The birth of scientific racism coincided with the age of exploration, exploitation, and plunder. As Europeans built empires, the subjugation and othering of people in invaded countries was facilitated and justified with new and pseudoscientific taxonomies of humans, almost exclusively based on pigmentation. These ideas were propagated by some of the most influential thinkers in modern history. For all their achievements in philosophy and spreading goodwill to all men, some of these figures were themselves profoundly racist – even for their time – including Immanuel Kant, and that great voice of Enlightenment thinking, François-Marie Voltaire. Their voices echo loudly into the present.
Now, in the age of personal genetic genealogy, race science is once again part of the public discourse, and real genetics is being misrepresented and co-opted by white supremacists.
Dr Adam Rutherford is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship science radio programme, Inside Science, as well as many documentaries, on the inheritance of intelligence, on MMR and autism, human evolution, astronomy and art, science and cinema, scientific fraud, and the evolution of sex. His critically acclaimed first book, 'Creation' – on the origin and future of life – was published in 2013, and was nominated for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. He is also the author of 'A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived', 'Genetics: A Ladybird Expert Book', and 'The Book of Humans'.
Adam has a PhD in Genetics, a degree in evolutionary biology, is an honorary Research Fellow at UCL, and is a former Editor at the journal Nature.
