originally posted on 05/06. latest update on 05/08 @5:20 p.m. (pdt).
i’ve made this post a “sticky” – it’ll remain at the top of the page for the next few days or so so that you can easily check back for updates. keep in mind that there might be newer posts below this one (like my paton oswalt post of today [05/08]). (^_^) look for the newest links at the bottom of the first section, although i am sometimes throwing in some new tweets in the bottom sections, too.
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i thought i’d compile a festival of links to reviews/commentaries/blogposts/tweets/etc. related to nicholas wade‘s new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. i’ll keep adding to this list as the week goes forward. (keep in mind, though, that’s there’s more to human biodiversity than just racial differences…):
new – quote from nicholas wade from this interview: “I think it would be only to the good if we understood what part of our behavior had a genetic component, ’cause then we could focus our efforts, to the extent it might be relevant, on the remedial efforts that would reduce inequities.”
- read an excerpt at penguin books: New Nonfiction: A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History by Nicholas Wade.
- The Liberal Creationists from steve sailer – “To Wade, race isn’t just skin deep. In fact, he finds the visual differences between races less significant than the behavioral. Evolution’s strategy for adapting to radically different environments is to ‘keep the human body much the same but change the social behavior….’ Wade observes: ‘African populations have not gone through the same Malthusian wringer that shaped the behavior of the European and East Asian populations. Between 1200 and 1800, the English, adapting to the harsh pressures of an intense agrarian economy, became less violent, more literate and more willing to save for the future. In Africa, population pressure has long been much lower than in Europe and Asia….’ European cultures tried to keep population below the famine level by inculcating the sexual restraint and romantic choosiness conducive to relatively late marriages, while East Asian cultures cultivated grinding work ethics. In most of tropical Africa, however, the infectious disease burden was so lethal that dense populations could not be achieved due to epidemics. So the population could not form cities, nor even fully farm the countryside. The big danger in Africa was not Malthusian overpopulation, but underpopulation, which may account for how sexualized their cultures are. Not surprisingly, each continent’s culture seems to have bred people befitting its environment, and their traits live on in their descendants in modern America.”
- see also Charles Murray on Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” and “A Couple of Wild-Eyed Wackos: Me and the NYT” from steve sailer.
- John Derbyshire On Nicholas Wade’s A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE – A Small, But Significant, Step For Race Realism – “In his new book, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, scheduled for publication May 6th, Wade raises high the banner of race realism and charges head-on into the massed ranks of the SSSM. He states his major premise up front, on page two: ‘New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional.’ Those last four words are repeated at intervals throughout the narrative. They are, as it were, the keynote of the book; Wade returns to them many times to anchor his observations — and some speculations — on the history and development of human societies.”
- A Troublesome Inheritance from greg cochran – “Nicholas Wade has a new book out, on the reality of human biological differences. Not just differences in color, but differences in traits that have social consequences, such as personality and cognition. The existence of such differences is obvious enough, and there’s nothing theoretically difficult about them – natural selection naturally takes a different course in different circumstances, nor does it take very long to generate differences of the kind and magnitude we see around us…. He thinks that different populations have different distributions of personality traits (a result of different selection pressures), and that a social institution that comes easily to some groups may not come easily, maybe not at all, to other populations, even when there are big payoffs and vigorous attempts. That is certainly what the world looks like. He thinks that this failure-to-copy is significantly influenced by genetic differences, and of course that’s very likely – although we don’t know a lot about the genetic basis of such traits at this time. IQ differences must also play a part in failure-to-copy.”
- Darwin’s Unexploded Bomb from ed west – “This book’s ideas are indeed fraught but beyond carefully explaining the dangers of misusing science, the consequences are not for scientists to ponder, but rather lawmakers and others of influence; they can choose either to consider the evidence and make things work as best as they can, using what knowledge we have, or they can continue to ignore the ticking of Darwin’s unexploded bomb, punishing anyone who raises the subject. This hostility faced by those with troublesome ideas is, of course, itself explained by evolution. As Wade mentions earlier on, we are social creatures, and we have evolved behaviours to live as such: ‘One is a tendency to criticise, and if necessary punish, those who do not follow the agreed norms.’ That is partly why, as a species, we find it easier to talk about how the world should be, rather than how it is.”
