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When Donald Trump invoked genetics a campaign rally in Minnesota In September 2020, commentators quickly connected their language to the twentieth century. with Nazi eugenics and science in the early twentieth century. “You have good genes, you know, right?” Trump asked his almost white audience. “You have good genes. It’s a lot about genes, right? The conclusion was – by the strength of his race – that his population was genetically different and that Trump was constantly underestimated and targeted by black and brown immigrants with his administration’s policies.
This view, which was once explicitly accepted by some far-right politicians, was once the main scientific view. Today, however, most scientists don’t take the idea of biological races seriously, in part because Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, died in July at the age of 92. Lewontin made his name in 1960, when he demonstrated that wild individuals of a species were used by populations more genetically diverse than scientists had previously imagined.
In 1972, Lewontin took an explicit interest in genetic diversity in a political direction has published a paper that only about 6 percent of human genetic variation is among conventionally defined racial groups; the rest can be found inside these groups. By studying how alternative versions of certain blood proteins — encoded by subtle variations in the same genes — were distributed in the human population, he was able to determine how many genetic clusters there are among racial groups.
For example, if all whites had type A blood and blacks had type B blood, the idea of genetically separated race groups would be validated to some extent. But if half of the people in both groups had type A blood and half had type B blood, the whole genetic variant would be within the groups, not between the two. Lewontin found the reality much closer to the final stage. More recent experiments Survey of a wider variety of genes has validated Lewontin’s findings.
The 1972 article ended with a statement that would look politically horrible in today’s scientific journals. “The classification of the human race has no social value and destroys social and human relations,” he wrote. “Currently this racial classification sees almost no genetic or taxonomic significance, since no justification can be provided.” The article was crucial — according to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 3,000 times — and “race is a social construct” is the main pillar of the aphorism.
“It’s an old idea that there was more variation within a group than between groups. That was there for decades, “says Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.” What Lewont did was put in numbers. And that was very powerful. “
Since the 1970s, new technologies have significantly changed the landscape of genetics: large-scale genomic research has changed the way scientists understand the relationship between genes and behavior. “Lewontin predicted that with the largest public investment in genomics, genetics would take the lead in trying to explain the disease, as well as the increasing characteristics of social behavior,” says Sandra Lee, a professor of humanities and ethics at Columbia University. As the power and sophistication of genetic technology grow, Lewontin’s work remains incredibly topical.
One of Lewontin’s major flaws was his Harvard colleague EO Wilson, who had strong opinions and influences on the role of genetics in determining the social behavior of both animals and humans. With the 1975 book Sociobiology: a new synthesis, Wilson altruized the idea that behaviors that range from altruism to sexual assault habits can be explained by reference to evolutionary pressures. Lewontin believed that Wilson reasonably assumed — largely based on animal research — that many human behaviors and traits, from creativity to consensus, had to be selected throughout the evolutionary history of species. Lewontin argued that the idea that the fate of biology was merely a re-enactment of conventional regressive belief was what he believed he was accustomed to. strengthen social hierarchies over the centuries.
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