Welcome to the Virtual Event series. I am the manager here. I arrived at the bookstore, we have a special event, a couple things before we get started. If you have a question for adam please use the q and a button, i love audience interaction. Make this fun and engaging live stream, submit your questions at any point in the presentation and get to as many as possible. I encourage you to purchase adams book, how to argue with a racist, whatever genes do and dont tell us. If you purchase the book through us you also get a signed book from adam, check out the chat room, click on the link and purchase the book, if you are on facebook live, the town scholar. Now it is my pleasure to introduce doctor adam rutherford, geneticist, Science Writer and broadcaster who study genetics at University College london. He was part of a team that identified the first known genetic cause of childhood virus. He has written and presented many awardwinning series and programs for the bbc including inside science, the cell, playing god for the leading science series, author of the book of humans and a brief history of everyone who ever lived. Once again, how to argue with a racist, here it is, a fascinating debunking of racial pseudoscience, it smashes race myth that plague society. If you would like to purchase the book, check out the link in the chat room. Please join me in welcoming to the screen doctor adam rutherford. Am i live . Thank you. Very generous introduction. Presenting the book of humans, showing me around the basement, was absolutely amazing. I will be back as soon as i can. I am a geneticist, exactly right. That means ideal in evolution and dna, my work in the last few years, i will share my screen with you has been slight technical issue here, it is not sharing my screen. Cold on just a second, let me try that again. Title screen. Primarily about race and eugenics and the quintessential role played in the development of the invention of race and enactment of future policies all over the world. I wrote this book because i felt compelled to. There are sensitive issues. Is in the last few years, science communicator, historical ideas about race and human genetics which are totally noncontroversial within the academic genetics community were not sure wellknown to the general public. As a result the changing landscape of global politics, race has been part of the Public Discourse now more than any time in living memory. The book is written to equip people with arguments about the history of science because that is part of the construction of race as we recognize it and also contemporary genetics, deconstructed the concept of race comprehensively. I will be talking tonight about the core ideas in the book about overt and Structural Racism, key ideas about racial purity and White Supremacists a little bit but in many ways they are distraction from i am primarily concerned with things like racial stereotypes, that people express. Often about attributes we consider complementary or positive like intelligence. The book is for people who get into these discussions with family members or with friends in parks or around thanksgiving tables or wherever where they feel they dont have the most contemporary scientific tools or understanding of the history of science and the construction of race so they can confront background stereotypes. And i think we need to lead these conversations, they are not necessarily very good at talking about the politics that emerge from their research but the fact is if you are a geneticist like me and talk about genomes and human variation you cannot not talk about race and the fact that it is a social construct and not routed to a biological classification system as we now understand human variation in the twentieth and 21st century. The Political Landscape is changed, some of the factors which drove me to write this book and discussions about race, the Public Discourse, we have this changing political atmosphere, rise of populism with the election of donald trump in your country and here with rightwing government and the whole brexit phenomena in. I love america, two years ago i spent a couple weeks there in harrisburg. It is the longest. Go i havent been in america my adult life. I find it heartbreaking that conversations about race are so prominent and racialized and there is a racist in the white house as we have a racist Prime Minister in the uk parliament. The fact is i dont need to tell you this the us never managed to reconcile its racist past and what we are seeing in the black lives matter movement, from the death of george floyd, the murder of george floyd is a frustration of structural institutional racism that has built over as it has done many times before 2020 and indeed the 21st century. Science is about discourse. It always has been. We see a huge growth in the maturation of human genetics, we just celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the human genome project. One of the great things about this is matching popular interest in genetics, this is what they want to talk about. The enormity and rise of the commercial genetics market related to ancestry. I take a pretty dim view of these companies or the products they are selling, i will be talking about that in just a minute and 2020 happened. This book was published in the uk in february, just before covid19 struck i had my six weeks before lockdown in the uk occurred, and was seriously ill during that period but covid19 itself was massively part of the conversation of race we are currently having. Origin of the virus in china has meant its been racialized in that way, and again i dont want to good on pout trump but he refers to it as the chinese virus which i know is technically correct, came from china. And then the spanish flu. That is an incorrect reverence. The spanish flu is call that because during the first world war, spain wasnt censors its journalists was the first country to report on this new pandemic when fa fact we dont in the origin of the pandemic itself. But we think either came from kansas, from