Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race

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, non-violence-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.

About the Author
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 behaviour was favoured 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.