When two rival scientific groups jointly announced in June that they had completed a working draft of the entire sequence of the human genome -- the genetic material found in every cell of every human being -- the achievement was rightly greeted as a milestone of modern medical research.
Doctors recognized at once that it would have huge implications for the understanding and treatment of genetically determined human diseases. Since then, however, as the enormity of the breakthrough continues to sink in, social scientists and others have pointed out that its significance extends far beyond medicine. The most recent revelation slipped into the news almost unnoticed, but it may eventually prove to be the most revolutionary of all. The genome project, it turns out, undermines a belief dear to the human heart and central to the whole history of human strife: the concept of race.
Everybody knows, or thought they knew, that humanity is divided into races. Merriam-Webster blandly defines the term as denoting a division of mankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize distinct human types. The old-fashioned labels -- Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Malayan and so on -- have been more or less retired, but their latter-day variants live on in the organization of human beings largely by color: white, black, Asian, Hispanic and others. At its worst, the belief in "distinct human types" has fueled atrocities of the magnitude of Europeans' enslavement of Africans or the Nazis' attempt to exterminate Jews, as the right of a "master race" over an inferior one. But it has less malign manifestations, too, so familiar that we may not even notice them, let alone stop to question them. Racial terms appear on official documents like passport or university applications. Laws are passed forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, as if race were an objective, scientific concept.