a chicken farm, or possibly from france but certainly didnt come from spain. There has been more than 3,000 physical Violent Attacks in america, in the u. S. A. , on Chinese Americans and korean americans, which obviously makes no sense bus then often racism doesnt and its happening all over the world as well. A kid from my own university was beaten february didnt ox october Oxford Street in Central London about and he was front singapore. The one the comfort has been racialized. And the second way in march we began to notice in the uk black and, i people were at a much greater risk of infection and death than White British people, and the states it was black, asian or hispanic or latin x people at higher risk of infection. And death. Now, immediately this was part of the racialization of covid when people articles in the press suggesting that this was discretion of the biological reality of race, and that is this disease was somehow targeting nonwhite americans or british people in my country. Now that doesnt make a lot of sense anyway. Just serves to say there are two groups of people that are white people and other people. That doesnt make any sense to most hardens racist but people started putting forward proposals why this might be and some are of some interest. In a minor way shame point out that this version of the book you have in front of you is the american version, has an extra introduction several thousand lines which brings it to date with covid and blesser and more references in the full text. It is a specifically u. S. Version of the book. Now, the fact that people try to racialize biology include racialize this disease, i think was very telling how we think about race in the 21st century because the truth of the merit by far the easier better explanations for the disparitiy, racial disparitiy in peep getting covid and dying from it could be complained by socioeconomic factors, things like the fact that minority groups or nonwhites tend to live in urban areas, tend to live in Multigenerational Families with older people present who are more susceptible to infection and tend to have key work, jobs so less likely to be able to lock down or be able to selfisolate. So what we see is that the socioeconomic reasons that explain the disparity and the racialization of Covid Infection is much better understood without having to look at it because its not unique to covid at all. Race its already racialized for exactly the same reason down the socialow check in lines and as soon as covid happened we talked but racialization of the disease itself. So, this is just the background to where we are now. The world turned upsidedown in march and we are style trying to work our how its going to play out. Just want to just before i get stuck into the weeds but some of the consequences of the back, i want to talk but the overview, the first thing is, theres only four chapters its a deliberately short book, 45,000 words, four chapters and i talk but the origin of rate asian an invention from the 17n inch century from ouran expansionism, and i talk about a concept that is essential for some singapores of racism, White Supremacy, and i talk but race in sport. Even though people arent necessarily interest sports, i love my sport, i think its a really important battleground from the extending and contest something of the stereotypes we associate with race and race intelligence which is probably the most inflammatory and controversial subject in all of science. We talk about that and the origin of race tonight which are both subjects which warrant whole well meaning people, nonracist sometimes because they understood that race is not a biological categorization but a social one, sometimes tempted to say that race does not exist. This is really important that we dont say this because the fact of the matter is that race does exist. It exists as a social construct, not a biological for reality. This is very important. Sometimes people attack this idea by saying, well, race exists merely youre sayingraise merely exists as social construct as if social constructs are less involved or less important than biological reality. That is an absurd argument because almost all social interacts are socially moderate. Time is a social construct, money is a social construct. Dont get people saying im not going to pay you because money is just a social construct, and yet somehow in arguments against for the biological reality of race people sometimes say its just social construct. Its really important we recognize that races to exist because its a social construct and that is why its important. Race exists because we perceive it. So this is the part of the framework. Said this in the past. Well intentioned people try to be so nonracist and end up being potentially damaging some of the more sophisticated arguments. So, when we talk but race in sports forthe first bit and then purity in the next bit and then get on to the questions. So, as i said i think that sports is an important ball Battle Ground for talk about race in the 21st and 20th center because we see people from around the rest of the world as extremes of ability, elite athletic status, and its very easy to make judgments or make clumsy sometimes based on this. This is often considered to be positive attributes racism. So, it was last week we was the anniversary of one of the greatest events in american sporting history and indeed in any sporting history when jesse owens won four gold medals at the berlin olympics in 1936. This photo is in the book and is to my mind one of the most powerful photos in history. 