# Wade Book "A Troublesome Inheritance" - science, or racism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 5, 2014, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616 "2014-09-05T21:55:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/21 "2014-09-07T02:24:53Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > No, I’m only on year 6 of my biology PhD. We haven’t covered those yet. Yes and you’ve probably gone to schools dominated by guilt-ridden PC liberals who’ve been suppressing THE TRUTH!!! How many courses have you taken from the courageous race realists who go to malls and demand of people there “How large is your penis when fully erect?” “How far can you ejaculate?” “How many female sexual partners have you had in the past three years?”! ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/22 "2014-09-07T03:19:37Z")
> [@Stringbean](#): > > 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. Um, that’s not the point of Wade’s book. Obviously, people have different skin colors, and skin color is, in part, genetic. If Wade had limited himself to pointing that out, then he’d have a book that is one page long. Did you even read the rebuttals to Wade’s book? Do you even know how to science? ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/23 "2014-09-07T07:02:28Z")
Is the percentage assertion about Askenazi Jews and Nobel prizes true? ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/24 "2014-09-07T12:57:01Z")
> [@Stringbean](#): > > Do you even know what genes are? They are the blueprint for your body. > [@Smeghead](#): > > No, I’m only on year 6 of my biology PhD. We haven’t covered those yet. You must be racist against Indian people because that was a sikh burn! ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 2:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/25 "2014-09-07T14:53:04Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Is the percentage assertion about Askenazi Jews and Nobel prizes true? I am horribly ignorant of the history of Jewish people, and have never before heard the term “Askenazi”. Does that not sound like an unfortunate term? (Poor attempt at humor: It sounds like the name of an evil 1930’s advice column.) ---
**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/26 "2014-09-07T15:55:32Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > No, I’m only on year 6 of my biology PhD. We haven’t covered those yet. When you do, try using them as a geeky pick-up like on the co-eds: “I just want to get into your genes.” ---
**Author:** ![Stringbean](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d6d6ee/32.png) [@Stringbean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stringbean)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2014, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/27 "2014-09-07T16:42:16Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > 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. You betray your years of education with such a statement, if indeed you are on year 6 of receiving a PhD in biology. It’s rather like a physicist saying a book and a rock both fall at an equal rate and are therefore the same thing. You know genetics run the gamut and the cluster that determines height potential is not equal between all people. If you meant to say something more nuanced it was not portrayed. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/28 "2014-09-08T04:35:38Z")
> [@bup](#): > > _ **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?” > … > > 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? Obviously anyone who suggests group differences have arisen from natural selection is likely to attract a hostile reception. Unfortunately, this kind of thing may be inevitable. It’s something [Professor Robert Weinberg pointed out 10 years ago as an ethical issue as genomic research progresses](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-012-introduction-to-biology-fall-2004/video-lectures/lecture-35-human-polymorphisms-and-cancer-classification/). > [@](#): > > Whatever ability you want, valued or not so valued, what if those alleles begin to come out? And here’s the worse part. What if somebody begins to look for the frequency of those alleles in different ethnic groups scattered across this planet? Now, you will say to me, well, God has made all his children equal. But the fact is if you look at the details of human evolution, some of which I discussed with you a week ago, last week, you’ll come to realize that most populations in humanity are the modern descendents of very small founder groups. > > … So the fact is it’s inescapable that different alleles are going to be present with different frequencies in different inbreeding populations of humanity or populations of humanity that traditionally have been genetically isolated from one another. > > It’s not as if all the genes that we carry have been mixed with everybody else’s genes freely over the last 100,000 years. Different groups have bred separately and have, for reasons that I’ve told you, founder affects and genetic drift, acquired different sets and different constellations of alleles. So what’s going to happen then, I ask you without wishing to hear an answer because nobody really knows? > … > What’s going to happen then? I don’t know. But some scientists say, well, the truth must come out and that everything that can be learned should be learned, and we will learn how to digest it and we will learn how to live with that. But I’m not so sure that’s the right thing. And you all have to wrestle with that as well. … ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/29 "2014-09-08T11:19:36Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Obviously anyone who suggests group differences have arisen from natural selection is likely to attract a hostile reception. Unfortunately, this kind of thing may be inevitable. It’s certainly inevitable (and not unfortunate at all) when, as Wade has, someone makes baseless and evidence-free assertions about the inherent genetic characteristics of personality and intelligence for various “races”. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/30 "2014-09-08T11:28:33Z")
