Picture this, it's 1851 down in the American
South, and there's this prominent physician,
and he's looking at enslaved people who are risking
their lives, braving dogs, armed patrols, I mean,
everything just to escape captivity. And this
doctor, using the full authority of his medical
degree, publishes a paper declaring that these
people are not reacting to horrific oppression.
Instead, He diagnoses them with a psychiatric
illness. He literally medicalizes the desire
for freedom. Exactly. He calls it a biological
disease that needs to be cured. It is honestly
one of the most chilling examples in our source
stack today. That doctor was Samuel Cartwright.
Right. And he named his fabricated disease drapedomania.
I mean, he basically took the raw brutality of
human prejudice and dressed it up in a lab coat.
He used the supposed objectivity of medicine
to justify an atrocity. Yes. OK, let's unpack
this because today our mission on this deep dive
is to explore a massive, incredibly heavy stack
of historical and modern sources covering what
is known as scientific racism. And it is a heavy
stack. It really is. We're going to look at how
the objective veneer of science was historically
hijacked to build artificial human hierarchies.
And more importantly, how you the person listening
to this right now, how you can still spot the
echoes of this pseudoscience today. Because it's
still out there. Exactly. Whether you are scrolling
through a news feed, reading a medical journal,
or just trying to make sense of modern data,
understanding how statistics and biology can
be manipulated is what's the ultimate tool for
critical thinking. Think of science like a mirror.
Okay, a mirror. Right. We think it reflects objective
reality, but sometimes it only reflects the biases
of the person holding it. That is a great way
to look at it. To set our foundation from the
sources and, you know, try to visualize this
against a backdrop of shifting historical texts
and modern DNA helixes, scientific racism is
essentially the pseudoscientific belief that
you can use hard empirical data to prove some
groups of humans are biologically distinct. Distinct
and hierarchical, like ranked. Exactly. Ranked
into taxa. It is taking cultural biases and formalizing
them into biological taxonomy. Now, Modern scientific
consensus completely rejects this force like
the 1950 UNESCO statement formally denounced
it But we really have to understand from the
1600s all the way through World War two. This
wasn't some fringe theory It was the norm. It
was mainstream heavily funded completely accepted
science So to understand how data gets manipulated
today in the 2020s We have to go back to how
humans first started classifying each other We
have to look at the Enlightenment right the age
of reason. Yeah humanity's simply had this desperate
need to categorize the expanding natural world.
But they brought all their cultural baggage with
them right to the microscope. They really did.
The Enlightenment brought this massive weight
of scientific classification, but you cannot
separate the science from the society that's
funding it. Take François Bernier, for example.
The French physician. Right. In 1684, he published
an essay attempting to divide all of humanity
into four distinct races. Wait, so a French physician
in the 1600s is just looking at a globe and Deciding
where the biological lines are drawn? Basically,
yes. What was he actually basing this on? Did
he have any sort of empirical metric at all?
Not really. He was basing it almost entirely
on geography and his own highly subjective ideas
of female beauty. Wow. Seriously? Yes. He put
Europeans in the first race, which he clearly
viewed as the baseline, you know, the norm. And
by contrast, he notoriously described the Sami
people of northern Europe as awful and, quote,
reminiscent of a bear's face. Reminiscent of
a bear's face. That is, that's just wild. It
was purely observational prejudice disguised
as early taxonomy. He was observing cultural
and aesthetic differences and just declaring
them to be deep biological divides. Which brings
a much bigger name into our source stack, Carl
Linnaeus. Oh yes, the father of modern taxonomy.
Right, the guy who gave us the system of naming
species. that we still use today. Kingdom, phylum,
class, order. That's the one. In his 1767 edition
of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus didn't just classify
plants and animals. He turned his gaze to humans.
Uh -oh. Yeah. But he didn't stop at categorizing
physical traits like skin color or geography.
He assigned highly subjective moral behaviors
to his categories. Like personality traits? Exactly.
He claimed Europeaness was gentle, acute, inventive,
and governed by customs. Meanwhile, Africanus
was described as sly, lazy, negligent, and governed
by caprice. That is just... blatant stereotyping.
He even threw in a category called homomonstrosis
for mythical creatures and like feral men. Wait,
so the father of modern taxonomy was just baking
flat -out behavioral stereotypes into the permanent
scientific record. Did anyone in the scientific
community push back on this at the time? I mean,
someone had to say something. Well, this raises
an important question, and it's heavily debated
in our modern sources. OK. Some critics, like
the scholar Marie Christine Sinca, argue Linnaeus
was merely Eurocentric. Nearly Eurocentric. Right.
