This can be a delicate and sensitive subject, but it is very silly if it becomes unmentionable. The only real problem, of course, comes when someone begins with a particular agenda, and builds an interpretation specifically to support that agenda. For anyone asking honest questions with an open mind, it ought to be a subject that can be discussed without offence to anyone. My understanding is that anthropologists are reasonably satisfied with the evidence that today’s population of the world, outside Africa, is descended from a migration from Africa that dates to about 70,000 years ago. That, in evolutionary terms, is a mere blink of an eye, and thus it should not be a surprise that whatever our diversity of appearance, we are all demonstrably the same species, with extremely recent common ancestors. Modern communications that mean that we are now essentially a single world community date so recently that it should also not be a surprise that previous isolation between different populations has been sufficient for the ethnic diversity we observe today to have developed. But this ethnic diversity is very shallow and only a matter of appearance. Those modern communications and the reality of human nature means that those distinctions are already beginning to blur, and it won’t be so long before the very concept of ‘mixed marriage’ will become anachronistic.
There are undoubtedly some things that have to be addressed carefully. One elephant in the room has been the dominance of black people in athletic sprinting events, for example. A recent program on British television, presented by the black American athlete Michael Johnson, considered opinions from geneticists that suggested that the harsh realities of the transportation of slaves from Africa to America meant that survivors had a tendency to be those with high testosterone levels. There is therefore a credible possibility that this has lead to a high proportion of people with higher than the mean levels of testosterone among the black population of the Americas. But it is a vital point that this, by no means constitutes evolution. It is far too short term for that. And again, the way in which modern society works means that concentration of high testosterone levels will tend to re-disperse through the broader population. And it remains equally credible that social differences in lives of the different communities is at least as much of a factor. Whatever may be the case about that, those who seek to suggest that this dominance of black athletes constitutes any kind of evidence of deeper levels of differences between ethnicities are usually motivated by some kind of racist agenda and their arguments are not difficult to refute.