- Book Review: ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ by Nicholas Wade from charles murray – “To date, studies of Caucasians, Asians and sub-Saharan Africans have found that of the hundreds of genetic regions under selection, about 75% to 80% are under selection in only one race. We also know that the genes in these regions affect more than cosmetic variations in appearance. Some of them involve brain function, which in turn could be implicated in a cascade of effects. ‘What these genes do within the brain is largely unknown,’ Mr. Wade writes. ‘But the findings establish the obvious truth that brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from natural selection. They are as much under evolutionary pressure as any other category of gene….’ As the story is untangled, it will also become obvious how inappropriate it is to talk in terms of the ‘inferiority’ or ‘superiority’ of groups. Consider, for example, the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. What are the ideal points on these continua? They will differ depending on whether you’re looking for the paragon of, say, a parent or an entrepreneur. And the Big Five only begin to tap the dozens of ways in which human traits express themselves. Individual human beings are complicated bundles of talents, proclivities, strengths and flaws that interact to produce unexpected and even internally contradictory results. The statistical tendencies (and they will be only tendencies) that differentiate groups of humans will be just as impossible to add up as the qualities of an individual. *Vive les différences*.”
- Nicholas Wade Takes on the Regime from jared taylor – “The physical differences we see in human groups reflect separate evolutionary paths that led to unmistakably biological differences. Hunter-gatherers left Africa about 50,000 years ago, and once they wandered into all of earth’s habitable spaces, they stayed put and bred with their neighbors. DNA testing shows there was essentially no crossing until the modern era. For tens of thousands of years, independently breeding populations developed distinct genetic patterns. Mr. Wade explains that the physical traits of populations are dramatically and consistently different even though there are very few alleles, or gene variants, that occur exclusively in only one group. This is because most traits are influenced by many genes. Norwegians, for example, need have only a *preponderance* of Norwegian-style alleles in their genes in order to give birth exclusively to Norwegians — and never to Malays or Pakistanis. As Mr. Wade puts it, ‘The fact that genes work in combination explains how there can be so much variation in the human population and yet so few fixed differences between populations….’ Mr. Wade’s boldest assertion: that different races behave differently because they are genetically different and genetic differences give rise to differences in social institutions. He is at pains to argue that the genetic differences are small — so small that they are almost undetectable at the individual level — but that once a group has been nudged even slightly in a particular genetic direction it may be receptive to institutions that completely change the nature of society. Mr. Wade cites one study that estimates fully 14 percent of the human genome has been under evolutionary pressure since the races separated, and that substantial differences are therefore inevitable…. Mr. Wade makes the crucial point that what is known as ‘national character’ is undoubtedly genetic, and that is why group behavior is consistent. Jews prosper everywhere they go. So do overseas Chinese. If the Malays and Indonesians envy the success of their Chinese minorities, why don’t they just copy their good habits? Mr. Wade argues that they can’t; they don’t have the genetic predisposition to act Chinese.”
- see also A Troublesome Inheritance from jared taylor.
- american anthropological association webinar with nicholas wade and anthropologist agustin fuentes discussing the new book/topic. (i haven’t listened to this yet.)
- Race Is Real. What Does that Mean for Society? from robert verbruggen @real clear science – “[A]s Wade notes, these small differences add up quickly, and scientists can use these ‘ancestry informative’ DNA markers to easily sort humans into population clusters — clusters that correspond almost perfectly to the casual classifications people have used since well before the genetic age. One can debate how broadly or narrowly to define the clusters — just how many races are there? — but it’s undeniable that human populations exhibit distinctive genetic patterns. Racial groupings are human decisions, and so is the social importance we attach to those groupings. But race, more broadly construed, is a feature of humanity itself. The big question is what these genes do — when natural selection acted, what exactly was being selected for? Researchers have figured some of it out; genetic differences account for racial differences in skin tone, resistance to malaria, etc. But for many genes that have apparently been subject to recent natural selection, all we have are vague indications of their function. Wade writes that these genes affect ‘fertilization and reproduction,’ ‘skeletal development,’ and ‘brain function’ — and no, ‘brain genes do not lie in some special category exempt from natural selection.’ That’s what we know to a reasonable degree of certainty. Anything further requires speculation, and Wade boldly goes there.”
- The Trouble with Inheritance: A Review of Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance from bryce laliberte – “In the latter half he elaborates on the essential thesis that ‘Follow an institution all the way down, and beneath thick layers of culture, it is built on instinctual human behaviors.’ This at once acknowledges the role of society in developing the individual, but just like how a structure depends on its material, the society you will have depends in great part on the social material. The distribution of traits in a population cannot be discounted when inquiring as to the cause of social outcomes. Some people are rich, some people are poor, and many of them just are innately that way. The naïve view of any average person who lived from the 19th century or before that some people were just different has turned out to be true. This is important because it is *despite* an intensive and powerful investment by Western society in nearly all of the endeavors in the 20th century which were predicated on the notion that all peoples everywhere were essentially the same.”
- Get ready for Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” @savage minds – “Nicholas Wade’s new book, A Troublesome Inheritance, drops on Amazon today. Wade, a science writer for the New York Times, has been critical of cultural anthropology in the past — and the feeling has pretty much been mutual. Inheritance is set to create a ground swell of indignation in the anthropological community because it is one of the most biologically reductionist writings to come out in years. The AAA has, to its credit, been on top of the issue and has hosted a showdown between Wade and Augustín Fuentes. Expect more coverage from us, including a couple of guest blogs, in the next couple of months…. As this moves forward I hope people punch above the belt. It shouldn’t be hard, since Wade is such an easy target.“ – oohhh-kay. =/
- Race, Genetics, And Nicholas Wade from rod dreher.
