A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B00K30R6R2 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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 t...
Direct download links available for A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 49 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Penguin Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: May 6, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00K30R6R2
In this book Nicholas Wade advances two simple premises: firstly, that we should stop looking only toward culture as a determinant of differences between populations and individuals, and secondly, that those who claim that any biological basis for race is fiction are ignoring increasingly important findings from modern genetics and science. The guiding thread throughout the book is that "human evolution is recent, copious and regional" and that this has led to the genesis of distinct differences and classifications between human groups. What we do with this evidence should always be up for social debate, but the evidence itself cannot be ignored.
That is basically the gist of the book. It's worth noting at the outset that at no point does Wade downplay the effects of culture and environment in dictating social, cognitive or behavioral differences - in fact he mentions culture as an important factor at least ten times by my count - but all he is saying is that, based on a variety of scientific studies enabled by the explosive recent growth of genomics and sequencing, we need to now recognize a strong genetic component to these differences.
The book can be roughly divided into three parts. The first part details the many horrific and unseemly uses that the concept of race has been put to by loathsome racists and elitists ranging from Social Darwinists to National Socialists. Wade reminds us that while these perpetrators had a fundamentally misguided, crackpot definition of race, that does not mean race does not exist in a modern incarnation.
Nicholas Wade is a science writer, not a scientist himself. His genius is to survey what is going on on the frontiers of science, collect reports from many different frontiers, and compile a composite picture of what is happening in the world.
This is ostensibly a book about the science of human evolution. Whatever its intent, it will be treated, or rather, egregiously mistreated, as a political screed. The era of free scientific inquiry which began with the Enlightenment is pretty much at an end. Most scientific questions of our age - global warming, the nature of human sexuality, and certainly human evolution - have implications for public policy. Powerful interests have a vast stake in the status quo. Wade is like Galileo challenging the Pope or Darwin challenging creationists. Government is the establishment church of our era, with acolytes in the educational establishment and the press. Wade has to believe fervently in the truth to summon the bravery to challenge them by writing this book.
Wade is self-aware. Rather than adopt the stance of a disinterested scientist, he acknowledges the abuse he expects, from which quarters, and why. He inoculates himself in two ways. First, he goes into great detail with regard to the treatment meted out to the sociobiologists and intelligence researchers by government, academia and the press. Secondly, quixotically, he has chosen to attack some figures like Stephen Pinker who would seem most support his arguments, and laud the expertise of others like
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