I'm Christian Gary Murphy, and this is the podcast in which we talked to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives on the events that have helped shape them.

And my guest today is Dr Adam Rutherford.

Now you probably know him best.

Is that bloke on the radio?

And he talks to us about science, on interviews, other people about science.

But he's also a serious academic at UCL, and he's written a book which doesn't really sound like his area, which Genetics called how to argue with a racist history science race.

In reality, it's a punchy title, quite pugnacious.

Yes, there's no point in being subtle about these things.

But we felt that it was, um, attempt to equip people with the right tools that they can have arguments about race, especially with people who don't think that they're particularly racist but actually are saying effectively racist things.

A lot of people in the run up to a younger people particularly say have said to me, um, I wish I'd had this book at Christmas or Thanksgiving hymn to take on the pseudoscience.

Yeah, when people say sort of glib things about your particular sport.

But music, often racial stereotypes, often positive attributes racism.

So saying, You know, black men are better at sprinting East Asians are better at maths.

Jews amore, intelligent, those sorts of racial tropes which are associated with positive characteristics.

Who doesn't want to be faster sports hero Brighter but actually there both untrue.

Scientifically and also we have the effect of reinforcing some very ancient racial stereotypes rate racialized tropes which originate at the birth of scientific racism, which is only 3 400 years ago.

Can we go through some of the language first?

I mean, first of all, what is race?

Do you believe it exists?

Is it just a construct?

Race definitely exists, and this is a really important thing to state a state up front.

There was a period when, when I was writing it, where we were toying with the title as being Does race exist, Race does exist, and it exists as a social construct, not just because it's a social construct.

Social constructs are make up the vast majority of how humans interact with each other.

Money is a social construct.

Time is a social construct.

You don't turn up late to things and say, I'm sorry I'm late.

But time is just a social construct.

Social constructs are the most important way that humans interact with each other.

The reason we say it's a social construct is that it used to be thought of as a biological innate characteristic.

That race as weak Alok will you define it is embedded in our genes, which modern genetics has shown is is not correct, that the standard racial categorizations that people use and incidentally, that is incredibly flexible has been flexible over history.

And it's flexible today.

But they don't align perfectly with what we know about human diversity, genetic diversity, human evolution, the movement of people around the world in history and today.

But some people will be confused because they're going on.

But it's the genes surely that make me brown skinned and you slightly like brown skinned and other people think, yeah, that's absolutely true.

So even a social construct has a biological basis to it, butts.

One aspect of of understanding the history of race is that pigmentation only really becomes associate ID.

With the way we talk about race and colloquial terms, really only during the age of enlightenment.

There's a couple of earlier references to it in terms of character in relation to pigmentation.

But in ancient history, ladies of references to pigmentation none primarily associated with character traits as we have them today.

So the idea of race comes about because ancient scientists started trying to classify human beings.

Yes, exactly it is.

It emerges at the same time as the age of expansion, European expansion, the age of exploitation of plunder, off empire on DDE.

What I argue in the book, which is not my argument it's a standard argument in history is that the invention of race is the co opting, the marshalling off science off pseudoscience we now know into a political ideology.

So it is a bunch of guys, enlightenment thinkers, important enlightenment thinkers.

Can't Voltaire Linnaeus blumen back a load of others, many of whom didn't travel.

So many of them are no actually doing scientific exploration.

Most of them didn't do any measurements themselves, but they are saying the these, the people that we're meeting as Europe expands around the world on this is how we're going to classify them.

It's not just classifications, though it is hierarchical classification, and that's essential to this.

All off these classifications are are they put white Europeans at the top there, white supremacists in a literal sense rather than the contemporary sense.

All of the categorization say white European people are top, Others are below.

Pretty much all of them have sub Saharan Africans or Africans at the bottom of that here.

Now, in those descriptions, what we see are the roots off racial stereotypes that people still have today.

That black people are lazy but strong that East Asians are greedy and haughty.

Those both those examples are direct Quotes from Linnaeus is first classifications of humans in this hierarchy.

White Europeans are graceful, kind and gentle.

Why have you felt the need to bring this book out now?

Is it bluntly because racism's back?

Yes, bluntly, yes, I think we've seen a number of things in the last few years, which are, you know, you're a news guy, that changing political climates, the rise of nationalism.

I think a a normalization off racism and discussions about race in in public has occurred, which is sort of concurrent with rises in nationalism.

You got another couple of things which are more on the science end of spectra, which, of course, is my area.

Which is that?

What?

We're much better understanding genomes and DNA and genetics now than at any other time.

There has bean, a unpredicted rise from nowhere in commercial genetic ancestry testing kits.

So these companies where you spin a tube, you send it off when they give you a map of where your ancestors from, that's not possible.

What they're telling you is where people on Earth are today that have similar DNA to you on we infer ancestry.

From that I'm on DDE at the trivial end of the spectrum.

I think this is reinforced.

The notion of biological essential is, um that that we don't think it is right in with in genetics, within anthropology and their sciences.

But just the notion that, well, my ancestors are from here, and that has some bearing on my behavior, my identity, the relationship between genetics and identity, I think is very weak.

But I think a lot of people feel it very strongly, and I think these types of kits have reinforced that and is back very straightforwardly and acceptably it seems in political discourse that the idea that Britain, for example, has a national culture that is something to be preserved that is essentially white, right?

So there's I mean, there's a lot to unpick in that, and I don't think in terms of what national identities, I think people I think countries do have national identities.

I think they're much fuzzier than the sort of stereotype one of of Britain being purely white.

So I think that is a close to racist robe.

Or at least it's a It's a traditional view of Britain, which I don't think he's, I think, say historical, basically, Um, because you know, what does it mean to be British?

