Carl Zimmer, science journalist: "It is worrying that racism wrapped in the language of genetics is making a comeback"

“Heredity defines us and gives us a chance for a future,” writes Carl Zimmer in his new book,

(Captain Swing, 2023).

The science journalist from

analyzes how this concept, linked to the transmission of property between family members, mutated through the centuries and became a way of differentiating groups and measuring the degrees of purity of people: genetics. .

Zimmer (56 years old, Connecticut, USA) finds it worrying how misconceptions in this field are becoming popular again, sometimes even bordering on 19th century racial pseudoscience.

The technology for the study of genes has become cheaper since the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and millions of people have taken DNA tests to relate to missing parents, connect with distant ancestors and resignify themselves in ethnic identities and even to know their identity. degree of

.

For that reason, Zimmer decided to dedicate her thirteenth book to the history of the concept of heredity and how it has changed according to the scientific knowledge, beliefs and moral panics of each era.

And how people have justified their place in society, hence the subtitle of the work is: "Power, deformation and potential of inheritance."

Zimmer, who has more than 30 years of experience in the field of science communication, answers EL PAÍS by video call from California.

Ask.

An example of experimentation in real time that he points to is that of the Spanish monarchy during the Habsburg dynasty, between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Answer.

Like other royal families, they wanted to keep power for themselves.

So their close relatives were marrying each other just to maintain power.

And also because they thought that royalty should marry royalty, because you don't want to dilute that royal blood.

The irony is that by doing that, they were actually falling into one of the dangers of inheriting mutations that lead to hereditary diseases.

And, in many cases, if you have a mutation in one copy of one gene, but the other gene works, you'll be fine.

But if both copies of your gene are mutated, you can have a devastating disease.

Q.

Would you say that the obsession with blood purity is constant throughout history in all societies?

R.

Yes, somehow we understand that there is something that is fixed within us that is transmitted.

In the United States, which relied so heavily on slavery, there were plenty of justifications for the exploitation of other humans through claims about race: In some states, anyone with a black great-great-grandparent was legally considered black.

And therefore you could be sold as property.

This is how, again, the language of blood, race and heredity have been tied together for centuries.

Q.

You say that even people who converted from Judaism to Christianity were still treated as second-class citizens.

There was no redemption possible.

A.

Stories were told about people being converted, but they couldn't really get away from their true nature.

Ideas about blood in Spain, England and other countries were related to royalty and aristocracy, so there was royal blood.

It is the reason why a king could inherit power from his father: people thought that blood was linked to a certain noble nature.

If a nobleman was raised by poor peasants, his nobility would come from him because he carried that blood so that his upbringing could not change what he had inherited.

Today, people talk about genes as somehow determined.

They used to have that kind of vocabulary.

Eugenics was highly influential in the United States in the early 20th century and later in Nazi Germany.

Q.

At what point did a movement to improve the species lead to mass sterilizations and systematized extermination?

R.

The figure of the polymath Francis Galton is very complex and problematic in the history of science.

He was a cousin of Charles Darwin.

He was brilliant, and statistical techniques he developed are still used today in many branches of science, including genetics.

Like when we talk about a correlation, if there are certain genes correlated with height, that comes from Galton, it's his language, those are his ideas.

But he also had a lot of ridiculous ideas with which he sought to justify pre-existing beliefs.

He believed that heredity explained all sorts of things, including intelligence and behavior.

He tried to prove it by studying twins, famous families and so on, eventually developing it into an ideology called eugenics.

He coined the idea, which basically means something like

upbringing

And he saw it in a very positive sense, that he would encourage only the

to have children.

But, having said that, he had a lot of very dark ideas: there's a lot of racism in his work, like he believed that eugenics showed that whites were superior to other races.

His ideas were very influential, especially in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

And then later in Nazi Germany.

Q.

The worrying thing, he details, is that they were not marginal beliefs.

The British Eugenics Society, although the name has been changed, continues to exist.

A.

At the beginning of the 20th century, I would say between 1910 and 1915, perhaps most of the leading biologists would have called themselves eugenicists.

But, of course, it means many different things.

Like the word itself, it has gone through many changes over the years and in different places.

Q.

In a conference, you warned about the

renaissance of hereditary and genetic concepts that are mixed with racial pseudoscience or political extremism.

Is it that serious?

A.

Yes, it is worrying that old discredited ideas about heredity are coming back wrapped in the language of genetics, as if it somehow justified them.

In America we have to deal with this regarding white supremacy.

The idea that somehow whites are superior, but it's never quite clear in what way.

You see white supremacists taking DNA tests just to make sure they are "white."

But what white means in scientific terms cannot be connected to a list of genes with the cultural idea of

.

It just doesn't work like that.

So you see these very strange attempts to prove it, for example, some white supremacists took the fact that they can drink milk to be somehow proof of being

.

There is a mutation that is relatively high in some parts of northern Europe that allows people to break down lactose in adulthood.

That can prove anything, like you find Maasai tribesmen in Kenya who have a very similar mutation that does exactly the same thing.

And they would not fit into these people's

notion of

Genes are a very complicated story, with many variations.

Q.

