Getting back to human evolution, what has happened with the concept of race?
The concept of race disappeared with the fairly recent discovery of genetics. No one talks scientifically about race anymore because, thanks to genetics, we now know we’re not different. The reason we know we began as a species 150,000 years ago is that it can be traced back on molecular clocks, and we discover we all came from one individual woman, Mitochondrial Eve; the variation in genetic makeup between one individual and the next in the human species is less than one tenth of 1 percent. So a tall, thin Masai warrior in Africa varies from a blue-eyed blonde in Latvia by less than one tenth of 1 percent. When you look at that you wonder how much of race is cultural as opposed to genetics; that there’s so little variation in the genome has sort of destroyed the notion of race. Are we becoming one race? It certainly looks that way: consider one of our current presidential candidates. Sixty years ago, if a black man had sex with a white woman he’d be lynched. Now we have a presidential