Are you British?

Yes, I'm only British.

Yes.

Where were you born?

In Britain, Right?

So that that legally and actually makes us British.

But your Indian Indian descent, I'm of half Guyanese Indians ascent.

An interesting thing happened recently, which was that since I started writing about race and genetics, I noticed that my Wikipedia page entry had being changed immediately after write an article about about this and it being changed to it says something like Adam Rutherford is a British Indo Guyanese geneticist.

I looked at that and thought, Well, that's all it because that is technically correct.

But I've never bean to Guyana.

Only ever been to India on holiday, my parents split up when there's very little I was raised by my step Mom, who's from Essex.

I looked like this.

I'm from Ipswich, all right.

Indo Guyanese has no bearing on my identity whatsoever.

And yet that is what someone else is chosen is my identity and genetically that is I cure it.

But what does that mean about?

Do I not get to decide what my identity is?

Cause May I'm from Suffolk.

So that relationship between genetics and identity that could be imposed upon you on what you choose.

I think I think this is part of this of territory we're trying explore s So what is the importance of skin color in your identity, my personal identity?

Because our our identity is sort of, you know, the way we describe our identities, as you just said is is often geographical rather than descriptive on, as you say.

You know, you're sort of I'm a British Indian.

Um even though India doesn't particularly have ah you know, a huge bearing on my mindset or how I feel or women with my identity is or what's home or anything like that.

Yeah, just because we don't really have a better way of describing me.

Yeah.

You know, we talk about Asians.

We talk about black, white and Asian.

People were black and white colors, and Asia is a place.

So how is that race?

You know?

Yeah, Well, yes, you're absolutely right.

Obviously, Andi is a sort of tacit agreement that you roughly know what people are talking about when we can really talk about race.

We say black people, meaning someone probably of on average, darker skin than Europeans who has recent African descent meaning within the last 4 500 years, maybe from a continent which consists of what, 54 countries on 1.3 billion people.

So from a scientific point of view, that's just a non starter.

It's meaningless.

It's meaningless for another specific scientific reason.

For two reasons.

The first is that we know and have known for years that there is MME or genetic diversity Seymour variation and genes within Africa than in the rest of the world.

Put together, and this is a reflection of the fact that I miss happens is an African species on.

Most of our evolution happened within Africa in the last half a 1,000,000 years.

Only a small proportion, maybe as few as 10,000 people, migrated out of Africa within the last 100,000 years or so, from which the rest of the world's population was was.

Is this a I mean that if I would put that Maur rudely, perhaps, I mean, I was saying that the rest of the world is just more inbred.

Yes, that's not really so.

There's no that's Jerry.

Yes, two people from if you took two random people from Rwanda and South Africa, they are.

They will beam or different to each other genetically than either one of those people is to anyone else outside of Africa, including an aboriginal Australian Chinese guy.

Whatever the pigmentation things where you ask me is also the same.

There is more pigmentation variation within Africa than there is in the rest of world put together.

How explain that what is 1.3 billion people on the genes that encodes pigmentation arm or varied within Africa than the rest of genetically rather than the color.

No, the color is more color as well.

Yeah, so explain this Whole arguments around.

All Europeans come from Africa.

They've got black jeans.

Well, I don't think it's right to say they've got black jeans because I don't want black jeans are that we all have pigmentation jeans.

We'll have roughly the same pigmentation genes, but they vary in many ways.

As I said, within Africa, they very much more than outside of Africa.

One of the things that we get confused about in biology, in genetics and evolution is trying to work out.

What of our characteristics that are genetically encoded?

Have bean selected by natural selection.

So the adaptations and what are just stuff that happened, right drift is what we call it on dhe.

A few years ago, the picture was a bit clearer than it is today as we continue to do research.

So we do think that pale skin is an adaptation to moving away from the equator into less sunny climates, and that's to do with basic biology.

Today.

With violate metabolism, we can identify regions of the genome which say this has been selected right this.

This is definitely an adaptation, so pale skin is an adaptation to the move away from Africa to a certain degree.

The variation we see in pigmentation, though, doesn't isn't accounted for by that one fact.

Andi, you know they should be obviously true because people at the same latitude don't have the same skin color.

It's not a simple as the further away from the equator are you are the further you will be on a color chart.

So the racist says so why people have evolved in a way that black people haven't well, in a sense, it's actually the other way around.

The fact that there's more genetic diversity within Africa shows that there's been much Maur evolution within Africa than the other direction.

It's just that we're very visual.

Were visual species on evolution, has deceived our eyes by saying the first thing you see in someone is, well, whether they're male or female, primarily on the second thing is skin color.

But skin color is an absolutely terrible proxy for underlying variation between people.

So the idea of white and brown people being fundamentally different is a fundamental error, even though they seem visually so different.

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

And so pigmentation is a good example of how deceptive this idea is.

African Americans, of which there are something like 42 million, not currently, almost all of whom are descended from the enslaved from five or six countries on the west coast of Africa within the last.

For 400 years, they we group thumb on sale.

They self identify as African Americans.

But the genetics that underlies that African American status is hugely varies hugely variable that it is a combination of the fact that they were taken from different countries and mixed without any sense of ancestry of specific regional ancestry.

It is hugely confounded by the levels of breeding with within those populations, which is standard over that period of time.

On, in fact, up to what we estimate is that up to up to 20% on average of the African American genome is European, right, because off wth e often enforced rape off slaves of the enslaved people during those eight that era.

And yet we just go well that black people right there by people in the same way that Africans of that people then they know.

I mean, they they're genetically distinct.

It's really important.

I stress that, you know, the that having a cultural identity of being African American is, you know, a really important part of of that lived experience.