Introduction

When Michael Crawford asked me to write a final chapter for this volume he suggested that I write some ‘science fiction’ and that I should ‘let myself go’. I will take him at his word in what follows, assessing several areas of anthropological genetics in terms of their likely short-term directions and consequences. I discuss anthropological genetics specifically rather than any of the rest of human genetics since there is no shortage of science fiction available about the latter.

If there is a coherent theme in my story it is that some areas of our discipline will soon find themselves at the centre of public debates about important political, social justice and educational issues. This will be caused by market forces in some cases and by new data about human genetic diversity that will force a drastic reassessment of our views about the possibility of group equalities in contemporary industrial societies. As a discipline there is a sense in which we have had our heads hidden in the sand, earnestly teaching our students about lactase and HbS and about G6PD while maintaining the fiction, or failing to deny the fiction, that humans don't really differ at all in traits that have large visible social consequences. Other areas of our discipline will in the near future enjoy less visibility than they do now, for example the effort to read global human history from patterns in the neutral genome.