She suggests his focus was on culture rather
than inherent biology, noting he didn't even
use the word race himself. But other historians,
like Renato Masolini, argue that regardless of
his exact conscious intent, this white -black
polarity that Linnaeus codified, it became the
absolute paradigm for later racist beliefs. Because
it set the standard. Exactly. He essentially
built the scaffolding for a biological hierarchy.
and the lengths people went to justify these
new categories is just crazy. I mean, looking
at the stack, our sources mention American founding
father, Dr. Benjamin Rush. Oh, Dr. Rush, yes.
He was a highly respected physician, but he genuinely
believed that black skin was actually a form
of hereditary leprosy. He called it negroidism.
Negroidism. He thought it was a curable skin
disease. And the bizarre thing is, because he
viewed it as a disease, Rush thought he was actually
being highly progressive. Wait, what? Progressive
how? He argued that non -white people shouldn't
be tyrannized or enslaved because they were simply,
quote, diseased and could potentially be cured.
Meaning turned white. Meaning turned white underneath.
It perfectly illustrates how desperate early
scientists were to maintain a European biological
default. That is fascinating. They were trying
to cram the vast complex reality of human diversity
into an incredibly narrow biased worldview. So
once Linnaeus and others built these categorical
boxes, society needed a way to prove who belonged
in which box, and more importantly, who was at
the top. Right, because you can't rank things
objectively without data. Exactly. That demand
for proof birthed physical anthropology, and
specifically, the absolute obsession with measuring
the unmeasurable. Subjective observation morphed
into the illusion of hard data through craniometry.
Measuring skulls. Measuring skulls to determine
intelligence. We see Peter Kamper's facial angle
theories, and then in the 19th century, Dr. Samuel
George Morton He collected skulls from all over
the world to measure the brain size. Yes. He
started measuring their interior volume by filling
them with lead shot or mustard seed, assuming
that a bigger skull meant a bigger brain, which
automatically equated to higher intelligence.
I think we can all see where this is going. It's
like grading a test where you already decided
who's going to get an A and who's going to get
an F before you even look at the answers. That
is exactly what he did. Morton claimed Caucasian
brains had the largest volume, averaging 87 cubic
inches. Native Americans were at 82, and Negroes
had the smallest at 78 cubic inches. Just assigning
neat little numbers to it. He used this specific
numerical data to argue that the races had been
separate and unequal since the very beginning
of human history. What's really fascinating to
me in this stack is how modern scientists look
back at Morton's numbers today. Oh, the data
debate. Yeah. Because for a long time, the famous
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued
that Morton deliberately falsified his data.
Right. Gould claimed Morton subconsciously packed
the Caucasian skulls tighter with seed to make
the measure larger. But later, anthropologists
completely upended that theory. What's fascinating
here is that anthropologists like Jason Lewis
and John Michael physically re -measured Morton's
smell collection. And they found that Morton's
physical data was actually quite accurate. Really?
Yes. He didn't physically fudge the numbers.
The cubic inches were correct. But his conclusions
were entirely racist and scientifically invalid.
Wait, how does that work? If the measurements
were physically accurate, How is the science
completely wrong? Because modern science demonstrates
that human variation is continuous, not discrete,
Morton forced continuous human diversity into
rigid, artificial categories. Oh, I see. Think
of human variation like a rainbow. OK. It's a
continuous fluid spectrum of color. Morton essentially
walked up to that beautiful, continuous rainbow
with three buckets of paint, red, blue, and yellow.
and forced every single subtle shade into one
of those three buckets. Completely ignoring the
blending in between. Exactly. His math on how
much paint was in the bucket was right, but the
buckets themselves were a total fiction. That
is the perfect way to visualize it. He decided
the boxes existed, sorted the skulls into them
based on his own cultural biases, and then used
the mathematical averages of those artificial
boxes to, quote, prove a hierarchy. So the arithmetic
was flawless. But the biological premise was
a complete fabrication. And once you have scientific
proof of a hierarchy from people like Morton,
you can start medicalizing anything that threatens
that hierarchy. Which brings us right back to
our intro. Dr. Cartwright in 1851, diagnosing
fleeing enslaved people with drapedomania. Cartwright
used the prevailing science of the day to argue
that specific groups were biologically designed
for subservience. Therefore, any resistance to
that subservience couldn't be a rational human
desire for freedom. It had to be diagnosed as
a pathology. Exactly. And his prescribed medical
treatment for this illness was, quote, proper
medical advice. Which meant what, exactly? In
practice, it meant physical abuse, whipping,
and forced submission. God. So... What does this
all mean? If science can prove hierarchy through
skull measurements and diagnose resistance as
a mental illness, it inevitably becomes a tool
for state power. It absolutely scales up from
the plantation to global policy. And we see this
shift explicitly in the 1920s in the United States
with the dawn of IQ testing. It becomes a literal
mechanism for social engineering. Henry Goddard
started applying early intelligence tests to
immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Claiming
to objectively measure their innate cognitive
ability. Right. But think about the mechanics
of this. You have immigrants arriving after a
grueling multi -week boat ride. They likely don't
speak English. They are exhausted, scared and
in a completely foreign environment. Yeah. And
Goddard hands them a puzzle or a test that relies
heavily on American cultural context. It wasn't
testing innate intelligence. It was testing their
proximity to American culture. Yet based on these
heavily biased tests, Goddard published data
claiming that vast majorities of Jewish, Italian
and Russian immigrants were, quote, feeble minded.
