Equality is a popular fashion but, ask an expert and they will tell you, it has no place in the biological sciences... LIE: Races do not exist Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist, Reading University: "There is an overbearing censorship to the way we are allowed to think and talk about the diversity of people on Earth. Officially we are all the same: there are no races. Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. What this all means is that, like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations—including differences that may even correspond to old categories of 'race'—that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem. This in no way says one group is in general 'superior' to another, or that one group should be preferred over another. But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations." LIE: We are all equal Simon Baron-Cohen, psychologist, Autism Research Center, Cambridge University: "When I was young I believed in equality as a guiding principle in life. My mind has been changed. I still believe in some aspects of the idea of equality, but I can no longer accept the whole package. Striving to give people equality of social opportunity is still a value system worth defending, but we have to accept that equality has no place in the realm of biology." Charles Darwin wrote in Descent of Man : "The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties." In light of the slight but definite effect that racial origins have on physical traits like medical risk factors and athletic abilities, there is no reason to suppose that such effects do not extend to mental traits. In his 2007 book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science, Nobel Laureate James D. Watson writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically."