Scientist Asks: Is Science Racist?

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The question the title asks is provocative, as are the answers. In Is Science Racist (Polity Press), Jonathan Marks, biological anthropologist at the University of North Caroline, insists that science is just that when scientists allow suppositions about race to color their research. Race exists—as a cultural construct, but not as a genetic reality. And as anyone with a passing interest in the history of science already knew before reading Marks, mainstream scientists from the 18^th century through World War II were usually racist in their assumptions. Neither Charles Darwin nor Thomas Huxley thought that “our dusky cousins” (Huxley’s words) would ever attain the summit of civilization.

Marks packs many ideas into his essay as he reviews the history of racism in science—and its persistence. Charles A. Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s notorious book, The Bell Curve (1994), assumes that IQ is genetically determined; likewise, Nobel laureate and Human Genome director James Watson uses statistics to show that intelligence is distributed unequally across the races. Their ideas emerge from the same petri dish that gave rise to the Nazi project of breeding a master race and exterminating competitors—ideas that differed only in degree and consequence from what was taught at the time in American universities.

Racist science has been employed to justify existing social inequality. If particular subsets of humanity are actually less intelligent than other subsets, the algorithm of prejudice is perpetuated. If they can’t help themselves anyway, why help them to fail? Genetic determinism is a dangerous theory, born out at Auschwitz but also in attitudes that remain entrenched in America.

The fundamental problem with the science of race is that at bottom, everyone is related to everyone else: the initial genetic pool of the homo sapiens was, apparently, shallow. We are truly a brother(sister)hood of humanity. Lower IQ scores across an entire subset of people at a particular time and place reflect the social-cultural conditions they live under, not innate disabilities.

Aside from its attack on the misuse of genetics—from the officially sanctioned racism of the early 20^th century through the genomic ancestry testing of the early 21^st—Is Science Racist? is a short treatise on the philosophy of science. As Marks says, science rests on experiments that produce the same results when repeated, a process distinct from revelation but owing much to the alchemists. Objectivity is a goal of science and yet, the author admits, “life and education produce bias.” Logic and rationalism are inherent to the scientific method, “but any practicing scientist will tell you that inspiration, intuition, and obsession play important roles as well.” Imposing one’s own ideas on “what is rational” is a danger. Science, he confesses, “is not a better mode of thought; it is a unique mode of thought that is useful in particular contexts.” It takes us to the moon but can’t relieve social injustice.