Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), p. 12.
“As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth.
Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives.
That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities.”
Source: The Machine's Child (2006), Chapter 29, “Still Another Morning in 500,000 BCE” (p. 330)
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Kage Baker 79
American writer 1952–2010Related quotes
Mascott, R. D. (pseud. Arthur Calder-Marshall). The Adventures of James Bond Junior 003½. London: Jonathan Cape. 1967.

Source: Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (1987), p. 190

Source: Way Station (1963), Ch. 25
Context: That had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment — not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death or misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.
Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.

“Of late years… it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin”
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278
Context: Of late years... it has been successfully shewn that the human race might have had one origin, for anything that can be inferred from external peculiarities.
Source: Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015), pp. 9–10.

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 4 (p. 42)

We would not have been the bastion of freedom we have been in the twentieth century.
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A