The core ideological principle that maintains racism is the mistaken belief thatI donno ... Most people have always assumed that #1 is true, but I never believed in #2. I don't see why the two propositions have to go together.
[1] biological races really exist in the human species and that
[2] individual aspects of character and morality can be identified by one's racial ancestry.
As noted above, there are certainly very distinct differences in racial physiology. For example, there are specific racial settings/norms for breathing capacity tests. And for some reason the Olympic sprints are dominated by people of West African heritage.
As for character and morality, there's no particular reason to believe that there are not racial components, either. Compare, for example, the temperaments of golden retrievers vs. German shepherds. Although humans are more complex, why should we be immune to such things?
At any rate, it's interesting how a professor of evolutionary biology would tell us that subtle population differences between, say, silvereye birds is evidence of evolution; while simultaneously holding that significant physiological differences are somehow not evidence of evolutionary divergence between humans. This is not logical -- but it is politically correct.