The Economist on the human-genome project:

[It may someday turn out] that some differences both between and within groups are quite marked. If those differences are in sensitive traits like personality or intelligence, real trouble could ensue.

People must be prepared for this possibility, and ready to resist the excesses of racialism, nationalism and eugenics that some are bound to propose in response. That will not be easy. The liberal answer is to respect people as individuals, regardless of the genetic hand that they have been dealt. Genetic knowledge, however awkward, does not change that.

These kind of arguments have bothered me for a long time now. Really, is this “liberal” answer the best we have? Is all we can say to proponents of eugenics and the like, that it is uncivil to think what they think? That’s hardly a convincing counter-argument. Let’s keep moral judgement out of the discussion for a moment.

Here’s one deeper problem I see with racial intolerance and eugenicist strategies: they tend to reduce genetic diversity.

Why is that bad? Well, I’m not an evolutionary biologist or anything close to that, but the one take-home message I got from the whole “survival of the fittest” tale is that genetic diversity saves species. One day you’re the cripple bacterium¹ that wastes his energy producing beta-lactamases because, well, you can’t help it. You’re a freak of nature. Everybody else spends that energy reproducing, making you look seriously pitiful. But the next day some guy called Fleming shows up, and changes the rules. “Who’s the fittest now?!! …” So there, evolutionary fitness strongly depends on external circumstances, and diversity just saved your species.

Who will be the fittest of men when an industrial disaster eats the ozone layer, when we finally run out of fossil fuels, when the next ice-age begins, when the big bad asteroid arrives, when the next revision of the flu turns out really effective? Might there be circumstances in which the overdeveloped cerebrum, so highly desired in our information age, would turn out to be an energy-hog and too-vulnerable a liability?

I have had supremacist thoughts sometimes, and I won’t apologise for that, because I know we all do². The thing is, feeling ashamed because it is improper to think what you think doesn’t help to develop or invalidate those thoughts. Instead, whenever you think that you see weakness, you can try to change perspective. Maybe you’re really looking at diversity, at a secure future for humanity. Most of the time, that’s a sunnier perspective³.