Superior: The Return of Race Science

by Angela Saini

A powerful look at the non-scientific history of "race science," and the assumptions, prejudices, and incentives that have allowed it to reemerge in contemporary science

Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.

After the horrors of the Nazi regime in WWII, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of unrepentant eugenicists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's 1994 title, The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races.

If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas, and considered race a social construct, it was still an idea that managed to somehow make its way into the research into the human genome that began in earnest in the mid-1990s and continues today. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Saini shows us how, again and again, science is retrofitted to accommodate race. Even as our understanding of highly complex traits like intelligence, and the complicated effect of environmental influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races"--to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores or to justify cultural assumptions--stubbornly persists.

At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a powerful reminder that biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Race, Politics, Sociology, Audiobook

292 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 21, 2019

About the author

Angela Saini is an award-winning author and journalist, and she teaches science writing at MIT. She has presented science programmes on BBC radio and television, and her writing has appeared in National Geographic, Wired, and Foreign Policy.
 
She is the author of four books, including Superior: The Return of Race Science, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest, The Patriarchs, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize.
 
Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford. She was made an honorary fellow of Keble College, Oxford in 2023.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a journalistic account of 'race science' - where both terms 'race' and 'science' are scrutinised with a sharp eye. Saini is quite up-front with her own stance: that there's no genetic or biological support for racial difference beyond the merest superficialities such as skin pigmentation. Driven by the re-emergence of the most pernicious ideologies that many of us thought had been exposed for what they are by the Holocaust and other race-based genocides of the C20th, this takes an interesting look at the history of 'race science' and the role it still plays in academic research today, however contested and controversial.

Saini is a relaxed writer, always accessible and with a sense of humour that is light but with just the right level of suppressed snarkiness: witness the anecdote of the geneticist who proclaims that he's discovered the 'chop-stick using gene' in Chinese people! Well, we laugh - but, of course, it's not much of a jump to go from 'Chinese people are biologically pre-determined to use chopsticks' to insidious and horrific claims about racialised intelligence, racial hierarchies, justifications for slavery, the creation of race-based underclasses and we're soon back at those looming gas ovens of Auschwitz.

What is most dispiriting about this book is the extent to which highly-educated scientists at the heart of the academe in both Europe and the US can cling to old views of racialised genetic predermination and 'race fate' *in the face of an almost complete lack of biological evidence for racial difference in humans*. It's an important point, of course, but one which perhaps gets slightly repetitive in this book. But, perhaps, it needs to.

There are some horribly disconcerting moments such as when we realise that Maria Stopes favoured eugenics to stop the 'wrong' kind of people from giving birth in favour of so-called 'racial progress'; or that the legendary James Watson (of Crick and Watson fame) was openly racist and sexist and believed that cultural qualities such as Jewish intelligence, in the example given, is genetically pre-determined.

It's impossible not to snigger at some of the desperate manoeuvers of 'race scientists': in the 1920s, when Greeks, Italians and other southern Europeans were being stigmatised as having sub-par intelligence, one 'scientist' claimed that artists such as Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo and da Vinci were clearly 'Nordic' - as, apparently, was Jesus!

A high point, too, is Saini's digging behind the story from 2018 when the mummy of so-called 'Cheddar Man' was discovered and offered the opportunity to profile an ancient Briton - to the horror of many, not least the UK right-wing press, Cheddar Man turns out to have been black, not white. Which, considering the fact that humans all migrated out of Africa, is hardly surprising. (Light or white skin is an evolutionary development as ancient humans who migrated to less sunny northern Europe needed to maximise absorption of Vitamin D from the sun). So much, then, for all the Brexit-associated nostalgia for a mythic (white) England.

And, of course, that's both the point of the book and why it's so important: this isn't a light-hearted review of old, done-and-dusted attitudes, this is about *now*: it's about Brexit and Trump, it's about #blacklivesmatter, it's about the alt-right appropriating and mis-using science, it's about respected scientists and scientific institutions themselves (though a marginal number, it must be stressed) still trying to find the elusive biological basis for race and differentiation - and all that follows along with it.

Many thanks to HarperCollins, 4th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about the scientific basis of race. There isn’t one.

From a scientific, biological point of view, there is NO SUCH thing as race. You probably heard this, but there are more DNA variations between black Africans than between black Africans and white Europeans. Since the Unesco statement in 1952 (“The Race Question in Modern Science”) this has been official scientific policy. In their words race was “a fundamentally anti-rational system of thought”.

You will have noted that, alas, this announcement did not stop the whole entirety of human society proceeding on the basis that of course race exists, and of course there are different races. Angela Saini puts it like this :

Racial categories were still alive in people’s minds. They were still active in everyday life, playing out in the politics and the racism of the real world. For scientists to suddenly stop thinking about humans in racial terms was impossible so long as everyone out there still thought about themselves and others that way.

Or in a nutshell, race is a “social reality” not a biological fact.

THE RISE AND FALL AND ATTEMPTED RISE AGAIN OF THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE CONCEPT OF RACE

Angela Saini tells the story of how science came to believe in the biological basis of separate races and how this “race science” rose to become orthodoxy, then fell dramatically and smashed to bits, and how now it tries to get back in through the back door, courtesy of some well-funded alt right whack jobs.

In the Victorian period there were a lot of bogus scientists running around spouting total nonsense, it took a long while to get them thrown out. You couldn’t tell the bogus ones from the sensible ones for the longest time. Race science began as part of the Victorian mania for classifying everything, butterflies, albatross eggs, fossils, types of wheat, and …. Humans.

EUGENICS (IT’S PRONOUNCED EWWWGENICS)

At the same time came the Darwinian evolution-revolution. When you put the two together, and considering Mendel’s rediscovered work on selective breeding, you got the idea of improving the human race… or a part of it…. (let’s say, oh, I don’t know, the white part)… by selective breeding of people. You know, just like farmers do with cows and those other things. That was called eugenics. Built into all this thinking was, of course, that some races are essentially superior than others, and therefore worth purifying.

DOWNFALL OF RACE SCIENCE

By the 1920s and 30s race science in the form of eugenics had been signed into law in over 30 states in the USA. Compulsory sterilisation of those deemed mentally or physically unfit was the first idea. Europeans were enthusiastic about this too. Germany under Hitler was the apotheosis of the racist state, and you know he kind of gave a bad name to that whole way of thinking, so this led to the abandonment of scientifically based race concepts after WW2 by all except the whack jobs.

DNA

However, says Angela Saini, there has been a partial return of race science in the form of genetics. Self-described antiracist scientists use the phrase “human biodiversity” and sometimes this whole DNA human genome thing sounds kind of not that dissimilar to something those old Victorian gentlemen scientists would have thought they were talking about.

THE BORING BIT

This book spends half its pages detailing the nefarious shady organisations and methods of right wing fruitcakes who still think there is a biological reality to race and who want to reintroduce their untruths into public discourse, to reclothe the Victorian racial hierarchy with sciency DNA chatter. Angela Saini really cares about that stuff, she wants those people recognised and booted out and crushed. I can see why but there was way too much detail for me.
First half was very interesting though. I’m not sure if it’s useful to say I recommend the first half of a book!

[Rama Rao · Rating 1 out of 5]

Politically correct but scientifically unsound

This book drew a lot of attention recently in which the author suggests that the use of race in biological/medical research is due to widespread racism. For example, in Chapter 1, she argues that Out of Africa theory is invented by Europeans, and Nazis wanted to prove superiority of Aryan race. This is false; Hitler made alliances with Muslims from the Middle east against Jews. The Third Reich was anti-Semitic. If Hitler was really a racist, he would have invaded Africa. In fact, many SS officers who went to live in Egypt after the war became Muslims and followed Islamic practices.

The author is also in error when she reminds readers that races correspond to “arbitrary” divisions of population variation that are “politically and economically useful,” The fact is that there are heritable characteristics that allow us to divide into a set of races in such a way that all the members share traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race. These traits and tendencies are viewed as race. Natural barriers such as oceans (e.g. the Atlantic), deserts (e.g. the Sahara) and mountain ranges (e.g. the Himalayas) impeded gene flow between different populations for substantial periods of time. When there is limited gene flow between populations that have come under different selection pressures, we would expect them to gradually diverge from one another over via the processes of genetic drift and natural selection. Races therefore correspond to human populations that have been living in relative isolation from one another, under different regimes of selection. This means that racial categories identify real phenotypic differences and reflect real genetic variation. Natural philosophers began to classify humans into different races because they looked different from one another. These differences reflect their divergent geographical origins. But the most controversial area of “race science” is research into population differences in cognitive ability.

