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The image of the Neanderthals has changed over the last decade. These extinct hominines were considered stupid and brutal thugs. We are now seeing them more and more, at least in the Western world, as smart and cultured people that our aggressive human ancestors eliminated about 40,000 years ago.
The transforming event was decoding 10 years ago of Neanderthal DNA extracted from fossilized bones, which showed that most living Europeans inherited about 2% of their Neanderthal genome by crossing, whereas Africans do not possess any Neanderthal gene. As Angela Saini writes in Superior, his brilliant badysis of past and present racial science, the acceptance of Neanderthals as "people like us" is a recent example of a secular European attitude – "which gives humanity its picture".
After the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossils in the 1850s, many scientists concluded on the basis of fictitious physical similarities that Native Australians were their closest living relationships. This supposed resemblance then allowed to eliminate the Aborigines, already victims of horrendous racist abuses, even further away from the restricted circle of humanity in the minds of many Europeans.
Although dominant societies have always regarded their people as the best, Saini focuses on scientific research on the differences between human groups, which has translated higher feelings into political and social racism. Ironically, racial science emerged during the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and many readers will understand how these ideas intensified in the 19th century and reached a terrible climax in the 1930s-1940s.
Saini, a professional science writer, gives them remarkable vivacity, for example by describing the "human zoos" that became popular in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ethnographic exhibitions featured "savages" in supposedly "primitive" natural villages, both to educate and entertain the public, and to provide anatomists and anthropologists with human guinea pigs, which they could study without having to go through long sea voyages to the tropics infested with diseases. .
Superior becomes more fascinating when we go beyond the second world war. Although the defeat of Nazism put an end to the most extreme manifestation of racial science, it survived in a more moderate form and is now undergoing a revival, fueling racist political and social movements in Europe and the United States. -United. Ideas appear in specialized journals – Saini focuses particularly on The quarterly humanity, published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research – and disseminated to a wider audience through social media.
According to Saini, the intellectual "realists of the race" inspire Polish nationalists who parade under the slogan "A pure Poland, a white Poland" – as well as Steve Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump, who said at A rally of the National Front in France last year: "Calls you racist … Wear it as a badge of honor."
Modern genomic technology makes it possible to relate individuals' DNA to their biological characteristics and, by comparing data gathered from groups of people, to generalize their differences. Although the sequence of biochemical letters in the genetic code is clear, the rest of this process is fraught with ambiguity.
The first problem is how to select your group for badysis. Recent research on human diversity and mobility demolishes any scientific validity claimed by the ancient concept of "race". The DNA badysis of living people and old bones shows that since Homo sapiens evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, we have migrated – and exchanged genes – more actively than the generations of previous anthropologists had imagined.
Human identity has been obscured geographically, making it difficult to determine the origin of someone by testing its DNA, even though consumer-driven companies have made a fortune selling kits that claim reveal ancestral origins from genes. An African with dark skin and a characteristic facial shape may look different from Europeans, but few biological features are unambiguous identifiers of African descent.
Saini is particularly critical of "racialized medicine". She argues convincingly that studies leading medical authorities to recommend different treatments to people of African, Asian and European descent – such as the heart drug BiDil specifically prescribed to African Americans – do not take sufficient account of environmental conditions. Even when there are genetic differences, such as sickle cell disease, which is more prevalent among Africans because of the protection of the genes responsible for the disease against malaria, the disease occurs quite often in Europeans for whom it is possible. it is clinically sensible to screen white and black babies. for the condition.
Politically, the most incendiary feature to badociate with race is intelligence. Studies over several decades have sought racial differences in cognitive and intellectual abilities – and white nationalist groups have seized upon any discovery of European superiority. It is now clear that intelligence comes from such a complex interaction between thousands of genes, an education and a way of life that it is impossible to draw from. significant conclusions. There is no evidence that people in one part of the world are fundamentally less brilliant than those in other regions, even though poor living conditions may give an impression of it.
The author is so pbadionately opposed to racial science in all its forms that it comes to suggest that scientists refrain from investigating the genetic basis of human variation in intelligence and intellectual capacity. in case their results are misused by racists.
This may be an exaggerated argument, because such research, conducted with appropriate safeguards, is potentially an important part of the scientific will to understand the brain. This reservation aside, Superior is a mix of science, social history and modern politics.
Superior: The return of racial science, by Angela Saini, Beacon Press, PVC $ 26.95 / 4th Estate, PVC £ 14.99, 256 pages
Clive Cookson is the scientific editor of the FT.
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