- T-shirt slogans #9 @outside in. (~_^)
- Genetic disorder from anthony daniels (this one, NOT this one!) – “Nicholas Wade, the science editor of The New York Times, has written a book that will no doubt win him many brickbats. In it, he argues that race is a perfectly valid scientific concept and one that is supported by the latest genetic science. It is no criticism of race as a biological concept, he says, that races have no clear boundaries and that gradations between them obviously exist, for if clear boundaries existed and the races could not interbreed, they would be different species, not races. A race is a population of a single species with a cluster of genetic variants, the presence of none of which is either a necessary or a sufficient condition of being a member of that race, but which nevertheless in aggregate gives that population distinguishing characteristics. According to the author, there are five basic races of man, as revealed by the clustering of genetic variants: African, Caucasian (including Semitic and South Asian), East Asian, Amerindian, and Australian. There are also sub-variants within the races: for example Ashkenazi Jews, who are Caucasians but have managed for cultural reasons to maintain a genetic profile of their own. Furthermore, he says that race is of some explanatory value in world history, for the races evolved under different environmental pressures, and it is reasonable to suppose that these pressures gave rise to different psychological, as well as physical, characteristics. For example, the hypotheses that Chinese geography (unlike European) favored the emergence of a centralized state; that this necessitated the development of a powerful bureaucracy; that the kind of person who flourishes economically in such a bureaucracy, more of whose children survive to pass on their genes, is intelligent but conformist; and that therefore the Chinese are genetically more intelligent but by nature more conformist than Europeans. In point of scientific inventiveness, the effect of their conformism more than cancels out that of their superior IQ, which is why East Asian societies are still not scientific powerhouses. Fourteen percent of the human genome, says the author, has been subject to ‘evolution that has been recent, copious, and regional’ — not enough to divide humanity into species, but enough to make physical and mental differences between populations. In view of the potentially explosive nature of these claims, the author is at pains to point out that no policy prescription follows from them, certainly not exploitation or genocide of one race by another. Political equality is an ethical or metaphysical concept, not one that relies for its validity on an empirical fact other than that mankind is a single species. That the concept of race has been used to justify the most hideous of crimes should no more inhibit us from examining it dispassionately as a biological and historical reality than the fact that economic egalitarianism has been used to justify crimes just as hideous should inhibit us from examining the effects of modern income distribution.”
- see also this tweet from dr. james thompson and this one from outsideness.
- Nicholas Wade Writes Again – And Again Anthropology Pays Attention from tony waters @ethnography.com – “Nicholas Wade has a new book out, and the Anthropologists are sharpening their indignation — complaining because he treads on their private territory. Sorry, anthro, you are not medicine or law, and do not have a monopoly over who practices what you preach. Let it go. Sometimes I think that the entire discipline is beset by a big-time inferiority complex. The solution? Simply do good anthropology, and more importantly, promote good anthropology…. Strawmen. Are. Not. Worth. Class. Time. Of. Which. There. Is. Too Little.”
new – see also Nicholas Wade, Jared Diamond and Anthropology from tony waters.
new – The Paradox of Racism – “Why the new book by the New York Times’ Nicholas Wade is both plausible and preposterous.” – from andrew gelman – “Wade’s argument has three parts: First, along with the divergence of physical traits such as skin color and types of earwax, racial groups have genetically evolved to differ in cognitive traits such as intelligence and creativity. Second, Wade argues that ‘minor differences, for the most part invisible in an individual, have major consequences at the level of a society.’ Third, he writes that his views are uncomfortable truths that have been suppressed by a left-wing social-science establishment…. Wade is clearly intelligent and thoughtful, and his book is informed by the latest research in genetics. His explanations seem to me simultaneously plausible and preposterous: plausible in that they snap into place to explain the world as it currently is, preposterous in that I think if he were writing in other time periods, he could come up with similarly plausible, but completely different, stories. As a statistician and political scientist, I see naivete in Wade’s quickness to assume a genetic association for any change in social behavior…. [i'm sure he doesn't. - h.chick] I can’t say that Wade’s theories are wrong. As noted above, racial explanations of *current* social and economic inequality are compelling, in part because it is always natural to attribute individuals’ successes and failures to their individual traits, and to attribute the successes and failures of larger societies to group characteristics. And genes provide a mechanism that supplies a particularly flexible set of explanations when linked to culture…. But I think the themes of a book like Wade’s are necessarily contingent both on the era when it is written and the audience to which it is addressed…. The racial explanation tuned to our social group and our time period will look oh so reasonable, while all the others will just look silly, like either historical relics or desperate attempts to shore up the status quo…. I feel awkward giving this conclusion because it seems so *relativistic*, it makes me feel like such a *social scientist*. And I certainly don’t want to say that all racial arguments are equally valid. The theories of the book under discussion, for example, seem much more plausible than various crude racisms of the past. But that returns us to the paradox that today’s racism seems plausible in comparison to what came before. At any given time, racial explanations are a convenient and natural way to explain social economic inequality. Then, as relations between and within societies change, the racial explanations change alongside. The terms of race are simply too flexible given the limited information we have regarding the connections between genes and behavior.”
new – First Mainstream Notice of ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’ – jayman’s response to gelman’s review.
new – nicholas wade, theories, and racism – my response to gelman’s review.
new – Gelman on “A Troublesome Inheritance” in Slate – steve sailer on gelman’s review.
new – What I’ve Been Reading from ross douthat – “Nicholas Wade, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.’ The Times’ science correspondent’s argument for the reality and importance of race is both less and more controversial than I expected going in: Less because my colleague treads very carefully around the black-white-Asian I.Q. gap debate, more because he then embarks on some very wide-ranging and (as he acknowledges) speculative theorizing about genes, race, and cross-civilizational differences. I found the less-speculative first half of the book extremely persuasive, but await dissenting takes. Most of the reviews so far have come from the political right: Charles Murray raves, Robert VerBruggen has some anxieties; Anthony Daniels critiques. I would very much like to read a Ta-Nehisi Coates review.”
new – Nicholas Wade’s *A Troublesome Inheritance* from tyler cowen – “Overall I was disappointed by my read of this book and I write that as someone who very much has liked Wade’s NYT pieces on similar topics. I appreciated the honesty and courage of the work, but I felt Wade needed to have pushed deeper in book-length form.”
new – What I’m Reading from arnold kling – “It’s the book that you’re *not* supposed to read. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade.”
new – Nicholas Wade interview: A Troublesome Inheritance @steve hsu’s blog. steve offers a couple of brief thoughts, too.
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see also:
- jayman’s recent post JayMan’s Race, Inheritance, and IQ F.A.Q. (F.R.B.)
- an older post from razib: Why race as a biological construct matters
- steve sailer’s The Race FAQ
- Roundup of Book Reviews of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance @occam’s razor.
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and some relevant tweets:
The day of its release, evil nasty people aside, only @edwest, @RAVerBruggen, and @charlesmurray have reviewed Nicholas Wade’s book.
— J. Arthur Bloom (@j_arthur_bloom) May 6, 2014
Disagree w much of Wade (goes beyond data, gets some wrong) but he explodes race-is-only-a-social-construction myth. http://t.co/RabdNBbffh
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) May 3, 2014
“Knowledge is usually considered a better basis for policy than ignorance,” Nicholas Wade concludes, in A Trou… http://t.co/XS5uClFDWp
— Isegoria (@Isegoria) May 5, 2014
"Whether or not a thesis might be politically incendiary should have no bearing on the estimate of its scientific validity…" Nicholas Wade
— Outsideness (@Outsideness) March 15, 2014
"The rise of the West is an event not just in history but also human evolution." -Nicholas Wade
— Bryce Laliberte (@AnarchoPapist) May 6, 2014
"Human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional." Awkward, but should be understood. http://t.co/CiF2Lz85ym
— John Rentoul (@JohnRentoul) May 6, 2014
social institutions are "largely cultural edifices resting on a base of genetically shaped social behaviors…." #ATroublesomeInheritance
— hbd chick (@hbdchick) May 6, 2014
@hbdchick @MikeAnissimov @aylwyn_scally He who says intelligence not a well-defined concept is ignorant of 120 years of psychometrics.
— Mangan (@Mangan150) May 5, 2014
"Most of the ideas of evolution are very intuitive if we could just set our minds free." W. D. Hamilton
— Erwin Schmidt (@Schmidt_Erwin) May 5, 2014
.@StatModeling "…Wade’s quickness to assume a genetic association for any change in social behavior." pretty sure wade doesn't think that.
— hbd chick (@hbdchick) May 8, 2014
@bswud The same thing has characterized all the reviews, even positive ones. The genetic evidence is what makes the book important.
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) May 8, 2014
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Nicholas Wade joins us this week on @CBCDay6 RT @sapinker Disagree w much of Wade but he explodes race-is-only-a-social-construction myth.
— brent bambury (@notrexmurphy) May 8, 2014
See Nicholas Wade discuss A TROUBLESOME INHERITANCE: Genes, Race, & Human History at the UES B&N tonight! http://t.co/cgIctbKEnw @BNBuzz
— The Penguin Press (@penguinpress) May 8, 2014
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