Chimpanzees share the distinction of being our closest living relative which share about 99% of our genes. A unique collaboration between the humanities and the natural sciences; geneticists, historians, archaeologists and linguists found a common ground about the origins of modern human beings including the common origins of languages from an ancient language called Indo-European language. Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations. Modern human beings arose some 200,000 years ago, and for 190,000 years, they we were all dark-skinned, reflecting the origins from Africa. Caucasians are the product of a work of evolution across Europe, while scientist have discovered three genes that produce light skin – they have played a part in the lightening of Europeans’ skin color and the color of the eye over the past 8,000 years. The process of skin lightening, known as “depigmentation,” occurred due to a series of mutations in one particular gene called SCL24A5.

Equating hereditarian claims with racism is illogical and irresponsible. Many of the ideas that Saini classifies as “scientific racism” are empirical claims. Besides, race is not a social construct, but nationalism and regionalism are certainly social constructs. She uses false arguments to fit her theory. This is a blatant abuse of scientific data to write a politically correct fable. Her conclusions are inaccurate. I would recommend staying away from this apologue.

[K.J. Charles]

Outstanding examination of 'race science' aka racism pretending to be objectivity. Extraordinarily good in how deep it goes (covering the intersection of 'science' with history, culture, and politics) and showing how very deeply rooted the tendrils are. Written with remarkable calm and objectivity which makes the final shout of rage all the more powerful.

It goes into excellent detail about the resurgence of 'scientific' racism in recent years, as well as laying out the foolishness of the thinking but also its pervasiveness even in people who would think they know better and call themselves anti-racist. Essential reading, and I don't say that lightly.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of the history of race "science." I studied a lot of the earlier documents for my own research and they just sounded like such a ridiculous and desperate attempt to justify racial hierarchies. Unfortunately, this garbage science is coming back in the form of IQ testing and DNA "science." The best part of this book was when she covered David Reich's research--I would suggest going straight to the source if you're interested. His book "Who we are and how we got here" is excellent.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was always going to be difficult to follow Angela Saini's hugely popular Inferior, but with Superior she has pulled it off, not just in the content but by upping the quality of the writing to a whole new level. Where Inferior looked at the misuse of science in supporting sexism (and the existence of sexism in science), Superior examines the way that racism has been given a totally unfounded pseudo-scientific basis in the past - and how, remarkably, despite absolute evidence to the contrary, this still turns up today.

At the heart of the book is the scientific fact that 'race' simply does not exist biologically - it is nothing more than an outdated social label. As Saini points out, there are far larger genetic variations within a so-called race than there are between individuals supposedly of different races. She shows how, pre-genetics, racial prejudice was given a pseudo-scientific veneer by dreaming up fictitious physical differences over and above the tiny distinctions of appearance - and how this has been continued and transformed with genetics to draw conclusions that go against the fundamental proviso of science - correlation is not causality. Saini demonstrates vividly how, for example, socio-economic or cultural causes of differences in capability, and even medical response to drugs, have been repeatedly ascribed to non-existent biological racial differences.

Along the way we come across the horrendous race-based acts of the past - from slavery to the Nazi atrocities - which have been justified by fictitious assumptions about the implications of race. But Saini makes clear that this is not just a historical problem. One of the excellent aspects of the book is the way that she brings in interviews and personal experience, so, for example, there is a fascinating section on discrimination on the basis of caste in India, and attempts to justify this on a genetic basis. Similarly, she repeatedly shows how white supremacists misuse information to draw incorrect and vile conclusions.

There are fascinating interviews with scientists whose work strays into misuse of evidence to imply something that the data simply does not support. With one exception of Robert Plomin, whose work seems far more solid than the rest, and can only be used to support racism by deliberately misunderstanding it, a lot of this work seems to have been poorly executed or involves drawing inappropriate conclusions. A considerable amount of this nonsense involves IQ testing - yet it has been shown that all IQ tests do is demonstrate an ability to do well at IQ tests, an ability that can be learned - so provides no useable evidence.

The coverage might have easily been extended to cover other discrimination on perceived differences, but I can see the benefit of keeping the focus on race. For me, the only disappointing thing is that Saini shies away from the logical conclusion of her observations. Having categorically shown that race does not exist, it's ridiculous that we still classify people this way. As the author acknowledges, we need some means of categorisation to fight prejudice - but surely it should be based on real markers such as socio-economic means and culture - to continue to do so by race having established that race doesn't exist seems oddly incongruous, and makes it more difficult to counter racists by giving weight to the labels they use.

Overall, a brilliant book, highly readable, which, if there were any justice, would put a final nail in the coffin of racism.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

'There is a kind of will to truth. We will make this be the truth if we try hard enough'- Subir Sinha.

Oh how this resonates in our social media dominated/'fake news' society. Sinha's quote refers particularly to religious extremists but effectively demonstrates the kind of sentiment that underlies the 'science' and ways of thinking that the book works to demolish. That backwards system which starts with ideology and then looks for evidence to support it. Race is not about genetics/ biological difference, it is a social, cultural, political construct. It was created to separate, subordinate, invalidate certain types of people, a way of perpetuating and bolstering the supposed superiority of the great white male. It's the kind of thing that feels like part of the past, and it definitely should be, but Angela Saini shows that not only it it still here, it never went away. Even the Holocaust was not enough to demonstrate the dangers inherent in such ideology, simply pushing those who held these types of views out of the mainstream. For a while at least.

Because now they're back and at the forefront of populist politics- given airtime, given applause, given power. And that's why books like this are so essential, to hold people and ideas up to scrutiny, to start conversations, to attack the fundamental misunderstandings (deliberate or otherwise) about human variation. Because feelings of superiority are how we end up arguing that migrant children in border camps don't really need soap or blankets or safety, it's how the fear of difference and the 'other' leads to Trump and Brexit, how 'knowing' that certain ethnic groups just aren't as clever or industrious means that they're a lost cause, worthless, a burden. It's always useful to blame those being crushed by inequality for their own problems. If they deserve it, there's nothing we can do, right?

If nothing else, this book is an essential reminder about evaluating the quality of the information you access, share, and trust. Where does it come from? Who paid for it? What are they trying to sell you? Who benefits? What Saini's book does is present the ways in which the ideologies behind race science have altered or even determined its conclusions. And if you want to apply the same fact checking to her work, her sources are right there at the back.

ARC via Netgalley

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book isn't written from a neutral perspective, and doesn't discuss the scientific research in detail. Or even is up to date with latest genetic research and information.

[8stitches 9lives · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having grown up as part of an ethnic minority group in London during the 1980s and 90s, Angela Saini has first-hand experience of the racism which was rife during these decades. Unfortunately, after being heavily discredited, race science has slowly and insidiously crept back into public discourse over the past 50-70 years. During her formative years, the murder of Stephen Lawrence in close proximity to her childhood home had a big impact on her and what really stuck in her mind was the difference between someone white being murdered and a black individual; it was obvious that fewer resources and time were dedicated to an ethnic minority individual to those who were white. But was this due to scientific or societal issues?

This childhood experience precipitated Saini's intense interest in the subject of race, racial bias and matters surrounding it, and this is an essential and exceptional work which rebuts the idea of racism as a biological issue rather than a social one. Not only does she debunk the lie that inequality is to do with genetics but she goes a long way to proving that it has everything to do with political power. It is a fascinating and beautifully written piece which has clearly been extensively researched. It is a masterfully written, topical piece by one of the most trusted science writers of our time and should be on the reading lists of anyone interested in the history and evolution of this subject from the beginning of time up to present day.

Although it is frequently referred to as race science, I think the most appropriate and fitting terminology is racist science. Many thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poor book - despite it's heart being in the right place - does more to damage the thesis she presents by not credibly engaging with the academics she interviews. I think she is a bit out of her depth, perhaps as broadcast journalist she is used to the once-over-lightly feel-good style of journalism that this comes across as. Did not finish.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saini looks at how the politics of race and gender intersects with the science of race and finds it... disappointing... "It" being the scientific discoveries and the policies enacted based upon "science". It would seem lots of brilliant scientists do studies to support their biases and politicians use those studies to support policy and laws aka human nature... I enjoy and appreciate Saini's writing on the biases of scientific research and discoveries. She's passionate and writes in a logical and engaging way. Her books are important because basically the pathology of entrenched biases affects the way that we study and research issues. Despite even our self-awareness, it potential taints not only results, but the things we chose to study. I love that there are writers in these spaces identifying these biases that unchecked do great harm to our civilization (my assessment, not the book). A worthwhile read!

