Introductory Note
- This was issued by email on 1st October 2025, either as input to the meeting of 5th October, or consequent on the meeting of the previous week.
- The piece is a bit of soapbox oratory with no referencing but deserves to be taken seriously.
- I’m in the process of adding some footnotes and will then summarise my thoughts here.
- Scientific consensus1 affirms that distinct biological races do not exist among humans. The concept of race is a social construct, not a biological reality, and was developed to support social hierarchies. While physical traits like skin color are visible, the genetic variations that produce these traits are far more complex2 than simple racial categories suggest.
- The concept3 of race is a social construct
- Genetics show a single, diverse human species4
- Race as a social reality
Though race lacks a biological foundation5, it is a powerful social reality that has profoundly real consequences.
- Affects life and health: Socially defined race influences access to resources6, opportunities, and is a major factor in health disparities across different groups.
- Racism, not race, impacts health: It is the societal impact of racism—including stress, lack of access to healthcare, and environmental factors—that creates different health outcomes, not inherent biological differences7.
- Racism8 is at the core of Nazism. In the US, it is at the core of the Ku Klux Klan. In South Africa, it was at the core of Apartheid.
- The concept of Race is false at its core9.
- Having an intelligent discussion about Race is as ridiculous as10 having an intelligent discussion about Eugenics, Phrenology or Biological Determinism.
To whit: many other false concepts, often rooted in pseudoscience, have been used to justify discrimination, violence, and oppression. These ideas falsely claim that some groups of people11 are biologically inferior, inherently criminal, or otherwise "unfit".
- Pseudoscience and discrimination
- Throughout history, scientific authority has been misused12 to support harmful societal biases.
- Eugenics: A scientifically erroneous theory from the 20th century that promoted "racial improvement" through selective breeding.
- Practices: Eugenicists championed policies like involuntary sterilization and anti-immigration laws in the U.S. and other countries.
- Harm: In Nazi Germany, eugenics was a central justification for the Holocaust and the murder of people with disabilities and other marginalized groups.
- Phrenology: A 19th-century pseudoscience13 that claimed a person's character and mental traits could be determined by feeling the bumps and contours of their skull.
- Basis: Phrenologists falsely assumed that skull shape indicated the size of different brain "organs," which they believed controlled specific behaviors and abilities.
- Harm: This concept was used to promote scientific racism and justify the biological superiority of white people.
- Scientific Racism: A broad ideology that misrepresents scientific methods and findings to argue for the inherent superiority of some "races" and the inferiority of others.
- History: Scientific racism emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and was used to justify slavery and colonialism.
- Examples: Proponents used pseudoscientific methods, such as measuring skulls (craniometry) and IQ tests14, to promote discriminatory practices.
- Biological Determinism: The belief that human behavior and social structures are primarily or entirely shaped by genetic and biological factors rather than environmental or cultural ones.
- Misuse: This idea has been used to claim that social inequality is "natural" or "innate," ignoring the complex interplay15 between biology, culture, and social environment.
- Harm: Biological determinism reinforces social hierarchies, such as those related to gender, race, and class, by falsely attributing social disparities to inherent biological differences.
- Pathologizing marginalized groups
Beyond race, pseudoscience has been used to invent "mental illnesses16" to control and demean marginalized people.
- Drapetomania: In the 1850s, American physician Samuel Cartwright invented this fake mental illness to explain why enslaved people in the United States would run away. He described the "disease" as a psychological affliction17 that made Black people desire freedom, claiming it proved they were inherently subservient.
- Sexual deviance theories: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many doctors and psychiatrists regarded homosexuality and other non-normative sexualities18 as mental illnesses. These false diagnoses led to decades of social stigma and harmful "treatments," such as conversion therapy.
- Stereotypes
Generalizations about entire groups of people — both "positive" and "negative" — are false concepts that cause harm.
- Examples: False stereotypes19 can include:
- Attributing negative traits like laziness or criminality to specific groups.
- Assigning "positive" characteristics, such as musical talent or high intelligence, to a group. This can also be harmful by ignoring individual diversity and creating undue pressure.
- Impact: Stereotypes can create social divides, limit opportunities, and cause significant mental health struggles for individuals.
