I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.
Perhaps, but so far modern scientific discoveries have been fairly devastating towards the various hypotheses of "scientific racism." Just recently it's gotten to the point where some white supremacists are convinced the field if genetics is a Jewish conspiracy because they got their genes tested and... surprise... they're 5% non-white.