4+ Stars

Listened to the Audiobook. Hannah Melbourn was an excellent narrator. Sounds very much like the author in interviews.

[Giovanni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important subject but somewhat rambling execution. The book doesn't seem to have a coherent trajectory, and repeats over and over the same points. It is essentially a reaction to the resurgence of racisms in today's world. IMHO the missing point is the following: there are facts and value judgments about such facts. Even imagining there are identifiable average differences between different populations (whose grouping might be a social construct) this does NOT imply any different treatment of such people is justified. E.g. in a different domain, ethical vegetarians are ready to admit different capabilities of different species, but they do not derive that humans are justified in slaughtering non human animals. So it's a two step process and the author focuses on the "facts" side ignoring the "value" side, making her argument more confused than what IMHO could be.

Edit: from "who we are and how we got here" by David Reich :

"The right way to deal with the inevitable discovery of substantial differences across populations is to realize that their existence should not affect the way we conduct ourselves."

"I am worried that people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among populations across a range of traits are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."

"Because of the multidimensionality of human traits, the great variation that exists among individuals, and the extent to which hard work and upbringing can compensate for genetic endowment, the only sensible approach is to celebrate every person and every population as an extraordinary realization of our human genius and to give each person every chance to succeed, regardless of the particular average combination of genetic propensities he or she happens to display."

[Stetson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'd like to first acknowledge that I generally agree with a major premise of the work: race, in its casual usage even in scientific work, is meaningfully a social construct without a precise biological definition. However, Saini's almost complete rejection of genetic effects and that they may vary by population and her reactive categorical thinking (common to her work) is difficult to treat seriously. It reveals that Saini is more polemicist than a neutral reviewer of the science. This delicate and complex topic deserves a more nuanced treatment, and Saini should steelman the arguments of her foes rather than strawman them or devolve to tactics like guilt by association and ad hominem (unfortunately much of the work is predicated on this).

Additionally, I do appreciate Saini's criticism of post hoc fallacies, p-hacking, and other psychological biases and sloppy methodologies that affect the accuracy and precision of scientific studies. However, it also seems that Saini is not particularly enamored with the scientific method as an epistemology (i.e. a system for arriving at truths about human nature and variation), often selling it short when convenient or implying that humans are too constrained by their sociocultural milieu to perform science objectively (why do science at all then!?). This is an unreasonable and wantonly pessimistic perspective on scientific inquiry. Superior is unfortunately not a fair representation of science broadly or the fields that study intra-species diversity in human populations or the genetic inputs on behavior or psychological traits. Instead, she insinuates that the fields like behavioral genetics and population genetics are, by their nature, racist and eugenicist.

For a more nuanced understanding of how race and human ancestry are related (imperfectly of course), I'd recommend reading David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here. Saini interviews Reich in her book, but fails to substantively engage with his science. For instance, the early portion of the book ignores a topical observation about the selection against Neanderthal portions of the human genome, demonstrating that historical selection can be studied rigorously in human populations. The omission of the relevant data appears to be motivated by fear that the obvious implication here is that humans are subject to selection pressures (like other species) and hence have allele frequencies that can vary substantially across different sub-populations for various reasons (like other species). There are numerous examples of this, which is also why population geneticists are able to use genetic markers to cluster individuals with high confidence by ancestry (which often times but not always correlates with casual understandings of race). Saini doesn't even address this issue directly.

As a geneticist, maybe my biggest gripe is that there really isn't any depth to the discussion of genetics in the book. Saini's Superior repeatedly reveals either a poor or deliberately misleading picture of genetics and genome sciences, including a sophomoric criticism of Mendelian genetics (a reality for a quarter of the coding portion of the genome and a contributor to 5-10% of total disease burden in human populations). Ironically, Saini's argument for race as a complete social construct is (unknowingly to her) partially predicated on a world of perfect Mendelian genetics (i.e., the principle of independent assortment).

As one can see by the length of this review (it could go on), there are a lot of sophisticated issues raised by the work, but most are treated without sufficient depth and rigor. Instead, Saini chose to waste ink on tracking down which purported scientific racist got funding from where or is on the editorial board of which journal. I think it's vitally important to criticize and refute faulty science and distortions of scientific data, especially when used for nefarious purposes, but this isn't a license to be sloppy methodologically and intellectually in return. Additionally, we should attack ideas rather than people as it is uncharitable to impute malign motives without clear evidence of such motives. Plus, the existence of bad faith actors or data misuse or pseudoscientific propaganda isn't license to deploy a mirrored form of motivated reasoning (like the equal post hoc fallacy of chalking up disparities all to history or racism). Doing activism under the guise of science in any form will ultimately undermine broader public faith in the social venture of scientific research. This, more or less, has already matured as a project and Saini work played an aggravating role.

P.S. New scientific research appears almost every few weeks or so to invalidate Saini's claims. Here are some examples:

1) Robust selection on intelligence from within-family data -> https://tinyurl.com/IQselect
2) Evidence of selection on intelligence in ancient genomes from Western Eurasia post-Agricultural Revolution -> https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39314...
3) Genetic ancestry explaining group differences in traits -> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.11...
4) The Resolution of "Missing Heritability" with rare variants -> https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...

[Gretel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A full-length review needs more time than I currently have so TLDR:

- race science is full of crap
- it never went away and is now turning back full force
- "centrists" helped it gain traction because they inherently have racist ideas that they never critically engaged with
- STEM is full of "well-meaning" racists and needs to do fucking better
- white supremacists/nazis/right-wingers/eugenicists/etc. are fucking dangerous and unfortunately for us funded by the wealthies of people. The 0.1%. And they want us dead.
- race science has ruined and taken many lives and it is an ongoing process and if we don't take responsibility - especially White people who have the privilege of their Whiteness - then genocide will spread even further
- also, I have to add my own observation: those who believe in race science and those who don't "believe" (actually more like welcome) climate change/catastrophy is a single circle in a venn diagram (and they also happen to be fundi Christians so have fun with that one)

In short: Read this book because it's not only well-written, excellently researched and highly illuminative, it gives a fantastic overview of the history of race science and how it connects to other problems (see: the financial aspect, meaning that they're funded by the wealthies and most powerful people who literally want to the see the world burn).

A proper review will follow but it'll take some time to write since I have to summarise a really long book full proof and references.

[Fifmut · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ideologically driven, unsupported by science

The way this book was written is the following: "Racism is bad, therefore we have to conclude that race is not real." Otherwise we'd have to face some uncomfortable truths..

What follows is the typical downplaying of race differences, proclaiming everything as superficial. All in accordance to modern liberalism, but little to do with biology. Skip this book if you'd rather stick to reality and the truth.

[Khan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book keeps floating in and out of my consciousness. At the time of reading this book, I failed to perceive the degree of its importance. As we continue to move into a data point world, some of these metrics can be used in ways that are insidious without really understanding the dangers it will cause. At my organization we have personality tests where if you click on a co workers icon, it will describe the animal the coworker falls under. There are three categories, eagle, parrot and owl. Each represent their own personality traits, owls are supposedly more attuned to attention to detail, eagles will stop at nothing to get a task done and parrots are charismatic, easy going etc. This is a very insignificant example but people in the organization make judgements based on the animal you fall under. The personality assessment questions used to determine these categorical factors provide no context on anything. It gives you choices that are often deeply constrained where if you agree with none of them, you're still forced to pick one. Asking me stupid ass questions like

"Are you willing to create an uncomfortable situation in order to complete a task?".
I mean what is the payoff?
What is the context?
For the love of god what is the situation!?

Re read that question again, Am I the boss, manager, director etc?
Do I have equity in the company?
Do I have stock options?
Are we under a deadline and someone is under performing?
If I get uncomfortable is that even a guarantee that it will help resolve the situation?
How significant is the situation?
If I piss off this co worker, how will it impact our future relations?

