James Watson, the Nobel laureate, Harvard professor, and head of the Human Genome Project, said to Time Magazine in 1989, “We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.”

He was no doubt trying to find a cute way of saying that scholars used to try and predict the future astrologically, but now science is allowing us to do it genetically. But is genetics really like astrology in that way (although presumably more accurate)? Is the future really predictable from genetics? Of course, there are many genetic diseases known in humans – though relatively few of them are fully penetrant, meaning that if the gene is there, so is the disease. But most features of the human genome aren’t like that at all.

Most primates have a sense of who their mother is. Some have a sense of fatherhood, or at least the-big-guy-who-hangs-around-and-doesn’t-kill-me-hood. Many have a sense of siblinghood, or at least of their half-siblings who haven’t moved away. Some have a sense of “mom’s sister” or other maternal relations, but generally speaking, primate kinship beyond these is subtle at best.

While burning and cutting were certainly crucial technological developments in the ultimate evolutionary success of our lineage, an equally important invention was the family. Unfortunately, social relations are much harder to find in the archaeological record than tools and hearths, so it scarcely gets the attention it merits. Nevertheless, a million and a half years ago, an unusual creature was inhabiting Africa and western Asia. Unlike other apes, it lived on the ground, as its ancestors had been doing with increasing anatomical specialization for a few million years.

The first of several fallacies about race is that it has a precise scientific meaning. Biologists sometimes use the term “race” synonymously with “subspecies” – the lowest taxonomic category, which is created by dividing a species into formal subunits. An example close to home would be the four genetically differentiated populations of Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee. Other biologists reject the subspecies as a taxonomic category altogether.

But whether or not you believe in formally recognized taxonomic human subspecies, as biologists did up into the 1960s, race has always been about the idea that there are a few basic kinds of people. Race is a device for meaningfully sorting people, and we can summarize the idea of race with four properties. First, that there are only a few of them. If there are 700 races of people, then it’s not very useful as a classificatory device.

Candace Owens, a right-wing media personality, told her audience in March of 2023 some pretty strange things about pit bulls and math scores. She observed that pit bulls had been bred to be fighting dogs, and quickly pivoted.

Who does not know the most basic fact from the science of genetics, that peas and people reproduce in a similar fashion?

It is taught in high schools. Gregor Mendel discovered the fundamental scientific way that organisms breed, and it works the same way in people as it does in peas. Everyone knows that. They may not remember the specifics, with dominant uppercase A and recessive lowercase a – but they know that humans and peas reproduce basically the same way, because they were taught it, and it’s true.

Now I am certainly not going to try and convince you otherwise. But have you ever actually seen peas reproduce? Thanks to the internet, you can readily see videos of plant breeding. The videos of humans breeding, of course, are posted on more restricted internet sites.

Race is only significant to human life insofar as it correlates with class, or more broadly, with the quality of life. That is to say, whatever you may consider race to be, it is only a problem if your racial assignment has an effect on your life course. Or, put another way, race exists for racism – more generally, for the reinforcement of political-economic boundaries in society and the maintenance of inequality.

That is a major reason why race can be so confusing. It is social difference masquerading as biological difference. The relationships between colonized and colonizers are frequently reducible to non-Europeans and Europeans. Despite its etymological origin (in the subjugation of the Slavic peoples of central Europe) the relationships between slaves and slavers became easily reducible to Africans and Europeans.

Of the many things that DNA is, or can be, presumably the most reliable is as a marker of recent ancestry. You got half of your DNA from mom, and half from dad. In a situation of contested parenthood, the evidence of DNA is the gold standard. Careers in daytime television attest admirably to that fact.

With great authority, however, comes great responsibility, and responsibility isn’t a scientific concept; consequently, “responsibility” represents humanists sometimes having to hold the reins on scientific practice.

It had been well established by the 1920s that human and chimpanzee bloods were more similar to one another than horse and donkey bloods were. This was not particularly unfathomable, since humans and chimpanzees are rather similar, after all, but the special similarity of their blood was well known in educated circles at the time of the Tennessee “Monkey Trial” in 1925.

The similarity of the blood of humans and great apes remained an interesting fact until the 1960s, as the molecularization of biology was proceeding, and genes were shown to be linear instructions for the production of proteins, and proteins were shown to be long chains of amino acids. And when you painstakingly sequenced the 287 amino acids of human hemoglobin and gorilla hemoglobin, showed biochemist Emile Zuckerkandl in 1963, you found them to differ in only one or two places, for a difference of less than 1%.