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A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History Kindle Edition

by Nicholas Wade (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 953 ratings

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Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory.

Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well.

Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.

Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“[A Troublesome Inheritance] is a delight to read—conversational and lucid. And it will trigger an intellectual explosion the likes of which we haven't seen for a few decades.” --Charles Murray, Wall Street Journal:

“Extremely well-researched, thoughtfully written and objectively argued…. The real lesson of the book should not be lost on us: A scientific topic cannot be declared off limits or whitewashed because its findings can be socially or politically incendiary…. Ultimately Wade’s argument is about the transparency of knowledge.” --Ashutosh Jogalekar, Scientific American

“Nicholas Wade combines the virtues of truth without fear and the celebration of genetic diversity as a strength of humanity, thereby creating a forum appropriate to the twenty-first century.” --Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

“A freethinking and well-considered examination of the evidence “that human evolution is recent, copious, and regional.” --Kirkus Reviews

“Wade ventures into territory eschewed by most writers: the evolutionary basis for racial differences across human populations. He argues persuasively that such differences exist… His conclusion is both straightforward and provocative…He makes the case that human evolution is ongoing and that genes can influence, but do not fully control, a variety of behaviors that underpin differing forms of social institutions. Wade’s work is certain to generate a great deal of attention.” --Publishers Weekly

“Mr. Wade is a courageous man, as is anyone who dares raise his head above the intellectual parapet; he has put his argument with force, conviction, intelligence, and clarity.” --The New Criterion

About the Author

Nicholas Wade received a BA in natural sciences from King’s College, Cambridge. He was the deputy editor of Nature magazine in London and then became that journal’s Washington correspondent. He joined Science magazine in Washington as a reporter and later moved to The New York Times, where he has been an editorial writer, concentrating on issues of defense, space, science, medicine, technology, genetics, molecular biology, the environment, and public policy, a science reporter, and a science editor.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Evolution, Race and History

Since the decoding of the human genome in 2003, a sharp new light has been shed on human evolution, raising many interesting but awkward questions.

It is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the past 30,000 years and almost certainly—though very recent evolution is hard to measure—throughout the historical period and up until the present day. It would be of the greatest interest to know how people have evolved in recent times and to reconstruct the fingerprints of natural selection as it molded and reworked the genetic clay. Any degree of evolution in social behavior found to have taken place during historical times could help explain significant features of today’s world.

But the exploration and discussion of these issues is complicated by the fact of race. Ever since the first modern humans dispersed from the ancestral homeland in northeast Africa some 50,000 years ago, the populations on each continent have evolved largely independently of one another as each adapted to its own regional environment. Under these various local pressures, there developed the major races of humankind, those of Africans, East Asians and Europeans, as well as many smaller groups.

Because of these divisions in the human population, anyone interested in recent human evolution is almost inevitably studying human races, whether they wish to or not. Scientific inquiry thus runs into potential conflict with the public policy interest of not generating possibly invidious comparisons that might foment racism. Several of the intellectual barriers erected many years ago to combat racism now stand in the way of studying the recent evolutionary past. These include the assumption that there has been no recent human evolution and the assertion that races do not exist.

The New View of Human Evolution

New analyses of the human genome establish that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure. Most of these signals of natural selection date from 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, just an eyeblink in evolution’s 3 billion year timescale.

Natural selection has continued to mold the human genome, doubtless up until the present day, although the signals of evolution within the past few hundred or thousand years are harder to pick up unless the force of selection has been extremely strong. One of the most recent known dates at which a human gene has been changed by evolution is from 3,000 years ago, when Tibetans evolved a genetic variant that lets them live at high altitude.

Several instances have now come to light of natural selection shaping human traits within just the past few hundred years. Under the pressure of selection, for example, the age of first reproduction among women born between 1799 and 1940 on L’Isle-aux-Coudres, an island in the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec, fell from 26 to 22 years, according to researchers who were able to study an unusually complete record of marriages, births and deaths in the island’s parish records.

The researchers argue that other possible effects, like better nutrition, can be ruled out as explanations, and note that the tendency to give birth at a younger age appeared to be heritable, confirming that a genetic change had taken place. “Our study supports the idea that humans are still evolving,” they write. “It also demonstrates that microevolution is detectable over just a few generations in a long-lived species.”

Another source of evidence for very recent human evolution is that of the multigenerational surveys conducted for medical reasons, like the Framingham Heart Study. Borrowing statistical methods developed by evolutionary biologists for measuring natural selection, physicians have recently been able to tease out certain bodily changes that are under evolutionary pressure in these large patient populations. The traits include age at first reproduction, which is decreasing in modern societies, and age at menopause, which is increasing. The traits are of no particular importance in themselves and have been measured just because the relevant data were collected by the physicians who designed the studies. But the statistics suggest that the traits are inherited, and if so, they are evidence of evolution at work in present-day populations. “The evidence strongly suggests that we are evolving and that our nature is dynamic, not static,” a Yale biologist, Stephen Stearns, concludes in summarizing 14 recent studies that measured evolutionary change in living populations.

Human evolution has not only been recent and extensive; it has also been regional. The period of 30,000 to 5,000 years ago, from which signals of recent natural selection can be detected, occurred after the splitting of the three major races, and so represents selection that has occurred largely independently within each race. The three principal races are Africans (those who live south of the Sahara), East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) and Caucasians (Europeans and the peoples of the Near East and the Indian subcontinent). In each of these races, a different set of genes has been changed by natural selection, as is described further in chapter 5. This is just what would be expected for populations that had to adapt to different challenges on each continent. The genes specially affected by natural selection control not only expected traits like skin color and nutritional metabolism but also some aspects of brain function, although in ways that are not yet understood.

Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is indeed a biological reality to race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. A longer discussion of this issue is offered in chapter 5, but an illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed-race populations, such as African Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome and assign each segment to an African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.

The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.