None of these context questions are asked so I am blindly being categorized with no context. This is why these assessments have the veneer of science but are in fact a charlatan fraud. Now imagine if you were asked "IQ" questions to determine if a company should hire you? Psychologist and social scientists have engaged in creating tests to measure "intelligence" and then using these findings in the real world once they have established reputations in lucrative consulting contracts. This is how race science gets legitimized. Institutions first label so and so academic hotshot (whose research does not replicate) from {Insert prestigious school here} and then credentialize them with their level of education as a means to validate what they say. This happens everywhere you look and often times these are the biggest frauds. Warren Buffett said it best when he said "Beware of nerds with formulas". This brings us to IQ tests which essentially are a pseudo intellectual.

IQ is a gaussian metric, meaning outliers will not impact the overall mean once a sufficient amount of N is reached aka the law of large numbers. However, wealth is not gaussian. Imagine we have a room with 1k people, lets say the average wealth is 100k which is absurd but lets do it for this example. Now imagine someone walks into the room worth hmmm... Lets say 80 billion, do you think the average is going to change? The average will now be 80 million. This renders the mean useless. So we're effectively comparing two distributions. The studies on IQ as a predictor of wealth do not mention this. this goes back to something I have harped on in previous reviews. That academia, degrees, certifications and standardized tests are not a measure of intelligence. The tests that used these questions are often created by people who spend all their time with these problems. IQ tests are a better measure of being an academic than a measure of being intelligent. This is not the same, its almost as if these sterile classroom activities are used as a one to one comparison of the real world. Which is insane. The classroom does not equal the real world. If you want to test for real world performance, test for the actual activity. Not tasks academics test for. Reality is very messy, there are no direct and clear cut answers unlike an exam. IQ and standardized tests select for people who train to think for a sterile environment vs a dynamic environment. Intelligence is something that we don't have tools to measure yet. These types of "scientific studies" make there way into the mainstream, does anyone remember the famous marshmallow study? This study was infamous and filled the social science and psychology literature for years. A child is seated across from a single marshmallow, the researcher tells the child if they can wait for 15 minutes. The researcher will come back with another marshmallow. This study stated that children who could wait for the full 15 minutes had a higher level of delay of gratification. They would go on to make more money, have stable jobs and stable relationships. This study was done on 90 children, decades later they tested this theory on 900 kids. They found out that nothing replicates. They did find out that the children from single parent homes or from children from less stable economic backgrounds were unable to wait the first 15 minutes in some cases. The original study was not presented like this and the conclusion's are totally different. I believe this scenario is and will be played out with IQ tests today.

I think this is a very important book, I wish the author would have dived more into this topic specifically, academics with the legitimacy of prestigious schools are far more dangerous than bigots using flawed stats to make a racial point of view. This is something to pay attention to in upcoming decades.

[Imi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The power of nationalism is that it calls to the part of us that doesn’t want to accept being ordinary. It tells people that they are descended from greatness, that they have been genetically endowed with something special, something passed down to them over the generations. It attaches them to origin stories that have existed for hundreds of years, soaking into their subconscious, obscuring truth...

Simply outstanding. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story was also fantastic, but I think Saini has outdone herself here!

This is, above all, a journalist's exploration on what is happening right now. "Race science" never left, it was never gone, but it is having a resurgence today. Maybe most (some?) scientists have good intentions, but the language they use, the beliefs and biases they bring to their research, all of it has real-life consequences. This is what happens when researchers have already made their conclusions (through an upbringing full of society's social conditioning to believe that some races are inferior to others) before they have the evidence.

‘If you see the genetic markers today that are found in western Europe, people will see those in the past and continue referring to them as western European, even if they’re then also found in Siberia.’ It’s another example of an ‘indexing problem’, when the first available body of evidence influences subsequent thinking. Western researchers tend to have more access to European data because it’s on their doorstep, so later discoveries elsewhere in the world are often interpreted relative to these.

Saini beautifully and effectively explains why "race" is not a biological category, but a social, cultural and political one. Scientists insistence to study race as biological has done extreme harm throughout history. First, as Saini explains, racial "difference" was believed to be "in the blood", while today many believe that it is genetic. As Saini frequently stresses, there are far more genetic variations within a "race" than there are between individuals of supposedly different races. There is a constant determination, within some sectors of the scientific community, that eventually they will find their proof of racial difference, that it'll be when the next form of technology comes into use, and the next, and the next...

And this results in a society like this:

...Americans cling to the idea of black exceptionalism when it comes to health may be that, in some way, the idea lets society off the hook. It places the blame for inequality at the foot of biology. If poor health today is intrinsic to black bodies and nothing to do with racism, it’s no one’s fault. ‘It says it’s not our organisation of society that’s somehow unfair or unjust or discriminatory. It’s not that we treat people badly. It’s not that we give people worse life chances,’ he says. ‘It’s just that these people have some genetic defect and it’s just the way they are.’

It's disturbing and dispiriting, but Saini's collected evidence shows we cannot ignore this phenomenon any long. Race science was never history. It's still alive and here today.

Overall, a fascinating, readable and stellar read. Everyone and anyone should read this book! Above all, it's important reminder to check your beliefs and check your sources.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superior: The Return of Race Science, by Angela Saini, is a book looking at the disturbing history and modern application of race science. Saini argues that race science is almost entirely political - differences in humans are almost entirely related to nurture, economic and social differences, and culture. These factors are transferred between parent and child, but are not biological in any sense. Sainin brings together numerous data points and interviews with leading geneticists and biologists to show the science backs up these points. And yet, racial sciences persist. It has even seen a resurgence in recent years, with nationalists globally using racial science as a tool to rewrite history, and change the narrative to promote their own ideals of superiority.

Racial science was a vogue branch of biology with roots in Darwinism, and was often utilized by colonial societies to promote racial hierarchy in highly unequal societies. This branch of science was, historically, related to white supremacy and domination of groups that were enslaved, colonized, or oppressed. The field of racial science was steeped in Darwinism and the idea that if different species of animal diverged, so to must humans. It stands to reason that this would be an assumption; racial differences were often perceived based on visual differences, and socioeconomic differences. Basically, if someone is poor, or colonized, then it stands to reason their must be a natural, genetic reason for this. This thought process led to the development of eugenics; the study of actual biological differences between peoples from different places on Earth. Eugenics was a nasty field of science that informed colonists in Europe, segregationists in the US, and the Nazi movement in Germany, a science steeped in blood.

Saini moves on to analyze why racial science is still has such strong adherents. After WWII, the study of Eugenics went underground, and was re-branded. The word race was no longer an accepted term, and instead, phrases like human diversity, genetics, and biodiversity were used to portray the same ideas. Infamous books such as the Bell Curve - a 1993 study on differences in educational achievement in white and black communities in the US, came to the conclusion that these differences were genetic - that white students may be more capable students due to genetic differences, and not differences in socio-economic advantages. This book is rightly considered pretty pseudo-scientific, but has been influential in right leaning think tanks and magazines like Mankind Quarterly, which have in turn fuelled racialized rhetoric in nations all over the world.

Saini looks at this form multiple perspectives, both from advert racists globally, and the more subtle, and inherent insensitivity and conflict that dog genetic research. Saini argues that genetics do not inform most differences between humans, and that, although an important field of study, genetics is often utilized for poor reasons. White supremacists scroll through academic papers to cherry pick information that conforms to their world view. Hindi nationalists use it to try and reignite the debates on caste and anti-Islamic thought. The list goes on. These deep connections are sought after by humans to try and conform to how they want to see the world, and how they want to perceive themselves. In reality, genetic diversity in humans in massively complex, and we show a remarkable level of human integration. On the plus side here, most racial sciences are considered to be quack, and many openly racists scientist are marginalized. Even so, they still exist, and groups like the Pioneer Fund, and their Mankind Quarterly, exist to fund racial sciences so that the debate on racial differences - largely considered bunk, can continue to influence opinions.

An excellent read through and through, this book is an excellent look at the peer-reviewed world behind racism, and how racial sciences exist to fuel political topics that have little to do with the actual human genome. A solid read, and definitely a recommendation for a great and informative work on racial sciences.

[John Devlin · Rating 1 out of 5]

(1.5) So I thought this was going to be a balanced take on the reemergence of the study of IQ and Race…it’s not.

It’s a typical Leftist lament on a subject they don’t want to discuss. First, the science is settled and there’s zero difference between modern humans…we’re all the same…then the well there are small differences but those are negligible too we shouldn’t even study this topic bc what might be unearthed could be weaponized by racists.

