UNESCO said races were equal; the new genetics said they didn’t exist. Finally, moving a few decades on, the Out-of-Africa hypothesis of the origin of Homo sapiens comes to the fore, and multi-regionalism falls from fashion as it becomes clear that humans are not only a single species — something which we’ve known since Linnaeus’ day—but a single species that has only diverged into sub-populations very recently.
The result of this history — which has been partly driven by data, and partly by ideology — is that these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that’s a fine thing. But I suggest that it’s time that we grew up. I would like to suggest that actually by emphasizing the similarities but ignoring the differences, we are turning away from one of the most beautiful problems that modern biology has left: namely, what is the genetic basis of the normal variety of differences between us? What gives a Han Chinese child the curve of her eye? The curve I read once described by an eminent Sinologist as the purest of all curves. What is the source of that curve? And what gives a Solomon Islander his black-verging-on-purple skin? Or what makes red hair?
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