DNA tests to find out your ancestors arose as a hobby.

How did it degenerate into a nativist or racial purity movement?

A.

I think people really want to be related to someone famous and have a DNA test connect them to a genealogy database.

It's exciting, something of that is there.

The problem is that it is disassembled very quickly, since genealogy and DNA are not the same.

People think they are identical but after 5 or 10 generations you are going to be related to some of your direct ancestors from whom you have not inherited any DNA, because it has been combined or lost.

And another thing that surprises people is that if you go back far enough, a couple thousand years, you get to people who are the direct ancestors of all people living on Earth today.

Q.

Do you think you should intercede in these matters about the abuse of language, allegedly scientific, related to everything that surrounds inheritance?

"Genes are not destiny," she has written.

A.

Yes, I think it is important that science writers not only present the latest research, but try to understand how science is understood and used by the public.

And if there are situations where there is a misuse or misunderstanding, it is essential to try to clarify things.

It's not easy, but it's worth a try.

It is essential to try to clarify things.

It's not easy, but it's worth a try

Q.

Is it possible that after a traumatic situation this stress is transmitted from parents to children?

A.

Parents' experiences may affect their offspring, but in many different ways.

Just like children who grow up in broken homes.

When people ask about it, they want to give it a directly biological meaning.

Q.

Perhaps they refer to the genetic marks of suffering?

R.

Yes. There's a lot of discussion about whether a traumatic experience somehow affects cell biology and then that's passed down the generations and causes people all kinds of problems.

I haven't seen evidence of that in terms of epigenetics [changes in gene expression caused by environment or habit], but there are a lot of ways that trauma has real effects across generations and in the long term.

Material deprivation or rights.

I mean, in the United States, as we know, Africans were kidnapped.

They were enslaved and then dispossessed and prevented from living in certain areas, creating an intergenerational process that today leads to African Americans having far less wealth than white Americans.

There is no need for epigenetics to explain this injustice.

'She Has Her Mother's Smile: Power, Deformation, and Heredity Potential', by Carl Zimmer (Captain Swing, 2023)Captain Swing

Q.

Inheritance has personal meaning for you.

R.

I realized the meaning of inheritance and its mystery when my wife and I were expecting our first daughter in the year 2000. I had always been curious about my ancestors, but when there is another human being who is going to inherit things from you, that really centers the mind.

I think people think that heredity is the same as DNA in a simple way, but the truth is that it's much more complicated, much more dangerous in a way, but also much more fascinating.

My wife and I met with a genetic counselor before our first daughter was born.

We had a very basic conversation about the possibilities that we could face in terms of inherited genetic diseases.

The counselor began to ask us about our family history.

That's when I realized that, honestly,

I hadn't thought much about it.

Like everyone else, I have family members who have had various disorders, so I thought, “Wait, should I have been aware of that?

Is it something I should worry about?

For my daughter?".

This was at the turn of the millennium, before the revolution in DNA sequencing.

It would have cost billions of dollars to analyze a genome.

So I didn't know what my DNA was like and I didn't know what my daughter's was like.

But she is fine now.

I think that influenced me as a journalist.

It would have cost billions of dollars to analyze a genome.

So I didn't know what my DNA was like and I didn't know what my daughter's was like.

But she is fine now.

I think that influenced me as a journalist.

It would have cost billions of dollars to analyze a genome.

So I didn't know what my DNA was like and I didn't know what my daughter's was like.

But she is fine now.

I think that influenced me as a journalist.

Q.

Then the results came in about your genetic test.

A.

The genetic counselor said, “Well, we don't see anything you need to be concerned about in terms of your own health.

You are a carrier of two genetic disorders, but they are very rare, and you would have known if your children had developed the disease."

It was not so.

So that was it.

And I remember the doctor laughed, and he told me why he was a little disappointed, as if he had received terrible news.

And then I thought: “Well, I am a journalist, what am I going to write about?”

[laughs].

I don't think my genome is special, but it's fascinating, millions of years of evolution.

It led me to think more about what we want from these tests and what we can learn.

I don't think my genome is special, but it's fascinating, millions of years of evolution in it.

Q.

You said that in the 1990s writing about evolution was seen worse than any other subject by creationists.

R.

Science journalists had to justify our existence, unlike sports journalists.

On the

team in the US, we received outraged letters for talking about science.

We were young and it was all so much fun.

I was the one who received the most insults.

Now I think that this has diversified more, and from evolution it has gone to climate change or against vaccines.

Q.

Has the fascination for science vanished?

Is there even opposition to technological development?

R.

I think there was a kind of ideology of progress that was tied not only to science, but to companies that provide new products for people to buy.

And for decades, people have questioned the value of always having something new.

Sometimes it's valuable to ask those questions.

But it is also important not to think that everything new is bad or that "only what is natural is good".

That is related to vaccine denialism.

People will say, "Oh, I don't want to contaminate my child with vaccines and I want him to develop immunity naturally."

But they are people who don't have to deal with smallpox, diphtheria and measles.

So they do not imagine or face these dangers.

It is true that we do not have to worry about smallpox at this time.

And that's because people got vaccinated,

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