Nicholas Wade in his latest book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, arguing that economic success can, at least in part, be attributed to racial differences with a genetic foundation. He states that the latest research on the human genome establishes beyond doubt that there is indeed a biological basis for race, and that the human population can be broadly divided into three main racial types: sub-Saharan Africans, Caucasians and East Asians. In addition to obvious physical differences – notably skin colour – natural selection on the main continents has resulted in marked differences in some aspects of brain function, which has in turn influenced the kind of economic success enjoyed by some countries, and missed out by others.
Nearly 150 population geneticists, who study how genes collectively contribute to physical and behavioural attributes, have now signed a letter criticising Wade misappropriating research from their field to support his arguments about inheritable differences among human societies – epitomised in a biological basis for race.
“Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development,” the letter says. “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures,” it says.
Britain, and specifically the English, pioneered the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century because since the Middle Ages the rich had more surviving children than the poor and this meant that the values of the upper middle classes – nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience – spread as genetic traits within the population, according to Wade, an old Etonian. Europe benefited early on from industrialisation because their people were more genetically predisposed to being open and tolerant, unlike the Chinese, while the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ because the more intelligent among them were richer and therefore able to afford more children, he says.
With all Africans reduced to a single racial category, Wade commences explaining why genes cause its problems. Africans did not “develop the ingrained behaviors of trust, nonviolence and thrift that a productive economy requires.” To advance, they need “the transformation of a population’s traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies” and in the West. The failure of “Africa” to evolve the necessary traits for success in our modern world is not for lack of resources. Rather, after colonialism, Wade writes, Africa “reverted to the kind of social system to which Africans had become adapted during the previous centuries.” By “adapted,” he means “genetically adapted,” a point made explicit at the beginning of the book. Wade offers no evidence to support his genetic story of Africa’s poverty because none exists. In the absence of evidence, Wade resorts to homicide statistics.
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, said that Wade should be deeply embarrassed because his propensity to “make up” stories resembles a theologian more than a science journalist. “For Wade to write a whole book resting on this speculative house of cards – the idea that genes and natural selection are everything in explaining culture – is simply bad popular science,” Professor Coyne said.
Mark Stoneking, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in Germany said that Wade is wrong to say that modern genomics shows there is a biological basis for race. “How to define the concept of race biologically is not easy, but to me one prediction is that not only should one be able to define discrete clusters of people that correspond to races, there should be distinct boundaries between them,” Dr Stoneking said. “And if you look at patterns of genetic variation in human populations, you find they are distributed along geographic ‘clines’ with no distinct boundaries,” he said. “It's like a rainbow. Sure, I can identify parts of a rainbow that are different –red, yellow, blue, and so forth – but there are no sharp boundaries between them; a rainbow is a gradient of colours.”
Wade is a science writer, not a scientist. The people criticising him are actual scientists and specialists in the field, and he is using their research to support racist theories. So when the people who did the actual research say he does not know what he is talking about, SOYMB would go with the scientists rather than Wade.
In the New York Times Book Review of July 13, David Dobbs wrote that it was "a deeply flawed, deceptive, and dangerous book" with "pernicious conceits". Biologist H. Allen Orr writes, "Hard evidence for Wade's thesis is nearly nonexistent." In the Boston Review, sociologist Philip Cohen places it "in the grand tradition of scientific racism." Discussion of human race isn't shunned in academia, they say: it's merely kept within the bounds of what is known and unknown. On race, researchers "say about all we can say," in the words of UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen. Wade, Eisen says, "is trying not just to make it OK to voice racist theories about the origins of human phenotypic variation, he is yearning to give them the validity of science." Wade has blurred "the distinction between storytelling and science," writes Eisen.
From here and here and here
Nearly 150 population geneticists, who study how genes collectively contribute to physical and behavioural attributes, have now signed a letter criticising Wade misappropriating research from their field to support his arguments about inheritable differences among human societies – epitomised in a biological basis for race.
“Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic development,” the letter says. “We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures,” it says.
Britain, and specifically the English, pioneered the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century because since the Middle Ages the rich had more surviving children than the poor and this meant that the values of the upper middle classes – nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience – spread as genetic traits within the population, according to Wade, an old Etonian. Europe benefited early on from industrialisation because their people were more genetically predisposed to being open and tolerant, unlike the Chinese, while the Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ because the more intelligent among them were richer and therefore able to afford more children, he says.
With all Africans reduced to a single racial category, Wade commences explaining why genes cause its problems. Africans did not “develop the ingrained behaviors of trust, nonviolence and thrift that a productive economy requires.” To advance, they need “the transformation of a population’s traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies” and in the West. The failure of “Africa” to evolve the necessary traits for success in our modern world is not for lack of resources. Rather, after colonialism, Wade writes, Africa “reverted to the kind of social system to which Africans had become adapted during the previous centuries.” By “adapted,” he means “genetically adapted,” a point made explicit at the beginning of the book. Wade offers no evidence to support his genetic story of Africa’s poverty because none exists. In the absence of evidence, Wade resorts to homicide statistics.
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago, said that Wade should be deeply embarrassed because his propensity to “make up” stories resembles a theologian more than a science journalist. “For Wade to write a whole book resting on this speculative house of cards – the idea that genes and natural selection are everything in explaining culture – is simply bad popular science,” Professor Coyne said.
Mark Stoneking, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in Germany said that Wade is wrong to say that modern genomics shows there is a biological basis for race. “How to define the concept of race biologically is not easy, but to me one prediction is that not only should one be able to define discrete clusters of people that correspond to races, there should be distinct boundaries between them,” Dr Stoneking said. “And if you look at patterns of genetic variation in human populations, you find they are distributed along geographic ‘clines’ with no distinct boundaries,” he said. “It's like a rainbow. Sure, I can identify parts of a rainbow that are different –red, yellow, blue, and so forth – but there are no sharp boundaries between them; a rainbow is a gradient of colours.”
Wade is a science writer, not a scientist. The people criticising him are actual scientists and specialists in the field, and he is using their research to support racist theories. So when the people who did the actual research say he does not know what he is talking about, SOYMB would go with the scientists rather than Wade.
In the New York Times Book Review of July 13, David Dobbs wrote that it was "a deeply flawed, deceptive, and dangerous book" with "pernicious conceits". Biologist H. Allen Orr writes, "Hard evidence for Wade's thesis is nearly nonexistent." In the Boston Review, sociologist Philip Cohen places it "in the grand tradition of scientific racism." Discussion of human race isn't shunned in academia, they say: it's merely kept within the bounds of what is known and unknown. On race, researchers "say about all we can say," in the words of UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen. Wade, Eisen says, "is trying not just to make it OK to voice racist theories about the origins of human phenotypic variation, he is yearning to give them the validity of science." Wade has blurred "the distinction between storytelling and science," writes Eisen.
From here and here and here
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