[A Troublesome Inheritance - Genes, Race and Human History](A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History) has attracted a lot of hate.
If you’re not familiar with it (and I haven’t read it), it was written by the former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade. He also wrote Before the Dawn, about what humans did before writing was invented and how we know it. Fascinating book. Lots of well-deserved accolades.
A Troublesome Inheritance suggests that some differences we see among races is genetic (but recent), exacerbated by culture. Again, I haven’t read the book, but I know one hypothesis Wade has espoused is that Ashkenazi Jews were subject to unique survival stresses, not being able to own land in most of Europe for most of the last 1000 years. Therefore, he says, they worked as bankers or lawyers, or failed to get married and reproduce. So fully half the Nobel prizes for physics ever awarded have gone to Ashkenazi Jews, or people with at least one Ashkenazi parent.
Is that hateful, or is it, as Thomas Jefferson would say, not being “afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead?”
I got my Southern Poverty Law Center magazine a couple of days ago and it reviewedA Troublesome Inheritance, dismissing it roundly.
Googling about the book gives many similar results.
Is Wade being made a pariah because he asks uncomfortable questions, and posits uncomfortable answers, or has he gone round the bend and is just espousing fascist eugenics?
Just the usual Pseudo-science, I have seen the same coming from creationists, 911 truthers, moon hoaxers, climate change deniers and many others. The denial of not only science but that they wilfully ignore the conclusions of the experts that made the scientific work that the pseudo scientist abuses. And that is why they get no respect where it counts. No wonder he had to make a book, he could not face peer review to check if he was onto something as it is clear he knew what the result of that would had been.
Having read a lot of the thread with orcenio’s reference guide as the anchor, I don’t think my thread is adding much. If a mod wants to close it, that’s fine with me.
I really liked Before the Dawn. Is that a bunch of junk, too?
A false dichotomy. There is no binary choice between accepting a “race” system created by European colonialists and total denial of human genetic variation.
There’s plenty of genetic variation between groups; it just doesn’t conveniently follow the unscientific race system. Two “black people” will often be more genetically different from each other than either of them are from a “white” person, for example.
I’m generally sympathetic to ideas that there might be significant genetic variation between ethnic groups, and I’m fairly strongly hereditarian (leaving race and ethnicity entirely aside). That said, anyone who really believes there are five biological races is a fool.
The really interesting differences between populations are usually at a much smaller scale than ‘continental groupings’. For example, the way Quechuas and Aymaras, Tibetans, and Amhara have all independently evolved adaptations to high altitude (and as you’d expect, the South American groups are the least well adapted, since they haven’t lived at altitude for that long). If I was recruiting someone to explore a newly discovered planet with lower oxygen, it might make sense to take those differences into account.
I wouldn’t be especially surprised if some behavioral and cognitive traits showed genetic differences among populations, but simply, there are a lot more than five reasonable human groupings out there.
Nobody is claiming that, clearly humanity has many different skin colors. The claim is that “white people” and “black people” are social constructs with no scientific basis, in fact those two grouping are fluid and have and continue to become more inclusive or exclusive.
The tack I’ve started taking lately is pointing out that we don’t think that all tall people are separate from all short people, so why separate ourselves by an equally superficial trait? Sure, tall parents will tend to have tall kids, just like black parents will tend to have black kids, but that doesn’t mean that all tall people are somehow different, genetically, from all short people. Grouping by skin color is just as arbitrary.
Lol. In looking at orcenio’s thread, Stringbean did a drive-by gibberish post there too! Looks like Stringbean is really, really interested in this topic, but not interested enough to actually learn about it, or post more than once in a thread.
Do you even know what genes are? They are the blueprint for your body.
Of course tall people and short people are different genetically; one group has a strong genetic potential for height and another has a strong genetic potential to be short. The point is we are grouping people by a particular trait, which is valid whether it’s comfortable or not.
This isn’t a debate; it’s an infiltration of PC sterility. Racism is wrong, but seeing people deny that genetic variation exists, particularly in a trait so distinct as skin color, is intellectually bankrupt.
That was the point of my initial post, which if read accurately is actually an insult to myself since I am the one espousing a view of nuance.