It's no secret that a small amount of knowledge can be poisonous to a person who lacks context and understanding. As more and more scientists uncover tiny variations in DNA that cause certain racial or ethnic traits — such as pale skin in Europeans, West Africans' resistance to certain diseases, and even Asians' tendency to sweat less — many in the scientific community worry that people who are already prejudiced will use these findings as false scientific proof that certain races are superior to others. It's already happening, according to a story in the New York Times.

Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.

No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-old software developer, means “the egalitarian theory,” that all races are equal, “is proven false.”

As scientist and professor Joseph L. Graves told Stereohyped a few weeks ago, if the nation (and world) at large actually understood science, even a little bit, this wouldn't be a concern. But most people don't. Will the more information we find out about our genetic differences give us more reasons to hate each other?