Armand Leroi discusses The Nature of Normal Human Variety:
After the Second World War, when the enormities of Nazi science really hit home — which were in turn the consequence of a much larger racial science, not just in Germany, but everywhere — all right-thinking scientists made a resolute effort to ensure that science would not be bent to such evil purposes again. They were determined that science would never again be used to make invidious discriminations among people. The immediate result of this was the UNESCO Declaration on Race in 1950, fronted by Ashley Montagu and backed up by geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky which affirmed the equality of races. Then, in the 1960s, Dick Lewontin and others discovered that gel electrophoresis could be used to survey genetic variation among proteins. These studies showed that humans have a huge amount of concealed genetic variation. What is more, most of that genetic variation existed within continents or even countries rather than among them. 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?
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The reason I love the problem of normal human variety is because, almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street.