THE ORIGINS OF RACISM

In the bad old days of 19th-century eugenics, scientists who had supped at the table of social Darwinism would construct evolutionary trees that had twigs within the species Homo sapiens. Each twig was a racial group. The top twig was, of course, the white Caucasian one—since the scientists who did this work were themselves white Caucasians. Modern genetics has shown the error of their ways. Systematic genetic differences between people from different parts of the world, though they exist, are small compared with variations between people from the same place. The visible differences, such as skin colour, are the result of a mere handful of genes. Under the skin, humanity is remarkably homogenous. Racism, however, is ubiquitous. It is not only white Caucasians (whatever that term means, in the context of current knowledge) who are guilty of it. That has led to another biological hypothesis, that people are somehow "programmed" to recognise race and be racist. Robert Kurzban, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, three evolutionary psychologists who work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, find this hypothesis unlikely. And they have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that supports an alternative hypothesis. That hypothesis is that racism is actually an unfortunate by-product of another phenomenon—a tendency to assign people to "coalition groups", and to use whatever cues are available, be they clothing, accent or skin colour, to slot individuals into such groups (or "stereotype" them, as modern usage might term it). The good news is that experiments done by the researchers suggest that such stereotypes are easily dissolved and replaced with others. Racism, in other words, can be eliminated.