The Social Science Creed and Evolution

It has long been convenient for social scientists to assume that human evolution ground to a halt in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to put a roof over their heads and to protect themselves from the hostile forces of nature. Evolutionary psychologists teach that the human mind is adapted to the conditions that prevailed at the end of the last age, some 10,000 years ago. Historians, economists, anthropologists and sociologists assume there has been no change in innate human behavior during the historical period.

This belief in the recent suspension of evolution, at least for people, is shared by the major associations of social scientists, which assert that race does not even exist, at least in the biological sense. “Race is a recent human invention,” proclaims the American Anthropological Association. “Race is about culture, not biology.” A recent book published by the association states that “Race is not real in the way we think of it: as deep, primordial, and biological. Rather it is a foundational idea with devastating consequences because we, through our history and culture, made it so.”

The commonsense conclusion—that race is both a biological reality and a politically fraught idea with sometimes pernicious consequences—has also eluded the American Sociological Association. The group states that “race is a social construct” and warns “of the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological.”

The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.

The recent discoveries that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional severely undercut the social scientists’ official view of the world because they establish that genetics may have played a possibly substantial role alongside culture in shaping the differences between human populations. Why then do many researchers still cling to the notion that culture alone is the only possible explanation for the differences between human societies?

One reason is, of course, the understandable fear that exploration of racial differences will give support to racism, a question addressed below. Another is the inherent inertia of the academic world. University researchers do not act independently but rather as communities of scholars who constantly check and approve one another’s work. This is especially so in science, where grant applications must be approved by a panel of peers, and publications submitted to the scrutiny of editors and reviewers. The high advantage of this process is that the statements

scholars make in public are usually a lot more than their own opinion—they are the certified knowledge of a community of experts.

But a drawback of the system is its occasional drift toward extreme conservatism. Researchers get attached to the view of their field they grew up with and, as they grow older, they may gain the influence to thwart change. For 50 years after it was first proposed, leading geophysicists strenuously resisted the idea that the continents have drifted across the face of the globe. “Knowledge advances, funeral by funeral,” the economist Paul Samuelson once observed.

Another kind of flaw occurs when universities allow a whole field of scholars to drift politically to the left or to the right. Either direction is equally injurious to the truth, but at present most university departments lean strongly to the left. Any researcher who even discusses issues politically offensive to the left runs the risk of antagonizing the professional colleagues who must approve his requests for government funds and review his articles for publication. Self-censorship is the frequent response, especially in anything to do with the recent differential evolution of the human population. It takes only a few vigilantes to cow the whole campus. The result is that researchers at present routinely ignore the biology of race, or tiptoe around the subject, lest they be accused of racism by their academic rivals and see their careers destroyed.

Resistance to the idea that human evolution is recent, copious and regional is unlikely to vanish unless scholars can be persuaded that exploration of the recent evolutionary past will not lead to a resurgence of racism. In fact, such a resurgence seems most unlikely, for the following reasons.

Genomics and Racial Differences

In the first place, opposition to racism is now well entrenched, at least in the Western world. It is hard to conceive of any circumstance that would reverse or weaken this judgment, particularly any scientific evidence. Racism and discrimination are wrong as a matter of principle, not of science. Science is about what is, not what ought to be. Its shifting sands do not support values, so it is foolish to place them there.

Academics, who are obsessed with intelligence, fear the discovery of a gene that will prove one major race is more intelligent than another. But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Although intelligence has a genetic basis, no genetic variants that enhance intelligence have yet been found. The reason, almost certainly, is that there are a great many such genes, each of which has too small an effect to be detectable with present methods. If researchers should one day find a gene that enhances intelligence in East Asians, say, they can hardly argue on that basis that East Asians are more intelligent than other races, because hundreds of similar genes remain to be discovered in Europeans and Africans.

Even if all the intelligence-enhancing variants in each race had been identified, no one would try to compute intelligence on the basis of genetic information: it would be far easier just to apply an intelligence test. But IQ tests already exist, for what they may be worth.

Even if it were proved that one race were genetically more intelligent than another, what consequence would follow? In fact, not much of one. East Asians score around 105 on intelligence tests, an average above that of Europeans, whose score is 100. A higher IQ score doesn’t make East Asians morally superior to other races. East Asian societies have many virtues but are not necessarily more successful than European societies in meeting their members’ needs.

The notion that any race has the right to dominate others or is superior in any absolute sense can be firmly rejected as a matter of principle and, being rooted in principle, is unassailable by science. Nonetheless, races being different, it is inevitable that science will establish relative advantages in some traits. Because of genetic variants, Tibetans and Andean highlanders are better than others at living at high altitudes. At every Olympic games since 1980, every finalist in the men’s 100-meter race has had West African ancestry. 9 It would be no surprise if some genetic factor were found to contribute to such athleticism.

Study of the genetics of race will inevitably reveal differences, some of which will show, for those who may be interested, that one race has some slight edge over another in a specified trait. But this kind of inquiry will also establish a wider and more important truth, that all differences between races are variations on a common theme.

To discover that genetics plays some role in the differences between the major human societies does not mean that that role is dominant. Genes do not determine human behavior; they merely predispose people to act in certain ways. Genes explain a lot, probably far more than is at present understood or acknowledged. But their influence in most situations is or can be overwhelmed by learned behavior, or culture. To say that genes explain everything about human social behavior would be as absurd as to assume that they explain nothing.

Social scientists often write as if they believe that culture explains everything and race nothing, and that all cultures are of equal value. The emerging truth is more complicated. Human nature is very similar throughout the world. But though people are much the same, their societies differ greatly in their structure, their institutions and their achievements. Contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more than other cultures in many significant spheres and has done so because Europeans, probably for reasons of both evolution and history, have been able to create open and innovative societies, starkly different from the default human arrangements of tribalism or autocracy. People being so similar, no one has the right or reason to assert superiority over a person of a different race. But some societies have achieved much more than others, perhaps through minor differences in social behavior. A question to be explored below is whether such differences have been shaped by evolution.