A solid rundown of what’s wrong, scientifically speaking, with Wade’s book, is [here](http://stanfordcehg.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/echoes-of-the-past-hereditarianism-and-a-troublesome-inheritance/). ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/31 "2014-09-08T14:31:57Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Is the percentage assertion about Askenazi Jews and Nobel prizes true? They are certainly well represented among Nobel winners. The rest of it is simple assertion without evidence. Michelin star restaurants are predominantly located in France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Somehow, I doubt this would be taken as a sign of a Japanese cooking gene. Sure, we could come up with some kind of story about scarce resources on an island nation leading to the dying out of people without appropriate culinary sense. But your BS meter should be pinging pretty loudly at that (just as it should be pinging pretty loudly at the story of Ashkenazi non-banker/lawyer/academics “dying out”). It’s possible to come up with a story that ties genetics to an existing conclusion. It’s entirely a different matter to prove such a story. ---
**Author:** ![miss\_elizabeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/838e76/32.png) [@miss\_elizabeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/miss_elizabeth)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/32 "2014-09-08T15:43:24Z")
Well, scientists say it’s racism, but racists say it’s science. So, it really just comes down to who you choose to listen to. ---
**Author:** ![bup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6bbea6/32.png) [@bup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bup)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/33 "2014-09-08T15:50:18Z")
> [@astro](#): > > Is the percentage assertion about Askenazi Jews and Nobel prizes true? I misremembered (or maybe Wade gave the wrong number in his book, but I’d bet the error is mine). It’s not quite so lopsided. According to Jinfo - [26% of physics Nobel prizes have gone to people with one or two Jewish parent](http://www.jinfo.org/Nobels_Physics.html)s (measuring by heredity, not by faith). I know Wade talked about Ashkenazis in particular (I think to make the point this is really about environmental stressors and not ‘innate’ Jewish DNA being superior). But also, clearly, Germany and northern Europe generally were the hotbed of physics in the first half of the 20th century, and the US is now well represented and has a higher proportion of northern European Jews than the planet as a whole. Still, certainly fewer than 26% of Germans, or Americans, or any nationality but \*maybe \*Israelis are Jews of northern European descent, and it’s an interesting question why the number is as high as it is. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/34 "2014-09-08T15:56:52Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > 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. Exactly- a “white” Sicilian may have more in common genetically with an “Arab” N. African than he would with a “white” German or Pole. I think the fallacy is to take the Ashkenazi example and extrapolate it any further than the fact that the environmental stressors selected for intelligence. The high Jewish representation in Nobel Prize winners may just as easily be explained through some kind of cultural natural selection. If having and excelling in intellectual professions is the way to survive and thrive, it’s more likely over the historical time frame that the culture changed, not the genetics. It’s pretty clear that Jewish culture has much more reverence toward professional and intellectual careers and achievement than say… standard White culture, and I think that pushes smart Jews into science and math in higher proportional numbers. I suspect for the same reasons, we’ll start seeing a lot of Asian-American Nobel Prize winners in the next 4-5 decades as well, not because they’re inherently smarter than anyone else. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/35 "2014-09-08T16:30:39Z")
> [@bobot](#): > > I am horribly ignorant of the history of Jewish people, and have never before heard the term “Askenazi”. Does that not sound like an unfortunate term? > (Poor attempt at humor: It sounds like the name of an evil 1930’s advice column.) Ashkenazi Jews are just Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. It comes from a Medieval Hebrew name for Germany. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2014, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/36 "2014-09-08T20:47:56Z")
Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2014, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/37 "2014-09-09T06:16:19Z")