- No scientific basis: The traditional idea that humans can be divided into a few discrete races based on appearance is a myth. Modern genetic studies confirm there is only one human race.
- Arbitrary categorization: The specific physical characteristics used to define race, such as skin tone and hair type, are inherited independently and are not genetically linked. If different physical traits were used as the basis for categorization — such as blood type — the resulting "racial" groups would look completely different.
- Historical origin: The social concept of race emerged during the era of European colonialism, where it was used to create social hierarchies and justify slavery and discrimination against non-European peoples.
- High genetic similarity: Any two humans share 99.9% of their DNA. This makes humans one of the most genetically homogeneous species on Earth, with far less genetic variation than other animals like chimpanzees and emperor penguins.
- Greater diversity within groups: There is more genetic variation within traditionally defined "racial" groups than there is between them.
- Geographic, not racial, variation: Human genetic differences are best described as gradual variations, or "clines," that correspond with geographic distance. The greatest human genetic diversity is found in Africa, and genetic diversity tends to decrease in populations that live farther from Africa. This pattern is a result of the serial founder effect that occurred during the "Out of Africa" migration of early humans.
In-Page Footnotes
Footnote 1: Footnote 2:
- So-called ‘racial characteristics’ are certainly biologically-based.
- Whether they are important – and correlate well with other ‘desirable’ characteristics – or are a useful way of segregating human populations is much less obvious.
Footnote 3:
- Aren’t all concepts – if shared – social constructs?
- For instance, a whale is a mammal and was so even when our concept of it was of a great fish.
Footnote 4:
- No-one these days denies this. The evident fact of miscegenation producing fertile offspring shows that human beings are all one species.
Footnote 5:
- It doesn’t lack a biological foundation. It’s the significance of the racial differences that’s the issue.
Footnote 6:
- Does it really? I dare say this depends on the society.
- This paper is doubtless written from a US perspective, with the only ‘racism’ in mind is prejudice against American Blacks.
- So much prejudice is not so much racial as against the ‘unknown’ – immigrants or those with different cultures who have not yet had the chance to integrate (or have no wish to).
- I dare say that the ‘health disparities’ are down to social deprivation rather than racism as such. It’s the reason for the correlation between certain groups and ‘social disadvantage’ that needs to be explained.
Footnote 7:
- Well, there are biological differences that are correlated to race that are relevant to health (alcohol intolerance, sickle-cell anaemia), but these are marginal.
- There’s also the historical fact that most medical research has been performed in the west by white males on white patients as these were typical of the local population. This has nothing much to do with racial prejudice.
- The main health disadvantage of some groups is social. Poor people are less healthy – in general – whatever their race.
Footnote 8:
- It depends what is meant by ‘racism’.
- No-one doubts that the groups mentioned were evil – though not on the same scale.
- But someone researching putative ‘racial difference’ and their consequences isn’t necessarily a racist in the pejorative sense.
Footnote 9:
- Well, if so, it’s surprising that so many different societies seem to have believed it to be a fact.
- Even if it’s a social construct with no biological basis, it’s not thereby ‘false’.
Footnote 10:
- You can have an intelligent discussion on any of these topics, though only from a historical perspective with respect to phrenology.
- We might have a moral objection to eugenics, particularly its racial variants, but you can have an intelligent discussion about – say – whether people with particularly unpleasant heritable diseases should be allowed to reproduce.
- You can have an intelligent discussion about determinism, but I doubt anyone would maintain that biology trumps the impact of society. All biology can do is give you a good or bad start.
Footnote 11:
- It is recognised my all that the ‘bell curves’ – whatever their cause – between different social or racial groups overlap to a very considerable extent, so nothing can be predicated of an individual based on the group they belong to (or are assigned to) unless the selection process is definitive of the group. For instance, if you’ve selected a group of tall people, it’s fair to expect a member of that group to be tall.
- The important point is that it’s an empirical question whether different populations do or do not differ in their mean values of various characteristics.
- If they do differ, insisting on ‘equal representation’ (in any area requiring competence) is both a folly and an injustice.
Footnote 12:
- I agree with all the three objections below, and with the harms attributed to the falsified theories.
- But, the fact that then popular scientific theories have been misused or have been seized upon for malign purposes has nothing to do with their truth or falsity.
