How will our understanding of race and genetics evolve? Do we anticipate great discoveries that will significantly change our views about racial equality? What does the future hold?

To begin with, we can only assume that all of the fields that contribute to our current understanding of race and genetics, such as biology, geography, archeology, anthropology, sociology, and history, will continue to advance. As I mentioned, the identification of a single toe bone or tooth fragment could rewrite human history. However, considering that accepted theories are based on multiple overlapping lines of evidence, I do not think that our understanding will change radically. Instead, it will  become more refined.

For example, we will learn more about how we lived before we migrated from Africa, the territory we occupied, the plants and animals found there, the climate at that time, and details of events such as the Toba Catastrophe, that steered the course of human history. Likewise, the dates and paths of our various migrations from Africa and to other parts of the world will become more clear, as well as the gene flow that occurred between these areas, and the varying degrees of isolation, imposed by geographical barriers, that effected our genetic composition.

We will learn more about how humans intermingled with and eventually replaced Neanderthals and Denisovans, and how much and what parts of our genome derive from this union. Perhaps we will also discover that humans met and interbred with other hominins, such as Homo floresiensis, the small Pacific islanders. If so, we may add more extinct sub species to the human lineage, and our picture of the genes we have carried forward through time will become more complex.

Additionally, we will learn more recent human history–for example, the last 10,000 years. More details about how the environment shaped history will emerge, we will clarify the historical events and processes that are not determined by the environment, and our understanding of the importance of culture, and individual, will improve.

There are two areas of research that I believe have the potential to change our understanding of race and genetics in more profound ways. The first is the study of genetic variation. Recall that Lewontin’s 1972 study employed seventeen genetic markers, while Rosenberg’s 2003 study employed 993 markers. In the future, studies will routinely employ thousands of markers. In addition, the number of people sampled will increase. This is particularly important for areas previously considered homogeneous, including entire continents, such as Africa. Our understanding of human genetic variation will improve, and we will be able to make sense of the great admixture of genes in any one person, and trace our ancestry with greater precision.

The second area of research is the ongoing quest to relate particular genes to particular characteristics, or, to use the parlance of biology, to relate genotype to phenotype. Considering the remarkable achievements of genetic research, and the incredible amount of money and resources directed into this field, it is astonishing that we know so little about genes.

Consider a characteristic such as height. We know that height exhibits a high degree of heritability, that is, our height can be accurately predicted from the heights of our parents, so it must be encoded somewhere in our genes. We also know that height was shaped by natural selection. Therefore, you might expect that we have a solid understanding of the genetic basis for height. In fact, attempts to find the genes that determine height have been largely unsuccessful. Studies of genetic variation show that about half of the variation in height within a population can be explained by as many as 300,000 genetic markers. We also know there are mutations in certain genes that produce developmental disorders related to height, and so we assume that these genes play some role in determining height, at least when they do not function properly. However, we have no real understanding of which genes, or set of genes, control height in healthy humans. If this is true of height, a relatively simple physical characteristic, with high heritability, shaped by natural selection, how can we hope to understand more complex traits, influenced less by genes, and more by the environment, which have not changed so clearly over time?

When we have a better understanding of how genes and characteristic are related, we will be able to study how they are distributed through populations and over time. For example, we may be able to link specific characteristics, such as height or skin color, to specific genes, define how these genes vary between people from different parts of the world, and trace the evolution of these genes. Our understanding of human variation will consequently improve.

I should say that this kind of research could easily be misinterpreted. For the sake of argument, imagine that we identified a gene that determined a fundamental characteristic. Imagine, furthermore, that we determined the distribution of this genes in various groups of people. The potential to support racist beliefs or policies would be enormous. I hope it’s clear why this scenario will most likely never occur. To begin with, fundamental characteristics are almost certainly too complex to be precisely determined by one or even many genes. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe that fundamental characteristics vary around the world in any systematic way, for all of the reasons described elsewhere on this website.

Therefore, while our understanding of our history and origin, and our knowledge of genetics, will certainly improve in the future, there is no reason to suspect that the scientific basis for racial equality will be overturned.