Superior: The Return of Race Science (Unabridged)
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4.9 • 16 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019” (Library Journal)
An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences.
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 World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein 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 an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural 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 rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Attempting to scientifically justify racial prejudice might seem like a relic of less-enlightened times, but science journalist Angela Saini offers an emphatic “think again.” After giving us a brief history of race-based science—brief in part because the very idea of race only surfaced during the 18th-century heyday of European colonialism—she dives headlong into the ongoing struggle that genetic science has with ignoring race as a factor. We might be past human zoos that doubled as research facilities and Nazi-appropriated eugenics theories, but it’s disturbing to hear the ways that ideas started by those heinous practices color modern work. With geneticists agreeing that any differences in homo sapiens are minuscule, the question that arises repeatedly in Saini’s work is whether there’s any value in looking at the human genome through the lens of race. The answer she finds is “not really”—and yet there are researchers who refuse to let it go. Hannah Melbourn’s clear, conversational narration keeps even the most technical passages from becoming confusing. With Superior, Saini pushes an unseemly underside of science that thrives in the shadows out into the light.
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