Social Behavior and History

The purpose of the pages that follow is to demystify the genetic basis of race and to ask what recent human evolution reveals about history and the nature of human societies. If fear of racism can be overcome sufficiently for researchers to accept that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional, a number of critical issues in history and economics may be laid open for exploration. Race may be a troublesome inheritance, but better to explore and understand its bearing on human nature and history than to pretend for reasons of political convenience that it has no evolutionary basis.

It’s social behavior that is of relevance for understanding pivotal—and otherwise imperfectly explained—events in history and economics. Although the emotional and intellectual differences between the world’s peoples as individuals are slight enough, even a small shift in social behavior can generate a very different kind of society. Tribal societies, for instance, are organized on the basis of kinship and differ from modern states chiefly in that people’s radius of trust does not extend too far beyond the family and tribe. But in this small variation is rooted the vast difference in political and economic structures between tribal and modern societies. Variations in another genetically based behavior, the readiness to punish those who violate social rules, may explain why some societies are more conformist than others.

Social structure is the point at which human evolution intersects with history. Vast changes have occurred in human social structure in all three major races within the past 15,000 years. That is the period in which people first started to switch from the nomadic life of hunter-gatherer bands to settled existence in much larger communities. This wrenching shift required living in a hierarchical society instead of an egalitarian one and the temperament to get on with many strangers instead of just a few close kin. Given that this change took so long to occur—modern humans first appear in the archaeological record 200,000 years ago, yet it took them 185,000 years to settle down in fixed communities—it is tempting to assume that a substantial genetic change in social behavior was required and that it took this long to evolve. Moreover, this evolutionary process took place independently in the populations of Europe, East Asia, the Americas and Africa, which had separated long before the first settlements emerged.

The forager-settler transition is unlikely to have been the only evolutionary change in human social behavior. Probably from the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, most people have lived on the edge of starvation. After each new increase in productivity, more babies were born, the extra mouths ate up the surplus and within a generation everyone was back to a state of scarcity little better than before.

This situation was accurately described by the Reverend Thomas Malthus with his analysis that population was always kept in check by misery and vice. It was from Malthus that Darwin derived the idea of natural selection. Under conditions of the fierce struggle for existence that Malthus described, favorable variations would be preserved, Darwin perceived, and unfavorable ones destroyed, leading eventually to the formation of new species.

Given that the human population supplied Malthus with the observations that led Darwin to the concept of natural selection, there is every reason to suppose that people living in agrarian societies were subject to intense forces of natural selection. But what traits were being selected for during the long agrarian past? Evidence described in chapter 7 indicates that it was human social nature that changed. Until the great demographic transition that followed industrialization, the wealthy had more surviving children than the poor. As many of the children of the rich fell in status, they would have spread throughout the population the genes that support the behaviors useful in accumulating wealth. This ratchet of wealth provides a general mechanism for making a specific set of behaviors—those required for economic success—more general and, generation after generation, gradually changing a society’s nature. The mechanism has so far been documented only for a population for which unusually precise records exist, that of England from 1200 to 1800. But given the strong human propensity for investing in one’s children’s success, the ratchet may well have operated in all societies in which there have been gradations of wealth.

The narratives constructed by historians describe many forms of change, whether political, military, economic or social. One factor almost always assumed to be constant is human nature. Yet if human social nature, and therefore the nature of human societies, has changed in the recent past, a new variable is available to help explain major turning points in history. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, marked a profound change in the productivity of human societies, one that took almost 15,000 years to emerge after the first settlements. Could this too have required the evolution of a difference in human social behavior, as significant as the one that accompanied the transition from foraging to settled life?

There are other significant turning points in history for which scholars have proposed a clutch of possible causes but no compelling explanation. China created the first modern state and enjoyed the most advanced civilization until around 1800 ad, when it slid into puzzling decline. The Islamic world in 1500 ad surpassed the West in most respects, reaching a high tide of its expansion in the siege of Vienna in 1529 ad by the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Then, after almost a thousand years of relentless conquest, the house of Islam entered a long and painful retreat, also for reasons that defy scholarly consensus.

The counterpart of Chinese and Islamic decline is the unexpected rise of the West. Europe, feudal and semitribal in 1000 ad, had become a vigorous exponent of learning and exploration by 1500 ad. From this basis, Western nations seized the lead in geographical expansion, in military preeminence, in economic prosperity and in science and technology.

Economists and historians have described many factors that contributed to Europe’s awakening. One that is seldom considered is the possibility of an evolutionary change, that the European population, in adapting to its particular local circumstances, happened to evolve a kind of society that was highly favorable to innovation.

Economic Disparities

Explanation is also lacking for many important features of even today’s world. Why are some countries rich and others persistently poor? Capital and information flow fairly freely, so what is it that prevents poor countries from taking out a loan, copying every Scandinavian institution, and becoming as rich and peaceful as Denmark? Africa has absorbed billions of dollars in aid over the past half century and yet, until a recent spurt of growth, its standard of living has stagnated for decades. South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, almost as poor at the start of the period, have enjoyed an economic resurgence. Why have these countries been able to modernize so rapidly while others have found it much harder?

Economists and historians attribute the major disparities between countries to factors such as resources or geography or cultural differences. But many countries with no resources, like Japan or Singapore, are very rich, while richly endowed countries like Nigeria tend to be quite poor. Iceland, covered mostly in glaciers and frigid deserts, might seem less favorably situated than Haiti, but Icelanders are wealthy and Haitians beset by persistent poverty and corruption. True, culture provides a compelling and sufficient explanation for many such differences. In the natural experiment provided by the two Koreas, the people are the same in both countries, so it must surely be bad institutions that keep North Koreans poor and good ones that make South Koreans prosperous.

