Thread by @Humanists_UK

'It's unfortunate,' says @AdamRutherford 'that I'm here discussing an issue that we thought and hoped had gone away a long time ago,' starting off his #VoltaireLecture

Against a backdrop of increased racially motivated violence in recent years and an explosion in racism-in-politics controversies, we can accept that racism is at least less publicly acceptable than it was a number of decades ago. #VoltaireLecture

Has racism returned? 'It never went away,' says Adam. 'Structural racism is a part of our society...' #VoltaireLecture

'Attempts to justify racism have historically been rooted in misunderstandings, misreportings of science.' And if racism is making a comeback today, says Adam, it's happening for the same reasons – and increasing popular interest in genetics plays a part in this #VoltaireLecture

It's a #VoltaireLecture first... Adam has changed the title of his lecture, mid-lecture: 'How to argue with a racist.' It's also going to be the title of his next book!

'As scientists, we often find ourselves saying things like "race does not exist" or "race is just a social construct". But social constructs make up the main part of human society. Race exists because we perceive it and racism does because, sadly, we enact it.' #VoltaireLecture

'One of the first real indications of biological racism in the modern sense,' says Adam, 'comes from the scholar Avicenna, who argued that people "exposed to extreme temperatures" were suited to slavery.' (He was referring to white Europeans and black Africans.) #VoltaireLecture

'It's often stated that we shouldn't apply contemporary morality to historical figures. But often this line is used to shut down investigation of our past and therefore the origins of the way we are today. Not everyone in the past was equally racist.' #VoltaireLecture

Linnaeus came up with our modern animal classifications. But as well as this he came up with a pigment-based classification of humans, seemingly sorting human beings into subspecies, including with non-scientific judgments of their personalities. #VoltaireLecture

Adam is helpfully sorting biological racists of the past into two camps – polygeneists and monogeneists. In essence, the latter camp were creationists, who believed that the human species sprang from Adam and Eve and that some races represented a 'degradation' #VoltaireLecture

Adam says his hero, Charles Darwin, was 'measurably less racist' than some of his contemporaries – and expressed cynicism about the validity of human racial classifications. His successor, Huxley, was somewhat less equivocal, deciding there were 11 races.
#VoltaireLecture

The Belgian division of the Rwandan people into Tutsis and Hutus is based on an entirely specious — made-up — map of human races & their history. But it had a profound impact: decades of oppression, murder, torture, and rape all built on European pseudoscience. #VoltaireLecture

'There are no sharp boundaries between the different racial "groups".' If you look at our genetic diversity, you find a continuum – and only as many groups and clusters as you set out to find, says Adam #VoltaireLecture

'There is more variation within pigmentations and pigmentation genes within Africa than within the rest of the world put together.' The complexity of pigmentation alone in humans is much older and more complicated, new science shows, than anyone ever anticipated #VoltaireLecture

'The concept of an isolated population or of "racial purity" fall apart upon any analysis,' Adam says. 'Wherever human beings go, they have sex, and admixture occurs.' #VoltaireLecture

'For every individual in this room, if you go back to the 10th century, you have 2^40 ancestors: 12,000 times more people than have ever existed. That means the same people appear across that family tree multiple times.' An accurate "family tree" pictured here. #VoltaireLecture

'All people who were alive in the 14th century BCE, who have descendants alive today, the maths shows, are the ancestors of every person who is alive today.' #VoltaireLecture

'I spend a lot of time on white supremacy websites so that you don't to,' says Adam. 'It is astonishing the level of (illiterate) discussion in these hell-holes that is obsessed with population genetics in order to demonstrate supposed racial superiority.' #VoltaireLecture

'Most people can't tolerate dairy after weaning, but most white people can. Neo-Nazis like to film themselves chugging gallons of milk in order to showcase their, erm, racial purity.' #VoltaireLecture

'Why do we think about racial categorisation when we think about sport, when elite sport is – by its nature, and by design – about extreme outliers at the edges of human capability?' #VoltaireLecture

Why is it that 70% of African-Americans, surveys show, cannot swim? Not 'bone density and buoyancy', but the fact that public pools were built in predominantly white areas, economic factors, and... not being taught how to swim.'

'There are real consequences to this kind of structural racism. Death by drowning is 3x higher for African-American boys.' #VoltaireLecture

'We impose deep cultural biases on what we observe without a factual basis for doing so... Racism has relied on pseudoscientific grounds for decades. Science cannot justify the bigotry of racists...' #VoltaireLecture

'In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, you have to be anti-racist.'

Adam concludes his #VoltaireLecture and tour of genetic history with a quote from Angela Davis. Thank you for a brilliant talk @AdamRutherford

A fantastic talk on such a highly relevant topic to today's society. Now @theAliceRoberts has the job of chairing a fascinating Q&A session – exploring the reality of human diversity and seeing preconceptions about the nature of genetic genealogy shaken. #VoltaireLecture

Excellent shout-out from Adam for @AngelaDSaini's forthcoming book on the same topic coming out soon. A brilliant science writer whose previous work on structural sexism in society is similarly incisive and brilliant.

An enormous round of applause for Adam as he receives the inaugural #VoltaireLecture Medal! Richly deserved too. Thank you to everyone who came and helped to sell it such a success