Attention, white supremacists! On this hand, I offer you a slice of your own paradise:

(CNN) — The allegation is shocking: an 8-year-old girl lured to a storage shed with the promise of chewing gum, pinned down and sexually assaulted by four boys, none of them older than 14.

The response from the girl's family sent a second and equally stunning shockwave through their Phoenix, Arizona, community: "The parents felt that they had been shamed or embarrassed by their child," reported Phoenix police Sgt. Andy Hill.

As a result, the girl was taken into custody by Arizona's child welfare agency.

The prosecutor who charged the four boys called the crime "heartrending" and "deeply disturbing." But to those familiar with Liberia, the west African nation where the families of all of the children are from, the crime and response are both part of a sadly familiar story.

"It's something that happens every day in every community in Liberia," said Tania Bernath, a researcher for the human rights group Amnesty International.

But now that I have given you some paradise, I must give you some hell:

Some 99% of the human genome is shuffled from one birth to the next. The Genographic Project traces the 1% of the genome which is not shuffled—mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) through the maternal line and the Y-chromosome through the paternal. These jokers in the pack allow geneticists to work back to our common ancestors. Our mtDNA appears to coalesce in a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000 years ago. Our Y-chromosome survives from a single man, who lived in the Rift Valley of Kenya or Tanzania 59,000 years ago.So Adam and Eve did exist—90,000 years apart. The discrepancy is because, unlike the biblical Adam and Eve, this couple only represent the last common Ancestors we can trace genetically...

...Cavalli-Sforza’s “The History and Geography of Human Genes”, written with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1994), is still considered the best overview of genetic diversity in humans. Cavalli-Sforza demolished the idea of there being different species of human being. No more Homo afer, asiaticus, europaeus, americanus and monstrous. Race, says Cavalli-Sforza, has hardly any useful biological meaning at all. It is about adaptation. Grain-eaters between the Baltic and Black Sea got pale skin, pale eyes and pale hair because they were under selective pressure to process more Vitamin D from limited sunlight. Lewontin, Wells’s other mentor, posited that if a nuclear war struck and only the Kenyan Kikuyu survived, they would still have 85% of the genetic variation of mankind; with a similar history and conditions, they too would turn blond and blue-eyed under the northern sun...

This, by the way, is a member of the Kikuyu tribe:

More hell!

...We are all Africans. We originated in Africa. That is proved by the continent’s rich genetic inheritance. Africans are more diverse than the rest of humanity put together, because they are drawn from the pool of humans who did not leave. As Wells points out, two Africans from the same village could be more divergent from each other than either is from a non-African. The question is whether this new understanding will reinforce prejudices against Africans, or help end them.

As Africa’s population rises and parts of the continent collapse under economic and environmental pressures, eugenics may reappear. This would be revised eugenics, conceding the physical superiority of Africans in everything from penis size to sprinting, but holding that they are not selected for problem solving, having never benefited from the training ground of the Eurasian steppe (with its need for microliths, clothing and portable shelters). “To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity,” wrote the novelist H.G. Wells, a proponent of eugenics.

Rubbish, says Spencer Wells. There are no nasty genetic secrets out there about Africans, “certainly no differences in general intelligence”. Whites’ superior attitudes towards blacks, he reckons, is based on a “general correlation between latitudes and economic development”. Even if National Geographic is suffocated by political correctness and an obsessive need for a tidy narrative, he is right. If Africa is stunted, it is through circumstance, not genetics.