But in situations where culture and political institutions can flow freely across borders, long enduring disparities are harder to explain. The brisk and continuing pace of human evolution suggests a new possibility: that at the root of each civilization is a particular set of evolved social behaviors that sustains it, and these behaviors are reflected in the society’s institutions. Institutions are not just sets of arbitrary rules. Rather, they grow out of instinctual social behaviors, such as the propensity to trust others, to follow rules and punish those who don’t, to engage in reciprocity and trade, or to take up arms against neighboring groups. Because these behaviors vary slightly from one society to the next as the result of evolutionary pressures, so too may the institutions that depend on them.

This would explain why it is so hard to transfer institutions from one society to another. American institutions cannot be successfully implanted in Iraq, for instance, because Iraqis have different social behaviors, including a base in tribalism and a well-founded distrust of central government, just as it would be impossible to import Iraqi tribal politics into the United States.

With the advent of fast and cheap methods for decoding the sequence of DNA units in the human genome, the genetic variations that underlie human races can be explored for the first time. The evolutionary paths that have generated differences between races are of great interest to researchers and many are described in the pages that follow. But the broader significance of the worldwide variations in DNA is not the differences but the similarities. Nowhere is the essential unity of humankind more clearly and indelibly written than in the human genome.

Since much of the material that follows may be new or unfamiliar to the general reader, a guide to its evidentiary status may be helpful. Chapters 4 and 5, which explore the genetics of race, are probably the most securely based. Although they put the reader on the forefront of current research, and frontier science is always more prone to upset than that in the textbooks, the findings reported here draw from a large body of research by leading experts in the field and seem unlikely to be revised in any serious way. Readers can probably take the facts in these chapters as reasonably solid and the interpretations as being in general well supported.

The discussion of the roots of human social behavior in chapter 3 also rests on substantial research, in this case mostly studies of human and animal behavior. But the genetic underpinnings of human social behavior are for the most part still unknown. There is therefore considerable room for disagreement as to exactly which social behaviors have a genetic basis and how strongly any such behaviors may be genetically defined. Moreover the whole field of research into human social behavior is both young and overshadowed by the paradigm still influential among social scientists that all human behavior is purely cultural.

Readers should be fully aware that in chapters 6 through 10 they are leaving the world of hard science and entering into a much more speculative arena at the interface of history, economics and human evolution. Because the existence of race has long been ignored or denied by many researchers, there is a dearth of factual information as to how race impinges on human society. The conclusions presented in these chapters fall far short of proof. However plausible (or otherwise) they may seem, many are speculative. There is nothing wrong with speculation, of course, as long as its premises are made clear. And speculation is the customary way to begin the exploration of uncharted territory because it stimulates a search for the evidence that will support or refute it.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00G3L7VFM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (May 6, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 6, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3033 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 290 pages

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Nicholas Wade

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Nicholas Wade is the author of three books about recent human evolution. They are addressed to the general reader interested in knowing what the evolutionary past tells us about human nature and society today.

One, Before the Dawn, published in 2006, traces how people have evolved during the last 50,000 years.

The second book, The Faith Instinct (2009), argues that because of the survival advantage of religion, an instinct for religious behavior was favored by natural selection among early human societies and became universal in all their descendants.

A Troublesome Inheritance (2014), the third of the trilogy, looks at how human races evolved.

Wade was born in Aylesbury, England, and educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences. He became a journalist writing about scientific issues, and has worked at Nature and Science, two weekly scientific magazines, and on the New York Times.

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B Leyden

EVOLUTION AND RACE: A POLITICALLY INCORRECT ACCCOUNT OF HUMAN HISTORY

Reviewed in the United States on May 16, 2014

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EVOLUTION AND RACE: A POLITICALLY INCORRECT ACCOUNT OF HUMAN HISTORY

Nicholas Wade’s book, “A Troublesome Inheritance” is the most iconoclastic and provocative book of the decade. Read it or be square. Wade is the science writer for the NY Times and his book is a compilation of the latest scientific data on “race” and continuing human evolution. Regardless of whether you agree with his hundreds of individual data points, they should be read.

OUT OF AFRICA TO AUSTRAILIA, THE ‘LUCKYCONTINENT’

Modern humans first left their African homeland approximately 50,000 years ago. Life was hard and total human population was in the thousands. The humans leaving may have consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers. All of them would have had a black skin color that was perfectly adapted to their equatorial/tropical environment. Within 4000 years, their very much changed ancestors had reached Australia.

Humans had spread across the world by a process of population “budding.” When a group grew too big for the local resources, it would split………….these little groups would have been highly territorial and aggressive toward neighbors. To get away from one another and find new territory, bands started moving north into the cold forests and steppes of Europe and East Asia…... The evolutionary pressures for change on these small isolated groups would have been intense. Living by hunting and gathering, they would have had to relearn how to survive in each new habitat.

The mixing of genes between these little hunter-gatherer bands was limited. Even if geography had not been a formidable barrier, these groups were territorial and mostly hostile to strangers. How do we know? Until the modern era, humans had to find spouses in their immediate neighborhood. DNA analysis can often pinpoint ancestors to within a few miles in Europe, Asia or Africa.

Under conditions of a fierce struggle for existence -where most humans were often within a hair’s breadth of starvation - favorable genetic variations would be preserved, and unfavorable ones destroyed. Humans were/are no different than Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos.

When Europeans first arrived in Australia some 150 years ago, the indigenous natives were scarcely changed physically or culturally despite the intervening 46,000 years. The Australians of today call their country “the lucky country” so richly endowed is it with fertile land natural resources.

PHYSICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE “RACES”

SKULLS: Human skulls fall into three distinctive shapes, which reflect their owners’ degree of ancestry in the three main races, Caucasian, East Asian and African. African skulls have rounder nose and eye cavities, and jaws that protrude forward, whereas Caucasians and East Asians have flatter faces. Caucasian skulls are longer, have larger chin bones and tear-shaped nose openings. East Asian skulls tend to be short and broad with wide cheekbones.

