When James Watson died in November 2025, the New York Times published an obituary statement by an academic historian. That writer, Nathaniel Comfort, perfectly summarized the orthodoxy among radical academics concerning the role of genes in contributing to human nature and behavior. He accused Watson, who was described in the tendentious language of the contemporary woke academic left as a “racist … bourgeois, Anglophiliac … Eurocentric … elitist … fond of the mid-1950s patriarchy,” of “[a]n obsession with the gene.”
Wouldn’t we expect a geneticist to have a rather substantial degree of interest in genes? Comfort then bluntly and without argument claimed that it is clear that what makes people who they are is “culture, family, temperament.” Do genes contribute anything here? Only, in this writer’s view, “a little.”
Rina Bliss’ What’s Real About Race? would perhaps not even acknowledge that “little.”1 A Rutgers University sociologist whose work repeats a familiar claim in a growing body of scholarship—that biology plays no meaningful role in shaping human differences—argues that race has no reality beyond its illegitimate use to justify unequal treatment among human groups. Race is racism, and nothing else. No scientifically legitimate question can be asked about how different human populations with different histories in different physical and social ecologies might have adapted differently to those different environments via the evolution of their genomes.
The repetitiveness in the last sentence is an intentional effort to illustrate the incongruity of the intellectual movement to which Bliss belongs. These folks eagerly emphasize “difference” when it is conducive to their politics—so, e.g., cultural difference is everywhere, extending into infinity, and always to be embraced—but will not entertain the mention of the word when the context is the diversity of the human species in its phenotypes and the underlying genes.
At the outset of the book, Bliss admits straightforwardly that her only goal is the silencing of all effort to look into human genetic diversity and its possible implications: “There is only one way forward: to eliminate racial classification from genomic research reporting unless the study is explicitly about the biological effects of racism and bias.” The term “race” can only be used to describe groups recognized as victims of racism, and no biological component of that category can be admitted even in those cases. Bliss attacks all efforts at talking scientifically about the biological aspect of populational difference as racist. Even what she calls “genomic race,” which tries to link itself to the data from the Human Genome Project, cannot avoid falling into this hole, as “it reinforces the belief that racial differences are due to our genetics.”
This is a breathtakingly anti-science worldview, and Bliss is certainly not the only contemporary academic to adhere to it. Indeed, she approvingly cites many of her mentors in this contemporary school of race activists who would have it that human biology contributes nothing of substance to our diversity. Troy Duster has been producing tendentious texts like this for decades now, and a whole generation of younger ideologues such as Alondra Nelson are prepared to take up the anti-science mantle. This view has become widespread in the ranks of contemporary academia that are most saturated with radical cultural politics. The soft social sciences, much of the humanities, and everything that happens in all of the invented activist disciplines of the wake of the 1960s (Black Studies, Women’s Studies, etc.) are now thoroughly infested by versions of this view on human biological diversity.
This development reflects two cultural facts about post-1960s America: first, the significant presence of racist sentiment in American society before the 1960s; and second, the transformation of American higher education as part of the broader cultural upheaval that dismantled institutional discrimination where it existed. In short, we moved rapidly from justified outrage at real racial discrimination, to equally justified efforts to dismantle the institutions that sustained it, and finally to a sweeping overreach—one that has produced a cadre of Ph.D.-trained activists intent on constraining scientific inquiry into human nature on the disputed premise that any findings at odds with a progressive vision are, by definition, racist.
The core premise of What’s Real About Race? is out of tune with reality. Race is demonstrably not just racism. The blurb for the book on the publisher’s website neatly summarizes one of Bliss’s primary strategies for batting away all scholarly interest in human genetic diversity: “Biologically, race does not exist. Scientists have proven that human DNA is 99.9 percent identical.” Well, that would suggest a quick end to the discussion, wouldn’t it? But beneath the rhetoric is a much more complex reality. It is true that all members of our species are genetically quite similar. But that similarity alone cannot answer the questions of what genetic variation in the species looks like and what consequences it might have on human behavior and social organization. The claim that “all humans are more than 99 percent genetically identical” draws its persuasive force from a misunderstanding of scale: given the vast size of the human genome, even a tiny fraction of variation can produce significant phenotypic differences.
