Chuck Darwin<p>Scientific racism today must be seen and rejected for what it truly is<br>—a hollow attempt to dress discrimination in the garb of science and reason</p><p>Across Europe and the U.S., racist and anti-immigrant groups have embraced <br>long-discredited ideas that races constitute biologically separate groups <br>differing in everything from intelligence to birthrate. </p><p>With immigration a defining topic in fractious debates on both sides of the Atlantic, <br><a href="https://c.im/tags/scientific" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>scientific</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> is now explicit in right-wing discourse.</p><p>In October an exposé in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed a network dedicated to proliferating race science worldwide had received years of funding from Silicon Valley. </p><p>That same month came Donald Trump’s comment decrying immigration as <br>“a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” </p><p>In June it was revealed that a U.K. Reform Party candidate had previously insisted that sub-Saharan Africans were lowering IQ in the country.</p><p>But while its modern advocates rebrand scientific racism as “human biodiversity,” <br>such insidious euphemisms are just attempts to give a veneer of respectability to hateful, pseudoscientific beliefs.</p><p>These beliefs have a dark history tied to the racial pseudoscience of <a href="https://c.im/tags/eugenics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>eugenics</span></a>, <br>and its popularity sadly continues unabated. </p><p>On social media, avowed racists misrepresent genetic research to bolster the narrative that white people are intrinsically superior. </p><p>In the rarefied world of Silicon Valley, race science has made a dark renaissance, <br>elevated by Google and other search engines. </p><p>(In response to a request for comment from Scientific American, a representative of Google cited a statement from the company that had been included in a Wired article on this subject: <br>“Our goal is for AI Overviews to provide links to high quality content so that people can click through to learn more, <br>but for some queries there may not be a lot of high quality web content available.”) </p><p>Last year a then forthcoming book, <br>"The Origins of Woke", by right-wing author <a href="https://c.im/tags/Richard" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Richard</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hanania" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hanania</span></a> was lauded by tech industry figures <br><a href="https://c.im/tags/David" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>David</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sacks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Sacks</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Peter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Peter</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Thiel" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Thiel</span></a>. </p><p>That same year the Huffington Post reported that Hanania had previously written under a pseudonym for white supremacist websites.</p><p>He then wrote an essay in which he claimed to give “an explanation for why I wrote such things, <br>and why I no longer hold such views.” </p><p>But critics suggest those views are reflected in his book and in racist comments he has continued to make, <br>including his suggestions that people of color need aggressive policing and more incarceration.<br><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">scientificamerican.com/article</span><span class="invisible">/silicon-valley-is-reviving-the-discredited-and-discriminatory-idea-of-race/</span></a></p>