LIGHT AND DARK SKIN: In equatorial areas where ultra-violet light is intense, evolution promotes dark skin to protect the body from overdosing on Vitamin D which can be fatal. Light skin is advantaged in the northern latitudes where ultra-violet light is weak

25,000 years ago in Europe, only those humans in the northern-most latitudes had white skin. Then, the glaciers advanced south one more time, forcing bands of men to move south. The light-skinned people living in northern latitudes did not wait for the glaciers to bury them. They moved south ahead of the advancing ice fields and as they did so they displaced and probably killed the darker-skinned people to the south in what is today France, Spain and Italy.

The East Asian “race” evolved in a very cold environment. Their white skin is caused by a combination of entirely different genes. East Asian nostrils are narrower and they have a fold of fat over the eyelid, which seem helpful in conserving body heat. The hair of East Asians is thicker than the hair of Europeans and Africans (who both share the same version of a gene called EDAR). And they have entirely different sweat glands. Most Asians in the north have a watery ear wax, as opposed to the hard ear wax of Europeans. (Evolved to keep insects out of the ear).Also in the north of Asia, shovel shaped front teeth are predominate. And Asian women tend to have smaller breasts.

These are not absolute racial characteristics. For example, the proportion of the population with watery ear wax and shovel teeth decreases as one moves from north to south Asia. The boundaries of race are thus imperfect.

But does this mean that “race” is not a meaningful concept? Is it a coincidence that for 50 years every finalist in the Olympic 100 meter race was of West African ancestry? Or that Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 110-115 (the highest of any ethnic group) and are grossly over-represented among Nobel Prize winners? (See the politically incorrect explanation, infra.)

RECENT PHYSICAL EVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

An adaptation that has occurred in the past 3000 years is the ability of Tibetans to live at high altitudes. Only a little older is the gene change that allowed middle Europeans to consume milk products. Our original African ancestors had a strong lactose intolerance. This is an instance where a cultural change – the herding of cattle – preceded a genetic change.

Many different genetic changes have arisen to protect humans from malaria. Africans developed unique genetic protection; but as is so often is the case, there is a downside: if they receive this protection from both parents, sickle-cell anemia can result. Italians and Greeks have an entirely different evolutionary-based resistance to malaria, but, for them, this can result in “thalassemia” diseases.

HUMAN BEHAVIOR HAS BEEN SCULPTED BY EVOLUTION

Dogs use their hind legs to scatter grass and dirt on their feces. They don’t always do it, but obviously, if it didn't provide some evolutionary benefit, it would not be done. Newborn human babies will smile and look up into the face of the person holding them. We know that it is an instinct because even babies born blind will do it. Babies having this genetic adaptation were more likely to “bond” with their parents and, thus survive, and over time this became the inheritance of all human babies.

Nicholas Wade writes: “But the genes that govern human behavior seldom issue imperatives. They operate by setting mere inclinations, of which even the strongest can be overridden.”

FOR PROTECTION, WEAK VULNERABLE HUMANS TO DEVELOP SOCIAL ALTRUISM

When the first humans left the forest, they required radically different social behaviors, in particular, some degree of social altruism, if roving tribal bands were to provide weak individuals with protection. Chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, do not share at all within the group; even mother chimps, if they give any food at all to their young, give the least desirable parts!

In humans, says Wade, expectation of fairness and reciprocity and charitable sharing within the group “most probably” have a genetic basis. The urges to help, inform and share are “naturally emerging” in young children,…children instinctively want to actively seek to be part of a “we,” a group that has pooled its talents and intends to work toward a shared goal... “Social norms— even of this relatively trivial type— can only be created by creatures who engage in shared intentionality and collective beliefs.” Children instinctively protest when a new game is played wrong. People have an intuitive morality, derived from growing up in a particular social milieu, which is the source of instinctive knowledge that certain actions are right or wrong. People will fight to the death to protect their own group…. or attack that of others!

LAW: Law is rooted in several complex social instincts, including those for following rules, punishing violators of social norms and the sense of personal transgression that underlies self-punishment and shame.

WARFARE: Warfare is an institution doubtless inherited from the joint ancestor of chimps and humans, given that both species practice territorial-based aggression. In a tribal society such as the Yanomamö, aggressive men are highly valued and honored .

RELIGION: A propensity for religious behavior bound people together in emotion-laden rituals that affirmed commitment to common goals.

BLUSHING: Shame and guilt are the penalties…Social norms and punishment of deviants are behaviors embedded so deeply in the human psyche that special mechanisms have arisen for punishing oneself for infractions of social norms.

THE SCLERA: In all our primate cousins, the sclera (the white of the eye) is barely visible. In humans it stands out like a beacon, signaling to any observer the direction of a person’s gaze and hence what thoughts may be on their mind. The whites of the eyes are the mark of a highly social, highly cooperative species whose success depends on the sharing of thoughts and intentions.

OXYTOCIN AND THE RADIUS OF TRUST: Scientists have identified the neural hormone oxytocin, sometimes known as the hormone of trust. A small difference in the radius of trust may underlie much of the difference between tribal and modern societies. The trust promoted by oxytocin is not of the “brotherhood of man” variety. Oxytocin engenders trust toward members of the in-group, together with feelings of defensiveness toward outsiders.

THE RISE OF CITIES AND STATES: The rise of the first city-states, based on large scale agriculture, required a new kind of social structure, one based on large, hierarchically organized populations ruled by military leaders. The states overlaid their own institutions on those of the tribe. They used religion to legitimate the ruler’s power and maintain a monopoly of force. These new institutions will feed back into the genome over the course of generations, as those with the social behaviors that are successful in a militaristic society leave more surviving children.

RISE OF CITIES AND MIDDLE CLASS: A person with social skills and intelligence had a reasonable chance of getting richer, something that was seldom possible in a hunter-gatherer society. In England, the rich had more surviving children than did the poor. Middle-class culture spread throughout the society through biological mechanisms.” By 1851 only 8% of the richest surnames from the 1560 –1640 period had disappeared. The poor had a much greater risk of being erased from the gene pool.