IQ is real. average IQ by race is unfortunately real and has great explanatory power.

Evolution occurred and is still occurring.
Humans are unique in that we’re the only species that figured out the game—evolution—-and we’re the only species that believes that once we stepped on the stage 250,000 years ago it stopped applying to us…

As I’ve been doing recently, I pull quotes from the book and analyze the spurious reasoning the author does…

“the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. . . . There is neither room for human endeavour nor the idea of progress.” Or, as President Trump reportedly said in a White House meeting with lawmakers in 2018, that Haiti, El Salvador, and parts of Africa are “shithole countries.”

—for 250,000 years Africa remained unchanged: small bands of nomadic folks traipsing across a harsh landscape…Yes, Africans were the first Homo sapiens and they had not progressed…they had no writing or the wheel. And btw Haiti is a shithole by any measure.

“Sloane could have known little of the more recent Aztec and Inca empires in South America, which upon their discovery by Europeans destabilized the very meaning of civilization by proving that highly sophisticated societies emerged independently elsewhere.”

—put aside the almost industrialized barbarism of the Aztecs…the fact was Cortez with 1,000 men quickly conquered a 1 million person empire speaks volumes about who was superior.

“We’re surrounded by the skeletons of real people who lived in a civilization no less remarkable than the ones that followed or that went before.”

—-here comes the large doses of Leftist relativism…nothings better, it’s all opinion, there is no truth…
How someone could write that the civilizations that exist today are no better than ones that have gone before beggars the mind…

“The global power balance, as it played out in the eighteenth century, meant that treasures from all over the world could and would only end up in a museum like this one, because Britain was one of the strongest nations at the time.”
—and an important point that rarely gets mentioned—the whole idea of a museum, a place to study a multitude of flora, fauna, and history is a western creation.

“The more experts like him have tried to decipher ancient art, wherever it is in the world, the more they’ve found themselves only scratching the surface of systems of thought so deep that Western philosophical traditions can’t contain them.”

—the trap of the well educated. They imagine some cave scratches are so deep, abstruse wonderings from a people who couldn’t write and had almost no ability to think symbolically…the high IQ imagining that Forrest Gump’s chocolate aphorism is actually really deep.

“Countless generations have absorbed and built upon knowledge of food sources and navigation. They have shaped the landscape sustainably over millennia, built a spiritual relationship with it and its unique flora and fauna.”

—The fetishizing of the primitive, and yet with all this knowledge, that could never be written down, the primitives lives had remained static for ten of thousands of years.
Fact: until modern times life was nasty, brutish, and short. Primitives were wholly dependent on good weather. Some seasons food was more available and tribes prospered, had more children, and sometimes drought happened, and folks died off…Malthus got this part right.

“Smith explains, but as far as convincing evidence goes, he believes none had the same capacity to think symbolically, to talk in past and future tenses, to produce art quite like our own. These are the things that made us modern. What separated “us”…sapiens evolved from a population of people in Africa before some of these people began migrating to the rest of the world around 100,000 years ago and then began adapting in small ways to their own particular environmental conditions.”

—the author lets facts break through her reverie over the supposed great insights of the primitive

“Within Africa, too, there was adaptation and change, depending on where people lived. Overall, however,
are amazing stories of dramatic events that are preserved in oral histories, oral traditions, such as the rising of the seas at the end of the last ice age, and hills becoming islands.

— and then we’re back to wish casting. Oral traditions are nearly worthless. How do I know? Well, when I was in kindergarten they had us play the telephone game and by the time the teacher’s whispered phrase had gotten back to me the message was entirely different…now do that over centuries…

“tells you concrete skyscrapers are the symbols of advanced culture, but when viewed from the perspective of deep time—across millennia rather than centuries, in the context of long historical trajectories—it becomes clearer. Empires and cities decline and fall. It is smaller, indigenous communities who survive throughout, whose societies date to many thousands rather than many hundreds of years old.”

— hard to take these kind of comments seriously, the author contends that the last five hundred years are really less significant than the remaining Australian aborigine culture…for some reason I hear the scarecrow in the wizard of Oz humming a tune.


“Archaeology shows us that all societies are incredibly sophisticated, they are just sophisticated in different ways,”

—again, as per earlier comment, the mammoth desire of Leftists to re-evaluate everything so nothing is simple, truth is relative, nothing ever redounds against their favorite POCs

“superior” to other human species—easily interpreted as economic terms. There’s an implicit assumption that higher productivity and more mastery over nature, the presence of settlements and cities, are the marks of human progress, even of the evolution of mankind. The more superior we are to nature, the more superior we are as humans.”

—see my initial comments on evolution here.

“where humans originated—in fact, its climate being so inhospitable back then, it was one of the last places humans migrated to, long after they arrived in Australia. But since Europe was where the first archaeologists happened to live”

— one of many ironies, the author notes the environment of those Europeans was bad…hmm perhaps that was used by evolution, you think? And the writer doesn’t ask why that the Europeans just so happened to be the first archaeologists…

“actually likely to have the most drops of Neanderthal blood, metaphorically speaking. In January 2014 an international team of leading archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists confirmed that humans outside Africa had bred with Neanderthals. Those of European and Asian ancestry”

—-yes, so the fact that some whites and Asians have up to 4% of a different sub species in their genetic blueprints might make them different…but the author spends many pages eliding over the differences or just claiming they’re negligible and we’re all the same..hallelujah, kumbaya.

“4 percent of our DNA. People in Asia and Australia also bear traces of another known archaic human, the Denisovans. There is likely to have been breeding with other kinds of human as well. Neanderthals and Denisovans”
“recently in evolutionary time—these are only superficial adaptations, such as skin color.”
— the cognitive dysfunction is rather grand here. She admits differences and then runs back to well it’s all superficial.

Genes are the blueprint for humans…skin color is superficial but the genes that are used to express that surface coloration are not….then there’s genes for cystic fibrosis, sickle cell, lactase tolerance, alcohol metabolization, bone density, extra molars…should I continue?

“A modern human from China looks. different than a modern human in Europe, not in the important ways, but in other ways,” he tells me. “So did one become modern earlier than the other one?”

—here’s as good a time as any to address the differences in physiognomy amongst races. Look at a hottentot women with steatopygia, a Masai warrior, a Tongan, and Australian aborigine, a Tibetan, a Spaniard, and a Scandinavian…the writer would have you believe that evolution has had its way with Homo sapiens…but that these differences aren’t important…or vitally for her ideology…they don’t touch the human brain.

Well, let’s unpack that ethos. The human brain is the apex of evolution. The crucial piece that has allowed humans to become the conquerors of nature. But in her shallow fallacy, she think that 250,000 years ago, evolution stopped when it came to Homo sapiens…well to be fair, it didn’t stop but it made sure not to touch the brain bc that would be racist…head shakingly obtuse at this point.

“In a sense, it shouldn’t matter. How we choose to live and treat each other is a political and ethical matter, one that’s already been decided by the fact that as a society we have chosen to call ourselves human and give every individual human rights.”

— correct, regardless of aggregate racial characteristics everyone should be equal under the law…

“name was Saartjie Baartman, and she was aged somewhere between twenty and thirty. What made her so fascinating were her enormous buttocks and elongated labia, considered by Europeans to be sexually grotesque. Calling her a “Venus” was a joke”

— here’s the Hottentot lady who was used as a carnival sideshow…

“ignoring that after generations in slavery, most black Americans simply didn’t have a tangible connection to Africa anymore—let alone to a new country that their ancestors most likely had never seen.”

—she’s in trouble here, she’s trying to claim that race is a social construct but she’s stepped into a woke minefield by asserting Black folks in america have zero idea about the life of their distant fore bearers…she’s right but Wokesters would fume and she’d spend days on X apologizing…

“Since the 1850s, people have been trying to figure out if black bones are harder than white bones.”

—there’s pretty good evidence that bone density varies a bit by race.

“For hunter-gatherers to live so differently from city dwellers, the logic goes, it must be that their brains had not yet progressed to the same stage of evolution…Adding fuel to this bonfire of flawed thinking..”

—Yes, the fact that Hunter gatherers in Africa had 250,000 years to come up with writing or the wheel and didn’t leads one to believe they didn’t have the intellectual firepower…
Some black folks like to crow about being the original first people…true…but the flip side is well you had the software for the longest time and accomplished the least…perhaps some of the folks that diaspora’d booted up homo sapien 2.0 when you weren’t looking.

