Genetic diversity and human equality

This book of a little more than 100 pages and just over 30 years old should be re-read by those who read it when first published. Moreover, it should be recommended to everyone involved in education from secondary school on up, and to those in the media; it should also be perused by all those responsible for Italian social policies. In dealing with its topic, this book is simple, almost to the point of being banal (starting from the title). Yet, usually the simplicity of authors so authoritative on such delicate questions conceals profound knowledge and thinking. In this article, I purposely deal with the book in some length, hoping not to bore the reader, because I have discovered with regret that it is no longer available in bookstores. But why write about genetics and human equality in the USA in 1973, and why suggest the reading or re-reading of this book in Italy in 2009? There are, in my opinion, two responses to the first question. Firstly, even though well over 100 years had passed since the abolition of slavery, the USA had nev er truly adapted ideologically to its multi-ethnic nature. Although promoting itself worldwide as the leader in human rights, the USA has constantly lived with the internal contradiction of not having fully managed to accept its multi-ethnicity, despite appreciating, like few others in the world, the value of multi-ethnicity in all productive sectors of the country. It has always been pervaded by subtle, almost invisible signs of discrimination, which occasionally have emerged in episodes of individual violence not easily explainable in view of the nation’s normal lawfulness. Secondly, in academia, the 1970s saw the increasing development and consolidation of the enormous possibilities of knowledge deriving from Watson and Crick’s discovery in 1953 of the helical structure of DNA. This discovery was followed by the expansion of human and population genetics as the leading disciplines in the field of genetics, not only as instruments of knowledge and comprehension of human variability, but especially as the means of verification and confirmation of the fact that such variability could be related to a gradient of lesser or greater intellectual abilities. It was precisely this point that Dobzhansky believed must be clarified. Physical diversity should be considered a patrimony of humanity and not evidence of cultural diversity: it should have nothing to do with cultural and social discrimination. Why recommend the reading or re-reading of this book in the Italy of 2009? The question is superfluous. In my opinion, Italian history presents two characteristic social and political aspects that mark the country’s dynamics and whose comprehension is necessary to understand my conviction that reading this text is still useful, even necessary, today. In the last 100-150 years, Italy has changed from a country of heavy emigration to one of strong immigration, all the while finding itself unprepared culturally, socially and politically for such a metamorphosis. This problem, combined with the Italian political history, has never been resolved and is even becoming accentuated in the early twenty-first century, transforming an initial verbally-expressed impatience toward the increasing multi-ethnicity of the Italian society into dangerous episodes of intolerance, at times gratuitous and even physical. It is grievous