CHILDREN WITH MIDDLE CLASS VALUES - GENETICALLY ENDOWED - PREDOMINATED: The values of the upper middle class— nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience— were thus infused into lower economic classes and throughout society. Generation after generation, they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. This explains the steady decrease in violence and increase in literacy that researchers have documented in Europe.

THE MAO-A GENE: CIRCUMSTANTIAL PROOF THAT DECLINE IN VIOLENCE IN SOCIETY WAS GENETIC: The MAO-A gene, which influences aggression and antisocial behavior, is one behavioral gene that is known to vary between races and ethnic groups. In advanced European civilizations, extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages, and the most bellicose members of a society were killed or ostracized, not honored, and their descendants gradually were erased from the gene pool.

GRACILIZATION/DOMESTICATION OF HUMANS AND ANIMALS

“Gracilization” is the lightening of bone in the body structure, a genetically based process, and has been documented by scientists in the fossil remains of species like pigs and cattle as they were domesticated from their wild forebears. The human fossil record shows that in the period prior to human settlements, which began some 15,000 years ago, there had been a gradual thinning of the human skeleton. Evolutionary Biologists believe that humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE PROVEN THAT THEY CAN BREED TAME FOXES WHO DEVELOP FLOPPY EARS: Biologists have now selectively bred tame foxes. It took 40 years and 30 to 35 generations of breeding, but the foxes are now as tame and biddable as a dog. Though they did not breed for the trait, the foxes incidentally developed floppy ears.

THE BURNING OF CATS: A famous Midsummer Day festivity in 16th century Paris was to burn alive a dozen cats. The king and queen were usually present, and the king or the dauphin would light a pyre. The cats were then tumbled into the flames from an overhead basket, and the crowd reveled in their cries. “Certainly this is not really a worse spectacle than the burning of heretics, or the torturings and public executions of every kind,” sociologist Norbert Elias writes. “It only appears worse because the joy in torturing living creatures shows itself so nakedly and purposelessly, without any excuse before reason. The revulsion aroused in us by the mere report of the institution, a reaction which must be taken as ‘normal’ for the present-day standard of affect control, demonstrates once again the long term change of personality structure.” Elias argued that between medieval and modern times, a society wide shift has taken place toward greater sensibility. Wade argues that it has to do with a continuing evolution in behavior.

ASHKENAZI JEWS

IQ tests are routinely administered in the United States .European Americans score 100 (by definition— their scores are normalized to 100), Asian Americans score 105 and African Americans score 85 to 90. Oriental Jews and Sephardim have IQs comparable to Europeans. But Ashkenazi Jews, in addition to their cultural achievements, have high IQs generally measured at between 110 and 115 which is the highest average of any ethnic group. They also have a strange pattern of Mendelian diseases (e.g. Gaucher’s disease) which have a correlation with occupations requiring high intelligence. An interesting sidelight: Ashkenazi Jews have below average scores on visuo-spatial tests!

IN OUR SOCIETY IT IS POLITICALLY INCORRECT TO EVEN MENTION RACE-BASED INTELLIGENCE. A University of Utah based group completed a comprehensive study of Ashkenazi intelligence. But publication was another matter. Their report was submitted to several journal editors in the United States, all of whom said it was fascinating but that they could not publish it.

JEWISH ISOLATION: Jews originally were no different from anyone else: they were part of the general Near East population from which today’s Arabs, Turks and Armenians are also descended. But as soon as their religion started forbidding members to marry nonmembers, the Jewish population would have entered into reproductive isolation, much as if it had been placed on a remote island. Some large degree of reproductive isolation is the necessary condition for a population to take its own evolutionary path.

RABBINIC JUDAISM GAVE JEWS A NATURAL ADVANTAGE. As is well known, rabbinic Judaism is focused on Torah study that requires a high degree of literacy. From about 900 AD to 1700 AD, Ashkenazim were concentrated in a few professions, notably moneylending and, later, tax farming. A prevailing view has been that Jews were forced into money lending because other professions were barred to them. The Utah researchers reject this explanation. Using a wealth of historical detail they argue that Jews were not forced into moneylending but rather chose it because it was so profitable, and that they generally dispersed not because of persecution but because there were jobs for only so many moneylenders in each town. Moneylending required a high degree of cognitive skill and the rabbinical form of Judaism supplied them with same. Rabbinic courts oversaw contract enforcement and disputes. Because of the presence of Jewish communities in many cities of Europe and the Near East, Jews had access to a natural trading network of their coreligionists. Both the network and the dispute resolution mechanism were unusual and gave Jews a special advantage in long-distance commerce.

NATURAL SELECTION AND THE SHARP DECLINE IN THE JEWISH POPULATION CIRCA. 65 AD. Historical research has shown that the world-wide Jewish population declined dramatically from around 5.5 million in 65 AD to a mere 1.2 million in 650 AD. As I have tried to demonstrate before, the Romans were, if anything, philosemitic. Even with the Jewish revolt of 70AD, Jewish communities and leaders continued to be honored and respected. Unlike Christians, the Romans never launched a pogrom against Jews. The best explanation for the population decline is that large numbers of rural and uneducated Jews converted away from Judaism because of the high literacy requirements of the developing rabbinic- based religion. Generation after generation, as the uneducated and illiterate were shed from the community, the intelligence and propensity for literacy of those remaining would steadily rise. Because moneylending was so profitable, despite its high risks, Jews could afford to support large families and, like other wealthy people, could ensure that more of their children survived to adulthood.
After the devastation of the Jewish communities in Iraq and Persia and the expulsion of European Jews from England, France and many regions of Germany, their total population fell to fewer than 1 million in 1500 AD. But propelled by their new wealth, the Jewish population started to increase rapidly and by 1939 had reached 16.5 million. Because of the requirement for literacy, Jews found themselves better able than non-Jews to cope with the new cognitive demands of urban commerce. “Jews had the behavioral traits conducive to success in a capitalist society.”

