Race Isn’t Biological — So Why Do So Many Still Think It Is?
29 August 2025
Last update: 29/08/25 14:04
Even though findings from genetics and other sciences unequivocally refute biological conceptions of race, this erroneous viewpoint remains widespread among the general public. Why can’t scientists convince people that race isn’t biological?
Since the 1950s, scholars at universities have been spreading the message that race is a social construct – a way of categorizing people that society has devised – in this instance, based on the arbitrary criterion of skin colour. Genetic data clearly show that races are not separate genetic lineages, and that differences in skin colour are not indicative of underlying genetic divisions. Throughout history, humans have constantly interbred, mixing up our genes such that meaningful differences never arose.
In fact, from a genetic perspective, using skin colour to categorize people is as random as the fabled warring residents of Gulliver’s Travels’ neighbouring islands of Lilliput and the Blefuscu, differentiated by whether they cracked open eggs at the smaller or larger end. Jonathan Swift, satirises how, in the real world, trivial differences can be blown out of proportion and escalate into conflicts.
Despite the concerted effort of academics to teach students that race is not biological, in wider society this lesson remains stubbornly unlearned. Something appears to be blocking communication.
In an article of ours newly published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, we identify five impediments to the effective countering of racist pseudoscience. Each of these hindering elements either counters, undermines or blocks the effective communication of accurate science related to ‘race’, thereby promoting racism.
The first such barrier is belief in genetic determinism. Attributing group differences to genes provides a simple, easy-to-understand explanation that sounds credible to a general public regularly fed a diet of ‘gene-for-X’ explanations in the media. Genetic studies are often presented as ‘breakthroughs’ that will lead to a new cure or treatment, while genes are rarely described as just one of many causal factors involved, and little prominence is given to the small amount of trait variance explained by DNA. Belief in genetic determinism is widespread and a genuine societal problem because it can foster both intolerant attitudes and acceptance, and even support, of inequality.
It is disturbing that a basic education in genetics may not help. The simple cases commonly used to introduce students to Mendelian genetics – ‘blue’ versus ‘brown’ eyes, for instance – are often characterized as direct genotype-to-phenotype mappings, and hence can actually encourage genetic determinism. Fortunately, innovative approaches to genetics education are being developed in which genes are no longer presented as the whole story. Studies show that when students are taught that traits typically have multiple causes and are sensitive to the environment, this broader genetics education can ‘inoculate’ them against genetic determinism.
A related concern is an overly simplistic conception of heredity that attributes the inheritance of traits, and of their differences, to genes and genetic variation. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of scientific interest in non-genetic inheritance. Many resources are now known to be passed across the generations, including molecular attachments to DNA (epigenetic inheritance), hormones, nutrients, antibodies, symbionts such as bacteria, cultural knowledge, including in other animals, and diverse ecological legacies. The significance of this non-genetic inheritance for understanding racial differences is only now coming to prominence. For illustration, persistent differences in the average levels of scholastic achievement between races is not explained by genetic transmission, but rather through the legacies of inherited wealth, inherited environments that vary in their amenities, opportunities and resources (e.g., toxins such as lead, nongenetic disease), and other inherited factors through which the experiences of parents (e.g., trauma, famine, racism) affect the physiology of offspring. People need to be introduced to the complexities of inheritance so that they don’t always assume racial differences are genetic.
A third impediment is belief in the naturalistic fallacy, the false belief that traits that evolved are desirable or inevitable. For instance, the growth of Western nations as industrialised global powers has been misattributed to the intrinsic merits of these nations, rather than to colonialism, while differences between African and European Americans are misattributed to ‘shortcomings’ of the former, rather than to the legacies of slavery, segregation, and discrimination.
A fourth barrier is the failure of relevant scientific disciplines to take responsibility for teaching the science of ‘race’ and racism. While ‘race’ and racism are taught by anthropologists, psychologists and social scientists, biologists have largely ignored this topic. As a consequence, biology classes do not adequately equip students to understand the complexities of human biology, and textbooks rarely challenge stereotypical racial beliefs. Relevant scientific knowledge that exposes racist claims as false needs to be incorporated into the curricula, and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching the topic encouraged. Indeed, biologists have a particular responsibility in teaching the science of race and racism, as, historically, they played a key role in reifying the idea of ‘race’ and are now uniquely equipped to rectify past mistakes.
A final concern is the self-promotion of academic fields. The histories of many disciplines, including biology, anthropology and psychology, are tarnished with racism and eugenics, and reticence to teach science that exposes biological ‘race’ as a myth may result from embarrassment about these histories, for fear of putting students off. This concern is not entirely ill-founded, but a greater danger is that failure to acknowledge past transgressions may alienate minoritized students. Acknowledging that racism is a deep structural problem is a key recommendation of experts. Yet academics sometimes respond defensively to the accusation that their field’s leaders were racist. Both Ronald Fisher and Charles Darwin have recently been subject to this apologism. Open appraisal of such behaviour, while giving voice to alternative perspectives, including the marginalised, are central pillars of anti-racism, inclusive teaching, and curriculum decolonization.
Figure 1: Approaches to countering racist pseudoscience
We suggest ‘solutions’ for each of these impediments (Figure 1), but meaningful progress will require their incorporation into curricula for relevant (particularly, biology) high school and undergraduate classes. We urge those responsible for school, college, and university curricula to support the implementation of these recommendations and help prevent the spread of racist misinformation.
For more information, read the full article, Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience, in Evolutionary Human Sciences.