1936 in berlin hitler is watching this happening. This is wonderful. This is an amazing moment in sporting history. It was massively undermine a few years later when jesse owens coach was quoted by saying the anything degree excels in the events he does because he is closer to primitive than the white man. Wasnt long ago his ability to sprint and life was a life and death matter to him in the jungle. Scientifically ill lit rat and racist thing to say by jesse owens own cove. This is in the 1930s and when he said dismiss in the modern era overt racism like this is as generally passed. We are less racist than we have been in the past. But it is still present and present in the way we talk but the physicality of black athletes. Just to bring it up to the date to the end of the 20th century. This is Michael Johnson winning the 200 meeter in atlanta. He is my favorite athlete of all time. I just adored him when i was growing up and i continue to eyer to him as he has become an eller statesman of elder statesman of athletes and a commentator. In the 2012 olympics in london, johnson was on the commentating team for the bbc and the runup to the olympics there is was a documentary but him and his life and the tracked some of his west African Heritage via transatlantic slavery and did some genetic tests on him and in the program he commented this help said that all my life i believed i became an athlete through my own determination but its impossible to think thating descended from slaves has not left an imprint through the generations. Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendents leak me. I believe theres a superior athletic gene within us. Im saying this and me thinking, thats kind of a heartbreaking in a couple of ways for someone like me. The couple of ways being i think its tragic that someone as successful as Michael Johnson, one of the greatest athletes of all time, find himself saying that his success is not actually predetermination, actually it is through ancestry and pernicious history that he is part of simply for the fact he is africanamerican in the 20th century. Also interesting because to me as a geneticist and this is a testable idea, an argument that is worth scrutinizing and we cant actually try to understand from evolutionary point of view and genetic point of view, and it does appear to be some genetic differences we can detect now in the third decade of the 21st century, in comparing africanamericans to africans to specifically west african, the people from whom the descendents of the enslaved were taken, and we see things like increased frequency for some diseases, hypertension and some certain forms of cancer. We see higher frequency of genes in africanamericans for diseases such as circle cell than in sickle cell then in west africans but circle cell is not a black disease its sometimes mistakenly said. It is a disease that takes people whose ancestors evolved alongside malaria because having two copies of genes means you have the disease and i was having one copy sickle cell trace its called youre immune to ma layer ian folks. So theres a higher proportion of circle cell in africanamerican buzz not exclusive to africanamericans and africans its not a black disease. We see similar effects when it comes to things like athleticism and you look at the begins sport with explosive energy success, which you see in sprint running. We see real differences between all people and elite levels of athleticism. Sportes definitely not a level Playing Field in that regard and yes Michael Johnson almost certainly has a genetic advantage over most humans but is that unique to black people or africanAmerican People . No, it is not. The question whether his genetic advantage is as a result of slavery, the idea being that during two or three hundred years of the slave trade in the americas, enslaved people were bred such that being strong or being fit was selective. This a scientifically testable idea that we can look at and two years ago when 29,000 africanamericans had their genos scanned, not looking specifically for a superior athletic gene as Michael Johnson speculated but just to see if there was any evidence of Natural Selection or artificial selection in the case of some of the breeding programs, and also was we didnt see the answer was we didnt see any evidence of selection in either direction, in the africanamerican genome compared to the african genome from whom their ancestors were taken. We dont see this at all. Theres no evidence for a superior athletic gone and yet it is such persistent myth and serious scientific crutch we find it even elite athletes say things like this. So, in a sense woe dont need to get to the genetic athleticism to undermine the sorts of ideas but sporting power, sport success being biologically encoded in descend dents of the enslaved. Thats speculate generously. Maybe selection is the biological difference even there thatter is no evidence for it for the overrepresentation of africanamericans in various sporting events. Lets leave out the fact that 200 or 300 years is nowhere enough time to see the fixation of those genes in a population that would spread into an entire population. Also doesnt exist. Lets just deal with the social aspect of this. Lets just say if there is a buyingologyat advantage in africanamericans, even though we cant see any evidence for it, that doesnt in any way explain the discrepancy we see in different sports. So, we do see dominance in short distance sprinting and explosive Energy Athletics of africanamericans but that should be able to translate into sort of Power Lifting where eastern europeans dominate, and a completely absence in sprinting. Or sports like squash, where dominated by egyptian people or indians or even british people occasionally. Dont see any africanamericans there. Why is it that africanamericans dominate in boxing but not in wrestling . As soon as you scratch beneath the surface you see this data set on which a really significant popular stereotype is based just falls apart after the tiniest bit of scrutiny. If africanamericans are biologically better at sprint athletics, track and field, why is there an absolute absence of them in short distance swimming . So, all of these types of ideas just fall apart when you take them apart. The same time theyre popular because the serve the narrative that is baked in our culture but a athleticism and the physicality of africanamericans and the descend dens of the enslaved. This is an example, a classic example of Structu