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Richard Lewontin, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose research showed that humans from different ethnic backgrounds aren鈥檛 as genetically different as appearances might suggest, has died at the age of 92.
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Lewontin鈥檚 work revealed that nearly 85 per cent of humanity鈥檚 genetic diversity is seen between individuals of a single population, such as those of a single nation. A further 8 per cent occurs between such populations that might have been put into the same racial category. Differences between ethnic groups accounted for just 7 per cent of genetic diversity. Simply put: two people are different because they are individuals, not because they come from two different ethnic backgrounds.
Lewontin pioneered the field of molecular population genetics and spent much of his career working in the fields of population genetics and human genetic diversity. In 1966, he published two seminal papers in the journal Genetics, co-authored by geneticist John Lee Hubby, which helped kickstart the field of molecular evolution. In 1972, he began analysing variations in blood proteins taken from populations around the world. This was the basis for his work which turned the idea of genetic diversity on its head.
The idea of race science died out after the end of the second world war but it was Lewontin鈥檚 findings that revealed that there was no such thing as genetically meaningful races, and that being of the same ethnic background as someone doesn鈥檛 necessarily mean you are more genetically similar to them than you are to someone of a different ethnic background.
Despite some opposition to his findings at the time, based on the idea that variation in proteins didn鈥檛 accurately reflect variation in DNA, Lewontin鈥檚 results were later replicated by Guido Barbujani, a geneticist at the University of Ferrara in Italy in 1997 as well as other labs since then. Lewontin 鈥� and later Barbujani鈥檚 鈥� research has provided us with a way of measuring human diversity that doesn鈥檛 depend on external appearance.
Lewontin was a prolific author who wrote a number of books including Biology as Ideology and The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change.