CHINESE EXAMINATION SYSTEM: The probable effect of the system was to select for excellent memory, high intelligence and unwavering conformity. At each cycle, the Chinese population became enriched in survival skills. At the same time, authoritarian regimes ruthlessly repressed dissent, just as they do today….Over many generations, these upper-class Chinese values would have been throughout society as the more numerous children of the well off descended through the social strata.

CONCLUSION: THE RISE OF THE WEST IS AN EVENT, NOT JUST IN HISTORY, BUT ALSO IN HUMAN EVOLUTION.

Europeans are much like everyone else except for minor differences in their social behavior. (Inclination, but not imperative.) But these minor differences, for the most part invisible in an individual, have major consequences at the level of a society. As with most human behaviors, the genes provide just a nudge in a certain direction. But these small nudges, acting on every individual, can alter the nature of a society. There is almost certainly a genetic propensity for following society’s rules and punishing those who violate them. If Europeans were slightly less inclined to punish violators and Chinese more so, that could explain why European societies are more tolerant of dissenters and innovators, and Chinese societies less so.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: “The recovery of human nature by modern biology . . . is extremely important as a foundation for any theory of political development, because it provides us with the basic building blocks by which we can understand the later evolution of human institution.,”

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John Walker

Excellent exploration of evolution in the human species: “recent, copious, and regional”

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2019

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Geographically isolated populations of a species (unable to interbreed with others of their kind) will be subject to natural selection based upon their environment. If that environment differs from that of other members of the species, the isolated population will begin to diverge genetically, as genetic endowments which favour survival and more offspring are selected for. If the isolated population is sufficiently small, the mechanism of genetic drift may cause a specific genetic variant to become almost universal or absent in that population. If this process is repeated for a sufficiently long time, isolated populations may diverge to such a degree they can no longer interbreed, and therefore become distinct species.

None of this is controversial when discussing other species, but in some circles to suggest that these mechanisms apply to humans is the deepest heresy. This well-researched book examines the evidence, much from molecular biology which has become available only in recent years, for the diversification of the human species into distinct populations, or “races” if you like, after its emergence from its birthplace in Africa. In this book the author argues that human evolution has been “recent, copious, and regional” and presents the genetic evidence to support this view.

A few basic facts should be noted at the outset. All humans are members of a single species, and all can interbreed. Humans, as a species, have an extremely low genetic diversity compared to most other animal species: this suggests that our ancestors went through a genetic “bottleneck” where the population was reduced to a very small number, causing the variation observed in other species to be lost through genetic drift. You might expect different human populations to carry different genes, but this is not the case—all humans have essentially the same set of genes. Variation among humans is mostly a result of individuals carrying different alleles (variants) of a gene. For example, eye colour in humans is entirely inherited: a baby's eye colour is determined completely by the alleles of various genes inherited from the mother and father. You might think that variation among human populations is then a question of their carrying different alleles of genes, but that too is an oversimplification. Human genetic variation is, in most cases, a matter of the frequency of alleles among the population.

This means that almost any generalisation about the characteristics of individual members of human populations with different evolutionary histories is ungrounded in fact. The variation among individuals within populations is generally much greater than that of populations as a whole. Discrimination based upon an individual's genetic heritage is not just abhorrent morally but scientifically unjustified.

Based upon these now well-established facts, some have argued that “race does not exist” or is a “social construct”. While this view may be motivated by a well-intentioned desire to eliminate discrimination, it is increasingly at variance with genetic evidence documenting the history of human populations.

Around 200,000 years ago, modern humans emerged in Africa. They spent more than three quarters of their history in that continent, spreading to different niches within it and developing a genetic diversity which today is greater than that of all humans in the rest of the world. Around 50,000 years before the present, by the genetic evidence, a small band of hunter-gatherers left Africa for the lands to the north. Then, some 30,000 years ago the descendants of these bands who migrated to the east and west largely ceased to interbreed and separated into what we now call the Caucasian and East Asian populations. These have remained the main three groups within the human species. Subsequent migrations and isolations have created other populations such as Australian and American aborigines, but their differentiation from the three main races is less distinct. Subsequent migrations, conquest, and intermarriage have blurred the distinctions between these groups, but the fact is that almost any child, shown a picture of a person of European, African, or East Asian ancestry can almost always effortlessly and correctly identify their area of origin. University professors, not so much: it takes an intellectual to deny the evidence of one's own eyes.

As these largely separated populations adapted to their new homes, selection operated upon their genomes. In the ancestral human population children lost the ability to digest lactose, the sugar in milk, after being weaned from their mothers' milk. But in populations which domesticated cattle and developed dairy farming, parents who passed on an allele which would allow their children to drink cow's milk their entire life would have more surviving offspring and, in a remarkably short time on the evolutionary scale, lifetime lactose tolerance became the norm in these areas. Among populations which never raised cattle or used them only for meat, lifetime lactose tolerance remains rare today.

Humans in Africa originally lived close to the equator and had dark skin to protect them from the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun. As human bands occupied northern latitudes in Europe and Asia, dark skin would prevent them from being able to synthesise sufficient Vitamin D from the wan, oblique sunlight of northern winters. These populations were under selection pressure for alleles of genes which gave them lighter skin, but interestingly Europeans and East Asians developed completely different genetic means to lighten their skin. The selection pressure was the same, but evolution blundered into two distinct pathways to meet the need.

Can genetic heritage affect behaviour? There's evidence it can. Humans carry a gene called MAO-A, which breaks down neurotransmitters that affect the transmission of signals within the brain. Experiments in animals have provided evidence that under-production of MAO-A increases aggression and humans with lower levels of MAO-A are found to be more likely to commit violent crime. MAO-A production is regulated by a short sequence of DNA adjacent to the gene: humans may have anywhere from two to five copies of the promoter; the more you have, the more the MAO-A, and hence the mellower you're likely to be. Well, actually, people with three to five copies are indistinguishable, but those with only two (2R) show higher rates of delinquency. Among men of African ancestry, 5.5% carry the 2R variant, while 0.1% of Caucasian males and 0.00067% of East Asian men do. Make of this what you will.