“scientists who had already long argued that history, culture, and environment were really behind what people thought of as racial difference…made people and nations seem different was culture and language, neither of which is hereditary.”

— here’s my next corrective polemic…huge parts of culture are evolutionary…how could they not be?

But let’s cut to the chase, ask AI to describe the cultures of chimps, gorillas, and bonobos. It’ll give you a quick take on chimps: alpha males, a coterie of supporting males, lower females with a strict hierarchy for both sexes. Gorillas: far smaller family size units, gentle with silver backed males protecting their genes. On the other hand, Bonobos: matriarchal, sex driven social hierarchy(There’s far more disparities)…my point is that their culture was not chosen…some chimp didn’t cogitate over how a society should be run and, discarding the bonobo or gorilla model, he went with the alpha male chimp system…are you seeing my point? Humans have been formed by evolution as well so are cultural systems are just as vulnerable to evolutions diktats.

“race is likely to be only a superficial variation on one theme. Most of the visible difference is cultural.”

— yes, and thats evolutionary( read Nicholas Wade’s well done book troublesome inheritance on this)

“It was already well known that the proportions of people with different blood types varied from population to population, because of a phenomenon known as genetic drift.”

— the author can’t help herself, she acknowledges differences but as they stack up she continues to dismiss them…remember, all these differences are insignificant, she says, and they never NEVER touch the human brain, even though the brain would be the most crucial thrust of evolution.

“After all, this is a journal considered so inflammatory that the security filter of my home broadband provider in the United Kingdom automatically blocks it.”

—at several points the author, when researching these alleged racist publications, notes that the EU blocks her from accessing the sites…Ho hum…some info is too dangerous for the masses to read…censorship always needs to blame folks who might not be able to handle opinions contrary to their own.

“There is no scientific evidence for this; it’s just speculation. Nobody has ever found any genes linking ethnicity or race to school results.”

—one of the more clarifying facts…on the SAT black parents with PhDs or making more than $300k a year have children that score equally to whites making under $40k…and do worse than low income Asians…I don’t know how you spin this to claim that it’s really economics or racism that’s holding black kids back…


“tells me, for instance, what a shame it would be for what he calls “low-IQ countries” such as Pakistan to lose their brightest citizens if they emigrate to the West. “This cripples the poor countries”

—the author wants tons of immigration, but I’ve made this point many times…shouldn’t we stop enticing folks to leave their home countries so that can take their ambition and work to make their home countries places folks don’t want to flee from?

—oh and fun fact, Pakistan has around a 50% marriage rate of first cousins…what do you think that does to the human genome? Good or bad?

“Populations that get too bright and too rich invariably slip into sub-replacement fertility and slowly breed themselves out of existence,”

—she scoffs but that’s turning out to be true, even 3rd world populations are dropping fast.


“Neo-Nazi political parties and white supremacists were thought to exist only on the irrelevant margins of real
difference does it make to science that a publication such as the Mankind Quarterly exists today? In truth, barely any. Its work is so rarely read”

—she spends a good part of her slim monograph detailing the history of these shadowy racist magazines and thinkers, and then takes apart their importance, admitting that even with the internet no one follows them.

“The Intelligence of American Jews,” in which he argued that “Jews have a higher average level of verbal intelligence than non-Jewish whites.”

—Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 114 and represent less than 1% of worlds population but have garnered nearly 20% of the last century’s Nobel prizes…QED

“In 1994, in The Bell Curve, one of the most notorious bestsellers of the twentieth century, political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein suggested that black Americans were less intelligent than whites and Asians….Although The Bell Curve was widely panned after it was published”

—yes it was panned by the very same people like the author who simply can’t countenance this unfortunate truth. Stephen Jay Gould had to rush out an added chapter of his book, the mismeasurement of man, in an attempt to discredit the Bell Curve. Distilled down, Gould’s argument was there’s a history of racists trying to study intelligence, so Murray must be a racist too.

“the Human Genome Diversity Project might have expected it to go forward without a hitch… activists, alert to the risk of exploitation, were ready to defend the communities targeted by the Human Genome Diversity Project…These activists warned of the possibility that DNA analysis might damage how these communities chose to understand their past, might reveal something that could be used commercially to extract profit, or even be used as a weapon by racists…the differences between us was already known to be trivial, then why embark on a multi-million-dollar international project to study it at all? In what way did this reinforce that we were all the same underneath?”

—So scientists were brow beaten bc they…gasp…might be studying something that would highlight differences in human genomes, clash with some groups myths about their past, and could be twisted for use by those evil racists.

“Ancestry testing has taken the work of well-meaning scientists who only tried to do good in the world and inadvertently has helped reinforce the idea that race is real….By tracking history through our genes, by dividing up individual bodies into proportions of nationalities—so much European, so much African, so much Asian—the tests fortify the assumption that race is biologically meaningful.”

—how dare those scientists and companies tell folks their ancestors were from France. People might get the impression that is somehow meaningful, but I’m a writer and I’m here to tell them it’s not…let’s forget about the Roman Empire and the last 500 years of phenomenal advancement…could’ve happened anywhere at any time… “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”…

“The subtext is that, without white Europeans, civilization couldn’t have flourished in North America.”

—how bout we take out the “sub” there was no North American civilization for the 15,000 years the first people lived there.

“who live almost entirely at sea, surviving by free-diving to hunt fish, had evolved an extraordinary ability to hold their breath underwater for long periods of time…Bajau tend to have disproportionately larger spleens than nearby populations of farmers, which possibly helps them to keep up their blood oxygen levels when diving. There appears to be a measurable genetic difference between them and others, sharpened over many generations by living in an unusual environment

—so evolution works on lungs but not brains…

“The effects of slavery and centuries of racism, in all its forms, are hard to quantify, but black Americans have undoubtedly suffered in ways that have left their marks on generations.”

— so I’m confused, black folks have been marked by just a few hundred years of bad treatment?where would those marks show up? On their genes…their culture? But that would mean evolution effects not only brains but acts over far smaller time spans than the author would want to admit.

“it struck me just how powerful a thing culture can be.”Culture, and the safety and security it brings, can have such a profound impact on behavior over generations, that to outsiders the cause of the behavior may well appear to be genetic….When we see the effects of culture, we can’t help but dream up biological mechanisms to explain it.
…for so long struggled to find in our DNA when it comes to intelligence and other complex traits may in fact be explained by the magic ingredient of culture….
In the same way that our parents pass on their genes to us, they also pass on their culture…it is so sticky and persistent that it may well look biological to an observer….Culture molds people, even subconsciously, for certain lives and careers.

—the irony is she’s very close and so very far away from understanding what’s going on. Evolution dictates culture…see earlier comment about chimps, gorillas, and bonobos!.

[Eleanor Metcalf · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so excited to read "Superior", having loved Saini's previous book, "Inferior" - which used science to systematically debunk myths about essential differences between men and women. It was a brilliantly researched and written book, which gave me ammunition in conversations with (sometimes well-meaning) people who say things like "I'm all for equality, but men and women are just wired differently, aren't they."

"Superior" promised to do the same for racism and race science - I expected to see similar analysis and critique of the scientific studies which claim to find essential differences between races. There was some of this, but it came late in the book, and only made up about a quarter of the content.

Instead, a large proportion of the book was dedicated to explaining the history of race & why it's a flawed concept, and following the network of money & influence behind the scientific journals which public race science today. Interesting and worthy topics, but not really what I was expecting, and covered somewhat repetitively in overly painstainking detail.

I was left feeling slightly confused about who the book was targeted at: if Saini is looking to bolster the beliefs and knowledge of anti-racist readers, imo the scientific rebuttal was lacking vs the more conceptual discussions of race (which presumably this group would already be familiar with). Similarly, if she's looking to convert people who believe that there are some essential genetic differences between people with different skin tones, 100+ pages of up-front debate about "but what even is race tho" would probably feel like an evasion, rather than a way to engage and win them over.

It's a shame, because this is such an important topic, but I felt the balance of content and its ordering within the book detracted from the key points Saini was trying to make.

(Also, this is not a genuine criticism, but the cover design gave me occasional concerns that people on the tube [I read this pre-lockdown] would think I was reading a pro-white supremacy book lol.)

[Jorge Zuluaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Angela Saini esta definitivamente sola. Que buena comunicadora. Que temas tan pertinentes los que aborda. Que rigor.