The total number of base pairs in the human genome is around 6.4 billion.2 Given a genome of that size, even a tiny fraction of variance nonetheless produces millions of genetic differences. Evidence suggests that the typical human individual’s genome differs from the reference genome of the Human Genome Project at around five million sites.3 That is more than enough genetic variation to generate real phenotypical difference, depending on which base pairs in which genes are in play in the variation. And this latter issue is an empirical question that, in the human genome, we are only just beginning to unpack and address.
Another way to demonstrate the ignorance relied on in the insinuation that we are too alike for any genetic differences to possibly matter is to show how much similarity exists in two species that are clearly phenotypically different. Chimps and humans, for example, share just under 99 percent of their genomes. It is a mere one percent difference that generates the massive, undeniable distinctions we see between us and our closest primate relative in appearance, intelligence, and behavior. How are we to believe that even a 0.1 percent difference in a genome this large cannot produce any meaningful differences in the phenotype for which those genes code?
Bliss does not trouble herself to give her readers a basic understanding of the nature of human populational difference. Her social constructionist account of race argues that race is nothing more than a conceptual grid produced by social, economic, and political forces. Such forces do indeed have something substantive to contribute to the substance of racial categories, at least as they are popularly understood. It is not difficult to see how strongly the content—especially the emotional meaning—of the racial categories “black” and “white” in nineteenth-century America was shaped by a system of social stratification built around a limited set of phenotypical features.
But the existence of racial bias and discrimination is not in itself proof that race as a biological concept has no intellectual utility. All serious study of the human genome shows that there is indeed genetic variation in our species and that this variation can be seen both between individuals—even those who are closely related—and between members of ancestral population groups with different evolutionary histories. Human population variation is continuous, which means that what we think of as race is a variable that exists on a continuum, rather than as a set of naturally existing discrete categories. Bliss and others who make her argument would be on to something if their case were simply that race as a non-continuous, discrete category for differentiating the species is a fiction. That much is true. No such groups are given as discrete, categorical distinctions in the natural world. Racial categories are inevitably porous, and their boundaries are fuzzy and subject to the decision-making of those who come up with the categories. But there are nonetheless potentially intellectually useful ways to help us analyze human population differences in the genome.
Gradual variation in phenotypical traits is undeniably present in the global human population. Imagine the following thought experiment. You are flying above the surface of the planet with a viewing device that allows you to see human beings both in their broad phenotypical characteristics (skin color, body morphology and size, facial features, etc.), but also at a distance that permits a scope of vision that encompasses large populations in the way they are often represented graphically on world maps. You would see if you started at the southern tip of the continent of Africa, and then flew up through Morocco and Spain, then northward through Europe and Scandinavia, a gradual shift in those population phenotypes that would, over sufficient distances, appear starkly obvious and undeniable. But the change would happen subtly and incrementally, not categorically, all at once. At no point would one be able to draw a line and say “this is the one clear point in the continuum at which group A ends and group B begins.” You could move the line a little bit northward, or a little bit to the south and then make the same statement, and it would be equally false. But it would also contain the truth that phenotypical change was clearly happening. And, thanks to genomic research, we know now that this gradual but discernible change is genetic as well.
Perhaps we should recognize that the term “race” has too much anti-scientific historical baggage. We can then find other conceptual language to continue to talk about human population difference in ways that remove the historical biases and concentrate on the empirical truths of the variation. In one of the most interesting articles published in a mainstream journal of sociology in the past quarter century, Jiannbinn Lee Hsiao et al.4 suggest “clinal class” might be such a term, as the term “clinal” directly refers to change or variation in a phenomenon that is gradual and continual.
It might well be pointed out here that the classificatory principle in use here is the same as that used to define social class groups. Where is the objective line separating the working class from the lower middle class? It does not exist in nature. We social scientists decide where the line demarcating the two categories will exist for the purposes of any given study. Careful sociologists will feel the intellectual need to make some defense of their particular definition of the categories, but they make the categories nonetheless because they are useful. It is universally recognized that class categories are, on the one hand, malleable and constructed by scientists and, on the other, based on real features of variation in the relevant population. Rigorous categories of race or clinal class meet the same criteria.
