoxy” that genetic variation among human populations was so limited that you could find more overlap among populations than differences between them. He felt that this was insufficient in the face of emerging data about human ancestry, and especially in light of the fact that “genome bloggers”—highly-skilled and educated specialists, who were only “amateurs” by the strictest definition, and most of whose politics bend to the right—emerged on the scene about a decade ago, testing this “orthodoxy” at every opportunity. He felt that if academia was to succeed in advancing the principles of a free and open society, it would have to come to grips with the fact that there were likely to be genetic differences between human populations.

As predictably as clockwork, Reich’s New York Times article incurred the same sort of condemnatory letter as Nicholas Wade’s book, decrying its reasoning as “seriously flawed.” The letter was signed by

“a group of 67 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities,”

many of them scholars who had written responses to Armand Leroi’s own Times column thirteen years prior. None of his colleagues in the field of ancient DNA research signed the letter.

Are the signatories of these castigating letters and withering responses irrationally afraid of the razor blade in the apple? David Reich is inclined to say yes. But given that he was one of the signatories in the case of Nicholas Wade, a certain degree of valence around the condemnation of genomic race talk seems to be afoot.

In Part 3, I’ll make the case that some such valence will arise in any society and offer up some advice for navigating it. . . .