As a part of my continued interest in race and genetics, I started reading Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. Part I starts with a history of race in genetics by Michael Yudell, where Yudell takes readers through the years from the eighteenth-century to the present. To summarize that history, Michael Yudell first begins with what race means: a way to classify people. He notes that race has been influenced by geography, politics, culture, science, and economics — and this applies to all of human history. For as long as race has been used to classify people, race has also been under the influence of the human society that it’s present in — whether that be societal values, culture, or social norms. Race is not a concrete concept — it has the flexibility to evolve and adapt to the current social climate — and that’s part of the reason why it has been able to stick around for so long. But subsequently, race in science (and especially biology) has been detrimental because it has social influence; it will never have the ability to fully be a scientific concept because of the years it has been used as a social construct, to marginalize and harm racial groups.

Yudell notes that some scientists have attempted to solve this problem today, by using different terminology in place of race in their studies. They substitute race for words like ethnicity, ancestry, or population, because they want to be able to study human difference without the social influence. But that’s today.

Let’s return to the history. Yudell starts with American’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, where Thomas Jefferson declared that “all men are created equal” — while he also owned slaves. This seemingly self-contradictory pairing of facts seems confusing at first, but in 1787 Jefferson wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, which clarified his perspective. He wrote in that history that there was a “fixed difference” between races, and he hypothesized that African Americans were once a distinct race from Europeans. This explains why he can both own slaves and say “all men are created equal,” in his mind — because his definition of who “men” are is different.

Fast forward to the mid-1700s, where Louis LeClerc, a French naturalist, theorized that physical human differences were caused by living in different climates. He also believed in European superiority, and he wrote that Europeans produced, “the most handsome and beautiful men,” so unfortunately his scientific thinking was influenced by his personal stake in race. However, he was the first scientist to introduce race, as a scientific concept, to the scientific field. It was during this time that Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, created four main racial groups to classify people by: Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus, and Europeaeus.

In the late 1700s, American Samuel Morton famously attempted to scientifically prove the reason behind physical and cognitive differences between races. He collected human skulls from around the world, measured their volume/cranial capacity, and declared that certain racial groups were better suited to cognitive challenges than others. Unfortunately, when a scientist a century later attempted to replicate his study, drastically different findings were found — which leads the scientific community to believe that Morton may have falsified his findings, either intentionally or subconsciously, in order to draw the conclusion that Mongolian and Europeans had the highest levels of cranial capacity, and thus intelligence.

In the early 1900s, scientists began to think about race in the context of genetics, instead of physically measurable traits. This thinking, unfortunately, was also inherently racist and led to negative eugenics (preventing people from different racial groups from reproducing). The idea behind this, was that due to different mental capacities and physical abilities, reproduction between races would be biologically harmful.

In the 1930s, race in scientific began to move towards population genetics and evolutionary biology. Scientists began classifying racial groups by gene frequencies, and in 1970 this thinking was disproved by geneticist Richard Lewontin. He used gel electrophoresis to discover that categorization by race was ineffective because the greatest amount of genetic diversity could actually be found within the same racial group.

Unfortunately, race continued on as a scientific concept in genetics…even though its validity was questioned and largely disproved by Lewontin. The 21st century has brought a new level to understanding race and genetics, which I’ll go into in the next post. Thanks for reading!