Este, su segundo libro, aborda una de las dos problemáticas sociales más acuciantes del presente.

Me refiero, en primer lugar, a la situación de sumisión e inferioridad –y una infinidad de otras problemáticas relacionadas– a la que se ha sometido al conjunto de todas las mujeres –la mitad de la humanidad– a lo largo de la historia. Condición que ha sido aupada, especialmente en los últimos dos siglos, por discursos con un alto prestigio social como la ciencia. Este fue precisamente el tema de su primer libro "Inferior" (mi reseña por aquí).

La segunda problemática es el racismo, tanto el racismo cotidiano, del que difícilmente nos libraremos en mucho tiempo –sus sesgos y vicios nos han conquistado sin remedio–, como los aún más nocivos racismos intelectuales y científicos que, como sucede con el machismo, han contado con un respaldo centenario del sacrosanto edificio de la ciencia. Este es precisamente el tema de su segundo libro, "Superior".

Como me ha pasado con otros libros, demore muchísimo el inicio de la lectura de este texto, aún después de haber devorado "Inferior" en un par de días y de comprobar la capacidad de Saini para atraparte. Como debe pasarles a todas las personas que siempre están leyendo, yo trato de variar los temas de mis lecturas para no aburrirme de una temática particular. Sin embargo, debo reconocer que le di muchas largas a empezar este libro urgente. Me arrepiento y explico más adelante por qué.

Cuando al fin lo comencé, no pude soltarlo.

Como sucede con las lecturas de feminismos, para quiénes hemos pasado por la vida sin reconocer el andamiaje de poder, privilegios y sesgos que sostiene a nuestras sociedades, enfrentarse por primera vez a estas lecturas es realmente asombroso. No sé si le pasa a todo el mundo. Pero al leer de feminismos y ahora de racismo, siento que estoy llegando a un planeta desconocido y quiero saberlo todo. Ya lo he dicho en otras reseñas, pero con este tema me pasaba como cuando estaba más joven y empece a leer mis primeros libros de astronomía: eran como una puerta abierta a un universo desconocido y fascinante.

Bueno, a diferencia de la astronomía, la "fascinación" por los feminismos y las discusiones raciales debe ser matizada por el hecho de que miles de millones de personas han sufrido injustamente.

Lo mejor de los libros de Saini es la combinación armoniosa de buena ciencia, anécdotas personales, opinión profesional y crónica periodística. Este maridaje de buenas prácticas narrativa hace que sus libros sean más fáciles de leer a pesar de estar muchas veces cargados de datos y de detalles técnicos. Esto último, es parte también de lo que admiro de ella. Siendo una profesional del periodismo, me ha impresionado mucho su capacidad para profundizar en temas muy técnicos. En el caso de este libro por ejemplo, es admirable su manejo de temas de genética, evolución animal y en particular humana, incluso de bioquímica. ¡Me quito el sombrero!

En "Superior", usando esa particular combinación de elementos, hacemos un viaje por la historia, no solamente del racismo científico que, según las investigaciones de Saini se remonta a mediados del siglo XVIII cuando se introdujo oficialmente las primeras ideas –casi supersticiones– sobre la "raza", sino también hacemos un viaje por la historia de nuestra propia especie.

Y es que para entender la falacia del concepto de raza debemos también viajar a nuestro pasado remoto, reconstruir, en la medida en la que nos permiten las evidencias arqueológicas y genéticas, el "viaje" de la humanidad entre las colinas figuradas de la evolución.

Con este libro reafirme lo que venía leyendo en otros textos y es la idea de que Homo sapiens, como especie, no esta enteramente separada de sus antepasados. Es una falacia pensar que un día éramos Homo erectus y al día siguiente nacimos humanos. La evolución, al menos la evolución humana, no da saltos. Hubo un tiempo en el que personas mucho más diversas de las que vivimos hoy, a las que habríamos llamado perfectamente humanos, poblábamos la Tierra. Algunas de esas personas se reconocen hoy como de especies diferentes dentro de la taxonomía biológica, pero solo porque necesitamos estos compartimientos para entender el mundo, no porque fueran esencial y profundamente diferentes (incluso con algunos de ellos tuvimos sexo y descendientes, una de las barreras reconocidas por la evolución entre las especies).

Si llegamos a entender que incluso personas que la misma ciencia reconoce como de especies diferentes, pudieron llegar a ser muy parecidas a nosotros, al punto quizás de considerarlas simplemente miembros de otras tribus ¿tiene algún sentido establecer barreras biológicas, como las razas, entre las personas que vivimos en el presente?

Curiosamente esta reflexión la puedo hacer hoy, gracias a las evidencias arqueológicas y genéticas que se han acumulado durante décadas. Sin embargo, durante la mayor parte de la historia de la ciencia, la idea dominante era muy distinta y este es el corazón del libro de Saini.

No solo pensábamos que Homo sapiens era diferente de todas las especies animales, vivas y extintas, incluso otras especies de homininos –como Homo neardentalensis, una idea a la que hoy llamamos especismo –y de la que no habla explícitamente Saini–, sino que aceptábamos, incluso con el sello de calidad de la ciencia, que entre los individuos de nuestra especie existen diferencias genéticas significativas que se ven reflejadas en rasgos superficiales o fenotípicos, el color de piel, la estatura, los rasgos faciales, otros rasgos físicos menos evidentes como la propensión a sufrir de ciertas enfermedades –la hipertensión por ejemplo entre las personas "afroamericanas" de los Estados Unidos– y aún peor, se sostenía que estas diferencias biológicas entre poblaciones humanas se reflejaban en diferencias de aptitudes y comportamientos, la inteligencia, la pereza, la tendencia a la criminalidad, entre muchas otras.

En una palabra: racismo puro y duro.

Leyendo a Saini me di cuenta de las múltiples veces que, supuestamente sin quererlo, he sido racista. Esta es una de las cosas buenas de leer este tipo de libros: problematizan las cosas que has considerado siempre normales, el machismo y el racismo en particular, te hacen ver la viga en el ojo propio.

Sin pensarlo mucho, he compartido y hablado de ideas tales como el efecto de selección que supuestamente se produjo entre los africanos venidos a América durante el holocausto esclavista de la modernidad. Lo he hecho, casi siempre, para decir cosas supuestamente buenas de las personas de esas comunidades; cosas como que "los negros y las negras americanas son más grandes, más lindas, cantan mejor". Creí que le hacía un favor a una minoría cuando en realidad estaba siendo racista. Punto.

Con Saini he aprendido que no hace falta no hablar mal de una minoría, incluso de una comunidad de miles de millones –chinos, indios, africanos, y me refiero aquí a los humanos casi idénticos a nosotros que nacieron y crecieron en esas regiones del mundo– para ser racista. El racismo se manifiesta en el momento en el que crees que hay una barrera biológica, que hay unos determinantes genéticos que nos hacen diferentes.

Saini, nos presenta las posiciones de parte y parte del debate; en su libro no solo leemos las posiciones de los científicos "progre" –el término que han inventado los racistas, homofóbicos y sexistas para descalificar disimuladamente el esfuerzo por hacer un mundo mejor para todos–, sino también de algunos personajes que sostienen el racismo intelectual y científico con la ayuda del financiamiento de fundaciones supremacistas, especialmente en países como Estados Unidos.

La autora nos convence, a la larga, de que la suma de todas las evidencias disponibles y el resultado de debates que llevan años haciéndose en distintos escenarios, demuestra que la idea de "raza" es simplemente una superstición. De que la diversidad genética humana, si bien es más amplia de lo esperado, lo que también debe celebrarse, una especie poco diversa esta condenada, es incapaz de explicar casi cualquiera de las diferencias que los racistas señalan existen entre las poblaciones que quieren menospreciar y a las que, de otro lado, quieren elevar al pináculo de la evolución.

El barniz de cultura que cubre nuestro millonario legado evolutivo, es suficientemente complejo para explicar casi todas nuestras diferencias en inteligencia, en avances sociales, en sensibilidad a las enfermedades, en violencia, etc.

La raza es un concepto científico arcaico usado para sostener estructuras de poder.

El libro de Saini es también una nueva advertencia para quiénes hacemos ciencia.