It is often claimed by opponents of this approach to race that the number of individuals who elude the categories— those who are racially mixed—is so numerous as to disrupt any classificatory utility. A typical pedagogical example advocates of this idea utilize to attempt to undermine the race concept is to display images of individuals who are phenotypically interstitial to existing racial groups, or who might reasonably be placed visually in two or more categories. But self-identified racial groups and the objective grouping data of one’s genome are nearly perfectly correlated in actual studies of the relationship. In one study of the relationship between these two definitions of race, barely one-tenth of 1 percent of subjects showed genetic cluster membership that differed from their self-identified racial identity.5 The subjects, from a range of different locales in the U.S. and in Taiwan, were asked to identify themselves as a member of one of four major racial/ethnic groups—white, African-American, East Asian, and Hispanic. The genetic analysis of the subjects also revealed four main groups, and overlap between the identities and the genetic analysis was almost perfect. Only five of the 3,636 subjects did not show correspondence.
At the end of the day, what the “race is nothing more than racism” folks are up to is an assault on scientific categories tout court. The evidence of the utility of a classificatory system to make organizational sense of human genetic variation based on population histories in particular ecologies is overwhelming. Real scientists who share the allergy to the term “race” and its unfortunate history are nonetheless compelled to admit this.
The revered geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, for example, was a well-known opponent of the use of traditional racial categories in discriminatory social systems. He worked hard always to show the complexity of human genetic variation. And yet his work always demonstrated the reality of human populational differences at the level of the genome. In the first systematic effort in the era of modern genetics to describe the genetic geography of our species, Cavalli-Sforza and his co-authors rejected the term “race” because of its history of entanglement with “prejudice, misunderstanding, and social problems,” yet went on to show that a genetic linkage tree can be drawn using the forty-two populations they studied on 120 gene allele frequencies that maps remarkably well on to the conventional set of racial categories.6
That is, there emerged from their analysis three broad human population subgroups—African, North Eurasian, and Southeast Asian. They then grouped the forty-two populations into nine clusters based on similarity of genome: 1) sub-Saharan Africans, 2) European Caucasoids, 3) extra-European Caucasoids, 4) Northern Mongoloids, 5) Northeast Asian Arctic populations, 6) Southern Mongoloids, 7) New Guineans plus Australians, 8) those from minor Pacific Islands, and 9) Americans. In their words, “[t]he single most important conclusion … is that the greatest difference within the human species is between Africans and non-Africans.”7 The magnitude of the genetic difference between these two groups was more than two times greater than that between the Southeast Asian and North Eurasian groups. More recent largescale analyses that have examined still larger numbers of alleles show quite similar groupings.
The delicate science of discerning how different genomic variations are linked in our species not just to superficial physical features such as skin color but also to deeper and more complex behavioral and personality variation across individuals and groups is in its infancy, and so caution is indeed required. But the anti-science race activists do not content themselves with recommending caution. They demand the abandonment of the entire effort to discover the nature of this relationship. It is not just that this is an entirely unrealistic position because such research is inevitably going to happen given the current structure of the scientific world. It is that we are being called to ignorance of an important piece of the study of human nature. Research has already provided plenty of indications of genetic loci that are significantly correlated with IQ, depression, aggression, sexual promiscuity, and a host of other traits. Variation at the individual level is well documented. It is entirely conceivable that variation of at least some such genetic loci exist across clinal classes, though only more research will be able to uncover the specifics.
Readers skeptical of a social scientist’s view on the biological basis of human population differences may instead consider the perspective of a widely respected geneticist at Harvard Medical School with more than two decades of hands-on experience in human genetics. David Reich, author of a recent book-length summary of the state of the art in the study of the human genome and its variations,8 suggests there is excellent reason to believe we are indeed going to find genetic variants among racial groups that link causally to cognitive and behavioral traits, just as we already have them on diseases such as prostate cancer.
