Like most popular reports of science, that one is confused and contradictory and in particular offers no evidence to support the claim about racial differences (that wasn’t even the point of the original study). I read more of Highfield’s writing at the Times and he is very deceptive about the evidence for ongoing evolution by natural selection in humans. A finding that shows rapid genetic evolution in the last 5 or 10 thousand years (he can’t seem to make up his mind) is not the same thing as showing that we are presently responding to continuing selection pressure. That’s just not very likely given all sorts of offsetting cultural trends like expanding medical intervention and so forth. And his idea that delaying reproduction–and living longer as a consequence–will cure all sorts of diseases is just preposterous. The reason we have so many late-life diseases now is because of our “unnaturally” long life spans. Living even longer will only expose ever more disease at a rate faster than our abilities to cure them.

Take popular science writing with a big, fat grain of salt.