And this wasn't just an academic exercise filed
away in a library somewhere. No, this data directly
influenced lawmakers. It provided the supposedly
objective foundation for the Immigration Act
of 1924, which imposed strict racial and national
quotas to block undesirable people from entering
the country. The science gave lawmakers the perfect
cover. It allowed them to say, hey, This isn't
prejudice. This is public health. We are just
protecting the nation's intelligence. Exactly.
And our sources show this exact same weaponization
happening globally. Look at the origins of apartheid
in South Africa. Oh, absolutely. The Carnegie
Commission on the Poor White Problem in South
Africa published a massive five volume report
in the early 1930s. And the context here is vital.
It's extremely vital. The global economic depression
was hitting South Africa hard, and poor white
populations were suffering right alongside Black
Native populations. Which completely broke the
visual hierarchy. of white supremacy. Yes. If
white people were intrinsically biologically
superior, they shouldn't be starving in the same
slums as the people they were oppressing. It
caused a massive panic among the ruling class.
The Carnegie Report explicitly expressed fear
that poor whites would not be able to resist
the process of what they called Africanization.
So they needed a structural way to separate the
populations. To protect the myth of white superiority.
This fear -driven pseudoscientific report played
a key role in providing the intellectual and
sociological groundwork for establishing the
brutal legal segregation system of apartheid.
Which all culminates in eugenics, the incredibly
dangerous idea that you can selectively breed
humanity to preserve the superior traits. and
physically eliminate the inferior ones. You see
this momentum building with Madison Grant, an
American eugenicist who wrote The Passing of
the Great Race in 1916. He championed the preservation
of the Nordic race. You see in Sweden, too. Yes.
Sweden opened the world's first government funded
state institute for racial biology in 1922, aiming
to cure criminality and alcoholism through racial
hygiene. And we all know where this ideology
ultimately leads. Nazi Germany weaponized these
exact American and European They took the theories
of eugenics and pushed them to their absolute,
horrific, logical conclusion. They used these
models to legally justify compulsory sterilization
and, ultimately, the Holocaust. Targeting Jewish
people, the disabled, homosexuals. Anyone the
state deemed Levinson -Verte's laban life unworthy
of life. There is a deeply dark irony in the
sources regarding the Nazis and this supposedly
objective data. Hitler actually banned IQ testing
in Germany. He did. He deemed IQ testing to be
Jewish because the results didn't always align
with his preconceived racial hierarchies. It
just proves that the science was always subservient
to the ideology. The moment the tool didn't perfectly
validate the prejudice, the tool was discarded.
Following the horrors of World War II and the
revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, the global
scientific community had a massive public reckoning.
Mainstream science formally denounced scientific
racism. Right. The 1950 UNESCO statement was
a vital turning point. It brought together geneticists,
anthropologists, sociologists to clearly separate
the biological myth of race from the very real
social reality of racism. And today, modern genetic
consensus is crystal clear on this. The 2019
JANA Declaration, published by the Jur... Armin
Theological Society definitively states that
the biological concept of distinct human races
is simply invalid. They proved through modern
sequencing that genetic variation is actually
smaller between human populations than within
them. Meaning there is more genetic difference
between two random people living in the same
town in Germany than there is between the average
genetic makeup of Europe and Asia. Exactly. The
categories Linnaeus and Bernier dreamed up simply
do not exist at a genetic level. If the scientific
consensus is so definitive, why does our source
stack include events from the 2020s? Because
the underlying human desire to justify inequality
didn't disappear, it just adapted to the times.
It put on a modern lab coat. Yes. We are seeing
a modern fringe movement attempting to resurrect
these hierarchical ideas using manipulated statistics
and genomic vocabulary. Like Arthur Jensen or
Richard Lin, who were heavily critiqued in our
sources. Lin actually published papers trying
to claim that a nation's GDP is biologically
determined by its national average IQ. He even
tried to tie intelligence to the proportion of
Caucasian genes and African Americans. But mainstream
scientists point out that Lin's methodology is
deeply flawed. He routinely commits one of the
cardinal sins of data analysis. Confusing correlation
with causation. Exactly. He attributes complex
societal outcomes solely to genetics, completely
ignoring mass - of social, economic, historical,
and environmental variables. Now, it's fascinating
to see how this historical debate bleeds right
into modern politics. Looking at the stack of
sources provided to us, we see conflicting views
playing out in real time. Very much so. And as
a quick reminder to you listening, we explicitly
do not take sides on this show. We strictly impartially
report what is in the source material, even when
it's politically charged. Right, just presenting
the text. Exactly. So for example, the sources
note a March 27, 2025 White House executive order.