> [@bump](#): > > Exactly- a “white” Sicilian may have more in common genetically with an “Arab” N. African than he would with a “white” German or Pole. > > I think the fallacy is to take the Ashkenazi example and extrapolate it any further than the fact that the environmental stressors selected for intelligence. The high Jewish representation in Nobel Prize winners may just as easily be explained through some kind of cultural natural selection. > > If having and excelling in intellectual professions is the way to survive and thrive, it’s more likely over the historical time frame that the culture changed, not the genetics. It’s pretty clear that Jewish culture has much more reverence toward professional and intellectual careers and achievement than say… standard White culture, and I think that pushes smart Jews into science and math in higher proportional numbers. > > I suspect for the same reasons, we’ll start seeing a lot of Asian-American Nobel Prize winners in the next 4-5 decades as well, not because they’re inherently smarter than anyone else. “Cultural natural selection”. Note that: 1. Intelligence is partially heritable (as are all behavioural traits). 2. If you have some reproductive advantage associated with that cultural niche, you’ll get an increase in the prevalence of that trait. That is pretty much the argument for the high average level of intelligence for Ashkenazi jewish groups - pegged at about 110? That means on a normal distribution of intelligence, you’ll get a far higher proportion of people with high IQ’s who enter cognitively demanding professions. @ **miss elizabeth** , Whether groups have differ on average due to genetic variation is simply a hypothesis like whether North and South Europeans differ on average height. In fact, as Steve Hsu has pointed out, that difference in itself appears to be due to differences in the allele frequencies linked to height. Intelligence has similar heritability and involves a number of genes of small effect. Once you identify the genetic architecture of intelligence (or whatever trait you like) you could simply look at the prevalence across groups (that’s what Weinberg was concerned about above). As Hsu, noted the 2nd half of Wade’s book is speculative (which Wade acknowledges), nonetheless, the [ideas are testable:](http://infoproc.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/whats-new-since-montagu.html) > [@](#): > > It is fair to say that results on height, as well as on simpler traits such as lactose or altitude tolerance, are consistent with Wade’s theme that evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. > > Further extrapolation to behavioral and cognitive traits will require more data, but: > > 1. The question is scientific – it can be answered with known methods. (I estimate of order millions of genotype-phenotype pairs will allow us to extract the genetic architecture of complex traits like cognitive ability – perhaps sometime in the coming decade.) > > 2. There is no a priori argument, given what we currently know, that such differences cannot exist. (Cf. Neanderthals!) Note this is NOT an argument that differences exist – merely that they might, and that we cannot exclude the possibility… > > The second part of A Troublesome Inheritance covers controversial topics such as genetic group differences in behavioral and cognitive predispositions, and their societal implications. Wade is mostly careful to present these as speculative hypotheses, but nevertheless his advocacy leaves him vulnerable to easy attack. What I have summarized above are the incontestable (albeit, in some circles, perhaps still controversial and poorly understood) new results that have accumulated through the last decade of genomic research… > > I think Orr/Coyne/Wade all miss the most interesting piece of science regarding strength of recent selection: evidence that the N-S height gradient (about 1 SD of difference between the two regions) in Europeans is due to selection pressure. That would constitute an example of fairly strong (in the context of the debate over group differences in humans) selection pressure acting over relatively short periods of time (~ 10 kya or less). I would think this result, if it holds up, might require significant updating of priors for certain people. It also provides a good example of how science in this area should be done: observed phenotype group difference, large data sets (GIANT) teasing out the genetic architecture, tests for selection on associated genetic variants. > > Another point, for the cognoscenti: Wade does a good job explaining the difference between soft and hard sweeps. Orr notes that small adjustments of allele frequencies is one of the primary mechanisms for evolutionary change (so nothing new in Wade’s discussion; goes all the way back to Fisher), but many many readers, even biologists who aren’t in population genetics, don’t understand this point very well. So reading that section in the book would increase understanding for a large number of people. ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/38 "2014-09-14T06:59:35Z")
Wade has made specific claims. **Orcenio** has posted rebuttals to those claims in the other thread. How about any of you Wade defenders go through one of those rebuttals, pick a specific rebuttal and actually respond to it? ---
**Author:** ![Chen019](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f19dbf/32.png) [@Chen019](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chen019)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 8:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/39 "2014-09-14T08:44:46Z")
> [@BrightNShiny](#): > > Wade has made specific claims. **Orcenio** has posted rebuttals to those claims in the other thread. How about any of you Wade defenders go through one of those rebuttals, pick a specific rebuttal and actually respond to it? Which I thought he was at pains to point out were speculative? ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2014, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616/40 "2014-09-14T12:24:45Z")
> [@Chen019](#): > > Which I thought he was at pains to point out were speculative? Well, I’m glad you admit that everyone is just speculating. We can dispense with the idea that you are actually doing science then. But, Wade made specific scientific claims which were rebutted by the articles in the other thread. So, let’s get the counter-rebuttals from the Wade defenders. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wade-book-a-troublesome-inheritance-science-or-racism/697616.md?page=3)