Es absurdo pensar que los descubrimiento científicos no están también afectados por la política y las ideologías sociales. Y aunque esto afecta a todas las ciencias sin excepción –incluso las aparentemente asépticas disciplinas de la física o la astronomía– es particularmente cierto en las ciencias más cercanas a la experiencia humana, la biología, la sicología, la medicina, la sociología. Si seguimos ciegos al hecho de que la ciencia es también un producto cultural, y uno muy útil para sostener ciertas estructuras de poder, podremos, como ya paso con la eugenesia, un caso ampliamente tratado en "Superior", arrepentirnos después de nuestra ingenuidad.

Bueno, si es que hay tiempo.

El racismo, como denuncia Saini en este excelente libro, está ganando terreno.

Hay que leer a "Superior" para, por lo menos, no convertirse o no seguir siendo cajas de resonancia de estas supersticiones dañinas.

[Emma-Louise Gale · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a bit underwhelming to say the least. I expected something a little stronger from Saini. First off I thought I'd mention, I don't hate this book, in fact I thought some points were extremely well thought out and made sense for all.

However, I'd like to think, not one person believes that scientists are immune to racism and nationalism (whether that be receiving or implementing) in the past. Scientific racism was definitely happening, as was general racism. I personally do not see a need to categorise them differently. It is racism and it is wrong.

As a scientist, the only way to combat hard biological science is with hard biological science, not the less factual sociology and psychology. I understand where most her points stem from and I am ashamed of the history of Europeans (particularly the Brits and Germans) and the scientific community for being a part of it. But I found this should have been a factual history lesson and not an opinionated (one sided throughout) theory. It was very repetitive and did not need to be the length it was.

I'm a little saddened by this. I had high expectations after seeing it on Nature's Top 10 of 2019. I will continue to educate myself on this topic but from a historical standpoint as that beat suits what I am looking for.

[Steve Bowbrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

An utterly gripping book. An essential read for an era in which pernicious racism is finding new support in bogus science.

[Sebastian Campos · Rating 1 out of 5]

A deeply unscientific and idiotic book. Racism being bad translates to race doesn’t exist and “biologists shouldn’t study race” because they may find ‘racist’ conclusions.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this book to focus on debunking the idea of innate differences in abilities between races. Instead, Saini documents the history of racial prejudice influencing science. The book is stronger for this approach, and I came out wiser, if a little more scared.
In a well-written, often absorbing narrative, Saini documents the thread of eugenics from Darwinism, through fascism, and right to fringe publications, wealthy foundations, and even members of the editorial boards of mainstream science journals. She illustrates how a consistent way of thinking - which emphasises the superiority of European norms and peoples - continues to influence more mainstream thought. In this, the idea that outright racists are still within the Academy - is a little frightening in an era where outright racist ideas are gaining currency.
Saini also looks at modern fields, from genetics to social and neuroscience. She covers the woeful tale of BiDil, which was for many years touted as the forerunner of a wave of racialised medicine. BiDil treats hypertension, which African-Americans suffer from in much higher rates than whites. Many American scientists persist in viewing this as a probable genetic difference, despite Africans (and Afro-Cuban) having quite low levels of hypertension. BiDil was touted as more effective on African-Americans. The issue is that it wasn't - in fact, in seeking approval to have listed as a specific racially targeted drug, BiDil was *only* tested on African Americans. The motivation was what Saini coyly calls "marketing", but was really to keep the drug in patent, and hence not subject to competing with generics. Nearly a decade on, BiDil is mostly a failure, not that surprising given it is marketed at a poor segment of the population but costs a mint, meaning health insurers won't pay for it. Oh, and it appears equally effective on all racial groups. BiDil has turned out to be the birth and death of racialised medicine.
Saini also interviews David Reich, who bedazzles her with his complex net of understanding if how genetically mixed most humans are, descended from waves of people who use their ingenuity to get closer to the rest of the world, before twisting to hold open the "but theoretically we could have cognitive differences between population groups which correspond to race". Saini tackles him on how these ideas have been used - given that while " theoretically" it is possible, we have no evidence that is actually is - despite many goes at proving so. Reich's insistence that science will proof us against prejudice rings uncomfortably naive against the background of the book. It harkens back to the history of the Max Planck Institute/Kaiser Wilhelm institute, whose scientists mostly acquiesced to the Nazis, producing endless science demonstrating the superiority of blond Germans. The resisters were heroic, but they were also small in number and isolated.
This book comes at a crucial time, not only because racism is on the rise, but as our societies seem more than ever riven between those who dismiss scientific experts altogether, and this who regard them as infallible. The book reminds us that scientists are human, part of society, and just as capable of storing their truths to support evil as the rest of us.

[Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed look at the interconnection of science(s) and its social & political aspects. Saini gives a good historical perspective and brings the issues forward to the present day to show how persistent and pernicious the effects of racism are on how we study (or try to study) human variation as well as how we apply the results. I appreciated that she took a global perspective, not just focussing on the United States, but had examples from other countries (Great Britain, India), and not only majority white countries showing how deeply embedded these issues are all over.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone in the field of genetics should read this. We need to consider the broader implications of our research and likely cannot predict how our research may be misconstrued to fit someone else's narrative.

I really enjoyed Saini's writing style and would definitely read more books by this author.

[jocelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes some mental acrobatics to be an intellectual racist in light of the scientific information we have today, but those who want to do it, will. Racists will find validation wherever they can, even if it means working a little harder than usual.

[Olivia Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, Angela Saini has written a book that I think should be required reading for scientists. I loved seeing the growth in her writing style from Inferior to Superior. Her journalism background shines through and brings a unique aspect to her storytelling. She unfolds the focus of each chapter by starting with assumptions the reader/society has, quickly unraveling them and illuminating how there is more to every story. I love how she is able to layer scientific studies, personal stories, history, politics, and interviews together so seamlessly, providing the reader with extensive details to support her narrative. I’ve learned so much about just how deep racism runs in biology through this book, and it’s shown me that I still have a lot further to go in unpacking the subject. There are a lot of questions scientists and academics need to be asking to fix the systemic problems in our field and society as a whole. Would definitely recommend!

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Angela Saini's striking dedication in Superior: The Return of Race Science reads "For my parents, the only ancestors I need to know," which immediately sets the tone for what is to follow.

The book an effective expose, and sometimes a demolition, of the shadier elements of race science, both historic and recent, but also one that argues convincingly that such science can never be fully objective, since much of it relies attempting to prove a prior hypothesis, or telling a story:

The answer is simple: science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out. It ultimately sits at the mercy of the personal political beliefs of those carrying it out.

The point is made multiple times, and one of the interviews in the book perhaps expresses it best:

‘Underlying assumptions and ideas definitely get embedded in ways that we don’t even think about consciously, which can play out in the science,’ Bolnick adds. ‘We interpret data. We bring our perspectives, our framings to the data. You can use the same data to say many different things. I think modern genomic data provides the perfect example of that, because you can have different people who are all very smart and understand the data, who look at the same datasets and describe them in polar opposite directions.’

It’s impossible to escape our beliefs, our upbringing, our environment, even the pressure of wanting to be correct, when it comes to interpreting the facts. Our stories get in the way.

Saini also argues that race science largely stems from the cultural context in which genetics and evolutionary theories developed, namely colonialism:

The key to understanding the meaning of race is understanding power. When you see how power has shaped the idea of race and continues to shape it, how it affects even the scientific facts, everything finally begins to make sense.

Although another theme is how issues often result from naivety of scientists or even good intentions, e.g. right back to the Enlightenment:

In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it. And here lay the fatal error at the birth of modern science, one that would persist for centuries, and arguably persists to this day. It is a science of human origins, as British anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, that ‘has written the essence of humanity in its own image, and that measures other people by how far they have come in living up to it’.

This is a timely book, and Saini should also be credited for making her own perspective, the story she wants to tell, very clear, and also for allowing those on the other side of the argument, particularly those who believe in racial differences, to present their side and in their own words.

The book itself is a good read generally, although a little repetitive. At times it also was a little too Sunday Magazine supplement for my taste (‘... I’m told by Mark Thomas, professor of evolutionary genetics at University College London, who worked on the finding. Leaning back in his chair, wearing stonewashed jeans and a grandad-collar shirt, Thomas is about as relatable as a professor comes.) albeit perhaps that comes with the genre. More specifically here though, the book also got a little bogged-down for me at times in another form of journalism, investigative journalism (following the money behind the journal Mankind Quarterly) which didn't feel so suited to the form.

4.5 stars for the importance of the messages although 3 for the reading experience - and thanks to the author/publisher for making the book free to Kindle readers for a period.