The author argues that just as the introduction of dairy farming tilted the evolutionary landscape in favour of those bearing the allele which allowed them to digest milk into adulthood, the transition of tribal societies to cities, states, and empires in Asia and Europe exerted a selection pressure upon the population which favoured behavioural traits suited to living in such societies. While a tribal society might benefit from producing a substantial population of aggressive warriors, an empire has little need of them: its armies are composed of soldiers, courageous to be sure, who follow orders rather than charging independently into battle. In such a society, the genetic traits which are advantageous in a hunter-gatherer or tribal society will be selected out, as those carrying them will, if not expelled or put to death for misbehaviour, be unable to raise as large a family in these settled societies.

Perhaps, what has been happening over the last five millennia or so is a domestication of the human species. Precisely as humans have bred animals to live with them in close proximity, human societies have selected for humans who are adapted to prosper within them. Those who conform to the social hierarchy, work hard, come up with new ideas but don't disrupt the social structure will have more children and, over time, whatever genetic predispositions there may be for these characteristics (which we don't know today) will become increasingly common in the population. It is intriguing that as humans settled into fixed communities, their skeletons became less robust. This same process of gracilisation is seen in domesticated animals compared to their wild congeners. Certainly there have been as many human generations since the emergence of these complex societies as have sufficed to produce major adaptation in animal species under selective breeding.

Far more speculative and controversial is whether this selection process has been influenced by the nature of the cultures and societies which create the selection pressure. East Asian societies tend to be hierarchical, obedient to authority, and organised on a large scale. European societies, by contrast, are fractious, fissiparous, and prone to bottom-up insurgencies. Is this in part the result of genetic predispositions which have been selected for over millennia in societies which work that way?

It is assumed by many right-thinking people that all that is needed to bring liberty and prosperity to those regions of the world which haven't yet benefited from them is to create the proper institutions, educate the people, and bootstrap the infrastructure, then stand back and watch them take off. Well, maybe—but the history of colonialism, the mission civilisatrice, and various democracy projects and attempts at nation building over the last two centuries may suggest it isn't that simple. The population of the colonial, conquering, or development-aid-giving power has the benefit of millennia of domestication and adaptation to living in a settled society with division of labour. Its adaptations for tribalism have been largely bred out. Not so in many cases for the people they're there to “help”. Withdraw the colonial administration or occupation troops and before long tribalism will re-assert itself because that's the society for which the people are adapted.

Suggesting things like this is anathema in academia or political discourse. But look at the plain evidence of post-colonial Africa and more recent attempts of nation-building, and couple that with the emerging genetic evidence of variation in human populations and connections to behaviour and you may find yourself thinking forbidden thoughts. This book is an excellent starting point to explore these difficult issues, with numerous citations of recent scientific publications.

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Yeats

Evolution: it's faster than you might think!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 2, 2022

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If you plan to read this book make sure you get a definition of the genetic component 'allele' first. Understanding this is important for the first couple of chapters.

All-in-all a very interesting and useful study of some of the implications arising from the fledgling science of genome analysis. This is just the beginning but already it seems that many left-wing pundits are rattled – some of the one-star reviews posted here are an indication of what might be termed the anxiety of the egalitarians. It goes without saying that any scientific study which may lead to a questioning of left-leaning academic orthodoxy is in danger of gaining taboo status.

In fact this book does NOT make a case for genetic determinism. The author argues that more general but significant differences can be seen and studied in the world's major racial groupings – that those minor but important differences probably have a genetic base. It has been assumed that evolution is a very slow process based on the successful adaptation of mutations. Mr Wade makes a case that minor but important changes can evolve in a much shorter time – perhaps as little as five generations. This field of genetic research is still very new but over time it will certainly reveal aspects of human nature that may not comfortably support of everyone's philosophy of mankind.

An important part of Mr Wade's thesis is the long term effects of those collective organisations he calls social institutions. Although individual creativity and intelligence are of tremendous importance it is Western institutions which have, over the past 500 years, enabled and encouraged the huge technological and intellectual lead all the world now benefits from. With that in mind, should we be worried that so many of our institutions are now falling under a well-meaning but censorious and restrictive form of moral control loosely labelled 'woke'?

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Dr Qazi Ashraf

An excellent piece

Reviewed in India on July 17, 2019

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This is wonderfully written wonderful piece of a book. I think every single person should read this excellent book. I don't know the author personally but I am really impressed by the amount of research and hardwork that the author has put in to create this excellent book. He has thrown light on a very fundamental yet controversial issue .The author's approach to the issue of race and culture has remained unbiased and forthright.

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Telly in Japan

Food for thought, and tasty

Reviewed in Japan on January 6, 2017

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Great read. A fresh perspective for anyone who has a genuine interest in human evolution. You'll find yourself agreeing with more than you thought.

Muggabox

Great read. Interesting book.

Reviewed in Germany on June 22, 2016

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Now that I've finished this excellent book, I'd love to lend this out to people. Unfortunately, we live in a world where the subject itself is so taboo that once can not even discuss concept of race. This is a shame. This book makes the world a more interesting and comprehensive place. It also leads to greater understanding of those in various cultural / ethnic groups. Very stimulating. True diversity is accepting and celebrating our differences.

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Gilberto de Abreu Sodre Carvalho

A courageous and impressive work

Reviewed in Brazil on July 8, 2014

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I had been looking for a new approach to race and to racism. One that could show that human and animal traits follow genetics; being races the result of such. To me, it has nothing to do with racism. I think it is possible to be against racism and also understand that races existed in the past.
The book is very good, even excelent in all aspects, including readability.

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