It characterized the Smithsonian exhibit on African
-American art as divisive, specifically objecting
to the exhibit's presentation of race as a social
construct rather than a biological reality. And
on the other side of that debate, in our sources,
we have scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. He
points out that human genetic diversity actually
unifies us because, quote, we are all mixed.
It really highlights how the definition of race
remains a highly charged, active debate in the
public sphere today, even with the genetic consensus
settled. It illustrates that the tension between
cultural identity and biological science is still
incredibly potent. But the sources point to something
even more concerning than political debates.
The active modern manipulation of hard scientific
data by fringe groups. Yes. Here's where it gets
really interesting. We are looking at a major
New York Times report from January 24th, 2026.
This is an historical theory. This is a modern
data breach. The report revealed that a group
of fringe researchers, including Brian Pesta
and Emile Kierkegaard, who, by the way, were
funded in part by the Pioneer Fund. Which is
an organization with a long history of supporting
scientific racism. Right. They used outright
deception to access protected data from the National
Institutes of Health. They infiltrated the adolescent
brain cognitive development study. How did they
actually pull that off? They applied for access
by claiming they were conducting standard, benign
sociological research. But once they got their
hands on that protected genetic and personal
data, they ran deeply flawed statistical regressions.
Flawed how? They deliberately isolated race as
a variable while minimizing or stripping out
socioeconomic status, school quality, and environmental
factors. They used this manipulated analysis
to publish at least 16 papers purporting to find
biological evidence for differences in intelligence
between races. So they were essentially suggesting
that black people earn less because they are
biologically less smart rather than acknowledging
systemic economic barriers. Yes. It's like money
laundering but for data. Oh that's a good way
to put it. Yeah you take biased counterfeit science
and you pass it through a clean highly respected
institution like the NIH. Once it comes out the
other side the public sees the NIH Association
and accepts the counterfeit data as valid currency.
Even though mainstream Geneticists immediately
rejected their methodology as biased and unscientific.
But the damage was already done. By laundering
their racist theories through a prominent data
set, they gave their work an air of analytical
rigor. It sparked a massive wave of online disinformation.
People shared these papers on social media claiming,
look, the NIH data proves it. It is the exact
same playbook. as Samuel Morton filling skulls
with mustard seed just updated for the age of
big data and algorithmic sequencing. It really
is. Which brings us to the core of this deep
dive. For you listening, we've traveled a massive
distance today. We went from Francois Bernier
looking at a map and deciding who was beautiful
in the 1600s to Linnaeus inventing behavioral
categories. We saw Dr. Cartwright diagnosing
runaway enslaved people with a mental illness.
And Henry Gadard designing puzzles to keep immigrants
out of America. We've seen how this illusion
of hard data fed state -sponsored eugenics all
the way to modern fringe groups laundering manipulated
statistics through the NIH in 2026. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the absolute key
takeaway from our sources is that data never
ever exists in a vacuum. As the scholar Jonathan
Marks notes in the text, science doesn't become
racist on its own. It is racist ideas propagated
by scientists that make science racist. We have
to relentlessly interrogate not just the numbers
on the page, but the assumptions, the funding,
and the cultural biases of the people designing
the studies. Because the legacy of this isn't
just an academic history lesson. I mean, Harriet
Washington's phenomenal book, Medical Apartheid,
which anchors much of the stack, shows how this
history of medical racism directly impacts the
massive lack of trust in the medical system today.
Where marginalized people were viewed as biologically
different and exploited for experiments. Exactly.
When a community has historically been diagnosed
with fake diseases to keep them enslaved or sterilized
by state biology institutes, that generational
memory doesn't just vanish. The past is still
in the exam room with us today. The categories
we create and the data we manipulate to justify
them have very real generational and often lethal
consequences. It demands constant vigilance.
And that leads me to a final thought I want to
leave you with today. Something to really mull
over as you consume data this week. Today, we
are outsourcing more and more of our decision
making, our sorting, and our categorization to
artificial intelligence and machine learning
algorithms. We use them for everything. Hiring,
medical diagnoses, loan approvals, criminal justice
risk assessments. We are training machines to
look at the massive chaotic world and categorize
it for us. Assuming the machine will finally
give us that perfectly clean objective mirror.
Right. But if the greatest, most celebrated scientific
minds of the past could unknowingly bake their
deepest, most horrific prejudices into what they
completely believed was objective data, what
biases are we currently programming into the
AI systems of our future, without even realizing
it? We think we're building an impartial intelligence,
but if we aren't careful about the data we feed
it, we might just be automating the exact same
distorted hierarchies we've been fighting for
centuries.