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Repeatedly in this article the authors claim that humans categorize each other by skin colour, as if the choice were arbitrary. Sophistry. It reminds me of the way sex-difference deniers insist “no single part of the brain is sexually dimorphic” even though male and female brains can be reliably distinguished with multiple characteristics. If humans really categorized arbitrarily by skin colour, we’d lump Koreans with the Irish, or confuse Indigenous Australians with Somalians. Obviously, we don’t. People use multiple cues—skin tone, facial features, hair texture, even body shape—to infer ancestry. If you doubt it, try playing EthnoGuessr.
The authors also frame it as irrational to believe in biological race differences, while attributing disparities to “legacies of inherited wealth, inherited environments, amenities, opportunities and resources.” This is a kitchen sink list. But which environmental conditions specifically? As Noah Carl has argued, many environmentalists express absolute certainty that hereditarianism is false, even calling it racist, yet fail to identify the particular factors that can account for persistent gaps in criminality, income, personality, family structure, illness and cognitive ability.
Unless and until a plausible, specific environmental account can explain why gaps recur across time, across cultures, and across socioeconomic strata, the biological model will remain more predictive. Until anti-racists can point to an intervention that closes these gaps reliably, people will not stop believing in race differences. People won’t abandon belief in race differences just because you try to “inoculate” them with lectures about colonialism, epigenetics, or gut bacteria—none of which actually explain the gaps. These interventions function more to cast doubt on biological explanations than as serious alternatives.
And until such a comprehensive environmental account exists, simply declaring race a “social construct” won’t abolish the concept because people want a framework that is predictive, not one that shames them for noticing group differences, or says the causes of group differences are so complicated that even the experts can’t tell you which ones are most important.
You’re just displaying your inability to distinguish real genetics form race realism. There’s a reason why “race” is irrelevant in medicine and such fields, there’s a reason why as we drift away from the colonial expansion era, less and less arguments are used to justify race realism (skull shapes), why do you think? If your beliefs shrink when science grows, maybe coincider it never being scientifically backed in the first place
Skull shapes? You mean more broadly forensics. These differences are profound and defining to a very high degree. They solve and help identify human remains everyday. The script has been flipped on what actual “pseudoscience” is. You can look at predisposition as well as to how different diseases and disorders that afflicts certain racial demographics overwhelmingly in large numer. Moyamoya disease afflicts approximately 3-10 over every 100,00 thousand people of East Asian descent. “Sickle Cell Anemia” disproportionately effects those of African descent linking (SCD) to an evolutionary link with Malaria. Because there is no actual 100% “pure race” with no traces of intermingling, doesnt mean there arent “real races” of people. Developement that took place over thousands of years that includes geological location and migration factors with defining traits and real differences. This is probably the most manipulative and politically driven kindergarten pseudoscience science that now rules the internet. I’m not even going to get into DNA and DNA markers. Diana Fleischman’s post above is 100% correct.
The notion of discrete biological “races” as meaningful categories for explaining human variation—particularly complex traits like cognitive ability, behavior, or socioeconomic outcomes—has been thoroughly refuted by modern genomics. Human genetic diversity is overwhelmingly clinal and continuous, with far greater variation within traditionally defined racial groups (about 85-95%) than between them, as established since Richard Lewontin’s work in the 1970s and confirmed by the Human Genome Project and subsequent large-scale sequencing efforts. There is no genetic basis for sharp boundaries that would define races as biologically distinct lineages; instead, ancestry is better captured through continuous gradients of allele frequencies shaped by geography, migration, and admixture over millennia. Claims that visible phenotypic cues reliably proxy deep genetic ancestry for polygenic traits ignore how most genetic variation is neutral or locally adaptive (e.g., skin pigmentation or lactose tolerance), while traits like intelligence or criminal propensity show no evidence of systematic genetic divergence between populations that aligns with social racial categories. Persistent group differences in outcomes are far better explained by environmental, historical, and structural factors—such as intergenerational effects of discrimination, access to education and nutrition, and systemic inequities—than by any unproven hereditarian model. Declaring race a “social construct” isn’t denial of observable patterns or ancestry; it’s an accurate reflection of the science that racial taxonomies lack biological validity for categorizing human genetic diversity or predicting meaningful differences beyond superficial traits.
The concept of discrete biological races as explanatory categories for human phenotypic variation—especially for polygenic, environmentally influenced traits such as cognitive performance, behavioral tendencies, or socioeconomic disparities—lacks empirical support from contemporary genomics. Large-scale sequencing projects, including the Human Genome Project and ongoing initiatives like All of Us, consistently show that humans share approximately 99.9% genetic identity at the DNA level, with the vast majority of variation (typically 85–95%) occurring within populations rather than between them, a pattern first quantified by Lewontin in the 1970s and reaffirmed in recent studies.
Genetic diversity follows clinal gradients shaped by historical migration, gene flow, and local adaptation, not discrete clusters corresponding to traditional racial groupings; attempts to infer ancestry from visible traits like skin color or facial features capture only a tiny fraction of neutral or regionally adaptive loci, while complex traits show no systematic, population-level genetic signals aligning with social racial categories. Recent consensus statements from bodies like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (as recently as 2025) underscore that race is a sociopolitical construct entangled with historical racism, not a biologically valid taxonomy for genomics research, and that persistent group differences in outcomes are far more plausibly attributable to intergenerational environmental and structural factors—including discrimination, unequal access to education/nutrition/healthcare, and socioeconomic legacies—than to any unsubstantiated hereditarian framework.
Labeling race a social construct does not dismiss observable ancestry patterns or phenotypic clines; it accurately conveys that racial categories fail to provide meaningful biological boundaries or predictive power for most genetic variation beyond superficial, locally selected traits.
Will this discussion include ancient DNA studies that show the origins of different human populations?
Throughout this entire article, not once is the term “race” defined or operationalized.
What does the word “race” mean in this context?