Letter: Race and reason

From Morris Bradley, Lancaster University

In your Comment of 27 May you write that scientists are using a spurious argument when they say that there is no justification for racism because only a tiny percentage of genes differ between the so-called races. You write that it is preferable to say, “We know from our daily experience that humans of all races are virtually identical and that there is no justification for racism.”

Surely the typical justification for racism is based precisely on the daily experience of people who very easily detect real differences between what they call races – skin colour and the rest are certainly not identical across the human population. The racist believes, not surprisingly, that these real differences reflect other, fundamentally important, differences and concludes that these imply superiority or inferiority.

So it is important to discover whether there are any such fundamental differences, and genetics provides evidence that almost certainly there are not. The genetic differences are not only extremely small as a percentage, they also indicate that the period of divergence among humans has been far too brief to allow for fundamentally important genetic differences to emerge. This short period of evolutionary divergence is consistent with our understanding of the dispersal during human prehistory and the pattern of human settlement.

Obvious differences such as skin colour involve very little genetic variation and are adaptive to different climates. Moreover, genetics reveals that within each of the human groups that the racist would distinguish, there exists vastly greater genetic diversity than exists between the groups. In other words, the genetic difference between any two individuals within such a group is vastly greater than the genetic differences between average members of two such groups.

I do not suggest that trying to explain the genetics would have a very useful outcome in the midst of a racist riot and I do not wish to devalue the argument that we can recognise that human diversity and empathy are universal through observation alone. But I do believe that the genetic explanation makes it easier to understand the origins of trivial genetic difference such as skin colour and helps to dispel the fears that feed racism.