Footnote 13:
- ‘Pseudoscience’ can be a tendentious or simply derogatory term.
- It all depends on what was known – or generally accepted – at the time the science or pseudoscience was practised or developed.
- The ‘best science of the day’ may turn out to be incorrect but – provided it is evidence-based and subject to the laws of logic – it may still be science.
- Subsequently, when more is known – it is necessary to abandon earlier views. To adopt them because they are convenient
- Some ‘creation science’ – looking for evidence of Noah’s great flood, for instance – might once have been a true science, but no longer as it ignores all the evidence for the great antiquity of the Earth.
- Similarly – I would claim – phrenology was once a science. It correctly appreciated that cognitive functions are to some extent localised in the brain, and assumed that this localisation – including specialisation – would be represented by increased volume and hence cranial bumps. This latter supposition turned out to be false, so – if practiced today – phrenology is a pseudoscience. But, it is unfair to label Gall as a pseudoscientist because he was a phrenologist. That said – it must always have been obvious to anyone with a hands-on approach to physiology – that there are no such things as ‘mental muscles’. I suppose the idea was one of analogy – muscles grow with use or natural predisposition and so – it was claimed – would brain areas.
- See Wikipedia: Phrenology.
Footnote 14:
- It’s interesting to see the use of IQ tests criticised in a HiQ society paper.
- Of course, whatever the merits of IQ tests in general, they have often been abused to ‘prove’ that certain groups are inferior by denying them a level playing field. For example, IQ tests are normed on groups for whom English is their native language, so it is unfair to compare the scores of non-anglophone immigrants to those of the native population. Even so-called ‘culture-fair’ tests may test only a subset of mental ability (as they have to miss out the linguistic elements so central to intelligence). Often, immigrant groups are such because they were the poorest and least educated in their communities (this applied to most white immigrants to the US). This may lead via a selection effect to a conclusion that this ‘race’ is of inferior IQ. The opposite may also be the case – sometimes expats are amongst the most intelligent or enterprising of their communities.
Footnote 15:
- It is self-serving to be comfortable with social inequality on the grounds that it is deserved.
- I agree that there’s a ‘complex interplay’ between biology and the environment. But that doesn’t disprove the fact that – other things being equal – superior biology will win through.
Footnote 16:
- This is a well-made point, though there are distinctions to be made concerning the motivations.
- ‘Drapetomania’ and similar ‘diagnoses’ – in Soviet Russia and other totalitarian regimes – are obviously self-serving and pseudoscientific.
- However, the fact that homosexuality was treated as a mental illness (as recorded in DSM-II until 1987) indicates an ethical policy change – brought on by a withdrawal from fundamentalism in the Abrahamic religions – rather than pulling away from ‘pathologizing marginal groups to control or demean their members’.
- See Burton - When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder.
- I don’t see much analogy – from our author’s viewpoint – between race and ‘sexual deviance’. Homosexuality – as a lifestyle – is a fact, though the ethical judgement associated with it has changed over time. I would say the same about ‘race’, but our author does not.
- Also, the neurodiversity movement takes the same line with all sorts of conditions still categorised as ‘mental illnesses’.
- The same goes for criticisms of ‘ablism’.
- It’s all madness, in my view, and stems from a denial of the now unpopular fact-value distinction.
Footnote 17:
- This theory is so obviously absurd that it should not be brought into this discussion.
Footnote 18:
- The glaring exception is the contemporary judgement of paedophiles – they are deemed to be irredeemably wicked rather than mentally ill – even if their desires would have been deemed perfectly legitimate in former ages (in the case of post-pubescent ‘children’ who would in former ages and in some contemporary cultures – or US States – have been deemed adults).
- There is something ‘unnatural’ about lusting after prepubescents – why not a mental illness? One cannot altogether control one’s desires (even though you can control acting on them). The same was said of homosexuality.
- The issues all have to do with harms, consent, and definitions of adulthood.
Footnote 19:
- Well – presumably – false stereotypes would always be harmful, but what about true stereotypes?.
- Given that lots of pit-bull terriers are dangerous dogs, it would be prudent to treat them with suspicion, even if some are as benign as their owners claim (until they savage their children).
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)