Q: You’ve written about how genomics will shed light on many evolutionary puzzles. What are some examples?

DR. KING: One example of enormous interest to me is what makes us human. As a species we became human because genetic changes occurred that enabled us to build a culture, and eventually cultural evolution became our most obvious feature.

One of the critical things that makes us human is our ability to alter our culture. What were the genetic changes that underlay our capacity to develop a culture that allows us to largely direct our own evolution? We don’t yet know what those alterations were, but we know that there weren’t very many of them. We have to learn much more about ourselves if we’re to understand how we came to be as a species.

Being able to determine the genetic differences between chimpanzees and human beings is extremely interesting. Humans get different diseases than other primates. To better understand this, we’ll have to gain a deeper understanding of our closest relatives. I’m a strong believer that one important way to get there is to have a chimp sequence as good as the human sequence. I’m concerned that there’s not as much enthusiasm for questions of evolution as there should be.

Another area of great interest to me is that geneticists take a constructive role in the dialogue about the whole question of race and ancestry. Race is an important cultural and social concept and we don’t do anyone any favors by ducking it.

However, race is not an important concept genetically. I hope geneticists will take advantage of what we now know about human genomic diversity to develop a way of discussing ancestry that makes sense genetically.