Reich notes that the dominant orthodoxy in many academic circles that genetic differences between human ancestral populations are so minimal as to have no possible implications for cognitive and behavioral traits is simply indefensible in light of current knowledge: “It is now undeniable that there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits.”9 Genetic data alone, for example, gives us a significant ability to predict an individual’s years of education, and there is no good reason to suspect that further research will turn up other non-trivial differences between groups. Reich makes clear that, while some findings on human genetic variation may be misused by racists, the greater danger lies in retreating from inquiry for political reasons or pretending such data do not exist. Doing so cedes the field to the uninformed and signals that scholarship is being steered less by the pursuit of truth than by political pressures.
Anti-science race ideologues often invoke the notion that greater variation exists within racial groups than between them as a “proof” that research on racial difference is at best a waste of time. But Reich notes that this widely misunderstood point simply means that if you compare the means of two groups, that difference will be less than what you can find in the most extreme outlying cases within the two groups. This is not an argument that no meaningful group differences exist, especially given the quantitative magnitude of the genome. Great variation can exist among the members of a racial group, but this does not preclude average differences in traits across racial populations, and even small such differences can cause larger significant effects at the extremes.
Those sympathetic to the race activists might know of the open letter published on Buzzfeed by a group of sixty-seven academics that trashed Reich’s discussion of race.10 They should also examine the list of sixty-seven signatories and note how many—like Bliss herself—hold degrees in fields far removed from the relevant scientific disciplines. The vast majority of the signatories are social science and law professors. They might note too how the open letter does not challenge any of the facts of genetic science referred to by Reich. They merely continue to insist on Bliss’s claim that traditional racial categories are too murky to work in genetic terms. They fail to see that Reich agrees with them, but argues that new, more careful categories do work.
There is a video clip,11 from a podcast interview I found on X, that perfectly summarizes the way in which discussions of the biology of racial difference go when radical progressives are involved. In the clip, the activist journalist Paolo Ramos, who has worked for Vice and is the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, in conversation with two interlocutors says, repeatedly that there is no scientific evidence for genetic differences between racial groups, while one of the others present gives her fact after fact challenging her claim. He grows increasingly exasperated with Ramos’s rote dogmatism, but she is unperturbed, ignoring everything he says and calmly continuing to repeat the mantra.
I have the same feeling that podcast guest expressed every time I read or hear people such as Rina Bliss confidently and repeatedly, and with exaggerated self-righteousness, make the same reality-denying claims. The damage done to the project of scientific knowledge of human nature if those driven by her ideology win the day will be devastating. May those committed to pursuing the truth hold firm against this irrational assault by the contingent of anti-science radicals who have seized positions inside higher education and are presently endeavoring to pull down the edifice from within.
Alexander Riley is Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University whose latest books include Toward a Biosocial Science: Evolutionary Theory, Human Nature, and Social Life (Taylor and Francis, 2021) and Reflecting on the 1960s at 50 (Routledge, 2021); atriley@bucknell.edu. Riley last appeared in AQ in fall 2025 with his part in a debate over the academic status of sociology, “Response to C.E. Larson: Sociology from the Outside.”
1 Rina Bliss, What’s Real About Race? Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), 184.
2 The number is sometimes given as 3.2 billion, but this derives from the reference genome compiled by the Human Genome Project, which gave only the DNA sequence for single copies of the twenty-two non-sex chromosomes, the X and Y sex chromosomes, and the mitochondrial DNA. The actual amount of DNA in a human being is roughly twice that because our genome is diploid, that is, we have a pair of each of the chromosomes, one from our mother, one from our father.
3 The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium. A global reference for human genetic variation, Nature (2015): 526, 68–74, https://doi. org/10.1038/nature15393.
4 Jiannbinn Lee Shiao et al. “The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race,” Sociological Theory, 30, no. 2 (2012).
5 Hua Tang et al., “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies,” American Journal of Human Genetics, 76 (2005):268–275.
6 L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al., The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton University Press, 1994), 19.
7 Ibid., 83.
8 David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Oxford University Press, 2018).
9 Ibid., 253.
10 Buzzfeed Opinion, “How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics,” Buzzfeednews.com, March 19, 2019.
11 X.com, at https://x.com/Catholicizm1/status/2003568641141592131.